So you extrapolated from a one-shot simulator experiment to some unspecified period on the highway, which you concluded would be covered with blood. Thanks for clearing this up.
Campaign finance records show that those state officials who most vocally opposed the plan received campaign contributions from Microsoft lobbyists. For instance, state Sen. Marc Pacheco, who held hearings on the move to OpenDocument Format at which he voiced opposition to the plan, received $600 in campaign contributions from Microsoft lobbyists over the past three years.
If three out of every 40 people who talked on cell phones were going to get in an accident, the highways would be a blood bath. A one in 14 chance of an accident?
Where did these statistics come from? In any event, I'm sure that 3 of every 40 drivers -- cell phone users or not -- are going to get into an accident at some point. Without a time/mileage constraint the statement is meaningless.
Recall that RIM was forced to settle to the tune of half-a-billion dollars even though the patents were in the process of being successfully challenged. I don't know if the settlement involved dropping the challenge, too.
I have read the patent and in my opinion it does not describe a method at all. It is just an example, with a few diagrams, of how a mapping might be done. There are thousands of academic papers that describe systematic ways of doing this, and lots of products, too.
So what exactly does this patent cover? A for instance of how to map the "name" method of an object into a "name" column in a table?
It is laughable that this patent was granted; however, I doubt Red Hat share the laughter.
Me too. WEP (or whatever) is way too intrusive. And what's the risk? That somebody will park in my driveway and steal some of my bandwidth? I think I'd notice before they took more than a gig or two. That somebody will break into my computer? I use ssl and firewalls. That a terr-ist would... what?
It's not guaranteed to happen but there's a good chance that Darl will go to jail.
Can you expand on the legal theory behind this, or is it just wishful thinking?
Certainly he enriched himself beyond belief by lying, so he *should* go to jail, but on what specific charge? Fraud? Securities fraud? Extortion?
I see him as open to Slander and Libel suits. Perhaps those could strip him of some of his ill-gotten gains, but I don't think they could land him in jail.
It's things like this that convince me never to try any of the "small" oddball distros.
A small distro is fine so long as it is architected as a delta on established base. Then you can keep current with the base and the worst that'll ever happen is that the distro-specific deltas have to be adapted and re-applied. If the small distro is viable, it should be able to do that much. Or figure out a way to use community support to maintain and enhance the deltas (for example, to support new hardware). Even if the distro dies, all you lose is whatever its value-add was in the first place.
MEPIS chose instead to say that if you upgrade from Debian sources you are on your own. And if you upgrade, say, from MEPIS 2004 to MEPIS 3 or from MEPIS 3 to MEPIS 6 you have to do a fresh install and all your configuration information and tweaks will be lost.
Warren has made his own problems. I tried Mepis in 2004 and quite liked it. I used it for more than a year and installed it on several people's machines. However, I will not use it any more.
My reasons are several, but one of the top ones is murky licensing.
No doubt somebody from the MEPIS community will loudly declare that licensing is not a problem. If this is the case, exactly how can I get the source to build myself a MEPIS distro?
There has been considerable bad blood in the MEPIS community and former community. I am not a member of any faction. I have done my share to contribute. I simply tried to get my questions answered and MEPIS and Warren came up short. His many rants -- the one cited in the story is one of many over the last three years -- further convince me that I was right to walk away.
MEPIS is because is non-standard. Warren repeatedly warns against upgrading packages from the standard Debian repositories. There is no upgrade path from one version of MEPIS to the next. There appears to be a very weak mechanism for collecting community know-how as to how to configure the system to "just work" on a particular platform.
For those you you who didn't notice, we elected our very own neo-con government. Complete with lobbyists as consultants and cabinet ministers, abolishment of unstaged press conferences, and reneging on Kyoto.
Slashdot is far from free and open. The editors exert great control, in secret, over what articles are posted. In exercising this control they have provided fertile ground for self-promotion and half-baked and outright crazy ideas. I cannot count the number of press releases and blogs and testimonials and deliberate misrepresentations they have reported as truth.
The mitigating influence of replies -- which are indeed free -- is overwhelmed by the initial selection bias.
