Agreed. Courts take into account the amount of time that passes between the event and the crime when examining that sort of defense. If you have time to calm down and think about it rationally, it's no longer a crime of passion. The question of how long that time is depends on the case.
If that's true, I've guessed we've made much less progress than I thought.
The original poster may not have intended this interpretation, but I look at it as the Irish governing the Irish here. If the majority of Irish people didn't want this policy, they're free to vote someone else into power to change it. In my opinion, the only people that have a right to complain about this policy are those actually in Ireland. As much as I hate seeing things like censorship and imposed morality, I hate interfering in peoples' rights to self-govern even more. If this is the way they want it there, let them have it that way. It's their call.
The imposition of one's morals onto others is the root of most of the conflicts in the world today. People don't understand that morals are not absolute concepts.
Their home page loads 100 images and has HTTP headers that forbid caching. I realize that not everyone can hire good web developers that take scalability issues like this into account, but surely this is an example of when you need to bite the bullet and do so.
Perhaps you misunderstand my point here. When you interact with a call center employee, of course that employee is going to have access to confidential information about you. You're either going to provide it to them, or they're going to be able to pull it up in order to do their job properly. I'm talking about the wholesale access to customer information.
A mere employee should never be able to pull up enough information in bulk for it to be valuable enough to trade with, and any attempt to gather this information piecemeal should be detected by proper auditing.
The level of perfect you're suggesting here is not only impractical, it's impossible. Many of a TV station's programs come over satellite. The speed of light is quite finite, and the delays involved with beaming a signal to a satellite and back completely destroy any possibility of having your station start something at precisely 00:00:00.000. In addition, even if the broadcaster were local and started at:00.000, the digital encoding process requires several frames of input before it starts sending the encoded output. By the time you start receiving your live MPEG stream, you're already several frames behind. This is all compounded by a station's need to show programming from a variety of sources. This requires flexible timing.
I used to work at a TV station, and the switching and commercials that weren't done by hand were done by automation not based on the clock, but on start/stop cues embedded in the broadcast itself. These signals are given well in advance of the actual "start" time, specifically to give the equipment adequate time to process and act on it. This is especially important with video tape, because tape players don't exactly start at full speed on frame 1 the instant the "play" signal is given. They normally take a second or so to get up to speed and get a good image going.
A "massive" amount of security patches? The only security patches that require reboots in Linux are those to the kernel, and these are exceedingly rare.
If the company designed its security and auditing correctly, call center employees should never have the ability to do this in the first place. Why are they trusting call center employees with wholesale access to customers' private data? Competent companies will require the employees to provide an explanation every time they access a record, and these will be tied to their phone records to make sure they are only accessing information relevant to their current task. A good audit trail, flagging unusual access behavior, combined with limiting access only to individual records at a time would have stopped these breaches.
Yes, some of these outsourced call centers are inexpensive because they don't do things like this. But you get what you pay for, right?
Different kind of clustering. The parent post is referring to a high-performance computing cluster (which is normally what people are talking about when they talk about clusters), which differs from an HA/load balancing cluster by having an OS tailored to the task, and applications and OS working together to split computation across multiple cluster members.
"Clusters" as used by most web communities are normally HA clusters, which are simply a logical group of servers running the same software, with a request being sent to one cluster member. The goal isn't to split computation across systems; it's to distribute traffic and (mostly) survive the loss of a single cluster member.
Let's assume for a moment that you live in a country that doesn't "compete" in this respect. Some scientists have a new idea, and they propose their idea to your government. You decide that it isn't worth the money and pass on it. They go to another government, and propose it to them. They decide to do it. Your scientists move. Your country now has fewer smart people than it did before.
Repeated enough times, this trickles down into education and your country's economy. You are now less capable than your neighbors. Your country's quality of life goes down. It is in your best interests to compete in this respect if you want to retain your smart people.
If we instead pretend that all of the countries of the world have signed treaties preventing their people from moving to other countries, this problem goes away. But without a competitive drive, spending on pure research is going to be based on the numbers, and based conservatively. Money spent on research will drop sharply and our rate of scientific advance will slow to a crawl.
