HGTTG is a radio show, a book, and a TV show. The radio show is available as audio and script. The TV show is available on video. The books are available everywhere. Each of these HGTTG stories involves Ford, Author, and Zaphod. The Earth gets blow up, and wildness ensues. Beyond that, the specifics are variable.
Therefore it make no sense to complain that the movie will not match the book, as it is to be expected. HGTTG is not about a specific plot, but a set of characters and ideas. In a way, this makes it harder to adapt, because the ideas do not lend themselves well to the standard Hollywood movie. On the other hand, with the proper support, a wonderful movie is possible.
How many ads will it take to satisfy the profit needs of the content producers, and how many distributors will want to add advertising to get their cut of the pie?
I personally think product placement could be good. What I worry about is that the same thing will happen to games that has happened to movies. Movies have product placement that drives the action at the expense of the plot. We have multiple advertisement before the movie in the theater and the video.
So what happens with online games. Will play be stopped until we go for McDonalds to lunch? Will the game be written to run best on Intel machines? Will ads pop up every five minutes? When we change clothes, will we have a choice between Gap and J. Crew?
Of course, most people would say these things will never happen, but who would have thought we would pay $8 for a movie and then have to sit through 2-3 minutes of commercials.
It is not lazy programmers, it is economics. In an effort to create affordable applications, we trade expensive programmer time for cheap cycle time. For instance, we use RAD tools to shorten the development process. We also skimp the design process, often using the RAD tool as an implicit design tool, thus avoiding the messy process of creating solid specifications. Both of these create applications that while cheaper, require heftier processor to run well.
If you get a chance, you should look at the Mythical Man Month. It has a chart that shows just how slow hand coding is. Compilers allowed us to create more complex codee at the cost of speed. That trend will continue.
IANASE, but it seems to only a problem if one is foolish enough to believe that the encryption method protects data forever. In the few situations where I was involved with security, we explicitly defined the span of time the data had to be secured. Surprisingly, the time can range from minutes to years.
In your first example, the responsible bank will keep the data secure for a finite amount of the time. At the end of that time, the data will be destroyed. The importance of this second step to the security of corporate world was shown in the Andersen/Enron case.
In the second example, in which transactions are saved by a 'man in the middle' for later decryption, the problem depends on the data. For instance, some data is extremely time sensitive, and future description is not a problem. If in 10 years we deciphered a message in which Martha Stewarts told her stockbroker to sell all of IM Clone, it probably would not be a smoking gun. Again, the issue is more a matter of appropriate security.
I am not talking about the distribution of music for free. In this case, the porn industry is likely going to charge for at least some content delivered through the Napster mechanism.
What I am talking about is the unwillingness of the RIAA to allow alternative distribution mechanisms. Napster was put out bussiness because it resulted in a lack of control of RIAA. Streaming music over the internet is a loss of control. Some still bitch at the way MTV was allowed to show videos without large royalty fees, even though MTV probably was the single biggest factor in the success of the music industry after the late 70's slump.
It seems to me that this may validate Napster type services as a valid marketing tool. Napster was unable to do this with musics because the RIAA is unwilling to compete in the open market place. They, like sports teams, MS, and other monopolists, know that is often more efficient to purchase lawmakers than actually compete for market share.
OTOH, the porn industry, which may find it more difficult find (openly) sympathetic legislators, and has a much lower cost of entry, tends to compete vigorously. The porn industry does look for innovative methods to gain market share, to distinguish themselves from the other 600 business card size ads in Hustler. Sometimes this competition leads to Spam, other times it leads to extensive free content in newsgroups, or aggressively priced introductory offers.
Which means that Private Media Group may actually have the experience, motivation, and cash to make Napster work. This may provide a way to differentiate their product form their competitors. If they are successfull, it will be harder to argue that Napster's only use is for pirating, and further increase evidence that content monopolies are primarily concerned about loss of control.
Well, he is shruken, and he is a monkey boy, but I think in is likely more of a cyborg rather than an automaton.
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed
on
The First Smiley :-)
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· Score: 1
It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent.
I think the premise of this is that your recipients are really stupid. After all emoticons do not dictate action or reaction any more than the message of the text. They merely suggest a motivation. I would not dare assume anything about other recipients, but I feel mine are smart enough to know the difference.
Furthermore, such a statement probably comes from a person with very little expense in personal letter writing by hand. Decorative annotations that suggest intent are widely used in such letter writing, and character decorations are one of the big things that has been lost in the movement to typewritten text. Emoticons are a natural attempt to translate these decorations to another media.
