I disagree with the 'stable' part. What is the basis for making that claim? Are representative governments really more stable than autocratic ones?
Democracy is the idea that a million men are smarter or more fit to rule than one man. Autocracy is the opposite claim. My personal take is that nobody is fit to rule anybody, and the only legitimate government is a completely consensual one, which is basically not a government at all, but a voluntary cooperative. I guess that makes me an anarchist, or something.
Look, I appreciate all the research. I find it fascinating. The more we know about human perception, the better. I would also prefer that design choices take empirical evidence into account. But if typeface designers and graphic artists say that a certain font 'flows better' or 'conveys a sense of industry' then that doesn't mean you need to (or even can) conduct research to prove them wrong.
If a graphic designer says that serifs 'lead your eye', but tests show that there is no difference in reading speed, then that's interesting, but neither the graphic designer nor the test is wrong, because the design choice is subjective.
Serif fonts were invented hundreds of years ago, evidently because the designers felt, as grandparent stated, that they are 'easier to read, especially large blocks of text. The serifs "lead your eyes" from one letter to the next, and help your eye group the words'. They were not wrong about this, no matter about reading speed, saccades, or empirical studies. The grandparent's 'simple test' is what you have to go on. I'm not going to prefer some shitty ugly typeface just because 'studies show' that it's no worse than a pleasant typeface. An ugly shitty typeface is an ugly shitty typeface if I say it is.
I tried to read you post, but all I got was *fap fap*saccades*fap fap*
Our eyes may use saccades at the hardware level, but we compose images with our brains' DSP (ASP?). The fact that the eyes jump around is interesting but means approximately nothing.
I think it's safe to say that nobody sees the world in jerky motion from eyeballs moving jerkily. For that matter, the high-resolution fovea in the human eye only subtends a few degrees of arc, but you just never notice, because the brain has heavy-duty processing power that synthesizes a high-resolution picture of the world through image-stitching. You can only focus at once distance at a time, but we don't really notice that either. We have stereo vision which means that we see double-images of things, but we don't really notice any double-images. We can see our noses 24 hours a day, but don't notice that either. If you want to try a fun experiment, go into an absolutely dark room, stare straight ahead, and fire a camera flash. Do not move your eyes. You will see a bright, very realistic image of the entire room for many seconds if you can avoid moving (saccading?) your eyes. You see the perfectly bright room, even in the absolute dark, because if you don't move your eyes, it's probably still accurate. As soon as you move your eyes, though, the image disappears, as your brain flushes it like cache data that can no longer be trusted. Sort of a visual cortex version of copy-on-write.
Typeface design is visual art. Visual artists have known for hundreds of years that certain shapes are pleasing, and how certain lines can draw your attention to certain features of an image, and how certain colors can influence mood. I'm sure it's all completely bunk though, after all, I read on Slasdot about saccades, so now I can dismiss another huge swath of scary subjective human experience and fence it safely out of the lonely introverted enclave that is my nerd existence.
No, it's more like the price of a coke is $0.50 if you buy it in the back section of Wal-mart and it's $1.00 in the vending machine outside. I don't want to walk into the store, so some guy might offer to walk to the back of the store, buy me a coke for $0.50, and sell it to me for $0.90, saving me a lot of walking, AND saving me money. Then, the first guy got tired of walking too, and there was another guy who offered to do the same thing for the first guy; buying the coke for $0.50 and selling it to the first guy in the middle of the store for $0.75. They both walked less, and both earned a little less money. But I still got my coke either way.
HFT is a continuous bucket-brigade of people from the back of the store all the way out to the front, each selling it to the next guy for 1 cent more. I don't care, because I'm getting value either way. If they want to stand there, and they think it's worth it, more power to them. HFT is a self-limiting problem.
Except HFT'ers ARE contributing to research and development in all kinds of technological areas. Better networks, faster connections, bigger pipes across the ocean...I heard some companies were looking into using neutrinos to communicate through the earth.
This always annoys me when people show data and the crowd is all 'wow that fits the data exactly'.
I learned in high school that the fundamental theorem of algebra states that for any N points, there exists a polynomial of degree N-1 that fits the points EXACTLY. So if the model fits the data well, that might mean something. But I can shoot a piece of graph paper with a shotgun and find a polynomial that goes through every point exactly. Fit means nothing.
Parent should be modded informative, not funny. This is a known technique to calculate the area under experimental curves. I suppose the cool kids nowadays just use a software package that automatically calculates the area under an arbitrary curve, and I could write a program to do it in a couple minutes, but the scissor + balance method is a long and glorious tradition.
