None of what you described sounds like "as soon as it's ready."
"Up to 2 times a day" sounds like ready-or-not here I come to me. Just because you have a formal cycle doesn't mean that the software has been decently vetted, it just means that you have a guaranteed way to keep staff busy. Up to 2 times a day.
You didnt miss much. Just some conclusions about the evolution of insects:
What is this evolution you talk of, and how can this insect be 520 million years old, if earth is only 6000 years old?
I still don't know whether to laugh or cry, when I hear people try to proclaim creationism as science. Otoh trying to get it into the classroom pisses me of for sure.
Don't be absurd. Evolution is a Lie from Hell. I have that straight from the congressional panel on Science and Technology.
You're obviously stuck back in the mid 20th Century when every research project didn't have to show immediate quarterly payback. We don't do that anymore. It's not "efficient".
Well what sort of "return" has been shown? Looks like we have a rather expensive fusion bomb simulator and not much else. I really tire of people who just don't get that any expenditure of public funds should be accountable. If you don't like the accountability issue, then find another way to fund the research. Don't just belittle it as short sighted thinking, especially, when ignoring accountability is the real short-sighted thinking here.
We used to show returns in the form of transistors, lasers, stuff like that. Many of these items didn't actually find a profitable use until decades after their discovery.
Not all R&D is expensive boondoggles, and who the $#%# said "public funds?" Bell Labs invented both the transistor and the laser and they came from pure research, not "payback-this-quarter".
They have repeatedly demonstrated that, via various acts that have been harmful and frequently fatal to the very animals they were "rescuing". They operate under the assumption that (despite daily evidence to the contrary) that animals fear and despise humans universally and unconditionally. This isn't even true for wild animals, much less domesticated ones. One of the biggest problems the filmers of the "March of the Penguins" documentary had was that the penguins kept wanting to socialize with the people who were trying to film them. In Alaska, wolves have been recorded bring their pup to the side of the highway for no apparent reason other than for people to admire them. Even skunks have shown a preference for living around humans on occasion.
PETA is an organization that hates humans. The animals are just a justification. If they really loved animals, they'd do their homework and learn what the animals themselves really want.
Odds are better than average that you yourself don't use some form of Unix. Unix is expensive. I would be willing to concede that you may use a distro of Linux but other than at work, I would bet you haven't touched Unix.
I worked in a mixed environment. Our Cash Cow was a mortgage loan processing system. That system tracked people's load payments in dollars and cents (fixed decimal) and if things didn't balance to the penny, people got unhappy (IIRC, 0.01 in binary floating-point is an irrational number, and therefore cannot be precise within a finite number of bits).
However, I worked for a time in a mortgage portfolio valuation system (yes, the type that estimated the present and future values - badly, as it came out - so that people could kite mortgage-backed securities). We were dealing with probabilities and statistics and we needed more decimals, but less precision. Plus fixed-decimal arithmetic is often slower than floating-point and we were computationally heavy.
In between the two extremes are things like amortization calculation. The amortization formulas were floating-point, but the final payment determination would, of course, be in dollars and cents because that's what the payments would be in.
The experiment was a success. The outcome a failure.
There are two proposed approaches for fusion power generation: tokamak and ICF. ITER tests the tokamak approach and the National Ignition Facility tests the ICF approach. Thanks to the NIF we now know exactly what ICF is and isn't capable of. I'd call that an excellent return on investment.
You're obviously stuck back in the mid 20th Century when every research project didn't have to show immediate quarterly payback. We don't do that anymore. It's not "efficient".
Coding is not a profession. It's a skill, which is a part of a series of job descriptions and career paths, but in itself it's a form of knowledge more like what an electrician has than what professionals like architects, doctors, lawyers and assassins must know.
W
T
F
????
A "skill" isn't a "knowledge", it's an application of knowledge. Not everyone who knows how to operate dangerous equipment should be allowed to do so. Not everyone who knows how to cut gemstones can cut them reliably.
