Any virtual file systems, of which there are many, would be *VFS. While the collision here is unfortunate, I find it hard to blame Microsoft. If you make a VFS and add a single letter in front of it, you cannot claim some kind of ownership on that single letter to the detriment of all other VFS implementations. If Gnome wanted to prevent clashes, it should have picked a more distinguishing name than a single letter + descriptive term of art. More likely, they just wanted to give it a name so they can refer to it themselves, not intending it to be unique forever. You cannot have it both ways.
Isn't there an equivalent of sovereign immunity in New Zealand? If I understand correctly, the sovereign immunity doctrine at least in the US would bar such a suit against the government. Sovereign immunity is the concept that a sovereign cannot be sued for damages except in cases where it has waived the immunity (for example, by having a law stating that it is responsible for damages in certain types of cases, usually with an upper limit).
I presume no sane government would make a law that subjects the country to that large liabilities. Many countries have laws that provide for some kind of restitution from the state in the case of wrongful imprisonment, but it's hard to imagine an unlimited liability.
If the officers of the state did wrong, it may be possible to sue them for damages (also in the US), but good luck collecting billions of dollars from them...
They built this absolutely toxic environment for conservatives under the cover of "diversity". Why should anyone believe they are going to do anything except continue to make conservatives feel like pariahs?
Because employees are by far the single greatest asset of Google, and since it would be reasonable to believe that it's possible for more people being happy in a culture which is not toxic for a large part of employees. In other words, Google bosses may wish that these people would convert into their worldview, but barring that, they want Google to be a place where as many qualified engineers as possible can be happy. Well, not necessarily all of them (like probably any Vice President of Diversity), but I would bet that most people at the top would choose this kind of reasonable pragmatism. Any engineer at Google could not get a well-paid job elsewhere; it's certainly not only about money, and it's a two-sided deal; Google is not really in a position to dictate.
I think what lead into the firing was a serious overestimation of the radicality of this engineer's views compared to other Googlers. Having said that, I think many execs may have now come to the realization that there is a problem they were not aware of and which needs to be discussed and solved.
I used to work at a game company. Before that, and coming from the a Linux world, I had always wondered how people manage to get even the executables to reach hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes. Now I understand.
For example, the game uses compression, so it embeds zlib. It also uses something like 50 externally or internally sourced libraries, many of which also embed zlib. Some of those embed other libraries, which again may embed zlib.
I found more than 80 copies of zlib in the game engine source code and its embedded dependencies. There were also tens of png and jpeg libraries, zip libraries and Lua interpreters. For building and tooling purposes only, there were around ten Python interpreters. Also, there were some eight copies of different versions of the in-house developed container library (STL replacement). And that doesn't count the libraries we didn't have source code for.
Nobody in our team even had the slightest idea that was the case. In the Windows world, that's standard and best practices. I believe this is largely due to the somewhat sorry state and limited benefits of dynamic linking on Windows.
The Linux world proves properly versioned dynamic linking can be extremely beneficial when done rigorously. To fix a security vulnerability in zlib, you only need to update zlib, not every application. Memory is saved: Any executable pages in dynamic libraries are only mapped once. That means you have one copy of zlib in memory per system, instead of 80 per application.
Statically embedding anything does have its benefits, though, which is why the commercial world likes it. It means you won't get to debug weird problems because of broken libraries on a system. Containerization is the trend also in devops, and that means explicitly duplicating stuff yo make it easier to maintain.
I think his goal was to question the monoculture, the echo chamber within Google that considers fairly mainstream worldviews unacceptable. I think it was about much more than gender diversity. In fact, I think he succeeded, though he got fired himself.
The author did quote research purportedly establishing gender differences pretty extensively (though in a digested form by links to Wikipedia, but frankly, for a forum posting that should be good enough if the articles are sourced - you can go dig the sources). More than that, he didn't even say that is necessarily the reason half of coders are not women, but that an honest discussion of the underlying factors should be possible. I see the posting mostly as an attempt to open discussion on the theme.
In the 5 major corporations I have worked for I have not seen this "bro" culture. The groups I have worked for wanted competent people men or women. Anyone who chooses their employees based on elements other than their abilities are choosing poorly.
