Unfortunately, I'd have to agree with a lot of that sentiment.
The first few seasons of Buffy were spectacular. After a while, though... meh... I just watched it because I liked the characters and there were some moments of greatness every once in a while... well that plus Charisma Carpenter wow.
Firefly and Angel were good enough to keep me tuning in, but nothing I was telling friends about. I didn't watch Dollhouse past the first half dozen episodes. The show is decent, but it's just not my thing.
On the plus side, nothing he's done is particularly bad. I think that he does competent work at worst, and we all hope for those flashes of brilliance.
Sounds like you may be working on something you don't enjoy so much?:D
Pretty much what I was thinking. Back when I was programming, I could just live in the code -barely wanting to take time for meals. If you like what you're doing, then it shouldn't be that hard to just do it. You might want to clear your browser of all your favorite surfing bookmarks. Maybe install a plugin that limits your browsing time? I saw one available for Chrome the other day.
As a manager of software developers these days, I'd be a bit concerned with someone spending half of a minimal (sorry) 40 hour work week surfing. If I noticed it, I'd probably give that developer's work careful scrutiny and not be satisfied unless that developer made superhuman use of those 20 hours actually developing.
It is the duty of governments to ensure equitable distribution of wealth, without discouraging wealth creation.
Guess who's doing a better job...
It's the duty of governments to provide a framework where people can work, build businesses, and interact within a minimal set of laws that attempt to maximize freedom for the individual.
"Redistribution of Wealth" is code for "Hand over everyones' freedom for the sake of equality of outcome."
My clients never seem to agree with your general sentiment.
They want the page to look EXACTLY like they specify it. When I try to give them more flexibility in the way that the pages flow at different resolutions, it almost always ends up being a waste of my time and frustrating for the client who wants things to look like a printed page on THEIR screen. When I try to explain why the text flow is not exactly like they want it so that it can be viewed on larger/smaller screens, they give me blank looks.
At the end of the day, I have to admit that I'd rather spend more of my development time on the back end coding rather than making sure that the web page can be viewed on everything from a wrist watch to a Jumbotron(tm).
They can come back and pay me more to do their iPad versions, I guess. It's not like I didn't offer to do it The Right Way in the first place.
Stupid dancing badgers almost ate my soul. Pretty colors... they dance. But why do they dance? What are they going to do next? Mushroom? It's red. What is it doing? Oh... badgers... how you torment me so.
[...] right and left agree that public schools aren't so much focused on education as they are on producing "useful people"... to employers, government, etc. [...]
Don't attribute to malice (motive) what can be explained through stupidity. There's no subversive "They Live" plot to create citizens for some later purpose. Public schools are simply acting in as lazy and self-interested a manner as possible in a system that doesn't allow for the punishing of poor performance or reward of excellence. Having the kids be good automatons makes sitting in a class all day easier for the teachers and the administration, so that's what they focus on.
Escalante was such a phenomenal individual that with the help of a rare principal who gave a shit, was able to go against the current and achieve something outstanding. In a world with competition for school funding based upon academic performance, dollars would have went to Escalante, giving him more latitude to do things his way. Instead, his great achievements were snuffed out by a system that is fundamentally broken and doesn't reward greatness.
The linked article says it well:
In the real world, those who provide a service can usually find a way to get it to those who want it, even if their current employer disapproves. If someone feels that he can build a better mousetrap than his employer wants to make, he can find a way to make it, market it, and perhaps put his former boss out of business. Public school teachers lack that option.
There are very few ways to compete for education dollars without being part of the government school system
Monopolies are evil. A Monopoly called AT&T was no better for consumers than the monopoly called "The US Government" is for citizens or the "State Board of Education" is for students. Fight monopolies in all forms.
As usual, considering the evolutionary impact of a behavior can be useful. Negative attention seeking can be a survival trait.
Negative attention is normally a bad thing within a small cohesive society; but in a fragmented society (real life) or competing societies, negative attention from your enemies is a good thing to earn respect amongst your allies.
Controlling your enemies emotions to an extent is useful. You can get your enemies to attack you when they may be at a disadvantage. You can get them to fear you because you're such an asshole.
Trolls are assholes, but I wouldn't make a value judgement about whether or not their behavior was due to some underdevelopment or "infantile" deficiency.
I disagree with your sentiment. If you publicly embarrass somebody for acting stupidly. They often think twice before acting stupidly again.
Well, you've got two problems with this disagreement.
