Why does it seem, that the entirety of American business is set up to fall to pieces if employees take more than a few days vacation?
Because in any given organization, 10% of the employees are doing 90% of the actual work. The other 90% are goofing off, taking long lunches, surfing the web, talking to co-workers, ordering from catalogs, playing crosswords/solitaire/minesweeper/sudoku, posting to Slashdot, etc. If those 10% leave for a few days, everything does fall to pieces.
I just truly can't imagine working in an environment where you are expected to put in long days (standard workweek around here is 37 hours, give-or-take) without compensation and not even get to take proper vacations
Of course you can't. Because you live in a country where if you were to suddenly find yourself out of a job, you wouldn't be completely fucked. Here in the land of opportunity (to get fucked), your job is quite literally your life. No employment? No health insurance. No house payments. No car. No food. It's incredible (incredibly sad, that is) how rapidly you can descend from "successful" to "eating out of garbage cans" in this country.
some of which were chance discoveries (aspirin, penicillin)
Your words: "Listen, our unbridled profits lead to the lion's share of the world's medical advances"
It doesn't matter if it was a "chance" discovery or the concerted efforts of hundreds of scientists. You said that United States capitalism is the direct cause for the "lion's share" of the world's medical advances, and the fact is that is simply wrong. And by the way, aspirin had actually been known about for centuries, but it was Bayer... that's right, a foreign pharma that perfected its use--so much for "chance".
some of which don't apply because of socialized medicine time-frames
You're the one bringing up socialized medicine. I simply countered your ridiculous assertion that the "lion's share" of the world's medical advances are a direct result of U.S. medical profiteering. Some of the advances were dumb luck. Some of them were because of directed research at universities. And yes, some of them were because of the American profit-motive. But the lion's share? I think fucking not.
and weren't even medical discoveries to begin with (x-ray)
OK, next time you break a bone, please let the nice doctors know you won't be needing this "non-medical" discovery.
Instead, you can look at the number of biomedical research papers coming out on a yearly basis from the USA versus the rest of the world...
There are more universities in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world, so naturally there will be more research papers coming out. But here again, you're changing the subject. How many research papers have directly resulted in the lion's share of the world's medical advances?
and at how many new drugs are developed in the USA versus the rest of the world
Of course! We're great at making pills. Pills if you're tired, pills if you're unmotivated, pills if you're angry, pills if you're fat... but the profit-motive doesn't lead to advances for the "world." It leads to advances in the physical and mental problems of your customers. And who are your customers? Those who can pay. Which is why the Great American System has yet to come up with solutions to malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis.
You had an opinion, and then selected some random examples that don't even support it properly
No, you had an opinion, a rather transparent and biased one: "our unbridled profits lead to the lion's share of world's medical advances". An opinion which was shot down fairly easily, and now you're trying to change the subject because you know you stuck your foot in your mouth.
I just think that a disease affects the middle-class liberal left in this country... and that disease is jealousy and ignorance.
Must be contagious! Say, maybe the great U.S. medical industry will see enough dollars to want to cure these terrible diseases.
in fact that's the only predictable drive that people have, which can then be harnessed to drive them forward
Tell that to Henry Dunant and Clara Barton. Just because you're a soulless cretin doesn't mean we all are.
Listen, our unbridled profits lead to the lion's share of world's medical advances
This is pure, 100% USDA approved genuine horseshit. That it keeps getting trotted out as some ace-in-the-hole to forgive our ass-backwards healthcare system is symptomatic of the ignorance most Americans have of world history. Let's take a look at some of the "big-time" medical advances of the last century, shall we?
Penicillin: UK
Heart Transplant: South Africa
Aspirin: Germany (by way of France)
X-Rays: Germany
Valium: Switzerland
Antidepressants: Switzerland
Pap Smear: Greece
...et-fucking-cetera...
The US has certainly had its share of medical contributions, but the most visible (and shameful) has been the commercialization of medicine--pharmaceuticals in particular, and the artificial restrictions on distribution that generate such wonderful, lovely profits.
We have no malware but yah there are some cookies that are used in order to show you DIFFERENT ads rather than the same ones over and over if possible.
