My personal experience of being a full blown, certified Optimist while at the same time being the kind of person that does a lot of self-analysis and tries to understand his own motivations and those of others is a bit different from what you describe.
As i experience it, Optimism is not about ignoring problems or ignoring things that can go wrong. It's all about celebrating the things that do go right and not becoming demoralized when things go wrong.
Optimists can be just as pragmatic as Pessimists: we're perfectly aware that shit happens and many of us will do contingency plans for when said shit happens.
The main difference between an Optimist and a Pessimist is not in the intellectual part of dealing with complex situations where there is a risk of failure, it's how we feel about the possibility that things might go wrong and how we feel when things do go wrong. An Optimist is less likely to worry about factors outside his or her control, will feel a stronger pleasure when things go right and will not feel quite as bad when things go wrong.
[We do feel bad when things go wrong, just not as bad as a Pessimist would and we'll get over it faster, usually by finding the silver lining in the dark cloud: a common failure coping strategy is "it went wrong this time but I've learned from it and I will succeed next time"]
The way we (Optimists) emotionally react to risks, to success and to failure does affect how much time we will dedicate to "risk identification", "risk reduction strategies" and "contingency planing". Given that for an Optimist, failure does not feel like a "crushing defeat" but instead it feels more like a "temporary setback" (still, bad, just not as bad and not for long) and success does not feel like "a lucky escape from defeat" but instead feels like "a victory", we are naturally less preoccupied with avoiding that "crushing defeat" feeling and more preoccupied with enhancing the "victory" feeling.
Still, Optimists will try to make sure that they succeed and not fail (meaning: we'll do things such as identifying risks and containing them and have contingency plans): after all, we do enjoy the feeling of success and dislike the feeling of failure - it's just that we enjoy success a lot more than we dread failure.
Anyways, for a Pessimist it will always look like Optimists don't dedicate enough time looking into things that can go wrong:)
Civilization (yeah, the original one, that you started from DOS, ran in full VGA glory and had no number after the name) was complicated. This game is the grandfather of all civilization building games (long before Age of Empires). Neither the newer versions of it nor similar games added any big complexity to it - actually, some of the later versions and games like Age of Empires were often simpler than the original.
By comparison, most RPGs are just slightly complex and FPSs are a no-brainer.
Current games aren't really much more complex than previous games: they have prettier graphic, better physics and slightly improved AIs because of the increased power of modern computers and maybe bigger maps because of the extra memory available. However, the differences are those of scale and speed, not complexity - the number of basic elements and combinations of elements hasn't increased that much, theres' just instances of them and some things go faster now than before (for example, the old turn-based strategy and adventure games have given way to RTS and RPGs).
In my opinion, the only really significant increase in complexity in gaming of the last 10 years was the introduction of Online gaming - for the first time in games we actually had opponents (other people) which were actually worthy (well, some of them;)). Downside of this is that many modern games rely too much in multiplayer to make the game challenging and don't really invest in proper AI development for the Single Player mode.
Contrails are not due to the water vapor put out by the engines.
They are actually generated in the tip of the wings and are due to the disturbance of the cold, low density, high-humidity (for that temperature) air caused by the passage of the plane.
This is why you only see contrails at high altitude (low temperature, low pressure) and then only in some days (since the air at those heights does not always contain the same amount of water vapor).
The source of this information is, unfortunately, offline: I believe i read it in the "The Air Law and Meteorology" study book for the PPL (European Private Pilot License).
However, if when flying in a commercial jet, you sit next to the window, just behind a wing and you look out and the plane is generating contrails, you will see that the contrails seem to be forming at the wingtips (which matches the expected place, since the wingtips is where the most turbulent effects are located - the source of this info is yet another PPL study book)
Each aircraft type will have to be tested and certificated for use with this fuel.
Nope, each aircraft engine type will have to be tested and certified. A PITA, sure - just do it once and your done.
Nope, they actually test the aircraft too. Mostly because there might be effects from the fuel, such as corrosion of the fuel hoses and the fuel tanks.
Go search for MOGAS (the Aviation term for the gas used by cars) on the Internet and read about the sorts of tests necessary for certifying a plane to legally use MOGAS.
I would say the problem is that most people cannot grasp the concepts behind the Theory of Big Numbers.
Many people have trouble understanding how a random genetic mutation that grants a slight (say 0.3%) advantage in, for example, the efficiency of an animal's metabolic process, can end up as the dominant mutation over the course of many generations due to the extra likelihood that animals with that mutation have of surviving till reproductive age.
And if the concept of a cumulative effect in the physical world that over the course of thousands of years slowly but surely weights the balance in one direction is hard to understand, then the concept of how the accumulation of small changes over millions of years can result in big changes is even harder to understand. It's just too much time, too many individuals and too many events- it's all too far apart from "everyday experience" and the "common sense" that we learn from that everyday experience.
It's the realm of probability and statistics, not of things one can count by the fingers of one's hand.
On top of this, there is also the fact that genes often have effects that can only be modeled using the mathematics of the Chaos Theory (very small changes in inputs = totally different outputs, another difficult concept) and the egocentric point of view of man (we marvel on how something as complex as man could come to be, but forget that in a universe where man didn't came to be, there would be nobody to wonder why it didn't happen).