I wish I could agree with the story that Slashdot's power had been supplanted by more open media such as Digg, but it ain't so. Slashdot is a powerful tool for internet demagogues, and the editors are complicit.
We all panic. Most of us are overwhelmed by it from time to time. Some people experience it daily and and are barely able to function in life because of it. Others are able to control it -- at least is most situations -- to the extent that it doesn't overtly affect their performance.
I suggest that first of all you accept that it will happen. Of course try to recognise the situations leading up to it and try to develop coping mechanisms. The coping mechanisms will have to be things you've worked out in advance because when you're in a state of panic you're not in any position to do so.
I think it is valuable to use your experience (and others') to develop understanding -- for others and for yourself. There's litte point in saying "I [they] should [should have] done this [that] instead" -- you [they] are [were] simply unable. Some people really are just as panicked as this every day of their lives, and equally unable to cope. This does not mean they are lazy or hopeless or even crazy. You're privileged -- you've made it to college and you're studying something you love. I assume that you're female, so you've done this in spite of a social environment that is not 100% inviting. Obviously you have all the necessary raw materials to be able to cope in stressful situations -- reflect on some such situations and try to figure out what you did.
What do I do? That's hard to articulate. I'm a big believer in exercise -- walking, running, swimming. Do it regularly and before you notice you are in a potentially panic-inducing situation. Even if you feel you don't have time because you have an assignment, cramming, etc. At least that's what I do. If I have a stressful event on the horizon and only get to bed at 2 a.m. I'm better off getting up at 6 instead of 7 and having a run. An extra hour's (fitful) sleep isn't going to do me the good that the exercise will. And maybe it'll translate into a much better hour's sleep the next night.
Others here have advocated drugs. Drugs can help in certain situations and for certain problems, but I would not advocate them as a first line of defense. Booze, valium, etc are just depressants. They are unlikely to be strong enough to overcome your angst, but they will certainly affect your performance. SSRIs -- Prozac, Effexor, etc -- can work remarkably well for anxiety. But they are not "pop one when you feel jittery" treatments. And they can have very bad effects. If you are bipolar, they may well exacerbate the problem a lot.
Enuring yourself to particular situations can help. Stage fright is a good example. Put yourself in speaking situations as opposed to avoiding them. Eventually things get better. I guess you can't replicate exam situations exactly but maybe try a programming contest or something that you wouldn't otherwise enjoy -- if you experience some of the same feelings, this might give you a sandbox in which to experiment with various strategies.
Sorry if this rambles. I think the theme is that you have to discover what works for you. By all means solicit and consider opinioons such as the ones that you receive here. Since your panic occurs in relatively rare situations it is tough to know exactly what is going to work. I am pretty sure that somebody else's solution applied on an ad hoc basis will not work.
Depends on what you're doing, your corporate culture, and how independent the workers are.
Face-to-face can be a big waste of time. Meetings, water cooler chat, and so on tend to be more exercises in shoulder rubbing than productivity. They may increase or decrease employees' effectiveness.
I totally agree that high-tech tools are a waste of time. Email is great when the rubber hits the road, phone calls are fine for brainstorming, and conference calls with a shared spreadsheet or ppt presentation or whatever are just fine for meetings.
The real issue with telecommuting is the tendency -- perceived or real -- to goof off. So I guess if you're running a sweatshop, it is bad; if you're running an operation with employees who are mature and motivated to see the operation succeed, telecommuting can be good.
Here's an example of a Wikipedia article that presents a contrarian point of view for a standard topic. While the contrarian article on which it is based is interesting and perhaps worth citing, Wikipedia should not state categorically "The Hawthorne Effect is still widely invoked, even after being proved incorrect." (The Hawthorne studies had flaws, to be sure, but those flaws hardly prove incorrect the general phenomenon that has come to be known and the Hawthorne effect.)
The article is flagged as having been challenged, but seems to have languished in that state for some time, with no obvious movement toward resolution.
