Even if you're an artist in a field you love, a good portion of your time is going to be spent doing something you don't enjoy. Arranging showings at galleries and talking to people where 3/4 don't understand/appreciate your work. 16 to 18 hour days from sitting in makeup/learning your lines. Going on tour for a year while your girlfriend/wife/kids are mostly at home.
Every job has aspects that won't interest you and you can't always subcontract them to someone else (or else you can't do it without taking a big risk on getting massively ripped off). That's reality. Find something where you can do enough of what you love to get you through the parts that you don't love.
It's sort of like a long-lasting marriage. There's going to be something about your partner that bugs you, but the relationship will last if there's enough good parts that draw you together to outweigh the things that pull you apart.
I'm personally against gay marriage but not because of religious issues but because of it creates an entitlement of rights based on a choice. There's good reason to believe that it's not any more of a choice than that you decided to be heterosexual. There's more and more physical evidence that it's how their body and brain are. See this article or the original paper or their earlier 2005 research on response to pheromones.
People don't decide to become mathematical or musical geniuses or star athletes. Sure some work or exercise is usually necessary develop a latent genetic talent. But I don't believe that any amount of "choosing" is going to help you develop specific new brain structures after the age of puberty, and that includes developing heterosexual brain structures if your body is wired for homosexuality.
Marriage is supported by the natural act of reproduction and if you choose to not participate in that act, you shouldn't have any special rights because of that choice. Or you could say that marriage is supported by the decision to raise the next generation necessary to continue civilization. There's no reason why gay couples can't do as good a job of that through adoption as straight couples do. Since homosexuality is not a choice, they're not going to have an effect on the sexual orientation of the child (although they will probably have an effect on that child's ability to tolerate differences from the norm).
There are ways to get the same benefits without marriage. Not in certain jurisdictions that deliberately discriminate again homosexuals.
Now, my wife and I have just had a boy and we're hoping he'll be heterosexual for a couple of reasons. Primarily because with only 10% of the population being homosexual, being homosexual cuts his mating pool down by an order of magnitude (and probably more since a good portion of that population still feels it has to live in the closet due to the intolerance of others and is seriously mentally messed up as a result). In addition, male heterosexual sexual activity generally does have a higher risk of STD transmission, even with the use of prophylactics.
It will also probably be at least be another couple of generations before homophobic attitudes are properly widely recognized as ignorant, intolerant, and about as valid a worldview as that of Creationists/Int. Design and flat-Earth proponents. I would prefer if my child wasn't directly threatened by such unreasoning and unscientific attitudes while they are still a rationalization for people's mindless hate.
In the end, as the evidence mounts that sexual orientation is predestined rather than chosen, people with religious objections to homosexuality are going to have to come to accept that you can't have a just god condemn a sexual practice which is hardwired as one of the most basic and fundamental need and instincts in a significant fraction of the human population.
The FEDs solution? spread the risk, but then the only final outcome is everyone fails at once like a titanic.
The biggest problem with a spreading of the risk is that it encourages people to take more risks than appropriate because it lessens consequences. It therefore increases the likelihood of failure.
No, your message that I was responding to mentions a "disastrous" Obama presidency and I clearly meant that I felt it's impossible for an Obama presidency to be worse than a W Bush presidency.
I'll grant you that those three individuals you name could potentially be worse presidents than W. However, Obama's policies are fairly mainstream and reality-based, not "faith"-based, and a large majority of US citizens support "liberal" policies like health care reform and getting out of Iraq. If your latest message is meant to subconsciously equate Obama to those three right-wing loonies in propensity to be a disastrous president, that's pretty ridiculous. While Pat Buchanan has been trying to soften his image a bit with his disavowing of neo-con adventurism, enough people still recognize him as no less of an extremist demagogic loon than Al Sharpton. And Buchanan's the most moderate of your three straw men - I don't remember him publicly advocating assassination as a means of achieving political goals for instance. I doubt that any of them could get legitimately elected unless there was a major nuclear attack on the USA causing the nuclear obliteration of at least a half-dozen major East/West coastal cities, including at least three from NY, Boston, LA, or SF. I sincerely hope that nuclear scenario never happens because if it were to happen then the election of any of those loony tunes would only be the start of a whole world of hurt for everyone and probably of the downfall of human civilization.