You say that you "don't care where these things get built so long as they get built," but without this "dick measuring competition", they never would.
You're right. We couldn't possibly learn anything about, say, performing surgery in low-gravity or weightless situations. It's not like we have a space station in orbit, or have plans to go to the MOON for heaven's sake! No realistic application at all. Waste of money.
Do you have annual performance reviews? If so, that's your opportunity to play up your responsibilities. Take a look at your boss's job description, and pretend that description is an organizational description. Document how you're meeting those "objectives".
But chiefly, as others have said, do your job well despite the problems. If your boss isn't doing anything for you, then ignore him. He is irrelevant. It will be clear to your clients that you're the person to go to, not him, and that will eventually trickle up the chain of command on their side.
Don't do anything that would piss your boss off, though. He's still the "expert" on your performance, so he should have nothing but good things to say about you when his boss asks him what you do. Don't give him a reason to plan a response to "OK, so what do YOU do then?"
And he must be doing something right. A 25% "closing" percentage is phenomenal.
I'd love to see what these people have to say a month down the road. What percentage are happy with the switch? How many don't understand any of this computer stuff, and let him install Linux because he seemed to know what he was talking about, but now don't know how to open e-mail to talk to their granddaughter, and are too embarrassed and feel bad about calling him back and having him put Windows back on because gosh, he was just such a nice fella?
I'm curious: What problems tend to be encountered on Windows that cause things to break and require steps to repair? Hardware problems? Botched software installations? Accidentally deleted files? Buggy drivers? Filesystem corruption? Am I missing some?
I didn't realize Linux was immune from all of that.
Linux and Windows are at the point where they're converging quite nicely in areas of OS stability. I might be missing something (and feel free to point me in the proper direction), but I really can't imagine these users not having their problems anymore by switching to Linux. If it's problems related to applications that you're targeting (IE is buggy, Office is bloated), alternatives are available for Linux AND Windows. A completely new OS really isn't necessary for that.
I really suspect here that these users aren't being "carefully selected". I think it's more likely they're being taken advantage of, and in the long term, this is going to do more harm than good. This guy needs to call all of his customers back, and ask them how they're doing with Linux. If their response isn't overwhelmingly positive, he needs to offer to switch them back to Linux, free of charge.
I'm with the parent poster. 25% is extremely high. Maybe it is just the "grandmas" out there. But why would that be? Because they're easily confused and easily taken advantage of, because they understand none of this stuff. So they were getting along OK before, but now some fast talking computer guy told them they'd be much better off doing things differently. And now they don't know how to start e-mail anymore and they're too embarrassed to admit it, and feel bad calling him back and telling him to put it back the way it was.
CDs play at 44KHz, but that does not necessarily mean they were recorded at 44KHz. DAT, for example, only has a frequency response of 20Hz-20KHz.
I think you're confusing sampling rate (44kHz) with frequency response (the interaction of the harmonics above 20Khz and those below 20KHz produces a much warmer, fuller sound.
These harmonics that you speak of are only audible when they vibrate your ear drum in the range of your hearing. Microphones are vibrated in the same manner, so whatever you think you're getting out of high-frequency harmonics is still being captured and digitized perfectly well. These high-frequency sounds are not being reproduced, but the audible waveforms that result from their interference in the original performance are very much within the range of human hearing, and are easily captured digitally.
We made side by side blind comparisons listening to a burned CD and picked the tape bounced version for it's musicality and smoothness...it simply sounded better when the music had some true tape saturation introduced.
I hear this a lot, but I think your wording hits the nail on the head: "it simply sounded better". You're not looking for accuracy in reproduction (which a CD will give you). You're looking for what you think sounds "better". It's perfectly plausible that the information lost (and/or introduced) in the analog or vinyl process produces a certain quality of the audio that many people prefer in their recordings.
This quality has little to do with accurate reproduction, however, and was not present in the room when the original recording was made.
I for one sometime feel I can here the stuttering steps of a digital approximation of a sine wave.
I find this highly unlikely, but even if you can, it would mean that your DAC isn't doing its job properly. There is enough information in the digital recording to reconstruct an absolutely perfect, smooth, pure waveform that exactly matches the characteristics of the original. If done properly, it should be impossible to distinguish between the original and the recording.