The author especially seemed to criticize affirmative action - internal Google programs only open to minorities, and shuffling teams if they are not diverse enough, because supposedly non-diversity is always a result of hidden, structural bias in the society (which I believe it often, but not always, actually is - in case of skin color I'm quite ready to believe it is so; and in case of gender I'm sure there's lot of bias, but I don't buy the claim that there is *no* relevant biological difference between the genders that would lead into anything other than 50/50 balance in any jobs). Choosing people on their outwardly apparent merits as you vouch for is the largely conservative choice here; the problem is that it often seems to lead into having white male majority in tech jobs.
Really? It seems to me he did not say women engineers are unsuitable for the job, but rather that gender differences cause less women to choose that job. Even if he did say 10% of men are suitable for engineering and 5% of women, that still wouldn't mean any particular group of engineers employed by a company are in any way unsuitable.
I find this problematic in this discussion. He did not say anything about his colleagues; he said something about larger groups they were drawn from non-randomly. Taking any personal offense from that seems to be a good silencing tactic, but it doesn't have anything to do with the merits of the discussion.
An assertion of a fact does not legally become an opinion merely by adding "in my opinion" or "I believe". For example, "I believe X molests his child" is actionable.
Adware is something that shows ads to you, by adding them or by replacing other ads by them. This has something to do with ads, but that is not sufficient to make this adware. If we define malware as something you would not agree to have on your computer, this is plain old malware, and I'd argue not one of the worst sorts.
Part of me is actually happy that the ad industry is facing problems with fraudulent clicks, even if I would not want this on my own computers. (Having said that, I might want something that clicks ads randomly.)
My take, after having read the court documents, is that Uber would not have wanted to fire Levandowski, but the court effectively compelled it to.
The issue here is effectively a discovery dispute. Discovery is a process that happens early in a lawsuit where the parties get to request relevant documents from the other parties, as well as (in some cases) take depositions of the other parties, i.e. get them to answer relevant-to-the-lawsuit questions under oath. Here, Waymo sued both Uber and Levandowski, and requested that both produce certain material related to the allegedly stolen files, and the court has ordered Uber to produce that material.
However, Levandowski believes that his testimony and production of any documents (therefore admitting to possessing them) would subject him to criminal charges. In such cases, the Fifth Amendment allows him to refuse to cooperate ("the right to stay silent"), and he has relied on that right. In a civil case, that would be grounds for an "adverse inference", meaning that since you refuse to cooperate, you will most probably lose; essentially, the Fifth Amendment only protects against criminal charges, but allows withholding information relevant to criminal charges in a civil context if you are willing to take the civil consequences.
Only Levandowski allegedly possesses some of the requested documents. However, there's a twist: Levandowski being employed by Uber means that Uber can, if it is willing, direct Levandowski to provide those documents, essentially making it a part of his job to do so. And if Levandowski refuses a lawful directive by his superiors, that would be cause for termination.
Now, why would Uber direct Levandowski to provide the documents? Easy. When the court compels discovery, Uber has to provide documents that it has access to. This includes the cases where it has to direct an employee provide them. Uber tried to argue in the court that in this case Levandowski's reliance on the Fifth Amendment means that the court cannot compel it to direct Levandowski to provide those documents, but the court ruled against Uber, more or less stating that Uber has to take all measures available to it to obtain those documents from Levandowski, up to firing him if he does not comply (and that the Fifth Amendment does not guarantee not losing a job if you do not cooperate). And that is what happened.
So, I believe Uber did not want to fire Levandowski and Levandowski did not want to be fired by Uber, but essentially the court compelled Uber to do that unless Levandowski cooperated with discovery.
If you say a certain one-hour exercise burns, say, 600 kcal, is that in addition to the expenditure by the resting metabolism, or including it? I've tried to parse this from the instructions of different monitors, but so far utterly failed to find anything.
But the thing is, the IQ scores that we're talking about are not direct measured scores, and therefore the 15 point choice is entirely arbitrary, in that they could just as well have chosen the standard deviation to be 24 or 32 (and some testers did). It's not in any way a measured quantity; rather, they measure the percentile and calculate the IQ score from it. An IQ score of 115 from a test with std 15 is exactly the same as an IQ score of 124 from a test of std 24. Neither provides more or less information, hence, the choice is entirely arbitrary (just like using 100 as the mean, but when talking about IQ scores, it seems everybody has agreed that 100 is a good standard mean).
So, the standard mean of 15 was not measured in the way you say. Rather, the calculation went in the opposite direction; they measured the distribution of raw score in an IQ test, and map it to a scale with an arbitrarily chosen mean of 100 and std of 15.
