True, there's not much to worry about. The North Pole melting will just change the salinity of the North Atlantic, causing the Gulf Stream to stop. This will in turn plunge Europe and possibly North America into another Ice Age.
The upper Great Lakes will be OK, since the Chicago river has already been turned around, draining Lake Michigan into the Illinois River. The Erie Canal might be used for draining Lake Ontario, so only relatively minor adjustments are needed.
You do of course realize that the Reagan administration changed the way "discouraged" workers were counted, or rather no longer counted in the unemployment figures.
And another interesting tidbit from your data is this:
4.0% Financial Activities
Now we know why Greenspan and the rest of the big money crowd are so confident about the ecomony. They still have jobs.
If we can save money shipping 70K IT jobs offshore, think how much shipping off those 1M+ CEO jobs will save!
Right. Tell that to the 40-year-old computer scientist with 15+ years of experience and a huge chunk of their life invested in CS who has been unemployed for a year, because their skill set wasn't the exact right match to get past HR.
Bow Wow Wow recorded the song "C30, C60, C90, Go" in the early 80's about that very topic. The song encouraged people to tape songs off of the radio rather than buying (unaffordable) records.
Except remember that the books are edited, to
eliminate some of the "less funny" strips. You
don't get that chronological feel when you
read the books. Another thing the books don't give you is the date published. Many times I'd like
to know, especially when I'm trying to explain
the jokes to my kids.
("Well you see, the air traffic controllers union
was called PATCO, and Reagan fired them when they
went on strike, so that's why Breathed gave the elves union
the name PETCO...")
Don't blame Crick for how Franklin was treated. IIRC, he didn't know where the X-Ray pictures came from. And when Watson was publishing The Double Helix, he made Watson add a little postscript at the end, supposedly apologizing for the caracature "Rosie", which is how Watson described her in the main part of the book. But if you read his "re-appraisal", it sounds insincere at best.
And what is even more galling about the book is that Franklin had died (ovarian cancer) a few years earlier, and so could not defend herself. It wasn't until the 1970's, when some feminist researchers started digging, did the details start to emerge.
It's certainly true that Franklin hadn't determined the structure correctly, but remember that she was virtually isolated in Oxford (thanks mostly to her personality conflicts with Maurice Wilkins.)
Also, remember that Wilkins gave (without her knowledge or permission) Franklin's pictures to Watson. Without those pictures, it might have taken Watson longer to put the pieces together, and he wouldn't have had Franklin's high-quality (far better than Watson could do himself) pictures to verify the correctness of the structure. In that time period Franklin may have been able to deduce the structure herself, or perhaps Pauling would have gotten it right.
The real tragedy is the way Watson treated Franklin, both in his scientific work and in his writings. Watson has become the poster boy for "the end justifies the means." I can't recall ever being more disappointed in a book than I was in The Double Helix.
The fact that LexisNexis and such did a lot of work is not the point. The point is that they are doing this with public domain works, and may (I don't know for sure) have gotten tax dollars to do this. It's apparent that LexisNexis provides a valuable value-added service. Any additional works (such as the head notes you mention) are obviously copyrightable and should definitely be a premium service.
But if they did get tax dollars to digitize the cases, then there ought so be some form of public access. It doesn't need to be a highly-refined search engine. It doesn't need to include those valuable head notes. But there should be some form of electronic access.
Now if I'm mistaken and they digitized all these documents at their own expense, then sure, they have the right to restrict access however they please.
There's actually little reason for your skills portfolio to become less valuable over time. Let me give you example. When I started in IT (1996), HTML and Perl CGI were in-demand skills. Very few people had them, lots of people wanted them, those that did have them were well paid for them by those who wanted them. Nowadays, of course, it's difficult to find someone who doesn't have HTML, and Perl CGI isn't really in demand anymore now that PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP et al are used.
But, I'm not unemployed, because I kept my skills up to date (FWIW, I do mission-critical OLTP work for investment banks). Someday, that'll be obsolete too - but I'm not even worried slightly, in 5 years I'll have a whole new skill set, and I'll still be ahead of the curve.
I certainly hope for your sake that you're correct, but my experience through 7 months of unemployment was that you have got to have years of job experience with that new skill set, or they won't even consider you, no matter what the rest of your experience is.