I'm sure there's a good chance that some future US president will be worse than W Bush. The less savoury aspects of human nature like greed and power-lust that is found in some specimens will work its way around any static defenses we or anyone else can build into a political system. Unless they have been usurped into a dictatorship, democracies can usually resolve the issue with a vote instead of a multi-decade politico-religious internecine war. Hopefully the American people have enough memory and sense that it won't happen for at least another generation. Some mandatory economics, politics, and civics classes, with a curriculum including the importance of a free, diverse, and responsible press for a healthy democracy, might be a good start.
The idea is, at least to many on the Right, that an Obama Presidency will be so disastrous as to guarantee a GOP President in 2012. ..
It's impossible for it to be worse than Bush, and Obama and the Democrats will have plenty of material evidence of how incompetent and corrupt this administration has been to still be able to drag out examples in an election 4 years from now. While I'm sure there will be some examples of Democratic malfeasance as well by then, the So-Called Liberal Media will be hard pressed to make it seem comparable.
Even Carter, for all his faults, managed to get Israel, Jordan, and Egypt to sit at the same table and sign a peace treaty. I honestly can't think of *one* thing on that scale that Bush and Co. has managed not to fuck up. Obama's biggest problem will be rooting out all the incompetent/fundamentalist patronage/nepotist Republican appointments that have happened in the last 8 years, since they'll all be trying to sabotage him. Kind of like the way Reagan sabotaged Carter's attempts to negotiate the freedom of the Iran US embassy hostages (a taste of Iran-Contra shenanigans to come).
I think the difference is that Obama is a lot more politically savvy than Carter. While he downplays the racism that his candidacy has stirred up, I think he does it because he knows it's politically necessary, not because he underestimates it. Given his and his wife's upbringing, he can't be unaware that there will be people trying to sabotage him. That said, he is going to have to deal with the economic disaster caused by 8 years of Republican fiscal and governance incompetence, and the country isn't going to be happy about some of the medicine pills he's going to have to make them swallow. Whether he'll be able to sell to the USA that it's the Republican incompetence that made him do it is another question.
I am afraid that I fail to see the irony since spelling civilization vs. civilisation is not an issue of homonyms (words with different meanings that sound the same) but instead one of regional spelling differences for a single word, and I spelled it correctly for the region in which I live.
Many later model SUVs (particularly so-called cross-overs which aren't built on truck frames) do actually have crumple zones that absorb some KE during impact.
If you're in an SUV impact against a compact or subcompact, then the KE of the smaller mass subcompact is distributed to the whole mass of the SUV so you only get a small fraction of it and crumple zones aren't as necessary. If you're in an impact with something the same size or bigger than you, then you get hit worse without the crumple zones.
SUVs were relatively safer when they weren't one third of the vehicles on North American roads because the odds of an impact with a travelling object that would deliver enough KE to matter were fairly low. When the odds of running into something with equal or higher mass increased as more SUVs got on the road, then the probability of more serious injury from those types of impact dominated the risk equation.
There's a reason why SUVs aren't popular in the UK and Europe, and that's safety. You've got *no* protection from impacts. Nah. Unless you're hitting a bus or a large truck, an SUV will plow through stuff by sheer mass alone. If you do hit the same size as or bigger than you, then that truck frame will absorb less than a car's crumple zone and you'll get hit worse. The biggest problem with SUVs is the same one as with Jeeps in the 80's. They're trucks with a high center of gravity and people buy them for the power and try to drive them like a Porsche Boxster. Hilarity ensues for anybody not caught up or related to someone in the accident.
The real problem with SUVs in Europe is that nearly all parking is sized for cars, and often for compact or economy models at that. Some stupid (single occupant) rich bitch in a town in southern France (can't remember which one) yelled at my sister for almost opening the door of our rental car into the side of her precious SUV. There was no more than an inch or two to spare on each side of her vehicle to the edges of her parking stall in a full lot. I was too dumbstruck by her arrogance to turn the tables and ream her out the way she really deserved to be. If we had stayed in France long enough for it to happen again, that next SUV owner wouldn't have been as fortunate.
