According to SFGate, traffic deaths did go up in California on roads where the speed limit increased. Here's some good quotes
In the first two years of higher limits, the number of fatal accidents increased 8.7 percent over the previous two years on the 2,317 miles of highway where limits were raised from 55 mph to 65 mph. Fatal accidents increased 9.7 percent on the 1,297 miles of highway where limits went from 65 mph to 70 mph.
and
``Increased speed leads to increased fatalities. It's the law of physics,'' said Julie Rochman, spokeswoman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. ``People who were cheating a little at 55 will cheat a little at 65.''
Rochman said drivers are kidding themselves if they think higher limits are just as safe. As good as the death rate is, hundreds of lives could be saved each year with lower speeds, she said.
A study by the institute reported that in the 12 states that raised limits to 70 mph, including California, there were 500 more deaths in the last nine months of 1996 than would have been expected with lower limits.
While it is true that there were fewer deaths due to car accidents in California after the speed limit was increased, it wasn't because the speed limit was increased on highways. The two have nothing to do with each other. Most traffic fatalities are on lower speed roads.
The number of gunshot wounds from assaults treated in hospital emergency departments fell from 64,100 in 1993 to 39,400 in 1997, a 39% decline. Homicides committed with a firearm fell from 18,300 in 1993 to 13,300 in 1997, a 27% decline.
Vermont's loss of hunters is part of a national trend. The number of hunters declined from 14.06 million to 13.03 million, or 7.3 percent, from 1991 to 2001, according to the Census Bureau and the Fish and Wildlife Service. The drop was greater in the West -- 9.6 percent, from 2.46 million to 2.22 million.
Not a direct comparison, but it's hard to find numbers detailing the number of times a gun was discharged at a person versus discharged at an animal or target. Nevertheless, it's pretty apparent the original poster was incorrect. The vast majority of shooting in the US is not at people, but at animals and targets.
So, back on topic. The analogy was not a good one. A closer analogy could be made for handguns (handguns are not designed for hunting, but a lot of people do use them for target practice), but it still wouldn't be a good one.
Calling FrameMaker an SGML based tool is like call TeX a PDF based format. Just because you can output PDF from TeX, doesn't mean it's based on PDF.
FrameMaker can output SGML or XML, and its structured editing framework can be designed to follow a DTD using a different file called an EDD (note that the EDD and DTD can get out sync, and often do). You don't author SGML or XML with it, you edit their binary format and then you can "Save As" SGML or XML. Without complex conversion and read/write rules, you get a mess that combines the worst of FrameMaker and SGML/XML.
FrameMaker is a very powerful tool, one that I've enjoyed working with for many years. I wish that Adobe had put the effort into it they spent on PageMaker and InDesign. Sadly they haven't, and soon I'll be forced to use a different tool, most likely a real XML editor like Arbortext Epic.
Adobe has a bad history of integrating two similar, but different products.
When Adobe bought FrameMaker they already had PageMaker. Instead of figuring out some integration or replacement product, they have slowly stopped improving both products and made a PageMaker (not FrameMaker) replacement called InDesign.
Best of both worlds? Hardly. Worst of both worlds? Close. InDesign is a pretty cool product for the layout crowd (PageMaker and Quark users), but it doesn't do nearly unusable for large document authors (see Notes on InDesign 2 as compared to FrameMaker 7 for reasons why). It's really just an evolution of PageMaker. If Adobe had focused on improving PageMaker, they'd probably have a better product than InDesign by now.
So, if history is any judge, Adobe will continue to sell GoLive and Dreamweaver, while creating a competing tool to GoLive. Nobody will know what to buy ("Why not buy all 3?", Adobe will ask), and none of the products will improve rapidly.
You missed the point of my post. Purposely killing someone is either wrong or right. It's the same action, taking someone's life away, so it has the same moral weight, regardless of the circumstances. If it's wrong, saying it's okay to execute someone or kill someone in a war is a value judgement. The question has to be, "Is the positive benefit great enough to balance out the negative of the act?".
I included my opinion on capital punishment to illustrate an example of that value judgement that I know many others would not share.
Saying that it's okay to kill the "guilty" but not okay to kill the innocent is meaningless because each person has to decide when someone is "guilty" enough to make killing them worth it.
You state that some people believe that there is a distinction between taking an innocent life, taking the life of the guilty, and accidental death. There is not.
I agree that accidental death is different. There is no intent to kill. The other two are no different, though. Either knowingly killing someone is wrong, or it is not. A person may believe that the wrong avoided by killing someone makes it justifiable, but that does not change the underlying moral decision on whether killing is right or wrong.
My belief is that the only time killing a person is justifiable is when it is done because there is no choice - the person must be killed to protect another person or people. If a person is in prison, they cannot harm other people. So, executing them is wrong. If that same person were out of jail and was attempting to kill someone else, the police would be justified in killing him to stop him.
This has nothing to do with abortion. As another poster said very well, what is involved when deciding on abortion is deciding what makes a human. Becoming human is a process. Until that mass of cells that is created by the joining of the sperm and the egg becomes human, abortion is not killing. Since there is not a scientific or medical definition of when that happens, it is up to each person to decide. Therefore, under the law, abortion should remain a personal choice.
Here's the thing - I bet your kids (if indeed your kids were watching) didn't even notice her boob.
There just wasn't anything to see. For less than a second part of her breast was exposed. Even if you look at it in slow motion (which, I'll admit, I have), you get just the merest glimpse of her nipple.