Also, when do you have the time to acquire that new skill set? Are you doing this during your 40-hour work week? Or are you doing this on your time. I like my IT work, but I have other interests, too. Also, is the company playing for those $3000 training classes? Mine sure didn't. And how are you applying all these new skills to the legacy projects that you've been assigned? Or do you simply refuse to do legacy work?
My point is that everyone does not get the same opportunities to advance their skill sets. I have never turned down the oportunity to work on a new technology, but I have rarely gotten those opportunities. You could claim (perhaps rightly) that I should have been more demanding, but not everyone has the confidence to be able to do that.
Um, I don't mean to be blunt (well, actually I do), but what planet are you on?
I have 14 years experience, (7 UNIX C/C++, 4 Perl, SQL, and a bunch of other languages along with a Sun Java 2 Programmer cert), a B.S.E.E. and a M.S.C.S. from Wash. U. in St. Louis, and I spent 8 months job hunting after my company shut down their facility here. I finally did get a job, but I had to take a 20% pay cut, and the benefits are almost non-existent.
You say they would MUCH rather hire qualified American workers. But they get to define what qualified means. Their meaning of qualified is that you have to have 3 (or more) years of job experience using the exact tools and programming environment that they are using. Pity the worker who spent their work time doing their job instead of looking for the latest technologies so they could pad their resume. And of course, if those 3 years of experience are your only 3 years, so much the better, because then they can lowball the salary. And then if you are an H1-B indentured servant, they can lowball it even more.
It's very simple. Companies don't want to train people, because the less you know, the less mobile you are. And a resume with 17 different skills on it is meaningless of you don't have the exact 5 they are looking for.
I'll believe there's a shortage of qualified workers when I start getting calls from employment agencies again.
A distubing parallel to this is the story of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who almost singlehandedly destroyed Soviet biological science fron the 1940's to the 1960's. In Lysenko's view, plants and animals (and by extension people) had to be infinitely pliable by changes in their environment and Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution must be simply the result of sick capitalist propaganda. This fit in quite well with Stalin's beliefs, and so Lysenko and his cronies took over Russian genetics and agriculture, exiled or put to death the best Soviet scientists, and caused an econmic catastrophe which contributed to the fall of the USSR.
The issue is not conservative vs. liberal, Democratic vs. Republican, or Western vs. Soviet. It is ideology vs. facts. It is a bad idea to only listen to the facts that support your preconceived notions. And any kind of ideological litmus test to these positions of governmental authority and review is another really bad idea. We could very well have another Lysenko offstage, ready to pounce.
> The leading cause of death on the planet today is good ol' malaria. Mosquito control with DDT could solve that problem - and no, it wouldn't require spraying massive amounts of tens of millions of pounds on food crops, just a few hundred thousand pounds a year.
> "B-b-b-ut DDT is bad! The enviros said so!" - really? The evidence [slashdot.org] for that is highly questionable.
> DDT also help with another up-and-coming [foxnews.com] disease, too.
Remember that DDT was originally thought to be this amazing wonder product, that killed mosquitos but caused no long term environmental damage. IIRC, the inventors won a Nobel Prize for it.
However, the main problem with DDT was the buildup of the chemical in top-of-the-food-web animals, especially birds. The problem was not the birds themselves, but the eggs. I remember lots of pictures of eggs with paper-thin shells. The birds would sit on them in their normal nesting behavior, and the weight of the bird would break the shell.
The whooping crane and California condor were down to a few mating pairs. The bald eagle was severely threatened. Other large birds of prey also suffered with DDT. Though your Fox source will deny it, there is plenty of evidence about this, one link being this one.
Now that being said, it's possible that small, limited uses of DDT might be appropriate in emergencies. However, we cannot go back to the indiscrimate use that was prevalent in the '50's. Not unless we want to start killing the big birds again.
Please, get your science from sources other than Faux News and the Cato Institute, OK?
Slashdot Mirror
When a blimp crashed on a roof a few years ago, I always envisioned the people on the roof looking up and shouting, "Look Out! Walk for your lives!"
Um, the derivative of x^2 is 2x .
Your friendly neighborhood pedant.
True, there's not much to worry about. The North Pole melting will just change the salinity of the North Atlantic, causing the Gulf Stream to stop. This will in turn plunge Europe and possibly North America into another Ice Age.
No worries....
The upper Great Lakes will be OK, since the Chicago river has already been turned around, draining Lake Michigan into the Illinois River. The Erie Canal might be used for draining Lake Ontario, so only relatively minor adjustments are needed.
