I'd be very curious to know how you're measuring productivity. Our experience has been that pairing results in more than 200% productivity.
(For our definition of productivity, which includes the long-term maintenance effort on the resulting code).
It almost has to be in LOC or some other hard to judge metric. If anyone really believed that pairing two coders results in one of them getting only half of their work done, they would be idiots for letting it go more than one day.
While I do agree with your point that propaganda is typically "persuasion by any means necessary" the burden of proof is so high when it comes to medical studies that you basically will never get to the point where you are sure of a conclusion, unless the entire sample in the study is dead. This makes it particularly pertinent to remember that people generally choose sides on a study solely based on their previous belief, not because of any particularly hard evidence inside it (since there is almost always a study just waiting to be read that basically disagrees entirely with it). That, and a very common rhetorical tactic (as seen here) is guilt by association; people naturally think of propaganda as bad so if you can make any tie between it and something you don't like (even just mentioning it in the same sentence), you will gain ground.
Does smoking pot as a teen lower your IQ, or are stupid teens more likely to smoke pot?
You control for that by looking at the entire population IQ, and then looking at the availability of pot (some parts of the population certainly have a harder time getting hold of it). Then follow those cohorts from year to year as they age and see if there is a difference in the group that has no problem getting it (they would end up with a lower IQ ultimately).
Propaganda by whom, and for what purpose? How do you identify it as propaganda instead of legitimate science? You have to answer these basic questions and support your answers with evidence before anybody is going to buy into your conspiracy theories.
Propaganda; n. Any material which proposes to sway a reader to form a conclusion that conflicts with your own.
Samsung, for several devices (the ones that did look a bit more iphone-ish like the Fascinate) had oddly curved corners, not a perfect radius from the union of the two sides. Strangely, the courts didnt find this distinction sufficient (even though an Apple product would NEVER have anything but perfectly radius-ed corners.)
Say what you want, but I've been having a hard time gauging Slashdot GroupThink on the subject of Climate change. It's ether:
A) Climate Deniers are Stupid
B) Climate Deniers are Justified
or
C) You're just a shill
It really seems to come down to which group has the most Mod Points or which group has the most dedication to the thread. Each side just views the other as Trolls so it goes nowhere.
Agreed, on top of the fact that expending energy on this particular study is wasteful. The story might as well be "water wet, sky blue", basically it's just more evidence that was already had, that temperature variations in the past have happened naturally (read: change MIGHT be non-anthropogenic.) Given that it's not proof or even indicative of anything happening in the present (since there was not a change taking place until after the point where anthropogenic affects came into being) it is particularly only useful to the deniers, so expect to see a lot of that.
That's the thing, it's not about "free" vs "paid". If my job were to deburr widgets and I got paid $1 per widget that I successfully deburred, sure I won't sit around on my free time deburring widgets without making any extra money for it. That's not what this economy is like though. If you are in a position where you can bill OT for every moment you spend thinking about work, great for you. Not many are in that position though, and those that aren't realize that a competitive advantage can be had by being as available as possible.
The bottom line is that if everyone else is doing it, you had sure as shit better do it too if you want to stay competitive.
Your point is taken, but for the record I wasn't the one who made the "original post" and you weren't the target of my example; I was pointing out that many jobs outside of car mechanics and factory work DO involve snowball issues that are best dealing with early on. An ounce of prevention, as it were. If you don't experience this in your job, then it sounds like a good spot and I suggest keeping it for a long time. Those of us who arent that lucky, get that availability has its price and its benefits.
Even if it is, I'd rather spend 15 minutes at 11pm typing an e-mail that will solve a problem right then, than having to spend 2 hours fixing something first thing the next morning.
You seem to have missed reading the headline, let alone TFA "Workers Working An Extra 20 Hours a Week". You won't get two hours off tomorrow for your 15 minutes of work at 11pm.
The thing about a lot of knowledge-based jobs is that usually a company (even a big one) has one, maybe two or three people with deep domain knowledge into a particular subject. This means that you are responsible for every issue regarding subject X, regardless of if it's too much work or if the issue comes up on the weekend or whatever. If you choose to ignore things over the weekend, and to ignore things that require working more than 8 hours a day, sure you can probably get away with it and you might even survive the next round of layoffs (but no guarantees.)
If solving a problem in 15 minutes that would have ballooned into a 2 hour fiasco once management gets their hands on it (say for example if the customer is shitstorm mad that they were waiting for an answer all weekend and now want a dog and pony show to keep them happy) then hell yes I would rather spend the 15 minutes on it now and maybe i can get something else productive done the next day with those 2 hours (or i can post to slashdot... ahem).
