To be clear, AOL has had a stigma attached to it's name for more than 10 years. Even back in the early 90s, it was a joke, and for those too dumb to use a proper unix shell to ftp and irc.
I know, but beyond that it's really all the same...failing to recognize a stigma that's been around for 11 years and failing to recognize a stigma that's been around for 19 years aren't too different. My point was, there's no excuse for not knowing how much people look down on aol. It's not just a chintzy domain like hotmail, it's the domain singularly associated with idiocy in people's minds. And the stigma's not a new thing, like something from the last year, but rather that it's been around since before most people have been online, so there's no excuse not to know.
It is terrible that someone would judge others by something as simple as an email address.
No it isn't. Given what an aol address tells you about the person, it's totally fair.
Yet we all do it. *@aol.com instantly kicks in my "dumbass...." reflex, and I'm sure it does for most other nerds.
As well it should, since you either 1) were such a dumbass you belonged on aol in the first place, or 2) were normally not a dumbass, yet somehow failed to realize the terrible stigma the aol user-base has had for OVER a DECADE and still persist in associating with that crowd.
And lest someone opine that the original aol stigma was unfounded, you're probably not old enough to remember when aol broke the internet. I'm sure you can find through Google some good accounts of what happened when aol transitioned from being a very large bbs to being a very large isp; most of the negative generalizations people make about the net itself have their origins in the aoler influx.
Since, at a minimum, you can't solve for the state of the lottery lady
Easy! The state of the lottery lady is the same as the state of the lottery itself.
I'm pretty sure they're allowed to hire out-of-staters to pull the lottery levers, and they become increasingly likely to want to commute as the state declines in size.
I'm really getting tired of the "underfunded" argument as to why schools are failing in the US. Seriously?
And I'm getting really tired of morons failing to grasp the simple connection, then invoking government conspiracy theories about them damn lib'ruls, as well as made-up statistics, to justify running the education system further into the ground.
Public funding has increased steadily, at a rate faster than inflation.
This is not just nationally, but also at the local level through property taxes.
I don't know where you live, but where I grew up (a village in southern Wisconsin) the school budget declined every year for the entire time I attended middle and high school, to the point that there was a toilet paper shortage, since it "wasn't in the budget" to buy a few dozen more rolls toward the end of the year, all because every year local conservatives whined more and more about property taxes. In the time since I've graduated funding has gotten even lower; a friend who now teaches at the school has reported that school lunch is now down to a couple slices of white bread, a slab of meat, and an apple. At least when I was there, we still got two vegetable choices and pizza day twice a month.
Also, the funding argument is easily dissuaded simply by pointing out counter-examples: there are many, many private schools which are able to educate students to superior levels in all of the basics. We're talking half as much funding and less.
Do you have documentary evidence of even one private school taking in half as much money as a nearby public school and outperforming it? Comparisons of widely different geographic and demographic areas don't count; that's called cherry-picking your data. While it's certainly true that the average private school outperforms similarly situated public schools, almost all of these private schools take in more funding per pupil AND have the selection bias of families whose parents are more motivated towards education than the local average.
The cause for government school failure in the US is not due to a lack of funding. That's an excuse, and pushes the blame from the cause.
Again, evidence please? In statistical or logical form, not just your assertion.
The cause is that they're government schools, with strict top-down models they must adhere to, and do not take the individual student in mind. Schools have to do well on standardized tests, yad
To give equal weight to each person's opinion we should assume that each person has an independent probability, p, of being right.
How can you treat them as independent when they all believe the same thing (namely, that Zed is full of shit)? By definition, if co-worker X were right then co-worker Y would also be right, and so forth, so there is only one event with two possible outcomes, Zed is right and Zed is wrong. The equation you listed is appropriate where any combination of Zed being right and some or all of his co-workers being right is possible, but that's not the case. You can't treat it as a binomial distribution unless the "events" are actually independent and they are obviously all dependent (or equivalently, all just one event).
btw I have to wonder if Zed named himself after the villain from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers...just a thought...
