I thought the problem was that they had to be resistant to cell phone signals? Has anyone considered tinfoil hats for bees? (because tinfoil bee hats, of course, would be ambiguous grammar.)
Only because you've not yet discovered the hyphen: tinfoil-bee hats vs tinfoil bee-hats.
The hyphen: Incapable of disambiguation since the rise of the Nazi Grammarians.
Yes, that use of the hypen seems quite wrong, although it would take me several minutes to figure out exactly why, so it is not worth my time until I encounter it professionally, at which point I will consult the appropriate Nazis.
My grandmother had a better solution. When the Jehova's Witnesses came over, she told them they could talk to her if they changed the tire on her truck.
They are perfectly safe assuming there are no problems--the problem is that the margin for error is so small, and that if there is an accident there is hardly any protection for the driver or passenger. I know someone who suffered major injuries from a relatively slow speed injury between a car and motorcycle, when he was stopped at a red light. It was not his fault--but a car would have made all the difference.
I thought the problem was that they had to be resistant to cell phone signals? Has anyone considered tinfoil hats for bees? (because tinfoil bee hats, of course, would be ambiguous grammar.)
Bicycles should not be on the same road with trucks. Neither should motorcycles. It is insane. Frankly, even cars is a little insane--drive a tractor trailer for a while, you'll see. But there's just no sense in smaller vehicles sharing the same road. We really should have a fundamentally different transportation design.
A million monkeys with a million typewriters might eventually type the works of Shakespeare, but more likely they'd get a million typewriters covered in monkey poo.
Yes--you would need much more than one million monkeys to come up with the works of Shakespeare, unless the monkeys are immortal and the typewriters have really good maintenance.
Ah, that's almost certainly right. (I had heard the story only once.) For purposes of the point I was making, it is still illustrative. (But thank you for clearing that up.)
And much of the world will, and it is helpful to have a framework in place to bring war crimes charges after regime change when local governments would otherwise give people a show trial at most.
The Iraq war was legalized by security council resolution--granted, they worded the resolution so that most of them could pretend to protest while the US could use it as pretext for invasion, but they went along with it, which effectively makes it legal under international law. (Either it was done b/c the US bribed everyone or because everyone knew the US would do it anyway and they didn't want the security council to lose legitimacy, but it *was* legal.) You could argue the whole security council were war criminals for going along with it, but that argument won't get you very far in the real world, much less in any international tribunals.
Also, wars wages for self-defense are not war crimes. Most of the people involved in the decision to wage war in Iraq saw it as a war of self-defense (The whole WMD thing), albeit a hell of a stretch for one. Such people are not war criminals, as military action for self-defense is specifically authorized in the Charter of the United Nations.
Can someone please explain why the U.S. should host, subsidize, or be a member of the U.N. given its current condition and activities? In all seriousness, I can think of no reason whatsoever.
The U.S. tends to look down on the U.N., as do most truly powerful countries. But the U.S. also is incredibly undereducated about the U.N. compared to many other nations, in part because we look down on the U.N. and our media provides information so slowly that snails eclipsed their information store long ago, and in part because as a powerful country with our own independent foreign agenda, we frankly tend to have more news that's related to what we are doing than we do about what the U.N. is doing.
But the U.N. is still important--it provides support for some important humanitarian work, for one (UNICEF and UNODC come to mind). It provides an international mechanism for justice and oversight of elections and regime change when countries are ready for those things. (The International Criminal Tribunals and later the International Criminal Court, for example.) It also determines whether wars are legal or illegal under International law, and arbitrates certain small disputes under international law. The legality of a war will influence the legitimacy of that war in the eyes of the world.
The Security Council was effectively neutered for the cold war by the perpetual split between Russia and and the U.S. China had no rep for a while in the 50s, and because of that the U.S. got approval for the Korean War (i.e. the UN action against North Korea). China learned its lesson and started sending representatives to the security council again. The U.S., similarly, as one of the only world powers with a veto over security council resolutions--a power that would NEVER be given to the US in a new, similar international body today--has a great interest in maintaining its presence in the United Nations.