I suspect you're letting anecdotal evidence, among people that "want" to believe, taint your objectivity. I highly recommend that people take a basic class in DSP so that they understand exactly how this analog information is recorded digitally, and how it allows for the reproduction of the original waveforms.
I'm not sure this averaging has the effect that you think it has. A 0.0001kHz signal (aka 0.1Hz, or one cycle per 10 seconds) is spread out over 44kHz*10 seconds = 440,000 samples. Yes, you're losing some precision, but no more than 1 part in 440k. Are you really saying that after 440,000 measurements, we can't accurately reproduce a sine wave with that period?
But the real source of "averaging" error occurs with the numeric value assigned to each sample, not the frequency. Since the values are limited to 16 bits of resolution, we have to quantize the power of the signal in that sample among 65k possible values. But again, you have to realize that these waveforms are spread out over many, many samples. The value at one instant doesn't matter so much as the values over many instants. The goal is to reconstruct a waveform, remember, and this is more than enough information to do that.
What distortion are you talking about? Digital sampling will perfectly reproduce waveforms up to half of the sampling rate. At 44.1kHz sampling, that means you will be able to perfectly capture and reproduce sounds up to 22kHz. Your output is capped there and frequencies above that are not reproduced. There's no "distortion" even above that, unless you're using some misconfigured or poorly designed equipment. If you attempt to record sound waves above the capabilities provided by your sampling rate (e.g. 23kHz sound recorded at 44 ksamples/sec), the sound will not be recorded correctly. Perhaps that's where you're getting your claims of distortion. But, again, this should only arise if the recording was done improperly.
Vinyl sounds "warmer" because vinyl DOES distort the sound. It is extremely imperfect, and those imperfections lend a certain quality to the reproduced sound that is common to vinyl but absent both from the original sound, and from the sound reproduced by CDs.
Digital sampling is capable of preserving 100% of the information, provided your sampling rate is double the maximum frequency you want to capture, and your analog sound source and speakers are of sufficiently high quality. (The latter problem is common to vinyl as well.) If you don't believe this, please don't make the mistake of assuming your anecdotes trump science. Take an introductory course in DSP and learn what it is doing.
"Natural selection", is, by definition, the principal mechanism that drives evolution. What you define as "[helping] the survival of existing species" is the very essence of evolution. Speciation is a very small part of what evolution does, mainly because the definition of "species" is something we invented, and is fairly subjective.
An environment that undergoes a change will cause members of a species that are not capable of handling that change to die off. Those that are left behind will have traits that allowed them to survive. The result is a small variation of the species that makes them better able to handle their (new) environment.
We have directly observed this, in action, at small scales (where life spans are short, such as in bacteria or even fruit flies).
These new variants of the species have small changes in their DNA that separates them from their brothers and sisters. The new DNA can still intermingle with the old, and the traits can be passed around the population.
If two sets of organisms are kept in isolation, though, they will develop more and more mutations that set them apart from their cousins, since the traits cannot intermingle. Since sexual reproduction only works when both sets of DNA are reasonably compatible, you reach a point where these minor changes add up to make the two populations sexually incompatible and they fail to reliably reproduce. This is the point where most people draw the line between two different species. This border situation is staring you in the face in the form of mules. (The two sets of organisms do not actually have to be in physical isolation; cosmetic mutations have been observed to cause two populations in an otherwise single species to isolate themselves. They only want to mate with others that look like them.)
It should be readily apparent how many small adaptations (from natural selection), which we have observed, directly, will result in speciation. All of this is part of evolution.
I think you misunderstood his point. Newton's explanation of gravity is just as "wrong" as the non-empirical ("God must be doing it") view of evolution that was dominant back when people originally started thinking about how species seem to adapt.
The post you replied to was intending to say that evolution is, just as gravity is. Our theories about how these things work may not be nailed down just yet, but just because you have a problem with the currently accepted theory of gravity doesn't mean gravity doesn't exist, any more than creationists can claim evolution isn't happening.
If they don't use the patented algorithms, then there's no patent infringement and they can do whatever they want. The problem is, the MP3 data can't really be interpreted and converted to sound without implementing those algorithms and infringing on those patents.
