I don't know the details, but I think it goes something like this:
Company X says "Sure, we'll take that e-crud you don't want off your hands for the low-low price of $10 per whatever-it-is."
Company Y says "But we'll recycle that e-crud into something somebody wants, in an environmentally- and worker-sensitive way. That will be . . . $15 please, for a whatever-it-is."
Company Y proceeds to unload the junk on the same Company Z that Company X uses, thus nullifying the promise and the extra money, and making the environmentalists who endorsed Company Y look silly.
I think part of it is that juries are asked to decide whether or not the defendant did the deed, but somebody else sets the punishment per song. Often, the jury either doesn't even know what punishment they will bring with a guilty charge, or they are unaware that they are allowed to find the defendant innocent if the punishment seems way out of proportion with the crime. Apparently the evidence that the defendant did the deed looks sufficient in this case . . .
Snow doesn't have to do that to your power grid. Wind, rain, slush, etc. don't have to do that to your power grid. I'm from Minnesota, where the power is very stable despite the weather. I'm living in Seattle, where (a) the trees are weaker because they grow fast and don't fight frequent wind & snow, (b) people don't know how to drive in snow & slush because they don't have practice and their cars aren't ready for it, and (c) they have these silly raised ceramic bumps in all of the road stripes, which prevent normal snow plows from plowing the streets, and thus the standard is to use rubber-tipped snowplows only on major streets with the goal of making 1" hard-pack. Yes, that's right, the goal is glare ice on the main roads and snow-in on the minor roads. This makes it hard for the power companies to fix the power outages (caused by tipped trees and sagging branches) until the snow melts. Usually it all melts in 48 hours, so it's okay. Except when it freezes for two weeks straight and we have a snowpocalyse. Sigh.
Except for the part where 9,500,000 copies * $0.00 profit per book is still a grand total of $0.00. The point of the Pentagon cash-out was not to pay the selling price for every book, but instead to make the publisher whole again after flushing a pile of books. If anything, it would have cost them more in all of the little extras; storing, hauling, etc.
The one huge thing that has changed is that the newspapers have started trying to claim that they aren't biased. It was much clearer who was saying what when a newspaper was plain about its political leanings. Now they lie about their bias and the reader has to figure it out from context and the track record of the paper.
Physiologically speaking, a person gets less power to run everything as they get older, especially their brains. It makes sense that you have less ability to multi-thread and context-switch as you get older; those are expensive.
Actually, there is one class of vending machines that handles Susan B's correctly: postage stamp machines in post offices. And the way they give change for amounts over a dollar is to clunk it out in Susan B's.
The other problem with dollar coins (which was not pointed out in the article) is that lots on cash registers don't have a slot for them. So they don't get stocked, and the clerk has to plunk them in with something else when he/she gets them.
Actually, my hands used to lay pretty flat. Look at little kids' hands, before they spend years typing and mousing. They lay flat. That hand curl comes from years of holding pencils, mousing, and keyboarding. You should do what you can to help those muscles relax, because if they stay tense long enough, you get problems with your carpal tunnel.
Robots are neat and useful and all, but . . . come on, raising kids is arguably the most important work we do (yeah, I know, that doesn't exactly square with how we treat the people who already raise the kids, but I believe that's a separate argument). Young primates are supposed to learn how to be functional older primates from other older primates, that's just the way we work. Kids crave attention from people they look up to, and attention from the robots is not a replacement for that.
There are some really interesting (though not especially well written) books about how kids used to be better socially adjusted because they got their primary social learning from their parents and other closely associated adults, but now kids get too much of their social learning from other kids. That's why kids these days (oh dear, and I'm only 28) seem to think that adults are totally irrelevant. Removing yet another chance for there to be a caring, properly interacting adult around for large chunks of their daily lives is not going to help at all.
Oh and then there are the studies that show that infants don't learn language from the tv because the tv is not catching and holding their attention, and trying to see what they see.
* Of course healthcare costs are cheap for healthy, active young adults. There is a serious sampling bias to those statistics. When you're not healthy and young anymore, you end up in another insurance system (random insurance company, or the VA -- which makes regular headlines about their huge costs and uneven quality).