I suspect, given the same situation, other Frenchmen would have found the vocabulary. Being an SUV owner in Europe is probably more pain than it's worth in terms of conspicuous consumption and feeling above the masses.
Riding a bicycle on the sidewalk is illegal in many jurisdictions. Pedestrians and vehicles don't mix well (or pedestrians are far too miscible by vehicles, if you prefer that point of view)
Ah, it would seem that's a rare case where the Canadian spelling is like the American spelling and not the British then. Doesn't change that daybot's attempt to correct the corrector fell flat. You had better success; thanks.
The point is that it's not a person that begs the question. It's the situation or the argument.
Let me be more explicit. In either interpretation, be it classical or contemporary, "one" never begs the question unless you're talking about circular theorems regarding numbers to the power of 0.
Yeah, sure. When somebody screws up an expression in a way that makes no sense, we should just accept it. In addition, since people on Slashdot constantly misuse pairs of homonyms like then/than, effect/affect, their/they're, we should just ignore historical usage differences and use them interchangeably. We should just accept sloppiness and mediocrity because that's how Western civilization was built.
Then again, maybe intelligent and well-educated people will just ignore people who aren't intelligent enough or who can't be bothered to learn how to properly communicate. The medium is the message, and a badly-formed message says to the recipient either "I don't care enough about talking to you to take the time to say it properly" or "the content of the message can't be that great if I can't be educated enough to learn to express it well enough".
How about we focus on terrorism in general? How about we make it hard for ANYONE to perpetrate terror attacks on our country?
Um, because then he would have to support wiretaps and investigations of anti-abortion groups that hav e used or approved of terror tactics against abortion clinics and doctors. That would piss off his right-wing religious extremists.
You see he wants to make clear that it will only be used against the "bad" terrorists, and not the "good" terrorists.
Yeah, I had some thoughts running that way as well. I was also thinking about pipelined asynchronous queries. I think people are trying to avoid retraining the application developer populace to know how to deal with asynchronous (and concurrent) processing because it's much more error prone and many programmers aren't up to the task. People that can do that are going to be more expensive and that's hard to sell to business.
But heck, if you're really running an application with a workload that needs to scale that much, then you can bloody well pay more for somebody that can handle that complexity. If not, then you're doing the large scale equivalent of hiring your neighbour's pre-teen kid at $8/hour to run your small office network because he worked out well for your parent's Windows PC. Sometimes, you need to pay more to get what you need.
Interesting ideas, but it would seem that, once your application tier is spread over multiple servers that don't share a memory space, you are going to have significant distributed cache coherency issues. While I can understand the desire to avoid the marshalling overhead involved in database reads and updates, you're also going to have to reinvent the wheel of distributed concurrency control for each application when it's already been solved in a general way in the clustered database.
For instance, from the JCS link you provided:
JCS is not a transactional distribution mechanism. Transactional distributed caches are not scalable. JCS is a cache not a database. The distribution mechanisms provided by JCS can scale into the tens of servers. In a well-designed service oriented architecture, JCS can be used in a high demand service with numerous nodes. This would not be possible if the distribution mechanism were transactional.
So if you're having to give up transactional integrity to have your distributed cache, I think it's going to have limited applications because it doesn't solve that 1000 transactions per thread problem you indicated. Sure you can work your way around it a little by treating it as extremely optimistic locking to maintain transactional integrity on writes, but it also does limit the accuracy of the cache and for some applications (financial for starters, I would expect) that's going to be an issue.
Just noticed that David R. Palmer mentions three new books in an Amazon review of Emergence. In addition to Tracking, apparently pending are a sequel to Threshold and a third novel unrelated to his prior books.
It's probably too much to hope that Donald Kingsbury has also been busy writing.
Oh yes, one more thing. I've heard some good things about Ian M. Banks Culture novels. I haven't started on them out of fear I would like them too much.