Of course, I can't begin to fathom how courts in other countries deal with patents, but I suspect they're not all that different from one another, and I'm not aware of a "fair use" for patents that would act as an affirmitive defense against patent infringement. But I could be wrong about that.
2) A lot of guys don't like the girls around because they feel really uncomfortable that they might say "the wrong thing", and the next minute they are having a "sensitivity training" session with Human Resources. Don't be emo. Please. Take a joke for what it is - a joke - instead of taking it personally. Bonus points for telling a few yourself, it will help us relax.
I completely agree with this point. A group of guys will talk like a group of guys. When even a single woman enters the picture, the group changes.
Now, some groups of guys can deal with that and adapt without anyone even thinking about it. But if you want to be a part of a group that's almost entirely guys, it will help if you make it clear that you're comfortable around a group of guys. You can't go into this assuming that the group will suddenly become a femme-sensitive, metrosexual crowd, just for you. (And if some do, they may resent you for it.)
If you have a break room where everyone eats lunch, just sit by them. "You guys mind if I join you?" Participate in the conversation. Eventually you'll be welcome.
You cannot (legally) be accused of sexual harassment for asking a co-worker out
You can be legally accused of sexual harrassment, unless the accusation is libelous/slanderous. Normally that behavior wouldn't be considered harrassment unless there was more to the story. But in many cases, the accusation is enough to make your life difficult.
But, IMO, that's not very likely. Just ask her. If she says, "No, and stop bothering me," then stop bothering her.
You do not have the "right" to receive whatever performance the contract requires of the other parties you have contracted with. All parties of a contract have the right to breach that contract at any time for any reason.
Of course, if you suffered harm (economic or otherwise) because they breached the contract, you can sue them for those damages, because you relied on their contracted promise, and they breached that contract, but if your only harm was not getting an e-mail from your grandma, the judge is going to throw you out. If you're lucky, his parting comments will include a bit of free advice: find another ISP.
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Agreed. Courts take into account the amount of time that passes between the event and the crime when examining that sort of defense. If you have time to calm down and think about it rationally, it's no longer a crime of passion. The question of how long that time is depends on the case.
The original poster may not have intended this interpretation, but I look at it as the Irish governing the Irish here. If the majority of Irish people didn't want this policy, they're free to vote someone else into power to change it. In my opinion, the only people that have a right to complain about this policy are those actually in Ireland. As much as I hate seeing things like censorship and imposed morality, I hate interfering in peoples' rights to self-govern even more. If this is the way they want it there, let them have it that way. It's their call.
The imposition of one's morals onto others is the root of most of the conflicts in the world today. People don't understand that morals are not absolute concepts.
Their home page loads 100 images and has HTTP headers that forbid caching. I realize that not everyone can hire good web developers that take scalability issues like this into account, but surely this is an example of when you need to bite the bullet and do so.
Perhaps you misunderstand my point here. When you interact with a call center employee, of course that employee is going to have access to confidential information about you. You're either going to provide it to them, or they're going to be able to pull it up in order to do their job properly. I'm talking about the wholesale access to customer information.
A mere employee should never be able to pull up enough information in bulk for it to be valuable enough to trade with, and any attempt to gather this information piecemeal should be detected by proper auditing.
The level of perfect you're suggesting here is not only impractical, it's impossible. Many of a TV station's programs come over satellite. The speed of light is quite finite, and the delays involved with beaming a signal to a satellite and back completely destroy any possibility of having your station start something at precisely 00:00:00.000. In addition, even if the broadcaster were local and started at :00.000, the digital encoding process requires several frames of input before it starts sending the encoded output. By the time you start receiving your live MPEG stream, you're already several frames behind. This is all compounded by a station's need to show programming from a variety of sources. This requires flexible timing.
I used to work at a TV station, and the switching and commercials that weren't done by hand were done by automation not based on the clock, but on start/stop cues embedded in the broadcast itself. These signals are given well in advance of the actual "start" time, specifically to give the equipment adequate time to process and act on it. This is especially important with video tape, because tape players don't exactly start at full speed on frame 1 the instant the "play" signal is given. They normally take a second or so to get up to speed and get a good image going.
