[Article] Jane Dobson throws soiled "linen" in the incinerator
Incinerators can be quite clean if the temperature is high enough and sufficient pollution-control technology is in place. Here's one (not particularly great) example.
[Guppy06] How could anybody that's seen what a V-2 could do in WWII not believe that it would be possible to get to the moon by the end of the century?
It's one thing to launch a missile ballistically, another thing to get into orbit or beyond. Remember that Sputnik wasn't until about 1957 (?), and I'm pretty sure I remember having read that in the 1950s there was still significant skepticism in the scientific community that it would ever be possible to reach the moon.
[Article] Instead of taking electrocardiographs, doctors place heart patients in front of a fluoroscopic screen, turn on the X-rays and then, with the aid of a photoelectric cell, examine every section of the heart
Slightly wrong in detail, but right in principle. I had something like this done a few years back, but with my lungs rather than my heart. I don't remember the name of the procedure, but I had to breathe some mixture infused with a radioactive tracer while laying inside this scanning device that detected the radiation and displayed the results on a CRT in real time. I have to say it was pretty cool to be able to actually see my lungs expand and contract as I breathed. Not X-rays, but otherwise very similar, and I'm pretty sure the same technique can be used with radioactive tracers in the blood (angiography or something like that?). Echocardiograms (and prenatal ultrasound) are also in the same, uh, vein, though again the details are a bit different.
I'm having a slightly hard time picturing water coming out of a faucet at 250 degrees, given that the boiling point of H20 is 212F. Wouldn't that "superheated water" be what most of us refer to as "steam"?
bogosity alert: the article contradicts itself!
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Buried in email?
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· Score: 2
Employees waste nearly an hour a day managing work e-mails, according to a new survey.
But wait:
workers spend an average of 49 minutes per day managing e-mail....34 percent of the internal business e-mail they receive is unnecessary
Um, the reporter (or maybe it's the actual Gartner people) needs to take a remedial math class. 34% times 49 minutes is 17 minutes per day, not remotely "nearly an hour". Presumably the other time spent managing e-mail is productive. I know plenty of people who waste more than 17 minutes a day smoking or chatting by the water cooler or exchanging pleasantries on the phone or reading the sports section in the men's room. What's the big deal here?
Yes, some people use e-mail really inefficiently. I think all managers should train employees two fundamental principles of e-mail etiquette:
Never use Reply to All when a reply to the sender alone would do.
Use informative subject lines so people can see instantly whether your message requires immediate attention or not.
I expect that those two guidelines alone would eliminate 90%+ of the "wasted" time.
internal McDonald's memo on this topic intercepted
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Soybean Powered Harley
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· Score: 1
To my fellow McDonald's franchise owners and managers:
Recently, media reports have surfaced that describe diesel-powered automobiles that have been adapted to burn soybean oil, resulting in exhaust that is often said to smell "just like McDonald's fries".
I'm sure this statement concerns you as much as it does me. Certainly we all are aware of the incredibly powerful role that the smell of our hot, crispy fries plays in driving sales. On many occasions I've had customers tell me that, for example, they walked past someone in the lobby of their office building and caught a whiff of that distinctive smell of McDonald's fries -- and were thus induced to forgo the low-fat, healthful, boring lunch they had planned, and instead head to one of our fine establishments to indulge in a Big Mac (TM) or Quarter Pounder with Cheese (TM) Value Meal (TM). In fact, our internal market research indicates that variations of this so-called IFFOR (Involuntary French-Fry Olfactory Response) may account for as much as 35 percent of all McDonald's sales!
Surely you can see where this is leading. Should automotive engines be altered to generate similar-smelling compounds, our potential customers might well become desensitized to that distinctive odor, resulting in dramatic declines in sales. Perhaps even worse is the possibility that customers would begin to associate the odor of McDonald's french fries with automotive exhaust, and become actively disgusted by the thought of eating our most profitable food product.
My friends and colleagues, I firmly believe that this soy-diesel automative engine concept presents a clear and present threat to the future growth and profitability of every McDonald's restaurant. Therefore I urge you to lobby your local government representatives in the strongest possible terms to oppose any sort of support for such alternative-fuel engines. In the meantime, I will be assessing the situation with some of our nation's leading intellectual-property lawyers, in order to determine whether we may be able to patent the distinctive smell of hot McDonald's fries. Initial signs are promising; after all, if genetics companies can patent naturally occurring genetic sequences -- which is to say molecules -- what should stop us from patenting our artificially created odorand molecules as the protected intellectual property of the McDonald's Corporation? I promise to keep you apprised of any and all progress on this front.
Thank you for your continuing support, and always remember to Super Size.