Sorry to be blunt, but that's pretty fucking dumb. Because if, on the remotest of remote chances, an advertisement actually broke through all the natural blindspots I have developed over time, I have one chance to click on the ad. Next time I go to the page, it's changed.
When I walk past a bus stop, or drive down the highway, the ads are the same over a period of time. Partly that's because it's more expensive to rotate ads with traditional media. But it's also because advertising takes repeated exposure due to people subconsciously, instinctively trying to block it out.
The technology is there to make ads more static. Have the rotate script on a one-week cycle and charge more for the placement. You can even use whatever heuristics you (or the ad company) likes to present different users with different static ads based on browsing history or URL "referer" or the like.
This isn't fucking rocket science. Stop annoying your users or they will simply find their own ways to circumvent your only means of revenue.
Macros and hotkeys produce more code automatically from less input. Anything they could do that saves work could instead be done by having more concise language constructs.
The thing is that the IDE has no idea what your intentions are. Take the JavaBean getter/setter idiom. Most of the time, you have a private member and a public getter and setter. Most of the time. But not all the time. Throwing out that aspect of the language because it fits with 75% (arbitrary number) of your usage means less flexibility and power for the other 25%.
Tell me, what Python and Ruby ORMs have you evaluated to support your claim that none exist which are high quality, and under what standards do you dismiss them as not being high-quality?
I wasn't being very civil last post, so my apologies for that. There are certainly lots of uses for the ActiveRecord pattern (for example), but those tend to be fairly small databases or trivial schema. When you have to support hundreds of tables, some with millions of rows, it just doesn't scale--neither by performance or development metrics. That's not to say it won't get better over time, but right now for enterprise application development the offerings simply aren't there.
If a "good IDE" can automatically complete the code from less-than-complete code, it means that the code doesn't need to be so verbose in the first place
Huh? Nobody said automatic. That was you. I said code completion. As in, macros. Hotkeys. Suggesting that the compiler should magically do this for you is either woefully optimistic or painfully stupid.
And then you wouldn't need the slow, heavyweight IDE to do development.
Right. And who needs digital video editing software when you can just put all your stills together by hand?
Certainly not compared to Ruby or Python.
Sorry, you are completely wrong. There is no debate here: it's a simple fact that statically typed languages are easier to refactor.
But, as far as using the existing libraries on the Java platform, Ruby and Python implementations for the Java platform allow you leverage them painlessly.
Sure they do.
but there are high-quality ORMs for Ruby and Python (and probably plenty of other languages)
OK, so you don't know what you're talking about. That's fine, I just wish you could have come out and said that from the start.
Why not? Don't want to "ruin" a good thing? Bah, says I! I'll name one, then. kaZantip is a somewhat hedonistic music festival held on the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. It's becoming a lot more commercial now (aren't they all?) but it's still a lot of fun if you're into the scene.
Naturally these laws had nothing to do with protecting children; they were usually used to target homosexuals. In fact, of the 70-or-so countries where these laws are still in place, 40 of them only target male homosexual acts.
So the (typically religious) nuts get all fire and brimstone about gay sex between dudes (which is icky and gross and you put it where?) but when it's between women, oh! well... well surely if God had wanted hot lesbian action to be illegal wouldn't have made it so damned arousing. No, can't go making that illegal.
There are a few encryption systems out there which provide plausible deniability
TrueCrypt does indeed offer such a feature. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's new Windows7 OS, while maintaining the ability to encrypt data, does not hide the volume.
Amusing that this piece of news should crop up so quickly after I just got through trying to explain to someone why the built-in Win7 encryption was half-assed. "Well, why would you want to hide the volume?" asks the idiot.
Except because the augmented information is geo-spacial, you'd have to actually be in front of/next to the building before you can see the sale. Which makes it less useful than a newspaper. Or the internet.
Not to rain on your parade, but I had this idea about ten years ago, which leads me to think:
1. About a million other people have also already had this idea.
2. At least a few of those million are programmers currently working on it.
Another idea would be to integrate a HUD with the internet so businesses could overlay meta-information about their store as you're walking down the street (restaurant menus, hours of operation, upcoming performers, etc).