At least until the glaciers start advancing.
It will help you become a bangup conference speaker.
Check out Damian Conway's Perl-in-Latim module Lingua::Romana::Perligata here.
You do of course realize that the Reagan administration changed the way "discouraged" workers were counted, or rather no longer counted in the unemployment figures.
And another interesting tidbit from your data is this:
4.0% Financial ActivitiesNow we know why Greenspan and the rest of the big money crowd are so confident about the ecomony. They still have jobs.
If we can save money shipping 70K IT jobs offshore, think how much shipping off those 1M+ CEO jobs will save!
Right. Tell that to the 40-year-old computer scientist with 15+ years of experience and a huge chunk of their life invested in CS who has been unemployed for a year, because their skill set wasn't the exact right match to get past HR.
Not everyone fits your stereotype.
So then the good ol' U. S. of A. should be scaring you something fierce.
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do learn history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
I can't claim originality for that, but I can't find the source, either.
BBC
Why it'd be "My Precious", of course.
Next!
You *did* see the SNL skit where the steroid-enhanced weightlifter ended up tearing his arms off? Right?
Bow Wow Wow recorded the song "C30, C60, C90, Go" in the early 80's about that very topic. The song encouraged people to tape songs off of the radio rather than buying (unaffordable) records.
I'm pretty sure it's "The Hotel New Hampshire"
Except remember that the books are edited, to eliminate some of the "less funny" strips. You don't get that chronological feel when you read the books. Another thing the books don't give you is the date published. Many times I'd like to know, especially when I'm trying to explain the jokes to my kids.
("Well you see, the air traffic controllers union was called PATCO, and Reagan fired them when they went on strike, so that's why Breathed gave the elves union the name PETCO...")
Just try to explain the 80's to an 11-year old.
That was my first reaction, too. However, it was the questioner who said he had cancer, not Niven.
Don't blame Crick for how Franklin was treated. IIRC, he didn't know where the X-Ray pictures came from. And when Watson was publishing The Double Helix, he made Watson add a little postscript at the end, supposedly apologizing for the caracature "Rosie", which is how Watson described her in the main part of the book. But if you read his "re-appraisal", it sounds insincere at best.
And what is even more galling about the book is that Franklin had died (ovarian cancer) a few years earlier, and so could not defend herself. It wasn't until the 1970's, when some feminist researchers started digging, did the details start to emerge.
It's certainly true that Franklin hadn't determined the structure correctly, but remember that she was virtually isolated in Oxford (thanks mostly to her personality conflicts with Maurice Wilkins.)
Also, remember that Wilkins gave (without her knowledge or permission) Franklin's pictures to Watson. Without those pictures, it might have taken Watson longer to put the pieces together, and he wouldn't have had Franklin's high-quality (far better than Watson could do himself) pictures to verify the correctness of the structure. In that time period Franklin may have been able to deduce the structure herself, or perhaps Pauling would have gotten it right.
The real tragedy is the way Watson treated Franklin, both in his scientific work and in his writings. Watson has become the poster boy for "the end justifies the means." I can't recall ever being more disappointed in a book than I was in The Double Helix.
The fact that LexisNexis and such did a lot of work is not the point. The point is that they are doing this with public domain works, and may (I don't know for sure) have gotten tax dollars to do this. It's apparent that LexisNexis provides a valuable value-added service. Any additional works (such as the head notes you mention) are obviously copyrightable and should definitely be a premium service.
But if they did get tax dollars to digitize the cases, then there ought so be some form of public access. It doesn't need to be a highly-refined search engine. It doesn't need to include those valuable head notes. But there should be some form of electronic access.
Now if I'm mistaken and they digitized all these documents at their own expense, then sure, they have the right to restrict access however they please.
There's actually little reason for your skills portfolio to become less valuable over time. Let me give you example. When I started in IT (1996), HTML and Perl CGI were in-demand skills. Very few people had them, lots of people wanted them, those that did have them were well paid for them by those who wanted them. Nowadays, of course, it's difficult to find someone who doesn't have HTML, and Perl CGI isn't really in demand anymore now that PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP et al are used.
But, I'm not unemployed, because I kept my skills up to date (FWIW, I do mission-critical OLTP work for investment banks). Someday, that'll be obsolete too - but I'm not even worried slightly, in 5 years I'll have a whole new skill set, and I'll still be ahead of the curve.