As always, the reader is free to ignore these hints in the same way they would ignore. a misplace period or: colon or even? a question! mark or the like. We, however, hope that the writer is literate enough not to make such foolish mistakes. Pehaps the writer is even clever enough to make a joke that does not need an emoticon!
I fail to understand the Nex II player is even an issue. It is US$120 without memory, while the Nomad is US$100 with memory, and pretty much the same specs(except for the microdrive).
The Nex II can use a microdrive, but with a 1GB microdive, the Nex II is about the same price of a 10 GB IPOD.
As far as the defense of the wimpy USB connector, it is not suitable for regular transfers of GB of data. It is slow. I can barely stand to use it for my Nomad.
Perhaps someone can tell me why I should spend more on the Nex II, when it is little more than sub standard interface dongle.
As has been mentioned before, the entertainment industry is concerned with every person having the capability to pirate content. They have largely solved this problem with DVDs, but other content is wide open.
The content providers have probably lost the battle for the GPC. The GPC, however, is too difficult for most people to use(I see this fact proven every day), and manufacturers are increasingly going to offer specialized equipment to manage content that will be simpler and more user friendly. Consumers will likely acquire these devices for the same reason consumers acquire TiVo instead of using their GPC. This is a battle that the content providers can and may well win. In addition, Intel and Microsoft want to be the company that provides the OEM component for such hardware, as this is where the money is to be made. As has also been mentioned, the current initiative at MS and Intel clearly point in this direction.
GPCs will then be relegated to their role of 20 years ago, i.e. business and hobbyist. Businesses will largely have no problem with content control, as it solves a number of current problems. One of these is that MS Windows comes with a bunch of consumer crap that is not suitable on a business machine. I suspect that the business machine will look more like the dumb terminal that the current GPC. Subscriber software is also part of this model.
Hobbyist will likely use GPCs with some form *nix, maybe Linux, BSD, or MacOS. This willl not feature content control. I feel it is likely that content will continue have unrestricted use on these machines. This hope rests on the idea that most consumer will use specialized devices that have content control built in, and the leakage from GPC will be small enough so that the companies will not spend money on locking the content itself too tightly
So, as long Apple( and by extension the PPC) remains DRM free, and someone produces DRM free Intel clones, there we should be Ok. MS Windows and Intel are already lost cause. Neither are making money with the home GPC and their best hope for profits is to align themselves with the pro DRM faction.
First, try the Cartoon Guide to Physics. This is kind of a silly book, but is at least as accurate as the other pop physics stuff. It will give you a good explanation of basic physics.
Second, Feynman has a book called the Character of Physical Law. This is an excellent series of lectures on the process and history of physics. It is a must read for anyone who wishes to know physics. It is much more accessible than the Lectures on Physics, which are much more suited to the serious student.
Third, any book by Dover Publishing is a good bet. These books are usually reprints of historical or definitive texts. They have books on subjects such as Quantum Theory, Crystallography, Relativity, and Thermodynamics, often by the scientist that defined the field. Remember, basic physical concepts are not quickly refuted, so a book written 50 years ago is still a good resource.
All of these books are available from your favorite book outlet, or do a search.
The reason that shows like these are being canceled is demographics. My theory is that shows are being targeted to audiences that will actually watch them instead of record them. Think of shows like Smallville, 7th Heaven and the like for young families. Football and Basketball for men. Also shows that are very cheap to make are good, as they require less ad revenue, and are double good if they are time critical. Examples of this American Idol, Survivor, and the like. Although these shows have less value in syndication, they actually deliver a non-time-shifted audience.
Farscape, Futurerama, and Dark Angel has almost no value if everyone TiVos them. Show like Nascar racing has a large value as it really delivers a key demographic.
I expect the current shift is shows to continue. We continue to see the market dominated by three classes of shows. Shows for young families. Sports shows. Cheap reality shows. Expensive shows that are targeted to a sophisticated audience will be all but gone. Think how Enterprise is different from Star Trek.
The things is, reading a scientific paper, even a simple one, is not like reading a novel, a popular magazine, or a newspaper. For one thing, the audience for a science paper is generally considered to be educated, while the audience for other popular media is considered to be less educated, perhaps able to comprehend at an early high school level. Also, the vocabulary used tends to be obscure. This is necessary to allow precise speech. IN addition, science writers sometimes are writers second, which can also cause probles.