The real problem wasn't the boob flashing, it was the insistence of people in the media that it was something worth talking about. It wasn't, and it still isn't.
You say what they did was wrong - in your opinion that's true, and I'm not going to try to change that. But in the scheme of the things TV does wrong, it was trivial.
Does it deserve a fine? Sure, as you said, flashing a boob does not fit into the rating scheme. But the fine should have been a tiny little one, not half a million. It was half a million because Powell (see, I can be on topic!) is a judgemental prude, not because it was in the best interests of our country.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be offended. Go ahead and be offended. Just take a breath and realize that a sub-second flash of a boobie isn't a big deal. Save your energy for something important. You know, like being mad at Randy Moss for pretending to moon a bunch of football fans. Oh wait, that wasn't big deal either.
I think this is exactly the use case they are looking at.
However, I'm not sure I see the advantage over smart cards. Sun, supposedly, has it set up so that no one has an assigned office. You sit down where you want to, swipe your card, and your computer is set up the way it was the day before.
I suppose, because it's got dual Power PC processors, some of the work gets done locally, but I think that's true with Sun's system as well. Maybe it's just a reflection of the fact that most PCs don't have a smart card reader.
Personally, I'd love if smart cards caught on all over. It'd make traveling, or any situation where you need to share a single physical computer, much nicer for everyone. It'd also make it really nice for parents, because they could set all kinds of access controls on the system.
You had me nodding until you said PHP. Then you mentioned MySQL and I stopped reading.
If you are doing anything on the web, whether it's web app development or web design (two very different things), you need to know HTML and CSS. Everything else is dependent on what you are trying to do.
If you are doing web development you need to understand databases and have a general knowledge of how they work. Read about them before you install one. You really, really should understand why the DBA has set up the database you'll be working with the way s/he has.
Don't learn databases by using MySQL. It does a lot of things in a non-standard way. If you really want to practice your database knowledge on a functioning database, download Oracle. It's free for playing around with. The other alternative I would recommend is PostgreSQL. Remember, you don't want to be a DBA, so the concepts are more important than anything else. Anywhere you work that can pay you will also be able to pay a DBA.
Again, for web development, learn JSP. It's easy, and will give you the most career benefit for the time needed to learn it. Along with learning JSPs, get a basic grounding in Java (not all of J2EE, and don't even look at EJB).
Also important for web development would be studying JSF and watching it closely. Look at Struts and know what it's good for and how to use a controller.
If you've got JSP and Struts under your belt, and you understand databases, that's enough technology skills to get a junior web development position. There you'll learn what they need you to learn (whether it's Hibernate, Spring, PHP, etc.) for their specific project. Working is how you move from a junior position to a senior position.
If you are doing web design, take design courses. Learn what makes good design and the importance of good communication. While doing that you'll learn tools like graphic editing software and layout design tools. Use the tools your teachers tell you to use (hopefully they'll start with paper, pencil, and a ruler, and then move you into software). Usually if you understand one software design tool, you can quickly pick up the others. In web design, tools don't get you jobs, your portfolio does.
And that's my final recommendation regardless of what you really wind up wanting to do. Learn the stuff, but do something with it. Create your own website (it doesn't have to be public) and do some experimentation. Don't be afraid to try really whacky things. Look at Google. If you think about their interface, before you see it, you'd probably say, "Nah, too simple". But when you actually see it in action, you appreciate the simplicity. Volunteer for projects, either in the OSS community, or in the broader (and much easier to gain a foothold in since nearly every programmer thinks s/he is a web designer) non-profit market. Then you'll have something to show people at your job interviews.
Learning both is great, but will take a lot of time. I'd focus first on one, then the other.
If I were just starting out, I'd start by learning design, then the technologies. Good design is a slowly evolving field compared to web development.
Note, to people that don't agree with me - I'm trying to answer the question of a person who is trying to break into the field of web development/designing, not telling people how to build websites. Dice lists 37 jobs in Silicon Valley that mention PHP and 228 that mention JSP, 886 for SQL, and 79 for MySQL. You want to break into a field, you learn what most people are using, not what you think is the best technology. Once you're in, then you understand what work you want to do, and you can make your own decisions on the best way to do it.
Every writer worth his beans knows that the experience of reading changes the work from being a individual effort into a collaborative effort between the writer and the reader.
The Slate article describes a perfect example of this. Le Guin said that most white readers don't even notice the racial/skin tone elements, whereas many minorities have praised her for those elements.
So, the meaning of the book for a typical white reader is different than the meaning for a minority.
We all, as readers, bring our own history, ideas, opinions, and feelings to everything we read. Whatever you believe a passage means is exactly what it means.
That's not to say traditional literature are not valuable. By telling you that the river in Huck Finn represents life, the teacher is trying to give you insight into the book.
Now, if you don't agree with that insight, don't agree, but at least you've thought about it, and maybe you've learned something about the book or about yourself.
Do you sometimes have to write something that you don't agree with to pass? Sure. Welcome to the real world. You'll always, unless you run your own business, have to take other people's positions to be successful in your job.
To bring this back full circle, it sounds like Le Guin is upset that the producers changed the basic elements of the story rather then presenting their own perspective on the story. Some of that, as she understood, is neccessary for an adaptation of the books, but she thinks they went too far. There will always be tension there, and I think producers including the author (if living) or a representative of the author in the creation process can minimize that tension. It's a shame that the producers of this mini-series didn't do that.
This is for 18-35 year old voters. Is/. going to start up a new section named "Youth" that us old farts are denied access to?