This "theory of multiple intelligences" is a quite popular narrative, but it's not empirically supported by studies. Rather, it seems that there is one "g factor", or general cognitive ability, that tends to explain quite well the "different kinds of intelligence". That is, any IQ test seems to be a good predictor of performance in any other IQ test, whether testing logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial or some other "kind" of intelligence.
You cannot calculate with it IQ scores like that. A 50% impact does not mean the difference of 150 to 100, or a 100% impact does not mean 200 to 100. For one thing, while the mean IQ is 100, that in itself means nothing unless you also pick a standard deviation, which is an arbitrary choice. I think 15 is the most commonly used, but by no means only, choice for IQ nowadays. This would mean that a score of 115 is one standard deviation above average, or that 68% of people fall below it, and a score of 130 is two standard deviations above average, corresponding to 95%.
The 5% impact in this kind of studies always means that the measured variable explains 5% of the total variance. 100% impact would mean that the IQ is directly determined by the measured variables (ie. the identified genetic variants), with randomness or environmental factors playing no role. As a side note, this would still not imply causation; both the intelligence and the genetic variations could be caused by another, unknown factor.
I agree that the salary excuse is a very poor one. Other than that, I am shocked by the tone of most of the responses here.
An employment contract is generally drafted to give the employer the necessary tools to manage the employee. It does not mean that everything written there should be the way the business is run day-to-day. Essentially, it's a two-sided deal, while it seems to me that most people here think that once you have signed an employment contract, you should accept being treated the worst way the contract technically allows and expect the employer to own your ass.
It does not need to be like that. I am sad that is the way it is in lower-paid jobs – people are not cattle and should not be treated like that. It almost seems as if many people here have had some kind of a traumatic experiences at work and now want everybody to be treated like that, in perpetuity.
I work in a company where the rule is, more or less, "make yourself useful to the company". Cannot think of what to do, or just have ran out of your productive energy? Why not play a game of pool on the employer-provided pool table. Everybody knows that you cannot be productive for eight hours a day. As long as the job gets done, the employer is satisfied.
Now, legally I know the employer could take all of that away. The company probably pretty much needs that power, since you cannot really draft "the atmosphere shall be relaxed" in the contract. However it knows very well it can only recruit the talent it needs because of these perks (and it has been able to recruit people who fit the culture shockingly well – we have more than 300 employees, and it still works very well). If it tried that, I can assure you the current talent would also leave the company very fast, and I'm sure it would be less productive, not more. Also, my employer couldn't care less about whose equipment I am using. Why should it? It's not like doing personal stuff causes the computers to wear out very fast.
It's all about total compensation. I know I could have a job that pays at least 10-20% more if I accepted a much less relaxed atmosphere and less perks. It's a whole spectrum, but I would not work long-term for an employer who treats their employees as cattle for pretty much any price. I have found that most employers are very satisfied at the performance they get from me and, as a result, do not whine. (Only once I had a Russian boss who did whine. I pulled some strings and got moved to a team whose boss was more than happy to have me.)
Having said that, I wouldn't run my own business from work. Hobby projects go in the same category with playing pool. As long as it won't distract from your duties, go ahead. There's a certain level of performance that the employer expects. If he has a problem with what I achieve, he can come and talk to me. If he is happy with what I achieve but is disturbed by me spending time on other things? I will tell him (truthfully) that I doubt I could achieve more long-term by pretending to be more hard-working, that this is how I work and that if he cannot tolerate that, then I'm also not happy to work in that company and offer to resign amicably, as companies tend to prefer that to firing people.
Not that I would personally be offended by this post -nor am I a big fan of PC talk or safe spaces - but don't you think it's a bit funny to compare the monetary value of such a cross-cutting, personal and protected area of life to that of companies? How is this different from doing a similar statistic on races and comparing the value of "blackness" to the value of companies?
Have you tried KDE on Ubuntu? It's in such a sorry state that I consider it a wonder if it starts at all. Even trivially fixable bugs that make a package unusable for everybody go unheeded for the best part of a decade, which is presumably because Ubuntu is not run by that many people. That has been the Ubuntu way as long as I remember, but their KDE support has only gone from bad to nonexistent.
I installed (K)Ubuntu at work, and regret it. At home I run Debian unstable, which mostly just works, but breaks in all kinds of interesting ways once every two years or so. I cannot afford that at work, so I thought I'd give the hyped Ubuntu with its rolling releases a try. (Before you tell me I should try Debian stable, consider that Debian doesn't generally fix/any/ bugs for a stable release, no matter how broken they make the package, unless it's a security issue. And that's a feature. Debian testing is a lot like unstable, but with the added downside that fixes are delayed by a random time after they get to unstable.)