Most people are not intelligent enough and/or lack the mathematical/philosophical basis to actually understand the theoretical basis of Evolution.
On the other hand, any explanations that "delegate the hard stuff" to a supernatural being (which just "made it be so"... somehow) are much easier to understand (as long as you lack the philosophical drive to ask yourself "If God made the world, then who made God?").
Actually, with 2 beams, good atomic clocks (like the ones used for GPS) and the right frequencies, it's perfectly possible to have more lethal microwave frequencies at the point where both beams cross paths.
Junior people are a lot cheaper. They're also a lot easier to convince to work 80 hour/weeks.
Experience developers usually have families and have to "leave at 5 to pick up my kid from school". Professionally they are also a lot more bothersome, constantly suggesting that "maybe we should do some analysis before we start coding" or "we should have a separate test team" or even "we need to write some documentation on what the software does".
In software development, experience is something whose benefices are spread over time: - A program done by an experienced developer is less prone to broke, easier to maintain and to extend. It's first version is probably done in a way that makes it easier to extend it to cope with the most likely requirement changes and new requirements. When a program done by an experience programmer needs to be maintained by somebody else, the explanatory comments in the hard parts of the code and the clear, easy to follow and side-effect free code mean that most changes are small tasks taking hours instead of major tasks taking days and working as expected. - A program done by a junior developer, on the other hand, is a spaghetti code filled piece of junk, were everything is bundled together in big blocks with no clean separation, comments are absent or illogical and were the major program pathways are far from straightforward. Error handling is inexistent ("ignore error and continue" style) or useless ("An error occurred!" message style). Maintenance is a nightmare, small changes break apparently unrelated things. After a couple of changes the program is prone to break for reasons than nobody can comprehend. [Yes, i often have to maintain this kind of garbage and yes, I'm sour about this]
When both programs took about the same time to do, but the junior programmer was cheaper, crappy managers will look at cost and time to deliver only and ignore the fact that in one or two years the software done by the junior developer will be consuming 5x - 10x the support resources (Really!) and will probably need to be scrapped and rewritten much sooner.
Ageism only makes sense in a world were managers are rewarded purely on achieving very short term objectives (delivered on time, as cheap as possible) and not at all on longer term objectives (maintenance is cheap, changes can be done fast, it's easy to keep the business happy).
What? Muslims, Christians, and Jews are all children of Abraham. They all worship the same deity.
They do however differ in their beliefs about if said entity has provided us with further instructions (post old-testament) as to how to worship Him, when and via whom.
It depends very much on where you are in Europe, for which industry you are working and if you are working as a permanent employee or a contractor.
When I was working as a permanent employee in Holland (i'm a contractor now), at 30 years of age (4 years ago), doing software development for an IT Products company, i was making about 3800 before taxes. This was during the worst of the recession in Holland.
The average salary at the time was probably around the mark you are listing.
However, employees in Holland are much harder to fire than in the US (though politicians have been changing the laws in Europe towards the "American model").
When i changed from being a permanent employee to being a contractor, my before taxes income went up so that i was almost making 3x as much as in an equivalent position as a perm. Contractors are a lot easier to fire (basically you can just come in one day and be told you're not needed anymore). At the same time, even though contractors have to pay the costs that an employer would pay on a "normal" employment contract (i.e. part of pension costs, national insurance costs, pay for having some mandatory insurances), after discounting that amount, a contrator still has about twice the before taxes income of an equivalent permanent employeer.
As far as i can tell, the only thing that seems to explain the level of premium on the pay of contractors vs permanent employees is that the contractor has zero employement rights with relation to the "client", and takes on the full risk of his or her work not being needed anymore (contractors typically are the first to go on a recession).
If you do a comparisson which is closer to an apples to apples comparisson (meaning, comparing with those in Europe with employment contracts which have similar terms as the employment contracts in US) and you use my 2x factor, then you would be looking at an average yearly income for a contractor in (certain countries of) Europe of 72.000 EUR/year which is higher than in the US one, the difference being probably related to the higher taxes in Europe.
My experience with working in the UK as a contractor is that the difference between the income of a perm and that of a contractor here is lower than in Holland (probably because employment laws here are laxer than in Holland). However base salaries are higher in the UK by about 20-40% versus Holland.
My advice is, if you're in Europe and you're willing to take on a higher risk of becoming unemployed (similar to the risk taken by permanent employees in the US), then become a contractor.
Given that employement laws in Europe are progressively getting closer to the US employement laws, but salaries for permanent employees are not increasing to compensate for the added risk of loosing one's job, i'm actually very surprised there aren't loads of people going into contracting. Myself, one of the reasons i went into contracting was exactly that - in Holland, as proven by the masses of "downsizings" during the recession, job security is very much an illusion nowadays unless you've been working in a company for many years (in which case you get payed a nice amount as compensation when you're fired).
I used to work in a company that used to put a lot of pressure on the programmers to work long hours. One old guy there came at 9am and left at 5pm every day, and refused to work any later. They didn't get rid of him because he was good and reliable. In retrospect I realise all of us ambitious youngsters were being taken for a ride and the old guy just wasn't having it.
I'm usually that "old guy".
Funny part is, i ain't that old - i'm in my early thirties.
