However, I'm sure I'd fail on any Java test or C test. The details (what's usually asked in such tests) do not matter, you'll find them quickly with a Google search because you're trained to know what to search for.
Our coding test definitely allows (and encourages) you to use google or ask us for details. I mean, if you If you get the job you'll have coworkers and the Web to use, a test that doesn't realize that is pretty useless (presuming you're trying to test suitability for the job). If you're at least a barely competent programmer, it's more about seeing how you work than what the results are.
A FLOSS(ed) resume helps avoid them. Work on the free/open source programs that you like, then point your employers at commit diffs (as well as your responses to idiotic questions on the respective mailing lists showing that your tolerant and work well with others).
8/10 times, in my experience.. an employer is just as happy to browse my Mercurial repositories as they are to give me a test
We always use both a coding test and ask for sample code. Those are pretty much the best 2 tools to evaluate a potential coworker. Our coding test is always a brief open-ended problem description that involves modifying some code, and people are encouraged to ask questions or search the web or whatever during it (since in real life you'd have coworkers and Google and so forth available when working). It's more to see how they work than what the final answer is, since we're going to be working with them every day.
Sample code, OTOH, serves as a guide of what they've done in the past with more than 20 minutes to sit and work, and more importantly acts as a jumping off point a lot of times (either into what they think of the library/language/framework/etc they used, why they were interested in that kind of program, whatever).
And we always have the team that they're going to be sitting with and working with day-to-day do the bulk of the interview. They'll meet the manager for a bit to make sure there's a personality fit. If things go well they'll meet an HR person but that's basically for the applicant's benefit (so they have a chance to ask about benefits and policies and such).
But isn't the POSIX subsystem a world unto itself? I was under the impression that a Windows application couldn't use the POSIX API, and vice versa... So you're out of luck making a POSIX application that is also graphical.
Yes. Hence my post saying
The POSIX subsystem blows for a host of reasons (you can't access most normal Win32 functionality, at least not easily), but it's got fork.
Let me clarify a common misconception. Windows is _NOT_ POSIX compliant for all practical intents and purpose for one simple reason: an application using the POSIX subsystem doesn't have access to the Win32 subsystem, making it completely useless.
Yeah, that's why my post you quoted said:
The POSIX subsystem blows for a host of reasons (you can't access most normal Win32 functionality, at least not easily), but it's got fork.
There are a few really nasty ways to try to work around it, but essentially POSIX procs can't use Win32 calls.
Win32 calls can do a copy-on-write fork, though, by using zwCreateProcess (or whatever it's been renamed in recent years) with a NULL SectionHandle.
I know that Windows provides some POSIX support, but it's broken and non-compliant in various ways. For example fork() is not supported.
Not true.
Microsoft Windows Internals, 4th. Ed (Russinovich & Solomon), p. 60:
Because POSIX.1 compliance was a mandatory goal for Windows, the operating system was designed to ensure that the required base system support was present to allow for the implementation of a POSIX.1 subsystem (such as the fork function, which is implemented in the Windows executive, and the support for hard file links in the Windows file system).
And to head off the next common incorrect belief, p.394:
The POSIX subsystem takes advantage of copy-on-write to implement the fork function. Typically, when a UNIX application calls the fork function to create another process, the first thing that the new process does is call the exec function to reinitialize the address space with an executable program. Instead of copying the entire address space on fork, the new process shares the pages in the parent process by marking them copy-on-write.
The POSIX subsystem blows for a host of reasons (you can't access most normal Win32 functionality, at least not easily), but it's got fork.
I thought many of those hyped benefits haven't panned out, or are taken out of proportion. Power consumption even on a good drive isn't significantly lot lower, the real-world speed generally isn't there yet, and the noise? I think first you'll need to deal with CPU power consumption. Notebook hard drives consume 1-2 watts of power, standard notebook CPUs go for 30W. Then there's the fan that's needed to cool the CPU. I personally don't need silent, and I am not really bothered by the noise a good computer emits, the noise level is so low that the money is much better spent on sound treatments for the house or quieter appliances.
For me, on the other hand, noise is huge for the machines in my bedroom and living room. It's quite easy to get fanless CPU/power supply/case/video card setups if you're not aiming for the current cutting edge graphics card (just enough for your PVR and so forth). Aside from the HD, my bedroom machine has been silent (and fanless) for years.