Furthermore, there's at least a myth that mid-level coders will someday be senior coders and in an era where even the entry-level people are expected to know and do everything, the whole idea of a static "mid-level, semi-skilled blue collar coder" is just plain absurd. Unlike, say, apprentice plumbers, even the least of coders is not only expected to make decisions, he/she cannot even function without making decisions all day long. If it weren't, we'd be machine-generating the code.
I do favor a guild-like track, where formal academic training and apprenticeship are components. Neither one is, I think sufficient unto themselves.
Most people in the field consider programming to be a craft - a combination of art and science, just like the traditional (non-software) profession of architect. Although the traditional dividing line between blue- and white-collar trades was how sweaty you got (literally, since blue shirts are easier to launder), the ultimate difference is in how much autonomous decision-making you do. That's while programmers tend to be so anti-union. They identify with the decision-makers (management). Unfortunately for them, the reverse isn't true.
I always assumed that no-one used floating point except for games, and even then it's risky unless you normalise sufficiently frequently.
Unfortunately, you assumed very, very wrong.
Very few programming languages come with native fixed-decimal capabilities as a first-class operation the way COBOL does. Most (such as Java) have to do financial calculations using cumbersome support packages and some don't even have that much. Everyone else just fakes it using floating-point, and even a lot of Java and C financial code is done in floating-point because the pressure is on to "Git 'er Dun" and that means using something where you can type "balance += transactionAmount;" instead of a lot of clumsy dancing around with method calls.
The bits of metal are there to prevent iron deficiency.
I heard on the radio this morning that the East German Stasi (secret police) built special high-capacity shredders to try and eliminate the evidence when the wall came down. They ran the shredders full throttle, but they had so much paper to process that the shredders, being run so "efficiently" all burned out and they were reduced to tearing bits of paper apart by hand.
Not sure I'd call it insightful. This is the situation with every team; different people always have different strengths and weaknesses. It's also one reason Agile rarely works the way the "experts" say it should (everyone is supposed to know all about the project and can pick up any task - just doesn't happen in real life).
When Fred Brooks wrote the original Mythical Man-Month and suggested the Chief Programmer Team approach to software development, a homogeneous team was quite the opposite of what he posited. The Chief Programmer Team was supposed to operate like a surgical team, with a designated lead and various supporting specialists. Not interchangeable grunts.
True statement. On the other hand, judging results by now many hours were worked is easy but notoriously inaccurate.
There is this thing I call the "Hamburger Grinder" theory of work. It's based on the idea that creative work is like hamburger. If you add more grinding machines and run them continuously and run them as fast as you can, you're supposed to be able to get more hamburger (productivity).
In the real world, even real hamburger grinders don't work that way. Run a grinder too fast, and - assuming it doesn't simply break, it will heat up and cook the hamburger while it grinds it.
Then there's Moore's Law, which bad managers have be attempting to disprove from time immemorial, and would try even harder, except for the fact that you can more easily squeeze free overtime out of existing salaried staff than get a budget to hire even more staff.
Again, even real hamburger grinders cannot be run continuously. They need to be taken offline and maintained. Humans call this "sleep" and "having a life". If you run an actual hamburger grinder without allowing for wear and tear, eventually you're going to wind up with bits of metal grinder in your hamburger and ultimately machine failure. While management isn't really too upset about having to wheel a broken machine out and a new one in, beyond the setup costs, those bits of metal in the hamburger tend to be troublesome.
Of course, what with the popularity of offshoring to India, you're better off not mentioning to them that you're grinding hamburger. A lot of Indians won't like that analogy, for religious reasons.
My first instinct when people start off saying "It's Simple" is too punch them right in the mouth, and stem the damage at its source.
Virtually NOTHING involving human effort is "Simple". In technology, the deadliest words are "All You Have To Do Is...".
Take this little example. What is "result"? In the long term, the result is, say, a functioning software system. In the short term, however, there's probably a timeframe and a set of available resources. So, if you can produce a "result", but it requires more time/people/equipment/knowledge than is available, a practical result and an acceptable result are two very different things, and which one is "the" result depends on who you ask and when. A lot of real-life results are Larry the Cable Guy stuff ("Just Git 'er Dun!"), and include rebooting servers once a week because making an app that runs clean from the start requires more resources than shoving something through that the operations staff has to keep nudging and bumping forever.