You are right that this comes down to understanding. What it means is that a worker (who is getting paid to fill a role, not getting paid to perform piecemeal work) can now be productive 4 more hours a day without being in the office for those 4 hours. Given the choice between staying in the office for 12 hours, and taking a 33% pay cut so that the company can hire someone else to show up for those 4 hours to get that work done, i would rather keep the money and blast out a few emails after hours. This is the new economy, it's not a question of convincing management to keep 2 guys around doing the same job. It's a question of are you the one guy left or are you are the one guy let go (hint they will probably choose the one that knows how to be more productive.)
"From: Doe, John [US/CORPHQ] Sent: Fri 2/13/2012 6:35PM Help I have a small grease fire! I am contemplating dousing it with water. Any advice? --JD"
If I can tell that idiot to use baking soda instead of water, he will stand a much better chance at saving himself and others a lot of time, money, and effort as opposed to ignoring it until monday. The analogues in the business world are MANY, I come across them all the time. If you don't see them, maybe you aren't in that kind of job, or you just aren't the fix-it guy.
Is it really necessary to make this an iOS vs Android pissing match? What point in suggesting one side is more gullible than the other? (It's probably an invalid point anyways.)
I think the whole premise of your post is wrong. The technical / bandwidth (and possibly legal) hurdles involved if Facetime over cellular (or any video-enabled VOIP) takes off in a big way are a lot scarier to telcos than ordinary streaming video from Youtube or Netflix. I don't necessarily approve of this solution from AT&T, just saying I can see some of the reasoning behind it.
The excuse AT&T used was that since FaceTime was a "preloaded" app, they were free to muck about with its availability whereas they weren't going to do so for any self-loaded apps (which would potentially violate basic net neutrality guidelines, as well as the 4G spectrum "rules" put in place if they ever made a 4G capable iPhone). Whether or not AT&T thinks that iPhone users are more or less gullible, they do think (otherwise they wouldn't pull this shit, ipso facto) that iPhone users are more likely to pay up than to take their business elsewhere. If such a simple option existed on Android handsets, I would suspect they would go after that too. But given the obvious differences between the platforms (the distinction between users who prefer one vs the other is left to the reader) there is something to be said for AT&T targeting the iPhone in this way.
Medical research actually does suggest a link between very early miscarriages and cortisol levels which seems to be very much along the lines of what Akins suggests (there are multiple studies along these lines, including some interesting research on the use of progesterone to counter-act stress and "protect" pregnancies in mice)
So you are suggesting that this study (cortisol levels over three weeks) is relevant? Women who are raped consecutively for three weeks will be *so* relieved.
The debate is actually over whether it's a harmful medical procedure performed on the fetus.
The debate is actually *actually* over whether a blastocyst (a collection of about a dozen stem cells in a loose ball) constitutes a "life" and whether or not it should be up to the mother to decide to continue to gestate that collection of cells to the point where it becomes a fetus (about 9-10 weeks later). Since the decision by the victim is principally quite immediate, the question of when life starts is pushed all the way to the point where the "Baby" is just two or three stem cells.
I wouldn't be so sure his flawed understanding of rape and conception is his motivation for opposing abortion in the case of rape.
I understand women can get pregnant from a rape, but still think abortion in the case of rape should be outlawed. The child is still a life and isn't responsible for the rape. Therefore, the child doesn't deserve to be punished with death for a crime he or she didn't commit.
Does not follow. If his belief was that no life should be jeopardized regardless of how early it is possibly viable, he should be on TV saying "I don't care if every conception happens from rape, I am against abortions no matter what."
Instead, he comes up with a complete falsification that is, no doubt, intended to make his position on abortion either more palpable to himself or (in the case that he doesnt believe it at all) to others. So he is either woefully bad at intellectual investigation, or he is a plain-faced liar who just wants to win mindshare. As a politician I wouldn't put either past him.
But it is a math issue. Akin has made the claim that somehow women who are raped can fend off pregnancy. So, there is a solid claim here that can be investigated, and before one starts pondering the means by which women can prevent rapists' sperm from fertilizing their ova, it seems useful to investigate the rates of pregnancy from rape.