10 REM FOR 16 BIT NMS MACHINES
20 FOR X=1 TO 10
30 PRINT "HELLO"
40 NEXT X
(told you I wasn't a coder)
But line 10, the comment may be very useful, aha, that's why this works on X machine but not X machine, etc.
If you have a machine which both supports a BASIC interpreter and doesn't support your lines 20-40, I think you have bigger problems than whether or not somebody commented this block of code.
Having worked as a programmer for many years, all I can say is poorly commented and undocumented code is unprofessional and I would rather
rewrite it than try to decipher it. I've heard all of these excuses before and all I can say to the people that make them is: Your code is not as
good as you think it is.
Having read Slashdot for many years, all I can say is poorly formatted and prematurely line-fed text is unprofessional and I would rather rewrite it than try to look at it. You haven't yet given any excuses for it, but all I'll say to you when you do is: "Your comment is not as good as you think it is."
If TFA doesn't tell us which Pearl River Deli it goes to, how can we decide whether to take the train? What if it takes you to Nauraushaun Country Deli when you wanted to go to Luigi O'Grady's?! (which is a confusing name to begin with...how do you know whether to expect an Italian-style or an Irish-style sandwich?)
The trouble is a project of that size usually requires some level of state/federal organisation or funding to secure the necessary investment from private funding and the power to buy the land. Which in the USA seems to cause foaming at the mouth and long rants about the evils of communism.
Gosh, that high-speed rail, robust economy, and strengthening currency the red Chinese have sure are evil.
If it was cost effective to install greener technology and produce less carbon today, companies would do it and save money.
If it becomes cost effective TOMORROW, they'll do it TOMORROW to save money.
In the meantime, the cost of carbon offsets has done nothing but cost them, and thus every one of their customers, money.
I know faulty slashdot moderation has long since become rampant, but parent getting "Insightful" threw my head spinning. The premise of carbon credits is that it's not cost-effective, now or tomorrow, to lower emissions, because there is no cost to companies to produce carbon. If we impose a cost on emitters, then it becomes cost-effective, now and tomorrow, to lower emissions, because emitting has become a cost. Where's the "Insight" in simply failing to understand that concept?
Of course, carbon trading is not just a theory. It has been empirically shown to work.
On advice from his lawyer, he intends to plead guilty...
You know, as a teenager I watched the movie Red Corner and felt glad *I* didn't live in a country where public defenders urge every client to plead guilty whether they are or not, simply because they're never going to win anyway. You know, one of those Communist ones without a real justice system. Ah, the folly of youth.
They somehow managed to sniff all the traffic on a major filing sharing network, then they found the IP's of everyone who had downloaded a certain file and then they just sat on it for two years before going after someone who had downloaded it?
Somehow I imagine that's not how they found him. They probably arrested someone for distribution, and looked at their computer's Limewire logs for everyone they had seeded the file to. Then they knocked on the doors of all those people, and whichever ones cooperated, they looked at the logs of who they seeded the file to, and so on until they found this guy. That process could easily take two years, if not longer. I'm pretty sure they'll never have the capacity to sniff all (or even most) of the traffic on a major file-sharing network, if only because as the government's search hardware scales, so do the file-sharing networks and the Internet itself.
Even if he spent years fighting the charges, and drove himself to bankruptcy in the process, it would still be less of a problem to his future than taking the felony conviction and serving 3.5 years in prison.
Not to mention being a registered sex offender. Say goodbye to ever having a job again. They won't even ask you why, they'll just see that you're on the list and that's that. What kind of a moron lawyer tells him not to fight that? If it were me I'd risk the extra 16.5 years because registered sex offender status lasts YOUR WHOLE LIFE.
All that for some Girls Gone Wild. Can we get them to put Joe Francis away too?
He created a multinational project of cooperation between tons of people all over the globe and made a project that has helped change the computer industry and lower costs, making computing more affordable for everyone. Sounds good to me....While some are obviously good (Doctors Without Borders, The Dalai Llama) others are much more questionable.