In addition, the level of isolationism in the US is frankly frightening. It's nothing like North Korea, of course, but there are a LOT of Americans who are incredibly insular. It isn't as bad as some of the numbers suggest--the very few Americans having a passport is more a testimony to the fact that you have to go farther to cross a border than you do in Europe--but it's bad. Most people in the US know effectively nothing about modern international affairs, and only a small percentage know anything about international history. During the presidential election, for example, then-candidate Obama expressing his willingness to go into Pakistan if necessary was a relatively small bit of trivia here, and most people had no freaking clue how upset his statements to that effect made pretty much everyone in Pakistan. Fast-forward a few years, and you see the consequences of that ignorance--the public's response to Pakistan's being upset with the actual raid isn't "We know how big a deal this was for you, we felt we had to do it, and we'll make it up to you," it was "if you're upset it must be because you were hiding Osama!"
We need more international involvement, not less. Better education. Why the hell we don't have every schoolchild in America watching good conferences on major international issues via the web and answering quizzes on them I have no idea. Not every day--but do four conferences a year on different subjects, and they'd learn a hell of a lot.
And that's why the original question strikes me as stinking of colonialistic snobbery.
Just because someone asks for help and thinks there might be a novel answer an expert might think of, even if it's a question it would have been nice to have an answer to any time in the last ten thousand years, doesn't mean we should call him a snob for asking. Ignorance or shortsightedness is not necessarily snobbery. The pursuit of knowledge should not be punished. Nor should he be called a colonialist, for that matter--he didn't advocate taking over the place.
Me, I'd go with shade, big fans, and ice-cold beverages. But I don't know if there's too much sand for the fans.
Aside from the fact that it's in the onion, this is almost certainly true. It's actually probably higher. There are high-functioning alcoholics who regularly commute while drunk, whose drunk driving likely is the majority of drunk driving.
The problem is that it's so easily for something to go horribly, horribly wrong. A high success percentage doesn't help if the low failure percentage has nasty consequences, like lots of death.
Oh, and get rid of the lawyers, they are even worse than an MBA.
Lawyers are risk management. Getting rid of them is getting rid of insurance--opening yourself up to major downside risk in everything from employment discrimination to your lease to the agreements you make with your clients. Effectively, it's a transaction cost of doing business.
Engineers tend to intuitively dislike lawyers because they seem to make things less efficient--transaction costs do that. When everything goes well, the lawyer was basically an expensive insurance policy that you never collected on. But when things go badly, a good lawyer can make the difference between riches and insolvency. Even having good agreements drafted can discourage people from suing you. Putting together a new corporate form can easily save millions, for example.
Sometimes a lawyer does too much--they effectively purchase too much insurance, spending far more to achieve additional downside protection that is not worth the expenditure. Think of it like a corollary to Amdahl's law. In these cases, good lawyers can (Depending on a client's preference and the specific trade-off) advise you about the relative costs and downside risks, or make some of these decisions using his or her own judgment.
Granted, there are a lot of fundamental problems with the legal system--good tort reform for everyone might be a better solution than limited liability conditional on legal forms, for example--but it also greatly benefits business (e.g. agreements are enforceable), so legal expenses are a cost of doing business well.
Putting Source Code for a major exchange in foreign hands is delivering information that can be useful for strategic electronic attacks. In the modern era, such espionage should be considered treasonous.
The administration in power is not somehow magically responsible for the economy. On slashdot, of all places, we should know better. Can we stop parroting the commentators who pretend the economy is a game of tug-of-war between administrations? *Nobody* wants the economy to collapse.
Cisco's share price is currently very low--significantly undervalued, and with several markets at risk. If they want to attract shareholders, big new business opportunities go a long way toward doing that. It would take a really remarkable company to turn down this kind of business opportunity for ethical reasons.
War generally does not really cull the human population. It occasionally does so locally or within a certain group, usually because of genocide, but the number of people who die in war is always small compared to the human population of the planet. Short of going nuclear, something like the Black death is much more effective at population culling.