Yours truly,
Harlan A. Jameson
Director of Brand Management, McDonald's Corporation
Something you can and should practice, whether or not you buy into the pair-coding concept:
Write your tests first!
Write really good, exhaustive tests. Then go write some code. Code pass all the tests? Then you're done for now. Code failed some tests? Go fix the code. Of course you can expand the test suite as you code and realize maybe there's special case you had failed to consider, or whatever.
This technique alone has made a vast difference in my productivity as a programmer. Once in a while I slip and get lazy and don't write tests first, and I invariably regret it later, because I do something dumb that would've been caught if I'd only had the tests instead of thinking to myself "this is so small and simple, I don't need to test it now".
Of course, having great tests is especially helpful as you change requirements and refactor and optimize, because you just run your test suite and if it's clean you can be confident your changes didn't bust anything.
Buy one at a newsstand, and you pay sales tax on top of the cover price (8-point-whatever percent). Buy one in a vending machine and you don't have to pay sales tax.
More than once I've seen customers get really angry at the people at newsstands or convenience stores, because the customer is convinced that the cashier must be mistaken about the sales tax. They inevitably say "I could go buy one out on the street for 75 cents -- and you're telling me it's 81 cents in here? You idiot!" I've tried to tell them to blame their legislators rather than the poor schmuck working the counter, who's just following the stupid law, but my pleas have always fallen on deaf ears.
The sun is currently near the maximum of its approximately 11-year cycle, so more auroral displays are likely in coming weeks. If this kind of stuff interests you, I suggest signing up for the e-mail alert from spaceweather.com so you get advance notice of events that are likely to trigger auroral displays.
Also, you can check out real-time satellite maps showing the extent of the auroral circle (in both N and S hemispheres) at www.sec.noaa.gov (note that the site has down -- or overwhelmed -- intermittently over the past day or so). Of course, if you live someplace dark you can just go outside and see for yourself, but if you're in a light-polluted area like me you can at least tell beforehand whether it's worth taking a drive to someplace with better skies. (Which I attempted to do last night, but unfortunately clouds thwarted my valiant attempt:-( )
Just like there are two kinds of people in the world, there are two kinds of ads: ones that try to get people to take action right away ("call now to order Frat Rock 17 -- operators are standing by!"), and ones that try to "build brand". You've described the latter.
Consider the former for a minute. The click-thru rate for TV ads may literally be zero, but there are other roughly equivalent metrics that advertisers can use. If they run an ad and the phone starts ringing off the hook, well, that's a reasonably good sign that their ad was effective.
Advertisers -- at least some advertisers -- are also much more sophisticated about print advetising than you may think. Dell is a great example; for years (before the spread of the Web) Dell used to use different 800 numbers in different publications so they could tell which ads were getting the responses. Now if you look at their ads you'll see that all the specific configs have an "e-value code" or something like that, which conveniently enough happens to tell them not just what product you want but where you saw the ad for it. It's pretty darn nearly as informative as a banner click-through number.
OK, back to the "raise the profile of your product" argument. Sure, companies use ads for branding. Unfortunately, the evidence seems to be that Web ads suck when it comes to branding. Basically, people just ignore them. And it's not surprising, since effective branding ads on TV are generally ones that set up an emotional resonance with the viewer. It's hard enough to get someone's attention, let alone play with their emotions, in a 468x60 banner.
Also, precisely because the data for Web ads is so good, it's easy to do the math and look at your customer-acquisition cost and realize that banners not be the ticket. Say you are paying a $40 CPM (cost per thousand impressions -- why it's not CPK, I don't know) and get a 0.2% clickthrough. That means it costs $20 for every person you get to page one of your Web site. Maybe you convert one in ten of those folks. So each new customer just cost you $200 to acquire. At prices like that, you might well make the decision that it would be cheaper to, say, send a door-to-door salesperson to try to sign up new customers. (For comparison, even AOL with its incessant streams of CD-ROMs has traditionally a customer acquisition cost of around $30, IIRC. And I'm pretty sure that $200 is significantly more than the profit margin on almost any mainstream PC or consumer-electronics device.)
This isn't to say that Web advertising won't be successful in some form, someday. But banner ads as we know them today are pretty clearly inadequate. (The cynic in me says the Web is just not a medium that really allows ads in the forms we are familiar with them, because people mostly use the Web with a goal-oriented mentality rather than a "sit back and entertain me" frame of mind. Of course, that may not last forever either.)
