I have yet to see any version of autism that confers any reproductive advantage. All of them I have met have been at a moderate to severe reproductive disadvantage.
That's a problem for a few individuals but not for the Y chromosome (defect is on the X) and not for the species. Natural selection ensures that the genes that can't keep up are continually weeded out, and especially fast on the X chromosome compared to others.
What I'd like to see is an explanation for why natural selection has favored the shortening of the Y why there are no other such asymmetric pairs.
Humans would have to evolve a new mechanism of determining sex before the Y chromosome could lose its function.
It's always been obvious that the disappearing Y was bullshit. What we have is a selection pressure that shrinks the Y down to its essential core, which apparently is not much less than the 19 genes and other noncodong DNA it carries in humans.
I was clearing up a common misconception that religion and science have to be at odds. The faith in a creator is not diametrically opposed to accepting science.
Religion and science ARE at odds.
Religion teaches you to believe a lot of really unlikely things on the basis of bare assertion and tradition. Science teaches you to believe what can be demonstrated from physical evidence and the application of logic to that evidence.
The problem is that you assume it is a black/white reaction. IOW either they hear you or you get out. Unfortunately, most reactions will be gray, where people try to dispute your facts with some extreme cases where you can shave off a few minutes of work, and try those freak cases extrapolate that to double digit gains.
A cynic's approach:
Warn once, and once only, but make sure there is a permanent record. (e.g. minutes of a meeting). Do it subtle, and avoid pissing off to many people.
Then after an half year, when the writing is on the wall, get rid of the projects that are the worst.
No, I don't assume that. But I may have oversimplified.
Sometimes managers think you're wrong -- underestimating your own ability or the ability of others on your team. And sometimes they are right about that. Junior personnel are usually not very good at assessing their own capability. Either they are way too pessimistic or more commonly way too optimistic.
What the OP was describing was a systemic and ongoing situation. If upper management doesn't take action to correct such a problem, they are going to fail dramatically and you don't want to be there when it all comes crashing down.
The employee, including lower-level managers, has to make an assessment whether they are working in a well-managed and sustainable business or in a dysfunctional and doomed business.
But there is some gray area between the two. Most businesses are neither as well-managed as they could be nor so ill-managed that they are doomed to fail. It takes some insight an experience to distinguish where on the scale your business lies and much more to move it in the right direction.
"Also, you need a way to shield the people working on each project from interruptions generated from outside the project and the project managers need to insulate their people from scope creep"
BINGO! Don't know how many times I have to stop the project I am on because the boss's kid can't get his mac to work on the home wireless. The IT guys wear many hats unfortunately. A good idea is to get most projects are done after hours, work output is doubled seemingly because you are not pulled from the project every 15 minutes. Would be nice to be on the after hours team.
The problem is in no way unique to IT departments. Every department suffers from the same thing. I manage hardware engineers and we face the same issues. Everybody thinks that because a problem is his biggest priority it should be your biggest priority.
But I recognize that there's a particular problem in IT departments. They have day-to-day issues that have to be dealt with on a timely basis as well as long-term issues that absolutely must be dealt with but on a longer schedule. You have to segment the problem somehow.
Some companies have a group that only handles system-down and user complaints and other people handle the longer-term projects. Some companies have babysitters for upper management.
At some point, doesn't it become unethical for a lawyer to hire on with a company to pursue a lawsuit that they have absolutely no chance in hell of winning?
Any half-competent lawyer is going to tell LightSquared to cut its losses and go begging on bended knee to the FCC and ask them to please allow them to license some other spectrum instead.
And if they persist in their stupidity, I'd think any ethical lawyer would quit. But maybe I have an overly-optimistic view of the state of corporate legal ethics.
It sounds like they need more than one project manager and a number of additional worker-bees to get the jobs done.
Start by showing the problem to senior management and tell them flat-out that there is no way to get all the projects done on schedule unless they hire enough people that each project has enough people on it to get the job done. It's always incumbent on workers at each level to give their best (i.e. worst-case) estimates of how much work is required to execute a project and how much time it requires. (Some work can't be accelerated past a certain point by adding more people.)
There are three responses that might generate: * "you'll just have to work harder" This response is not unusual but tells you you're going to fail anyway and is a signal to get out of the organization before it crashes and burns. * they'll cancel some projects and focus their people on the remaining ones * they'll hire some more warm bodies to get more work done.
Also, you need a way to shield the people working on each project from interruptions generated from outside the project and the project managers need to insulate their people from scope creep.
Don't just complain about it. Run for Parliament and throw the corrupt government out. Shut down the program.
Unfortunately you won't be able to penalize companies for cooperating with the law. But you may be able to prove corruption of your current MPs and lock them the hell up for taking or soliciting bribes.
