Statistically, mentally ill people aren't more or less likely to attack you than a normal person unless said mentally ill person is a schizophrenic female.
If you want to understand the DHS, all you have to do is change the name: Department of Homeland Pork. When you follow their activity, just think DHP instead of DHS, and it all becomes perfectly clear.
The DHP has two missions. The primary mission is to expand the budget of the DHP. The secondary mission is to intrude into every aspect of peoples lives. Mission two is a way to justify mission one. So far they have a 100% success rate. Note that security is not even on the list.
Very true, it is one large funnel, with taxpayers at the big end pouring in cash, and various cronies of those in power taking turns holding their money bags under the narrow end.
I'll put my name on the "watch list" by saying that DHS has a second goal: looking for citizens that would attempt to organize a revolt against those in power.
Foreign terrorists are way down the list of threats actually being considered.
They've spent a large quantity of money (ooh, stimulus package by another name) in searching for terrorist threats and have found nothing. Not a shock, as there really isn't much in the way of a terrorist threat to find.
Essentially, they've been pouring money into offices, staff, systems, software, all in searching through an abandoned coal mine at midnight searching for a black cat THAT ISN"T THERE!
Unfortunately, the paranoia of those in power is such that they feel they have to be on the lookout for the citizens to rise up in revolt and squash it before that happens.
There was a fun set of lawsuits a few years back over the lights with the turn signals in them. A supplier developed the tech to put the turn signal behind the mirror and then teamed up with someone (Ford maybe?), others copied, and they sued. Then folks patented the signal on the end of the mirror, then the bottom of the mirror, then IIRC the original partner got in a dispute with the supplier. Huge mess. But if you look at truck mirrors today you'll notice no two do the turn signal in the mirror the same way.
On a related note, design patents remind me of visual trademarks...
Jeep has a trademark on a "seven vertical slot grill"... they feel this appearance (provided this is being displayed in a sans serif font):
OlllllllO is enough to identify a vehicle as a Jeep in the eyes of the marketplace. Glancing at that, Jeep might be right...
What is painful or unfortunate about the existence of "stupidest". It clearly *should* exist as it simply follows the normal pattern of appending "est" to a word to form the superlative.
Your observation is ridiculousest!
Many, many adjectives in the English language do not have a comparative or superlative form. "stupid" is usually included as one of those adjectives, along with:
interesting descriptive recent ridiculous
and many more.
If you want to indicate a comparative or superlative with these words, they are used with "more" or "most".
Example: This whole off-topic discussion is most stupid.
I'm old enough to remember when the phone company would add a data charge to your phone bill if you used a modem (300 baud - and we LIKED it) on that POTS line.
They did that right up until they were told... it's a phone line, carrying audio, exactly the service you sold, you can't charge extra just because a device is making the audio instead of a person.
There's a slight chance that same bit of reason will apply here, eventually. You advertise and sell people bandwidth and a chunk of data... getting irked just because the customers are using what you've sold them is ludicrous.
Look at how your boss dresses. Your normal, "I'm not meeting with clients" work wear should NOT be dressier than your boss on a typical day, but shouldn't be significantly trashier either, unless you have filthy work duty* that your boss doesn't participate in.
Actually this rule of thumb applies to behavior, handling of issues, manner of answering the phone, all kinds of things. Check how your boss and your peers around the company do something, assume it to be the corporate norm, and adapt that corporate norm to your specific situation.
*poking around through a raised floor/dropped ceiling and the like
0.44s - 0.135s = 0.305s. Speed of sound is 343m/s. Are we supposed to believe that the farthest starting position is about 343m/s * 0.305s = 104m further away from the pistol than the nearest? The guy's just slow.
I'm guessing you've never been to a track meet...
In events like the 400m (one complete circuit of a standard track oval), people run in their lane the entire distance around the track. Because the outside lanes are longer than the inside lanes and the finish line is directly across the track, the starting positions are staggered to make the distance ran equal. Yes, that is a significant distance between the fellow in the outside lane (close to the starter pistol) and the fellow in the inside lane (far from the starter pistol), possibly quite close to the 100m you computed.