Again, probably a million others have already thought of this. Actually doing it has always been the hard part.
Do you remember the private copying levy that the Liberals introduced back in 1997? Where we have to pay extra money on all blank media we buy here to compensate the poor media companies and the losses they incur?
Actually, this was a godsend in disguise, because it essentially created a giant loophole for Bittorrent operators in Canada. The CRIA hasn't been nearly as successful as their American counterpart because infringing citizens can happily point to the levy and say, "You're already getting your cut, so STFU."
I thought this was Slashdot. Where in the hell is the information on the hack itself?
"...And then the magical hacker waved a wand over it and it was cloned. After cloning the card, the grand wizard placed it in his magical Black Box of Mystery and managed to change the data!"
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works.
And yet, somehow television stations were able to miraculously stay in business just giving away their content! Quality programming that took millions of dollars to produce, all those employees that had to be paid, all those corporate offices with their leases... and yet, they just beamed all their hard work into the aether. Absurdity!
Slashdot Mirror
Because in any given organization, 10% of the employees are doing 90% of the actual work. The other 90% are goofing off, taking long lunches, surfing the web, talking to co-workers, ordering from catalogs, playing crosswords/solitaire/minesweeper/sudoku, posting to Slashdot, etc. If those 10% leave for a few days, everything does fall to pieces.
Of course you can't. Because you live in a country where if you were to suddenly find yourself out of a job, you wouldn't be completely fucked. Here in the land of opportunity (to get fucked), your job is quite literally your life. No employment? No health insurance. No house payments. No car. No food. It's incredible (incredibly sad, that is) how rapidly you can descend from "successful" to "eating out of garbage cans" in this country.
the kind of typo like when you write "the" twice, and noone notices
Wait, I thought Noone was using Windows? He sure does get around!
some of which were chance discoveries (aspirin, penicillin)
Your words: "Listen, our unbridled profits lead to the lion's share of the world's medical advances"
It doesn't matter if it was a "chance" discovery or the concerted efforts of hundreds of scientists. You said that United States capitalism is the direct cause for the "lion's share" of the world's medical advances, and the fact is that is simply wrong. And by the way, aspirin had actually been known about for centuries, but it was Bayer... that's right, a foreign pharma that perfected its use--so much for "chance".
some of which don't apply because of socialized medicine time-frames
You're the one bringing up socialized medicine. I simply countered your ridiculous assertion that the "lion's share" of the world's medical advances are a direct result of U.S. medical profiteering. Some of the advances were dumb luck. Some of them were because of directed research at universities. And yes, some of them were because of the American profit-motive. But the lion's share? I think fucking not.
and weren't even medical discoveries to begin with (x-ray)
OK, next time you break a bone, please let the nice doctors know you won't be needing this "non-medical" discovery.
Instead, you can look at the number of biomedical research papers coming out on a yearly basis from the USA versus the rest of the world...
There are more universities in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world, so naturally there will be more research papers coming out. But here again, you're changing the subject. How many research papers have directly resulted in the lion's share of the world's medical advances?
and at how many new drugs are developed in the USA versus the rest of the world
Of course! We're great at making pills. Pills if you're tired, pills if you're unmotivated, pills if you're angry, pills if you're fat... but the profit-motive doesn't lead to advances for the "world." It leads to advances in the physical and mental problems of your customers. And who are your customers? Those who can pay. Which is why the Great American System has yet to come up with solutions to malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis.
You had an opinion, and then selected some random examples that don't even support it properly
No, you had an opinion, a rather transparent and biased one: "our unbridled profits lead to the lion's share of world's medical advances" . An opinion which was shot down fairly easily, and now you're trying to change the subject because you know you stuck your foot in your mouth.
I just think that a disease affects the middle-class liberal left in this country... and that disease is jealousy and ignorance.
Must be contagious! Say, maybe the great U.S. medical industry will see enough dollars to want to cure these terrible diseases.
in fact that's the only predictable drive that people have, which can then be harnessed to drive them forward
Tell that to Henry Dunant and Clara Barton. Just because you're a soulless cretin doesn't mean we all are.
