The time and effort you spend on being "a parent" is much better used better being *with* the child, rather than making lunch for the child. Especially if the school can provide a healthy and tasty meal for the children. There is no magic attribute that makes mothers or fathers food any more healthy.
The only silly thing about the system is that it is individualized, the school should provide healthy food for all the pupils, rather than just the ones whose parents have asked for it.
Doping has been part of the game for as long as Tour de France has existed. The game doesn't gat any less exiting for that reason, doping isn't magic potions that turn ordinary humans into superhumans.
The hypocracy is anoying though, and it is annoying when some of the pre-race favorites gets excluded because they are unlucky enough to get caught, but that risk is part of the game, like the risk of being involved in a bad crash before the start.
The Internet is providing the foundation for a large number of new tools, which people have to learnto use. Wikipedia is no different from other tools in that regard, it is very valuable if you know how to use it, and and you can cut yourself if you don't.
For Wikipedia, depending on how important the information is to you, consider if the subject area you looked up is from of Wikipedias strength. Read the talk page. Look at the history. Is it essentially one mans work?
For printed encyclopedia you should also look at the publisher, is it one with a good reputation? That a book calls itself an "encyclopedia" and is printed does not make it reliable, there are partisan encyclopedia, and artistic encyclopedia, as well as simply poor workmanship out there. But a few of them has a good reputation, which makes them valuable as autoritative sources. We know which ones.
I notice that your definition of "perfect backward compatibility" seems to be "there is one example where it works". Microsoft seems to have an uncanny power to make its customers lower their expectations.
The official progress report for the EU project I work for was written in Word 2000, and cannot be opened with Word XP. That is unusual, normally it is just that the text is slightly broken, especially if it contains mathematical formulas.
The reason we (well, not me, my cow-orkers. I use LaTeX for anything that is important, and my 15 years old reports still print with no display glitches) use Microsoft Office, and continue to use it, and continue to upgrade, is that the people we need to colaborate with use it, and upgrade.
> You'd really be surprised how many times people list "c++ expert" on their > resumes and are completely unable to explain the difference between a pointer > and a reference.
It doesn't surprise me, the difference is mostly syntactical. Th initial motivation for references was syntactical (for operator overloading), and the choice is usually made for syntactical reasons.
A reference is a const pointer that cannot point to NULL (without cheating).
> We were, perhaps, in the 80s and early 90s - which were the glory days > of the EU competition (anti-trust, if you must) directorate attacking > state monopolies and imposing (and enforcing) serious fines against > member states for illegal state aid.
I was mostly thinking about private trusts. There are still a lot of business areas in Denmark where you get almost identical price quotes from different companies (and *not* because of a perfect market!), and areas where a single company manage to dominate the market.
Our national anti-trust agency has been inefficient, and whenever anyone was busted only ridiculously small fines were given. EU has been much more active, the fines has been signficant.
The trust have become better at not leaving any paper trail though. Having a trust is so much more lucrative than actually competing, that it is very hard to give up. Without constant intervention, any free market will automatically colapse into trusts (or guilds as they used to be called) and monopolies.
With regard to state monopolies, Denmark has (like UK) been way ahead of the EU in privatization, so we haven't felt the influence directly there. It may have been a signficant factor in other member countries.
It is the freedom to choose future vendors that follows with free software. You don't have a single vendor who is the only one who can inspect, modify and redistribute the code. Anyone can do that, which ensures competition, which ensures the lowest cost in the long run.
The initial cost of free software is usually higher, as a vendor of proprietary software can sell the product below production cost, with the expectation of making the money back later in support and manitanence.
Which again is why we should work to make it official policy to require all software to be covered by a free software license in *any* organization where we are members (including the temptation), as there will be a temptation for decision makers to make the purchase that is cheapest in this budget year, and ignore the expenses later on.
A capitalist society that embrace large companies and monopolies (with ever stronger "IP" laws) and weakened anti-trust laws is moving towards a kind of feudalism.
EU is actually moving (incredibly slowly, and with many backslashes) the opposite direction, from a feudal economy dominated by national monopolies and trust, into a competitive European market backed by strong anti-trust legislation.