And the "unintended consequences" are "the ADA might sound like a good idea on paper, but ergonomic advantages of lever-type door handles work for velociraptors, too."
Making barrels is not even hard. Certainly making a barrel would be easier than making a reciever! If you have a lathe, you can make a smoothbore barrel in like a half hour. Drill a hole through it; done. You can buy the blanks and the drills from McMaster. Standard barrels are 4140 chrome-moly and stainless ones are 316 stainless. If you want to rifle it, you just need the tools to make cut rifling. This is how all high-grade target barrels are made anyway; they are mostly hand-cut and hand-polished. You will probably end up with a better barrel than most, which are usually hammer-forged. Reaming the chamber will take 5 minutes of flushing chips out. People re-chamber guns all the time; that's how new cartridges are developed.
People who make traditional muzzle-loaders weld up their own barrels from as many as 4 flat pieces of steel, using a forge and anvil. This is how it was done for many decades...I supposed people killed each other with hand-forged barrels LONGER than modern ones!
Not far off. The Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) at 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(23), and the National Firearms Act (NFA) at 26 U.S.C. 5845(b) define a "machinegun" very loosly:
“any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger...and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.”
You may note that this makes an awful lot of things 'machineguns'. The BATF technology branch has actually affirmed in writing that shoelaces are machineguns. Google "shoelaces are machineguns", you can read the letter for yourself. Also, Chore Boy copper pot scrubber pads are also legally machineguns. Don't listen to me, google it and read the BATF correspondence.
If shoelaces are machineguns, you bet you ass a 3D printer is a machinegun. Hurray for gun control laws, most logical and reasonable of all laws.
As another child points out, you are incorrect about the guns. LEO's have extra special above-the-law privileges when it comes to guns, even when they are off duty, even in their personal life, and even after they are retired. My police-officer neighbor has a full-auto short-barrel Thompson, personally-owned. I would love to have one, but some animals are more equal than others.
The NRA aggregates and publishes official news reports of armed self-defense. There is also the now-defunct http://thearmedcitizen.com/wp/category/armed.
The reason you don't hear about armed self-defense on national news is that it's pretty anti-climatic. "Man shoots would-be robber" is not national newsworthy; "ARMED GUNMAN KILLS 12 IN THEATER MASSACRE" is.
But when somebody stops a shooter before anyone gets killed, you don't see it on national news. Obviously, if you go by what you see on the news, you are going to come to the conclusion that nobody ever stops violence with violence.
Plus, when somebody manages to stop somebody early in a killing spree, there's no way to tell how bad of a killing spree it would have been if he hadn't been stopped. You can't say "armed citizen prevents 50 shooting deaths", even though that very well may be the total body count if nobody did anything to stop the shooter.
I work at a Texas Instruments semiconductor fab in Dallas, and we ship two thousand 200mm wafers per day, including the whole world's supply of DLP chips. Including half a dozen of the chips in your iPhone. TI has at least 4 other semiconductor fabs in the US. The US hasn't given up yet; it is, however, difficult to compete with Asia considering the looming macroeconomic factors against us.
It's not worth trying to extract a great lesson on politics from this passage, although that hasn't stopped people from trying to do so. The Church has a consistently poor understanding of this passage, partly because they don't read history outside of the bible, which you have to do in order to understand some of it.
The Roman denarius was the USD of its day, being the most important world currency and what you needed to pay your taxes. It was stamped with an image of Cesar. Now, remembering your history, the emperors of Rome were considered to have divinely sanctioned authority, and we ain't talking Yaweh here. The Jews did not like this at all, and considered the image of Cesar stamped on the denarius to be idolatry. Jews had been known to actually re-mint denarii with different images. They might have avoided the coins altogether, and vanished from history by starvation, but we can assume they compromised--principles are great, but sometimes there's no other option but to use the currency of the day (sort of like h.264).
When the Pharisees try to entrap Jesus by asking him if it's ok to pay taxes, he jabs back at them by drawing attention to the fact that although they talk big, the coins in their pockets are Roman denarii, thus highlighting the the fact that they are just a bunch of whores whose rules and laws are as irrelevant as Ceasar's on a spiritual level. If there is an overarching political message of the gospels, it's that things of the world do no matter, including political matters.
Matthew 21, ESV
45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. 46 And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet.
15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. 16 And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone's opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances.[b] 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius.[c] 20 And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” 21 They said, “Caesar's.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” 22 When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away.