Listen, our unbridled profits lead to the lion's share of world's medical advances
This is pure, 100% USDA approved genuine horseshit. That it keeps getting trotted out as some ace-in-the-hole to forgive our ass-backwards healthcare system is symptomatic of the ignorance most Americans have of world history. Let's take a look at some of the "big-time" medical advances of the last century, shall we?
The US has certainly had its share of medical contributions, but the most visible (and shameful) has been the commercialization of medicine--pharmaceuticals in particular, and the artificial restrictions on distribution that generate such wonderful, lovely profits.
We have no malware but yah there are some cookies that are used in order to show you DIFFERENT ads rather than the same ones over and over if possible.
Sorry to be blunt, but that's pretty fucking dumb. Because if, on the remotest of remote chances, an advertisement actually broke through all the natural blindspots I have developed over time, I have one chance to click on the ad. Next time I go to the page, it's changed.
When I walk past a bus stop, or drive down the highway, the ads are the same over a period of time. Partly that's because it's more expensive to rotate ads with traditional media. But it's also because advertising takes repeated exposure due to people subconsciously, instinctively trying to block it out.
The technology is there to make ads more static. Have the rotate script on a one-week cycle and charge more for the placement. You can even use whatever heuristics you (or the ad company) likes to present different users with different static ads based on browsing history or URL "referer" or the like.
This isn't fucking rocket science. Stop annoying your users or they will simply find their own ways to circumvent your only means of revenue.
Macros and hotkeys produce more code automatically from less input. Anything they could do that saves work could instead be done by having more concise language constructs.
The thing is that the IDE has no idea what your intentions are. Take the JavaBean getter/setter idiom. Most of the time, you have a private member and a public getter and setter. Most of the time. But not all the time. Throwing out that aspect of the language because it fits with 75% (arbitrary number) of your usage means less flexibility and power for the other 25%.
Tell me, what Python and Ruby ORMs have you evaluated to support your claim that none exist which are high quality, and under what standards do you dismiss them as not being high-quality?
I wasn't being very civil last post, so my apologies for that. There are certainly lots of uses for the ActiveRecord pattern (for example), but those tend to be fairly small databases or trivial schema. When you have to support hundreds of tables, some with millions of rows, it just doesn't scale--neither by performance or development metrics. That's not to say it won't get better over time, but right now for enterprise application development the offerings simply aren't there.
Are you serious? What kind of kindergarten crap is this? "those who know something" tend to disagree, huh? The good 'ol appeal to authority.
Well, how about this:
"You might not agree with me, but most people with even a passing intellect do."
"You think you're right, but I did an informal survey of people with brains and they say you're wrong."
Astroturfer Harry, you might think you have a penis, but all the women I talked to said you don't. How about that for a summary?
If a "good IDE" can automatically complete the code from less-than-complete code, it means that the code doesn't need to be so verbose in the first place
Huh? Nobody said automatic. That was you. I said code completion. As in, macros. Hotkeys. Suggesting that the compiler should magically do this for you is either woefully optimistic or painfully stupid.
And then you wouldn't need the slow, heavyweight IDE to do development.
Right. And who needs digital video editing software when you can just put all your stills together by hand?
Certainly not compared to Ruby or Python.
Sorry, you are completely wrong. There is no debate here: it's a simple fact that statically typed languages are easier to refactor.
But, as far as using the existing libraries on the Java platform, Ruby and Python implementations for the Java platform allow you leverage them painlessly.
Sure they do.
but there are high-quality ORMs for Ruby and Python (and probably plenty of other languages)
OK, so you don't know what you're talking about. That's fine, I just wish you could have come out and said that from the start.
Verbosity? It's called code completion, folks. Which you can do that with any good IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans, and my personal fave, IntelliJ).
Need to change code around? Java refactoring is a cinch!
Don't want to reinvent the wheel? Millions of open source libraries out there, and 'cause it's Java, it's actually easy to read and understand.
And any good language that accesses a database had better have a damned good ORM. That means Java and C#, and I'm allergic to Microsoft.