Even funnier than that, the reason i get away with it is because by working a reasonable amount of ours, my productivity is actually higher than that of those that regularly work long hours - you see, i make a lot less stupid mistakes due to being tired, so i'm a lot less likelly to waste time tracking down and fixing those stupid mistakes. Not only that, but my software is a lot more stable (again, fewer stupid mistakes) and gets delivered on time.
The funniest thing is that, whenever i leave a company, they're always sad to see me leave, and I've often been offered positions of higher responsability as an incentive to stay. Even beter, this even happened after i started working as a freelancer.
It's a shame that so many managers out there are so inept that they confuse extra hours with extra results and that so many of my colleagues are such suckers that they're willing to sacrifice themselfs to preserve the bonuses of said inept managers.
British consumers have become numbed to paying more for less over the years, so companies clap their hands with glee at the thought of increasing their profit margins by 50% or more over the US for exactly the same product. "Oh, but you use PAL." "Oh, but you use 240 volts AC with three-prong plugs." "Oh, but you have VAT." Always the same excuses, and they're pretty much bullshit - but nobody questions them any more. We've been ground down by decades of being ripped off.
Actually, an ever beter proof of how prices in the UK are due to people being ripped off by companies is to point out that average prices in the UK are 20% more than the rest of the old EU members (not even including Eastern European EU members).
Keep in mind that VAT in the UK is 17% which is about the same as in most of the EU.
Also, power wise, the only difference between electrical devices in the UK and the rest of Europe is the shape of the plug and the addition of a fuse, nothing else (an adaptor can be gotten for 3 pounds).
I'm actually surprised that the place isn't being invaded by foreign retailers undercutting the local companies in price. I reckon that a lot of it has to do with the fact that the Euro isn't used in the UK and that the UK is outside the Schengen zone (a zone of free circulation of goods and people).
In most european countries i see a significant presence of pan-European big retailers such as Carefour and Lidle, but not in the UK: I wouldn't be suprised if there are a number of (bought by the industry) laws here whose real purpose is to create high barriers to entry into the UK market for foreign retailers.
The locals seem to have been convinced of their uniqueness and the need to "remain separate and distinct" from the rest of Europe - anytime the idea of joining the Euro or the European Common Market is brought up, voices come up about pointing the "uniqueness" of the UK. If i had to bet, i would say that mindset is purposelly fed by some "interest groups".
The point of these cameras is not to make people safer, but to make people *feel* safer. Last I heard, the Brits love the things...
I've lived in several countries in Europe (Portugal, Holland) and i now live in the UK (in London).
From what i see: - Brits are by far the most consumerist people - Brits are (again, by far) the most likelly to be into "celeb" news and following "celeb" fashion - Prices are higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe - England (at least London) is the most likelly place for people to work long hours - Political spin here is the worse i've seen (yeah, I could speak the local language of all other countries i lived in, so I could follow politics in there too)
Last pool I saw said that 27% of Brits defended more and harsher security measures.
In all honesty, London is the place in Europe where i get the strongest feeling that i'm surrounded by mindless drones and that most people live life as if they were in a rat race.
Even the locals seem to agree with me: a high percentage of Brits actually emigrates to other countries when they retire.
Maybe there is some relation between people having surrendered to being shallow, mindless followers and the easiness with which they are fooled by for-show-only measures.
Then again, maybe i've become more elitist in the last year...
"A survey run at the same time in a sex shop showed that most Americans have not time for the internet because they're having sex."
Hey, we have an untapped market here for the taking!
All that is needed is to create an online discussion forum for sex shop users, where people can discuss subjects such as comparing the quality of dildos from different manufacturers, discuss the efficiency of different sex creams, announce new and exciting technological developments in the area of self-pleasuring and device-assisted intercourse and other such relevant subjects.
I can already imagine the flame wars between fans of Vaseline and those of KY jelly...
Even beter, in said forum, Goatse and Tubegirl would actually not be considered trolling.
Being a gatekeeper in a whitelist scheme is a great business opportunity:
After all, businesses would be willing to pay to get their products into said whitelist, while one hardly expects virus makers to pay for getting their creations into a blacklist.
Of course, i'm sure the Symantec guys are naturally not at all thinking of all those extra $$$
Microsoft could embrace ODF. They could integrate it with Microsoft Office, eliminate.DOC, and produce the best ODF tools in the market and maintain their dominance, even in Government. Open Office, while great for the breadth of its tools, is a complicated beast and can be overwhelming for general office staff.
One of the strongest reasons for the continued market share of MS Office is the network effects that come from the majority of people using the MS Office. It works like this:
If a person or a company need to send a document to another person or company, they need to do it in such a way that the other side can at least read it and maybe even edit it.
Since most senders have MS Office and they expect most recievers also have it, they will likelly send the document in Word Doc format. If the receiver doesn't have MS Office, and because of the problems that other text editors have in fully supporting that format, he now has a strong incentive to get MS Office.
Conversely, a sender which does not have MS Office and sends a document in a format other than Word Doc, is likelly to be faced by a receiver which cannot read that document since they have MS Office and it doesn't support most other widespread document formats. The sender thus has an incentive to get MS Office.
Lastly, a sender which does not have MS Office and tries to send a document in Word Doc format, is likelly to have the document not being fully compatible with MS Office, again due to the problems that other text editors have in fully supporting that format, and thus be displayed incorrectly in the reciver's machine. Again the sender thus has an incentive to get MS Office.