It is possible to slowly get used to reading science, at least in the popular medium such as Scientific American, if not Nature. I remember reading Discover in Jr. High School because I could not understand SA. In time, I was able to read SA. I think I was frustrated because it was so hard to understand, and I was not able to quickly skim the text as I would for other magazines. Even now I have trouble understanding some of the biological science articles.
So don't worry if comprehension is not what you expect. Look up words if you cannot glean at least some meaning from context. Reading is a skill, and is not neccesarily transferable between genre.
What kind of whiny arrogant pseudo-intellectual gibberish is this? A cell phone is a tool, just like a knife or a pen or a screwdriver. Not everyone who owns a knife or a pen or a computer is stupid. Not everyone who stabs themselves with a knife or a pen or a screwdriver is stupid. Sometimes it is just a lack of skill or understanding.
The fact is that some people may not understand what the consequences of a cell phone are. It may be that understanding exists, and the decision is made to use the tool in spite of the risks. Or, the user of the tool may be stupid, and the best hope is that they do not take someone else out in the process. We are not going to change anything by calling all of them stupid.
And what about that pathetic attack of business majors on their cell phones. On most issues, I would say yea! I am all for bashing business majors and frat boys, but in this case, it seems kind of petty. Can you just imagine the business majors at party laughing at the stupid engineering people talking about Linux? Too stupid to use Microsoft. Too stupid to get an MBA. Too stupid to learn to dance. Too stupid to get laid. Dumb geeks.
I am quite disappointed that Michelson-Morley did not make the top ten. Most experiment on this list challenged our vision of reality. Young help illustrate the particle/light duality. Galileo showed us that acceleration does not depend on the mass of the falling object. Newton showed that light was made a composite of individual entities. Rutherford refuted the muffin theory of the atom.
Likewise, Michelson-Morley refuted the traditional hypothesis of the Ether(or aether). This concept was a kludge used to validate various assumptions. At that time, it was assumed that light needed a medium, and Ether was as good an explanation as any. By creating a beautiful experiment to refute the ether, Michelson-Morley forced scientist to study the problem instead of just making assumption. Progress is made when our fundamental assumption is proven false.
That does not mean that measuring physical constants is not beautiful experimentation. Certainly Foucault and Eratosthenes and Cavendish and even Milikan are great experiments which are instructive even now. But were they earth shattering pieces of experimentation. I do not know.
In their greed, they blackmailed some large Japanese corporations, some of whom gave in easily--I guess giving money to shady organizations is an accepted norm in their culture.
So, which culture has a habit of giving money to shady organizations? As has been mentioned before, if royalties payment are less than litigation, the royalty payments make a lot of sense.
For furture reference, unles your audience is a bunch of bigoted yahoos, random xenophobic statemnents tends to make an argument less effective.
I assume you mean that it worthwhile to pay for things that will makes one life easier. I totally agree.
WRT to your example, on the other hand, I find that most people are interested in the not the right tool, but the most convenient tool. For example, I recently interviewed with a self-declared Microsoft Shop. Since I have had the luxury of working with the Right Tool(c)(r), only some of my work has been with MS tools, even if I was on a M$ platform. Since the group consisted of young M$ addicts, the fact that I did not always use M$ was seen as A Bad Thing.
So what does this mean here? That if possible one should have more than one hammer, but if you put all your eggs in one basket, you do have to pay the piper when the fat lady sings. Aren't mixed metaphors great!
This isn't so much a branding situation as it is a licensing situation. It's like buying the right from Star Wars or Martha Stewart to use their name or characters on your products. JBoss has already done the work to create and propagate the brand, and presumably will continue to do so. The fee just allows the consultant to license the use of the brand. The training is then justified as a way to protect the brand image.
This may also be an effort to get some support personnel out there without JBoss actually having to risk resources and capital. Overall, it smells like a way to generate income by licensing.
The problem with most code is not in literacy, usually to mean basic reading and writing, but a lack of respect for structure.
As a metaphor, lets take the five-paragraph essay. This is a simple form of basic literacy. There is a head paragraph with a few statements leading to a strong thesis. There are three paragraphs that argue for those statements in an effort to validate the thesis. Finally, there is a conclusion paragraph where the thesis is formally validated. A literate person is expected to be able to apply this structure to a hypothetical issue. This, however, does not mean that the person will have enough respect for this structure to use it in communicating on a daily basis. Often, the bogus literati believe that it is more important to be complicated in an effort to create a perceived intelligence, rather than to be direct and allow statements to be judged on their own merit.