...I hear the company will offer a dot that you attach to the end of your male member to control the mouse cursor. Particularly useful for hands-free operation of porn sites. Gives a whole new meaning to "pointing device" if you ask me:-)
The reason you probably never experienced the vanishing effect it is that it only happens if your eyes are perfectly fixated on an object, and unfortunately even your example of starting at the dog doesn't qualify. The "fade to grey" you describe was probably psychosomatic, or at least an example of suggestion -- you saw what you wanted to, or thought, you should see.
It's true that if an object doesn't move around on the retina it vanishes. But your eye is constantly making infinitesmal adjustments, called micronystagmus (probably the plural is actually micronystagmi), that are totally unconscious and imperceptible. These adjustments occur on the order of 50 times per second over a distance of about 1 minute of arc. Try as you might to stare down a dog (or whatever), micronystagmus will maintain enough jitter to keep the neurons from "tiring out", and you therefore wouldn't see things fade out to gray.
The way this effect is actually observed is to attach specially constructed contact-lens-like objects directly to the eyeball so that the visual target moves precisely in conjunction with the pupil in spite of micronystagmus.
The aftereffect you describe is, in fact, a demonstration of the fact that micronystagmus is occurring. Probably everybody has done that experiment where you look at a big red square for a while and then look over to a blank white sheet and see a green afterimage. But in order for that to happen, you had to be staring directly at the red square for a period of time long enough to fatigue certain neurons -- yet the red square didn't disappear while you were staring at it, did it?
It always makes me laugh to come back to the States after a trip to Europe, where in many countries you see not just full nudity but pretty graphic sex on television, people sunbathing nude, ads for hard alcohol on TV, even legal prostitution and drugs in some places. Funny how it's here in the States, not in Europe, that kids run around shooting each other in schools...
Lest you think I'm disagree, I concur that parents should have "the ability to monitor and control" what their kids watch. My parents did this many years ago without a v-chip: If they didn't like what I watched, they turned off the set.
...it is the responsibility of we USAians to protect the civil liberties of our good friends to the north. Therefore we must construct large arrays of high-power TV transmitters right along the border, sending signals that are NOT v-chip enabled, so that Canadian kiddies can exercise their Constitutional (well, whatever) rights to consume all the violent and sexual programming they want, regardless of their parents' futile attempts to master the v-chip technology.
It is extremely important that we take these efforts to keep the Candians glued to their TV, you understand, so they won't react quickly when we finally decide to send the Marines across the border, plant the Stars and Stripes, and declare Canada the 51st state of the Union. (Everywhere except Quebec, of course, since nobody wants to deal with a bunch of secessionists:-)
Mmmm, excuse me while I go extract my tongue from my cheek...
The clone will not be the genetically unique mixture of two parents, but an exact replica of only one person.
Well, it won't be genetically unique, but then neither are natural identical twins, so I don't see how that has any bearing on "inherent dignity". Of course, the clone will be a mixture of two parents: the parents of the person who supplied the cell that was cloned.
How do we view ourselves if our sole reason for existence is not love, but utility?
How is this any different from the effects of fertilization techniques that infertile couples use to bear children? Why assume that the motive is "utility" rather than "love"?
How do we make sense of our identity within a family?
There are plenty of problems in this arena in a culture where divorce, remarriage, adoption, and so forth is rife.
If a doctor clones himself, and the clone decides that he wants to be an artist instead, the doctor will consider his "son" (or daughter) to be defective somehow.
Like this doesn't happen with naturally conceived kids either. (If you think it's not a big deal when it comes to career choice, replace "doctor" with "heterosexual" and "artist" with "homosexual" in the sentence above.) Cloning might intensify the level of identification with the offspring and the sense of letdown when it doesn't turn out the way the parents expected, but kids not turning out the way parents expected is as old as humanity itself.
...part of the problem. So if you really believe there are too many people on the planet, why don't you do all us some good by ending your own feeble existence.
Oh, you say, I'm special? When you said there were too many people, I guess you meant too many other people. It's OK if 5 out of 6 people worldwide were to die, as long as none of those 5 out of 6 were you, your family, your friends, etc.
You wrote: Let's maybe think about issues like overpopulation, disease, and poverty before we start artificially create people to suffer from these problems.
How does cloning have anything special to do with overpopulation? Fertilization clinics that help infertile couples have kids have precisely the same effect. For that matter, so does sex without contraception. And I feel pretty confident in saying that there are a lot more people worldwide who practice sex without contraception than practice human cloning. If you want to make a difference, focus on the real issue.
Liberal theory has it that the government has the obligation to create market share for socially responsible products.
I find that position laughable if you believe at all in individual freedom. Why should government decide what's "socially responsible" rather than individual citizens? The "create market share" argument implies that government should subsidize tofu to help wean Americans off Big Macs. And provide tax relief for purchasing the Abdominizer.