This is an important question that everyone should ask, regardless of how far they are moving. You mention graphics cards and hard drives that are not installed in computers - are they really worth transporting? I know this can be a hard question to answer but it is important. I would recommend looking at the cost per kilogram you are paying for transport, and then think seriously of which items that you are shipping are worth at least that much per kilogram on their own. Anything that doesn't meet that threshold should probably not be moved.
Actually, I'm puzzled by the need to move it at all. As Dave Barry once noted, computer equipment goes obsolete so fast, they might as well put a dumpster next to the cash register. Unless the destination is someplace like the Amazon jungle (and definitely almost NOWHERE in Asia), I'd pare down the transportables to just the data storage devices and simply buy native stuff at the other end. Unless you're moving a server farm, it's likely to be cheaper than transport, you get new shiny stuff (or buy used and save more), and it's going to be compatible with local power and infrastructure. so no need for adapters.
You could actually take that even further, archive the data in the Cloud and transport everything over the Internet, but that depends on the sensitivity of the data and the quality (and speed) of the data services at the destination.
Efficient in whose eyes? I prefer a car that goes directly from point A to B on my schedule, to a train that has me walk or drive to point C, then get off at point D, then take a bus to get to point B. Perhaps you have a surplus of idle time to ride the choo-choo and see the sights, but some of us are working under a tighter schedule.
That's pretty sad, actually.
When you operate anything too efficiently, you lose something. Ultimately, of course, you lose flexibility, since if there's no slack, there's no room for error. A bump in the road becomes an instant train wreck, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphors.
Personally, I used to read the newspaper on the bus. Most days, it was exactly done by the time I reached work*. On the way home, I could ponder the problems I'd left behind at work without the distractions of work (no tempting keyboard to sit down to before I'd thought through what I was planning, since this was pre-iPad days).
The walk from the bus stop was murder in the Summer, but it saved the price of a gym membership.
* Except Mondays. The business news took longer on Mondays.
The go-carts (I prefer "golf carts" which is probably closer to the truth) go nicely with rail. You don't add highways, you add rail, probably up the middle of the highways. The golf carts can be loaded onto the trains, or parked in half the space of the cars.
Purists call them "golf cars". Carts are not self-propelled. Cars are. Whatever.
There are cheaper ways to do things like weather displays. And the e-ink display is really only useful for what it's used for - displaying and reading printed text. And Amazon probably will find a way to shut it down, much like Sony does with its PS3 - force you to system update to use new features, which lock it down again.
Weather displays aren't "printed text"? Is there something wrong with wanting a customizable smart display that uses less power and is easier to read than the typical black/gray hardwired LCDs?
That means kicking your neighbor in the balls when they say or do anything in support of the TSA. That means slapping your girlfriend when she says something retarded like "if it means I arrive safely then it's okay".
So what do we do with the idiots who advocate violence in response to someone freely expressing their personal beliefs?
Assert our Second Amendment rights and shoot them, of course!
RSS linked shortened the headline to "Hitachi develops boarding gate with built-in explosives".
Now THAT would bring Real Meaning to the phrase "Terrorists' Surrogate Army!"
This whole bring-a-bomb-on-a-plane thing is something no sane person could believe. As has been often stated, if you wanted to do real damage, you'd detonate in a crowded airport, not on the plane. Yet these clowns continue to try and smuggle explosives onboard the plane. And, if one was to go strictly by public news reports, they succeed more often than not, only to be caught and neutralized by civilians.
It's stuff like this that makes me doubt how real reality is.
Its so obvious now, why didn't I see it before? Obama is just like Einstein and all of these other smart and wealthy people who wear the same clothes all the time. Obama is so smart. Now I'll vote for him for sure!
Einstein was a genius. When he was offered a job as president, he refused!
This has been the case for every president since the teleprompter was invented.