To maintain this virtuous circle (virtuous for MS, others might think of it as vicious), two factors need to be kept in place
The most widely used format (at the moment, Word Doc format) can only be properly read and written by MS Word
The most widely used document edition application (at the moment, MS Word) does not fully support any other competing document format.
To maintain this MS needs to:
Try and avoid the emergence of another widely used document format.
Make it impossible for other word edition applications to properly support Word Doc format.
Do not properly support other widespread document formats in MS Word.
I believe we all can find examples of all the above actions.
I'm pretty sure EULAs are considered a one-sided attempt to, post sale, change the contract terms and thus are not valid in most of the world except some US states and 3rd world countries...
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Even though i agree with the message, this is alwyas posted by someone, verbatum, everytime a securty vs liberty article comes up.
How come this is moderated Insighthful?
There no Insight involved anymore - it was Insightful centuries ago when the Original author came up with it, but the Slashdot poster is hardly being insightful
It isn't Informative since we see this at least once a day here in Slashdot.
At most it's +1 Karma Whoring, -1 Parroting Countless Others
I hereby want to thank any and all early adopters, early buyers and opening week movie-goers!
It's you guys with your inability to delay self-rewarding and your industry-promoted belief that being the first to get something is cool, that really test out the waters for everybody else, thus saving the savy consumers that follow you millions and millions of dollars.
You guys really are the backbone of society upon which everybody else's success stands: you are out there, bending over and taking it again and again from the industry, shoddy products, overhyped releases, buggy software and all kinds of crap products and services, serving as the shinning beacon of light that guides all others away from a good reaming.
In the name of all of us, who thanks to your pioneering work have avoided unmeasurable pain in their behinds, I salute you!
... which is a moral judgment ("Who decides what's appropriate and what's not?")
If someone chooses to refuse, remove or alter other people's opinions expressed on a public forum on the basis of their or someone else's moral judgements, then they're censoring that content.
Don't confuse censoring with obeying the law: if they take down content because it's a copyright violation, then that's obeying the law. If they take down content because it expresses opinions which are not against the law to express in that country, then it's censorship. (If the law forbids publicly expressing certain opinions, then that is state sponsored censorship)
I would like to meet and congratulate whatever PR person that's spreading the meme that if it's a private company that does it (even when they advertise their service as a public forum) it's not censorship, it's business sense: great way of denying responsability.
But even splitting up the electoral votes by Congressional district or as a percentage has some merit. For example, California has more Republican voters than any other state in the union...but they happen to be outnumbered (significantly) by Democratic voters. So those 55 electoral votes go (D) every time, even though ideologically, the split is closer to 32/23 Same thing with Texas on the reverse side. Lots of Democrats, but those 34 electoral votes go (R) every time.
The problem is the use of electoral districts, compounded by gerrymandering. If Proportional Voting was used, then from your example above 32 of California's seats would go for the Democrats and 23 for the Republicans (and a similar adjustment would take place in Texas). Even beter, Proportional Voting means that smaller parties actually have a chance to elect one or more representatives.
The truth is, as long as not every vote is equal and some are more equal than others, the US is not a true democracy.
You must be new here . . . but how did you grab such a low UID?
The Slashdor ID was probably inherited from a "wierd uncle" which died in a strange accident in his basement when a pile of old Sun workstations fell on top of him.
That's my experience also when working in technology companies - IT is very important in driving the business. If you think about this, in any sucessful technology company, the IT Department has to be both Production and Product R&D - they both are the source of money for the company and drive the innovation that makes the company grow.
However, in non-technology companies (Finance being the not-technology business area with which i have the most experience), IT is a cost center. Granted, the business is well aware that IT is a must if they want to keep up with other companies in the same business area, though it's almost always the business which drives innovation in those companies, not IT. (Picture an Investment Bank which is driven by the need to adopt new technologies instead of innovating with new financial products and services - they would be trashed in the market).
The less a company deals with information and information exchange (and if you think about it, Finance is all about knowing the right things and sending bits and bytes between companies - aka transactions), especially for non-service companies, the less important IT is for the bottom line of the company. Often enough, there are very few advantages in integrating IT with the core business of such a company, in which case IT is typically only used for things like invoicing, payroll and such.
One thing us in IT are often guilty of, is looking at the world in a technology-centric way. This is the reason why we so often are surprised by the lack of adoption of some "great new technology" or other and become disapointed when we work for a big, non-technology company and they're so slow and resistent to adopting the latest and greatest software, development language or development process.
In order to understand this and being able to deal with it, I've spent the last several years trying to "look beyond technology". I like to think i'm half way there already;)
As somebody who does software for a living, i can tell you that the biggest factor in the success of a company is... business processes.
In the big picture of how a company is successfull, software is a tool, networking technologies are tools and the Internet is a tool. It all boils down to people and organization - individuals and the way they work together.
IT is something that can fit into the business and can empower the people to work beter - it's not a silver bulet which will magically transform a mismanaged company into a growing, thriving business.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but from someone that has been working in IT for many years, across several industries, it's my experience that the best success stories are not "IT transforming companies", instead they came from "companies that mold IT to their needs".
Every company I've seen is still mired in red tape and completely backwards use of much of the technology we require to survive.