Smoking is not a great example, since it involuntarily affects people who choose not to participate in that activity. As for your father's position that more people would go out to see live music, it should be easy to determine whether that's true or not based on California's decision to outlaw smoking in basically all public places including bars. Incidentally, I'm a non-smoker and I truly despise smoking, but I don't see how it's my (or the government's) place to tell an individual (e.g. a bar proprietor) how he can or cannot use his private property. Anyway, who's to say that listening to live music is more "socially responsible" than, say, reading the classics of literature (not that that's what people who stay away from bars because of smoke are *really* doing on Saturday night -- my point being that I don't trust the government to make that "socially responsible" value judgment for me).
The Microsoft case is not a good example either, since PC makers probably would be falling all over themselves to offer it if M$ hadn't, in essence, said "do it and we'll break your kneecaps". I certainly don't think there's some market monopolist telling Dell et al. that it damn well better not sell censorware if it wants to keep its OS license.
Another example of government sticking its nose where it shouldn't be. If there were really a demand for computers with censorware preinstalled, don't you think Dell et al. would be falling over themselves to provide it?
I would love it if my congresspeople (one of whom is Maria Cantwell, formerly of RealNetworks, and presumably not computer-illiterate) would actually *use* e-mail to help stay in touch with constituents. I mean, it would be awesome to get a little weekly message that says "Hey folks, here's what we accomplished this week, and here are the things I voted on and why I voted the way I did."
in the U.S., it's the other way around: your congresspeople can send you all the crap they want for free, but you have to pay (it's up to $0.34 as of 1/1/01, btw) to send stuff to them. The Canadian system seems quite logical, I must say!
The end result id natural language programming. You literally tell the computer what you want it to do, and its amazing compiler will produce perfect code.
Bzzt, wrong. Two big reasons. First is that programming is not about "telling the computer what you want it to do", unless you're writing trivial macros. It requires the ability to logically analyze a problem, examine how its pieces fit together, design data structures and procedural abstractions (or objects if you prefer that metaphor) that can solve the problem, and so on. Certainly toolkits, frameworks, and preexisting modules can make the implementation of many of these tasks easier (you don't have to write string-manipulation libraries from the ground up these days), but it doesn't make the analytical stages any simpler. People with the requisite skills to understand the actual dynamics of a difficult systems problem are going to continue to be very hard to find unless something drastic changes.
Second is that natural language is not only badly suited for this kind of task, but that most people employ natural language poorly. It's poorly suited because it's hugely imprecise and depends tremendously on context. Now, on the one hand you could argue "a truly intelligent computer will understand the context I mean and do what I want". But this is much, much harder than simply understanding natural language. Even humans are not very good at this task unless they share similar demographics/backgrounds/experience/culture. (Try holding a conversation on a complex topic with someone who speaks your language but is from a different culture, class, and part of the world. Alternately, try just telling your administrative assistant what you want him/her to do -- for a task you've never discussed before -- and see whether he/she does it the way you'd expect.)
It's worth noting that a large proportion of the population is, in practice, only marginally literate. They may be able to read and "write", but that doesn't mean they can express themselves coherently. I attended an Ivy League university and I can readily attest that a significant proportion of my supposedly elite peers had a hard time putting together a well-constructed paragraph, let alone a cogent essay. And even the best writers are likely to miss or leave out critical details; it's as hard to anticipate how to handle every possible exception case in writing as it is in code.
Perhaps speech recognition is the answer? Not likely. Just read a totally literal transcript of a conversation sometime and you will see what I mean. Human speech is ridiculously sloppy and imprecise, but we happen to be very good at using shared knowledge and cultural standards to correct for this.
Here is Nielsen's actual commentary on this topic. As he points out, "Hypertext should not be used to segment a long linear story into multiple pages...Proper hypertext structure is not a single flow 'continued on page 2'."
Every additional dependent you have gives you an additional $2,800 exemption. Then there's additional stuff like the Earned Income Tax Credit...
It's not quite true that anyone who makes $25k pays no federal income tax. But if you are, say, married with two kids and make $25k, you probably pay none or next to none (I haven't actually done the math).
Your description of tiered tax rates is correct, but unfortunately they are far from the only factor to determine the amount of income tax you pay. On the lower end of the income scale, the way the Earned Income Tax Credit phases out can have precisely the effect the original poster indicates: You make money beyond a certain threshold, and suddenly your credits are gone; you actually pay more total tax than you would've if you made $1 less. At the high end of the scale, there are weird effects from things like deduction limitations (though I don't think this can actually cause a marginal rate over 100%) and especially the Alternative Minimum Tax. The AMT is particularly nasty; under some circumstances, it is actually possible that your tax bill will be larger than your actual income. I've known people who have found themselves in situations like this:
Your stock options vested, and you exercised 10,000 shares at a strike price of $1/share, and held those shares rather than sell them immediately.