Referrals. Affiliates refer buyers to amazon in exchange for a small percentage. Barnes and Noble likely has brick & mortar stores in California already, so they should be able to have a comparable program without hurting their bottom line. (Unless they're using legal trickery to get around the sales tax requirement, through a very carefully delineated entity structure.)
> 'We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive.'
Is your point how ridiculous the statement is?
If Amazon really believed it was unconstitutional, they would keep their associates and fight it in court. Even mid-priced lawyers would win if it were that simple and obvious, so the transaction cost of the lawsuit shouldn't preclude them from doing so. They figure there's a decent chance that it is not unconstitutional, which is why they are pulling out. (i.e. the downside risk of being ordered to pay sales tax.)
Also, if B&N is smart, they'll snap up a whole lot of business in Cali today.
> Human nature says transgressors must be punished.
It is also human nature to throw things, like rocks, at children who take our toys. We learn better.
People used to say human nature was that women were not landowners.
If we find things that work, and that are economically efficient, we can work on changing minds. The political system will delay the effects of that effort greatly, but that does not mean we will not learn better in another century or three.
> the things you hear about our health care system "after you're sick" are for elective surgeries and the like if you're really sick you get care. Free.
Bullshit. I know people who have had to wait months to see a specialist after they are diagnosed with cancer or life-threatening degenerative diseases.
I find the tax burden and $/capita claim hard to believe, and wonder about them as a percentage of income. Let's see... 333K in 2007... US About 2 Million in 2010... Canada population about 33M in that year... US about 310M in 2010... So in the US, GOV is about 0.6% of the population. In Canada, GOV is about 1%.
So per capita, the Canadian government is roughly 66% larger than the United States Government.
They don't need us. While we're destroying our economy, being dicks to the rest of the World, treating anyone and everyone coming into the US as criminals, blustering around the World like some big fat, well, American, the Canadians have been creating political and economic ties with the rest of the World and they're doing just fine.
In not too many years, we're going to be to them what Mexico is to us - mark my words.
I need to get in touch with some distant Canadian relatives and see if I can emigrate up there. Ya know, rats - ships....
Yes. They are. In many ways. But they do "need us," despite the great American antipathy Canadians show, sometimes justifiably. Just as much of America looks down on them, sometimes justifiably. Although many American stereotypes about Canada are wrong, just as many Canadian stereotypes about Americans are wrong.
Even if there were no other reason, and no international interdependence, or economic benefit, to being neighborly, Canada would need the US because they sit on vast resources (large Uranium deposits, for example), they have a very low population density, and their military is not a sufficient deterrent to world powers.
They have the 13th largest military budget, but only the 74th largest military force. They would be respectable, given their alliances, absent the United States, but their alliance partners are thousands of miles away. Having the most powerful military in the world belong to your closest neighbor really discourages anyone from attacking you across long supply lines.
They are good at international action. Their news actually discusses international issues, at least somewhat. They take the UN seriously, which most Americans do not. Their healthcare system is much better than the US at preventative care and comparatively abysmal at care after you are ill. They have had massive immigrant population growth. Their minority rights are insane by American standards. Their government is bloated and often ineffectual beyond belief; Ottawa's population has grown ridiculously because of it, and taxes are high and absurdly specific, more so than in the US. Yes, we're different. But we're neighbors. We don't *need* to know our neighbors--but it can be very helpful if something unexpected comes along and tries to burn down our house.
I guess you are one of the few brave ones who signed their teachers' evaluations in college.
Why not? Anonymity in student evaluations rarely matters, except in classes small enough that signing risks someone else's anonymity. A prof can try to make it matter if he or she is a dick, and dick students can use it to protect their dickiness, but the solution to that problem is not to take classes with dicks--or to be willing to say "X is a dick and here's why" if they try to retaliate for a poor evaluation.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the problem was that they had to be resistant to cell phone signals? Has anyone considered tinfoil hats for bees? (because tinfoil bee hats, of course, would be ambiguous grammar.)
Only because you've not yet discovered the hyphen: tinfoil-bee hats vs tinfoil bee-hats.