For Ubuntu, presumably they will eventually get any KDE fixes from Debian, but for issues which for some reason happen to be present in Ubuntu but not in Debian, you are out of luck. Moreover, the KDE packages in Ubuntu seem to be essentially an entirely randomly timed snapshot of Debian unstable KDE packages. If KDE was entirely broken in Debian unstable at that point, then it will be in Ubuntu. Nobody cares.
That's a nice theory, but unfortunately it's wrong. For example, it has been established that compelling a suspect to give a handwriting sample (Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966)) or to speak for voice identification (United States v. Dionisio, 410 U.S. 1 (1973)) does not violate the Fifth Amendment. Also permitted is compelling a suspect to sign a document that e.g. a foreign bank requires to release some information, although I'm too lazy to come up with a reference.
Yes, but the Federal Circuit's decision in this case is binding (only) in the 9th Circuit, I believe. You are right, though, that it will have influence in other circuits.
While I don't like the result, contrary to what others have written, I do not find the Federal Circuit's decision in this case to be hasty; on the contrary, I think it was very well reasoned. It's not for the courts to make law, but to interpret it. The decision made, in my opinion, well the case that this is what the law says and it is for the legislature to fix it if you want it fixed. I think the major problem is the completely broken legislature in the US. I think this probably also factored into why the Supreme Court did not grant certiorari (they also prefer to let issues percolate in lower courts before taking a suitable case).
The same cannot be said of Federal Circuit in may patent cases, though, where they seem to go to ridiculous lengths for the patent owner.
Well, not really. If the relevant facts are roughly as stated in the summary, it's indeed quite possible that the company will be forced to produce the source code or not rely on the evidence. However the only thing this means is that the defendant's paid experts get access to the source code under a strict protective order. They will then produce an expert report, which is the only thing anybody else will have access to, and even that may be sealed in whole or part if it would reveal, in the opinion of the judge (and often anyway unless the defendants object) significant trade secrets.
I think the two most realistic reasons to oppose are the costs of production and the possible loss of reputation if the evidence due to the inevitable criticism by opposing experts.
Some of the changes seem nice to me, some of them bad, and some neutral. However I use DejaVu regularly and some of these might be just a matter of getting used to. The biggest changes are to i and 0 (zero).
The changes I like are to comma, underscore and minus.
I don't quite understand their changes to i and 0 (zero); do they solve some problem or do they supposedly just look better? I like DejaVu's zero more. It seems to me the new i is closer to l (lowercase L) than in DejaVu, and I cannot imagine DejaVu's i being confused with anything; however I think I could live with the new i. DejaVu's original parentheses are better too; the new ones almost look like if there's a space in ().
There seems to be a tiny kerning change to r. It makes some words look better, but others look worse. For example, I think "import" looks better in Hack, but "Keyboard" and "Interrupt" in DejaVu.
Then configure your miners to not accept these transactions.
Essentially the blockchain is exactly this: A way to record information in an unforgeable way, for a fee to the miner. Bitcoin works, and the only way it can work, is by being a system that behaves in a desired way when each player maximizes their own benefit. (To a small extent this can be affected in a centralized fashion because the community can develop the reference implementation to a desired direction, but that may or may not turn to be anathema and may or may not be a powerful enough tool.)
True, blockchain bloat causes problems, and it's a limited resource. The bitcoin solution is to sell the space to the highest bidder, because generally that maximizes the seller's benefit. In a sense, someone saying "that's not what the blockchain is for" is very similar to someone complaining that people are using lithium to make these stupid batteries, driving its price up, and "that's not what lithium is for".
Whether Bitcoin can survive all the technical challenges in the long term is not at all obvious. For all we know, it might be that the entire model is game-theoretically self-destructive if analyzed thoroughly enough. In fact, it has provided quite a few surprises where the incentives have turned out to be something different than anticipated, causing weird scenarios where e.g. in some situations it's advantageous for a miner to not immediately report a found block. So far none of these have been such that they would cause a death spiral, but that's far from a given. (Arvind Narayanan's blog posts on the topic are quite insightful; you might want to start from https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...).
Slashdot Mirror
Call it What The F*** You Want Filesystem.