Now, for purposes of the AMT, your income from the option exercise is defined as the difference between the price you paid ($1 in this case) and the price of the stock on the day you exercised the options. So if the stock was, say, AMZN trading at $50/share a year ago, your AMT income from those 10,000 options was $490,000. Your tax on that amount will be maybe $150,000. Note, however, that you never actually made any money. Remember, I said you held the shares. And they are now worth $10 -- or about $90,000 more than you paid for them. Substantially less than your tax liability. Oops. What happened is you got taxed on paper gains that you never actually realized.
Yes, the tax law really does work this way. Here is a story The Standard did on a variation of this problem.
If the problem is that you might steal existing clients or use existing technology at a competitor, I don't see why a non-compete would be necessary at all. This kind of stuff should easily be covered by a standard non-disclosure agreement, which simply says you can't use information proprietary to the company you used to work for at any other companies you might work for in the future. But it doesn't put a blanket restriction on your ability to get a job...
I didn't realize that "homosexual" derived from the Greek root. (The fact that the alternative is "hereto-" should have clued me in -- duh! -- but I didn't think that far ahead, and I shot myself in the foot trying to be cute.)
As for straight women being homosexual by my botched definition, I suppose that would be true, but I figured that it was probably one of those words coined by men in an era when they didn't really consider women peers, and then it ended up being applied to them later.
Slashdot Mirror
[Article] Atoms are bombarded by electrons and other minute projectiles, electrically excited in this way and made to glow.
Isn't that a reasonable if simplified description of how fluorescent and neon lights work?
[Article] Jane Dobson throws soiled "linen" in the incinerator
Incinerators can be quite clean if the temperature is high enough and sufficient pollution-control technology is in place. Here's one (not particularly great) example.
[Guppy06] How could anybody that's seen what a V-2 could do in WWII not believe that it would be possible to get to the moon by the end of the century?
It's one thing to launch a missile ballistically, another thing to get into orbit or beyond. Remember that Sputnik wasn't until about 1957 (?), and I'm pretty sure I remember having read that in the 1950s there was still significant skepticism in the scientific community that it would ever be possible to reach the moon.
[Article] Instead of taking electrocardiographs, doctors place heart patients in front of a fluoroscopic screen, turn on the X-rays and then, with the aid of a photoelectric cell, examine every section of the heart
Slightly wrong in detail, but right in principle. I had something like this done a few years back, but with my lungs rather than my heart. I don't remember the name of the procedure, but I had to breathe some mixture infused with a radioactive tracer while laying inside this scanning device that detected the radiation and displayed the results on a CRT in real time. I have to say it was pretty cool to be able to actually see my lungs expand and contract as I breathed. Not X-rays, but otherwise very similar, and I'm pretty sure the same technique can be used with radioactive tracers in the blood (angiography or something like that?). Echocardiograms (and prenatal ultrasound) are also in the same, uh, vein, though again the details are a bit different.
I'm having a slightly hard time picturing water coming out of a faucet at 250 degrees, given that the boiling point of H20 is 212F. Wouldn't that "superheated water" be what most of us refer to as "steam"?
But wait:
workers spend an average of 49 minutes per day managing e-mail....34 percent of the internal business e-mail they receive is unnecessary
Um, the reporter (or maybe it's the actual Gartner people) needs to take a remedial math class. 34% times 49 minutes is 17 minutes per day, not remotely "nearly an hour". Presumably the other time spent managing e-mail is productive. I know plenty of people who waste more than 17 minutes a day smoking or chatting by the water cooler or exchanging pleasantries on the phone or reading the sports section in the men's room. What's the big deal here?
Yes, some people use e-mail really inefficiently. I think all managers should train employees two fundamental principles of e-mail etiquette:
I expect that those two guidelines alone would eliminate 90%+ of the "wasted" time.
Recently, media reports have surfaced that describe diesel-powered automobiles that have been adapted to burn soybean oil, resulting in exhaust that is often said to smell "just like McDonald's fries".
I'm sure this statement concerns you as much as it does me. Certainly we all are aware of the incredibly powerful role that the smell of our hot, crispy fries plays in driving sales. On many occasions I've had customers tell me that, for example, they walked past someone in the lobby of their office building and caught a whiff of that distinctive smell of McDonald's fries -- and were thus induced to forgo the low-fat, healthful, boring lunch they had planned, and instead head to one of our fine establishments to indulge in a Big Mac (TM) or Quarter Pounder with Cheese (TM) Value Meal (TM). In fact, our internal market research indicates that variations of this so-called IFFOR (Involuntary French-Fry Olfactory Response) may account for as much as 35 percent of all McDonald's sales!