The hyphen: Incapable of disambiguation since the rise of the Nazi Grammarians.
Yes, that use of the hypen seems quite wrong, although it would take me several minutes to figure out exactly why, so it is not worth my time until I encounter it professionally, at which point I will consult the appropriate Nazis.
And you Jehova's Witnesses, GET OFF MY LAWN!
My grandmother had a better solution. When the Jehova's Witnesses came over, she told them they could talk to her if they changed the tire on her truck.
They did, so it really worked out quite well.
They are perfectly safe assuming there are no problems--the problem is that the margin for error is so small, and that if there is an accident there is hardly any protection for the driver or passenger. I know someone who suffered major injuries from a relatively slow speed injury between a car and motorcycle, when he was stopped at a red light. It was not his fault--but a car would have made all the difference.
I thought the problem was that they had to be resistant to cell phone signals? Has anyone considered tinfoil hats for bees? (because tinfoil bee hats, of course, would be ambiguous grammar.)
Bicycles should not be on the same road with trucks. Neither should motorcycles. It is insane. Frankly, even cars is a little insane--drive a tractor trailer for a while, you'll see. But there's just no sense in smaller vehicles sharing the same road. We really should have a fundamentally different transportation design.
A million monkeys with a million typewriters might eventually type the works of Shakespeare, but more likely they'd get a million typewriters covered in monkey poo.
Yes--you would need much more than one million monkeys to come up with the works of Shakespeare, unless the monkeys are immortal and the typewriters have really good maintenance.
Ah, that's almost certainly right. (I had heard the story only once.) For purposes of the point I was making, it is still illustrative. (But thank you for clearing that up.)
And much of the world will, and it is helpful to have a framework in place to bring war crimes charges after regime change when local governments would otherwise give people a show trial at most.
The Iraq war was legalized by security council resolution--granted, they worded the resolution so that most of them could pretend to protest while the US could use it as pretext for invasion, but they went along with it, which effectively makes it legal under international law. (Either it was done b/c the US bribed everyone or because everyone knew the US would do it anyway and they didn't want the security council to lose legitimacy, but it *was* legal.) You could argue the whole security council were war criminals for going along with it, but that argument won't get you very far in the real world, much less in any international tribunals.
Also, wars wages for self-defense are not war crimes. Most of the people involved in the decision to wage war in Iraq saw it as a war of self-defense (The whole WMD thing), albeit a hell of a stretch for one. Such people are not war criminals, as military action for self-defense is specifically authorized in the Charter of the United Nations.
Can someone please explain why the U.S. should host, subsidize, or be a member of the U.N. given its current condition and activities? In all seriousness, I can think of no reason whatsoever.
The U.S. tends to look down on the U.N., as do most truly powerful countries. But the U.S. also is incredibly undereducated about the U.N. compared to many other nations, in part because we look down on the U.N. and our media provides information so slowly that snails eclipsed their information store long ago, and in part because as a powerful country with our own independent foreign agenda, we frankly tend to have more news that's related to what we are doing than we do about what the U.N. is doing.
But the U.N. is still important--it provides support for some important humanitarian work, for one (UNICEF and UNODC come to mind). It provides an international mechanism for justice and oversight of elections and regime change when countries are ready for those things. (The International Criminal Tribunals and later the International Criminal Court, for example.) It also determines whether wars are legal or illegal under International law, and arbitrates certain small disputes under international law. The legality of a war will influence the legitimacy of that war in the eyes of the world.
The Security Council was effectively neutered for the cold war by the perpetual split between Russia and and the U.S. China had no rep for a while in the 50s, and because of that the U.S. got approval for the Korean War (i.e. the UN action against North Korea). China learned its lesson and started sending representatives to the security council again. The U.S., similarly, as one of the only world powers with a veto over security council resolutions--a power that would NEVER be given to the US in a new, similar international body today--has a great interest in maintaining its presence in the United Nations.