* I got Navy health care when I was an infant. They delayed giving me the expensive, high-tech (yes, MRI) brain scan until I was nearly dead. It was cheaper and easier to blame my mom for my not eating, since she's the sort to not keep on weight. After the diagnosis, it was off to a non-Navy hospital for surgery and bills that bankrupted my parents.
I know a surgeon who lives in cold climates who says "You're not dead until you're warm and dead". Body processes really do slow down, including the destructive ones, when the body is cold. There have been enough instances of people waking up / being revived while they warm up after falling through ice that this saying exists in the medical community.
Actually, the weird ones tend to be your best developers... Whatever makes them weird usually works well for their ability to code.
Which works just fine with my assertion:). Being bright makes them weird, and makes them particularly well suited to the task at hand and more driven to solve the puzzles.
I just figure that if they weren't weird, then with their natural ability and intelligence, there's no way they'd work the crappy IT jobs that they do.
And lots of them have the problem that they don't suffer fools gladly, and that causes problems for their advancement into something better. Fortunately, I have not had much chance to analyze that situation -- I've had a dull job, but no terrible jobs yet. But I'm new here;).
Bright people tend to be kind of strange. We don't quite fit in, we have unusual ideas about how the world should work, and standard solutions to life's problems don't tend to make us happy. Programmers as a group have a much higher fraction of bright people than the population at large. So programmers tend to be weird. You'll get that in any profession that attracts bright people, though of course it will get expressed differently depending on which subset of skills you filter for.
Perhaps they meant zip + 4. Which gets you down to very few households, but most people can't rattle off their zip + 4, so this information wouldn't actually apply to the questions posed by cashiers. On the other hand, I have heard that data mining on web-surfing habits can usually pick up your zip + 4, so yeah, it would be pretty trivial to put that together with birth date (which is asked for a various places to determine that you're of-age -- though of course you can lie) and sex, which can probably be guessed at even if you don't click one of the radio buttons.
Thank you for pointing out the variety in American offices. Especially in tech (where recruiting for jobs definitely happens on a global scale, at least for large companies), evenly lily-white offices are not normal. Consistency of gender, race, or any other detail (except hopefully high intelligence) cannot be expected in this melting pot, even if you only recruit locally.
You think that's a joke, but I have heard of at least one company of this sort getting fidgety about contract re-negotiations, and holding all of the cars ransom when they didn't win. Cars get to just rot in there, and everybody gets a bad feeling about robo-parking for a while.
There is one tiny way in which this small-scale legalization can help. It could allow small-time users of marijuana to keep a plant around, and not require them to interact with and feed the drug traders. It would probably make the whole process a little safer for them too, since they would know exactly what's in the stuff they are smoking. It might reduce the frequency of said people "upgrading" to stronger drugs, which in my opinion is a pretty big win.
Sigh, I do this too. I can't stand homonym errors (and apostrophe errors, and some kinds of comma errors) and do take them as an indication of low intelligence. A lot of why I can't tolerate them is that I take everything too literally. This means that when things quit working, I have to stop, go back, tell myself that "their" really really needs to be "there" this time, and try re-reading it. It just slows me down terribly.
Yow, I hadn't seen that zinger from Emily -- I like it.
And I proof-read almost everything I write, even quick chats and emails (and Slashdot posts -- oh look, Firefox recognizes Slashdot as a word). I figure it makes me look better, improves my chances of understanding myself later, and reduces the likelihood that somebody else will have to spend extra time understanding me. And it gives me nice high ground to stand on:).
I am not against smileys in reasonable doses, and have been discovering the ";", "--", and " . . . " symbols for possibly good effect. Mainly they just make my run-on thoughts work better on the screen.
It also depends on which state you're in. Some (but pathetically few) states have laws to the effect that if an assailant gets himself killed, the victim isn't liable. It might get hazier if he merely gets injured (and he'll probably try to take you to court anyway), so I guess the lesson is . . . take no prisoners.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know the details, but I think it goes something like this:
Company X says "Sure, we'll take that e-crud you don't want off your hands for the low-low price of $10 per whatever-it-is."