Red tape is an organizational problem, not a technological problem. Bringing IT in without solving the underlying problem will just result in adding new layers to the bureaucracy (been there, seen it happen, not a pretty sight).
The truth is, IT brings with it whole new time and money sinks (license control, networking/systems administration, IT security, software development and costumization, outside consultants, etc) which would not be there without IT. In truth, as many of us in IT have seen again and again, often the blind, vendor-pushed, fashion-following approach to deploying IT in a company results in wasted money and a decrease in productivity (for that company, the vendors are probably quite happy).
During the Boom years, many companies where managed by people that did not understood that technology is a tool for empowering the business, not the other way around. Countless managers let themselfs be taken with sentences such as "utilizing technology to its fullest potential", "software that can boost our capabilities even farther", "the technology we require to survive", "streamline our business the way software is capable of doing" and other such sales pitches and so let their companies be taken for wild rides, where the only ones that really profited where the vendors. Hopefully, most learned their lesson, and the latest generation of of CxOs is beter at separating the technological wheat from the chaff.
PS: Even though i'm someone which if often brought in to help clean up the mess done during one of those "wild rides" (said mess having been done often enough by the unholy association of software vendors and IT consultancies), I would much rather loose that part of my work in the future that be faced again and again with the kind of raw sewage which is all that has been left from the blood sucking feeding frenzy done by the above mention vendors and consultancies.
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My personal experience of being a full blown, certified Optimist while at the same time being the kind of person that does a lot of self-analysis and tries to understand his own motivations and those of others is a bit different from what you describe.
:)
As i experience it, Optimism is not about ignoring problems or ignoring things that can go wrong. It's all about celebrating the things that do go right and not becoming demoralized when things go wrong.
Optimists can be just as pragmatic as Pessimists: we're perfectly aware that shit happens and many of us will do contingency plans for when said shit happens.
The main difference between an Optimist and a Pessimist is not in the intellectual part of dealing with complex situations where there is a risk of failure, it's how we feel about the possibility that things might go wrong and how we feel when things do go wrong. An Optimist is less likely to worry about factors outside his or her control, will feel a stronger pleasure when things go right and will not feel quite as bad when things go wrong.
[We do feel bad when things go wrong, just not as bad as a Pessimist would and we'll get over it faster, usually by finding the silver lining in the dark cloud: a common failure coping strategy is "it went wrong this time but I've learned from it and I will succeed next time"]
The way we (Optimists) emotionally react to risks, to success and to failure does affect how much time we will dedicate to "risk identification", "risk reduction strategies" and "contingency planing". Given that for an Optimist, failure does not feel like a "crushing defeat" but instead it feels more like a "temporary setback" (still, bad, just not as bad and not for long) and success does not feel like "a lucky escape from defeat" but instead feels like "a victory", we are naturally less preoccupied with avoiding that "crushing defeat" feeling and more preoccupied with enhancing the "victory" feeling.
Still, Optimists will try to make sure that they succeed and not fail (meaning: we'll do things such as identifying risks and containing them and have contingency plans): after all, we do enjoy the feeling of success and dislike the feeling of failure - it's just that we enjoy success a lot more than we dread failure.
Anyways, for a Pessimist it will always look like Optimists don't dedicate enough time looking into things that can go wrong
Civilization (yeah, the original one, that you started from DOS, ran in full VGA glory and had no number after the name) was complicated. This game is the grandfather of all civilization building games (long before Age of Empires). Neither the newer versions of it nor similar games added any big complexity to it - actually, some of the later versions and games like Age of Empires were often simpler than the original.
;)). Downside of this is that many modern games rely too much in multiplayer to make the game challenging and don't really invest in proper AI development for the Single Player mode.
By comparison, most RPGs are just slightly complex and FPSs are a no-brainer.
Current games aren't really much more complex than previous games: they have prettier graphic, better physics and slightly improved AIs because of the increased power of modern computers and maybe bigger maps because of the extra memory available. However, the differences are those of scale and speed, not complexity - the number of basic elements and combinations of elements hasn't increased that much, theres' just instances of them and some things go faster now than before (for example, the old turn-based strategy and adventure games have given way to RTS and RPGs).
In my opinion, the only really significant increase in complexity in gaming of the last 10 years was the introduction of Online gaming - for the first time in games we actually had opponents (other people) which were actually worthy (well, some of them
Contrails are not due to the water vapor put out by the engines.
They are actually generated in the tip of the wings and are due to the disturbance of the cold, low density, high-humidity (for that temperature) air caused by the passage of the plane.
This is why you only see contrails at high altitude (low temperature, low pressure) and then only in some days (since the air at those heights does not always contain the same amount of water vapor).
The source of this information is, unfortunately, offline: I believe i read it in the "The Air Law and Meteorology" study book for the PPL (European Private Pilot License).
However, if when flying in a commercial jet, you sit next to the window, just behind a wing and you look out and the plane is generating contrails, you will see that the contrails seem to be forming at the wingtips (which matches the expected place, since the wingtips is where the most turbulent effects are located - the source of this info is yet another PPL study book)
Nope, they actually test the aircraft too. Mostly because there might be effects from the fuel, such as corrosion of the fuel hoses and the fuel tanks.