They're not burying the cables? Is wind not a problem out there? I thought they had tornadoes...
Kansas City resident here... and a fairly old one to boot.
Tornadoes happen, but each tornado affects a relatively small area. I was a tornado spotter in my youth (yes, we actually train volunteers to do this in "Tornado Alley"), and I've only seen three tornadoes in my life, despite actively looking for them when conditions are favorable to their formation. This is why there are plenty of 100+ year old homes in the area... the likelihood of a tornado hitting a specific location in any given year is very low.
Kansas City itself is somewhat protected by the "urban heat bubble" effect - the Kansas City metropolitan area is a bit more prone to heat lightning, but less prone to tornadoes than the more rural surrounding areas.
As for just plain old wind... lines on poles and the poles themselves easily handle the fairly routine wind gusts of up to 35mph. Storms might have 45mph winds, which usually is also fine. On rare occasions wind speeds are higher than that, like last week's storms to the north of Kansas City that had 90mph winds... those storms will knock out wire-on-pole services to neighborhoods, but having your internet service disrupted for a few days isn't much of a problem since more than likely your power would be out as well for the same period of time.
Transparency is merely how much of the light gets through. What you are talking about is translucency (i.e. scattering). There's no indication from the article that there is significant scattering. It would just look like you had tinting on the window.
And not very much tinting, either. 70% transparent would just look like glass, if you didn't have something to compare it to. Even 90% tinting (10% transparent), as long as it is reasonably uniform at different color transmissions, doesn't interfere with vision at all... sunglasses block more light than that!
The content that's on Hulu is also on TPB. The only thing that I'm blocked from is paying for it.
Music distributors, are you listening? I want to buy music from an artist I like, but your distribution agreements with iTunes won't let me (legitimately) PURCHASE the music you supposedly want to sell (it's only available in Canada, I live in the USA).
You are driving your WILLING customers to piracy with your idiotic market segmentation!
My kids watch Nick shows (iCarly mostly) and they were sad that it was going away, but then I reminded them that there are no new episodes right now and they were fine with it. They also understood that DirecTV shouldn't pay 30% more for the same thing and get nothing extra. It was interesting to see them start to understand how the world works.
On the plus side, I'm pretty sure iCarly along with some of the similar shows (Victorious, etc) are usually available on iTunes the day after they are "aired" on Nickelodeon.
A more expensive product is not necessarily superior. Furthermore, there are many cases where the product is superior, but it doesn't matter for the purpose at hand. If you're stopping in the town for one night on your way somewhere else, do you really need a five star hotel? It's a strictly superior product, but is it worth the money that could be spent elsewhere instead?
If you are looking for a bed to crash on with clean linens, then "No, it doesn't matter."
If, on the other hand, you are tired from sitting in a car all day, and want to relax naked for a while with your significant other in the in-room spa while enjoying a snifter of brandy... then "Yes, it matters."
Wow so now we all are lawyers? I mean give me break, what has this world come to when copying a photo causes a deluge of DMCA takedowns. If you want to share, post it on the internet. Otherwise stay off of it and go to law school.
Given that the photo was posted on Flickr and clear marked as a copyrighted photo with "all rights reserved", any adult should know better than to think s/he can appropriate for their own commercial enterprise... and in this specific case, it wasn't just any random person, but in fact a LAWYER that appropriated the work of another.
Before even considering the unprofessional behavior, this was worth a slap from the state bar association, now it's worthy of several slaps and a couple of kicks as well.
I walked into a friend's place and there were a bunch of stoners sitting in a circle listening to Zeppelin and watching movies. That was one hell of a chaotic scene! I barely made it out alive!
I'll bet there wasn't a bag of Doritos left anywhere within a mile, either. Now that is rampant chaos!
Yea! How am I supposed to burn up a set of tires in 20 seconds if I can't do a brakestand? If this rule goes in to effect, people will buy less tires which will mean less profits for tire manufacturers which will result in layoffs! This rule will cost jobs!