Surely you can see where this is leading. Should automotive engines be altered to generate similar-smelling compounds, our potential customers might well become desensitized to that distinctive odor, resulting in dramatic declines in sales. Perhaps even worse is the possibility that customers would begin to associate the odor of McDonald's french fries with automotive exhaust, and become actively disgusted by the thought of eating our most profitable food product.
My friends and colleagues, I firmly believe that this soy-diesel automative engine concept presents a clear and present threat to the future growth and profitability of every McDonald's restaurant. Therefore I urge you to lobby your local government representatives in the strongest possible terms to oppose any sort of support for such alternative-fuel engines. In the meantime, I will be assessing the situation with some of our nation's leading intellectual-property lawyers, in order to determine whether we may be able to patent the distinctive smell of hot McDonald's fries. Initial signs are promising; after all, if genetics companies can patent naturally occurring genetic sequences -- which is to say molecules -- what should stop us from patenting our artificially created odorand molecules as the protected intellectual property of the McDonald's Corporation? I promise to keep you apprised of any and all progress on this front.
Thank you for your continuing support, and always remember to Super Size.
Yours truly,
Harlan A. Jameson
Director of Brand Management, McDonald's Corporation
Write your tests first!
Write really good, exhaustive tests. Then go write some code. Code pass all the tests? Then you're done for now. Code failed some tests? Go fix the code. Of course you can expand the test suite as you code and realize maybe there's special case you had failed to consider, or whatever.
This technique alone has made a vast difference in my productivity as a programmer. Once in a while I slip and get lazy and don't write tests first, and I invariably regret it later, because I do something dumb that would've been caught if I'd only had the tests instead of thinking to myself "this is so small and simple, I don't need to test it now".
Of course, having great tests is especially helpful as you change requirements and refactor and optimize, because you just run your test suite and if it's clean you can be confident your changes didn't bust anything.
More than once I've seen customers get really angry at the people at newsstands or convenience stores, because the customer is convinced that the cashier must be mistaken about the sales tax. They inevitably say "I could go buy one out on the street for 75 cents -- and you're telling me it's 81 cents in here? You idiot!" I've tried to tell them to blame their legislators rather than the poor schmuck working the counter, who's just following the stupid law, but my pleas have always fallen on deaf ears.
A friend of a friend recently bought a 911.
Friend #1 to Friend #2: "Do chicks like your new car?"
Friend #2 to Friend #1: "Other guys notice my new car. Chicks don't notice."
Hee hee...
Also, you can check out real-time satellite maps showing the extent of the auroral circle (in both N and S hemispheres) at www.sec.noaa.gov (note that the site has down -- or overwhelmed -- intermittently over the past day or so). Of course, if you live someplace dark you can just go outside and see for yourself, but if you're in a light-polluted area like me you can at least tell beforehand whether it's worth taking a drive to someplace with better skies. (Which I attempted to do last night, but unfortunately clouds thwarted my valiant attempt :-( )
Consider the former for a minute. The click-thru rate for TV ads may literally be zero, but there are other roughly equivalent metrics that advertisers can use. If they run an ad and the phone starts ringing off the hook, well, that's a reasonably good sign that their ad was effective.
Advertisers -- at least some advertisers -- are also much more sophisticated about print advetising than you may think. Dell is a great example; for years (before the spread of the Web) Dell used to use different 800 numbers in different publications so they could tell which ads were getting the responses. Now if you look at their ads you'll see that all the specific configs have an "e-value code" or something like that, which conveniently enough happens to tell them not just what product you want but where you saw the ad for it. It's pretty darn nearly as informative as a banner click-through number.
OK, back to the "raise the profile of your product" argument. Sure, companies use ads for branding. Unfortunately, the evidence seems to be that Web ads suck when it comes to branding. Basically, people just ignore them. And it's not surprising, since effective branding ads on TV are generally ones that set up an emotional resonance with the viewer. It's hard enough to get someone's attention, let alone play with their emotions, in a 468x60 banner.
Also, precisely because the data for Web ads is so good, it's easy to do the math and look at your customer-acquisition cost and realize that banners not be the ticket. Say you are paying a $40 CPM (cost per thousand impressions -- why it's not CPK, I don't know) and get a 0.2% clickthrough. That means it costs $20 for every person you get to page one of your Web site. Maybe you convert one in ten of those folks. So each new customer just cost you $200 to acquire. At prices like that, you might well make the decision that it would be cheaper to, say, send a door-to-door salesperson to try to sign up new customers. (For comparison, even AOL with its incessant streams of CD-ROMs has traditionally a customer acquisition cost of around $30, IIRC. And I'm pretty sure that $200 is significantly more than the profit margin on almost any mainstream PC or consumer-electronics device.)