A "massive" amount of security patches? The only security patches that require reboots in Linux are those to the kernel, and these are exceedingly rare.
If the company designed its security and auditing correctly, call center employees should never have the ability to do this in the first place. Why are they trusting call center employees with wholesale access to customers' private data? Competent companies will require the employees to provide an explanation every time they access a record, and these will be tied to their phone records to make sure they are only accessing information relevant to their current task. A good audit trail, flagging unusual access behavior, combined with limiting access only to individual records at a time would have stopped these breaches.
Yes, some of these outsourced call centers are inexpensive because they don't do things like this. But you get what you pay for, right?
Different kind of clustering. The parent post is referring to a high-performance computing cluster (which is normally what people are talking about when they talk about clusters), which differs from an HA/load balancing cluster by having an OS tailored to the task, and applications and OS working together to split computation across multiple cluster members.
"Clusters" as used by most web communities are normally HA clusters, which are simply a logical group of servers running the same software, with a request being sent to one cluster member. The goal isn't to split computation across systems; it's to distribute traffic and (mostly) survive the loss of a single cluster member.
I'd prefer to be surrounded by smart people, and I'd prefer to see my country (thus me) benefit more than others.
Let's assume for a moment that you live in a country that doesn't "compete" in this respect. Some scientists have a new idea, and they propose their idea to your government. You decide that it isn't worth the money and pass on it. They go to another government, and propose it to them. They decide to do it. Your scientists move. Your country now has fewer smart people than it did before.
Repeated enough times, this trickles down into education and your country's economy. You are now less capable than your neighbors. Your country's quality of life goes down. It is in your best interests to compete in this respect if you want to retain your smart people.
If we instead pretend that all of the countries of the world have signed treaties preventing their people from moving to other countries, this problem goes away. But without a competitive drive, spending on pure research is going to be based on the numbers, and based conservatively. Money spent on research will drop sharply and our rate of scientific advance will slow to a crawl.
You say that you "don't care where these things get built so long as they get built," but without this "dick measuring competition", they never would.
You're right. We couldn't possibly learn anything about, say, performing surgery in low-gravity or weightless situations. It's not like we have a space station in orbit, or have plans to go to the MOON for heaven's sake! No realistic application at all. Waste of money.
Ban all research!
Do you have annual performance reviews? If so, that's your opportunity to play up your responsibilities. Take a look at your boss's job description, and pretend that description is an organizational description. Document how you're meeting those "objectives".
But chiefly, as others have said, do your job well despite the problems. If your boss isn't doing anything for you, then ignore him. He is irrelevant. It will be clear to your clients that you're the person to go to, not him, and that will eventually trickle up the chain of command on their side.
Don't do anything that would piss your boss off, though. He's still the "expert" on your performance, so he should have nothing but good things to say about you when his boss asks him what you do. Don't give him a reason to plan a response to "OK, so what do YOU do then?"
And he must be doing something right. A 25% "closing" percentage is phenomenal.
I'd love to see what these people have to say a month down the road. What percentage are happy with the switch? How many don't understand any of this computer stuff, and let him install Linux because he seemed to know what he was talking about, but now don't know how to open e-mail to talk to their granddaughter, and are too embarrassed and feel bad about calling him back and having him put Windows back on because gosh, he was just such a nice fella?
25% is suspiciously phenomenal.
I'm curious: What problems tend to be encountered on Windows that cause things to break and require steps to repair? Hardware problems? Botched software installations? Accidentally deleted files? Buggy drivers? Filesystem corruption? Am I missing some?
I didn't realize Linux was immune from all of that.
Linux and Windows are at the point where they're converging quite nicely in areas of OS stability. I might be missing something (and feel free to point me in the proper direction), but I really can't imagine these users not having their problems anymore by switching to Linux. If it's problems related to applications that you're targeting (IE is buggy, Office is bloated), alternatives are available for Linux AND Windows. A completely new OS really isn't necessary for that.