Normal computers aren't radiation hardened, but the point is that they store and process information based on more than just the quantum state of a single particle. It takes a great deal more unwanted energy to cause them to flip to the undesired state. This kind of thing would many times more vulnerable to stray radiation, heat or stray electromagnetic fields than the smallest conventional transistor.
But any practical computer is going to have to contain millions of these things. If you want to carry out a computation with such a machine, either you have to protect it with conditions that have a minimal chance of causing a computational error or you will have to engineer it with redundancy and error correction mechanisms that may in the end be bigger and less reliable than a classical solution.
Hes fucking right. The lassez-faire attitude about this on slashdot is pretty disgusting. This level of collusion between the govt and business to stop counterfeiting (which is not worth spying on every printer) is an abomination and lays the groundwork for much worse. Im sorry you dont have the imagination to see the end game to this.
You're talking to a filtered population which explains the less-than-panic this announcement produced. If you're posting on/., you've already made the decision that you think you live in a free country where the police aren't likely to come breaking down your door on the basis of something you said that may be declared illegal after the fact. Do you imagine that/. isn't going to fetch up your registration information and complete posting history the first time a government agent asks for it?
"Spying on every printer" is an overstatement. What they're doing is laying the groundwork so that they can prove (sometimes) after the fact who committed a crime.
This isn't a technology that enables them to identify what you've printed on your computer remotely -- that would be spying and it's technically feasible today -- a fact that unsettles me a great deal more than the unannounced printing of identifying information. To use that information, they need a piece of paper you printed in hand and either the printer itself or a registration record linking that printer to you. They can't get the former without a search warrant. They can probably get the other without one because the printer company is probably going to cooperate.
And yeah, if they abuse the power, it could be bad. But if they have a mind to abuse power in way that makes anything you might have printed illegal, IT WON'T MATTER because a government that out of control isn't going to waste its time with gathering real evidence of its new thought crimes. It's just going to ignore your rights, produce whatever real and false evidence they want against you and lock you the hell up.
And before it gets to that point, smart people will have stopped using electronic devices for anything that the government could conceivably consider subversive. You'll be handwriting messages to your compatriots on used newspaper with pink crayons that you melt down and dispose of very carefully.
Back in the real world, we're still able to get pretty detailed information about what the government is doing using freedom of information requests. That, at least, ought to be somewhat comforting.
Oh, dear. Another member of the "if they're inside our network, we have bigger problems" policy of ignoring basic security practices until it's far, far, far too late.
It's much safer to protect freedoms and rights earlier, before their loss has become accepted, than to try to roll back years or decades of common practice.
Nice condescension there. Do you get points for that?
The ironic thing is that is the same sort of argument the Secret Service would make to support their efforts to print the identifying dots. They want to protect your ability to have some confidence in the authenticity of paper currency, and unless you're a counterfeiter, you want them to be successful at their efforts. You just don't like the dots because there are other potentially nefarious purposes that they could put those dots to.
There's an inherent tension between not wanting Big Brother too far in your shorts and wanting Big Brother to help you ensure that reasonable laws are enforced and enforceable.
I see the dots as a relatively low risk that any savvy person can work around if need be, especially when traded off against my desire to have it possible to ensure the authenticity and integrity of printed documents including but not limited to currency.
The are LOTS of flaws in your agument. Prehaps the easiest to explain is what happens if the is a revolution in your country and previous 'free-expression' suddenly lands you in jail?
Then you have bigger problems that won't be solved with an anonymous printer..
.... not so much the fact that this may have happened, but the fact that slashdot put it on the front page. This story has set the conservative blogosphere alight over "obama's nanny state" and what have you while overlooking one huge glaring problem here...
They are taking the word of a four year old kid to be god's-own-truth. I'm not saying she's intentionally lying, but how many reliable four year olds have you met in your life time? There could well be a very large gap between what she was told and what she thought she heard, and yet another between what she did and what she told her parents.
It says in the article that the mother has chosen to remain anonymous and the school claims that it has no knowledge of the incident.
So based not just on the word of a 4-year-old child but also on an anonymous mother whose story cannot be verified, we have a big kerfuffle.
I'll wait for verification before I pass judgment.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that our species will be succeeded by something that out-reproduces us. So it will have a fully functioning reproductive system.
I have yet to see any version of autism that confers any reproductive advantage. All of them I have met have been at a moderate to severe reproductive disadvantage.
Humans may turn out to have many descendant species or none. Too bad we won't get to see them.
That's a problem for a few individuals but not for the Y chromosome (defect is on the X) and not for the species. Natural selection ensures that the genes that can't keep up are continually weeded out, and especially fast on the X chromosome compared to others.
What I'd like to see is an explanation for why natural selection has favored the shortening of the Y why there are no other such asymmetric pairs.
Bingo!
Humans would have to evolve a new mechanism of determining sex before the Y chromosome could lose its function.