Seriously, I hate how these articles concentrate almost exclusively on speed. Speed is nice, but for a rather large portion of the computer-using population (including me, a full-time professional programmer) speed ceased to be the driving force in purchasing decisions nearly 10 years ago.
You mention power savings, which for some is a huge deal. I put a huge premium on silent computers for my bedroom (the one in there right now has no fans, the HD is the only noisy component). A lot of laptops get uncomfortably hot. Robustness against falls is important, too.
If I could get desktop HDs that were only 30% slower than current spinning platters at twice the cost, but were totally silent, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
It's possible people would read "Duke Nukem 3D" and assume it must be the "Forever" game, because that's the only Duke Nukem they're aware of.
I can't be the only one who still thinks of the original Duke Nukem when I see the name, and its primary shareware competitor--Commander Keen (one of id Software's first games).
I was very confused in college 12 years ago when I heard people talking about how awesome Duke Nukem is (to this day I've still never actually seen the 3d version) since it's a fairly cheesy platform side-scroller.
Adidas, the shoe sponsor at the 1960 Claiming that it's just the athlete and not equipment is missing what a bicycle is in the first place.Summer Olympics, had few shoes left when Bikila went to try out shoes and he ended up with a pair that didn't fit comfortably, so he couldn't use them. A couple of hours before the race the decision was taken by Abebe to run barefoot, the way he'd trained for the race...Bikila won in a record time of 2:15:16.2, becoming the first African to win an Olympic gold medal. He finished 26 seconds ahead of Rhadi.
After the race, when Bikila was asked why he had run barefoot, he replied, "I wanted the world to know that my country, Ethiopia, has always won with determination and heroism."
That aside, the comparison is ridiculous. Shoes are a means of protecting the feet, but the point of the sport is to test unaided human running skills. I'm sure advanced modern shoes add something to the equation, but if you can't see the difference between that sort of ancillary benefit and bicycling (where having a machine improve your speed and efficiency is the whole reason the event exists), I'm not sure what to say. The whole _point_ of a bicycle is to add mechanical advantage. The sport of cycling is predicated on the melding of the human athlete with the equipment. That the equipment may be similar for well-heeled teams doesn't alter the fact that the event is fundamentally one about a human _with_ a machine.
Well the tour de france is still the worlds most watched sporting event that happens yearly or more.
Not even close; US football, World football, baseball, basketball, cricket, tennis, and auto racing annual events all exceeded the Tour's viewership last year. Many of them absolutely blow it out of the water. I would expect that several other events beat out the Tour as well.
Quick and dirty googling: Super Bowl: 97.5 million viewers world series: 41.7 million viewers Wimbledon: 33 million viewers Brazilian (F1 Auto Racing) Grand Prix: 83 million viewers ICC Twenty20 Cricket India/Pakistan: 20 million viewers Tour de France: 19 million viewers
I can't be bothered to look at enough sites to get the accurate totals, but the Masters, NBA Finals, and English Premier League Championship all beat the Tour handily as well.
I'm not *that* sure. Remember first Safari releases and their negative to open up its code, even though safari rendering engine is based in KHTML.
Nobody but the Apple haters remembers that, not even the KHTML developers who complained that Apple didn't release their changes in the format they would have prefered to receive them in.
Disagree, strongly. I'd say to the casual person who isn't a close follower of Apple or KDE, that is the only thing they would remember about the Safari/KHTML code. It's certainly the only thing that made Slashdot headlines. Normal daily code releases don't get press, so anybody who isn't really following the development mailing lists is never going to hear about them.
I hate to break it to you but all high end bicycles are the same as it is now anyway. Any bike over $3000 from your local store can win the tour de france.
I think there's a disconnect here.
Currently there's a raging debate about the new LZR Racer suits in Olympic swimming, with people very concerned that they'll eliminate poorer swimmers from being able to race competitively because they're so expensive. They go for about $550.
The concern isn't that well-funded Olympic (or Tour) teams can't swing that money. It's that by making expensive equipment a part of the event, they'll eliminate a lot of people around the world from being able to play competitively, hence decrease the talent pool they're drawing from.
In a sport that is simply about the athletes, anyone can play. Therefore you can draw from a lot more people, and you can see great things happen like the emergence of Kenyan and Ethiopian marathoners as a dominant force.
That's funny, I thought Rodney Harrison's reputation is that he's a dirty player all around. I hadn't heard anything about steroids, he's just not well regarded.