Company Y says "But we'll recycle that e-crud into something somebody wants, in an environmentally- and worker-sensitive way. That will be . . . $15 please, for a whatever-it-is."
Company Y proceeds to unload the junk on the same Company Z that Company X uses, thus nullifying the promise and the extra money, and making the environmentalists who endorsed Company Y look silly.
I think part of it is that juries are asked to decide whether or not the defendant did the deed, but somebody else sets the punishment per song. Often, the jury either doesn't even know what punishment they will bring with a guilty charge, or they are unaware that they are allowed to find the defendant innocent if the punishment seems way out of proportion with the crime. Apparently the evidence that the defendant did the deed looks sufficient in this case . . .
. . . and you're slashdotted.
Snow doesn't have to do that to your power grid. Wind, rain, slush, etc. don't have to do that to your power grid. I'm from Minnesota, where the power is very stable despite the weather. I'm living in Seattle, where (a) the trees are weaker because they grow fast and don't fight frequent wind & snow, (b) people don't know how to drive in snow & slush because they don't have practice and their cars aren't ready for it, and (c) they have these silly raised ceramic bumps in all of the road stripes, which prevent normal snow plows from plowing the streets, and thus the standard is to use rubber-tipped snowplows only on major streets with the goal of making 1" hard-pack. Yes, that's right, the goal is glare ice on the main roads and snow-in on the minor roads. This makes it hard for the power companies to fix the power outages (caused by tipped trees and sagging branches) until the snow melts. Usually it all melts in 48 hours, so it's okay. Except when it freezes for two weeks straight and we have a snowpocalyse. Sigh.
Except for the part where 9,500,000 copies * $0.00 profit per book is still a grand total of $0.00. The point of the Pentagon cash-out was not to pay the selling price for every book, but instead to make the publisher whole again after flushing a pile of books. If anything, it would have cost them more in all of the little extras; storing, hauling, etc.
If that's success, I'd hate to see failure . . .
The one huge thing that has changed is that the newspapers have started trying to claim that they aren't biased. It was much clearer who was saying what when a newspaper was plain about its political leanings. Now they lie about their bias and the reader has to figure it out from context and the track record of the paper.
Physiologically speaking, a person gets less power to run everything as they get older, especially their brains. It makes sense that you have less ability to multi-thread and context-switch as you get older; those are expensive.
Actually, there is one class of vending machines that handles Susan B's correctly: postage stamp machines in post offices. And the way they give change for amounts over a dollar is to clunk it out in Susan B's.
The other problem with dollar coins (which was not pointed out in the article) is that lots on cash registers don't have a slot for them. So they don't get stocked, and the clerk has to plunk them in with something else when he/she gets them.
Actually, my hands used to lay pretty flat. Look at little kids' hands, before they spend years typing and mousing. They lay flat. That hand curl comes from years of holding pencils, mousing, and keyboarding. You should do what you can to help those muscles relax, because if they stay tense long enough, you get problems with your carpal tunnel.
Robots are neat and useful and all, but . . . come on, raising kids is arguably the most important work we do (yeah, I know, that doesn't exactly square with how we treat the people who already raise the kids, but I believe that's a separate argument). Young primates are supposed to learn how to be functional older primates from other older primates, that's just the way we work. Kids crave attention from people they look up to, and attention from the robots is not a replacement for that.
There are some really interesting (though not especially well written) books about how kids used to be better socially adjusted because they got their primary social learning from their parents and other closely associated adults, but now kids get too much of their social learning from other kids. That's why kids these days (oh dear, and I'm only 28) seem to think that adults are totally irrelevant. Removing yet another chance for there to be a caring, properly interacting adult around for large chunks of their daily lives is not going to help at all.
Oh and then there are the studies that show that infants don't learn language from the tv because the tv is not catching and holding their attention, and trying to see what they see.
One makes headlines every couple years. That doesn't actually say much about the frequency of incidents.
Hmmm except for some little issues:
* Of course healthcare costs are cheap for healthy, active young adults. There is a serious sampling bias to those statistics. When you're not healthy and young anymore, you end up in another insurance system (random insurance company, or the VA -- which makes regular headlines about their huge costs and uneven quality).