Well, if Doctors Without Borders is such a clear winner, doesn't that make a guy whose contribution is along the lines of Computers Without Borders a natural contender? In an age where people are decrying foreign aid for third world countries because it doesn't produce long-term stability or growth, and insisting these places need investment and education rather than handouts, doesn't making a strong, stable computer OS available to all count as a grand contribution? I agree with what you're saying, but I would state the case more strongly. The Linux project (along with GNU) has been a tremendous contribution to international peace and welfare.
Personally I would nominate Stallman for GNU, Linus for Linux, and Shuttleworth for shifting the focus to usability/accessibility and incorporating humanistic values into the distribution (to share the prize between the three of them) but that's just me.
Slashdot Mirror
And stop eating meat OR veggies -- I can hear the carrots scream!
Not til you get the hell out of my aura!
Even if we were to assume that these "electromagnetic allergies" did exist, no one is forcing that man to live there.
You're right, they're forcing him to live in his car! Didn't you RTFA?
To be clear, AOL has had a stigma attached to it's name for more than 10 years. Even back in the early 90s, it was a joke, and for those too dumb to use a proper unix shell to ftp and irc.
I know, but beyond that it's really all the same...failing to recognize a stigma that's been around for 11 years and failing to recognize a stigma that's been around for 19 years aren't too different. My point was, there's no excuse for not knowing how much people look down on aol. It's not just a chintzy domain like hotmail, it's the domain singularly associated with idiocy in people's minds. And the stigma's not a new thing, like something from the last year, but rather that it's been around since before most people have been online, so there's no excuse not to know.
It is terrible that someone would judge others by something as simple as an email address.
No it isn't. Given what an aol address tells you about the person, it's totally fair.
Yet we all do it. *@aol.com instantly kicks in my "dumbass...." reflex, and I'm sure it does for most other nerds.
As well it should, since you either 1) were such a dumbass you belonged on aol in the first place, or 2) were normally not a dumbass, yet somehow failed to realize the terrible stigma the aol user-base has had for OVER a DECADE and still persist in associating with that crowd.
And lest someone opine that the original aol stigma was unfounded, you're probably not old enough to remember when aol broke the internet. I'm sure you can find through Google some good accounts of what happened when aol transitioned from being a very large bbs to being a very large isp; most of the negative generalizations people make about the net itself have their origins in the aoler influx.
Have a domain and associated website if you want to, but it is outlandish to suggest it should be a de facto thing.
Is it outlandish to suggest people should use "de facto" correctly?
To sum up; a potential employer is far more likely to be put off by what comes before the @ in your e-mail address than by what comes afterwards.
Tell that to fredjones@cocksuckers.com
I'd guess more like
How does that work, invoking bitwise xor on two floating-point numbers?
Since, at a minimum, you can't solve for the state of the lottery lady Easy! The state of the lottery lady is the same as the state of the lottery itself.
I'm pretty sure they're allowed to hire out-of-staters to pull the lottery levers, and they become increasingly likely to want to commute as the state declines in size.
I'm really getting tired of the "underfunded" argument as to why schools are failing in the US. Seriously?
And I'm getting really tired of morons failing to grasp the simple connection, then invoking government conspiracy theories about them damn lib'ruls, as well as made-up statistics, to justify running the education system further into the ground.
Public funding has increased steadily, at a rate faster than inflation.
First of all, without other information this is completely meaningless. If schools were grossly underfunded to begin with, then you would expect spending to increase faster than inflation just to make up the deficit. How do we stand on education spending? As a percentage of GDP, 37th in the world (source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_spe-education-spending-of-gdp). What country is first? Cuba. Is this correlated with educational quality? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the country with the world's highest literacy rate? Also Cuba (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate).
Second, your claim that this increase has been steady is false. ( http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1980_2010&view=1&expand=&units=b&fy=fy10&chart=20-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=US&color=c&local=) True, most years the increase is more than inflation, but certainly not all, and in a few years it was as low as 1.8% when inflation was around 3%.
This is not just nationally, but also at the local level through property taxes.