In addition, the level of isolationism in the US is frankly frightening. It's nothing like North Korea, of course, but there are a LOT of Americans who are incredibly insular. It isn't as bad as some of the numbers suggest--the very few Americans having a passport is more a testimony to the fact that you have to go farther to cross a border than you do in Europe--but it's bad. Most people in the US know effectively nothing about modern international affairs, and only a small percentage know anything about international history. During the presidential election, for example, then-candidate Obama expressing his willingness to go into Pakistan if necessary was a relatively small bit of trivia here, and most people had no freaking clue how upset his statements to that effect made pretty much everyone in Pakistan. Fast-forward a few years, and you see the consequences of that ignorance--the public's response to Pakistan's being upset with the actual raid isn't "We know how big a deal this was for you, we felt we had to do it, and we'll make it up to you," it was "if you're upset it must be because you were hiding Osama!"
We need more international involvement, not less. Better education. Why the hell we don't have every schoolchild in America watching good conferences on major international issues via the web and answering quizzes on them I have no idea. Not every day--but do four conferences a year on different subjects, and they'd learn a hell of a lot.
And that's why the original question strikes me as stinking of colonialistic snobbery.
Just because someone asks for help and thinks there might be a novel answer an expert might think of, even if it's a question it would have been nice to have an answer to any time in the last ten thousand years, doesn't mean we should call him a snob for asking. Ignorance or shortsightedness is not necessarily snobbery. The pursuit of knowledge should not be punished. Nor should he be called a colonialist, for that matter--he didn't advocate taking over the place.
Me, I'd go with shade, big fans, and ice-cold beverages. But I don't know if there's too much sand for the fans.
News Flash: 93% of Drunk Drivers get Home Just fine:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-93-of-drunk-drivers-get-home-just-fine,6250/
Aside from the fact that it's in the onion, this is almost certainly true. It's actually probably higher. There are high-functioning alcoholics who regularly commute while drunk, whose drunk driving likely is the majority of drunk driving.
The problem is that it's so easily for something to go horribly, horribly wrong. A high success percentage doesn't help if the low failure percentage has nasty consequences, like lots of death.
Oh, and get rid of the lawyers, they are even worse than an MBA.
Lawyers are risk management. Getting rid of them is getting rid of insurance--opening yourself up to major downside risk in everything from employment discrimination to your lease to the agreements you make with your clients. Effectively, it's a transaction cost of doing business.
Engineers tend to intuitively dislike lawyers because they seem to make things less efficient--transaction costs do that. When everything goes well, the lawyer was basically an expensive insurance policy that you never collected on. But when things go badly, a good lawyer can make the difference between riches and insolvency. Even having good agreements drafted can discourage people from suing you. Putting together a new corporate form can easily save millions, for example.
Sometimes a lawyer does too much--they effectively purchase too much insurance, spending far more to achieve additional downside protection that is not worth the expenditure. Think of it like a corollary to Amdahl's law. In these cases, good lawyers can (Depending on a client's preference and the specific trade-off) advise you about the relative costs and downside risks, or make some of these decisions using his or her own judgment.
Granted, there are a lot of fundamental problems with the legal system--good tort reform for everyone might be a better solution than limited liability conditional on legal forms, for example--but it also greatly benefits business (e.g. agreements are enforceable), so legal expenses are a cost of doing business well.
[Paypal] Is full of shit! (Can I say that here?)
So long as you include the "Paypal," you can say it anywhere.
Putting Source Code for a major exchange in foreign hands is delivering information that can be useful for strategic electronic attacks. In the modern era, such espionage should be considered treasonous.
The administration in power is not somehow magically responsible for the economy. On slashdot, of all places, we should know better. Can we stop parroting the commentators who pretend the economy is a game of tug-of-war between administrations? *Nobody* wants the economy to collapse.
Cisco's share price is currently very low--significantly undervalued, and with several markets at risk. If they want to attract shareholders, big new business opportunities go a long way toward doing that. It would take a really remarkable company to turn down this kind of business opportunity for ethical reasons.
War generally does not really cull the human population. It occasionally does so locally or within a certain group, usually because of genocide, but the number of people who die in war is always small compared to the human population of the planet. Short of going nuclear, something like the Black death is much more effective at population culling.