I really suspect here that these users aren't being "carefully selected". I think it's more likely they're being taken advantage of, and in the long term, this is going to do more harm than good. This guy needs to call all of his customers back, and ask them how they're doing with Linux. If their response isn't overwhelmingly positive, he needs to offer to switch them back to Linux, free of charge.
I'm with the parent poster. 25% is extremely high. Maybe it is just the "grandmas" out there. But why would that be? Because they're easily confused and easily taken advantage of, because they understand none of this stuff. So they were getting along OK before, but now some fast talking computer guy told them they'd be much better off doing things differently. And now they don't know how to start e-mail anymore and they're too embarrassed to admit it, and feel bad calling him back and telling him to put it back the way it was.
This is not the way to spread open source.
CDs play at 44KHz, but that does not necessarily mean they were recorded at 44KHz. DAT, for example, only has a frequency response of 20Hz-20KHz.
I think you're confusing sampling rate (44kHz) with frequency response (the interaction of the harmonics above 20Khz and those below 20KHz produces a much warmer, fuller sound.
These harmonics that you speak of are only audible when they vibrate your ear drum in the range of your hearing. Microphones are vibrated in the same manner, so whatever you think you're getting out of high-frequency harmonics is still being captured and digitized perfectly well. These high-frequency sounds are not being reproduced, but the audible waveforms that result from their interference in the original performance are very much within the range of human hearing, and are easily captured digitally.
We made side by side blind comparisons listening to a burned CD and picked the tape bounced version for it's musicality and smoothness...it simply sounded better when the music had some true tape saturation introduced.
I hear this a lot, but I think your wording hits the nail on the head: "it simply sounded better". You're not looking for accuracy in reproduction (which a CD will give you). You're looking for what you think sounds "better". It's perfectly plausible that the information lost (and/or introduced) in the analog or vinyl process produces a certain quality of the audio that many people prefer in their recordings.
This quality has little to do with accurate reproduction, however, and was not present in the room when the original recording was made.
I for one sometime feel I can here the stuttering steps of a digital approximation of a sine wave.
I find this highly unlikely, but even if you can, it would mean that your DAC isn't doing its job properly. There is enough information in the digital recording to reconstruct an absolutely perfect, smooth, pure waveform that exactly matches the characteristics of the original. If done properly, it should be impossible to distinguish between the original and the recording.
I suspect you're letting anecdotal evidence, among people that "want" to believe, taint your objectivity. I highly recommend that people take a basic class in DSP so that they understand exactly how this analog information is recorded digitally, and how it allows for the reproduction of the original waveforms.
I'm not sure this averaging has the effect that you think it has. A 0.0001kHz signal (aka 0.1Hz, or one cycle per 10 seconds) is spread out over 44kHz*10 seconds = 440,000 samples. Yes, you're losing some precision, but no more than 1 part in 440k. Are you really saying that after 440,000 measurements, we can't accurately reproduce a sine wave with that period?
But the real source of "averaging" error occurs with the numeric value assigned to each sample, not the frequency. Since the values are limited to 16 bits of resolution, we have to quantize the power of the signal in that sample among 65k possible values. But again, you have to realize that these waveforms are spread out over many, many samples. The value at one instant doesn't matter so much as the values over many instants. The goal is to reconstruct a waveform, remember, and this is more than enough information to do that.
What distortion are you talking about? Digital sampling will perfectly reproduce waveforms up to half of the sampling rate. At 44.1kHz sampling, that means you will be able to perfectly capture and reproduce sounds up to 22kHz. Your output is capped there and frequencies above that are not reproduced. There's no "distortion" even above that, unless you're using some misconfigured or poorly designed equipment. If you attempt to record sound waves above the capabilities provided by your sampling rate (e.g. 23kHz sound recorded at 44 ksamples/sec), the sound will not be recorded correctly. Perhaps that's where you're getting your claims of distortion. But, again, this should only arise if the recording was done improperly.
Vinyl sounds "warmer" because vinyl DOES distort the sound. It is extremely imperfect, and those imperfections lend a certain quality to the reproduced sound that is common to vinyl but absent both from the original sound, and from the sound reproduced by CDs.