Any virtual file systems, of which there are many, would be *VFS. While the collision here is unfortunate, I find it hard to blame Microsoft. If you make a VFS and add a single letter in front of it, you cannot claim some kind of ownership on that single letter to the detriment of all other VFS implementations. If Gnome wanted to prevent clashes, it should have picked a more distinguishing name than a single letter + descriptive term of art. More likely, they just wanted to give it a name so they can refer to it themselves, not intending it to be unique forever. You cannot have it both ways.
Isn't there an equivalent of sovereign immunity in New Zealand? If I understand correctly, the sovereign immunity doctrine at least in the US would bar such a suit against the government. Sovereign immunity is the concept that a sovereign cannot be sued for damages except in cases where it has waived the immunity (for example, by having a law stating that it is responsible for damages in certain types of cases, usually with an upper limit).
I presume no sane government would make a law that subjects the country to that large liabilities. Many countries have laws that provide for some kind of restitution from the state in the case of wrongful imprisonment, but it's hard to imagine an unlimited liability.
If the officers of the state did wrong, it may be possible to sue them for damages (also in the US), but good luck collecting billions of dollars from them...
They built this absolutely toxic environment for conservatives under the cover of "diversity". Why should anyone believe they are going to do anything except continue to make conservatives feel like pariahs?
Because employees are by far the single greatest asset of Google, and since it would be reasonable to believe that it's possible for more people being happy in a culture which is not toxic for a large part of employees. In other words, Google bosses may wish that these people would convert into their worldview, but barring that, they want Google to be a place where as many qualified engineers as possible can be happy. Well, not necessarily all of them (like probably any Vice President of Diversity), but I would bet that most people at the top would choose this kind of reasonable pragmatism. Any engineer at Google could not get a well-paid job elsewhere; it's certainly not only about money, and it's a two-sided deal; Google is not really in a position to dictate.
I think what lead into the firing was a serious overestimation of the radicality of this engineer's views compared to other Googlers. Having said that, I think many execs may have now come to the realization that there is a problem they were not aware of and which needs to be discussed and solved.
I used to work at a game company. Before that, and coming from the a Linux world, I had always wondered how people manage to get even the executables to reach hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes. Now I understand.
For example, the game uses compression, so it embeds zlib. It also uses something like 50 externally or internally sourced libraries, many of which also embed zlib. Some of those embed other libraries, which again may embed zlib.
I found more than 80 copies of zlib in the game engine source code and its embedded dependencies. There were also tens of png and jpeg libraries, zip libraries and Lua interpreters. For building and tooling purposes only, there were around ten Python interpreters. Also, there were some eight copies of different versions of the in-house developed container library (STL replacement). And that doesn't count the libraries we didn't have source code for.
Nobody in our team even had the slightest idea that was the case. In the Windows world, that's standard and best practices. I believe this is largely due to the somewhat sorry state and limited benefits of dynamic linking on Windows.
The Linux world proves properly versioned dynamic linking can be extremely beneficial when done rigorously. To fix a security vulnerability in zlib, you only need to update zlib, not every application. Memory is saved: Any executable pages in dynamic libraries are only mapped once. That means you have one copy of zlib in memory per system, instead of 80 per application.
Statically embedding anything does have its benefits, though, which is why the commercial world likes it. It means you won't get to debug weird problems because of broken libraries on a system. Containerization is the trend also in devops, and that means explicitly duplicating stuff yo make it easier to maintain.
I think his goal was to question the monoculture, the echo chamber within Google that considers fairly mainstream worldviews unacceptable. I think it was about much more than gender diversity. In fact, I think he succeeded, though he got fired himself.
The author did quote research purportedly establishing gender differences pretty extensively (though in a digested form by links to Wikipedia, but frankly, for a forum posting that should be good enough if the articles are sourced - you can go dig the sources). More than that, he didn't even say that is necessarily the reason half of coders are not women, but that an honest discussion of the underlying factors should be possible. I see the posting mostly as an attempt to open discussion on the theme.
In the 5 major corporations I have worked for I have not seen this "bro" culture. The groups I have worked for wanted competent people men or women. Anyone who chooses their employees based on elements other than their abilities are choosing poorly.
The author especially seemed to criticize affirmative action - internal Google programs only open to minorities, and shuffling teams if they are not diverse enough, because supposedly non-diversity is always a result of hidden, structural bias in the society (which I believe it often, but not always, actually is - in case of skin color I'm quite ready to believe it is so; and in case of gender I'm sure there's lot of bias, but I don't buy the claim that there is *no* relevant biological difference between the genders that would lead into anything other than 50/50 balance in any jobs). Choosing people on their outwardly apparent merits as you vouch for is the largely conservative choice here; the problem is that it often seems to lead into having white male majority in tech jobs.