This is exactly it. The "big deal" isn't that a conservative thinks there is some sort of magic that God put in women to prevent unwelcome pregnancy (conservatives believe all kinds of ridiculous things so this is not a shocker at all). The big deal is that Rep Akin was appointed to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology in the U.S. House. This obviously puts him in a position to influence the nation's policy toward science, and since he is clearly a firm disbeliever in science as a whole it is really important that as many people know about this tragic mismatch as possible.
Careful, you might not want the boardroom audio available to all.
The safest path might be to replace the tape deck with a solid state recorder with removable storage. I've hooked ours up to an iPod in the past.
This. I would suggest keeping the Mics (they probably have good placement and superior audio) and feeding them into a small digital recorder that someone has the responsibility of starting/stopping/uploading. This way only the activity that is supposed to be recorded, retransmitted, etc. is actually done since a human needs to handle the movement of the information. Try to automate it and get it wrong (even on accident,) and you could find yourself looking for a new job at best, and looking out from a jail cell at worst.
My first thought was some sort of remote-controlled mic system that took cues from an Exchange server managing meeting resource events. That way the file would automatically be generated for each meeting that was scheduled, and saved accordingly. That would be awesome until someone scheduled an off the record meeting and found out only later that the whole thing was recorded and stashed on the intranet where who knows who has access to it.
The idea (not that it's a particularly brilliant one) isn't to inconvenience spammers or to stop them spamming - it's designed to stop users being spammed. Think of it like putting all the mimes in the world on a remote island - they can carry on doing their thing but none of us have to put up with it.
Hmm. Excuse me, I have some extraordinarily silent renditions to arrange.
The idea presumes that the spammer does some sort of follow-up to see if his posts aren't just deleted immediately, who will then decide IF he should post more spam from a different account. The false premise here is that they somehow value checking for old spam more than they do the opportunity to just post more spam.
The *only* way to stop spammers is to have enough of a profile on how they operate at any given time as to be able to algorithmically track their entire process. Trying to "beat" little pieces will only result in them picking a different piece (like user verification in this case) to attack. Look at email spam; for users of high-volume mail services (like Gmail) spam is reduced to an almost unnoticeable level, thanks to their ability to see so many millions of users worth of email and put together spam patterns instantly and precisely. Therefore, a viable solution to forum spam (certainly more so than this idea) is to have a forum (or some centralized service) large enough to see forum spam from a huge sample.
Decriminalization is NOT the answer. If we'd simply decriminalized alcohol in 1933 rather than outright legalizing it, we'd still have the bar bombings etc we had when it was completely illegal.
Legalize it and the gangs and gang violence goes away, the prices drop drastically so maybe that crackhead doesn't have to burglarize your house for his crack, etc.
If someone wants to shoot heroin, let him shoot heroin. Your drug use is not my business. If you have to steal to support your habit, it's your theivery that's my business when you rob me, not your drug habit.
However, there is one class of drugs I would keep illegal -- antibiotics. Your illicit use of heroin doesn't affect me, but your use of antibiotics breeds supergerms which DO affect me.
Don't decriminalize it -- legalize it, regulate it, and tax it. I have a acquaintence who is a crack addict, she was surprised to find when she checked into rehab that there was not only cocaine in her system, but meth as well. Back in the '70s they used to dust pot with PCP. Regulation will keep adulterants out of dope, the dope they're doing is bad enough.
Lagalizing alcohol worked well. Yes, we still have alcoholics, but a lot lower percentage of teenagers are drinking now than in 1925.
It's been beaten to death (working on a pun here) but those with a drug habit ended up there in a lot of cases because they were already destitute and making crack $1 a hit instead of $10 a hit isn't going to make them less likely to want to steal to get it... they don't have a job and legalizing it won't change that. Drug use, joblessness, homelessness, mental illness, burglary, violence, and emergency health care are all tightly intertwined. The first 3 might be easy to ignore but the last 4 are *your* problem as a member of a first world country. The solution is not to simply take away the criminal atmosphere surrounding issue #1...
As a student of Economics, I admit that this is appealing and possibly beneficial if part of a larger solution, but only if.
There should be doctors who specialize in non-medical drugs. In order to purchase drugs you will need to go to a doctor and get ok'd for specific drugs, you then get a card allowing you to purchase said drugs. If you do not go back for quarterly check-ups your card will be revoked.
If a significant portion of people who use currently illegal drugs go this route then there will not be enough of a market for illegal suppliers.
Sure there is. When this un-doctor (prescribing you drugs to make you less healthy) is required to report the use to the insurance companies, after they realize there is a pretty solid correlation with legal blow and heart attacks (or whatever) and want to jack rates for any confirmed users. Black markets will always be around since there are many undeniably negative trade-offs to recreational drug use, and therefore benefits to concealing their use will always be present.