A non-government lobbyist organization has no obligation to being fair, just to effective. Being effective means taking up the most popular cases. If they start defending the right to publish pedophile fantasies, to take a non-political example, that will be used against them and make the entire campaign inefficient.
The number "7" is in the public domain. The number that represents the.exe file of Microsoft Word is not.
Patents cover ideas. Copyrights cover the expression of ideas. A specific expression of an idea can be represented as a number. Ideas themselves can't.
You can of course represent the patent text as a number, but that is again a particular expression of the idea, not the idea itself. The patent text is therefore covered by copyright, not by the patent.
> Limiting yourself to open source limits your choices.
Depends on which choices you talk about. Insisting on free software for the *initial choice* is the same as insisting on not limiting your *future choice* of vendors for service, maintenance and improvements.
To be honest, this particular freedom is probaby more important for business applications, than for a home user applications such as Picasso.
An ISP will obviously try optimize the three factors for maximal profit: 1) The amount of money they lose due to customers who flee because of too many false negatives in the spam filter. 2) The amount of money they lose due to customers who flee because of too many false positives in the spam filter. 3) The amount of money they put into developing spam filters.
The marketplace will determine who does the best job.
It really doesn't seem to a task for a supposedly freedom oriented organization such as the EFF, but they always had a strange standpoint when spam is involved. Early on, they questioned peoples right to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to accept mail from open mail relays on their own servers.
Whenever I see such a statement I have to surpress an urge to insert a procmail rule to forward all my spam to them.
At the time when I finally gave up and added Baysian filtering, I spend over half an hour every morning "deleting unwanted mail", and didn't read mail during the day. My manual deletion had more false positives than the Baysian filter, it is hard to keep focus when you have to delete 100's of spams for every ham.
> Oh yes, Sandman is deep AND entertaining. There are also other comics > that can be considered to be in the same universe, like Lucifer, Books of > Magic and Hellblazer.
Well, technically, Superman and Batman are in the same universe...
Obviously, the professional developers will mostly work on issues their customers care about. Which is a good thing. Sure, bugs should be fixed. But hey should be fixed because users care about them. Otherwise, the only reason to fix them is the professional pride of the programmers, which is fine for hobbyists, but not professionals.
> Unless I've been living under a rock, Wal-Mart is, without a shred of bias, bad > by many objective definitions of the word.
Sure. Here is one objective definition of the word bad: "Any entity whose English name start with a W is bad". Objective doesn't mean "true" or "useful", it just means that different people using this criteria will come to the same conclusion.
A more useful observation would be that no widely accepted definition of the word "neutral" can be applied to the words "bad" or "good".
Obviously, your personality is important for your ability to work efficiently in a team. And if your job doesn't involve any kind of teamwork, it will probably be outsurced soon to Ukraine anyway.
The tests, however, are just pseudo-science. They exists in order to allow management to avoid responsibility for their actions. The companies that sell them have many highly paid and competent professionals whose major competance is to invent pseudo-arguments for why their pseudo-science works, using words also found in real science which the customers don't understand. They are on the level with (and in the same market as) astrology, except that most of the astrologist actually believe in their nonsense.
A good manager will know his team, and will ask you question that will reveal if you are likely to fit well into that team. That is not something a standardized test can help with.
If you want the job despite management being incompetent, they way to answer these test is to ignore everything you will be told about the tests, try to imagine what kind of person that would fit the buzzwords would be like, and answer according to that persona.
Basically, you have to be smarter than the people who made the test, which is usually quite easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully they don't just buy for 100 mio laptops, but have an educational program for teachers and pupils to learn to use them as well.
The time and effort you spend on being "a parent" is much better used better being *with* the child, rather than making lunch for the child. Especially if the school can provide a healthy and tasty meal for the children. There is no magic attribute that makes mothers or fathers food any more healthy.
The only silly thing about the system is that it is individualized, the school should provide healthy food for all the pupils, rather than just the ones whose parents have asked for it.
Doping has been part of the game for as long as Tour de France has existed. The game doesn't gat any less exiting for that reason, doping isn't magic potions that turn ordinary humans into superhumans.
The hypocracy is anoying though, and it is annoying when some of the pre-race favorites gets excluded because they are unlucky enough to get caught, but that risk is part of the game, like the risk of being involved in a bad crash before the start.