Really? It seems to me he did not say women engineers are unsuitable for the job, but rather that gender differences cause less women to choose that job. Even if he did say 10% of men are suitable for engineering and 5% of women, that still wouldn't mean any particular group of engineers employed by a company are in any way unsuitable.
I find this problematic in this discussion. He did not say anything about his colleagues; he said something about larger groups they were drawn from non-randomly. Taking any personal offense from that seems to be a good silencing tactic, but it doesn't have anything to do with the merits of the discussion.
An assertion of a fact does not legally become an opinion merely by adding "in my opinion" or "I believe". For example, "I believe X molests his child" is actionable.
How would it be trivial to show? They assert what they do is legal; Bruce asserts it is not. It's mostly a dispute of law, not of facts.
Adware is something that shows ads to you, by adding them or by replacing other ads by them. This has something to do with ads, but that is not sufficient to make this adware. If we define malware as something you would not agree to have on your computer, this is plain old malware, and I'd argue not one of the worst sorts.
Part of me is actually happy that the ad industry is facing problems with fraudulent clicks, even if I would not want this on my own computers. (Having said that, I might want something that clicks ads randomly.)
It's more nuanced than that.
My take, after having read the court documents, is that Uber would not have wanted to fire Levandowski, but the court effectively compelled it to.
The issue here is effectively a discovery dispute. Discovery is a process that happens early in a lawsuit where the parties get to request relevant documents from the other parties, as well as (in some cases) take depositions of the other parties, i.e. get them to answer relevant-to-the-lawsuit questions under oath. Here, Waymo sued both Uber and Levandowski, and requested that both produce certain material related to the allegedly stolen files, and the court has ordered Uber to produce that material.
However, Levandowski believes that his testimony and production of any documents (therefore admitting to possessing them) would subject him to criminal charges. In such cases, the Fifth Amendment allows him to refuse to cooperate ("the right to stay silent"), and he has relied on that right. In a civil case, that would be grounds for an "adverse inference", meaning that since you refuse to cooperate, you will most probably lose; essentially, the Fifth Amendment only protects against criminal charges, but allows withholding information relevant to criminal charges in a civil context if you are willing to take the civil consequences.
Only Levandowski allegedly possesses some of the requested documents. However, there's a twist: Levandowski being employed by Uber means that Uber can, if it is willing, direct Levandowski to provide those documents, essentially making it a part of his job to do so. And if Levandowski refuses a lawful directive by his superiors, that would be cause for termination.
Now, why would Uber direct Levandowski to provide the documents? Easy. When the court compels discovery, Uber has to provide documents that it has access to. This includes the cases where it has to direct an employee provide them. Uber tried to argue in the court that in this case Levandowski's reliance on the Fifth Amendment means that the court cannot compel it to direct Levandowski to provide those documents, but the court ruled against Uber, more or less stating that Uber has to take all measures available to it to obtain those documents from Levandowski, up to firing him if he does not comply (and that the Fifth Amendment does not guarantee not losing a job if you do not cooperate). And that is what happened.
So, I believe Uber did not want to fire Levandowski and Levandowski did not want to be fired by Uber, but essentially the court compelled Uber to do that unless Levandowski cooperated with discovery.
If you say a certain one-hour exercise burns, say, 600 kcal, is that in addition to the expenditure by the resting metabolism, or including it? I've tried to parse this from the instructions of different monitors, but so far utterly failed to find anything.
But the thing is, the IQ scores that we're talking about are not direct measured scores, and therefore the 15 point choice is entirely arbitrary, in that they could just as well have chosen the standard deviation to be 24 or 32 (and some testers did). It's not in any way a measured quantity; rather, they measure the percentile and calculate the IQ score from it. An IQ score of 115 from a test with std 15 is exactly the same as an IQ score of 124 from a test of std 24. Neither provides more or less information, hence, the choice is entirely arbitrary (just like using 100 as the mean, but when talking about IQ scores, it seems everybody has agreed that 100 is a good standard mean).
So, the standard mean of 15 was not measured in the way you say. Rather, the calculation went in the opposite direction; they measured the distribution of raw score in an IQ test, and map it to a scale with an arbitrarily chosen mean of 100 and std of 15.