The first time I ever saw those glass-panel teleprompters they were surrounding Saint Reagan. One on each side, so he could turn and spontaneously address the audience.
The way some people carry on, you'd think that teleprompters had had to be specially invented just for Obama.
I don't understand austerity; is the idea "sacrifice tomorrow to pay for today"? I bet that will work about as well as it sounds.
Austerity in tough times is ass-backwards: it feeds the economic vicious cycle. The only sensible way to run a country is to set spending at a long-term sustainable level, borrow to maintain that level when times are tough, and pay the debt down when times are good.
Unfortunately, most countries are run by politicians, so when times are good they cut taxes and go on a spending spree instead of paying down the public debt. Then when times are tough the find themselves in a real jam. (Cf. USA, 2001-present.)
There is some irony in the fact that the Great Recession was brought on by an orgy of private borrowing against flawed intangible promises (e.g. mortgaged-backed securities), but people find it a horrible idea to borrow in order to invest in skills and knowledge.
Realistically, of the these 3 bases of running up a debt: faith in other people's promises, faith in the government, and faith in education, the most risky of the 3 is the one we worship the most. Yes, I know, the government is evil, and it weasels out of its obligations by printing phoney money, but at the end of the day, phoney money still spends better than evaporated contracts, even if you do end up having to spend more of it.
I like FreeMind as an idea organizer. Especially since, although it has a very nice GUI, you can rapidly outline stuff using only the keyboard. But FreeMind is just the overview where I do my brainstorming. Once I start adding diagrams and tables and schemas, I either hyperlink it to something more suitable (like pages in a wiki) or I run an XSLT on the freemind file to produce a prototype ODF ("Word") outline document.
Slashdot Mirror
None of what you described sounds like "as soon as it's ready."
"Up to 2 times a day" sounds like ready-or-not here I come to me. Just because you have a formal cycle doesn't mean that the software has been decently vetted, it just means that you have a guaranteed way to keep staff busy. Up to 2 times a day.
You didnt miss much. Just some conclusions about the evolution of insects:
What is this evolution you talk of, and how can this insect be 520 million years old, if earth is only 6000 years old?
I still don't know whether to laugh or cry, when I hear people try to proclaim creationism as science. Otoh trying to get it into the classroom pisses me of for sure.
Don't be absurd. Evolution is a Lie from Hell. I have that straight from the congressional panel on Science and Technology.
If pen beats sword (and thereby knife and dagger), what would a pocket calculator beat?
Barack Obama at calculating the deficit?
Congress at creating a budget.
You're obviously stuck back in the mid 20th Century when every research project didn't have to show immediate quarterly payback. We don't do that anymore. It's not "efficient".
Well what sort of "return" has been shown? Looks like we have a rather expensive fusion bomb simulator and not much else. I really tire of people who just don't get that any expenditure of public funds should be accountable. If you don't like the accountability issue, then find another way to fund the research. Don't just belittle it as short sighted thinking, especially, when ignoring accountability is the real short-sighted thinking here.
We used to show returns in the form of transistors, lasers, stuff like that. Many of these items didn't actually find a profitable use until decades after their discovery.
Not all R&D is expensive boondoggles, and who the $#%# said "public funds?" Bell Labs invented both the transistor and the laser and they came from pure research, not "payback-this-quarter".
PETA is not an organization that loves animals.
They have repeatedly demonstrated that, via various acts that have been harmful and frequently fatal to the very animals they were "rescuing". They operate under the assumption that (despite daily evidence to the contrary) that animals fear and despise humans universally and unconditionally. This isn't even true for wild animals, much less domesticated ones. One of the biggest problems the filmers of the "March of the Penguins" documentary had was that the penguins kept wanting to socialize with the people who were trying to film them. In Alaska, wolves have been recorded bring their pup to the side of the highway for no apparent reason other than for people to admire them. Even skunks have shown a preference for living around humans on occasion.
PETA is an organization that hates humans. The animals are just a justification. If they really loved animals, they'd do their homework and learn what the animals themselves really want.
