It is good to have this debate, but like abortion, this is an area where people who deal with the messy situations that life provides should get to drive the policy, rather than any particularly flavour of god-botherers.
Like organ donors, perhaps? I am one, and I'm not cancelling my card over any of this, but don't subscribe to doctor's arrogance that deciding how to manage our ends is yours to do. It's ours. We appreciate your services, but don't forget that's what they are.
Death is a prognosis, not a state.
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That's the best explanation I've ever heard. "Dead" is simply the expectation that you're never going to be what we call "alive" again. Sometimes we're more certain than others. Run over by a steamroller? Yeah, we're pretty certain you're dead. Brain dead? We're pretty certain you're dead, just ever so slightly less so. Heart stopped? Ok, you're not dead, but you're definitely in danger of it if we don't get it started Very Soon Now.
There's a video on youtube of a "kiai master" fighting an MMA fighter. Guy believes he can make woo-woo noises and wave at people and beat them up. There's a lengthy bit where he's doing this, presumably at his school, where everyone else also drank the cool aid. THEY are defeated by his woo-woo noises and hand waving. The real life MMA fighter is predictably undeterred by woo-woo and hand waving and beats the snot of out the "master" in about 10 seconds.
I hope the guy retired. Dangerous fraud, not dangerous embarrassment. Just look at how many people he had snowed into believing this nonsense. Yes, they were gullible fools, too.
So do I, and I don't understand why the parent got modded down. There is no "real life Jedi academy". Come on, we've all seen the movies. They're from a universe where there IS this thing called "the force" that some people can learn to control and do freakishly amazing things with. It doesn't exist here. You can't learn to use it here. They also master this sword-like weapon that paradoxically cuts through anything but itself. That also doesn't exist here. You can't learn how to use it.
I'll be honest, too, if this WAS real I'd sign up in a second...but it's not. It's a bunch of grown ups play acting because they liked a movie universe. It is NOT a real life Jedi academy. You can call it LARP or cosplay or probably half a dozen things. It could even be an acting school if it wants. It's not training Jedi.
I really would have hoped that the ACLU and the other folks involved would have found a more pleasant way to settle this, without burning cash on litigation.
Well, if I were the parent I'd accept disciplinary action against those involved. At a minimum, how about a month suspension without pay? Do you suppose the school district and police force were actually willing to put anything on the table? I'll eat my hat if they did.
While I appreciate that this situation is outright silly (on the part of the school), ACLU's action here seems a little foolhardy. If schools can't discipline kids for what they say on social media, etc., then how are they meant to respond to cyber bullying such as that has led to however many teen suicides?
The short answer is that they aren't, unless those things happen in a realm that falls under their authority. Schools are not the "child police". Their job is not to discipline children when they do things wrong. Their job is to educate children. Period. Now, if "cyber" bullying happens on school grounds, using school equipment, etc, then by all means they should discipline. If not, they have no standing to say word one about it, any more than if I, as John Q Public, call you a poopoohead, do you get to run off to my employer and tell on me.
It really doesn't matter that you'd rather the schools handle it than the judicial system. The schools don't have the authority. The judicial does. Schools have gotten worse and worse at educating students due to the plethora of things which are not their job that they insist on doing instead.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that any time you're involved with someone engaged in criminal enterprise, you should probably assume they're not exactly the most ethical person.
You know, we've come a long way. We used to put people down for a host of things. About a century ago we got over the notion that women weren't smart enough to vote. Not so many decades ago being black and flirting with a white woman could get you killed. I'll bet more than a few of you are acquainted with the idea that "nerd" was not a badge of honor way back in high school. Like I say, we've come a long way, but it's somehow still cool to put down the "gingers".
Grow up already.
And not to be totally off topic, but this notion of people with red hair having a differing response to pain has been known for a long time. Wikipedia has references going back at least decade. I'm pretty sure I've known about this for longer than that. Finding older refs is left as an exercise for the reader.
but if you're talking about reducing pain, then it gets complicated.
Good morning, Mr. Patient! Please rate your pain today on a scale of 1 to 10...
You simply do that for a population of patients who get the test therapy and a population that gets a placebo. There's this magic stuff called statistics that lets you tease out how likely any difference between the populations is a result of chance. When it's more than 95% likely it is NOT the result of chance, we get interested.
but what do we do in the case of conditions where a "placebo" works very well for a significant fraction of people? shouldn't we fund some research into why the placebo works?