Also, in a space opera vein, I quite liked some of the early Miles Vorkosigan novels by Lois McMaster Bujold. She gets a little maudlin in some of the later books in a way that seems a little out of character. But most of the books are quite entertaining and, in the books and stories where LMB gets into bioethics, more thought-provoking than you would expect out of space opera.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you're an artist in a field you love, a good portion of your time is going to be spent doing something you don't enjoy. Arranging showings at galleries and talking to people where 3/4 don't understand/appreciate your work. 16 to 18 hour days from sitting in makeup/learning your lines. Going on tour for a year while your girlfriend/wife/kids are mostly at home.
Every job has aspects that won't interest you and you can't always subcontract them to someone else (or else you can't do it without taking a big risk on getting massively ripped off). That's reality. Find something where you can do enough of what you love to get you through the parts that you don't love.
It's sort of like a long-lasting marriage. There's going to be something about your partner that bugs you, but the relationship will last if there's enough good parts that draw you together to outweigh the things that pull you apart.
People don't decide to become mathematical or musical geniuses or star athletes. Sure some work or exercise is usually necessary develop a latent genetic talent. But I don't believe that any amount of "choosing" is going to help you develop specific new brain structures after the age of puberty, and that includes developing heterosexual brain structures if your body is wired for homosexuality. Marriage is supported by the natural act of reproduction and if you choose to not participate in that act, you shouldn't have any special rights because of that choice. Or you could say that marriage is supported by the decision to raise the next generation necessary to continue civilization. There's no reason why gay couples can't do as good a job of that through adoption as straight couples do. Since homosexuality is not a choice, they're not going to have an effect on the sexual orientation of the child (although they will probably have an effect on that child's ability to tolerate differences from the norm). There are ways to get the same benefits without marriage. Not in certain jurisdictions that deliberately discriminate again homosexuals.
Now, my wife and I have just had a boy and we're hoping he'll be heterosexual for a couple of reasons. Primarily because with only 10% of the population being homosexual, being homosexual cuts his mating pool down by an order of magnitude (and probably more since a good portion of that population still feels it has to live in the closet due to the intolerance of others and is seriously mentally messed up as a result). In addition, male heterosexual sexual activity generally does have a higher risk of STD transmission, even with the use of prophylactics.
It will also probably be at least be another couple of generations before homophobic attitudes are properly widely recognized as ignorant, intolerant, and about as valid a worldview as that of Creationists/Int. Design and flat-Earth proponents. I would prefer if my child wasn't directly threatened by such unreasoning and unscientific attitudes while they are still a rationalization for people's mindless hate.
In the end, as the evidence mounts that sexual orientation is predestined rather than chosen, people with religious objections to homosexuality are going to have to come to accept that you can't have a just god condemn a sexual practice which is hardwired as one of the most basic and fundamental need and instincts in a significant fraction of the human population.
The biggest problem with a spreading of the risk is that it encourages people to take more risks than appropriate because it lessens consequences. It therefore increases the likelihood of failure.
No, your message that I was responding to mentions a "disastrous" Obama presidency and I clearly meant that I felt it's impossible for an Obama presidency to be worse than a W Bush presidency.
I'll grant you that those three individuals you name could potentially be worse presidents than W. However, Obama's policies are fairly mainstream and reality-based, not "faith"-based, and a large majority of US citizens support "liberal" policies like health care reform and getting out of Iraq. If your latest message is meant to subconsciously equate Obama to those three right-wing loonies in propensity to be a disastrous president, that's pretty ridiculous. While Pat Buchanan has been trying to soften his image a bit with his disavowing of neo-con adventurism, enough people still recognize him as no less of an extremist demagogic loon than Al Sharpton. And Buchanan's the most moderate of your three straw men - I don't remember him publicly advocating assassination as a means of achieving political goals for instance. I doubt that any of them could get legitimately elected unless there was a major nuclear attack on the USA causing the nuclear obliteration of at least a half-dozen major East/West coastal cities, including at least three from NY, Boston, LA, or SF. I sincerely hope that nuclear scenario never happens because if it were to happen then the election of any of those loony tunes would only be the start of a whole world of hurt for everyone and probably of the downfall of human civilization.