Seriously, though, I think this is great. I remember when I was in college, so many of the people didn't care about the election. One of the reasons why is that the candidates weren't answering their questions. Clinton started changing that by appearing on MTV, but I'm willing to bet the perception still keeps a lot of younger people from voting.
Sorry, you missed what I was saying on Point 1. If you are against government regulation, then that's a solid stance. If you are for government regulation of X because X should be regulated because it [can kill people|is a non-profit sector|is too expensive for private industry to handle|etc.], that's a solid stance. Being against most governement regulation, without specifying what government regulation is okay, but it is wishy-washy.
Again, you missed what I was saying about Point 2. Internal audits can fail. Having a second level of regulation can catch those failures. How is that bad?
Point 3 is the most complicated point. Each of your bullet points have easy responses, though.
Unless a company cannot keep any of its profits, an unsustainable model for growth, dividends would not have helped in the Enron situation. The board would have been able to say "We need that cash for [infrastructure|purchasing|etc.] purposes. They knowingly committed fraud. Dividends would have just caused them to commit it a different way.
I say it doesn't make sense to force a company to give dividends. Oracle wouldn't be able to buy PeopleSoft if they had paid out dividends when they were profitable. The board kept the profit to help with growth. When a board doesn't feel it needs that money, it can already give a dividend, just like Microsoft is doing.
Unless your program adds government regulation forcing companies to disburse all, or a set percentage of its profits, as dividends, nothing changes. Of course, you are against such regulation, so, you're at an impasse.
As for taxation, as I said, what the level of taxation of dividends should be is a difficult question. Right now, I believe, it's the same as capital gains, which might be the right place for it.
An investor that counts on a high stock price is an idiot. Stock prices fluctuate. You need to be prepared to lose money. However, people that have been defrauded (such as the employees of Enron that were forced to invest in Enron stock if they wanted to participate in their 401k program), should have a method to get their money back.
If you really believe that dividends can protect you, buy stock that gives dividends.
Corporations will never be responsible to society, regardless of how the give money to their shareholders. The people that run corporations will always be focused on increasing their money, even if it negatively affects society. Because their goals differ from the corporations, corporations will not be responsible without oversite.
Sorry if you feel I'm generalizing, but all your points were very general, so you didn't really give me any specific points to rebut.
Point 1 is just wishy-washy thought. It's no different than the current stand-off between the democrats and republicans. Republicans want less government regulation, democrats want what we have, and in some cases more.
Point 2. Yeah, coporate auditing is nice, but it can't replace the SEC. Look at Arthur Andersen.
Point 3 logically doesn't fly.
Dividends can be a source of fraud, just like stock prices.
Companies should often "sit on" their profits to ensure they can weather bad times. I wish California had done that.
Taxes on dividends shouldn't some great surprise. They are income, and should be taxed as income. Whether they should or should not be higher than capital gains tax is a good question, but they should be taxed.
In my mind the biggest issue with expecting corporations to be responsible is that corporations are not people. Only people can be responsible for their actions.
Ah what the heck, I'll tell it. Not like anyone is going to read this anyway.
So, I went to visit a, um, friend, that lived on campus. I rode my bike up, and like I normally did, I leaned it up against the bike rack outside her dorm. No lock. I'd been leaving it unlocked for a long time, maybe a couple of years and it had never gotten stolen. Why should I worry?
I came out the next morning, went to breakfast, grabbed my books out of my gym locker (I was a boy scout, always prepared and all that), and went to class. Physics always makes more sense after a night of heavy, um, studying. Afterwards, I went back by her dorm to grab my bike to head home for a couple of hours of shut-eye. No bike.
I'm sure my reaction was typical. F*ck. F*ck. F*ck. Storm about a bit. Stamped my feet a good bit. Looked to make sure someone didn't move it to the next door to f*ck with me. Probably pretty funny to watch. Then, shoulders bent, I started to walk home. Thank god the Capitol bar was on the way home, and I had enough cash for a couple of pints.
I'd give you a link to the Capitol, but it couldn't do the place justice. Let's just say it's the best place on earth for a pint after your bike has been stolen. Heck, it might be the best place on earth for a pint regardless of whether your bike has been stolen or not. Thanks Stephanie for rebuilding after the lighting strike.
Anyway, I moved on. I no longer was spending nights with my friend, nor was I mourning my bike.
Losing the bike was the last bit of incentive I needed to finish my other bike project. Pissed as I was, I made my new bike from bits I had laying about the house (okay, back yard, shed, basement, you get the picture), which was twice the bike that I had lost, look like crap. I painted it with a toothbrush, and made the handle bar tape job look like crap. It worked well, though, and it actually made my commute to school easier. So, really, I didn't mind that much that my bike had been stolen.
For a while I locked the new bike up, just because the other one was stolen, but it wasn't long until I got too lazy to lock it up. After all, if this one got stolen, I had another at home waiting to be built out of parts, and that was fun for me.
To put beer on the bartop, I took a job working with the campus food service. I know, I know, you probably hate me and all the other people that forced that crap down your throat. Sorry.
My main job was handling the catering for events on campus. I delivered food, especially breakfast treats like bagels and coffee.
One day I jumped into the catering truck with a tray of (what else) doughnuts and assorted pastries for the campus police and others organizing the yearly auction on campus.
You see, each department would retire things, like computers, decks of punch cards, hydraulic rams, or APCs (yes, APCs, they were used for explosives research) that they no longer needed, and those would be sold at auction. I dropped off the tray of goodies, and took a look around at the swag. I never bought anything at these auctions, because they always sold the stuff I was interested in (like computers) in lots that put them out of my price range, but, like a good geek, I liked to drool over the things I couldn't get, like Linotype machines and welding rigs.