Chris Henry isn't even a starter let alone a star. I think if these steroid violators were dominating the league like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens people might view it as more of an epidemic.
How about the 1970s Steelers D-line and all their Superbowls, the 1980s 49ers O-line and all their Superbowls, multiple linemen on the 2 Broncos Superbowl teams, the 1990s Cowboys O-line, several of the 1990s Raiders, Pro-Bowler and reigning defensive rookie of the year Shaun Merriman, 3 guys on the 2004 Carolina Panthers Superbowl (losing) O-line, etc?
All of those were well documented on TV and newspaper coverage at the time, and the public reaction was pretty much nonexistent.
Obviously steroids helps QBs and WRs less than other positions (so it's not the glamor positions that get caught as much), but every major dynasty of the last 35 years has had a number of key players suspended or outed by major media of the ESPN/CNN/ABC level. People don't care. It's not like baseball, where it's treated as a big scandal even when Luis Castillo tests positive.
Heck, Merriman was on the cover of the NFL 2006 (or whatever year) PS2 game after testing positive. Coaches say it's "disappointing", 4-game suspensions are served, and the player goes back in the game.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying the post I first responded to claiming that if a sport accepted steroid use it would die seems pretty untrue so far.
Permitting doping in any sport is the road to that sport's ruin.
I wish that were the case.
Bodybuilding didn't take off until steroids entered the picture. The "natural" bodybuilding events (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_bodybuilding ) are basically niche sports by comparison.
American football does pretty well, and while performance drug use is not technically allowed it's been essentially overlooked since steroids entered the league in 1962. Nobody has the same "strike them from the record books" outcry against teams like the 1970s Steelers and 1980s 49ers dynasties who had players that are well-known to have used performance enhancing drugs regularly. Even with the increased public pressure against them, you see the Carolina Panthers and others (Rodney Harrison with the Pats, Chris Henry with the Titans, really tons of others not limited to any small set of teams) get tiny slaps on the wrist and at most maybe a 4-game suspension.
Heck, rather than outrage you actually see people writing things about guys like Shaun Merriman like "17 sacks in 12 games last year? Without the 4 game steroid suspension that extrapolates to 22.67 sacks for the season and the NFL record is 22.5!"
Hardly seems like people care enough about extant widespread use for it to ruin the sport.
Wrong direction, everyone should be riding the exact same bike. The Tour is about the athletes not the equipment.
It's a bicycle race. The equipment is a huge part of it (it's what the sport is named after). Foot racing is all about the athletes. Cycling, by its very nature, is about both.
Yeah right, as in "you are perfectly free not to sign this contract, but unfortunately we then won't employ you , oh and by the way all the other firms in this industry have similar contracts, so in fact your choice is sign or never work again".
Every company I've worked for has had no problems amending employment contracts if there are legitimate concerns about them. Even really big government contractors and the like are, in my experience, quite reasonable about making changes to those contracts if you present them with a reasonable justification for the changes (though sending changes up through the legal department often takes a bit more time).
Too many people just assume when the contract is plopped in front of them that it's not open to negotiation. In reality, most companies aren't overtly out to get you, and are more than willing to listen to reasonable suggestions if you just take the time to make them in a polite, rational manner. Indeed, many times these sorts of stipulations are just part of some boilerplate contract and not something the company has really given much thought to.
I've changed contracts that:
1. Wanted ownership of all code and patents I developed while in their employ. I pointed out that I do open-source development and had the section explicitly changed to note that anything I developed on my own time outside of the office was my property (so long as it didn't disclose company secrets). 2. Wanted my indemnification that none of my code violated any patents and I'd be liable for the penalties if it did. I pointed out that this was unreasonable given my assets as a solo consultant and the monetary value of the job in question, and had it changed to guarantee that none of my code knowingly violated patents and indemnify them against any patents I held personally. 3. Stated that I could not work as a software developer for another company while in their employ. This is almost certainly unenforceable anyway, but I explained that I was coming to them as a consultant and would have other jobs contemporaneously; they struck the section entirely.
I'm sure there are more. (1) in particular has happened several times, and (2) has happened at least twice.
But the point is, you can negotiate most contracts as long as your requests are reasonable. If you can't, that's probably a warning sign that the company is going to be unreasonable in other areas.
It was because of ignorance of the law. Exactly like I said. That's an escape that doesn't work for regular crimes. Only white collar workers who cost people millions of dollars get off saying, "I didn't know it was wrong."