Unfortunately I have met several programmers who do exactly that. Usually recent refugees from homemade.csv land. Then they go on an epic bender of why SQL is not webscale and we need to use nosql solutions etc etc. I realize this sounds like a daily WTF post but I've also seen people implement sorting in the app instead of letting the DB do it. Madness.
Why would I trust the lousy SQL server app to properly implement a superior bubble sort algorithm?
After Apple lost the "Microsoft coppied our GUI" case, their desktop GUI remained unchanged for 10 years. System 7 through 9 were basically identical..... they couldn't even multitask properly (used cooperative multitasking which led to misbehaving programs refusing to give-up the CPU & freezing the system). Apple said they would stop innovating their GUI if competitors simply copied their ideas, and that's essentially what happened.
There are two premises in play here; one is that if Apple's IP is not protected that they would choose not to innovate (perhaps so that they can take their ball and go home) and the other is that if their IP is not protected that they are at a competitive financial disadvantage and can no longer innovate since there is no revenue coming in. In the past, it could be argued that Apple was indeed at disadvantage because they lost to Microsoft and therefore had poor sales revenue, and that is what stunted their innovation because they kept creating the same lousy desktop experience over and over. However at this point Apple has more than enough money to innovate to any degree imaginable, so any "missing innovation" would be due solely to their will to restrain themselves.
1. Wait for US energy companies to use a cost-effective manufacturing solution (in China). Hijack trade secrets and hire away skilled workers. 2. Produce a few years worth of product. 3. "Dump" product for less than it cost to make, bankrupting the US based competition. 4. Profit from stockpile of product that can now be sold with little competition.
No ???, because this is exactly what is happening.
And that's a huge problem with cyber: attribution. Even if an attack appears to be coming from a particular source, that doesn't mean it originated from and/or was ordered by that source. In fact, intentional misattribution or denial of attribution is yet another element of cyber operations. From a US perspective, we still don't have a comprehensive set of rules of engagement for cyber, or even really have consistent, well-understood definitions for what constitutes "cyber war" (though there's certainly a lot of hype...)
Attribution is a problem, but it certainly isn't a new one. The King got poisoned? Well hell, it could have been spies from any one of our enemies! Or even an ally that wanted us to hate our enemies more! Or even a friend that wanted us to turn on an ally! To the horses! Avenge the King!
But seriously, covert and clandestine operations have been around basically since the beginning of state conflict. "Cyber war" is scary, and some threats are justified, but acting like this is a brave new world really does overstate it a bit. It's the same big scary world out there, we just have a new face on the conflict.
Why can't ACT have one big massive pool of questions in its database. For each question, there would be a bit flag field as part of it's entry in the database.
One flag would be christian friendly, another flag would be christian naughty, another would be muslim friendly, another could be muslim nauthty, and so forth.
A mysql or postgress database, along withe some perl/python scripts should be all you need to whip out tests for each of the fifty states. In fact, you can have a state table in the database; one row for each of the 50 states and territories. The scripts can then match the flags for each state with the flags for each of the test questions.
I could probably whip up something in less than a day.
I could be wrong, but as a standardized test I believe they need to evaluate every set of questions against a baseline of students and then against the whole population of participants; that's what gives them the ability to use it to uniformly identify educational knowledge levels. If they had a set specifically for those students, all of a sudden the test doesnt tell you where a kid is in relation to the entire student population, but only to the other students who used the same set of questions. While it may seem like a non-issue to let idiots be with idiots when it comes to creationism, I for one would like to see the testing and reporting not be fragmented.
Not to mention the whole establishment clause thingy...
of course darwin made it up! einstein also completely made up relativity. since they both used the scientific method, it turns out this theory they both proposed is both provable and a very good model for how the world and universe works, respectively. if the kentucky legislature wants to completely make up their own theory they are more than welcome to. if their theory turns out to be a better model than darwin's then by all means let's teach the one that is the most correct...
THIS! The idea that the lawmaker dismisses evolution as "made up" just because someone at some point thought of it (and didn't have the foresight to put it in the Bible) is un-fucking-believable. He clearly has NO idea what science is, what it's for, or why it's better than believing a 1000-2000 year old text that's been retranslated about twenty times. How do you even begin to reply to that kind of ignorance?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be very curious to know how you're measuring productivity. Our experience has been that pairing results in more than 200% productivity.