Wandering about, I came across, in a dark corner a bunch of bikes. In case it's not already obvious, I'm a bike scavenger. You have a bike part you don't want, give it to me, I'll figure out something to do with it. I thought, maybe nobody will be interested in these crappy bikes. So, I took a close look.
That's when I saw it. My old bike. Yup, tjere it was. Nothing wrong with it except cobwebs from storage. It was sitting there, ready to be sold to some yahoo that couldn't appreciate all the work I'd put into the damn thing.
Luckily I knew most of the campus cops (don't ask how), and I was on a friendly basis wi
You've hit the nail on the head. Have stuff that nobody wants to steal, or at least, that looks like stuff that nobody wants to steal, but that does the job good enough for you. And make sure you can live without it.
I had a crappy bike in college, but it looked really flashy. I left it locked up, but with a crappy cable lock. It got stolen.
I had a great bike that I built myself from an aluminum frame with a bunch of great components. I painted it with a tooth brush, and the handle bar tape looked like it had been put on by a monkey on speed. Don't even get me started on how old the leather bindings on the rat traps were. It looked like crap. I left it all over, unlocked. The only time anyone touched it was when the campus cops picked it up because it wasn't locked.
Most thieves, especially on or near a college campus, are looking for the easy theft and the easy sale. The want to grab something, unload it, and buy their booze/pot/coke/etc. So, don't make your stuff easy to steal, and don't make it look like it's worth stealing.
On a similar topic, don't ever buy something that looks too good to be true, either. It was probably stolen from someone else. People that buy stolen stuff are what cause stuff to be stolen.
BTW, emacs is the ultimate note taking engine. Abbrev mode and outline minor mode make it simple to get down the things your prof is saying in the correct structure.
Actually, you can already get a lot of public domain books dirt cheap (some for $1), even at B&N. They are mostly very short, though, due to the cost of shipping them.
Shipping is what makes books expensive. I used to work in a bookstore. We destroyed (cough, cough, really we did, we'd never consider giving them away to poor students), at the publisher's request, a lot of books when we wanted them off the shelf. They lost more money on the shipping then it cost them to print new copies.
There are three ways I see this affecting students - availability, current events, and used books.
Availability
Nothing is so frustrating as trying to buy a book for your class (you finally got your paycheck and can buy that damn $200 book) and the bookstore doesn't have it. With this system, that won't happen.
Current events
I remember back when we attacked Iraq the first time. One of my professors tried to find a book about the events leading up to the attack for use in our PolSci course. He found one, but it wasn't a terribly good book due to the pressure to get it printed quickly. Network book printing would allow authors writing about current events to get their books printed faster, and into students hands earlier, than traditional printing. Heck, you could probably also get errata at a low cost on a regular basis.
Used books
But wait, the old friend of the poor/cheap college student, the used book will be history. You think having to buy the 4th edition of that $120 physics book sucks when the 3rd is available for $15 is bad, wait until this catches on - used books will no longer be useful for students. Professors will always want you to have the latest edition, you know, the one published three days before the semester started, replacing the one you bought two weeks ago.
Look, you don't have a lot of time, and you don't have a lot of experience documenting software (you're a programmer, right?), so you need to use writing tools, rather than instinct, to maximize the result of your effort.
The best tool you can use is an outline.
Make sure you start with a document purpose (the more detailed the better), then organize your information in goals and tasks.
For example
Purpose: Use CMS to manage information throughout its lifespan.
Audience: Developers that are forced to write documentation
I. Overview
An overview of the system
A. Why should you use CMS
i. You won't have to write as much
ii. Those damn writers will leave you alone....
v.
B. CMS process [result of a work flow model]
i. [intros to major sections II - XXX]....
xi.
II. Creating a set of documents
III. Creating a single document
IV. Finding a document
V. Deleting a document
VI. Versioning a document
etc.
There are a lot of other tools you can use (3x5 cards, doc plans, work flow models, etc.). Just make sure before you write one word you outline your document. Otherwise it won't work well, and you, or the person that takes your job when you've failed, will have to re-do it.
Besides helping you scope out the work, once you have an outline it's easy to fill in the blanks with paragraphs because you know how to do each of the sections in the outline. For example, I'm sure you know exactly how to delete a document from your CMS system. So, when you get to that item in the outline, you don't have to think, you just write.
My hardware is a bit different (Sony UX-50), but otherwise, I totally agree with you. The main beef I have is the speed of data transfer over my cell phone.
The advantage, in this case, of the UX over the T2 is really just the very usable built in keyboard on the UX50.
The UX also supports 802.11 for visits to wireless hotspots. That's a big win if you're cell phone provider lets you access their 802.11 hotspots. The extra resolution (320x480 vs T2's 320x320) on the UX might make web browsing a bit nicer, too.
As others have pointed out, the price (around $500 new, cheaper on eBay) of a UX50 is in the range of a cheap laptop. The cheap laptop won't fit in his mom's purse, though.
My college degree is a BS in Technical Communication. For years I've been working as a technical writer, or a technical writing manager.
About 6 months ago I realized that I just wasn't satisfied anymore. It was then that I realized that I hadn't been performing up to my skill level, I wasn't interested in what I was doing, and I dreaded going to work.