This "theory of multiple intelligences" is a quite popular narrative, but it's not empirically supported by studies. Rather, it seems that there is one "g factor", or general cognitive ability, that tends to explain quite well the "different kinds of intelligence". That is, any IQ test seems to be a good predictor of performance in any other IQ test, whether testing logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial or some other "kind" of intelligence.
You cannot calculate with it IQ scores like that. A 50% impact does not mean the difference of 150 to 100, or a 100% impact does not mean 200 to 100. For one thing, while the mean IQ is 100, that in itself means nothing unless you also pick a standard deviation, which is an arbitrary choice. I think 15 is the most commonly used, but by no means only, choice for IQ nowadays. This would mean that a score of 115 is one standard deviation above average, or that 68% of people fall below it, and a score of 130 is two standard deviations above average, corresponding to 95%.
The 5% impact in this kind of studies always means that the measured variable explains 5% of the total variance. 100% impact would mean that the IQ is directly determined by the measured variables (ie. the identified genetic variants), with randomness or environmental factors playing no role. As a side note, this would still not imply causation; both the intelligence and the genetic variations could be caused by another, unknown factor.
I agree that the salary excuse is a very poor one. Other than that, I am shocked by the tone of most of the responses here.
An employment contract is generally drafted to give the employer the necessary tools to manage the employee. It does not mean that everything written there should be the way the business is run day-to-day. Essentially, it's a two-sided deal, while it seems to me that most people here think that once you have signed an employment contract, you should accept being treated the worst way the contract technically allows and expect the employer to own your ass.
It does not need to be like that. I am sad that is the way it is in lower-paid jobs – people are not cattle and should not be treated like that. It almost seems as if many people here have had some kind of a traumatic experiences at work and now want everybody to be treated like that, in perpetuity.
I work in a company where the rule is, more or less, "make yourself useful to the company". Cannot think of what to do, or just have ran out of your productive energy? Why not play a game of pool on the employer-provided pool table. Everybody knows that you cannot be productive for eight hours a day. As long as the job gets done, the employer is satisfied.
Now, legally I know the employer could take all of that away. The company probably pretty much needs that power, since you cannot really draft "the atmosphere shall be relaxed" in the contract. However it knows very well it can only recruit the talent it needs because of these perks (and it has been able to recruit people who fit the culture shockingly well – we have more than 300 employees, and it still works very well). If it tried that, I can assure you the current talent would also leave the company very fast, and I'm sure it would be less productive, not more. Also, my employer couldn't care less about whose equipment I am using. Why should it? It's not like doing personal stuff causes the computers to wear out very fast.
It's all about total compensation. I know I could have a job that pays at least 10-20% more if I accepted a much less relaxed atmosphere and less perks. It's a whole spectrum, but I would not work long-term for an employer who treats their employees as cattle for pretty much any price. I have found that most employers are very satisfied at the performance they get from me and, as a result, do not whine. (Only once I had a Russian boss who did whine. I pulled some strings and got moved to a team whose boss was more than happy to have me.)
Having said that, I wouldn't run my own business from work. Hobby projects go in the same category with playing pool. As long as it won't distract from your duties, go ahead. There's a certain level of performance that the employer expects. If he has a problem with what I achieve, he can come and talk to me. If he is happy with what I achieve but is disturbed by me spending time on other things? I will tell him (truthfully) that I doubt I could achieve more long-term by pretending to be more hard-working, that this is how I work and that if he cannot tolerate that, then I'm also not happy to work in that company and offer to resign amicably, as companies tend to prefer that to firing people.
What is jrank and why should anybody trust in law matters a site that confuses prosecution with persecution?
Not that I would personally be offended by this post -nor am I a big fan of PC talk or safe spaces - but don't you think it's a bit funny to compare the monetary value of such a cross-cutting, personal and protected area of life to that of companies? How is this different from doing a similar statistic on races and comparing the value of "blackness" to the value of companies?
Have you tried KDE on Ubuntu? It's in such a sorry state that I consider it a wonder if it starts at all. Even trivially fixable bugs that make a package unusable for everybody go unheeded for the best part of a decade, which is presumably because Ubuntu is not run by that many people. That has been the Ubuntu way as long as I remember, but their KDE support has only gone from bad to nonexistent.