(For our definition of productivity, which includes the long-term maintenance effort on the resulting code).
It almost has to be in LOC or some other hard to judge metric. If anyone really believed that pairing two coders results in one of them getting only half of their work done, they would be idiots for letting it go more than one day.
While I do agree with your point that propaganda is typically "persuasion by any means necessary" the burden of proof is so high when it comes to medical studies that you basically will never get to the point where you are sure of a conclusion, unless the entire sample in the study is dead. This makes it particularly pertinent to remember that people generally choose sides on a study solely based on their previous belief, not because of any particularly hard evidence inside it (since there is almost always a study just waiting to be read that basically disagrees entirely with it). That, and a very common rhetorical tactic (as seen here) is guilt by association; people naturally think of propaganda as bad so if you can make any tie between it and something you don't like (even just mentioning it in the same sentence), you will gain ground.
Does smoking pot as a teen lower your IQ, or are stupid teens more likely to smoke pot?
You control for that by looking at the entire population IQ, and then looking at the availability of pot (some parts of the population certainly have a harder time getting hold of it). Then follow those cohorts from year to year as they age and see if there is a difference in the group that has no problem getting it (they would end up with a lower IQ ultimately).
But scientific rigor is for squares.
Propaganda by whom, and for what purpose? How do you identify it as propaganda instead of legitimate science? You have to answer these basic questions and support your answers with evidence before anybody is going to buy into your conspiracy theories.
Propaganda; n. Any material which proposes to sway a reader to form a conclusion that conflicts with your own.
Samsung, for several devices (the ones that did look a bit more iphone-ish like the Fascinate) had oddly curved corners, not a perfect radius from the union of the two sides. Strangely, the courts didnt find this distinction sufficient (even though an Apple product would NEVER have anything but perfectly radius-ed corners.)
Say what you want, but I've been having a hard time gauging Slashdot GroupThink on the subject of Climate change. It's ether:
A) Climate Deniers are Stupid
B) Climate Deniers are Justified
or
C) You're just a shill
It really seems to come down to which group has the most Mod Points or which group has the most dedication to the thread. Each side just views the other as Trolls so it goes nowhere.
Agreed, on top of the fact that expending energy on this particular study is wasteful. The story might as well be "water wet, sky blue", basically it's just more evidence that was already had, that temperature variations in the past have happened naturally (read: change MIGHT be non-anthropogenic.) Given that it's not proof or even indicative of anything happening in the present (since there was not a change taking place until after the point where anthropogenic affects came into being) it is particularly only useful to the deniers, so expect to see a lot of that.
That's the thing, it's not about "free" vs "paid". If my job were to deburr widgets and I got paid $1 per widget that I successfully deburred, sure I won't sit around on my free time deburring widgets without making any extra money for it. That's not what this economy is like though. If you are in a position where you can bill OT for every moment you spend thinking about work, great for you. Not many are in that position though, and those that aren't realize that a competitive advantage can be had by being as available as possible.
The bottom line is that if everyone else is doing it, you had sure as shit better do it too if you want to stay competitive.
Your point is taken, but for the record I wasn't the one who made the "original post" and you weren't the target of my example; I was pointing out that many jobs outside of car mechanics and factory work DO involve snowball issues that are best dealing with early on. An ounce of prevention, as it were. If you don't experience this in your job, then it sounds like a good spot and I suggest keeping it for a long time. Those of us who arent that lucky, get that availability has its price and its benefits.
Even if it is, I'd rather spend 15 minutes at 11pm typing an e-mail that will solve a problem right then, than having to spend 2 hours fixing something first thing the next morning.
You seem to have missed reading the headline, let alone TFA "Workers Working An Extra 20 Hours a Week". You won't get two hours off tomorrow for your 15 minutes of work at 11pm.
The thing about a lot of knowledge-based jobs is that usually a company (even a big one) has one, maybe two or three people with deep domain knowledge into a particular subject. This means that you are responsible for every issue regarding subject X, regardless of if it's too much work or if the issue comes up on the weekend or whatever. If you choose to ignore things over the weekend, and to ignore things that require working more than 8 hours a day, sure you can probably get away with it and you might even survive the next round of layoffs (but no guarantees.)
If solving a problem in 15 minutes that would have ballooned into a 2 hour fiasco once management gets their hands on it (say for example if the customer is shitstorm mad that they were waiting for an answer all weekend and now want a dog and pony show to keep them happy) then hell yes I would rather spend the 15 minutes on it now and maybe i can get something else productive done the next day with those 2 hours (or i can post to slashdot... ahem).