So, I talked with my boss. He suggested I think about becoming a product manager in a releated product area. I made the move about two months ago, and although things have been tough, I'm really glad I did it. My interest is back and I'm enjoying going to work.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "Do what you love and the money will follow", but if you aren't satisfied with your job, try to find something that meets all of your needs, not just your monetary needs.
As a hiring manager in a software company let me tell you, you're situation doesn't look bad, assuming it's exactly as you tell it. If I bring someone in for an interview, and they tell me what you've been through, I'd be more likely to empathize with their situatition rather than hold it against them. So, just tell the truth.
The one thing that might be a problem is getting to the interview. You may need to do a bit of work on your cover letter to make it plain that the funding was cut rather than you losing the job because of cause.
One other thing - you may not want to include a 5 week job on your resume. Unless you gained a lot of important job experience in 5 weeks, I'd be likely to write the entire thing off. Since resume space is limited, you may want to include a former job that is more relevant to the position you are applying to.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is true that there were fewer deaths due to car accidents in California after the speed limit was increased, it wasn't because the speed limit was increased on highways. The two have nothing to do with each other. Most traffic fatalities are on lower speed roads.
What reliable sources? Without a link you sound like a kook.
Good point, you should have done it rather than posting about it.
Here are some statistics for your hungry little minds.
From the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence
Digging a little deeper, from the Department of Justice
And from the Burlington Free Press
Not a direct comparison, but it's hard to find numbers detailing the number of times a gun was discharged at a person versus discharged at an animal or target. Nevertheless, it's pretty apparent the original poster was incorrect. The vast majority of shooting in the US is not at people, but at animals and targets.
So, back on topic. The analogy was not a good one. A closer analogy could be made for handguns (handguns are not designed for hunting, but a lot of people do use them for target practice), but it still wouldn't be a good one.
And you are just as likely to get a correct response as the psuedo-spyware company got when they asked their users what their sex was.
FrameMaker is a very powerful tool, one that I've enjoyed working with for many years. I wish that Adobe had put the effort into it they spent on PageMaker and InDesign. Sadly they haven't, and soon I'll be forced to use a different tool, most likely a real XML editor like Arbortext Epic.
Adobe has a bad history of integrating two similar, but different products.
When Adobe bought FrameMaker they already had PageMaker. Instead of figuring out some integration or replacement product, they have slowly stopped improving both products and made a PageMaker (not FrameMaker) replacement called InDesign.
Best of both worlds? Hardly. Worst of both worlds? Close. InDesign is a pretty cool product for the layout crowd (PageMaker and Quark users), but it doesn't do nearly unusable for large document authors (see Notes on InDesign 2 as compared to FrameMaker 7 for reasons why). It's really just an evolution of PageMaker. If Adobe had focused on improving PageMaker, they'd probably have a better product than InDesign by now.
So, if history is any judge, Adobe will continue to sell GoLive and Dreamweaver, while creating a competing tool to GoLive. Nobody will know what to buy ("Why not buy all 3?", Adobe will ask), and none of the products will improve rapidly.
I included my opinion on capital punishment to illustrate an example of that value judgement that I know many others would not share.
Saying that it's okay to kill the "guilty" but not okay to kill the innocent is meaningless because each person has to decide when someone is "guilty" enough to make killing them worth it.
You state that some people believe that there is a distinction between taking an innocent life, taking the life of the guilty, and accidental death. There is not.
I agree that accidental death is different. There is no intent to kill. The other two are no different, though. Either knowingly killing someone is wrong, or it is not. A person may believe that the wrong avoided by killing someone makes it justifiable, but that does not change the underlying moral decision on whether killing is right or wrong.
My belief is that the only time killing a person is justifiable is when it is done because there is no choice - the person must be killed to protect another person or people. If a person is in prison, they cannot harm other people. So, executing them is wrong. If that same person were out of jail and was attempting to kill someone else, the police would be justified in killing him to stop him.
This has nothing to do with abortion. As another poster said very well, what is involved when deciding on abortion is deciding what makes a human. Becoming human is a process. Until that mass of cells that is created by the joining of the sperm and the egg becomes human, abortion is not killing. Since there is not a scientific or medical definition of when that happens, it is up to each person to decide. Therefore, under the law, abortion should remain a personal choice.
BTW, it appears to be a doctored photo of a lily. I'm not sure what the original poster was trying to suggest.
Here's the thing - I bet your kids (if indeed your kids were watching) didn't even notice her boob.
There just wasn't anything to see. For less than a second part of her breast was exposed. Even if you look at it in slow motion (which, I'll admit, I have), you get just the merest glimpse of her nipple.
The real problem wasn't the boob flashing, it was the insistence of people in the media that it was something worth talking about. It wasn't, and it still isn't.
You say what they did was wrong - in your opinion that's true, and I'm not going to try to change that. But in the scheme of the things TV does wrong, it was trivial.
Does it deserve a fine? Sure, as you said, flashing a boob does not fit into the rating scheme. But the fine should have been a tiny little one, not half a million. It was half a million because Powell (see, I can be on topic!) is a judgemental prude, not because it was in the best interests of our country.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be offended. Go ahead and be offended. Just take a breath and realize that a sub-second flash of a boobie isn't a big deal. Save your energy for something important. You know, like being mad at Randy Moss for pretending to moon a bunch of football fans. Oh wait, that wasn't big deal either.
I think this is exactly the use case they are looking at.
However, I'm not sure I see the advantage over smart cards. Sun, supposedly, has it set up so that no one has an assigned office. You sit down where you want to, swipe your card, and your computer is set up the way it was the day before.