Yeah, why not, but here's the thing. In order to start using a treatment, we generally insist on proving it works at least as well as the stuff we already have. If you propose people eat orange peels to cure cancer, it would play out like this: Group A eat orange peels. Group B gets chemo and radiation. Group A's average survival time is dramatically lower, and your proposed treatment is quickly binned. Apply to your placebo argument. You have some therapy. I have a sugar pill. They cost about a penny each. Your therapy involves paying some quack to give you water at a high price. Both our treatments work at about the same rate (which is to say not at all--they are placebos). Which should we use? The cheap one. Duh.
We should not encourage the use of expensive therapies that don't work any better than a placebo because they are essentially scams designed to separate the desperate from their cash. This is a bad thing. Don't do it.
Some customers (me) like the idea of predictability. Ever hear about those people who stream a movie while sitting near the border, then get a $40,000 bill because they happened to connect to a tower on the wrong side and just ate 4GB at international rates? Yeah, I don't want to be them. I much prefer to overpay some for the certainty of never getting hammered by a monster bill.
One thing phone companies can do, and have a little but not enough, is notify and cut you off when you're going nuts on your bill. No one should ever incur a monster phone bill. We should always have the option of capping our own bills. Dear AT&T, if my phone bill ever hits $150, I want to hear from you. If it ever hits $200, I want everything that costs extra money blocked until we talk.
Nah, you nailed it. It's simply a lie. Unlimited *must* mean that they aren't limiting you, period. Sure, there's only so much data that you can push across a 3G/4G pipe, but that's not a thing they're DOING to you to limit your use. When they cut you off after a certain amount of use, that's undeniably a limit. When they throttle you after a certain amount of use, that's also undeniably a limit.
Sorry, AT&T, but if you don't want to support a service with no limits, don't sell one. If you do sell one, don't you dare tell me I'm using too much of it.
I agree with everyone else. Trying to subvert your company's security policy, especially as a new employee, is an excellent way not to be an employee for very long. Just ask them if you're allowed to use the laptop for personal use. If they say no, then don't do it. If they say it depends, tell them what you have in mind. My employer wouldn't care if I was reading ebooks on it. Reasonable personal use also wouldn't be an issue. Messing around on FB on my own time? No problem. Browsing porn? Yeah, that's not going to be ok. Watching movies? Depends. DVD? Fine. Netflix (or anything else you have legit rights to)? Fine. Downloading them illegally to watch? Not a chance.
And this would be ok if they acted in a reasonable manner. What I've read is that once you hit the cap, they throttle you to 1% of normal bandwidth. That makes unlimited data a complete farce and an outright lie. Even if they do this at 5GB of 5TB, if they set your bandwidth to 1%, you are effectively turned off and should be sued for breach of contract. Which they have been. Successfully.
They could certainly do something more defensible, like drop the priority on your traffic if you're a network hog, but if actual utilization is below capacity, they have no business throttling anyone.
I've seen a video where a toddler stands in FRONT of a parked car and the front of the car is taller than the toddler so the driver couldn't see the toddler and ran over the toddler. The toddler's parents/guardians are mostly to be blamed in that incident. It was a moderately busy street not suitable for unsupervised toddlers.
I have a pretty big SUV. There was an interesting segment I saw once were they had not one, but an entire kindergarten class stand in front of that model. From inside the car, you couldn't see any of them. For that reason, I always walk around my car if there are small children known to be in the vicinity. Sometimes I do it anyway just out of habit. 10 seconds of inconvenience to spare me a lifetime of guilt if I run over someone's kid? Yeah, I'm willing to take the time.
So this guy is suing for patent infringement over a patent HE DOESN'T EVEN HAVE? How is this not instantly thrown out and the lawyers fined a hefty sum for this stupidity?
Don't lie is a good start. Not you, Peat, but whoever claimed that the content owners reviewed it and certified it belongs to them. That sure SOUNDS dishonest, here. Reminiscent of the whole mortgage robosigning business, to be honest.
I don't have any issue at all with content owners protecting their rights. The problem is that content owners are often quite indifferent to trampling the rights of others. It's good that you're sorting this out, but really, if I get tagged inadvertently in the same way, do I have to get my story on slashdot to get it fixed? One would hope I'd just file a dispute and a real, live person would look at and see it doesn't belong to you guys. And by the way, that should be the default. Unless you're SURE, you let it go. We have stuff that sounds like birdsong isn't good enough.
Undoubtedly so. In fact I can't imagine for a second that Amazon and the like aren't running on VMs. But you're exactly right. Virtualization by itself is not cloud any more than an engine is a car. There, you knew there was a car analogy in there somewhere, didn't you?;-)
It's not a mistake, though, it's marketechture. Virtualization is old hat. You can't get people to shell out the big bucks for that, but if you rebrand it "cloud" (ooooh!) you can get people to pay more.