You are right that this comes down to understanding. What it means is that a worker (who is getting paid to fill a role, not getting paid to perform piecemeal work) can now be productive 4 more hours a day without being in the office for those 4 hours. Given the choice between staying in the office for 12 hours, and taking a 33% pay cut so that the company can hire someone else to show up for those 4 hours to get that work done, i would rather keep the money and blast out a few emails after hours. This is the new economy, it's not a question of convincing management to keep 2 guys around doing the same job. It's a question of are you the one guy left or are you are the one guy let go (hint they will probably choose the one that knows how to be more productive.)
"From: Doe, John [US/CORPHQ]
Sent: Fri 2/13/2012 6:35PM
Help I have a small grease fire! I am contemplating dousing it with water. Any advice? --JD"
If I can tell that idiot to use baking soda instead of water, he will stand a much better chance at saving himself and others a lot of time, money, and effort as opposed to ignoring it until monday. The analogues in the business world are MANY, I come across them all the time. If you don't see them, maybe you aren't in that kind of job, or you just aren't the fix-it guy.
Is it really necessary to make this an iOS vs Android pissing match? What point in suggesting one side is more gullible than the other? (It's probably an invalid point anyways.)
I think the whole premise of your post is wrong. The technical / bandwidth (and possibly legal) hurdles involved if Facetime over cellular (or any video-enabled VOIP) takes off in a big way are a lot scarier to telcos than ordinary streaming video from Youtube or Netflix. I don't necessarily approve of this solution from AT&T, just saying I can see some of the reasoning behind it.
The excuse AT&T used was that since FaceTime was a "preloaded" app, they were free to muck about with its availability whereas they weren't going to do so for any self-loaded apps (which would potentially violate basic net neutrality guidelines, as well as the 4G spectrum "rules" put in place if they ever made a 4G capable iPhone). Whether or not AT&T thinks that iPhone users are more or less gullible, they do think (otherwise they wouldn't pull this shit, ipso facto) that iPhone users are more likely to pay up than to take their business elsewhere. If such a simple option existed on Android handsets, I would suspect they would go after that too. But given the obvious differences between the platforms (the distinction between users who prefer one vs the other is left to the reader) there is something to be said for AT&T targeting the iPhone in this way.
wow, how is his claim "anti-science"?
Medical research actually does suggest a link between very early miscarriages and cortisol levels which seems to be very much along the lines of what Akins suggests (there are multiple studies along these lines, including some interesting research on the use of progesterone to counter-act stress and "protect" pregnancies in mice)
So you are suggesting that this study (cortisol levels over three weeks) is relevant? Women who are raped consecutively for three weeks will be *so* relieved.
The debate is actually over whether it's a harmful medical procedure performed on the fetus.
The debate is actually *actually* over whether a blastocyst (a collection of about a dozen stem cells in a loose ball) constitutes a "life" and whether or not it should be up to the mother to decide to continue to gestate that collection of cells to the point where it becomes a fetus (about 9-10 weeks later). Since the decision by the victim is principally quite immediate, the question of when life starts is pushed all the way to the point where the "Baby" is just two or three stem cells.
I wouldn't be so sure his flawed understanding of rape and conception is his motivation for opposing abortion in the case of rape.
I understand women can get pregnant from a rape, but still think abortion in the case of rape should be outlawed. The child is still a life and isn't responsible for the rape. Therefore, the child doesn't deserve to be punished with death for a crime he or she didn't commit.
Does not follow. If his belief was that no life should be jeopardized regardless of how early it is possibly viable, he should be on TV saying "I don't care if every conception happens from rape, I am against abortions no matter what."
Instead, he comes up with a complete falsification that is, no doubt, intended to make his position on abortion either more palpable to himself or (in the case that he doesnt believe it at all) to others. So he is either woefully bad at intellectual investigation, or he is a plain-faced liar who just wants to win mindshare. As a politician I wouldn't put either past him.
But it is a math issue. Akin has made the claim that somehow women who are raped can fend off pregnancy. So, there is a solid claim here that can be investigated, and before one starts pondering the means by which women can prevent rapists' sperm from fertilizing their ova, it seems useful to investigate the rates of pregnancy from rape.