Digital sampling is capable of preserving 100% of the information, provided your sampling rate is double the maximum frequency you want to capture, and your analog sound source and speakers are of sufficiently high quality. (The latter problem is common to vinyl as well.) If you don't believe this, please don't make the mistake of assuming your anecdotes trump science. Take an introductory course in DSP and learn what it is doing.
"Natural selection", is, by definition, the principal mechanism that drives evolution. What you define as "[helping] the survival of existing species" is the very essence of evolution. Speciation is a very small part of what evolution does, mainly because the definition of "species" is something we invented, and is fairly subjective.
An environment that undergoes a change will cause members of a species that are not capable of handling that change to die off. Those that are left behind will have traits that allowed them to survive. The result is a small variation of the species that makes them better able to handle their (new) environment.
We have directly observed this, in action, at small scales (where life spans are short, such as in bacteria or even fruit flies).
These new variants of the species have small changes in their DNA that separates them from their brothers and sisters. The new DNA can still intermingle with the old, and the traits can be passed around the population.
If two sets of organisms are kept in isolation, though, they will develop more and more mutations that set them apart from their cousins, since the traits cannot intermingle. Since sexual reproduction only works when both sets of DNA are reasonably compatible, you reach a point where these minor changes add up to make the two populations sexually incompatible and they fail to reliably reproduce. This is the point where most people draw the line between two different species. This border situation is staring you in the face in the form of mules. (The two sets of organisms do not actually have to be in physical isolation; cosmetic mutations have been observed to cause two populations in an otherwise single species to isolate themselves. They only want to mate with others that look like them.)
It should be readily apparent how many small adaptations (from natural selection), which we have observed, directly, will result in speciation. All of this is part of evolution.
I think you misunderstood his point. Newton's explanation of gravity is just as "wrong" as the non-empirical ("God must be doing it") view of evolution that was dominant back when people originally started thinking about how species seem to adapt.
The post you replied to was intending to say that evolution is, just as gravity is. Our theories about how these things work may not be nailed down just yet, but just because you have a problem with the currently accepted theory of gravity doesn't mean gravity doesn't exist, any more than creationists can claim evolution isn't happening.
If they don't use the patented algorithms, then there's no patent infringement and they can do whatever they want. The problem is, the MP3 data can't really be interpreted and converted to sound without implementing those algorithms and infringing on those patents.
Of course, I can't begin to fathom how courts in other countries deal with patents, but I suspect they're not all that different from one another, and I'm not aware of a "fair use" for patents that would act as an affirmitive defense against patent infringement. But I could be wrong about that.
2) A lot of guys don't like the girls around because they feel really uncomfortable that they might say "the wrong thing", and the next minute they are having a "sensitivity training" session with Human Resources. Don't be emo. Please. Take a joke for what it is - a joke - instead of taking it personally. Bonus points for telling a few yourself, it will help us relax.
I completely agree with this point. A group of guys will talk like a group of guys. When even a single woman enters the picture, the group changes.
Now, some groups of guys can deal with that and adapt without anyone even thinking about it. But if you want to be a part of a group that's almost entirely guys, it will help if you make it clear that you're comfortable around a group of guys. You can't go into this assuming that the group will suddenly become a femme-sensitive, metrosexual crowd, just for you. (And if some do, they may resent you for it.)
If you have a break room where everyone eats lunch, just sit by them. "You guys mind if I join you?" Participate in the conversation. Eventually you'll be welcome.
You cannot (legally) be accused of sexual harassment for asking a co-worker out
You can be legally accused of sexual harrassment, unless the accusation is libelous/slanderous. Normally that behavior wouldn't be considered harrassment unless there was more to the story. But in many cases, the accusation is enough to make your life difficult.
But, IMO, that's not very likely. Just ask her. If she says, "No, and stop bothering me," then stop bothering her.
You do not have the "right" to receive whatever performance the contract requires of the other parties you have contracted with. All parties of a contract have the right to breach that contract at any time for any reason.
Of course, if you suffered harm (economic or otherwise) because they breached the contract, you can sue them for those damages, because you relied on their contracted promise, and they breached that contract, but if your only harm was not getting an e-mail from your grandma, the judge is going to throw you out. If you're lucky, his parting comments will include a bit of free advice: find another ISP.