The "Render unto Cesar" passage is nothing more than Jesus deflecting the Pharisees' attempts to frame him, in a somewhat clever way. It's pointless to try to derive a lesson or a teaching on separation of church and state from it. Actually, it's hard to extract any political message at all from the teachings of Jesus, which teachings are practically devoid of political content even to the point of ignoring looming contemporary political issues. It's not just modern followers who are frustrated by this. His disciples never quite got it either. They discussed what position they would have in the kingdom when Jesus made himself king. Seriously. After his resurrection, they assume he's going to take over the world, and he immediately brushes them off and starts talking about the Holy Spirit.
6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, 'Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?'
7 He said to them: 'It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.'
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
Less than 10 min.: Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
I still remember getting this one wrong in grade school:
How many 'states of matter' are there? a) 1 b) 2 c) 3 d) 4
I would answer 4--Solid, Liquid, Gas, Plasma--because I read books. But we weren't expected to know about plasma, so the correct answer was always 3, and I was marked wrong. The teachers never gave me credit, because I don't think they knew what a plasma was either.
Now the problem with barter is inefficiency, that you can't really pay me in chickens for software with effective granularity.
False premise? Why is this assumed? Why can't the internet fix this problem?
It seems to me that the speed of internet transactions should make barter actually practical again. If I'm a soybean farmer, I should be able to take my actual crop of soybeans and trade it directly for whatever I want. There are people making thousands of trades per second on financial markets. We have complex trading algorithms, and neat ways to track changes and solve dependency problems like apt, git, etc. So what if 3, 20, or 2000 intermediate transactions are required to get me from soybeans to the wheelbarrow I want. Sure, there would still be edge cases, but there are with money too (manifested as price spikes).
Money has always arisen because it was needed to facilitate trade. Why can't we just facilitate trade with the internet and forget about money altogether?
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with the 'stable' part. What is the basis for making that claim? Are representative governments really more stable than autocratic ones?
Democracy is the idea that a million men are smarter or more fit to rule than one man. Autocracy is the opposite claim. My personal take is that nobody is fit to rule anybody, and the only legitimate government is a completely consensual one, which is basically not a government at all, but a voluntary cooperative. I guess that makes me an anarchist, or something.
Less spectacular?
00:45 flying chunks of skull FTW
NSWF obviously
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2Bkk7pmFdU&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Look, I appreciate all the research. I find it fascinating. The more we know about human perception, the better. I would also prefer that design choices take empirical evidence into account. But if typeface designers and graphic artists say that a certain font 'flows better' or 'conveys a sense of industry' then that doesn't mean you need to (or even can) conduct research to prove them wrong.
If a graphic designer says that serifs 'lead your eye', but tests show that there is no difference in reading speed, then that's interesting, but neither the graphic designer nor the test is wrong, because the design choice is subjective.
Serif fonts were invented hundreds of years ago, evidently because the designers felt, as grandparent stated, that they are 'easier to read, especially large blocks of text. The serifs "lead your eyes" from one letter to the next, and help your eye group the words'. They were not wrong about this, no matter about reading speed, saccades, or empirical studies. The grandparent's 'simple test' is what you have to go on. I'm not going to prefer some shitty ugly typeface just because 'studies show' that it's no worse than a pleasant typeface. An ugly shitty typeface is an ugly shitty typeface if I say it is.
I tried to read you post, but all I got was *fap fap*saccades*fap fap*
Our eyes may use saccades at the hardware level, but we compose images with our brains' DSP (ASP?). The fact that the eyes jump around is interesting but means approximately nothing.
I think it's safe to say that nobody sees the world in jerky motion from eyeballs moving jerkily. For that matter, the high-resolution fovea in the human eye only subtends a few degrees of arc, but you just never notice, because the brain has heavy-duty processing power that synthesizes a high-resolution picture of the world through image-stitching. You can only focus at once distance at a time, but we don't really notice that either. We have stereo vision which means that we see double-images of things, but we don't really notice any double-images. We can see our noses 24 hours a day, but don't notice that either. If you want to try a fun experiment, go into an absolutely dark room, stare straight ahead, and fire a camera flash. Do not move your eyes. You will see a bright, very realistic image of the entire room for many seconds if you can avoid moving (saccading?) your eyes. You see the perfectly bright room, even in the absolute dark, because if you don't move your eyes, it's probably still accurate. As soon as you move your eyes, though, the image disappears, as your brain flushes it like cache data that can no longer be trusted. Sort of a visual cortex version of copy-on-write.