Tax evasion and all kinds of other white collar crimes don't require knowledge of the law. Obstruction of justice is a specific crime alleging that you intentionally hindered a criminal investigation, and so requires knowledge of the illegitimacy of your actions. It is not "ignorance of the law" as a defense; the allegation is not that AA didn't know that obstruction of justice was illegal, but did not believe that their actions constituted obstruction and hence lacked the willfullness required for that particular crime.
It's not a white collar/blue collar thing. There are several blue-collar crimes that require specific intent and/or willfullness, and most white collar crimes do not.
Well, using the name of a city in place of the types of businesses a city has is a bit of synecdoche. It's clear enough to a native speaker, and there is context in the particular sentence to boot. However, it's quite possible someone other than a native speaker of English could miss the subtlety.
I hope you're not suggesting that we should avoid using literate English in a full-length book so that people with a minimal grasp of the language can understand everything.
In road signs or medicine instructions, limiting the language to simple sentences with a 5th-grade vocabulary may make sense. In a book, artful and expressive use of English is often one of the primary goals.
No, I'm getting at the fact that people that are drug users or drug dealers may be imprisoned solely for other crimes because that's what they are convicted of
That would fall under my second option ("If what you're getting at is that these people may be drug users/dealers independent of the crimes that they were convicted for").
the prohibition of drugs (whether that policy is on balance justified or not) makes it more likely that any drug user or seller will be involved in violence
Absolutely true. Still, we don't say that people are in jail for poverty when they get busted stealing stuff, or for alcohol use when they commit violent crimes after having several drinks.
My main interest in correcting the GGP is that I'm in favor of re-examining drug prohibition, and I think the numbers are stark enough when presented without an obvious bias.
Trying to claim that state prisons are mostly in for drug use/dealing makes opponents of reform likely to turn a deaf ear when they look at the numbers and see that that is certainly not obviously true, and requires drawing a lot of tenuous implications to defend.
It undermines the argument to present contorted conclusions as fact, and if you want to make the more complex case you should take the time to do so fully; if you just want a quick stat, saying that more than half of our federal prisoners are in for drug crimes and another quarter-million prisoners in state prisons are there for drug crimes (1 in 5 state prisoners).
Your claim and the statistics you point to indicate that you think that "drug users/dealers" and "violent criminals" are exclusive sets, and that conviction of a non-drug offense means that one is not a "drug user/dealer".
If you're getting at the fact that people can be imprisoned for multiple offenses, that still doesn't change the fact that the majority of state prisoners are _not_ in for drug-related crimes. And even if _all_ of the drug-related prisoners were also in for some violent crime, there are still more violent-crime-only prisoners in state prisons.
If what you're getting at is that these people may be drug users/dealers independent of the crimes that they were convicted for, that's certainly true. If you read the thread, it's also clearly not what was being discussed. The post I responded to said in part:
Federal prison is mainly big-time drug users and drug dealers.
State prison is mainly small-time drug users and drug dealers.
A friend's brother down in the St Louis area went to federal prison for loaning a cocaine dealer a thousand dollars; the charge was conspiracy to deliver cocaine (the dealer had been busted and was setting up innocent guys to lessen his own sentence; most of his high school graduating class went to Maximum Security Club Fed for twice as long as he did).
Violent criminals usually don't get caught. When they do, it depends on who they attacked.
A woman I know went to Dwight Correctional (Illinois hardcore women'sprison) for 4 months for nonviolent drug posession, while a guy I know and intensly dislike broke into a man's home and tried to kill him with a butcher knife. He spent two weeks in the county jail - but the man he attacked was a poor black man.
Clearly the discussion was about drug users/dealers in the context of those who are actually prosecuted for (and convicted of) such crimes.
The proportion of people serving time for drug-related crimes is quite high, and does in fact form a majority of federal prisoners. On the other hand, the intimation that the majority of state prisoners are in for drug-related crimes is simply incorrect.
Federal prison is mainly big-time drug users and drug dealers.
Correct. Well, I dunno that it's all big-time, but it mainly drug users/dealers.
State prison is mainly small-time drug users and drug dealers
Incorrect. There are far more violent criminals than drug users/dealers in state prisons.