1. People rationalize pretty much any behavior they intentionally exhibit. The most hardened of criminals in lock-up feel that they don't deserve it. What they did wasn't that wrong, or society made them do it, or they were justified because of some wrong they perceived against themselves. It's no different with this guy. What he's doing is right no matter what the judge says, what his neighbors say, what the general public says. It wouldn't be very surprising if it were shown that he deceptively uses a laptop or visual observations to know that his neighbor is using wifi or her cell phone. I'm sure he'd view these things as justified because of "what she's doing".
If I'm wrong, he should go for the Randi prize. I bet they'd agree to test him if he claimed to be sensitive to the types of EMR described in the story.
2. Many people do feed off of the negative attention. Just look at the enormous amount of effort that Slashdot editors and the moderation system go to in order to fend off the trolls. Trolls are the people that get a warm fuzzy feeling when they see someone frowning or imagine that they're frowning.
I don't doubt that he uses a laptop or other wifi detecting device to know that his neighbor has wifi. He probably saw her using her iPhone and it made him feel sick. He has problems, but it's doubtful that the EMR is the direct source of them.
I agree that the money needs to come from somewhere if the research is going to be done... but warping the already-overused patent system, or copyright system doesn't seem to be the right way to go.
Common sense should still rule when discussing the patenting of information that's locked up inside of all of us. When anesthesia was first used to perform an operation, was the knowledge of that process patented? I would doubt it. Did advances continue without contriving a revenue stream for the very knowledge of that process? Yes.
Like with open source software or the "free" internet, the money will come from somewhere. Advances will continue. Will advances be as fast without contriving bizarre ownership rules? I don't know. I'd rather come out of this with common sense intact rather than more rapid advances, though.
I live in the suburbs where almost every soccer mom has her phone glued to her ear from the moment she gets into her car until she arrives at her destination. I think it's a sickness.
I don't see anyone adjusting their glasses quite so assiduously.
The move I love is when they're too busy to take their phones off their left ears so they just turn left without really looking to see what may be in the intersection. It's a classic. At those moments, I wish they had something hands free available.
Even more necessary than the hands free talking would be the hands free dialing. Dialing (and now texting) are to using a cell phone what take-offs and landings are to airplanes. They're the critical time when things always seem to go wrong because too much is happening.
Don't you hate it when drivers feel absolutely compelled to look at their passengers while talking to them?
I'll forego the politeness of being looked at while being spoken to in order to arrive alive.
It's almost as bad when you're at a light behind a man who has a woman in the car. The light turned green ten seconds ago, but he's still watching her like she's dessert. You hate to honk and be a cockblocker, but jeez dude... go!
(To me still a imaginary excuse, based on the arrogance of not being able to admit that the math is wrong, but instead calling the universe wrong! ^^ [But a good {and compact!} explanation will of course change my mind.])
That might be something similar to what they told Einstein when he used his math to explain characteristics of nature that no one had witnessed.
I find the possibility of dark matter and energy kind of fascinating. Maybe it just a problem with their math - but then again, having huge amounts of mass in the universe be something other than what we experience every day adds a little mystery to it all.
Water and gas meter technologies lag behind electric meters because of the simple fact that water and gas meters aren't hooked up to power... so they require long-life batteries to be functional. Since they're on battery, lots of frills are eliminated, like the ability to receive transmissions.
Most deployed water and gas meters these days are transmit only. There are some coming to market that will listen too, but the corresponding limited functionality will make hacking into them much harder.
You also have to wonder why Slashdot has to post an article each time support is announced for a different device and then each time that support arrives (or so it seems). We get it... Netflix streams movies over the Internet to an assortment of devices.
Now we just have to work on the organs like the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas etc. And I don't think those are very far off, they've pretty much figured out how to vascularize large organs.
Learn to read. The poster said "keep the store alive", not people.
Plus, I'm waiting for you to sell everything you own and send it to Africa you insensitive clod. They have needs that you're not meeting due to your selfishness.
Slashdot Mirror
That's kind of why I bank only with the Bank of Nikolai
I sleep well at night.
I'll be in my bunk.
Unfortunately, I'd have to agree with a lot of that sentiment.
The first few seasons of Buffy were spectacular. After a while, though... meh... I just watched it because I liked the characters and there were some moments of greatness every once in a while... well that plus Charisma Carpenter wow.
Firefly and Angel were good enough to keep me tuning in, but nothing I was telling friends about. I didn't watch Dollhouse past the first half dozen episodes. The show is decent, but it's just not my thing.