* I got Navy health care when I was an infant. They delayed giving me the expensive, high-tech (yes, MRI) brain scan until I was nearly dead. It was cheaper and easier to blame my mom for my not eating, since she's the sort to not keep on weight. After the diagnosis, it was off to a non-Navy hospital for surgery and bills that bankrupted my parents.
It's starting to look like we'll have to pull the plug some time. Is later much better than now?
It used to be that way in the US, but it got changed in the mid-90s. Sigh.
I know a surgeon who lives in cold climates who says "You're not dead until you're warm and dead". Body processes really do slow down, including the destructive ones, when the body is cold. There have been enough instances of people waking up / being revived while they warm up after falling through ice that this saying exists in the medical community.
Also, San Francisco has earthquakes. Earthquakes are much better than floods at destroying bridges.
Actually, the weird ones tend to be your best developers... Whatever makes them weird usually works well for their ability to code.
Which works just fine with my assertion :). Being bright makes them weird, and makes them particularly well suited to the task at hand and more driven to solve the puzzles.
I just figure that if they weren't weird, then with their natural ability and intelligence, there's no way they'd work the crappy IT jobs that they do.
And lots of them have the problem that they don't suffer fools gladly, and that causes problems for their advancement into something better. Fortunately, I have not had much chance to analyze that situation -- I've had a dull job, but no terrible jobs yet. But I'm new here ;).
Bright people tend to be kind of strange. We don't quite fit in, we have unusual ideas about how the world should work, and standard solutions to life's problems don't tend to make us happy. Programmers as a group have a much higher fraction of bright people than the population at large. So programmers tend to be weird. You'll get that in any profession that attracts bright people, though of course it will get expressed differently depending on which subset of skills you filter for.
Perhaps they meant zip + 4. Which gets you down to very few households, but most people can't rattle off their zip + 4, so this information wouldn't actually apply to the questions posed by cashiers. On the other hand, I have heard that data mining on web-surfing habits can usually pick up your zip + 4, so yeah, it would be pretty trivial to put that together with birth date (which is asked for a various places to determine that you're of-age -- though of course you can lie) and sex, which can probably be guessed at even if you don't click one of the radio buttons.
Thank you for pointing out the variety in American offices. Especially in tech (where recruiting for jobs definitely happens on a global scale, at least for large companies), evenly lily-white offices are not normal. Consistency of gender, race, or any other detail (except hopefully high intelligence) cannot be expected in this melting pot, even if you only recruit locally.
You think that's a joke, but I have heard of at least one company of this sort getting fidgety about contract re-negotiations, and holding all of the cars ransom when they didn't win. Cars get to just rot in there, and everybody gets a bad feeling about robo-parking for a while.
There is one tiny way in which this small-scale legalization can help. It could allow small-time users of marijuana to keep a plant around, and not require them to interact with and feed the drug traders. It would probably make the whole process a little safer for them too, since they would know exactly what's in the stuff they are smoking. It might reduce the frequency of said people "upgrading" to stronger drugs, which in my opinion is a pretty big win.
Sigh, I do this too. I can't stand homonym errors (and apostrophe errors, and some kinds of comma errors) and do take them as an indication of low intelligence. A lot of why I can't tolerate them is that I take everything too literally. This means that when things quit working, I have to stop, go back, tell myself that "their" really really needs to be "there" this time, and try re-reading it. It just slows me down terribly.
:).
Yow, I hadn't seen that zinger from Emily -- I like it.
And I proof-read almost everything I write, even quick chats and emails (and Slashdot posts -- oh look, Firefox recognizes Slashdot as a word). I figure it makes me look better, improves my chances of understanding myself later, and reduces the likelihood that somebody else will have to spend extra time understanding me. And it gives me nice high ground to stand on
I am not against smileys in reasonable doses, and have been discovering the ";", "--", and " . . . " symbols for possibly good effect. Mainly they just make my run-on thoughts work better on the screen.
It also depends on which state you're in. Some (but pathetically few) states have laws to the effect that if an assailant gets himself killed, the victim isn't liable. It might get hazier if he merely gets injured (and he'll probably try to take you to court anyway), so I guess the lesson is . . . take no prisoners.