The Internet is providing the foundation for a large number of new tools, which people have to learnto use. Wikipedia is no different from other tools in that regard, it is very valuable if you know how to use it, and and you can cut yourself if you don't.
For Wikipedia, depending on how important the information is to you, consider if the subject area you looked up is from of Wikipedias strength. Read the talk page. Look at the history. Is it essentially one mans work?
For printed encyclopedia you should also look at the publisher, is it one with a good reputation? That a book calls itself an "encyclopedia" and is printed does not make it reliable, there are partisan encyclopedia, and artistic encyclopedia, as well as simply poor workmanship out there. But a few of them has a good reputation, which makes them valuable as autoritative sources. We know which ones.
So, as always, know your tools.
> the RMS type "OSS is religion"
Religion? Would you really claim Saint IGNUcius considers free software a religion?
(He certainly don't consider "OSS" anything but a detraction.)
I notice that your definition of "perfect backward compatibility" seems to be "there is one example where it works". Microsoft seems to have an uncanny power to make its customers lower their expectations.
The official progress report for the EU project I work for was written in Word 2000, and cannot be opened with Word XP. That is unusual, normally it is just that the text is slightly broken, especially if it contains mathematical formulas.
The reason we (well, not me, my cow-orkers. I use LaTeX for anything that is important, and my 15 years old reports still print with no display glitches) use Microsoft Office, and continue to use it, and continue to upgrade, is that the people we need to colaborate with use it, and upgrade.
> You'd really be surprised how many times people list "c++ expert" on their
> resumes and are completely unable to explain the difference between a pointer
> and a reference.
It doesn't surprise me, the difference is mostly syntactical. Th initial motivation for references was syntactical (for operator overloading), and the choice is usually made for syntactical reasons.
A reference is a const pointer that cannot point to NULL (without cheating).
> We were, perhaps, in the 80s and early 90s - which were the glory days
> of the EU competition (anti-trust, if you must) directorate attacking
> state monopolies and imposing (and enforcing) serious fines against
> member states for illegal state aid.
I was mostly thinking about private trusts. There are still a lot of business areas in Denmark where you get almost identical price quotes from different companies (and *not* because of a perfect market!), and areas where a single company manage to dominate the market.
Our national anti-trust agency has been inefficient, and whenever anyone was busted only ridiculously small fines were given. EU has been much more active, the fines has been signficant.
The trust have become better at not leaving any paper trail though. Having a trust is so much more lucrative than actually competing, that it is very hard to give up. Without constant intervention, any free market will automatically colapse into trusts (or guilds as they used to be called) and monopolies.
With regard to state monopolies, Denmark has (like UK) been way ahead of the EU in privatization, so we haven't felt the influence directly there. It may have been a signficant factor in other member countries.
It is the freedom to choose future vendors that follows with free software. You don't have a single vendor who is the only one who can inspect, modify and redistribute the code. Anyone can do that, which ensures competition, which ensures the lowest cost in the long run.
The initial cost of free software is usually higher, as a vendor of proprietary software can sell the product below production cost, with the expectation of making the money back later in support and manitanence.
Which again is why we should work to make it official policy to require all software to be covered by a free software license in *any* organization where we are members (including the temptation), as there will be a temptation for decision makers to make the purchase that is cheapest in this budget year, and ignore the expenses later on.
A capitalist society that embrace large companies and monopolies (with ever stronger "IP" laws) and weakened anti-trust laws is moving towards a kind of feudalism.
EU is actually moving (incredibly slowly, and with many backslashes) the opposite direction, from a feudal economy dominated by national monopolies and trust, into a competitive European market backed by strong anti-trust legislation.
A non-government lobbyist organization has no obligation to being fair, just to effective. Being effective means taking up the most popular cases. If they start defending the right to publish pedophile fantasies, to take a non-political example, that will be used against them and make the entire campaign inefficient.
True, but being a "non-violent bigot" is also not the same as being a "neo-nazi".
The number "7" is in the public domain. The number that represents the .exe file of Microsoft Word is not.
Patents cover ideas. Copyrights cover the expression of ideas. A specific expression of an idea can be represented as a number. Ideas themselves can't.