The same is true for code. Code has it's own vocabulary, grammar, and idioms. It also has a structure that can be generalized for all code, as well as structure that is unique for each language and application. It is the application of these structures that creates legible code.
This was very clear to me a several months ago when I was wading through some code written in VC++. The person who wrote the code, though likely to do well on VC++ test, was totally ignorant the standard structures and grammar of not only OO code, but even structured programming. Repeated tasks were not converted into a generalized function. Variables were ambiguously retrieved from the registry. Identical conversions were done differently in various areas of the code. Related variable and function were not encapsulated into classes. This has nothing literacy. It had everything to do with a lack of respect for structure. I was able to take this code that worked and convert it into code that legible without the inclusion of foreign syntax.
Two last things. First, there are situations where rules of structure and grammar must be broken. There are even times when it is fun to do so. That said, it is one thing to intentionally break well known rules, and a totally different thing to be too ignorant to realize their importance. Second, translation tables are still needed between human languages and computer readable languages. The trick is to create code using existing structures and idioms in an effort to make the translation tables as simple as possible.
Although this article is obvious, it is also interesting. Toys can drive development of technology. For instance, it is said that some pre-Colombian civilizations had toys with wheels, but no tools with wheels. Toys are a great way to develop technology in a much more forgiving setting.
Likewise, video games can drive computer technology. Though most people have commented on the lack of a business needs preventing the adoption of bleeding edge technology, I think it is more a matter of reliability. After all, if a computer crashes or makes a slight rendering or math mistake in you game, it is not going to affect anything. It is not like making a mistake in a paycheck or bill of lading. The consequences are miniscule. Likewise, if a computer crashes every couple hours in a game, as long as the game is saved, there is little productivity loss. And of course, if the buggy Intel chip were limited to games, as it should have been, we would have not had such a powerful outcry.
We see this with the original Mac. It was a very capable machine. I would spend all day and most of my night on it programming, analyzing business data, and writing. It would not crash, and would not make mistakes. The problem was that graphic technology had not advanced enough to make the machine both reliable and inexpensive. We can absolutely thank gamers for our cheap GUI devices.
This reminds me of Douglas Adams Somebody Else's Problem field. It ran for a long time on 9V batter, IIRC. Following the same principle, tell the people what they want to believe, back it up with contrived numbers, and you can take the money and run.
SysMark 2001 and 2002
obfuscate their specific tasks by spitting out one "dumb" number as a score for
an entire suite of tests. This makes it impossible to know the relative
performance of CPUs on individual tasks.
Which again shows that if people accept a single unexplained statistic as fact, they tend get what they deserve. This reminds me of a mantra from my physics lab: a single number is a guess.
Furthermore, why do we believe that there is a typical 'real world' set of problems that can be benchmarked. Even within a single application, there may be a mode work profile, but there is enough variability that a wide range of profiles would be defensible. The trick is to choose the one that makes your product look good.
It *is* like breaking into someone's house, going through their papers and files, then telling the local newspaper that this particular house has a crappy lock that's easy to break into.
No, they were not breaking into someone's house. They were walking into an open unguarded government office, and picking up some confidential documents lying on the desk. I believe that confidential documents are traditionally behind locked doors and guards to keep such a thing from happening.
Can you justify that?.
How can you argue that it is acceptable to leave confidential document in an unlocked, unguarded office for anyone to take. Do you live in the real world where confidential documents are securely stored, or in la la land where everyone is trusted to follow the rules?
In this case, the government has not fulfilled their mandate to guard the security of the U.S. and it's citizens. A Citizen of the U.S. discovered this, and went to the press. Citizens of the U.S. have that right.
The Government also has the right to find some way to punishing these citizens for exposing Government incompetence. A cynic would say that was to expected. A more rational person would hope his or her government would spend some time trying to solve the problem instead of engaging in a cover-up. This is especially true as we are suppose to protect whistle blowers to ferret out corruption, although I realize the Bush administration is intent on hiding behind homeland security.
I certainly am not saying that what these people did was strictly legal, but I would hope the U.S. government would take security a bit more seriously. I understand it is a learning curve.
Having been on both sides of the, I can tell you some of some key points I believe are important.