This isn't to say that Web advertising won't be successful in some form, someday. But banner ads as we know them today are pretty clearly inadequate. (The cynic in me says the Web is just not a medium that really allows ads in the forms we are familiar with them, because people mostly use the Web with a goal-oriented mentality rather than a "sit back and entertain me" frame of mind. Of course, that may not last forever either.)
...I hear the company will offer a dot that you attach to the end of your male member to control the mouse cursor. Particularly useful for hands-free operation of porn sites. Gives a whole new meaning to "pointing device" if you ask me :-)
It's true that if an object doesn't move around on the retina it vanishes. But your eye is constantly making infinitesmal adjustments, called micronystagmus (probably the plural is actually micronystagmi), that are totally unconscious and imperceptible. These adjustments occur on the order of 50 times per second over a distance of about 1 minute of arc. Try as you might to stare down a dog (or whatever), micronystagmus will maintain enough jitter to keep the neurons from "tiring out", and you therefore wouldn't see things fade out to gray.
The way this effect is actually observed is to attach specially constructed contact-lens-like objects directly to the eyeball so that the visual target moves precisely in conjunction with the pupil in spite of micronystagmus.
The aftereffect you describe is, in fact, a demonstration of the fact that micronystagmus is occurring. Probably everybody has done that experiment where you look at a big red square for a while and then look over to a blank white sheet and see a green afterimage. But in order for that to happen, you had to be staring directly at the red square for a period of time long enough to fatigue certain neurons -- yet the red square didn't disappear while you were staring at it, did it?
Lest you think I'm disagree, I concur that parents should have "the ability to monitor and control" what their kids watch. My parents did this many years ago without a v-chip: If they didn't like what I watched, they turned off the set.
It is extremely important that we take these efforts to keep the Candians glued to their TV, you understand, so they won't react quickly when we finally decide to send the Marines across the border, plant the Stars and Stripes, and declare Canada the 51st state of the Union. (Everywhere except Quebec, of course, since nobody wants to deal with a bunch of secessionists :-)
Mmmm, excuse me while I go extract my tongue from my cheek...
Well, it won't be genetically unique, but then neither are natural identical twins, so I don't see how that has any bearing on "inherent dignity". Of course, the clone will be a mixture of two parents: the parents of the person who supplied the cell that was cloned.
How do we view ourselves if our sole reason for existence is not love, but utility?
How is this any different from the effects of fertilization techniques that infertile couples use to bear children? Why assume that the motive is "utility" rather than "love"?
How do we make sense of our identity within a family?
There are plenty of problems in this arena in a culture where divorce, remarriage, adoption, and so forth is rife.
If a doctor clones himself, and the clone decides that he wants to be an artist instead, the doctor will consider his "son" (or daughter) to be defective somehow.
Like this doesn't happen with naturally conceived kids either. (If you think it's not a big deal when it comes to career choice, replace "doctor" with "heterosexual" and "artist" with "homosexual" in the sentence above.) Cloning might intensify the level of identification with the offspring and the sense of letdown when it doesn't turn out the way the parents expected, but kids not turning out the way parents expected is as old as humanity itself.
Oh, you say, I'm special? When you said there were too many people, I guess you meant too many other people. It's OK if 5 out of 6 people worldwide were to die, as long as none of those 5 out of 6 were you, your family, your friends, etc.
You wrote: Let's maybe think about issues like overpopulation, disease, and poverty before we start artificially create people to suffer from these problems.
How does cloning have anything special to do with overpopulation? Fertilization clinics that help infertile couples have kids have precisely the same effect. For that matter, so does sex without contraception. And I feel pretty confident in saying that there are a lot more people worldwide who practice sex without contraception than practice human cloning. If you want to make a difference, focus on the real issue.
I find that position laughable if you believe at all in individual freedom. Why should government decide what's "socially responsible" rather than individual citizens? The "create market share" argument implies that government should subsidize tofu to help wean Americans off Big Macs. And provide tax relief for purchasing the Abdominizer.
Smoking is not a great example, since it involuntarily affects people who choose not to participate in that activity. As for your father's position that more people would go out to see live music, it should be easy to determine whether that's true or not based on California's decision to outlaw smoking in basically all public places including bars. Incidentally, I'm a non-smoker and I truly despise smoking, but I don't see how it's my (or the government's) place to tell an individual (e.g. a bar proprietor) how he can or cannot use his private property. Anyway, who's to say that listening to live music is more "socially responsible" than, say, reading the classics of literature (not that that's what people who stay away from bars because of smoke are *really* doing on Saturday night -- my point being that I don't trust the government to make that "socially responsible" value judgment for me).