I can't find a link in 2 minutes of googling, but the proportions haven't changed much since 2000:
In 2000, an estimated 57% of Federal inmates and 21% of State inmates were serving a sentence for a drug offense; about 10% of Federal inmates and 49% of State inmates were in prison for a violent offense.
For many years I have been using LaTeX to compose scientific documents, but truly I am getting tired of its complexity. You have to install new packages for new features, compatibility issues are everywhere
LaTeX is the pinnacle of "what you did 10 years ago will work beautifully today". If you are installing new packages willy-nilly, something is horribly wrong.
I have assignments I wrote for a group theory class in 1993 that render exactly the same today as they did then. That is, in fact, the reason that Metafont uses e (2.718...) and TeX uses pi (3.1415...) as their version numbers. There are no changes in functionality these days; they only correct true bugs.
Indeed, Knuth has said the reason for that is so that documents written today will render the same in 20 or 100 years. New versions are legally not allowed to change the behavior or typesetting of the program without changing the name to something other than TeX. And as a user, that's completely true. If you learned it in 1995, you know it now.
The story is really, truly bizarre to me. Given that it's railing against a central tenet of TeX, I would expect some explanation other than "truth by assertion".
It's for the appliances (e.g. music player in the bedroom, DVR, etc) that are much more convenient as true instant-on devices where silence is a driving factor.
Huh? System cooling makes far more noise than the disk drive in just about every system I've been near.
Fanless PSUs, CPUs, and graphics cards are relatively easy to find if you care. Silent storage of sufficient size is tough (I've used CF-to-IDE adapters in the past but size is limited and they have a lot of drawbacks), so you wind up having to run a second machine in a closet with networked disks or something.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I'm sure I'd fail on any Java test or C test. The details (what's usually asked in such tests) do not matter, you'll find them quickly with a Google search because you're trained to know what to search for.
Our coding test definitely allows (and encourages) you to use google or ask us for details. I mean, if you If you get the job you'll have coworkers and the Web to use, a test that doesn't realize that is pretty useless (presuming you're trying to test suitability for the job). If you're at least a barely competent programmer, it's more about seeing how you work than what the results are.
A FLOSS(ed) resume helps avoid them. Work on the free/open source programs that you like, then point your employers at commit diffs (as well as your responses to idiotic questions on the respective mailing lists showing that your tolerant and work well with others).
8/10 times, in my experience .. an employer is just as happy to browse my Mercurial repositories as they are to give me a test
We always use both a coding test and ask for sample code. Those are pretty much the best 2 tools to evaluate a potential coworker. Our coding test is always a brief open-ended problem description that involves modifying some code, and people are encouraged to ask questions or search the web or whatever during it (since in real life you'd have coworkers and Google and so forth available when working). It's more to see how they work than what the final answer is, since we're going to be working with them every day.
Sample code, OTOH, serves as a guide of what they've done in the past with more than 20 minutes to sit and work, and more importantly acts as a jumping off point a lot of times (either into what they think of the library/language/framework/etc they used, why they were interested in that kind of program, whatever).
And we always have the team that they're going to be sitting with and working with day-to-day do the bulk of the interview. They'll meet the manager for a bit to make sure there's a personality fit. If things go well they'll meet an HR person but that's basically for the applicant's benefit (so they have a chance to ask about benefits and policies and such).
But isn't the POSIX subsystem a world unto itself? I was under the impression that a Windows application couldn't use the POSIX API, and vice versa... So you're out of luck making a POSIX application that is also graphical.
Yes. Hence my post saying
The POSIX subsystem blows for a host of reasons (you can't access most normal Win32 functionality, at least not easily), but it's got fork.
Let me clarify a common misconception. Windows is _NOT_ POSIX compliant for all practical intents and purpose for one simple reason: an application using the POSIX subsystem doesn't have access to the Win32 subsystem, making it completely useless.
Yeah, that's why my post you quoted said:
The POSIX subsystem blows for a host of reasons (you can't access most normal Win32 functionality, at least not easily), but it's got fork.
There are a few really nasty ways to try to work around it, but essentially POSIX procs can't use Win32 calls.
Win32 calls can do a copy-on-write fork, though, by using zwCreateProcess (or whatever it's been renamed in recent years) with a NULL SectionHandle.
I know that Windows provides some POSIX support, but it's broken and non-compliant in various ways. For example fork() is not supported.
Not true.
Microsoft Windows Internals, 4th. Ed (Russinovich & Solomon), p. 60:
And to head off the next common incorrect belief, p.394:
The POSIX subsystem blows for a host of reasons (you can't access most normal Win32 functionality, at least not easily), but it's got fork.