On the plus side, nothing he's done is particularly bad. I think that he does competent work at worst, and we all hope for those flashes of brilliance.
Sounds like you may be working on something you don't enjoy so much? :D
Pretty much what I was thinking. Back when I was programming, I could just live in the code -barely wanting to take time for meals. If you like what you're doing, then it shouldn't be that hard to just do it. You might want to clear your browser of all your favorite surfing bookmarks. Maybe install a plugin that limits your browsing time? I saw one available for Chrome the other day.
As a manager of software developers these days, I'd be a bit concerned with someone spending half of a minimal (sorry) 40 hour work week surfing. If I noticed it, I'd probably give that developer's work careful scrutiny and not be satisfied unless that developer made superhuman use of those 20 hours actually developing.
It is the duty of governments to ensure equitable distribution of wealth, without discouraging wealth creation.
Guess who's doing a better job...
It's the duty of governments to provide a framework where people can work, build businesses, and interact within a minimal set of laws that attempt to maximize freedom for the individual.
"Redistribution of Wealth" is code for "Hand over everyones' freedom for the sake of equality of outcome."
Good point. As long as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and ESPN.com work on it; mass appeal is there.
They really need to get the wireless recharging pad and over the air synching going across their iPad/iPhone/iPod lines.
That would help untether the masses.
My clients never seem to agree with your general sentiment.
They want the page to look EXACTLY like they specify it. When I try to give them more flexibility in the way that the pages flow at different resolutions, it almost always ends up being a waste of my time and frustrating for the client who wants things to look like a printed page on THEIR screen. When I try to explain why the text flow is not exactly like they want it so that it can be viewed on larger/smaller screens, they give me blank looks.
At the end of the day, I have to admit that I'd rather spend more of my development time on the back end coding rather than making sure that the web page can be viewed on everything from a wrist watch to a Jumbotron(tm).
They can come back and pay me more to do their iPad versions, I guess. It's not like I didn't offer to do it The Right Way in the first place.
Stupid dancing badgers almost ate my soul. Pretty colors... they dance. But why do they dance? What are they going to do next? Mushroom? It's red. What is it doing? Oh... badgers... how you torment me so.
SNAKE!
Two iPads, one bed. Fun views for you and your partner.
Meh... AdultFriendFinder.com has had multi-touch for years.
[...] right and left agree that public schools aren't so much focused on education as they are on producing "useful people"... to employers, government, etc. [...]
Don't attribute to malice (motive) what can be explained through stupidity. There's no subversive "They Live" plot to create citizens for some later purpose. Public schools are simply acting in as lazy and self-interested a manner as possible in a system that doesn't allow for the punishing of poor performance or reward of excellence. Having the kids be good automatons makes sitting in a class all day easier for the teachers and the administration, so that's what they focus on.
Escalante was such a phenomenal individual that with the help of a rare principal who gave a shit, was able to go against the current and achieve something outstanding. In a world with competition for school funding based upon academic performance, dollars would have went to Escalante, giving him more latitude to do things his way. Instead, his great achievements were snuffed out by a system that is fundamentally broken and doesn't reward greatness.
The linked article says it well:
In the real world, those who provide a service can usually find a way to get it to those who want it, even if their current employer disapproves. If someone feels that he can build a better mousetrap than his employer wants to make, he can find a way to make it, market it, and perhaps put his former boss out of business. Public school teachers lack that option.
There are very few ways to compete for education dollars without being part of the government school system
Monopolies are evil. A Monopoly called AT&T was no better for consumers than the monopoly called "The US Government" is for citizens or the "State Board of Education" is for students. Fight monopolies in all forms.
As usual, considering the evolutionary impact of a behavior can be useful. Negative attention seeking can be a survival trait.
Negative attention is normally a bad thing within a small cohesive society; but in a fragmented society (real life) or competing societies, negative attention from your enemies is a good thing to earn respect amongst your allies.
Controlling your enemies emotions to an extent is useful. You can get your enemies to attack you when they may be at a disadvantage. You can get them to fear you because you're such an asshole.
Trolls are assholes, but I wouldn't make a value judgement about whether or not their behavior was due to some underdevelopment or "infantile" deficiency.
I disagree with your sentiment. If you publicly embarrass somebody for acting stupidly. They often think twice before acting stupidly again.
Well, you've got two problems with this disagreement.