I don't know where you live, but where I grew up (a village in southern Wisconsin) the school budget declined every year for the entire time I attended middle and high school, to the point that there was a toilet paper shortage, since it "wasn't in the budget" to buy a few dozen more rolls toward the end of the year, all because every year local conservatives whined more and more about property taxes. In the time since I've graduated funding has gotten even lower; a friend who now teaches at the school has reported that school lunch is now down to a couple slices of white bread, a slab of meat, and an apple. At least when I was there, we still got two vegetable choices and pizza day twice a month.
Also, the funding argument is easily dissuaded simply by pointing out counter-examples: there are many, many private schools which are able to educate students to superior levels in all of the basics. We're talking half as much funding and less.
Do you have documentary evidence of even one private school taking in half as much money as a nearby public school and outperforming it? Comparisons of widely different geographic and demographic areas don't count; that's called cherry-picking your data. While it's certainly true that the average private school outperforms similarly situated public schools, almost all of these private schools take in more funding per pupil AND have the selection bias of families whose parents are more motivated towards education than the local average.
The cause for government school failure in the US is not due to a lack of funding. That's an excuse, and pushes the blame from the cause.
Again, evidence please? In statistical or logical form, not just your assertion.
The cause is that they're government schools, with strict top-down models they must adhere to, and do not take the individual student in mind. Schools have to do well on standardized tests, yad
The n's justifies the means.
Way to rip off Dogbert there, pal.
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1989-09-08/
To give equal weight to each person's opinion we should assume that each person has an independent probability, p, of being right.
How can you treat them as independent when they all believe the same thing (namely, that Zed is full of shit)? By definition, if co-worker X were right then co-worker Y would also be right, and so forth, so there is only one event with two possible outcomes, Zed is right and Zed is wrong. The equation you listed is appropriate where any combination of Zed being right and some or all of his co-workers being right is possible, but that's not the case. You can't treat it as a binomial distribution unless the "events" are actually independent and they are obviously all dependent (or equivalently, all just one event).
btw I have to wonder if Zed named himself after the villain from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers...just a thought...
totalEnergyResidingInAnObjectInJoules = massOfObjectInKilograms*speedOfLightInVacuumInMetersPerSecond^2
oh, and by the way:
gravitationalForceBetweenTwoMassesinNewtons = massOfFirstObjectInKilograms * massOfSecondObjectinKilograms * 6.673e-11 / (distanceBetweenCentersOfTwoObjects ^ 2)
That should put you in your place.
10 REM FOR 16 BIT NMS MACHINES
20 FOR X=1 TO 10
30 PRINT "HELLO"
40 NEXT X
(told you I wasn't a coder)
But line 10, the comment may be very useful, aha, that's why this works on X machine but not X machine, etc.
If you have a machine which both supports a BASIC interpreter and doesn't support your lines 20-40, I think you have bigger problems than whether or not somebody commented this block of code.
His point is that worthless comments are worse than no comments at all.
Unfortunately a large percentage of the comments you see on Slashdot today were autogenerated by monkeys and are just noise.
Having worked as a programmer for many years, all I can say is poorly commented and undocumented code is unprofessional and I would rather rewrite it than try to decipher it. I've heard all of these excuses before and all I can say to the people that make them is: Your code is not as good as you think it is.
Having read Slashdot for many years, all I can say is poorly formatted and prematurely line-fed text is unprofessional and I would rather rewrite it than try to look at it. You haven't yet given any excuses for it, but all I'll say to you when you do is: "Your comment is not as good as you think it is."
No no, they mean the Pearl River Deli. It's on the East Side
Not being from NYC I can't rightly tell what part of NY this is meant to be called, but there is a town called "Perl River", and yes, the have Deli's
Pearl River Deli
Anyone ever eaten at one of these???
If TFA doesn't tell us which Pearl River Deli it goes to, how can we decide whether to take the train? What if it takes you to Nauraushaun Country Deli when you wanted to go to Luigi O'Grady's?! (which is a confusing name to begin with...how do you know whether to expect an Italian-style or an Irish-style sandwich?)