On the other hand, it'll be great for the environment if people can't do a brakestand... it often takes upwards of 20minutes for the tire-smoke smell to dissipate enough to breathe without coughing after a massive brakestand!
Tree-huggers for brake-overrides!// this post is entirely in jest - attempting to not invoke Poe's Law//
Oh right -- answered my own question -- because you're panicking like a moron and can't think to do anything but stand on the brake.
Actually, the people panicking like a moron and standing on the brake will come to a rapid and controlled stop.
It is the panicking morons that swear they are standing on the brake and are instead: A) Standing on the accelerator B) Timidly applying light brake and boiling brake fluid 'til the brakes don't work these are the people that actually have issues with "unintended acceleration".
So, those employers that demand access to your social networking accounts, or, say, bank accounts, personal e-mail accounts, etc. They get a free pass at violating those sites' Terms of Use and can sign on with employees' access credentials... NO PROBLEM?
Judging by languages that have succeeded over the past 20 years, I would say that the main factor in success is a large company pushing the language. It seems that the average programmer is swayed by marketing just as much as much as anyone else. Then, beyond a certain threshold, network effects kick in. If you want to interoperate with another project, life is easier if you use the same programming language.
Yes, and as an example, how about Microsoft's amazing J++!
Now, how many readers are old enough to have been programming while that language spectacularly failed to take off?
The problem is that most of the proposed merit-based evaluation systems that are going into place are as bad as, if not worse than, the existing system.
Evaluating teachers based on student performance results in: 1) Teachers that "teach the test" - as a result we have mediocre educational performance getting rewarded. 2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
However the current seniority-based system is also shit - once a teacher receives tenure there is no incentive to continue performance.
We need to move away from the current system - that much is clear. The problem is that so far, all of the "merit" based proposals don't have any metrics for "merit" that are worth jack shit, and will make our educational system even worse than it already is.
Agreed.
Plus, I know from the IEP meetings with the school for planning out each semester for my autistic son, the various school representatives would be selecting teachers for the classes he was to be put in based on teaching style, teacher experience, etc.
I lived in the area I did intentionally because that district had AMAZING support plans for special needs children. Lots of other families did the same.
I would NOT want to see those teachers penalized because the metrics indicate their teaching isn't on par with others because their students are struggling... the metrics will be off because they have a triple-normal load of students with special needs. Not all of those special needs kids are going to make it all the way to "peer typical", no matter how much effort is put in.
You just communicated WITHOUT quoting something else you've heard.
See the difference?
My son is autistic, and like the above, his conversational skills are limited. In my son's case, he's lucky, as long as he has heard a similar conversation in the past, he can respond. It's almost like a choose-your-story book, based on where the conversation is currently, and everything he's heard before, he can pick a response that seems to fit and say it.
Since he likes sit-coms, he's known in high school as quite the comedian, despite never having said an original joke.
Again, this is high-functioning autistic.
For low-functioning, think of somebody who never speaks actual words and screams when the air conditioner comes on due to the noise. Which would be son's mother's aunt's son... some forms of autism are due to faulty X-chromosome, so while the symptoms manifest more often in men, the carriers are typically women (since most autistic men won't reproduce).
Many of the key-value pair DBs supply a Perl library that let you tie a Perl hash (%Variable) to the DB directly, giving you persistent hashes.
Makes database storage virtually a native feature of the language. Anybody who uses Perl is probably already a hash buff, so it is a win-win if you and your app already use Perl.
Disclaimer: I run a 10yo web "app" (Perl/CGI/Apache), so I'm a bit biased. But, the thing is rock-solid, so I'm not going to be too apologetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Statistically, mentally ill people aren't more or less likely to attack you than a normal person unless said mentally ill person is a schizophrenic female.
I believe the adjective is redundant ...
... oh, wait, I'm 46 years old.
Other than that, the entire original summary could be me ... spooky.