Odds are better than average that you yourself don't use some form of Unix. Unix is expensive. I would be willing to concede that you may use a distro of Linux but other than at work, I would bet you haven't touched Unix.
Umm. Ever hear of this thing called "BSD"?
I worked in a mixed environment. Our Cash Cow was a mortgage loan processing system. That system tracked people's load payments in dollars and cents (fixed decimal) and if things didn't balance to the penny, people got unhappy (IIRC, 0.01 in binary floating-point is an irrational number, and therefore cannot be precise within a finite number of bits).
However, I worked for a time in a mortgage portfolio valuation system (yes, the type that estimated the present and future values - badly, as it came out - so that people could kite mortgage-backed securities). We were dealing with probabilities and statistics and we needed more decimals, but less precision. Plus fixed-decimal arithmetic is often slower than floating-point and we were computationally heavy.
In between the two extremes are things like amortization calculation. The amortization formulas were floating-point, but the final payment determination would, of course, be in dollars and cents because that's what the payments would be in.
The experiment was a success. The outcome a failure.
There are two proposed approaches for fusion power generation: tokamak and ICF. ITER tests the tokamak approach and the National Ignition Facility tests the ICF approach. Thanks to the NIF we now know exactly what ICF is and isn't capable of. I'd call that an excellent return on investment.
You're obviously stuck back in the mid 20th Century when every research project didn't have to show immediate quarterly payback. We don't do that anymore. It's not "efficient".
Coding is not a profession. It's a skill, which is a part of a series of job descriptions and career paths, but in itself it's a form of knowledge more like what an electrician has than what professionals like architects, doctors, lawyers and assassins must know.
W
T
F
????
A "skill" isn't a "knowledge", it's an application of knowledge. Not everyone who knows how to operate dangerous equipment should be allowed to do so. Not everyone who knows how to cut gemstones can cut them reliably.
Furthermore, there's at least a myth that mid-level coders will someday be senior coders and in an era where even the entry-level people are expected to know and do everything, the whole idea of a static "mid-level, semi-skilled blue collar coder" is just plain absurd. Unlike, say, apprentice plumbers, even the least of coders is not only expected to make decisions, he/she cannot even function without making decisions all day long. If it weren't, we'd be machine-generating the code.
I do favor a guild-like track, where formal academic training and apprenticeship are components. Neither one is, I think sufficient unto themselves.
Most people in the field consider programming to be a craft - a combination of art and science, just like the traditional (non-software) profession of architect. Although the traditional dividing line between blue- and white-collar trades was how sweaty you got (literally, since blue shirts are easier to launder), the ultimate difference is in how much autonomous decision-making you do. That's while programmers tend to be so anti-union. They identify with the decision-makers (management). Unfortunately for them, the reverse isn't true.
I always assumed that no-one used floating point except for games, and even then it's risky unless you normalise sufficiently frequently.
Unfortunately, you assumed very, very wrong.
Very few programming languages come with native fixed-decimal capabilities as a first-class operation the way COBOL does. Most (such as Java) have to do financial calculations using cumbersome support packages and some don't even have that much. Everyone else just fakes it using floating-point, and even a lot of Java and C financial code is done in floating-point because the pressure is on to "Git 'er Dun" and that means using something where you can type "balance += transactionAmount;" instead of a lot of clumsy dancing around with method calls.
The bits of metal are there to prevent iron deficiency.
I heard on the radio this morning that the East German Stasi (secret police) built special high-capacity shredders to try and eliminate the evidence when the wall came down. They ran the shredders full throttle, but they had so much paper to process that the shredders, being run so "efficiently" all burned out and they were reduced to tearing bits of paper apart by hand.
Not sure I'd call it insightful. This is the situation with every team; different people always have different strengths and weaknesses. It's also one reason Agile rarely works the way the "experts" say it should (everyone is supposed to know all about the project and can pick up any task - just doesn't happen in real life).