Referrals. Affiliates refer buyers to amazon in exchange for a small percentage. Barnes and Noble likely has brick & mortar stores in California already, so they should be able to have a comparable program without hurting their bottom line. (Unless they're using legal trickery to get around the sales tax requirement, through a very carefully delineated entity structure.)
> 'We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive.'
Is your point how ridiculous the statement is?
If Amazon really believed it was unconstitutional, they would keep their associates and fight it in court. Even mid-priced lawyers would win if it were that simple and obvious, so the transaction cost of the lawsuit shouldn't preclude them from doing so. They figure there's a decent chance that it is not unconstitutional, which is why they are pulling out. (i.e. the downside risk of being ordered to pay sales tax.)
Also, if B&N is smart, they'll snap up a whole lot of business in Cali today.
> Human nature says transgressors must be punished.
It is also human nature to throw things, like rocks, at children who take our toys. We learn better.
People used to say human nature was that women were not landowners.
If we find things that work, and that are economically efficient, we can work on changing minds. The political system will delay the effects of that effort greatly, but that does not mean we will not learn better in another century or three.
No, I said "Even if there were no other reason."
> the things you hear about our health care system "after you're sick" are for elective surgeries and the like if you're really sick you get care. Free.
Bullshit. I know people who have had to wait months to see a specialist after they are diagnosed with cancer or life-threatening degenerative diseases.
I find the tax burden and $/capita claim hard to believe, and wonder about them as a percentage of income. Let's see... 333K in 2007... US About 2 Million in 2010... Canada population about 33M in that year... US about 310M in 2010... So in the US, GOV is about 0.6% of the population. In Canada, GOV is about 1%.
So per capita, the Canadian government is roughly 66% larger than the United States Government.
They don't need us. While we're destroying our economy, being dicks to the rest of the World, treating anyone and everyone coming into the US as criminals, blustering around the World like some big fat, well, American, the Canadians have been creating political and economic ties with the rest of the World and they're doing just fine.
In not too many years, we're going to be to them what Mexico is to us - mark my words.
I need to get in touch with some distant Canadian relatives and see if I can emigrate up there. Ya know, rats - ships ....
Yes. They are. In many ways. But they do "need us," despite the great American antipathy Canadians show, sometimes justifiably. Just as much of America looks down on them, sometimes justifiably. Although many American stereotypes about Canada are wrong, just as many Canadian stereotypes about Americans are wrong.
Even if there were no other reason, and no international interdependence, or economic benefit, to being neighborly, Canada would need the US because they sit on vast resources (large Uranium deposits, for example), they have a very low population density, and their military is not a sufficient deterrent to world powers.
They have the 13th largest military budget, but only the 74th largest military force. They would be respectable, given their alliances, absent the United States, but their alliance partners are thousands of miles away. Having the most powerful military in the world belong to your closest neighbor really discourages anyone from attacking you across long supply lines.
They are good at international action. Their news actually discusses international issues, at least somewhat. They take the UN seriously, which most Americans do not. Their healthcare system is much better than the US at preventative care and comparatively abysmal at care after you are ill. They have had massive immigrant population growth. Their minority rights are insane by American standards. Their government is bloated and often ineffectual beyond belief; Ottawa's population has grown ridiculously because of it, and taxes are high and absurdly specific, more so than in the US. Yes, we're different. But we're neighbors. We don't *need* to know our neighbors--but it can be very helpful if something unexpected comes along and tries to burn down our house.
Geeking out over the true geekiness of other geeks? What a bunch of geeks.
True geeks do not. Ironically, they simply grok it.
I guess you are one of the few brave ones who signed their teachers' evaluations in college.
Why not? Anonymity in student evaluations rarely matters, except in classes small enough that signing risks someone else's anonymity. A prof can try to make it matter if he or she is a dick, and dick students can use it to protect their dickiness, but the solution to that problem is not to take classes with dicks--or to be willing to say "X is a dick and here's why" if they try to retaliate for a poor evaluation.