It's always been obvious that the disappearing Y was bullshit. What we have is a selection pressure that shrinks the Y down to its essential core, which apparently is not much less than the 19 genes and other noncodong DNA it carries in humans.
I was clearing up a common misconception that religion and science have to be at odds. The faith in a creator is not diametrically opposed to accepting science.
Religion and science ARE at odds.
Religion teaches you to believe a lot of really unlikely things on the basis of bare assertion and tradition. Science teaches you to believe what can be demonstrated from physical evidence and the application of logic to that evidence.
The property rights of the helicopter owner were certainly violated, and most probably gun safety laws.
The problem is that you assume it is a black/white reaction. IOW either they hear you or you get out. Unfortunately, most reactions will be gray, where people try to dispute your facts with some extreme cases where you can shave off a few minutes of work, and try those freak cases extrapolate that to double digit gains.
A cynic's approach:
Warn once, and once only, but make sure there is a permanent record. (e.g. minutes of a meeting). Do it subtle, and avoid pissing off to many people.
Then after an half year, when the writing is on the wall, get rid of the projects that are the worst.
No, I don't assume that. But I may have oversimplified.
Sometimes managers think you're wrong -- underestimating your own ability or the ability of others on your team. And sometimes they are right about that. Junior personnel are usually not very good at assessing their own capability. Either they are way too pessimistic or more commonly way too optimistic.
What the OP was describing was a systemic and ongoing situation. If upper management doesn't take action to correct such a problem, they are going to fail dramatically and you don't want to be there when it all comes crashing down.
The employee, including lower-level managers, has to make an assessment whether they are working in a well-managed and sustainable business or in a dysfunctional and doomed business.
But there is some gray area between the two. Most businesses are neither as well-managed as they could be nor so ill-managed that they are doomed to fail. It takes some insight an experience to distinguish where on the scale your business lies and much more to move it in the right direction.
"Also, you need a way to shield the people working on each project from interruptions generated from outside the project and the project managers need to insulate their people from scope creep"
BINGO!
Don't know how many times I have to stop the project I am on because the boss's kid can't get his mac to work on the home wireless.
The IT guys wear many hats unfortunately.
A good idea is to get most projects are done after hours, work output is doubled seemingly because you are not pulled from the project every 15 minutes. Would be nice to be on the after hours team.
The problem is in no way unique to IT departments. Every department suffers from the same thing. I manage hardware engineers and we face the same issues. Everybody thinks that because a problem is his biggest priority it should be your biggest priority.
But I recognize that there's a particular problem in IT departments. They have day-to-day issues that have to be dealt with on a timely basis as well as long-term issues that absolutely must be dealt with but on a longer schedule. You have to segment the problem somehow.
Some companies have a group that only handles system-down and user complaints and other people handle the longer-term projects. Some companies have babysitters for upper management.
At some point, doesn't it become unethical for a lawyer to hire on with a company to pursue a lawsuit that they have absolutely no chance in hell of winning?
Any half-competent lawyer is going to tell LightSquared to cut its losses and go begging on bended knee to the FCC and ask them to please allow them to license some other spectrum instead.
And if they persist in their stupidity, I'd think any ethical lawyer would quit. But maybe I have an overly-optimistic view of the state of corporate legal ethics.
It sounds like they need more than one project manager and a number of additional worker-bees to get the jobs done.
Start by showing the problem to senior management and tell them flat-out that there is no way to get all the projects done on schedule unless they hire enough people that each project has enough people on it to get the job done. It's always incumbent on workers at each level to give their best (i.e. worst-case) estimates of how much work is required to execute a project and how much time it requires. (Some work can't be accelerated past a certain point by adding more people.)
There are three responses that might generate:
* "you'll just have to work harder" This response is not unusual but tells you you're going to fail anyway and is a signal to get out of the organization before it crashes and burns.
* they'll cancel some projects and focus their people on the remaining ones
* they'll hire some more warm bodies to get more work done.
Also, you need a way to shield the people working on each project from interruptions generated from outside the project and the project managers need to insulate their people from scope creep.
should be "Dump your Member of Parliament."
Don't just complain about it. Run for Parliament and throw the corrupt government out. Shut down the program.
Unfortunately you won't be able to penalize companies for cooperating with the law. But you may be able to prove corruption of your current MPs and lock them the hell up for taking or soliciting bribes.
That's all well and good, except for the fact that they paid for the trade mark.
They say they paid for the trademark. The court decides whether they legally bought or licensed the trademark.
I think Apple will win this one because they'll be able to show that they really did pay for the trademark in China.
Normal computers aren't radiation hardened, but the point is that they store and process information based on more than just the quantum state of a single particle. It takes a great deal more unwanted energy to cause them to flip to the undesired state. This kind of thing would many times more vulnerable to stray radiation, heat or stray electromagnetic fields than the smallest conventional transistor.