When Fred Brooks wrote the original Mythical Man-Month and suggested the Chief Programmer Team approach to software development, a homogeneous team was quite the opposite of what he posited. The Chief Programmer Team was supposed to operate like a surgical team, with a designated lead and various supporting specialists. Not interchangeable grunts.
if you have a good way to measure results
True statement. On the other hand, judging results by now many hours were worked is easy but notoriously inaccurate.
There is this thing I call the "Hamburger Grinder" theory of work. It's based on the idea that creative work is like hamburger. If you add more grinding machines and run them continuously and run them as fast as you can, you're supposed to be able to get more hamburger (productivity).
In the real world, even real hamburger grinders don't work that way. Run a grinder too fast, and - assuming it doesn't simply break, it will heat up and cook the hamburger while it grinds it.
Then there's Moore's Law, which bad managers have be attempting to disprove from time immemorial, and would try even harder, except for the fact that you can more easily squeeze free overtime out of existing salaried staff than get a budget to hire even more staff.
Again, even real hamburger grinders cannot be run continuously. They need to be taken offline and maintained. Humans call this "sleep" and "having a life". If you run an actual hamburger grinder without allowing for wear and tear, eventually you're going to wind up with bits of metal grinder in your hamburger and ultimately machine failure. While management isn't really too upset about having to wheel a broken machine out and a new one in, beyond the setup costs, those bits of metal in the hamburger tend to be troublesome.
Of course, what with the popularity of offshoring to India, you're better off not mentioning to them that you're grinding hamburger. A lot of Indians won't like that analogy, for religious reasons.
Its not really. Specifications -> result.
My first instinct when people start off saying "It's Simple" is too punch them right in the mouth, and stem the damage at its source.
Virtually NOTHING involving human effort is "Simple". In technology, the deadliest words are "All You Have To Do Is...".
Take this little example. What is "result"? In the long term, the result is, say, a functioning software system. In the short term, however, there's probably a timeframe and a set of available resources. So, if you can produce a "result", but it requires more time/people/equipment/knowledge than is available, a practical result and an acceptable result are two very different things, and which one is "the" result depends on who you ask and when. A lot of real-life results are Larry the Cable Guy stuff ("Just Git 'er Dun!"), and include rebooting servers once a week because making an app that runs clean from the start requires more resources than shoving something through that the operations staff has to keep nudging and bumping forever.
This is an important question that everyone should ask, regardless of how far they are moving. You mention graphics cards and hard drives that are not installed in computers - are they really worth transporting? I know this can be a hard question to answer but it is important. I would recommend looking at the cost per kilogram you are paying for transport, and then think seriously of which items that you are shipping are worth at least that much per kilogram on their own. Anything that doesn't meet that threshold should probably not be moved.
Actually, I'm puzzled by the need to move it at all. As Dave Barry once noted, computer equipment goes obsolete so fast, they might as well put a dumpster next to the cash register. Unless the destination is someplace like the Amazon jungle (and definitely almost NOWHERE in Asia), I'd pare down the transportables to just the data storage devices and simply buy native stuff at the other end. Unless you're moving a server farm, it's likely to be cheaper than transport, you get new shiny stuff (or buy used and save more), and it's going to be compatible with local power and infrastructure. so no need for adapters.
You could actually take that even further, archive the data in the Cloud and transport everything over the Internet, but that depends on the sensitivity of the data and the quality (and speed) of the data services at the destination.
Efficient in whose eyes? I prefer a car that goes directly from point A to B on my schedule, to a train that has me walk or drive to point C, then get off at point D, then take a bus to get to point B. Perhaps you have a surplus of idle time to ride the choo-choo and see the sights, but some of us are working under a tighter schedule.
That's pretty sad, actually.
When you operate anything too efficiently, you lose something. Ultimately, of course, you lose flexibility, since if there's no slack, there's no room for error. A bump in the road becomes an instant train wreck, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphors.
Personally, I used to read the newspaper on the bus. Most days, it was exactly done by the time I reached work*. On the way home, I could ponder the problems I'd left behind at work without the distractions of work (no tempting keyboard to sit down to before I'd thought through what I was planning, since this was pre-iPad days).