It is not your company's core competency. They will do it better than you. Period.
The notion that companies should do only one thing is misguided. They shouldn't squander their resources trying to be everything, true, but for companies beyond a certain size, they can provide these services cheaper than "cloud" companies can. Why? Well, because the provider isn't doing anything you can't do. If you're a big company or a government, you already own data centers. You already own staff. You already own software. In short, you're already providing the service, and you're doing it cheaper.
I know we're all supposed to drool when anybody says cloud, but I've priced it vs. our own cost to provide. We're cheaper. Hands down. Not even close.
The problem is you're talking about virtualization, not cloud. Cloud is a real thing that not many people actually do. It's also a nonsense buzzword sprinkled like MSG across the menu of everything IT does. Excuse the pun, but virtually none of what is called cloud deserves the name.
I dislike the fines, but this is EXACTLY the way things like this should be tried out. Try things at relatively small scale and on a population that volunteers for it. This is exactly the way medical research is carried out. If you want the cancer treatment that looks promising, but might not actually work, you have to volunteer to get it and it's available to a limited number of people.
Contrast this with what we usually do: entire school districts, or worse, entire states, or MUCH worse, the whole country tries some harebrained scheme, or even some halfway decent sounding scheme, which turns out to have real problems. Take No Child Left Behind, for example. Testing to measure performance sounds like a really good idea. Could we perhaps have tried it out on a smaller group than the whole country in order to find out it doesn't work?
*I* don't like the idea, but my kids aren't going there. Leave them alone unless there's sufficient data to prove this performs worse than the default.
I guess I'm just lucky you know my body better than I do.
I know 220-age is just a rule of thumb. I hit ~230 when I was 18 (all out effort on a rowing machine). I'm sure you'll tell me "no way" there too, but whatever. I was there and my pseudonym has nothing to prove to your pseudonym.
I couldn't get my HR over 192, which is higher than 220-age, so I figured "close enough." My RHR is ~60, so 90% of MHR for me is 177. Running in the range I consider sustainable but pushing is 175-178.
Running 5Ks in the 90%+ HR range is apparently nothing special. Thinking about it, that's not too surprising as a full effort 5K should be partly anaerobic, meaning you're already driving your cardiovascular system for all it's worth. I'm pretty impressed by the notion of running a 5K at 97% MHR. I don't think I can do that right now, though my 5K time has come down by over 2 minutes since that HR monitor session. I don't think I'm in better shape, I think I'm just running harder.
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Like organ donors, perhaps? I am one, and I'm not cancelling my card over any of this, but don't subscribe to doctor's arrogance that deciding how to manage our ends is yours to do. It's ours. We appreciate your services, but don't forget that's what they are.
That's the best explanation I've ever heard. "Dead" is simply the expectation that you're never going to be what we call "alive" again. Sometimes we're more certain than others. Run over by a steamroller? Yeah, we're pretty certain you're dead. Brain dead? We're pretty certain you're dead, just ever so slightly less so. Heart stopped? Ok, you're not dead, but you're definitely in danger of it if we don't get it started Very Soon Now.
There's a video on youtube of a "kiai master" fighting an MMA fighter. Guy believes he can make woo-woo noises and wave at people and beat them up. There's a lengthy bit where he's doing this, presumably at his school, where everyone else also drank the cool aid. THEY are defeated by his woo-woo noises and hand waving. The real life MMA fighter is predictably undeterred by woo-woo and hand waving and beats the snot of out the "master" in about 10 seconds.
I hope the guy retired. Dangerous fraud, not dangerous embarrassment. Just look at how many people he had snowed into believing this nonsense. Yes, they were gullible fools, too.
So do I, and I don't understand why the parent got modded down. There is no "real life Jedi academy". Come on, we've all seen the movies. They're from a universe where there IS this thing called "the force" that some people can learn to control and do freakishly amazing things with. It doesn't exist here. You can't learn to use it here. They also master this sword-like weapon that paradoxically cuts through anything but itself. That also doesn't exist here. You can't learn how to use it.
I'll be honest, too, if this WAS real I'd sign up in a second...but it's not. It's a bunch of grown ups play acting because they liked a movie universe. It is NOT a real life Jedi academy. You can call it LARP or cosplay or probably half a dozen things. It could even be an acting school if it wants. It's not training Jedi.
Well, if I were the parent I'd accept disciplinary action against those involved. At a minimum, how about a month suspension without pay? Do you suppose the school district and police force were actually willing to put anything on the table? I'll eat my hat if they did.