1) Define the person you need
A job description is often deemed as overrated, but it's helps to insure that the person is going to be happy doing the job. Even if the job is a jack-of-all-trades, there are going to be dominant tasks, and the person has to be able to do those well, and enjoy doing them.
2) What is the importance of current and future knowledge
In my experience tests can be very effective to judge current knowledge. What tests are less good at is to determine how quickly the person can gain new knowledge and how quickly the person is going to be able to apply that knowledge to the job. Even a good college GPA is only so useful.
3) Can the person write code
A simple coding test can validate the knowledge of standard idioms and basic language constructs. What is often harder to test is whether the programmer can write code that is useful. That is, is the code written to minimize bugs? Is it modular enough to facilitate debugging? Are the interfaces clean and clear? I have had only one interview process in which these skills were sufficiently tested. Some might say that looking at past code is good, but who wrote the code? In one job, half of the people who were hired with me were let go because they could not write code, even though they had the technical skills.
4) Can the person work in the environment
My experience is that professional can work in a wide variety of environments.. They question is does the person want to work under the conditions, and will the current staff accept that person. That is why I believe in face to face interviews with co-workers much more than personality tests. Unless the test is screening for certain philosophical beliefs, such tests are a waste of time
I find interviews like these to be the most. Interviews that do not follow these guidelines tend to be a waste of time, at least for me.
A small thimbleful of carbon can be made into 0.25 carat
diamond, for which LifeGem would charge $4,000. A full karat
would cost $22,000.
So this is no use to a super villain who wishes to convert a body to diamonds.
A cynical person would say this was just another grab by the death industry to separate grieving family from their money. What is it that this company does for the $4K. A 1/4-caret cubic zirconia can be had for fifty dollars or so. The only thing that Lifegem does is to extract the base carbon from the body remains, apparently using a simple furnace. Assuming that they contract out the actual diamond production, their risk and capital equipment expense should be relatively small. I admit that the purification process is probably innovative, and development costs must be recovered, but a nearly 100 times markup. Ridiculous.
I know I say this every time this topic appears but:
1) require real return addresseses
2) require real headers
3) require using mail hosts paid for by the advertiser
4) require real adminstrative email address
and for good measure
5) Require a real physical mail address(at least a PO box) for the advertiser and the emailer.
The only reason spam works is because the spammer steals other people resources, and then hides like a coward. And for the record, I do not consider advertisers who follow these rules spammers, just advertisers with questionable ethics.
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore it make no sense to complain that the movie will not match the book, as it is to be expected. HGTTG is not about a specific plot, but a set of characters and ideas. In a way, this makes it harder to adapt, because the ideas do not lend themselves well to the standard Hollywood movie. On the other hand, with the proper support, a wonderful movie is possible.
I personally think product placement could be good. What I worry about is that the same thing will happen to games that has happened to movies. Movies have product placement that drives the action at the expense of the plot. We have multiple advertisement before the movie in the theater and the video.
So what happens with online games. Will play be stopped until we go for McDonalds to lunch? Will the game be written to run best on Intel machines? Will ads pop up every five minutes? When we change clothes, will we have a choice between Gap and J. Crew?
Of course, most people would say these things will never happen, but who would have thought we would pay $8 for a movie and then have to sit through 2-3 minutes of commercials.
If you get a chance, you should look at the Mythical Man Month. It has a chart that shows just how slow hand coding is. Compilers allowed us to create more complex codee at the cost of speed. That trend will continue.
In your first example, the responsible bank will keep the data secure for a finite amount of the time. At the end of that time, the data will be destroyed. The importance of this second step to the security of corporate world was shown in the Andersen/Enron case.
In the second example, in which transactions are saved by a 'man in the middle' for later decryption, the problem depends on the data. For instance, some data is extremely time sensitive, and future description is not a problem. If in 10 years we deciphered a message in which Martha Stewarts told her stockbroker to sell all of IM Clone, it probably would not be a smoking gun. Again, the issue is more a matter of appropriate security.
What I am talking about is the unwillingness of the RIAA to allow alternative distribution mechanisms. Napster was put out bussiness because it resulted in a lack of control of RIAA. Streaming music over the internet is a loss of control. Some still bitch at the way MTV was allowed to show videos without large royalty fees, even though MTV probably was the single biggest factor in the success of the music industry after the late 70's slump.