Go search for MOGAS (the Aviation term for the gas used by cars) on the Internet and read about the sorts of tests necessary for certifying a plane to legally use MOGAS.
I would say the problem is that most people cannot grasp the concepts behind the Theory of Big Numbers.
... somehow) are much easier to understand (as long as you lack the philosophical drive to ask yourself "If God made the world, then who made God?").
Many people have trouble understanding how a random genetic mutation that grants a slight (say 0.3%) advantage in, for example, the efficiency of an animal's metabolic process, can end up as the dominant mutation over the course of many generations due to the extra likelihood that animals with that mutation have of surviving till reproductive age.
And if the concept of a cumulative effect in the physical world that over the course of thousands of years slowly but surely weights the balance in one direction is hard to understand, then the concept of how the accumulation of small changes over millions of years can result in big changes is even harder to understand. It's just too much time, too many individuals and too many events- it's all too far apart from "everyday experience" and the "common sense" that we learn from that everyday experience.
It's the realm of probability and statistics, not of things one can count by the fingers of one's hand.
On top of this, there is also the fact that genes often have effects that can only be modeled using the mathematics of the Chaos Theory (very small changes in inputs = totally different outputs, another difficult concept) and the egocentric point of view of man (we marvel on how something as complex as man could come to be, but forget that in a universe where man didn't came to be, there would be nobody to wonder why it didn't happen).
Most people are not intelligent enough and/or lack the mathematical/philosophical basis to actually understand the theoretical basis of Evolution.
On the other hand, any explanations that "delegate the hard stuff" to a supernatural being (which just "made it be so"
Actually, with 2 beams, good atomic clocks (like the ones used for GPS) and the right frequencies, it's perfectly possible to have more lethal microwave frequencies at the point where both beams cross paths.
Junior people are a lot cheaper. They're also a lot easier to convince to work 80 hour/weeks.
Experience developers usually have families and have to "leave at 5 to pick up my kid from school". Professionally they are also a lot more bothersome, constantly suggesting that "maybe we should do some analysis before we start coding" or "we should have a separate test team" or even "we need to write some documentation on what the software does".
In software development, experience is something whose benefices are spread over time:
- A program done by an experienced developer is less prone to broke, easier to maintain and to extend. It's first version is probably done in a way that makes it easier to extend it to cope with the most likely requirement changes and new requirements. When a program done by an experience programmer needs to be maintained by somebody else, the explanatory comments in the hard parts of the code and the clear, easy to follow and side-effect free code mean that most changes are small tasks taking hours instead of major tasks taking days and working as expected.
- A program done by a junior developer, on the other hand, is a spaghetti code filled piece of junk, were everything is bundled together in big blocks with no clean separation, comments are absent or illogical and were the major program pathways are far from straightforward. Error handling is inexistent ("ignore error and continue" style) or useless ("An error occurred!" message style). Maintenance is a nightmare, small changes break apparently unrelated things. After a couple of changes the program is prone to break for reasons than nobody can comprehend. [Yes, i often have to maintain this kind of garbage and yes, I'm sour about this]
When both programs took about the same time to do, but the junior programmer was cheaper, crappy managers will look at cost and time to deliver only and ignore the fact that in one or two years the software done by the junior developer will be consuming 5x - 10x the support resources (Really!) and will probably need to be scrapped and rewritten much sooner.
Ageism only makes sense in a world were managers are rewarded purely on achieving very short term objectives (delivered on time, as cheap as possible) and not at all on longer term objectives (maintenance is cheap, changes can be done fast, it's easy to keep the business happy).
They do however differ in their beliefs about if said entity has provided us with further instructions (post old-testament) as to how to worship Him, when and via whom.
It depends very much on where you are in Europe, for which industry you are working and if you are working as a permanent employee or a contractor.
When I was working as a permanent employee in Holland (i'm a contractor now), at 30 years of age (4 years ago), doing software development for an IT Products company, i was making about 3800 before taxes. This was during the worst of the recession in Holland.
The average salary at the time was probably around the mark you are listing.
However, employees in Holland are much harder to fire than in the US (though politicians have been changing the laws in Europe towards the "American model").
When i changed from being a permanent employee to being a contractor, my before taxes income went up so that i was almost making 3x as much as in an equivalent position as a perm. Contractors are a lot easier to fire (basically you can just come in one day and be told you're not needed anymore). At the same time, even though contractors have to pay the costs that an employer would pay on a "normal" employment contract (i.e. part of pension costs, national insurance costs, pay for having some mandatory insurances), after discounting that amount, a contrator still has about twice the before taxes income of an equivalent permanent employeer.
As far as i can tell, the only thing that seems to explain the level of premium on the pay of contractors vs permanent employees is that the contractor has zero employement rights with relation to the "client", and takes on the full risk of his or her work not being needed anymore (contractors typically are the first to go on a recession).
If you do a comparisson which is closer to an apples to apples comparisson (meaning, comparing with those in Europe with employment contracts which have similar terms as the employment contracts in US) and you use my 2x factor, then you would be looking at an average yearly income for a contractor in (certain countries of) Europe of 72.000 EUR/year which is higher than in the US one, the difference being probably related to the higher taxes in Europe.