Typeface design is visual art. Visual artists have known for hundreds of years that certain shapes are pleasing, and how certain lines can draw your attention to certain features of an image, and how certain colors can influence mood. I'm sure it's all completely bunk though, after all, I read on Slasdot about saccades, so now I can dismiss another huge swath of scary subjective human experience and fence it safely out of the lonely introverted enclave that is my nerd existence.
Under-inflation is a major cause of blowouts.
Other than the BPA thing, cans are superior to bottles for packaging beer, because they keep out light, which degrades the beer.
Shiner's other beers are packaged in screw-top bottles that I can't even reuse for homebrew, so I might as well buy the cans.
Shiner Bock
Heineken
Not as interesting as chicken cam. Apes have poor image stabilization properties.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UytSNlHw8J8
No, it's more like the price of a coke is $0.50 if you buy it in the back section of Wal-mart and it's $1.00 in the vending machine outside. I don't want to walk into the store, so some guy might offer to walk to the back of the store, buy me a coke for $0.50, and sell it to me for $0.90, saving me a lot of walking, AND saving me money. Then, the first guy got tired of walking too, and there was another guy who offered to do the same thing for the first guy; buying the coke for $0.50 and selling it to the first guy in the middle of the store for $0.75. They both walked less, and both earned a little less money. But I still got my coke either way.
HFT is a continuous bucket-brigade of people from the back of the store all the way out to the front, each selling it to the next guy for 1 cent more. I don't care, because I'm getting value either way. If they want to stand there, and they think it's worth it, more power to them. HFT is a self-limiting problem.
Except HFT'ers ARE contributing to research and development in all kinds of technological areas. Better networks, faster connections, bigger pipes across the ocean...I heard some companies were looking into using neutrinos to communicate through the earth.
Also, R^2 don't mean shit.
This always annoys me when people show data and the crowd is all 'wow that fits the data exactly'.
I learned in high school that the fundamental theorem of algebra states that for any N points, there exists a polynomial of degree N-1 that fits the points EXACTLY. So if the model fits the data well, that might mean something. But I can shoot a piece of graph paper with a shotgun and find a polynomial that goes through every point exactly. Fit means nothing.
Parent should be modded informative, not funny. This is a known technique to calculate the area under experimental curves. I suppose the cool kids nowadays just use a software package that automatically calculates the area under an arbitrary curve, and I could write a program to do it in a couple minutes, but the scissor + balance method is a long and glorious tradition.
And the "unintended consequences" are "the ADA might sound like a good idea on paper, but ergonomic advantages of lever-type door handles work for velociraptors, too."
Making barrels is not even hard. Certainly making a barrel would be easier than making a reciever! If you have a lathe, you can make a smoothbore barrel in like a half hour. Drill a hole through it; done. You can buy the blanks and the drills from McMaster. Standard barrels are 4140 chrome-moly and stainless ones are 316 stainless. If you want to rifle it, you just need the tools to make cut rifling. This is how all high-grade target barrels are made anyway; they are mostly hand-cut and hand-polished. You will probably end up with a better barrel than most, which are usually hammer-forged. Reaming the chamber will take 5 minutes of flushing chips out. People re-chamber guns all the time; that's how new cartridges are developed.
People who make traditional muzzle-loaders weld up their own barrels from as many as 4 flat pieces of steel, using a forge and anvil. This is how it was done for many decades...I supposed people killed each other with hand-forged barrels LONGER than modern ones!
Not far off. The Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) at 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(23), and the National Firearms
Act (NFA) at 26 U.S.C. 5845(b) define a "machinegun" very loosly:
“any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than
one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger...and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be
assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.”
You may note that this makes an awful lot of things 'machineguns'. The BATF technology branch has actually affirmed in writing that shoelaces are machineguns. Google "shoelaces are machineguns", you can read the letter for yourself. Also, Chore Boy copper pot scrubber pads are also legally machineguns. Don't listen to me, google it and read the BATF correspondence.
If shoelaces are machineguns, you bet you ass a 3D printer is a machinegun. Hurray for gun control laws, most logical and reasonable of all laws.
As another child points out, you are incorrect about the guns. LEO's have extra special above-the-law privileges when it comes to guns, even when they are off duty, even in their personal life, and even after they are retired. My police-officer neighbor has a full-auto short-barrel Thompson, personally-owned. I would love to have one, but some animals are more equal than others.
The NRA aggregates and publishes official news reports of armed self-defense. There is also the now-defunct http://thearmedcitizen.com/wp/category/armed.