I'm sure there's a good chance that some future US president will be worse than W Bush. The less savoury aspects of human nature like greed and power-lust that is found in some specimens will work its way around any static defenses we or anyone else can build into a political system. Unless they have been usurped into a dictatorship, democracies can usually resolve the issue with a vote instead of a multi-decade politico-religious internecine war. Hopefully the American people have enough memory and sense that it won't happen for at least another generation. Some mandatory economics, politics, and civics classes, with a curriculum including the importance of a free, diverse, and responsible press for a healthy democracy, might be a good start.
It's impossible for it to be worse than Bush, and Obama and the Democrats will have plenty of material evidence of how incompetent and corrupt this administration has been to still be able to drag out examples in an election 4 years from now. While I'm sure there will be some examples of Democratic malfeasance as well by then, the So-Called Liberal Media will be hard pressed to make it seem comparable.
Even Carter, for all his faults, managed to get Israel, Jordan, and Egypt to sit at the same table and sign a peace treaty. I honestly can't think of *one* thing on that scale that Bush and Co. has managed not to fuck up. Obama's biggest problem will be rooting out all the incompetent/fundamentalist patronage/nepotist Republican appointments that have happened in the last 8 years, since they'll all be trying to sabotage him. Kind of like the way Reagan sabotaged Carter's attempts to negotiate the freedom of the Iran US embassy hostages (a taste of Iran-Contra shenanigans to come).
I think the difference is that Obama is a lot more politically savvy than Carter. While he downplays the racism that his candidacy has stirred up, I think he does it because he knows it's politically necessary, not because he underestimates it. Given his and his wife's upbringing, he can't be unaware that there will be people trying to sabotage him. That said, he is going to have to deal with the economic disaster caused by 8 years of Republican fiscal and governance incompetence, and the country isn't going to be happy about some of the medicine pills he's going to have to make them swallow. Whether he'll be able to sell to the USA that it's the Republican incompetence that made him do it is another question.
Reality has a "liberal" bias.
I am afraid that I fail to see the irony since spelling civilization vs. civilisation is not an issue of homonyms (words with different meanings that sound the same) but instead one of regional spelling differences for a single word, and I spelled it correctly for the region in which I live.
Many later model SUVs (particularly so-called cross-overs which aren't built on truck frames) do actually have crumple zones that absorb some KE during impact.
If you're in an SUV impact against a compact or subcompact, then the KE of the smaller mass subcompact is distributed to the whole mass of the SUV so you only get a small fraction of it and crumple zones aren't as necessary. If you're in an impact with something the same size or bigger than you, then you get hit worse without the crumple zones.
SUVs were relatively safer when they weren't one third of the vehicles on North American roads because the odds of an impact with a travelling object that would deliver enough KE to matter were fairly low. When the odds of running into something with equal or higher mass increased as more SUVs got on the road, then the probability of more serious injury from those types of impact dominated the risk equation.
There's a reason why SUVs aren't popular in the UK and Europe, and that's safety. You've got *no* protection from impacts.
Nah. Unless you're hitting a bus or a large truck, an SUV will plow through stuff by sheer mass alone. If you do hit the same size as or bigger than you, then that truck frame will absorb less than a car's crumple zone and you'll get hit worse. The biggest problem with SUVs is the same one as with Jeeps in the 80's. They're trucks with a high center of gravity and people buy them for the power and try to drive them like a Porsche Boxster. Hilarity ensues for anybody not caught up or related to someone in the accident.
The real problem with SUVs in Europe is that nearly all parking is sized for cars, and often for compact or economy models at that. Some stupid (single occupant) rich bitch in a town in southern France (can't remember which one) yelled at my sister for almost opening the door of our rental car into the side of her precious SUV. There was no more than an inch or two to spare on each side of her vehicle to the edges of her parking stall in a full lot. I was too dumbstruck by her arrogance to turn the tables and ream her out the way she really deserved to be. If we had stayed in France long enough for it to happen again, that next SUV owner wouldn't have been as fortunate.
I suspect, given the same situation, other Frenchmen would have found the vocabulary. Being an SUV owner in Europe is probably more pain than it's worth in terms of conspicuous consumption and feeling above the masses.