My experience with working in the UK as a contractor is that the difference between the income of a perm and that of a contractor here is lower than in Holland (probably because employment laws here are laxer than in Holland). However base salaries are higher in the UK by about 20-40% versus Holland.
My advice is, if you're in Europe and you're willing to take on a higher risk of becoming unemployed (similar to the risk taken by permanent employees in the US), then become a contractor.
Given that employement laws in Europe are progressively getting closer to the US employement laws, but salaries for permanent employees are not increasing to compensate for the added risk of loosing one's job, i'm actually very surprised there aren't loads of people going into contracting. Myself, one of the reasons i went into contracting was exactly that - in Holland, as proven by the masses of "downsizings" during the recession, job security is very much an illusion nowadays unless you've been working in a company for many years (in which case you get payed a nice amount as compensation when you're fired).
I'm usually that "old guy".
Funny part is, i ain't that old - i'm in my early thirties.
Even funnier than that, the reason i get away with it is because by working a reasonable amount of ours, my productivity is actually higher than that of those that regularly work long hours - you see, i make a lot less stupid mistakes due to being tired, so i'm a lot less likelly to waste time tracking down and fixing those stupid mistakes. Not only that, but my software is a lot more stable (again, fewer stupid mistakes) and gets delivered on time.
The funniest thing is that, whenever i leave a company, they're always sad to see me leave, and I've often been offered positions of higher responsability as an incentive to stay. Even beter, this even happened after i started working as a freelancer.
It's a shame that so many managers out there are so inept that they confuse extra hours with extra results and that so many of my colleagues are such suckers that they're willing to sacrifice themselfs to preserve the bonuses of said inept managers.
Actually, an ever beter proof of how prices in the UK are due to people being ripped off by companies is to point out that average prices in the UK are 20% more than the rest of the old EU members (not even including Eastern European EU members).
Keep in mind that VAT in the UK is 17% which is about the same as in most of the EU.
Also, power wise, the only difference between electrical devices in the UK and the rest of Europe is the shape of the plug and the addition of a fuse, nothing else (an adaptor can be gotten for 3 pounds).
I'm actually surprised that the place isn't being invaded by foreign retailers undercutting the local companies in price. I reckon that a lot of it has to do with the fact that the Euro isn't used in the UK and that the UK is outside the Schengen zone (a zone of free circulation of goods and people).
In most european countries i see a significant presence of pan-European big retailers such as Carefour and Lidle, but not in the UK: I wouldn't be suprised if there are a number of (bought by the industry) laws here whose real purpose is to create high barriers to entry into the UK market for foreign retailers.
The locals seem to have been convinced of their uniqueness and the need to "remain separate and distinct" from the rest of Europe - anytime the idea of joining the Euro or the European Common Market is brought up, voices come up about pointing the "uniqueness" of the UK. If i had to bet, i would say that mindset is purposelly fed by some "interest groups".
I've lived in several countries in Europe (Portugal, Holland) and i now live in the UK (in London).
From what i see:
- Brits are by far the most consumerist people
- Brits are (again, by far) the most likelly to be into "celeb" news and following "celeb" fashion
- Prices are higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe
- England (at least London) is the most likelly place for people to work long hours
- Political spin here is the worse i've seen (yeah, I could speak the local language of all other countries i lived in, so I could follow politics in there too)
Last pool I saw said that 27% of Brits defended more and harsher security measures.
In all honesty, London is the place in Europe where i get the strongest feeling that i'm surrounded by mindless drones and that most people live life as if they were in a rat race.
Even the locals seem to agree with me: a high percentage of Brits actually emigrates to other countries when they retire.
Maybe there is some relation between people having surrendered to being shallow, mindless followers and the easiness with which they are fooled by for-show-only measures.
Then again, maybe i've become more elitist in the last year...
"A survey run at the same time in a sex shop showed that most Americans have not time for the internet because they're having sex."
...
Hey, we have an untapped market here for the taking!
All that is needed is to create an online discussion forum for sex shop users, where people can discuss subjects such as comparing the quality of dildos from different manufacturers, discuss the efficiency of different sex creams, announce new and exciting technological developments in the area of self-pleasuring and device-assisted intercourse and other such relevant subjects.
I can already imagine the flame wars between fans of Vaseline and those of KY jelly
Even beter, in said forum, Goatse and Tubegirl would actually not be considered trolling.
Being a gatekeeper in a whitelist scheme is a great business opportunity:
After all, businesses would be willing to pay to get their products into said whitelist, while one hardly expects virus makers to pay for getting their creations into a blacklist.
Of course, i'm sure the Symantec guys are naturally not at all thinking of all those extra $$$
Update: This machine is now compromised
One of the strongest reasons for the continued market share of MS Office is the network effects that come from the majority of people using the MS Office. It works like this:
To maintain this virtuous circle (virtuous for MS, others might think of it as vicious), two factors need to be kept in place
To maintain this MS needs to:
I believe we all can find examples of all the above actions.
I'm pretty sure EULAs are considered a one-sided attempt to, post sale, change the contract terms and thus are not valid in most of the world except some US states and 3rd world countries ...
Even though i agree with the message, this is alwyas posted by someone, verbatum, everytime a securty vs liberty article comes up.
How come this is moderated Insighthful?
There no Insight involved anymore - it was Insightful centuries ago when the Original author came up with it, but the Slashdot poster is hardly being insightful
It isn't Informative since we see this at least once a day here in Slashdot.