I suppose, because it's got dual Power PC processors, some of the work gets done locally, but I think that's true with Sun's system as well. Maybe it's just a reflection of the fact that most PCs don't have a smart card reader.
Personally, I'd love if smart cards caught on all over. It'd make traveling, or any situation where you need to share a single physical computer, much nicer for everyone. It'd also make it really nice for parents, because they could set all kinds of access controls on the system.
You had me nodding until you said PHP. Then you mentioned MySQL and I stopped reading.
If you are doing anything on the web, whether it's web app development or web design (two very different things), you need to know HTML and CSS. Everything else is dependent on what you are trying to do.
If you are doing web development you need to understand databases and have a general knowledge of how they work. Read about them before you install one. You really, really should understand why the DBA has set up the database you'll be working with the way s/he has.
Don't learn databases by using MySQL. It does a lot of things in a non-standard way. If you really want to practice your database knowledge on a functioning database, download Oracle. It's free for playing around with. The other alternative I would recommend is PostgreSQL. Remember, you don't want to be a DBA, so the concepts are more important than anything else. Anywhere you work that can pay you will also be able to pay a DBA.
Again, for web development, learn JSP. It's easy, and will give you the most career benefit for the time needed to learn it. Along with learning JSPs, get a basic grounding in Java (not all of J2EE, and don't even look at EJB).
Also important for web development would be studying JSF and watching it closely. Look at Struts and know what it's good for and how to use a controller.
If you've got JSP and Struts under your belt, and you understand databases, that's enough technology skills to get a junior web development position. There you'll learn what they need you to learn (whether it's Hibernate, Spring, PHP, etc.) for their specific project. Working is how you move from a junior position to a senior position.
If you are doing web design, take design courses. Learn what makes good design and the importance of good communication. While doing that you'll learn tools like graphic editing software and layout design tools. Use the tools your teachers tell you to use (hopefully they'll start with paper, pencil, and a ruler, and then move you into software). Usually if you understand one software design tool, you can quickly pick up the others. In web design, tools don't get you jobs, your portfolio does.
And that's my final recommendation regardless of what you really wind up wanting to do. Learn the stuff, but do something with it. Create your own website (it doesn't have to be public) and do some experimentation. Don't be afraid to try really whacky things. Look at Google. If you think about their interface, before you see it, you'd probably say, "Nah, too simple". But when you actually see it in action, you appreciate the simplicity. Volunteer for projects, either in the OSS community, or in the broader (and much easier to gain a foothold in since nearly every programmer thinks s/he is a web designer) non-profit market. Then you'll have something to show people at your job interviews.
Learning both is great, but will take a lot of time. I'd focus first on one, then the other.
If I were just starting out, I'd start by learning design, then the technologies. Good design is a slowly evolving field compared to web development.
Note, to people that don't agree with me - I'm trying to answer the question of a person who is trying to break into the field of web development/designing, not telling people how to build websites. Dice lists 37 jobs in Silicon Valley that mention PHP and 228 that mention JSP, 886 for SQL, and 79 for MySQL. You want to break into a field, you learn what most people are using, not what you think is the best technology. Once you're in, then you understand what work you want to do, and you can make your own decisions on the best way to do it.
Every writer worth his beans knows that the experience of reading changes the work from being a individual effort into a collaborative effort between the writer and the reader.
The Slate article describes a perfect example of this. Le Guin said that most white readers don't even notice the racial/skin tone elements, whereas many minorities have praised her for those elements.
So, the meaning of the book for a typical white reader is different than the meaning for a minority.
We all, as readers, bring our own history, ideas, opinions, and feelings to everything we read. Whatever you believe a passage means is exactly what it means.
That's not to say traditional literature are not valuable. By telling you that the river in Huck Finn represents life, the teacher is trying to give you insight into the book.
Now, if you don't agree with that insight, don't agree, but at least you've thought about it, and maybe you've learned something about the book or about yourself.
Do you sometimes have to write something that you don't agree with to pass? Sure. Welcome to the real world. You'll always, unless you run your own business, have to take other people's positions to be successful in your job.
To bring this back full circle, it sounds like Le Guin is upset that the producers changed the basic elements of the story rather then presenting their own perspective on the story. Some of that, as she understood, is neccessary for an adaptation of the books, but she thinks they went too far. There will always be tension there, and I think producers including the author (if living) or a representative of the author in the creation process can minimize that tension. It's a shame that the producers of this mini-series didn't do that.
This is for 18-35 year old voters. Is /. going to start up a new section named "Youth" that us old farts are denied access to?
Seriously, though, I think this is great. I remember when I was in college, so many of the people didn't care about the election. One of the reasons why is that the candidates weren't answering their questions. Clinton started changing that by appearing on MTV, but I'm willing to bet the perception still keeps a lot of younger people from voting.
Sorry, you missed what I was saying on Point 1. If you are against government regulation, then that's a solid stance. If you are for government regulation of X because X should be regulated because it [can kill people|is a non-profit sector|is too expensive for private industry to handle|etc.], that's a solid stance. Being against most governement regulation, without specifying what government regulation is okay, but it is wishy-washy.
Again, you missed what I was saying about Point 2. Internal audits can fail. Having a second level of regulation can catch those failures. How is that bad?
Point 3 is the most complicated point. Each of your bullet points have easy responses, though.
There's an interesting discussion of dividend fraud at the Angry Economist.
If dividends become more common, more fraud will happen. It's the Stainless Steel Rat syndrome.