The short answer is that they aren't, unless those things happen in a realm that falls under their authority. Schools are not the "child police". Their job is not to discipline children when they do things wrong. Their job is to educate children. Period. Now, if "cyber" bullying happens on school grounds, using school equipment, etc, then by all means they should discipline. If not, they have no standing to say word one about it, any more than if I, as John Q Public, call you a poopoohead, do you get to run off to my employer and tell on me.
It really doesn't matter that you'd rather the schools handle it than the judicial system. The schools don't have the authority. The judicial does. Schools have gotten worse and worse at educating students due to the plethora of things which are not their job that they insist on doing instead.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that any time you're involved with someone engaged in criminal enterprise, you should probably assume they're not exactly the most ethical person.
You know, we've come a long way. We used to put people down for a host of things. About a century ago we got over the notion that women weren't smart enough to vote. Not so many decades ago being black and flirting with a white woman could get you killed. I'll bet more than a few of you are acquainted with the idea that "nerd" was not a badge of honor way back in high school. Like I say, we've come a long way, but it's somehow still cool to put down the "gingers".
Grow up already.
And not to be totally off topic, but this notion of people with red hair having a differing response to pain has been known for a long time. Wikipedia has references going back at least decade. I'm pretty sure I've known about this for longer than that. Finding older refs is left as an exercise for the reader.
Pot? Kettle.
Good morning, Mr. Patient! Please rate your pain today on a scale of 1 to 10...
You simply do that for a population of patients who get the test therapy and a population that gets a placebo. There's this magic stuff called statistics that lets you tease out how likely any difference between the populations is a result of chance. When it's more than 95% likely it is NOT the result of chance, we get interested.
Yeah, why not, but here's the thing. In order to start using a treatment, we generally insist on proving it works at least as well as the stuff we already have. If you propose people eat orange peels to cure cancer, it would play out like this: Group A eat orange peels. Group B gets chemo and radiation. Group A's average survival time is dramatically lower, and your proposed treatment is quickly binned. Apply to your placebo argument. You have some therapy. I have a sugar pill. They cost about a penny each. Your therapy involves paying some quack to give you water at a high price. Both our treatments work at about the same rate (which is to say not at all--they are placebos). Which should we use? The cheap one. Duh.
We should not encourage the use of expensive therapies that don't work any better than a placebo because they are essentially scams designed to separate the desperate from their cash. This is a bad thing. Don't do it.
Some customers (me) like the idea of predictability. Ever hear about those people who stream a movie while sitting near the border, then get a $40,000 bill because they happened to connect to a tower on the wrong side and just ate 4GB at international rates? Yeah, I don't want to be them. I much prefer to overpay some for the certainty of never getting hammered by a monster bill.
One thing phone companies can do, and have a little but not enough, is notify and cut you off when you're going nuts on your bill. No one should ever incur a monster phone bill. We should always have the option of capping our own bills. Dear AT&T, if my phone bill ever hits $150, I want to hear from you. If it ever hits $200, I want everything that costs extra money blocked until we talk.
Nah, you nailed it. It's simply a lie. Unlimited *must* mean that they aren't limiting you, period. Sure, there's only so much data that you can push across a 3G/4G pipe, but that's not a thing they're DOING to you to limit your use. When they cut you off after a certain amount of use, that's undeniably a limit. When they throttle you after a certain amount of use, that's also undeniably a limit.
Sorry, AT&T, but if you don't want to support a service with no limits, don't sell one. If you do sell one, don't you dare tell me I'm using too much of it.
Democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for everything else we've tried.
"effectively prevent(ing) lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders"' is actually worth something, you know.
I agree with everyone else. Trying to subvert your company's security policy, especially as a new employee, is an excellent way not to be an employee for very long. Just ask them if you're allowed to use the laptop for personal use. If they say no, then don't do it. If they say it depends, tell them what you have in mind. My employer wouldn't care if I was reading ebooks on it. Reasonable personal use also wouldn't be an issue. Messing around on FB on my own time? No problem. Browsing porn? Yeah, that's not going to be ok. Watching movies? Depends. DVD? Fine. Netflix (or anything else you have legit rights to)? Fine. Downloading them illegally to watch? Not a chance.
Basically, don't be an idiot.
And this would be ok if they acted in a reasonable manner. What I've read is that once you hit the cap, they throttle you to 1% of normal bandwidth. That makes unlimited data a complete farce and an outright lie. Even if they do this at 5GB of 5TB, if they set your bandwidth to 1%, you are effectively turned off and should be sued for breach of contract. Which they have been. Successfully.