At most it's +1 Karma Whoring, -1 Parroting Countless Others
I hereby want to thank any and all early adopters, early buyers and opening week movie-goers!
It's you guys with your inability to delay self-rewarding and your industry-promoted belief that being the first to get something is cool, that really test out the waters for everybody else, thus saving the savy consumers that follow you millions and millions of dollars.
You guys really are the backbone of society upon which everybody else's success stands: you are out there, bending over and taking it again and again from the industry, shoddy products, overhyped releases, buggy software and all kinds of crap products and services, serving as the shinning beacon of light that guides all others away from a good reaming.
In the name of all of us, who thanks to your pioneering work have avoided unmeasurable pain in their behinds, I salute you!
If someone chooses to refuse, remove or alter other people's opinions expressed on a public forum on the basis of their or someone else's moral judgements, then they're censoring that content.
Some people might say it's not censorship because it's not the state doing it: i call that bollocks - censorship is an act, not an entity doing it. Here's a couple of dicionary definitions to show my point:
http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censori
http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censors
Don't confuse censoring with obeying the law: if they take down content because it's a copyright violation, then that's obeying the law. If they take down content because it expresses opinions which are not against the law to express in that country, then it's censorship. (If the law forbids publicly expressing certain opinions, then that is state sponsored censorship)
I would like to meet and congratulate whatever PR person that's spreading the meme that if it's a private company that does it (even when they advertise their service as a public forum) it's not censorship, it's business sense: great way of denying responsability.
The problem is the use of electoral districts, compounded by gerrymandering. If Proportional Voting was used, then from your example above 32 of California's seats would go for the Democrats and 23 for the Republicans (and a similar adjustment would take place in Texas). Even beter, Proportional Voting means that smaller parties actually have a chance to elect one or more representatives.
The truth is, as long as not every vote is equal and some are more equal than others, the US is not a true democracy.
Actually, it's quite possible the Universe would colapse on itself
The Slashdor ID was probably inherited from a "wierd uncle" which died in a strange accident in his basement when a pile of old Sun workstations fell on top of him.
That's my experience also when working in technology companies - IT is very important in driving the business. If you think about this, in any sucessful technology company, the IT Department has to be both Production and Product R&D - they both are the source of money for the company and drive the innovation that makes the company grow.
;)
However, in non-technology companies (Finance being the not-technology business area with which i have the most experience), IT is a cost center. Granted, the business is well aware that IT is a must if they want to keep up with other companies in the same business area, though it's almost always the business which drives innovation in those companies, not IT. (Picture an Investment Bank which is driven by the need to adopt new technologies instead of innovating with new financial products and services - they would be trashed in the market).
The less a company deals with information and information exchange (and if you think about it, Finance is all about knowing the right things and sending bits and bytes between companies - aka transactions), especially for non-service companies, the less important IT is for the bottom line of the company. Often enough, there are very few advantages in integrating IT with the core business of such a company, in which case IT is typically only used for things like invoicing, payroll and such.
One thing us in IT are often guilty of, is looking at the world in a technology-centric way. This is the reason why we so often are surprised by the lack of adoption of some "great new technology" or other and become disapointed when we work for a big, non-technology company and they're so slow and resistent to adopting the latest and greatest software, development language or development process.
In order to understand this and being able to deal with it, I've spent the last several years trying to "look beyond technology". I like to think i'm half way there already
In the big picture of how a company is successfull, software is a tool, networking technologies are tools and the Internet is a tool. It all boils down to people and organization - individuals and the way they work together.
IT is something that can fit into the business and can empower the people to work beter - it's not a silver bulet which will magically transform a mismanaged company into a growing, thriving business.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but from someone that has been working in IT for many years, across several industries, it's my experience that the best success stories are not "IT transforming companies", instead they came from "companies that mold IT to their needs".
Red tape is an organizational problem, not a technological problem. Bringing IT in without solving the underlying problem will just result in adding new layers to the bureaucracy (been there, seen it happen, not a pretty sight).
The truth is, IT brings with it whole new time and money sinks (license control, networking/systems administration, IT security, software development and costumization, outside consultants, etc) which would not be there without IT. In truth, as many of us in IT have seen again and again, often the blind, vendor-pushed, fashion-following approach to deploying IT in a company results in wasted money and a decrease in productivity (for that company, the vendors are probably quite happy).
During the Boom years, many companies where managed by people that did not understood that technology is a tool for empowering the business, not the other way around. Countless managers let themselfs be taken with sentences such as "utilizing technology to its fullest potential", "software that can boost our capabilities even farther", "the technology we require to survive", "streamline our business the way software is capable of doing" and other such sales pitches and so let their companies be taken for wild rides, where the only ones that really profited where the vendors. Hopefully, most learned their lesson, and the latest generation of of CxOs is beter at separating the technological wheat from the chaff.
PS: Even though i'm someone which if often brought in to help clean up the mess done during one of those "wild rides" (said mess having been done often enough by the unholy association of software vendors and IT consultancies), I would much rather loose that part of my work in the future that be faced again and again with the kind of raw sewage which is all that has been left from the blood sucking feeding frenzy done by the above mention vendors and consultancies.
PPS: Yeah, i'm sour about this.