OTOH, the porn industry, which may find it more difficult find (openly) sympathetic legislators, and has a much lower cost of entry, tends to compete vigorously. The porn industry does look for innovative methods to gain market share, to distinguish themselves from the other 600 business card size ads in Hustler. Sometimes this competition leads to Spam, other times it leads to extensive free content in newsgroups, or aggressively priced introductory offers.
Which means that Private Media Group may actually have the experience, motivation, and cash to make Napster work. This may provide a way to differentiate their product form their competitors. If they are successfull, it will be harder to argue that Napster's only use is for pirating, and further increase evidence that content monopolies are primarily concerned about loss of control.
Well, he is shruken, and he is a monkey boy, but I think in is likely more of a cyborg rather than an automaton.
I think the premise of this is that your recipients are really stupid. After all emoticons do not dictate action or reaction any more than the message of the text. They merely suggest a motivation. I would not dare assume anything about other recipients, but I feel mine are smart enough to know the difference.
Furthermore, such a statement probably comes from a person with very little expense in personal letter writing by hand. Decorative annotations that suggest intent are widely used in such letter writing, and character decorations are one of the big things that has been lost in the movement to typewritten text. Emoticons are a natural attempt to translate these decorations to another media.
As always, the reader is free to ignore these hints in the same way they would ignore. a misplace period or: colon or even? a question! mark or the like. We, however, hope that the writer is literate enough not to make such foolish mistakes. Pehaps the writer is even clever enough to make a joke that does not need an emoticon!
The Nex II can use a microdrive, but with a 1GB microdive, the Nex II is about the same price of a 10 GB IPOD.
As far as the defense of the wimpy USB connector, it is not suitable for regular transfers of GB of data. It is slow. I can barely stand to use it for my Nomad.
Perhaps someone can tell me why I should spend more on the Nex II, when it is little more than sub standard interface dongle.
The content providers have probably lost the battle for the GPC. The GPC, however, is too difficult for most people to use(I see this fact proven every day), and manufacturers are increasingly going to offer specialized equipment to manage content that will be simpler and more user friendly. Consumers will likely acquire these devices for the same reason consumers acquire TiVo instead of using their GPC. This is a battle that the content providers can and may well win. In addition, Intel and Microsoft want to be the company that provides the OEM component for such hardware, as this is where the money is to be made. As has also been mentioned, the current initiative at MS and Intel clearly point in this direction.
GPCs will then be relegated to their role of 20 years ago, i.e. business and hobbyist. Businesses will largely have no problem with content control, as it solves a number of current problems. One of these is that MS Windows comes with a bunch of consumer crap that is not suitable on a business machine. I suspect that the business machine will look more like the dumb terminal that the current GPC. Subscriber software is also part of this model.
Hobbyist will likely use GPCs with some form *nix, maybe Linux, BSD, or MacOS. This willl not feature content control. I feel it is likely that content will continue have unrestricted use on these machines. This hope rests on the idea that most consumer will use specialized devices that have content control built in, and the leakage from GPC will be small enough so that the companies will not spend money on locking the content itself too tightly
So, as long Apple( and by extension the PPC) remains DRM free, and someone produces DRM free Intel clones, there we should be Ok. MS Windows and Intel are already lost cause. Neither are making money with the home GPC and their best hope for profits is to align themselves with the pro DRM faction.
Second, Feynman has a book called the Character of Physical Law. This is an excellent series of lectures on the process and history of physics. It is a must read for anyone who wishes to know physics. It is much more accessible than the Lectures on Physics, which are much more suited to the serious student.
Third, any book by Dover Publishing is a good bet. These books are usually reprints of historical or definitive texts. They have books on subjects such as Quantum Theory, Crystallography, Relativity, and Thermodynamics, often by the scientist that defined the field. Remember, basic physical concepts are not quickly refuted, so a book written 50 years ago is still a good resource.
All of these books are available from your favorite book outlet, or do a search.
Farscape, Futurerama, and Dark Angel has almost no value if everyone TiVos them. Show like Nascar racing has a large value as it really delivers a key demographic.
I expect the current shift is shows to continue. We continue to see the market dominated by three classes of shows. Shows for young families. Sports shows. Cheap reality shows. Expensive shows that are targeted to a sophisticated audience will be all but gone. Think how Enterprise is different from Star Trek.
It is possible to slowly get used to reading science, at least in the popular medium such as Scientific American, if not Nature. I remember reading Discover in Jr. High School because I could not understand SA. In time, I was able to read SA. I think I was frustrated because it was so hard to understand, and I was not able to quickly skim the text as I would for other magazines. Even now I have trouble understanding some of the biological science articles.