The reason you don't hear about armed self-defense on national news is that it's pretty anti-climatic. "Man shoots would-be robber" is not national newsworthy; "ARMED GUNMAN KILLS 12 IN THEATER MASSACRE" is.
But when somebody stops a shooter before anyone gets killed, you don't see it on national news. Obviously, if you go by what you see on the news, you are going to come to the conclusion that nobody ever stops violence with violence.
Plus, when somebody manages to stop somebody early in a killing spree, there's no way to tell how bad of a killing spree it would have been if he hadn't been stopped. You can't say "armed citizen prevents 50 shooting deaths", even though that very well may be the total body count if nobody did anything to stop the shooter.
I work at a Texas Instruments semiconductor fab in Dallas, and we ship two thousand 200mm wafers per day, including the whole world's supply of DLP chips. Including half a dozen of the chips in your iPhone. TI has at least 4 other semiconductor fabs in the US. The US hasn't given up yet; it is, however, difficult to compete with Asia considering the looming macroeconomic factors against us.
It's not worth trying to extract a great lesson on politics from this passage, although that hasn't stopped people from trying to do so. The Church has a consistently poor understanding of this passage, partly because they don't read history outside of the bible, which you have to do in order to understand some of it.
The Roman denarius was the USD of its day, being the most important world currency and what you needed to pay your taxes. It was stamped with an image of Cesar. Now, remembering your history, the emperors of Rome were considered to have divinely sanctioned authority, and we ain't talking Yaweh here. The Jews did not like this at all, and considered the image of Cesar stamped on the denarius to be idolatry. Jews had been known to actually re-mint denarii with different images. They might have avoided the coins altogether, and vanished from history by starvation, but we can assume they compromised--principles are great, but sometimes there's no other option but to use the currency of the day (sort of like h.264).
When the Pharisees try to entrap Jesus by asking him if it's ok to pay taxes, he jabs back at them by drawing attention to the fact that although they talk big, the coins in their pockets are Roman denarii, thus highlighting the the fact that they are just a bunch of whores whose rules and laws are as irrelevant as Ceasar's on a spiritual level. If there is an overarching political message of the gospels, it's that things of the world do no matter, including political matters.
Matthew 21, ESV
45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. 46 And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet.
15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. 16 And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone's opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances.[b] 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius.[c] 20 And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” 21 They said, “Caesar's.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” 22 When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away.
The "Render unto Cesar" passage is nothing more than Jesus deflecting the Pharisees' attempts to frame him, in a somewhat clever way. It's pointless to try to derive a lesson or a teaching on separation of church and state from it. Actually, it's hard to extract any political message at all from the teachings of Jesus, which teachings are practically devoid of political content even to the point of ignoring looming contemporary political issues. It's not just modern followers who are frustrated by this. His disciples never quite got it either. They discussed what position they would have in the kingdom when Jesus made himself king. Seriously. After his resurrection, they assume he's going to take over the world, and he immediately brushes them off and starts talking about the Holy Spirit.
6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, 'Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?'
7 He said to them: 'It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.'
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
Less than 10 min.: Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 min.: Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min.: Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
I still remember getting this one wrong in grade school:
How many 'states of matter' are there?
a) 1
b) 2
c) 3
d) 4
I would answer 4--Solid, Liquid, Gas, Plasma--because I read books. But we weren't expected to know about plasma, so the correct answer was always 3, and I was marked wrong. The teachers never gave me credit, because I don't think they knew what a plasma was either.
I use my wife's Verizon android phone to tether with my netbook, and have never rooted it. I used a program called 'proxoid'.
I have always felt that a Snow Crash motion picture would have to me animated. It's too cartoonish to be live action.
Now the problem with barter is inefficiency, that you can't really pay me in chickens for software with effective granularity.
False premise? Why is this assumed? Why can't the internet fix this problem?
It seems to me that the speed of internet transactions should make barter actually practical again. If I'm a soybean farmer, I should be able to take my actual crop of soybeans and trade it directly for whatever I want. There are people making thousands of trades per second on financial markets. We have complex trading algorithms, and neat ways to track changes and solve dependency problems like apt, git, etc. So what if 3, 20, or 2000 intermediate transactions are required to get me from soybeans to the wheelbarrow I want. Sure, there would still be edge cases, but there are with money too (manifested as price spikes).
Money has always arisen because it was needed to facilitate trade. Why can't we just facilitate trade with the internet and forget about money altogether?