If you want to understand the DHS, all you have to do is change the name: Department of Homeland Pork. When you follow their activity, just think DHP instead of DHS, and it all becomes perfectly clear.
The DHP has two missions. The primary mission is to expand the budget of the DHP. The secondary mission is to intrude into every aspect of peoples lives. Mission two is a way to justify mission one. So far they have a 100% success rate. Note that security is not even on the list.
Very true, it is one large funnel, with taxpayers at the big end pouring in cash, and various cronies of those in power taking turns holding their money bags under the narrow end.
I'll put my name on the "watch list" by saying that DHS has a second goal: looking for citizens that would attempt to organize a revolt against those in power.
Foreign terrorists are way down the list of threats actually being considered.
They've spent a large quantity of money (ooh, stimulus package by another name) in searching for terrorist threats and have found nothing. Not a shock, as there really isn't much in the way of a terrorist threat to find.
Essentially, they've been pouring money into offices, staff, systems, software, all in searching through an abandoned coal mine at midnight searching for a black cat THAT ISN"T THERE!
Unfortunately, the paranoia of those in power is such that they feel they have to be on the lookout for the citizens to rise up in revolt and squash it before that happens.
There was a fun set of lawsuits a few years back over the lights with the turn signals in them. A supplier developed the tech to put the turn signal behind the mirror and then teamed up with someone (Ford maybe?), others copied, and they sued. Then folks patented the signal on the end of the mirror, then the bottom of the mirror, then IIRC the original partner got in a dispute with the supplier. Huge mess. But if you look at truck mirrors today you'll notice no two do the turn signal in the mirror the same way.
On a related note, design patents remind me of visual trademarks ...
Jeep has a trademark on a "seven vertical slot grill" ... they feel this appearance (provided this is being displayed in a sans serif font): ...
OlllllllO
is enough to identify a vehicle as a Jeep in the eyes of the marketplace.
Glancing at that, Jeep might be right
What is painful or unfortunate about the existence of "stupidest". It clearly *should* exist as it simply follows the normal pattern of appending "est" to a word to form the superlative.
Your observation is ridiculousest!
Many, many adjectives in the English language do not have a comparative or superlative form.
"stupid" is usually included as one of those adjectives, along with:
interesting
descriptive
recent
ridiculous
and many more.
If you want to indicate a comparative or superlative with these words, they are used with "more" or "most".
Example: This whole off-topic discussion is most stupid.
I'm old enough to remember when the phone company would add a data charge to your phone bill if you used a modem (300 baud - and we LIKED it) on that POTS line.
They did that right up until they were told ... it's a phone line, carrying audio, exactly the service you sold, you can't charge extra just because a device is making the audio instead of a person.
There's a slight chance that same bit of reason will apply here, eventually. You advertise and sell people bandwidth and a chunk of data ... getting irked just because the customers are using what you've sold them is ludicrous.
... for any workplace when it comes to dress:
Look at how your boss dresses. Your normal, "I'm not meeting with clients" work wear should NOT be dressier than your boss on a typical day, but shouldn't be significantly trashier either, unless you have filthy work duty* that your boss doesn't participate in.
Actually this rule of thumb applies to behavior, handling of issues, manner of answering the phone, all kinds of things. Check how your boss and your peers around the company do something, assume it to be the corporate norm, and adapt that corporate norm to your specific situation.
*poking around through a raised floor/dropped ceiling and the like
0.44s - 0.135s = 0.305s. Speed of sound is 343m/s. Are we supposed to believe that the farthest starting position is about 343m/s * 0.305s = 104m further away from the pistol than the nearest? The guy's just slow.
I'm guessing you've never been to a track meet ...
In events like the 400m (one complete circuit of a standard track oval), people run in their lane the entire distance around the track. Because the outside lanes are longer than the inside lanes and the finish line is directly across the track, the starting positions are staggered to make the distance ran equal. Yes, that is a significant distance between the fellow in the outside lane (close to the starter pistol) and the fellow in the inside lane (far from the starter pistol), possibly quite close to the 100m you computed.