The walk from the bus stop was murder in the Summer, but it saved the price of a gym membership.
* Except Mondays. The business news took longer on Mondays.
The go-carts (I prefer "golf carts" which is probably closer to the truth) go nicely with rail. You don't add highways, you add rail, probably up the middle of the highways. The golf carts can be loaded onto the trains, or parked in half the space of the cars.
Purists call them "golf cars". Carts are not self-propelled. Cars are. Whatever.
Just don't try to drive them on the Interstate.
There are cheaper ways to do things like weather displays. And the e-ink display is really only useful for what it's used for - displaying and reading printed text. And Amazon probably will find a way to shut it down, much like Sony does with its PS3 - force you to system update to use new features, which lock it down again.
Weather displays aren't "printed text"? Is there something wrong with wanting a customizable smart display that uses less power and is easier to read than the typical black/gray hardwired LCDs?
That means kicking your neighbor in the balls when they say or do anything in support of the TSA. That means slapping your girlfriend when she says something retarded like "if it means I arrive safely then it's okay".
So what do we do with the idiots who advocate violence in response to someone freely expressing their personal beliefs?
Assert our Second Amendment rights and shoot them, of course!
RSS linked shortened the headline to "Hitachi develops boarding gate with built-in explosives".
Now THAT would bring Real Meaning to the phrase "Terrorists' Surrogate Army!"
This whole bring-a-bomb-on-a-plane thing is something no sane person could believe. As has been often stated, if you wanted to do real damage, you'd detonate in a crowded airport, not on the plane. Yet these clowns continue to try and smuggle explosives onboard the plane. And, if one was to go strictly by public news reports, they succeed more often than not, only to be caught and neutralized by civilians.
It's stuff like this that makes me doubt how real reality is.
Its so obvious now, why didn't I see it before? Obama is just like Einstein and all of these other smart and wealthy people who wear the same clothes all the time. Obama is so smart. Now I'll vote for him for sure!
Einstein was a genius. When he was offered a job as president, he refused!
This has been the case for every president since the teleprompter was invented.
The first time I ever saw those glass-panel teleprompters they were surrounding Saint Reagan. One on each side, so he could turn and spontaneously address the audience.
The way some people carry on, you'd think that teleprompters had had to be specially invented just for Obama.
We're sorry. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
HP Compaq. Continuing in a long proud tradition of downsizing its way to greatness.
I don't understand austerity; is the idea "sacrifice tomorrow to pay for today"? I bet that will work about as well as it sounds.
Austerity in tough times is ass-backwards: it feeds the economic vicious cycle. The only sensible way to run a country is to set spending at a long-term sustainable level, borrow to maintain that level when times are tough, and pay the debt down when times are good.
Unfortunately, most countries are run by politicians, so when times are good they cut taxes and go on a spending spree instead of paying down the public debt. Then when times are tough the find themselves in a real jam. (Cf. USA, 2001-present.)
There is some irony in the fact that the Great Recession was brought on by an orgy of private borrowing against flawed intangible promises (e.g. mortgaged-backed securities), but people find it a horrible idea to borrow in order to invest in skills and knowledge.
Realistically, of the these 3 bases of running up a debt: faith in other people's promises, faith in the government, and faith in education, the most risky of the 3 is the one we worship the most. Yes, I know, the government is evil, and it weasels out of its obligations by printing phoney money, but at the end of the day, phoney money still spends better than evaporated contracts, even if you do end up having to spend more of it.
As mentioned above they can't handle complex data structures (or much data at all). Wiki-based software is better.
http://zim-wiki.org/
http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/
There's a lot of things they don't do well.
I like FreeMind as an idea organizer. Especially since, although it has a very nice GUI, you can rapidly outline stuff using only the keyboard. But FreeMind is just the overview where I do my brainstorming. Once I start adding diagrams and tables and schemas, I either hyperlink it to something more suitable (like pages in a wiki) or I run an XSLT on the freemind file to produce a prototype ODF ("Word") outline document.