1. People rationalize pretty much any behavior they intentionally exhibit. The most hardened of criminals in lock-up feel that they don't deserve it. What they did wasn't that wrong, or society made them do it, or they were justified because of some wrong they perceived against themselves. It's no different with this guy. What he's doing is right no matter what the judge says, what his neighbors say, what the general public says. It wouldn't be very surprising if it were shown that he deceptively uses a laptop or visual observations to know that his neighbor is using wifi or her cell phone. I'm sure he'd view these things as justified because of "what she's doing".
If I'm wrong, he should go for the Randi prize. I bet they'd agree to test him if he claimed to be sensitive to the types of EMR described in the story.
2. Many people do feed off of the negative attention. Just look at the enormous amount of effort that Slashdot editors and the moderation system go to in order to fend off the trolls. Trolls are the people that get a warm fuzzy feeling when they see someone frowning or imagine that they're frowning.
I don't doubt that he uses a laptop or other wifi detecting device to know that his neighbor has wifi. He probably saw her using her iPhone and it made him feel sick. He has problems, but it's doubtful that the EMR is the direct source of them.
I agree that the money needs to come from somewhere if the research is going to be done... but warping the already-overused patent system, or copyright system doesn't seem to be the right way to go.
Common sense should still rule when discussing the patenting of information that's locked up inside of all of us. When anesthesia was first used to perform an operation, was the knowledge of that process patented? I would doubt it. Did advances continue without contriving a revenue stream for the very knowledge of that process? Yes.
Like with open source software or the "free" internet, the money will come from somewhere. Advances will continue. Will advances be as fast without contriving bizarre ownership rules? I don't know. I'd rather come out of this with common sense intact rather than more rapid advances, though.
Another reason, Gene's are nature's "programming language". Once you can read some of it, reasonable efforts will help you to understand more of it.
So reverse engineering them should be adjudicated under the DMCA?
I live in the suburbs where almost every soccer mom has her phone glued to her ear from the moment she gets into her car until she arrives at her destination. I think it's a sickness.
I don't see anyone adjusting their glasses quite so assiduously.
The move I love is when they're too busy to take their phones off their left ears so they just turn left without really looking to see what may be in the intersection. It's a classic. At those moments, I wish they had something hands free available.
Even more necessary than the hands free talking would be the hands free dialing. Dialing (and now texting) are to using a cell phone what take-offs and landings are to airplanes. They're the critical time when things always seem to go wrong because too much is happening.
Don't you hate it when drivers feel absolutely compelled to look at their passengers while talking to them?
I'll forego the politeness of being looked at while being spoken to in order to arrive alive.
It's almost as bad when you're at a light behind a man who has a woman in the car. The light turned green ten seconds ago, but he's still watching her like she's dessert. You hate to honk and be a cockblocker, but jeez dude... go!
(To me still a imaginary excuse, based on the arrogance of not being able to admit that the math is wrong, but instead calling the universe wrong! ^^ [But a good {and compact!} explanation will of course change my mind.])
That might be something similar to what they told Einstein when he used his math to explain characteristics of nature that no one had witnessed.
I find the possibility of dark matter and energy kind of fascinating. Maybe it just a problem with their math - but then again, having huge amounts of mass in the universe be something other than what we experience every day adds a little mystery to it all.
Water and gas meter technologies lag behind electric meters because of the simple fact that water and gas meters aren't hooked up to power... so they require long-life batteries to be functional. Since they're on battery, lots of frills are eliminated, like the ability to receive transmissions.
Most deployed water and gas meters these days are transmit only. There are some coming to market that will listen too, but the corresponding limited functionality will make hacking into them much harder.
You also have to wonder why Slashdot has to post an article each time support is announced for a different device and then each time that support arrives (or so it seems). We get it... Netflix streams movies over the Internet to an assortment of devices.
Now we just have to work on the organs like the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas etc. And I don't think those are very far off, they've pretty much figured out how to vascularize large organs.
Umm.... you might want to look at this
I'm not sure if those 5-10 micrometer features remain in the scaffolding. Seems possible that the stem cells create new ones, but I'm just guessing.
This stuff is really really cool. I need to go print myself a new meniscus.
I'd assume that the extra low-res camera on the front of the phone is intended to make this sort of use possible. Why else have it?
Learn to read. The poster said "keep the store alive", not people.
Plus, I'm waiting for you to sell everything you own and send it to Africa you insensitive clod. They have needs that you're not meeting due to your selfishness.