This article seems to be an anomaly. For the most part, articles on science and mathematics are informative and even handed. I was surprised to find this example, and I thought./ readers might find it the seed for a somewhat more dispassionate discussion of Wikipedia (as opposed to subject matter) issues.
liberal ('lIb&schwa.r&schwa.l), a. and sb. Forms: 4-5 liberale, (5 libral), 4-7 liberall(e, 5-6 lyberal(l, 4- liberal. [a. OFr. liberal (Fr. liberal) = Sp., Pg. liberal, Ital. liberale, ad. L. liberalis pertaining to a free man, f. liber free.]
1 Originally, the distinctive epithet of those `arts' or `sciences' (see ART 7) that were considered `worthy of a free man'; opposed to servile or mechanical. In later use, of condition, pursuits, occupations: Pertaining to or suitable to persons of superior social station; `becoming a gentleman' (J.). Now rare, exc. of education, culture, etc.,
2 a Free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted.
3 a Free from restraint; free in speech or action.
4 a Free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid.
5 Of political opinions: Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.
You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far there are few outside the US. I asked a handful of American computer science professors which universities in Europe were most admired, and they all basically said "Cambridge" followed by a long pause while they tried to think of others. There don't seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in technology.
And this survey demonstrates what, other than the parochialism of the American computer science professors with whom Graham happens to be acquainted?
Slashdot Mirror
So you extrapolated from a one-shot simulator experiment to some unspecified period on the highway, which you concluded would be covered with blood. Thanks for clearing this up.
Campaign finance records show that those state officials who most vocally opposed the plan received campaign contributions from Microsoft lobbyists. For instance, state Sen. Marc Pacheco, who held hearings on the move to OpenDocument Format at which he voiced opposition to the plan, received $600 in campaign contributions from Microsoft lobbyists over the past three years.
? action=print
-- http://www.cio.com/archive/040106/opensource.html
Sure, $600 is only a token, but its the thought that counts.
If three out of every 40 people who talked on cell phones were going to get in an accident, the highways would be a blood bath. A one in 14 chance of an accident?
Where did these statistics come from? In any event, I'm sure that 3 of every 40 drivers -- cell phone users or not -- are going to get into an accident at some point. Without a time/mileage constraint the statement is meaningless.
Under threat of injunction and following pointed instruction by the judge, they settled prior to a judgement being imposed.
Sorry, there was a verdict, and their appeal was denied. I call that "forced to settle," don't you?
Recall that RIM was forced to settle to the tune of half-a-billion dollars even though the patents were in the process of being successfully challenged. I don't know if the settlement involved dropping the challenge, too.
I have read the patent and in my opinion it does not describe a method at all. It is just an example, with a few diagrams, of how a mapping might be done. There are thousands of academic papers that describe systematic ways of doing this, and lots of products, too.
So what exactly does this patent cover? A for instance of how to map the "name" method of an object into a "name" column in a table?
It is laughable that this patent was granted; however, I doubt Red Hat share the laughter.
Me too. WEP (or whatever) is way too intrusive. And what's the risk? That somebody will park in my driveway and steal some of my bandwidth? I think I'd notice before they took more than a gig or two. That somebody will break into my computer? I use ssl and firewalls. That a terr-ist would ... what?
I don't have a padlock on my garden hose either.
It's not guaranteed to happen but there's a good chance that Darl will go to jail.
Can you expand on the legal theory behind this, or is it just wishful thinking?
Certainly he enriched himself beyond belief by lying, so he *should* go to jail, but on what specific charge? Fraud? Securities fraud? Extortion?
I see him as open to Slander and Libel suits. Perhaps those could strip him of some of his ill-gotten gains, but I don't think they could land him in jail.
It's things like this that convince me never to try any of the "small" oddball distros.
A small distro is fine so long as it is architected as a delta on established base. Then you can keep current with the base and the worst that'll ever happen is that the distro-specific deltas have to be adapted and re-applied. If the small distro is viable, it should be able to do that much. Or figure out a way to use community support to maintain and enhance the deltas (for example, to support new hardware). Even if the distro dies, all you lose is whatever its value-add was in the first place.
MEPIS chose instead to say that if you upgrade from Debian sources you are on your own. And if you upgrade, say, from MEPIS 2004 to MEPIS 3 or from MEPIS 3 to MEPIS 6 you have to do a fresh install and all your configuration information and tweaks will be lost.