They could certainly do something more defensible, like drop the priority on your traffic if you're a network hog, but if actual utilization is below capacity, they have no business throttling anyone.
And good riddance when it does. It's a massive distraction as people who should know better go chasing after the latest silver bullet.
I have a pretty big SUV. There was an interesting segment I saw once were they had not one, but an entire kindergarten class stand in front of that model. From inside the car, you couldn't see any of them. For that reason, I always walk around my car if there are small children known to be in the vicinity. Sometimes I do it anyway just out of habit. 10 seconds of inconvenience to spare me a lifetime of guilt if I run over someone's kid? Yeah, I'm willing to take the time.
So this guy is suing for patent infringement over a patent HE DOESN'T EVEN HAVE? How is this not instantly thrown out and the lawyers fined a hefty sum for this stupidity?
Don't lie is a good start. Not you, Peat, but whoever claimed that the content owners reviewed it and certified it belongs to them. That sure SOUNDS dishonest, here. Reminiscent of the whole mortgage robosigning business, to be honest.
I don't have any issue at all with content owners protecting their rights. The problem is that content owners are often quite indifferent to trampling the rights of others. It's good that you're sorting this out, but really, if I get tagged inadvertently in the same way, do I have to get my story on slashdot to get it fixed? One would hope I'd just file a dispute and a real, live person would look at and see it doesn't belong to you guys. And by the way, that should be the default. Unless you're SURE, you let it go. We have stuff that sounds like birdsong isn't good enough.
Those who forget history are doomed to pay overpriced consultants to reinvent it for them.
Undoubtedly so. In fact I can't imagine for a second that Amazon and the like aren't running on VMs. But you're exactly right. Virtualization by itself is not cloud any more than an engine is a car. There, you knew there was a car analogy in there somewhere, didn't you? ;-)
It's not a mistake, though, it's marketechture. Virtualization is old hat. You can't get people to shell out the big bucks for that, but if you rebrand it "cloud" (ooooh!) you can get people to pay more.
The notion that companies should do only one thing is misguided. They shouldn't squander their resources trying to be everything, true, but for companies beyond a certain size, they can provide these services cheaper than "cloud" companies can. Why? Well, because the provider isn't doing anything you can't do. If you're a big company or a government, you already own data centers. You already own staff. You already own software. In short, you're already providing the service, and you're doing it cheaper.
I know we're all supposed to drool when anybody says cloud, but I've priced it vs. our own cost to provide. We're cheaper. Hands down. Not even close.
The problem is you're talking about virtualization, not cloud. Cloud is a real thing that not many people actually do. It's also a nonsense buzzword sprinkled like MSG across the menu of everything IT does. Excuse the pun, but virtually none of what is called cloud deserves the name.
I dislike the fines, but this is EXACTLY the way things like this should be tried out. Try things at relatively small scale and on a population that volunteers for it. This is exactly the way medical research is carried out. If you want the cancer treatment that looks promising, but might not actually work, you have to volunteer to get it and it's available to a limited number of people.
Contrast this with what we usually do: entire school districts, or worse, entire states, or MUCH worse, the whole country tries some harebrained scheme, or even some halfway decent sounding scheme, which turns out to have real problems. Take No Child Left Behind, for example. Testing to measure performance sounds like a really good idea. Could we perhaps have tried it out on a smaller group than the whole country in order to find out it doesn't work?
*I* don't like the idea, but my kids aren't going there. Leave them alone unless there's sufficient data to prove this performs worse than the default.
I guess I'm just lucky you know my body better than I do.
I know 220-age is just a rule of thumb. I hit ~230 when I was 18 (all out effort on a rowing machine). I'm sure you'll tell me "no way" there too, but whatever. I was there and my pseudonym has nothing to prove to your pseudonym.
I couldn't get my HR over 192, which is higher than 220-age, so I figured "close enough." My RHR is ~60, so 90% of MHR for me is 177. Running in the range I consider sustainable but pushing is 175-178.
I googled and found this:
http://www.runningahead.com/forums/topic/1bb5de602e374ab396b396e44dcef92e
Running 5Ks in the 90%+ HR range is apparently nothing special. Thinking about it, that's not too surprising as a full effort 5K should be partly anaerobic, meaning you're already driving your cardiovascular system for all it's worth. I'm pretty impressed by the notion of running a 5K at 97% MHR. I don't think I can do that right now, though my 5K time has come down by over 2 minutes since that HR monitor session. I don't think I'm in better shape, I think I'm just running harder.