Unless a company cannot keep any of its profits, an unsustainable model for growth, dividends would not have helped in the Enron situation. The board would have been able to say "We need that cash for [infrastructure|purchasing|etc.] purposes. They knowingly committed fraud. Dividends would have just caused them to commit it a different way.
I say it doesn't make sense to force a company to give dividends. Oracle wouldn't be able to buy PeopleSoft if they had paid out dividends when they were profitable. The board kept the profit to help with growth. When a board doesn't feel it needs that money, it can already give a dividend, just like Microsoft is doing.
Unless your program adds government regulation forcing companies to disburse all, or a set percentage of its profits, as dividends, nothing changes. Of course, you are against such regulation, so, you're at an impasse.
As for taxation, as I said, what the level of taxation of dividends should be is a difficult question. Right now, I believe, it's the same as capital gains, which might be the right place for it.
An investor that counts on a high stock price is an idiot. Stock prices fluctuate. You need to be prepared to lose money. However, people that have been defrauded (such as the employees of Enron that were forced to invest in Enron stock if they wanted to participate in their 401k program), should have a method to get their money back.
If you really believe that dividends can protect you, buy stock that gives dividends.
Corporations will never be responsible to society, regardless of how the give money to their shareholders. The people that run corporations will always be focused on increasing their money, even if it negatively affects society. Because their goals differ from the corporations, corporations will not be responsible without oversite.
Sorry if you feel I'm generalizing, but all your points were very general, so you didn't really give me any specific points to rebut.
Point 1 is just wishy-washy thought. It's no different than the current stand-off between the democrats and republicans. Republicans want less government regulation, democrats want what we have, and in some cases more.
Point 2. Yeah, coporate auditing is nice, but it can't replace the SEC. Look at Arthur Andersen.
Point 3 logically doesn't fly.
In my mind the biggest issue with expecting corporations to be responsible is that corporations are not people. Only people can be responsible for their actions.
Yeah, there's a long story there.
Ah what the heck, I'll tell it. Not like anyone is going to read this anyway.
So, I went to visit a, um, friend, that lived on campus. I rode my bike up, and like I normally did, I leaned it up against the bike rack outside her dorm. No lock. I'd been leaving it unlocked for a long time, maybe a couple of years and it had never gotten stolen. Why should I worry?
I came out the next morning, went to breakfast, grabbed my books out of my gym locker (I was a boy scout, always prepared and all that), and went to class. Physics always makes more sense after a night of heavy, um, studying. Afterwards, I went back by her dorm to grab my bike to head home for a couple of hours of shut-eye. No bike.
I'm sure my reaction was typical. F*ck. F*ck. F*ck. Storm about a bit. Stamped my feet a good bit. Looked to make sure someone didn't move it to the next door to f*ck with me. Probably pretty funny to watch. Then, shoulders bent, I started to walk home. Thank god the Capitol bar was on the way home, and I had enough cash for a couple of pints.
I'd give you a link to the Capitol, but it couldn't do the place justice. Let's just say it's the best place on earth for a pint after your bike has been stolen. Heck, it might be the best place on earth for a pint regardless of whether your bike has been stolen or not. Thanks Stephanie for rebuilding after the lighting strike.
Anyway, I moved on. I no longer was spending nights with my friend, nor was I mourning my bike.
Losing the bike was the last bit of incentive I needed to finish my other bike project. Pissed as I was, I made my new bike from bits I had laying about the house (okay, back yard, shed, basement, you get the picture), which was twice the bike that I had lost, look like crap. I painted it with a toothbrush, and made the handle bar tape job look like crap. It worked well, though, and it actually made my commute to school easier. So, really, I didn't mind that much that my bike had been stolen.
For a while I locked the new bike up, just because the other one was stolen, but it wasn't long until I got too lazy to lock it up. After all, if this one got stolen, I had another at home waiting to be built out of parts, and that was fun for me.
To put beer on the bartop, I took a job working with the campus food service. I know, I know, you probably hate me and all the other people that forced that crap down your throat. Sorry.
My main job was handling the catering for events on campus. I delivered food, especially breakfast treats like bagels and coffee.
One day I jumped into the catering truck with a tray of (what else) doughnuts and assorted pastries for the campus police and others organizing the yearly auction on campus.
You see, each department would retire things, like computers, decks of punch cards, hydraulic rams, or APCs (yes, APCs, they were used for explosives research) that they no longer needed, and those would be sold at auction. I dropped off the tray of goodies, and took a look around at the swag. I never bought anything at these auctions, because they always sold the stuff I was interested in (like computers) in lots that put them out of my price range, but, like a good geek, I liked to drool over the things I couldn't get, like Linotype machines and welding rigs.
Wandering about, I came across, in a dark corner a bunch of bikes. In case it's not already obvious, I'm a bike scavenger. You have a bike part you don't want, give it to me, I'll figure out something to do with it. I thought, maybe nobody will be interested in these crappy bikes. So, I took a close look.
That's when I saw it. My old bike. Yup, tjere it was. Nothing wrong with it except cobwebs from storage. It was sitting there, ready to be sold to some yahoo that couldn't appreciate all the work I'd put into the damn thing.
Luckily I knew most of the campus cops (don't ask how), and I was on a friendly basis wi
You've hit the nail on the head. Have stuff that nobody wants to steal, or at least, that looks like stuff that nobody wants to steal, but that does the job good enough for you. And make sure you can live without it.
I had a crappy bike in college, but it looked really flashy. I left it locked up, but with a crappy cable lock. It got stolen.