I thought many of those hyped benefits haven't panned out, or are taken out of proportion. Power consumption even on a good drive isn't significantly lot lower, the real-world speed generally isn't there yet, and the noise? I think first you'll need to deal with CPU power consumption. Notebook hard drives consume 1-2 watts of power, standard notebook CPUs go for 30W. Then there's the fan that's needed to cool the CPU. I personally don't need silent, and I am not really bothered by the noise a good computer emits, the noise level is so low that the money is much better spent on sound treatments for the house or quieter appliances.
For me, on the other hand, noise is huge for the machines in my bedroom and living room. It's quite easy to get fanless CPU/power supply/case/video card setups if you're not aiming for the current cutting edge graphics card (just enough for your PVR and so forth). Aside from the HD, my bedroom machine has been silent (and fanless) for years.
Seriously, I hate how these articles concentrate almost exclusively on speed. Speed is nice, but for a rather large portion of the computer-using population (including me, a full-time professional programmer) speed ceased to be the driving force in purchasing decisions nearly 10 years ago.
You mention power savings, which for some is a huge deal. I put a huge premium on silent computers for my bedroom (the one in there right now has no fans, the HD is the only noisy component). A lot of laptops get uncomfortably hot. Robustness against falls is important, too.
If I could get desktop HDs that were only 30% slower than current spinning platters at twice the cost, but were totally silent, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
No, it was Duke Nukem first, then changed to Nukum later, then back to Nukem.
It's possible people would read "Duke Nukem 3D" and assume it must be the "Forever" game, because that's the only Duke Nukem they're aware of.
I can't be the only one who still thinks of the original Duke Nukem when I see the name, and its primary shareware competitor--Commander Keen (one of id Software's first games).
I was very confused in college 12 years ago when I heard people talking about how awesome Duke Nukem is (to this day I've still never actually seen the 3d version) since it's a fairly cheesy platform side-scroller.
I don't think there is that much difference in the bikes of TDF riders.
You could say the same about the shoes of runners.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abebe_Bikila
That aside, the comparison is ridiculous. Shoes are a means of protecting the feet, but the point of the sport is to test unaided human running skills. I'm sure advanced modern shoes add something to the equation, but if you can't see the difference between that sort of ancillary benefit and bicycling (where having a machine improve your speed and efficiency is the whole reason the event exists), I'm not sure what to say. The whole _point_ of a bicycle is to add mechanical advantage. The sport of cycling is predicated on the melding of the human athlete with the equipment. That the equipment may be similar for well-heeled teams doesn't alter the fact that the event is fundamentally one about a human _with_ a machine.
Well the tour de france is still the worlds most watched sporting event that happens yearly or more.
Not even close; US football, World football, baseball, basketball, cricket, tennis, and auto racing annual events all exceeded the Tour's viewership last year. Many of them absolutely blow it out of the water. I would expect that several other events beat out the Tour as well.
Quick and dirty googling:
Super Bowl: 97.5 million viewers
world series: 41.7 million viewers
Wimbledon: 33 million viewers
Brazilian (F1 Auto Racing) Grand Prix: 83 million viewers
ICC Twenty20 Cricket India/Pakistan: 20 million viewers
Tour de France: 19 million viewers
I can't be bothered to look at enough sites to get the accurate totals, but the Masters, NBA Finals, and English Premier League Championship all beat the Tour handily as well.
And, yeah, all are annual.
Disagree, strongly. I'd say to the casual person who isn't a close follower of Apple or KDE, that is the only thing they would remember about the Safari/KHTML code. It's certainly the only thing that made Slashdot headlines. Normal daily code releases don't get press, so anybody who isn't really following the development mailing lists is never going to hear about them.
I'm saying that as someone who likes Apple.
I hate to break it to you but all high end bicycles are the same as it is now anyway. Any bike over $3000 from your local store can win the tour de france.
I think there's a disconnect here.
Currently there's a raging debate about the new LZR Racer suits in Olympic swimming, with people very concerned that they'll eliminate poorer swimmers from being able to race competitively because they're so expensive. They go for about $550.
The concern isn't that well-funded Olympic (or Tour) teams can't swing that money. It's that by making expensive equipment a part of the event, they'll eliminate a lot of people around the world from being able to play competitively, hence decrease the talent pool they're drawing from.