The trouble is a project of that size usually requires some level of state/federal organisation or funding to secure the necessary investment from private funding and the power to buy the land. Which in the USA seems to cause foaming at the mouth and long rants about the evils of communism.
Gosh, that high-speed rail, robust economy, and strengthening currency the red Chinese have sure are evil.
Seizing private property and forcing the owners to accept a pittance in return just won't work in the U.S.
It wouldn't work in China, either. Fortunately, China doesn't recognize land as private property to begin with, and thus has no need to seize.
If it was cost effective to install greener technology and produce less carbon today, companies would do it and save money.
If it becomes cost effective TOMORROW, they'll do it TOMORROW to save money.
In the meantime, the cost of carbon offsets has done nothing but cost them, and thus every one of their customers, money.
I know faulty slashdot moderation has long since become rampant, but parent getting "Insightful" threw my head spinning. The premise of carbon credits is that it's not cost-effective, now or tomorrow, to lower emissions, because there is no cost to companies to produce carbon. If we impose a cost on emitters, then it becomes cost-effective, now and tomorrow, to lower emissions, because emitting has become a cost. Where's the "Insight" in simply failing to understand that concept?
Of course, carbon trading is not just a theory. It has been empirically shown to work.
Let me get this right-- you purchase this offset so that you can deliberately write bad code?
Why??
Let me get this right-- you buy this plenary indulgence so that you can deliberately sin and be pre-forgiven?
Why??
Why not, my friend. Why in the world not.
On advice from his lawyer, he intends to plead guilty...
You know, as a teenager I watched the movie Red Corner and felt glad *I* didn't live in a country where public defenders urge every client to plead guilty whether they are or not, simply because they're never going to win anyway. You know, one of those Communist ones without a real justice system. Ah, the folly of youth.
They somehow managed to sniff all the traffic on a major filing sharing network, then they found the IP's of everyone who had downloaded a certain file and then they just sat on it for two years before going after someone who had downloaded it?
Somehow I imagine that's not how they found him. They probably arrested someone for distribution, and looked at their computer's Limewire logs for everyone they had seeded the file to. Then they knocked on the doors of all those people, and whichever ones cooperated, they looked at the logs of who they seeded the file to, and so on until they found this guy. That process could easily take two years, if not longer. I'm pretty sure they'll never have the capacity to sniff all (or even most) of the traffic on a major file-sharing network, if only because as the government's search hardware scales, so do the file-sharing networks and the Internet itself.
Even if he spent years fighting the charges, and drove himself to bankruptcy in the process, it would still be less of a problem to his future than taking the felony conviction and serving 3.5 years in prison.
Not to mention being a registered sex offender. Say goodbye to ever having a job again. They won't even ask you why, they'll just see that you're on the list and that's that. What kind of a moron lawyer tells him not to fight that? If it were me I'd risk the extra 16.5 years because registered sex offender status lasts YOUR WHOLE LIFE.
All that for some Girls Gone Wild. Can we get them to put Joe Francis away too?
And before you respond: No, OSCON is not a peace congress.
Well, at least not yet.
He created a multinational project of cooperation between tons of people all over the globe and made a project that has helped change the computer industry and lower costs, making computing more affordable for everyone. Sounds good to me....While some are obviously good (Doctors Without Borders, The Dalai Llama) others are much more questionable.
Well, if Doctors Without Borders is such a clear winner, doesn't that make a guy whose contribution is along the lines of Computers Without Borders a natural contender? In an age where people are decrying foreign aid for third world countries because it doesn't produce long-term stability or growth, and insisting these places need investment and education rather than handouts, doesn't making a strong, stable computer OS available to all count as a grand contribution? I agree with what you're saying, but I would state the case more strongly. The Linux project (along with GNU) has been a tremendous contribution to international peace and welfare. Personally I would nominate Stallman for GNU, Linus for Linux, and Shuttleworth for shifting the focus to usability/accessibility and incorporating humanistic values into the distribution (to share the prize between the three of them) but that's just me.