I had a great bike that I built myself from an aluminum frame with a bunch of great components. I painted it with a tooth brush, and the handle bar tape looked like it had been put on by a monkey on speed. Don't even get me started on how old the leather bindings on the rat traps were. It looked like crap. I left it all over, unlocked. The only time anyone touched it was when the campus cops picked it up because it wasn't locked.
Most thieves, especially on or near a college campus, are looking for the easy theft and the easy sale. The want to grab something, unload it, and buy their booze/pot/coke/etc. So, don't make your stuff easy to steal, and don't make it look like it's worth stealing.
On a similar topic, don't ever buy something that looks too good to be true, either. It was probably stolen from someone else. People that buy stolen stuff are what cause stuff to be stolen.
BTW, emacs is the ultimate note taking engine. Abbrev mode and outline minor mode make it simple to get down the things your prof is saying in the correct structure.
While MySQL is an okay database, it's not a drop-in replacement for MS*SQL.
If you want to go for a closer one, try PostgreSQL. It's much more feature rich and stable than MySQL.
Of course, the best bet is Oracle which runs great on Linux.
Actually, you can already get a lot of public domain books dirt cheap (some for $1), even at B&N. They are mostly very short, though, due to the cost of shipping them.
Shipping is what makes books expensive. I used to work in a bookstore. We destroyed (cough, cough, really we did, we'd never consider giving them away to poor students), at the publisher's request, a lot of books when we wanted them off the shelf. They lost more money on the shipping then it cost them to print new copies.
There are three ways I see this affecting students - availability, current events, and used books.
Availability Nothing is so frustrating as trying to buy a book for your class (you finally got your paycheck and can buy that damn $200 book) and the bookstore doesn't have it. With this system, that won't happen. Current events I remember back when we attacked Iraq the first time. One of my professors tried to find a book about the events leading up to the attack for use in our PolSci course. He found one, but it wasn't a terribly good book due to the pressure to get it printed quickly. Network book printing would allow authors writing about current events to get their books printed faster, and into students hands earlier, than traditional printing. Heck, you could probably also get errata at a low cost on a regular basis. Used books But wait, the old friend of the poor/cheap college student, the used book will be history. You think having to buy the 4th edition of that $120 physics book sucks when the 3rd is available for $15 is bad, wait until this catches on - used books will no longer be useful for students. Professors will always want you to have the latest edition, you know, the one published three days before the semester started, replacing the one you bought two weeks ago.What, on the portability side, does Java make "a lot harder" than C++?
Look, you don't have a lot of time, and you don't have a lot of experience documenting software (you're a programmer, right?), so you need to use writing tools, rather than instinct, to maximize the result of your effort.
....
....
The best tool you can use is an outline.
Make sure you start with a document purpose (the more detailed the better), then organize your information in goals and tasks.
For example
Purpose: Use CMS to manage information throughout its lifespan.
Audience: Developers that are forced to write documentation
I. Overview
An overview of the system
A. Why should you use CMS
i. You won't have to write as much
ii. Those damn writers will leave you alone
v.
B. CMS process [result of a work flow model]
i. [intros to major sections II - XXX]
xi.
II. Creating a set of documents
III. Creating a single document
IV. Finding a document
V. Deleting a document
VI. Versioning a document
etc.
There are a lot of other tools you can use (3x5 cards, doc plans, work flow models, etc.). Just make sure before you write one word you outline your document. Otherwise it won't work well, and you, or the person that takes your job when you've failed, will have to re-do it.
Besides helping you scope out the work, once you have an outline it's easy to fill in the blanks with paragraphs because you know how to do each of the sections in the outline. For example, I'm sure you know exactly how to delete a document from your CMS system. So, when you get to that item in the outline, you don't have to think, you just write.
My hardware is a bit different (Sony UX-50), but otherwise, I totally agree with you. The main beef I have is the speed of data transfer over my cell phone.
The advantage, in this case, of the UX over the T2 is really just the very usable built in keyboard on the UX50.
The UX also supports 802.11 for visits to wireless hotspots. That's a big win if you're cell phone provider lets you access their 802.11 hotspots. The extra resolution (320x480 vs T2's 320x320) on the UX might make web browsing a bit nicer, too.
As others have pointed out, the price (around $500 new, cheaper on eBay) of a UX50 is in the range of a cheap laptop. The cheap laptop won't fit in his mom's purse, though.
My college degree is a BS in Technical Communication. For years I've been working as a technical writer, or a technical writing manager.
About 6 months ago I realized that I just wasn't satisfied anymore. It was then that I realized that I hadn't been performing up to my skill level, I wasn't interested in what I was doing, and I dreaded going to work.
So, I talked with my boss. He suggested I think about becoming a product manager in a releated product area. I made the move about two months ago, and although things have been tough, I'm really glad I did it. My interest is back and I'm enjoying going to work.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "Do what you love and the money will follow", but if you aren't satisfied with your job, try to find something that meets all of your needs, not just your monetary needs.
It sounds like you're doing the right thing.
As a hiring manager in a software company let me tell you, you're situation doesn't look bad, assuming it's exactly as you tell it. If I bring someone in for an interview, and they tell me what you've been through, I'd be more likely to empathize with their situatition rather than hold it against them. So, just tell the truth.
The one thing that might be a problem is getting to the interview. You may need to do a bit of work on your cover letter to make it plain that the funding was cut rather than you losing the job because of cause.
One other thing - you may not want to include a 5 week job on your resume. Unless you gained a lot of important job experience in 5 weeks, I'd be likely to write the entire thing off. Since resume space is limited, you may want to include a former job that is more relevant to the position you are applying to.