They're not burying the cables? Is wind not a problem out there? I thought they had tornadoes...
Kansas City resident here ... and a fairly old one to boot.
Tornadoes happen, but each tornado affects a relatively small area. I was a tornado spotter in my youth (yes, we actually train volunteers to do this in "Tornado Alley"), and I've only seen three tornadoes in my life, despite actively looking for them when conditions are favorable to their formation. This is why there are plenty of 100+ year old homes in the area ... the likelihood of a tornado hitting a specific location in any given year is very low.
Kansas City itself is somewhat protected by the "urban heat bubble" effect - the Kansas City metropolitan area is a bit more prone to heat lightning, but less prone to tornadoes than the more rural surrounding areas.
As for just plain old wind ... lines on poles and the poles themselves easily handle the fairly routine wind gusts of up to 35mph. Storms might have 45mph winds, which usually is also fine. On rare occasions wind speeds are higher than that, like last week's storms to the north of Kansas City that had 90mph winds ... those storms will knock out wire-on-pole services to neighborhoods, but having your internet service disrupted for a few days isn't much of a problem since more than likely your power would be out as well for the same period of time.
Transparency is merely how much of the light gets through. What you are talking about is translucency (i.e. scattering). There's no indication from the article that there is significant scattering. It would just look like you had tinting on the window.
And not very much tinting, either. 70% transparent would just look like glass, if you didn't have something to compare it to. Even 90% tinting (10% transparent), as long as it is reasonably uniform at different color transmissions, doesn't interfere with vision at all ... sunglasses block more light than that!
The content that's on Hulu is also on TPB. The only thing that I'm blocked from is paying for it.
Music distributors, are you listening? I want to buy music from an artist I like, but your distribution agreements with iTunes won't let me (legitimately) PURCHASE the music you supposedly want to sell (it's only available in Canada, I live in the USA).
You are driving your WILLING customers to piracy with your idiotic market segmentation!
There is no such thing as an invalid question.
Why does yellow sound like sweet?
My kids watch Nick shows (iCarly mostly) and they were sad that it was going away, but then I reminded them that there are no new episodes right now and they were fine with it. They also understood that DirecTV shouldn't pay 30% more for the same thing and get nothing extra. It was interesting to see them start to understand how the world works.
On the plus side, I'm pretty sure iCarly along with some of the similar shows (Victorious, etc) are usually available on iTunes the day after they are "aired" on Nickelodeon.
A more expensive product is not necessarily superior. Furthermore, there are many cases where the product is superior, but it doesn't matter for the purpose at hand. If you're stopping in the town for one night on your way somewhere else, do you really need a five star hotel? It's a strictly superior product, but is it worth the money that could be spent elsewhere instead?
If you are looking for a bed to crash on with clean linens, then "No, it doesn't matter."
If, on the other hand, you are tired from sitting in a car all day, and want to relax naked for a while with your significant other in the in-room spa while enjoying a snifter of brandy ... then "Yes, it matters."
Wow so now we all are lawyers? I mean give me break, what has this world come to when copying a photo causes a deluge of DMCA takedowns. If you want to share, post it on the internet. Otherwise stay off of it and go to law school.
Given that the photo was posted on Flickr and clear marked as a copyrighted photo with "all rights reserved", any adult should know better than to think s/he can appropriate for their own commercial enterprise ... and in this specific case, it wasn't just any random person, but in fact a LAWYER that appropriated the work of another.
Before even considering the unprofessional behavior, this was worth a slap from the state bar association, now it's worthy of several slaps and a couple of kicks as well.
Or look at your average stoner...
I walked into a friend's place and there were a bunch of stoners sitting in a circle listening to Zeppelin and watching movies. That was one hell of a chaotic scene! I barely made it out alive!
I'll bet there wasn't a bag of Doritos left anywhere within a mile, either.
Now that is rampant chaos!
Yea! How am I supposed to burn up a set of tires in 20 seconds if I can't do a brakestand? If this rule goes in to effect, people will buy less tires which will mean less profits for tire manufacturers which will result in layoffs! This rule will cost jobs!