But any practical computer is going to have to contain millions of these things. If you want to carry out a computation with such a machine, either you have to protect it with conditions that have a minimal chance of causing a computational error or you will have to engineer it with redundancy and error correction mechanisms that may in the end be bigger and less reliable than a classical solution.
A 1st and a 4th Amendment.
His idea presumes that the city traffic engineers care at all that people are wasting time sitting at stop lights. For the most part, they don't.
In the few cities where they actually care, there's no problem to be solved because they've already synch'd the lights to optimize traffic flow.
A couple points:
1. Smart phone makers have no control of what crap software you're going to stick on their phone -- only the crap software that comes preinstalled.
2. The former is the point of why consumers buy smart phones in the first place.
3. The smart phone makers have a big incentive to find a way to make the hardware faster because running your apps faster is a selling point.
Hes fucking right. The lassez-faire attitude about this on slashdot is pretty disgusting. This level of collusion between the govt and business to stop counterfeiting (which is not worth spying on every printer) is an abomination and lays the groundwork for much worse. Im sorry you dont have the imagination to see the end game to this.
You're talking to a filtered population which explains the less-than-panic this announcement produced. If you're posting on /., you've already made the decision that you think you live in a free country where the police aren't likely to come breaking down your door on the basis of something you said that may be declared illegal after the fact. Do you imagine that /. isn't going to fetch up your registration information and complete posting history the first time a government agent asks for it?
"Spying on every printer" is an overstatement. What they're doing is laying the groundwork so that they can prove (sometimes) after the fact who committed a crime.
This isn't a technology that enables them to identify what you've printed on your computer remotely -- that would be spying and it's technically feasible today -- a fact that unsettles me a great deal more than the unannounced printing of identifying information. To use that information, they need a piece of paper you printed in hand and either the printer itself or a registration record linking that printer to you. They can't get the former without a search warrant. They can probably get the other without one because the printer company is probably going to cooperate.
And yeah, if they abuse the power, it could be bad. But if they have a mind to abuse power in way that makes anything you might have printed illegal, IT WON'T MATTER because a government that out of control isn't going to waste its time with gathering real evidence of its new thought crimes. It's just going to ignore your rights, produce whatever real and false evidence they want against you and lock you the hell up.
And before it gets to that point, smart people will have stopped using electronic devices for anything that the government could conceivably consider subversive. You'll be handwriting messages to your compatriots on used newspaper with pink crayons that you melt down and dispose of very carefully.
Back in the real world, we're still able to get pretty detailed information about what the government is doing using freedom of information requests. That, at least, ought to be somewhat comforting.
Oh, dear. Another member of the "if they're inside our network, we have bigger problems" policy of ignoring basic security practices until it's far, far, far too late.
It's much safer to protect freedoms and rights earlier, before their loss has become accepted, than to try to roll back years or decades of common practice.
Nice condescension there. Do you get points for that?
The ironic thing is that is the same sort of argument the Secret Service would make to support their efforts to print the identifying dots. They want to protect your ability to have some confidence in the authenticity of paper currency, and unless you're a counterfeiter, you want them to be successful at their efforts. You just don't like the dots because there are other potentially nefarious purposes that they could put those dots to.
There's an inherent tension between not wanting Big Brother too far in your shorts and wanting Big Brother to help you ensure that reasonable laws are enforced and enforceable.
I see the dots as a relatively low risk that any savvy person can work around if need be, especially when traded off against my desire to have it possible to ensure the authenticity and integrity of printed documents including but not limited to currency.
The are LOTS of flaws in your agument. Prehaps the easiest to explain is what happens if the is a revolution in your country and previous 'free-expression' suddenly lands you in jail?
Then you have bigger problems that won't be solved with an anonymous printer..
I'm sure they were thinking they'd only have to sell one at a steep discount to be fabulously rich the rest of their lives.
Until somebody hacks it. Then one morning 100,000 elderly people don't wake up.
.... not so much the fact that this may have happened, but the fact that slashdot put it on the front page. This story has set the conservative blogosphere alight over "obama's nanny state" and what have you while overlooking one huge glaring problem here...
They are taking the word of a four year old kid to be god's-own-truth. I'm not saying she's intentionally lying, but how many reliable four year olds have you met in your life time? There could well be a very large gap between what she was told and what she thought she heard, and yet another between what she did and what she told her parents.
It says in the article that the mother has chosen to remain anonymous and the school claims that it has no knowledge of the incident.
So based not just on the word of a 4-year-old child but also on an anonymous mother whose story cannot be verified, we have a big kerfuffle.
I'll wait for verification before I pass judgment.
I must not be a true conservative.
Who the f*** pays these guys?
This is actually how human beings evolved to live.
The interval training takes the place of what used to be occasional but reasonably frequent activities for millions of years of human evolution:
* Fighting with other people
* chasing after game
* running away from lions.