I certainly hope for your sake that you're correct, but my experience through 7 months of unemployment was that you have got to have years of job experience with that new skill set, or they won't even consider you, no matter what the rest of your experience is.
Also, when do you have the time to acquire that new skill set? Are you doing this during your 40-hour work week? Or are you doing this on your time. I like my IT work, but I have other interests, too. Also, is the company playing for those $3000 training classes? Mine sure didn't. And how are you applying all these new skills to the legacy projects that you've been assigned? Or do you simply refuse to do legacy work?
My point is that everyone does not get the same opportunities to advance their skill sets. I have never turned down the oportunity to work on a new technology, but I have rarely gotten those opportunities. You could claim (perhaps rightly) that I should have been more demanding, but not everyone has the confidence to be able to do that.
And finally, be sure you don't get old.
Um, I don't mean to be blunt (well, actually I do), but what planet are you on?
I have 14 years experience, (7 UNIX C/C++, 4 Perl, SQL, and a bunch of other languages along with a Sun Java 2 Programmer cert), a B.S.E.E. and a M.S.C.S. from Wash. U. in St. Louis, and I spent 8 months job hunting after my company shut down their facility here. I finally did get a job, but I had to take a 20% pay cut, and the benefits are almost non-existent.
You say they would MUCH rather hire qualified American workers. But they get to define what qualified means. Their meaning of qualified is that you have to have 3 (or more) years of job experience using the exact tools and programming environment that they are using. Pity the worker who spent their work time doing their job instead of looking for the latest technologies so they could pad their resume. And of course, if those 3 years of experience are your only 3 years, so much the better, because then they can lowball the salary. And then if you are an H1-B indentured servant, they can lowball it even more.
It's very simple. Companies don't want to train people, because the less you know, the less mobile you are. And a resume with 17 different skills on it is meaningless of you don't have the exact 5 they are looking for.
I'll believe there's a shortage of qualified workers when I start getting calls from employment agencies again.
Check out the story "Nine Lives" by Ursula LeGuin.
A distubing parallel to this is the story of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who almost singlehandedly destroyed Soviet biological science fron the 1940's to the 1960's. In Lysenko's view, plants and animals (and by extension people) had to be infinitely pliable by changes in their environment and Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution must be simply the result of sick capitalist propaganda. This fit in quite well with Stalin's beliefs, and so Lysenko and his cronies took over Russian genetics and agriculture, exiled or put to death the best Soviet scientists, and caused an econmic catastrophe which contributed to the fall of the USSR.
Time Magazine blurb about Lysenko
The issue is not conservative vs. liberal, Democratic vs. Republican, or Western vs. Soviet. It is ideology vs. facts. It is a bad idea to only listen to the facts that support your preconceived notions. And any kind of ideological litmus test to these positions of governmental authority and review is another really bad idea. We could very well have another Lysenko offstage, ready to pounce.
> The leading cause of death on the planet today is good ol' malaria. Mosquito control with DDT could solve that problem - and no, it wouldn't require spraying massive amounts of tens of millions of pounds on food crops, just a few hundred thousand pounds a year.
> "B-b-b-ut DDT is bad! The enviros said so!" - really? The evidence [slashdot.org] for that is highly questionable.
> DDT also help with another up-and-coming [foxnews.com] disease, too.
Remember that DDT was originally thought to be this amazing wonder product, that killed mosquitos but caused no long term environmental damage. IIRC, the inventors won a Nobel Prize for it.
However, the main problem with DDT was the buildup of the chemical in top-of-the-food-web animals, especially birds. The problem was not the birds themselves, but the eggs. I remember lots of pictures of eggs with paper-thin shells. The birds would sit on them in their normal nesting behavior, and the weight of the bird would break the shell.
The whooping crane and California condor were down to a few mating pairs. The bald eagle was severely threatened. Other large birds of prey also suffered with DDT. Though your Fox source will deny it, there is plenty of evidence about this, one link being this one.
Now that being said, it's possible that small, limited uses of DDT might be appropriate in emergencies. However, we cannot go back to the indiscrimate use that was prevalent in the '50's.
Not unless we want to start killing the big birds again.
Please, get your science from sources other than Faux News and the Cato Institute, OK?
10^9 is Giga (G)
10^12 is Tera (T)
10^15 is Peta (P)
10^18 is Exa (E)
10^21 is Zetta (Z)
10^24 is Yotta (Y)
Get your SI prefixes here