So don't worry if comprehension is not what you expect. Look up words if you cannot glean at least some meaning from context. Reading is a skill, and is not neccesarily transferable between genre.
The fact is that some people may not understand what the consequences of a cell phone are. It may be that understanding exists, and the decision is made to use the tool in spite of the risks. Or, the user of the tool may be stupid, and the best hope is that they do not take someone else out in the process. We are not going to change anything by calling all of them stupid.
And what about that pathetic attack of business majors on their cell phones. On most issues, I would say yea! I am all for bashing business majors and frat boys, but in this case, it seems kind of petty. Can you just imagine the business majors at party laughing at the stupid engineering people talking about Linux? Too stupid to use Microsoft. Too stupid to get an MBA. Too stupid to learn to dance. Too stupid to get laid. Dumb geeks.
Likewise, Michelson-Morley refuted the traditional hypothesis of the Ether(or aether). This concept was a kludge used to validate various assumptions. At that time, it was assumed that light needed a medium, and Ether was as good an explanation as any. By creating a beautiful experiment to refute the ether, Michelson-Morley forced scientist to study the problem instead of just making assumption. Progress is made when our fundamental assumption is proven false.
That does not mean that measuring physical constants is not beautiful experimentation. Certainly Foucault and Eratosthenes and Cavendish and even Milikan are great experiments which are instructive even now. But were they earth shattering pieces of experimentation. I do not know.
So, which culture has a habit of giving money to shady organizations? As has been mentioned before, if royalties payment are less than litigation, the royalty payments make a lot of sense.
For furture reference, unles your audience is a bunch of bigoted yahoos, random xenophobic statemnents tends to make an argument less effective.
WRT to your example, on the other hand, I find that most people are interested in the not the right tool, but the most convenient tool. For example, I recently interviewed with a self-declared Microsoft Shop. Since I have had the luxury of working with the Right Tool(c)(r), only some of my work has been with MS tools, even if I was on a M$ platform. Since the group consisted of young M$ addicts, the fact that I did not always use M$ was seen as A Bad Thing.
So what does this mean here? That if possible one should have more than one hammer, but if you put all your eggs in one basket, you do have to pay the piper when the fat lady sings. Aren't mixed metaphors great!
This may also be an effort to get some support personnel out there without JBoss actually having to risk resources and capital. Overall, it smells like a way to generate income by licensing.
As a metaphor, lets take the five-paragraph essay. This is a simple form of basic literacy. There is a head paragraph with a few statements leading to a strong thesis. There are three paragraphs that argue for those statements in an effort to validate the thesis. Finally, there is a conclusion paragraph where the thesis is formally validated. A literate person is expected to be able to apply this structure to a hypothetical issue. This, however, does not mean that the person will have enough respect for this structure to use it in communicating on a daily basis. Often, the bogus literati believe that it is more important to be complicated in an effort to create a perceived intelligence, rather than to be direct and allow statements to be judged on their own merit.
The same is true for code. Code has it's own vocabulary, grammar, and idioms. It also has a structure that can be generalized for all code, as well as structure that is unique for each language and application. It is the application of these structures that creates legible code.
This was very clear to me a several months ago when I was wading through some code written in VC++. The person who wrote the code, though likely to do well on VC++ test, was totally ignorant the standard structures and grammar of not only OO code, but even structured programming. Repeated tasks were not converted into a generalized function. Variables were ambiguously retrieved from the registry. Identical conversions were done differently in various areas of the code. Related variable and function were not encapsulated into classes. This has nothing literacy. It had everything to do with a lack of respect for structure. I was able to take this code that worked and convert it into code that legible without the inclusion of foreign syntax.
Two last things. First, there are situations where rules of structure and grammar must be broken. There are even times when it is fun to do so. That said, it is one thing to intentionally break well known rules, and a totally different thing to be too ignorant to realize their importance. Second, translation tables are still needed between human languages and computer readable languages. The trick is to create code using existing structures and idioms in an effort to make the translation tables as simple as possible.
Likewise, video games can drive computer technology. Though most people have commented on the lack of a business needs preventing the adoption of bleeding edge technology, I think it is more a matter of reliability. After all, if a computer crashes or makes a slight rendering or math mistake in you game, it is not going to affect anything. It is not like making a mistake in a paycheck or bill of lading. The consequences are miniscule. Likewise, if a computer crashes every couple hours in a game, as long as the game is saved, there is little productivity loss. And of course, if the buggy Intel chip were limited to games, as it should have been, we would have not had such a powerful outcry.