This is exactly it. The "big deal" isn't that a conservative thinks there is some sort of magic that God put in women to prevent unwelcome pregnancy (conservatives believe all kinds of ridiculous things so this is not a shocker at all). The big deal is that Rep Akin was appointed to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology in the U.S. House. This obviously puts him in a position to influence the nation's policy toward science, and since he is clearly a firm disbeliever in science as a whole it is really important that as many people know about this tragic mismatch as possible.
Careful, you might not want the boardroom audio available to all.
The safest path might be to replace the tape deck with a solid state recorder with removable storage. I've hooked ours up to an iPod in the past.
This. I would suggest keeping the Mics (they probably have good placement and superior audio) and feeding them into a small digital recorder that someone has the responsibility of starting/stopping/uploading. This way only the activity that is supposed to be recorded, retransmitted, etc. is actually done since a human needs to handle the movement of the information. Try to automate it and get it wrong (even on accident,) and you could find yourself looking for a new job at best, and looking out from a jail cell at worst.
My first thought was some sort of remote-controlled mic system that took cues from an Exchange server managing meeting resource events. That way the file would automatically be generated for each meeting that was scheduled, and saved accordingly. That would be awesome until someone scheduled an off the record meeting and found out only later that the whole thing was recorded and stashed on the intranet where who knows who has access to it.
But you won't stop the spam.
The idea (not that it's a particularly brilliant one) isn't to inconvenience spammers or to stop them spamming - it's designed to stop users being spammed. Think of it like putting all the mimes in the world on a remote island - they can carry on doing their thing but none of us have to put up with it.
Hmm. Excuse me, I have some extraordinarily silent renditions to arrange.
The idea presumes that the spammer does some sort of follow-up to see if his posts aren't just deleted immediately, who will then decide IF he should post more spam from a different account. The false premise here is that they somehow value checking for old spam more than they do the opportunity to just post more spam.
The *only* way to stop spammers is to have enough of a profile on how they operate at any given time as to be able to algorithmically track their entire process. Trying to "beat" little pieces will only result in them picking a different piece (like user verification in this case) to attack. Look at email spam; for users of high-volume mail services (like Gmail) spam is reduced to an almost unnoticeable level, thanks to their ability to see so many millions of users worth of email and put together spam patterns instantly and precisely. Therefore, a viable solution to forum spam (certainly more so than this idea) is to have a forum (or some centralized service) large enough to see forum spam from a huge sample.
Decriminalization is NOT the answer. If we'd simply decriminalized alcohol in 1933 rather than outright legalizing it, we'd still have the bar bombings etc we had when it was completely illegal.
Legalize it and the gangs and gang violence goes away, the prices drop drastically so maybe that crackhead doesn't have to burglarize your house for his crack, etc.
If someone wants to shoot heroin, let him shoot heroin. Your drug use is not my business. If you have to steal to support your habit, it's your theivery that's my business when you rob me, not your drug habit.
However, there is one class of drugs I would keep illegal -- antibiotics. Your illicit use of heroin doesn't affect me, but your use of antibiotics breeds supergerms which DO affect me.
Don't decriminalize it -- legalize it, regulate it, and tax it. I have a acquaintence who is a crack addict, she was surprised to find when she checked into rehab that there was not only cocaine in her system, but meth as well. Back in the '70s they used to dust pot with PCP. Regulation will keep adulterants out of dope, the dope they're doing is bad enough.
Lagalizing alcohol worked well. Yes, we still have alcoholics, but a lot lower percentage of teenagers are drinking now than in 1925.
It's been beaten to death (working on a pun here) but those with a drug habit ended up there in a lot of cases because they were already destitute and making crack $1 a hit instead of $10 a hit isn't going to make them less likely to want to steal to get it... they don't have a job and legalizing it won't change that. Drug use, joblessness, homelessness, mental illness, burglary, violence, and emergency health care are all tightly intertwined. The first 3 might be easy to ignore but the last 4 are *your* problem as a member of a first world country. The solution is not to simply take away the criminal atmosphere surrounding issue #1...
As a student of Economics, I admit that this is appealing and possibly beneficial if part of a larger solution, but only if.
There should be doctors who specialize in non-medical drugs. In order to purchase drugs you will need to go to a doctor and get ok'd for specific drugs, you then get a card allowing you to purchase said drugs. If you do not go back for quarterly check-ups your card will be revoked.
If a significant portion of people who use currently illegal drugs go this route then there will not be enough of a market for illegal suppliers.