Warren has made his own problems. I tried Mepis in 2004 and quite liked it. I used it for more than a year and installed it on several people's machines. However, I will not use it any more.
My reasons are several, but one of the top ones is murky licensing.
No doubt somebody from the MEPIS community will loudly declare that licensing is not a problem. If this is the case, exactly how can I get the source to build myself a MEPIS distro?
There has been considerable bad blood in the MEPIS community and former community. I am not a member of any faction. I have done my share to contribute. I simply tried to get my questions answered and MEPIS and Warren came up short. His many rants -- the one cited in the story is one of many over the last three years -- further convince me that I was right to walk away.
MEPIS is because is non-standard. Warren repeatedly warns against upgrading packages from the standard Debian repositories. There is no upgrade path from one version of MEPIS to the next. There appears to be a very weak mechanism for collecting community know-how as to how to configure the system to "just work" on a particular platform.
For those you you who didn't notice, we elected our very own neo-con government. Complete with lobbyists as consultants and cabinet ministers, abolishment of unstaged press conferences, and reneging on Kyoto.
Slashdot is far from free and open. The editors exert great control, in secret, over what articles are posted. In exercising this control they have provided fertile ground for self-promotion and half-baked and outright crazy ideas. I cannot count the number of press releases and blogs and testimonials and deliberate misrepresentations they have reported as truth.
The mitigating influence of replies -- which are indeed free -- is overwhelmed by the initial selection bias.
I wish I could agree with the story that Slashdot's power had been supplanted by more open media such as Digg, but it ain't so. Slashdot is a powerful tool for internet demagogues, and the editors are complicit.
We all panic. Most of us are overwhelmed by it from time to time. Some people experience it daily and and are barely able to function in life because of it. Others are able to control it -- at least is most situations -- to the extent that it doesn't overtly affect their performance.
I suggest that first of all you accept that it will happen. Of course try to recognise the situations leading up to it and try to develop coping mechanisms. The coping mechanisms will have to be things you've worked out in advance because when you're in a state of panic you're not in any position to do so.
I think it is valuable to use your experience (and others') to develop understanding -- for others and for yourself. There's litte point in saying "I [they] should [should have] done this [that] instead" -- you [they] are [were] simply unable. Some people really are just as panicked as this every day of their lives, and equally unable to cope. This does not mean they are lazy or hopeless or even crazy. You're privileged -- you've made it to college and you're studying something you love. I assume that you're female, so you've done this in spite of a social environment that is not 100% inviting. Obviously you have all the necessary raw materials to be able to cope in stressful situations -- reflect on some such situations and try to figure out what you did.
What do I do? That's hard to articulate. I'm a big believer in exercise -- walking, running, swimming. Do it regularly and before you notice you are in a potentially panic-inducing situation. Even if you feel you don't have time because you have an assignment, cramming, etc. At least that's what I do. If I have a stressful event on the horizon and only get to bed at 2 a.m. I'm better off getting up at 6 instead of 7 and having a run. An extra hour's (fitful) sleep isn't going to do me the good that the exercise will. And maybe it'll translate into a much better hour's sleep the next night.
Others here have advocated drugs. Drugs can help in certain situations and for certain problems, but I would not advocate them as a first line of defense. Booze, valium, etc are just depressants. They are unlikely to be strong enough to overcome your angst, but they will certainly affect your performance. SSRIs -- Prozac, Effexor, etc -- can work remarkably well for anxiety. But they are not "pop one when you feel jittery" treatments. And they can have very bad effects. If you are bipolar, they may well exacerbate the problem a lot.
Enuring yourself to particular situations can help. Stage fright is a good example. Put yourself in speaking situations as opposed to avoiding them. Eventually things get better. I guess you can't replicate exam situations exactly but maybe try a programming contest or something that you wouldn't otherwise enjoy -- if you experience some of the same feelings, this might give you a sandbox in which to experiment with various strategies.