Riding a bicycle on the sidewalk is illegal in many jurisdictions. Pedestrians and vehicles don't mix well (or pedestrians are far too miscible by vehicles, if you prefer that point of view)
When questions start handing out change to people, I'll start using the expression like jo42.
Ah, it would seem that's a rare case where the Canadian spelling is like the American spelling and not the British then. Doesn't change that daybot's attempt to correct the corrector fell flat. You had better success; thanks.
see this post
The point is that it's not a person that begs the question. It's the situation or the argument.
Let me be more explicit. In either interpretation, be it classical or contemporary, "one" never begs the question unless you're talking about circular theorems regarding numbers to the power of 0.
In French, and maybe in American English, but I live in Western Canada and was writing in Canadian English. In that context, it's civilization.
Yeah, sure. When somebody screws up an expression in a way that makes no sense, we should just accept it. In addition, since people on Slashdot constantly misuse pairs of homonyms like then/than, effect/affect, their/they're, we should just ignore historical usage differences and use them interchangeably. We should just accept sloppiness and mediocrity because that's how Western civilization was built.
Then again, maybe intelligent and well-educated people will just ignore people who aren't intelligent enough or who can't be bothered to learn how to properly communicate. The medium is the message, and a badly-formed message says to the recipient either "I don't care enough about talking to you to take the time to say it properly" or "the content of the message can't be that great if I can't be educated enough to learn to express it well enough".
I don't get out of the way for subgeniuses.
Um, because then he would have to support wiretaps and investigations of anti-abortion groups that hav e used or approved of terror tactics against abortion clinics and doctors. That would piss off his right-wing religious extremists.
You see he wants to make clear that it will only be used against the "bad" terrorists, and not the "good" terrorists.
Yeah, I had some thoughts running that way as well. I was also thinking about pipelined asynchronous queries. I think people are trying to avoid retraining the application developer populace to know how to deal with asynchronous (and concurrent) processing because it's much more error prone and many programmers aren't up to the task. People that can do that are going to be more expensive and that's hard to sell to business.
But heck, if you're really running an application with a workload that needs to scale that much, then you can bloody well pay more for somebody that can handle that complexity. If not, then you're doing the large scale equivalent of hiring your neighbour's pre-teen kid at $8/hour to run your small office network because he worked out well for your parent's Windows PC. Sometimes, you need to pay more to get what you need.
Probably about as many as there were Apple Lisas in the early 80's. Apple learned that lesson.
Interesting ideas, but it would seem that, once your application tier is spread over multiple servers that don't share a memory space, you are going to have significant distributed cache coherency issues. While I can understand the desire to avoid the marshalling overhead involved in database reads and updates, you're also going to have to reinvent the wheel of distributed concurrency control for each application when it's already been solved in a general way in the clustered database.
For instance, from the JCS link you provided:
JCS is not a transactional distribution mechanism. Transactional distributed caches are not scalable. JCS is a cache not a database. The distribution mechanisms provided by JCS can scale into the tens of servers. In a well-designed service oriented architecture, JCS can be used in a high demand service with numerous nodes. This would not be possible if the distribution mechanism were transactional.
So if you're having to give up transactional integrity to have your distributed cache, I think it's going to have limited applications because it doesn't solve that 1000 transactions per thread problem you indicated. Sure you can work your way around it a little by treating it as extremely optimistic locking to maintain transactional integrity on writes, but it also does limit the accuracy of the cache and for some applications (financial for starters, I would expect) that's going to be an issue.
Depends. If the capital gains is taxed less than the tax credit for the short loss, it would be a win.
Just noticed that David R. Palmer mentions three new books in an Amazon review of Emergence. In addition to Tracking, apparently pending are a sequel to Threshold and a third novel unrelated to his prior books.
It's probably too much to hope that Donald Kingsbury has also been busy writing.
Oh yes, one more thing. I've heard some good things about Ian M. Banks Culture novels. I haven't started on them out of fear I would like them too much.
Also, in a space opera vein, I quite liked some of the early Miles Vorkosigan novels by Lois McMaster Bujold. She gets a little maudlin in some of the later books in a way that seems a little out of character. But most of the books are quite entertaining and, in the books and stories where LMB gets into bioethics, more thought-provoking than you would expect out of space opera.