The Microsoft case is not a good example either, since PC makers probably would be falling all over themselves to offer it if M$ hadn't, in essence, said "do it and we'll break your kneecaps". I certainly don't think there's some market monopolist telling Dell et al. that it damn well better not sell censorware if it wants to keep its OS license.
Another example of government sticking its nose where it shouldn't be. If there were really a demand for computers with censorware preinstalled, don't you think Dell et al. would be falling over themselves to provide it?
I would love it if my congresspeople (one of whom is Maria Cantwell, formerly of RealNetworks, and presumably not computer-illiterate) would actually *use* e-mail to help stay in touch with constituents. I mean, it would be awesome to get a little weekly message that says "Hey folks, here's what we accomplished this week, and here are the things I voted on and why I voted the way I did."
in the U.S., it's the other way around: your congresspeople can send you all the crap they want for free, but you have to pay (it's up to $0.34 as of 1/1/01, btw) to send stuff to them. The Canadian system seems quite logical, I must say!
Bzzt, wrong. Two big reasons. First is that programming is not about "telling the computer what you want it to do", unless you're writing trivial macros. It requires the ability to logically analyze a problem, examine how its pieces fit together, design data structures and procedural abstractions (or objects if you prefer that metaphor) that can solve the problem, and so on. Certainly toolkits, frameworks, and preexisting modules can make the implementation of many of these tasks easier (you don't have to write string-manipulation libraries from the ground up these days), but it doesn't make the analytical stages any simpler. People with the requisite skills to understand the actual dynamics of a difficult systems problem are going to continue to be very hard to find unless something drastic changes.
Second is that natural language is not only badly suited for this kind of task, but that most people employ natural language poorly. It's poorly suited because it's hugely imprecise and depends tremendously on context. Now, on the one hand you could argue "a truly intelligent computer will understand the context I mean and do what I want". But this is much, much harder than simply understanding natural language. Even humans are not very good at this task unless they share similar demographics/backgrounds/experience/culture. (Try holding a conversation on a complex topic with someone who speaks your language but is from a different culture, class, and part of the world. Alternately, try just telling your administrative assistant what you want him/her to do -- for a task you've never discussed before -- and see whether he/she does it the way you'd expect.)
It's worth noting that a large proportion of the population is, in practice, only marginally literate. They may be able to read and "write", but that doesn't mean they can express themselves coherently. I attended an Ivy League university and I can readily attest that a significant proportion of my supposedly elite peers had a hard time putting together a well-constructed paragraph, let alone a cogent essay. And even the best writers are likely to miss or leave out critical details; it's as hard to anticipate how to handle every possible exception case in writing as it is in code.
Perhaps speech recognition is the answer? Not likely. Just read a totally literal transcript of a conversation sometime and you will see what I mean. Human speech is ridiculously sloppy and imprecise, but we happen to be very good at using shared knowledge and cultural standards to correct for this.
Here is Nielsen's actual commentary on this topic. As he points out, "Hypertext should not be used to segment a long linear story into multiple pages...Proper hypertext structure is not a single flow 'continued on page 2'."
It's not quite true that anyone who makes $25k pays no federal income tax. But if you are, say, married with two kids and make $25k, you probably pay none or next to none (I haven't actually done the math).
Your stock options vested, and you exercised 10,000 shares at a strike price of $1/share, and held those shares rather than sell them immediately.
Now, for purposes of the AMT, your income from the option exercise is defined as the difference between the price you paid ($1 in this case) and the price of the stock on the day you exercised the options. So if the stock was, say, AMZN trading at $50/share a year ago, your AMT income from those 10,000 options was $490,000. Your tax on that amount will be maybe $150,000. Note, however, that you never actually made any money. Remember, I said you held the shares. And they are now worth $10 -- or about $90,000 more than you paid for them. Substantially less than your tax liability. Oops. What happened is you got taxed on paper gains that you never actually realized.
Yes, the tax law really does work this way. Here is a story The Standard did on a variation of this problem.
If the problem is that you might steal existing clients or use existing technology at a competitor, I don't see why a non-compete would be necessary at all. This kind of stuff should easily be covered by a standard non-disclosure agreement, which simply says you can't use information proprietary to the company you used to work for at any other companies you might work for in the future. But it doesn't put a blanket restriction on your ability to get a job...
As for straight women being homosexual by my botched definition, I suppose that would be true, but I figured that it was probably one of those words coined by men in an era when they didn't really consider women peers, and then it ended up being applied to them later.