Sure there is. When this un-doctor (prescribing you drugs to make you less healthy) is required to report the use to the insurance companies, after they realize there is a pretty solid correlation with legal blow and heart attacks (or whatever) and want to jack rates for any confirmed users. Black markets will always be around since there are many undeniably negative trade-offs to recreational drug use, and therefore benefits to concealing their use will always be present.
Unfortunately I have met several programmers who do exactly that. Usually recent refugees from homemade .csv land.
Then they go on an epic bender of why SQL is not webscale and we need to use nosql solutions etc etc.
I realize this sounds like a daily WTF post but I've also seen people implement sorting in the app instead of letting the DB do it. Madness.
Why would I trust the lousy SQL server app to properly implement a superior bubble sort algorithm?
After Apple lost the "Microsoft coppied our GUI" case, their desktop GUI remained unchanged for 10 years. System 7 through 9 were basically identical..... they couldn't even multitask properly (used cooperative multitasking which led to misbehaving programs refusing to give-up the CPU & freezing the system). Apple said they would stop innovating their GUI if competitors simply copied their ideas, and that's essentially what happened.
There are two premises in play here; one is that if Apple's IP is not protected that they would choose not to innovate (perhaps so that they can take their ball and go home) and the other is that if their IP is not protected that they are at a competitive financial disadvantage and can no longer innovate since there is no revenue coming in. In the past, it could be argued that Apple was indeed at disadvantage because they lost to Microsoft and therefore had poor sales revenue, and that is what stunted their innovation because they kept creating the same lousy desktop experience over and over. However at this point Apple has more than enough money to innovate to any degree imaginable, so any "missing innovation" would be due solely to their will to restrain themselves.
You have gravely over-complicated the process...
1. Wait for US energy companies to use a cost-effective manufacturing solution (in China). Hijack trade secrets and hire away skilled workers.
2. Produce a few years worth of product.
3. "Dump" product for less than it cost to make, bankrupting the US based competition.
4. Profit from stockpile of product that can now be sold with little competition.
No ???, because this is exactly what is happening.
And that's a huge problem with cyber: attribution. Even if an attack appears to be coming from a particular source, that doesn't mean it originated from and/or was ordered by that source. In fact, intentional misattribution or denial of attribution is yet another element of cyber operations. From a US perspective, we still don't have a comprehensive set of rules of engagement for cyber, or even really have consistent, well-understood definitions for what constitutes "cyber war" (though there's certainly a lot of hype...)
Attribution is a problem, but it certainly isn't a new one. The King got poisoned? Well hell, it could have been spies from any one of our enemies! Or even an ally that wanted us to hate our enemies more! Or even a friend that wanted us to turn on an ally! To the horses! Avenge the King!
But seriously, covert and clandestine operations have been around basically since the beginning of state conflict. "Cyber war" is scary, and some threats are justified, but acting like this is a brave new world really does overstate it a bit. It's the same big scary world out there, we just have a new face on the conflict.
Why can't ACT have one big massive pool of questions in its database. For each question, there would be a bit flag field as part of it's entry in the database.
One flag would be christian friendly, another flag would be christian naughty, another would be muslim friendly, another could be muslim nauthty, and so forth.
A mysql or postgress database, along withe some perl/python scripts should be all you need to whip out tests for each of the fifty states. In fact, you can have a state table in the database; one row for each of the 50 states and territories. The scripts can then match the flags for each state with the flags for each of the test questions.
I could probably whip up something in less than a day.
I could be wrong, but as a standardized test I believe they need to evaluate every set of questions against a baseline of students and then against the whole population of participants; that's what gives them the ability to use it to uniformly identify educational knowledge levels. If they had a set specifically for those students, all of a sudden the test doesnt tell you where a kid is in relation to the entire student population, but only to the other students who used the same set of questions. While it may seem like a non-issue to let idiots be with idiots when it comes to creationism, I for one would like to see the testing and reporting not be fragmented.
Not to mention the whole establishment clause thingy...
of course darwin made it up! einstein also completely made up relativity. since they both used the scientific method, it turns out this theory they both proposed is both provable and a very good model for how the world and universe works, respectively. if the kentucky legislature wants to completely make up their own theory they are more than welcome to. if their theory turns out to be a better model than darwin's then by all means let's teach the one that is the most correct...
THIS! The idea that the lawmaker dismisses evolution as "made up" just because someone at some point thought of it (and didn't have the foresight to put it in the Bible) is un-fucking-believable. He clearly has NO idea what science is, what it's for, or why it's better than believing a 1000-2000 year old text that's been retranslated about twenty times. How do you even begin to reply to that kind of ignorance?