You can of course represent the patent text as a number, but that is again a particular expression of the idea, not the idea itself. The patent text is therefore covered by copyright, not by the patent.
# If we'd all said that GIF was good enough, PNG wouldn't have happened.
PNG happened for legal reasons, not technical reasons.
# If we'd all said that ZIP was good enough, RAR and 7z wouldn't have happened.
Isn't RAR older than ZIP? 7z: never heard of it, zip ig good enough for me.
# If we'd all said that WAV was good enough, MP3 wouldn't have happened.
MP3 was part of the MPEG2 spec, and not really related to WAV.
# If we'd all said that MP3 was good enough, AAC wouldn't have happened.
What's AAC? And why isn't MP3 good enough?
> Limiting yourself to open source limits your choices.
Depends on which choices you talk about. Insisting on free software for the *initial choice* is the same as insisting on not limiting your *future choice* of vendors for service, maintenance and improvements.
To be honest, this particular freedom is probaby more important for business applications, than for a home user applications such as Picasso.
An ISP will obviously try optimize the three factors for maximal profit:
1) The amount of money they lose due to customers who flee because of too many false negatives in the spam filter.
2) The amount of money they lose due to customers who flee because of too many false positives in the spam filter.
3) The amount of money they put into developing spam filters.
The marketplace will determine who does the best job.
It really doesn't seem to a task for a supposedly freedom oriented organization such as the EFF, but they always had a strange standpoint when spam is involved. Early on, they questioned peoples right to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to accept mail from open mail relays on their own servers.
Whenever I see such a statement I have to surpress an urge to insert a procmail rule to forward all my spam to them.
At the time when I finally gave up and added Baysian filtering, I spend over half an hour every morning "deleting unwanted mail", and didn't read mail during the day. My manual deletion had more false positives than the Baysian filter, it is hard to keep focus when you have to delete 100's of spams for every ham.
At least that is my experience. The false positives I get are all English language ham, while the false negatives I get are all Danish language spam.
Basically, it seems like I have taught bogofilter my contact list, plus how to distinguish English from Danish.
I haven't noticed any false positives or negatives in other languages.
> Oh yes, Sandman is deep AND entertaining. There are also other comics
> that can be considered to be in the same universe, like Lucifer, Books of
> Magic and Hellblazer.
Well, technically, Superman and Batman are in the same universe...
Obviously, the professional developers will mostly work on issues their customers care about. Which is a good thing. Sure, bugs should be fixed. But hey should be fixed because users care about them. Otherwise, the only reason to fix them is the professional pride of the programmers, which is fine for hobbyists, but not professionals.
Thanks, I wondered how compilers could fail to pick up *one* missing parentheses. Even in K&R C, that would be a syntax error.
That is another and more general problem, namely implicit pointer to int cast.
The many implicit convertions have never been my favorite part of the language, and I try not to rely on them in the code I write.
> Why can't anyone here realize
:-)
You know, when everybody around you seem insane or stupid, there is an alternative explanation you should consider...
> Unless I've been living under a rock, Wal-Mart is, without a shred of bias, bad
> by many objective definitions of the word.
Sure. Here is one objective definition of the word bad: "Any entity whose English name start with a W is bad". Objective doesn't mean "true" or "useful", it just means that different people using this criteria will come to the same conclusion.
A more useful observation would be that no widely accepted definition of the word "neutral" can be applied to the words "bad" or "good".
Obviously, your personality is important for your ability to work efficiently in a team. And if your job doesn't involve any kind of teamwork, it will probably be outsurced soon to Ukraine anyway.
The tests, however, are just pseudo-science. They exists in order to allow management to avoid responsibility for their actions. The companies that sell them have many highly paid and competent professionals whose major competance is to invent pseudo-arguments for why their pseudo-science works, using words also found in real science which the customers don't understand. They are on the level with (and in the same market as) astrology, except that most of the astrologist actually believe in their nonsense.
A good manager will know his team, and will ask you question that will reveal if you are likely to fit well into that team. That is not something a standardized test can help with.
If you want the job despite management being incompetent, they way to answer these test is to ignore everything you will be told about the tests, try to imagine what kind of person that would fit the buzzwords would be like, and answer according to that persona.
Basically, you have to be smarter than the people who made the test, which is usually quite easy.