I installed (K)Ubuntu at work, and regret it. At home I run Debian unstable, which mostly just works, but breaks in all kinds of interesting ways once every two years or so. I cannot afford that at work, so I thought I'd give the hyped Ubuntu with its rolling releases a try. (Before you tell me I should try Debian stable, consider that Debian doesn't generally fix /any/ bugs for a stable release, no matter how broken they make the package, unless it's a security issue. And that's a feature. Debian testing is a lot like unstable, but with the added downside that fixes are delayed by a random time after they get to unstable.)
For Ubuntu, presumably they will eventually get any KDE fixes from Debian, but for issues which for some reason happen to be present in Ubuntu but not in Debian, you are out of luck. Moreover, the KDE packages in Ubuntu seem to be essentially an entirely randomly timed snapshot of Debian unstable KDE packages. If KDE was entirely broken in Debian unstable at that point, then it will be in Ubuntu. Nobody cares.
That's a nice theory, but unfortunately it's wrong. For example, it has been established that compelling a suspect to give a handwriting sample (Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966)) or to speak for voice identification (United States v. Dionisio, 410 U.S. 1 (1973)) does not violate the Fifth Amendment. Also permitted is compelling a suspect to sign a document that e.g. a foreign bank requires to release some information, although I'm too lazy to come up with a reference.
Yes, but the Federal Circuit's decision in this case is binding (only) in the 9th Circuit, I believe. You are right, though, that it will have influence in other circuits.
While I don't like the result, contrary to what others have written, I do not find the Federal Circuit's decision in this case to be hasty; on the contrary, I think it was very well reasoned. It's not for the courts to make law, but to interpret it. The decision made, in my opinion, well the case that this is what the law says and it is for the legislature to fix it if you want it fixed. I think the major problem is the completely broken legislature in the US. I think this probably also factored into why the Supreme Court did not grant certiorari (they also prefer to let issues percolate in lower courts before taking a suitable case).
The same cannot be said of Federal Circuit in may patent cases, though, where they seem to go to ridiculous lengths for the patent owner.
Well, not really. If the relevant facts are roughly as stated in the summary, it's indeed quite possible that the company will be forced to produce the source code or not rely on the evidence. However the only thing this means is that the defendant's paid experts get access to the source code under a strict protective order. They will then produce an expert report, which is the only thing anybody else will have access to, and even that may be sealed in whole or part if it would reveal, in the opinion of the judge (and often anyway unless the defendants object) significant trade secrets.
I think the two most realistic reasons to oppose are the costs of production and the possible loss of reputation if the evidence due to the inevitable criticism by opposing experts.
Some of the changes seem nice to me, some of them bad, and some neutral. However I use DejaVu regularly and some of these might be just a matter of getting used to. The biggest changes are to i and 0 (zero).
Here's an animated gif from Reddit: http://i.imgur.com/8SqL6mT.gif
The changes I like are to comma, underscore and minus.
I don't quite understand their changes to i and 0 (zero); do they solve some problem or do they supposedly just look better? I like DejaVu's zero more. It seems to me the new i is closer to l (lowercase L) than in DejaVu, and I cannot imagine DejaVu's i being confused with anything; however I think I could live with the new i. DejaVu's original parentheses are better too; the new ones almost look like if there's a space in ().
There seems to be a tiny kerning change to r. It makes some words look better, but others look worse. For example, I think "import" looks better in Hack, but "Keyboard" and "Interrupt" in DejaVu.
Then configure your miners to not accept these transactions.
Essentially the blockchain is exactly this: A way to record information in an unforgeable way, for a fee to the miner. Bitcoin works, and the only way it can work, is by being a system that behaves in a desired way when each player maximizes their own benefit. (To a small extent this can be affected in a centralized fashion because the community can develop the reference implementation to a desired direction, but that may or may not turn to be anathema and may or may not be a powerful enough tool.)
True, blockchain bloat causes problems, and it's a limited resource. The bitcoin solution is to sell the space to the highest bidder, because generally that maximizes the seller's benefit. In a sense, someone saying "that's not what the blockchain is for" is very similar to someone complaining that people are using lithium to make these stupid batteries, driving its price up, and "that's not what lithium is for".
Whether Bitcoin can survive all the technical challenges in the long term is not at all obvious. For all we know, it might be that the entire model is game-theoretically self-destructive if analyzed thoroughly enough. In fact, it has provided quite a few surprises where the incentives have turned out to be something different than anticipated, causing weird scenarios where e.g. in some situations it's advantageous for a miner to not immediately report a found block. So far none of these have been such that they would cause a death spiral, but that's far from a given. (Arvind Narayanan's blog posts on the topic are quite insightful; you might want to start from https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...).