So, in the immortal words of Eddie Murphy...
My code wants to
Java all the time
Java all the time
Java all the time...
I'm obviously not going to name any
Why not? Don't want to "ruin" a good thing? Bah, says I! I'll name one, then. kaZantip is a somewhat hedonistic music festival held on the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. It's becoming a lot more commercial now (aren't they all?) but it's still a lot of fun if you're into the scene.
Also, it's filled with beautiful Ukrainian & Russian women that really enjoy their sunbathing.
Check out the photo gallery for more.
The crazy thing is, sodomy laws (which encompasses oral sex as well any other non-procreational sexual activity) were only finally ruled unconstitutional in 2003 in the U.S.
Naturally these laws had nothing to do with protecting children; they were usually used to target homosexuals. In fact, of the 70-or-so countries where these laws are still in place, 40 of them only target male homosexual acts.
So the (typically religious) nuts get all fire and brimstone about gay sex between dudes (which is icky and gross and you put it where?) but when it's between women, oh! well... well surely if God had wanted hot lesbian action to be illegal wouldn't have made it so damned arousing. No, can't go making that illegal.
There are a few encryption systems out there which provide plausible deniability
TrueCrypt does indeed offer such a feature. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's new Windows7 OS, while maintaining the ability to encrypt data, does not hide the volume.
Amusing that this piece of news should crop up so quickly after I just got through trying to explain to someone why the built-in Win7 encryption was half-assed. "Well, why would you want to hide the volume?" asks the idiot.
Because of stories like this.
Except because the augmented information is geo-spacial, you'd have to actually be in front of/next to the building before you can see the sale. Which makes it less useful than a newspaper. Or the internet.
Not to rain on your parade, but I had this idea about ten years ago, which leads me to think:
1. About a million other people have also already had this idea.
2. At least a few of those million are programmers currently working on it.
Another idea would be to integrate a HUD with the internet so businesses could overlay meta-information about their store as you're walking down the street (restaurant menus, hours of operation, upcoming performers, etc).
Again, probably a million others have already thought of this. Actually doing it has always been the hard part.
Do you remember the private copying levy that the Liberals introduced back in 1997? Where we have to pay extra money on all blank media we buy here to compensate the poor media companies and the losses they incur?
Actually, this was a godsend in disguise, because it essentially created a giant loophole for Bittorrent operators in Canada. The CRIA hasn't been nearly as successful as their American counterpart because infringing citizens can happily point to the levy and say, "You're already getting your cut, so STFU."
I meant gclef.
I don't have an iPhone or iTouch, but was sufficiently annoyed at the flaming you've been getting without offering anything resembling a solution.
Anyway, I think the DiskAid app might help you out.
Wow, paranoid much?
I think you missed my point.
They help the law enforcement know which way a criminal has gone
Unless that criminal is the law enforcement. Then the tapes go conveniently missing. Paranoid? Just read the links I included.
Completely agree. This is so fucking flagrant I want to kick the submitter in the knees from the front. Hard.
Because the patent system in the United States is completely, inexorably fucked.
I thought this was Slashdot. Where in the hell is the information on the hack itself?
"...And then the magical hacker waved a wand over it and it was cloned. After cloning the card, the grand wizard placed it in his magical Black Box of Mystery and managed to change the data!"
Incredible! Who needs details?
CCTV all over the place
I love this part. You lot have video cameras recording every innocuous moment of your lives, except when it involves the police, whereby the video suddenly, consistently, gets "lost".
Works ok on Firefox 3.5 though.
Ah yes, so it does. And that is pretty cool, actually.
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works.
And yet, somehow television stations were able to miraculously stay in business just giving away their content! Quality programming that took millions of dollars to produce, all those employees that had to be paid, all those corporate offices with their leases... and yet, they just beamed all their hard work into the aether. Absurdity!
I wonder how those guys managed to make a buck.
Here's a fantastic example of the sorts of things this'll make possible, which simply can't be done with flash:
OH MY GOD THE CORNER OF A BLACK BOX!
Incredible. Somebody should patent that.