Sorry if this rambles. I think the theme is that you have to discover what works for you. By all means solicit and consider opinioons such as the ones that you receive here. Since your panic occurs in relatively rare situations it is tough to know exactly what is going to work. I am pretty sure that somebody else's solution applied on an ad hoc basis will not work.
Here's a response I wrote to a related article on ergonomic keyboards. The parent is correct, exercise is the best known intervention.
Depends on what you're doing, your corporate culture, and how independent the workers are.
Face-to-face can be a big waste of time. Meetings, water cooler chat, and so on tend to be more exercises in shoulder rubbing than productivity. They may increase or decrease employees' effectiveness.
I totally agree that high-tech tools are a waste of time. Email is great when the rubber hits the road, phone calls are fine for brainstorming, and conference calls with a shared spreadsheet or ppt presentation or whatever are just fine for meetings.
The real issue with telecommuting is the tendency -- perceived or real -- to goof off. So I guess if you're running a sweatshop, it is bad; if you're running an operation with employees who are mature and motivated to see the operation succeed, telecommuting can be good.
Here's an example of a Wikipedia article that presents a contrarian point of view for a standard topic. While the contrarian article on which it is based is interesting and perhaps worth citing, Wikipedia should not state categorically "The Hawthorne Effect is still widely invoked, even after being proved incorrect." (The Hawthorne studies had flaws, to be sure, but those flaws hardly prove incorrect the general phenomenon that has come to be known and the Hawthorne effect.)
./ readers might find it the seed for a somewhat more dispassionate discussion of Wikipedia (as opposed to subject matter) issues.
The article is flagged as having been challenged, but seems to have languished in that state for some time, with no obvious movement toward resolution.
This article seems to be an anomaly. For the most part, articles on science and mathematics are informative and even handed. I was surprised to find this example, and I thought
There is nothing conservative about neo-cons. Another term they've co-opted. They are radicals.
Actually, I think CSM itself is more eloquent:
r .html
http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/about_the_monito
OED:
liberal ('lIb&schwa.r&schwa.l), a. and sb. Forms: 4-5 liberale, (5 libral), 4-7
liberall(e, 5-6 lyberal(l, 4- liberal. [a. OFr. liberal (Fr. liberal) = Sp.,
Pg. liberal, Ital. liberale, ad. L. liberalis pertaining to a free man, f.
liber free.]
1 Originally, the distinctive epithet of those `arts' or `sciences' (see ART
7) that were considered `worthy of a free man'; opposed to servile or
mechanical. In later use, of condition, pursuits, occupations: Pertaining to
or suitable to persons of superior social station; `becoming a gentleman'
(J.). Now rare, exc. of education, culture, etc.,
2 a Free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted.
3 a Free from restraint; free in speech or action.
4 a Free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid.
5 Of political opinions: Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or
administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.
Unless those articles are about Christian Science zealots refusing medical attention to the sick and dying.
Here's a CSM article on the Schiavo case. Judge for yourself.
Real Christians are typically well read and well thougt out individuals.
GP made no such generalization.
Liberal == Communist
An apt paraphrasal of the neo-con smear to which gp refers.
I read CSM articles from time to time and find them reasonably well balanced.
Christians are not, in general, a bunch of intolerant anti-intellectuals.
Liberals promote tolerance, not big government and immorality.
The neo-cons smear them both.
The Colin Powell rhetorical device worked on the United Nations, didn't it?
No. It worked on Americans.
I guess one could call this the Colin Powell rhetorical device.
And this survey demonstrates what, other than the parochialism of the American computer science professors with whom Graham happens to be acquainted?
Spam vendors and open source vendors make lots of whacko claims.
[...] extremely low false positive rate, with less than one in one million messages being a false positive.
A few years ago, Bayesian classification seemed a promising way to filter spam.
[...] best recorded levels of accuracy have included 99.991% by one avid user (2 errors in 22,786) and 99.987% by the author (1 error in 7000), which is ten times more accurate than a human being!
That translates to better than 99.984% accuracy, which is over ten times more accurate than human accuracy
In the game of cat and mouse between spammers and anti-spam vendors, spammers and hackers quickly developed new techniques to "fool" the Bayesian filtering software.
File these under UFO sightings.