On the other hand, it'll be great for the environment if people can't do a brakestand ... it often takes upwards of 20minutes for the tire-smoke smell to dissipate enough to breathe without coughing after a massive brakestand!
Tree-huggers for brake-overrides! // this post is entirely in jest - attempting to not invoke Poe's Law //
why not put the car in neutral?
Oh right -- answered my own question -- because you're panicking like a moron and can't think to do anything but stand on the brake.
Actually, the people panicking like a moron and standing on the brake will come to a rapid and controlled stop.
It is the panicking morons that swear they are standing on the brake and are instead:
A) Standing on the accelerator
B) Timidly applying light brake and boiling brake fluid 'til the brakes don't work
these are the people that actually have issues with "unintended acceleration".
I don't believe there has ever been a production model of car or truck where the brakes aren't FAR more powerful than the engine/transmission.
If you apply the brake firmly, you WILL stop, even if the engine is at Wide-Open Throttle.
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/how-to-deal-with-unintended-acceleration
So, those employers that demand access to your social networking accounts, or, say, bank accounts, personal e-mail accounts, etc. They get a free pass at violating those sites' Terms of Use and can sign on with employees' access credentials ... NO PROBLEM?
Judging by languages that have succeeded over the past 20 years, I would say that the main factor in success is a large company pushing the language. It seems that the average programmer is swayed by marketing just as much as much as anyone else. Then, beyond a certain threshold, network effects kick in. If you want to interoperate with another project, life is easier if you use the same programming language.
Yes, and as an example, how about Microsoft's amazing J++!
Now, how many readers are old enough to have been programming while that language spectacularly failed to take off?
The problem is that most of the proposed merit-based evaluation systems that are going into place are as bad as, if not worse than, the existing system.
Evaluating teachers based on student performance results in:
1) Teachers that "teach the test" - as a result we have mediocre educational performance getting rewarded.
2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
However the current seniority-based system is also shit - once a teacher receives tenure there is no incentive to continue performance.
We need to move away from the current system - that much is clear. The problem is that so far, all of the "merit" based proposals don't have any metrics for "merit" that are worth jack shit, and will make our educational system even worse than it already is.
Agreed.
Plus, I know from the IEP meetings with the school for planning out each semester for my autistic son, the various school representatives would be selecting teachers for the classes he was to be put in based on teaching style, teacher experience, etc.
I lived in the area I did intentionally because that district had AMAZING support plans for special needs children. Lots of other families did the same.
I would NOT want to see those teachers penalized because the metrics indicate their teaching isn't on par with others because their students are struggling ... the metrics will be off because they have a triple-normal load of students with special needs. Not all of those special needs kids are going to make it all the way to "peer typical", no matter how much effort is put in.
You just communicated WITHOUT quoting something else you've heard.
See the difference?
My son is autistic, and like the above, his conversational skills are limited. In my son's case, he's lucky, as long as he has heard a similar conversation in the past, he can respond. It's almost like a choose-your-story book, based on where the conversation is currently, and everything he's heard before, he can pick a response that seems to fit and say it.
Since he likes sit-coms, he's known in high school as quite the comedian, despite never having said an original joke.
Again, this is high-functioning autistic.
For low-functioning, think of somebody who never speaks actual words and screams when the air conditioner comes on due to the noise. Which would be son's mother's aunt's son ... some forms of autism are due to faulty X-chromosome, so while the symptoms manifest more often in men, the carriers are typically women (since most autistic men won't reproduce).
Many of the key-value pair DBs supply a Perl library that let you tie a Perl hash (%Variable) to the DB directly, giving you persistent hashes.
Makes database storage virtually a native feature of the language. Anybody who uses Perl is probably already a hash buff, so it is a win-win if you and your app already use Perl.
Disclaimer: I run a 10yo web "app" (Perl/CGI/Apache), so I'm a bit biased. But, the thing is rock-solid, so I'm not going to be too apologetic.