We see this with the original Mac. It was a very capable machine. I would spend all day and most of my night on it programming, analyzing business data, and writing. It would not crash, and would not make mistakes. The problem was that graphic technology had not advanced enough to make the machine both reliable and inexpensive. We can absolutely thank gamers for our cheap GUI devices.
SysMark 2001 and 2002 obfuscate their specific tasks by spitting out one "dumb" number as a score for an entire suite of tests. This makes it impossible to know the relative performance of CPUs on individual tasks.
Which again shows that if people accept a single unexplained statistic as fact, they tend get what they deserve. This reminds me of a mantra from my physics lab: a single number is a guess.
Furthermore, why do we believe that there is a typical 'real world' set of problems that can be benchmarked. Even within a single application, there may be a mode work profile, but there is enough variability that a wide range of profiles would be defensible. The trick is to choose the one that makes your product look good.
No, they were not breaking into someone's house. They were walking into an open unguarded government office, and picking up some confidential documents lying on the desk. I believe that confidential documents are traditionally behind locked doors and guards to keep such a thing from happening.
Can you justify that?.
How can you argue that it is acceptable to leave confidential document in an unlocked, unguarded office for anyone to take. Do you live in the real world where confidential documents are securely stored, or in la la land where everyone is trusted to follow the rules?
In this case, the government has not fulfilled their mandate to guard the security of the U.S. and it's citizens. A Citizen of the U.S. discovered this, and went to the press. Citizens of the U.S. have that right.
The Government also has the right to find some way to punishing these citizens for exposing Government incompetence. A cynic would say that was to expected. A more rational person would hope his or her government would spend some time trying to solve the problem instead of engaging in a cover-up. This is especially true as we are suppose to protect whistle blowers to ferret out corruption, although I realize the Bush administration is intent on hiding behind homeland security.
I certainly am not saying that what these people did was strictly legal, but I would hope the U.S. government would take security a bit more seriously. I understand it is a learning curve.
1) Define the person you need
A job description is often deemed as overrated, but it's helps to insure that the person is going to be happy doing the job. Even if the job is a jack-of-all-trades, there are going to be dominant tasks, and the person has to be able to do those well, and enjoy doing them.
2) What is the importance of current and future knowledge
In my experience tests can be very effective to judge current knowledge. What tests are less good at is to determine how quickly the person can gain new knowledge and how quickly the person is going to be able to apply that knowledge to the job. Even a good college GPA is only so useful.
3) Can the person write code
A simple coding test can validate the knowledge of standard idioms and basic language constructs. What is often harder to test is whether the programmer can write code that is useful. That is, is the code written to minimize bugs? Is it modular enough to facilitate debugging? Are the interfaces clean and clear? I have had only one interview process in which these skills were sufficiently tested. Some might say that looking at past code is good, but who wrote the code? In one job, half of the people who were hired with me were let go because they could not write code, even though they had the technical skills.
4) Can the person work in the environment
My experience is that professional can work in a wide variety of environments.. They question is does the person want to work under the conditions, and will the current staff accept that person. That is why I believe in face to face interviews with co-workers much more than personality tests. Unless the test is screening for certain philosophical beliefs, such tests are a waste of time
I find interviews like these to be the most. Interviews that do not follow these guidelines tend to be a waste of time, at least for me.
So this is no use to a super villain who wishes to convert a body to diamonds.
A cynical person would say this was just another grab by the death industry to separate grieving family from their money. What is it that this company does for the $4K. A 1/4-caret cubic zirconia can be had for fifty dollars or so. The only thing that Lifegem does is to extract the base carbon from the body remains, apparently using a simple furnace. Assuming that they contract out the actual diamond production, their risk and capital equipment expense should be relatively small. I admit that the purification process is probably innovative, and development costs must be recovered, but a nearly 100 times markup. Ridiculous.
1) require real return addresseses
2) require real headers
3) require using mail hosts paid for by the advertiser
4) require real adminstrative email address
and for good measure
5) Require a real physical mail address(at least a PO box) for the advertiser and the emailer.
The only reason spam works is because the spammer steals other people resources, and then hides like a coward. And for the record, I do not consider advertisers who follow these rules spammers, just advertisers with questionable ethics.