In a sport that is simply about the athletes, anyone can play. Therefore you can draw from a lot more people, and you can see great things happen like the emergence of Kenyan and Ethiopian marathoners as a dominant force.
That's funny, I thought Rodney Harrison's reputation is that he's a dirty player all around. I hadn't heard anything about steroids, he's just not well regarded.
Not steroids, HGH. He served a 4 game suspension and went right back in.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2999994
and tons of other outlets carried the story.
Chris Henry isn't even a starter let alone a star. I think if these steroid violators were dominating the league like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens people might view it as more of an epidemic.
How about the 1970s Steelers D-line and all their Superbowls, the 1980s 49ers O-line and all their Superbowls, multiple linemen on the 2 Broncos Superbowl teams, the 1990s Cowboys O-line, several of the 1990s Raiders, Pro-Bowler and reigning defensive rookie of the year Shaun Merriman, 3 guys on the 2004 Carolina Panthers Superbowl (losing) O-line, etc?
All of those were well documented on TV and newspaper coverage at the time, and the public reaction was pretty much nonexistent.
Obviously steroids helps QBs and WRs less than other positions (so it's not the glamor positions that get caught as much), but every major dynasty of the last 35 years has had a number of key players suspended or outed by major media of the ESPN/CNN/ABC level. People don't care. It's not like baseball, where it's treated as a big scandal even when Luis Castillo tests positive.
Heck, Merriman was on the cover of the NFL 2006 (or whatever year) PS2 game after testing positive. Coaches say it's "disappointing", 4-game suspensions are served, and the player goes back in the game.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying the post I first responded to claiming that if a sport accepted steroid use it would die seems pretty untrue so far.
Permitting doping in any sport is the road to that sport's ruin.
I wish that were the case.
Bodybuilding didn't take off until steroids entered the picture. The "natural" bodybuilding events (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_bodybuilding ) are basically niche sports by comparison.
American football does pretty well, and while performance drug use is not technically allowed it's been essentially overlooked since steroids entered the league in 1962. Nobody has the same "strike them from the record books" outcry against teams like the 1970s Steelers and 1980s 49ers dynasties who had players that are well-known to have used performance enhancing drugs regularly. Even with the increased public pressure against them, you see the Carolina Panthers and others (Rodney Harrison with the Pats, Chris Henry with the Titans, really tons of others not limited to any small set of teams) get tiny slaps on the wrist and at most maybe a 4-game suspension.
Heck, rather than outrage you actually see people writing things about guys like Shaun Merriman like "17 sacks in 12 games last year? Without the 4 game steroid suspension that extrapolates to 22.67 sacks for the season and the NFL record is 22.5!"
Hardly seems like people care enough about extant widespread use for it to ruin the sport.
Wrong direction, everyone should be riding the exact same bike. The Tour is about the athletes not the equipment.
It's a bicycle race. The equipment is a huge part of it (it's what the sport is named after). Foot racing is all about the athletes. Cycling, by its very nature, is about both.
Yeah right, as in "you are perfectly free not to sign this contract, but unfortunately we then won't employ you , oh and by the way all the other firms in this industry have similar contracts, so in fact your choice is sign or never work again".
Every company I've worked for has had no problems amending employment contracts if there are legitimate concerns about them. Even really big government contractors and the like are, in my experience, quite reasonable about making changes to those contracts if you present them with a reasonable justification for the changes (though sending changes up through the legal department often takes a bit more time).
Too many people just assume when the contract is plopped in front of them that it's not open to negotiation. In reality, most companies aren't overtly out to get you, and are more than willing to listen to reasonable suggestions if you just take the time to make them in a polite, rational manner. Indeed, many times these sorts of stipulations are just part of some boilerplate contract and not something the company has really given much thought to.
I've changed contracts that:
1. Wanted ownership of all code and patents I developed while in their employ. I pointed out that I do open-source development and had the section explicitly changed to note that anything I developed on my own time outside of the office was my property (so long as it didn't disclose company secrets).
2. Wanted my indemnification that none of my code violated any patents and I'd be liable for the penalties if it did. I pointed out that this was unreasonable given my assets as a solo consultant and the monetary value of the job in question, and had it changed to guarantee that none of my code knowingly violated patents and indemnify them against any patents I held personally.
3. Stated that I could not work as a software developer for another company while in their employ. This is almost certainly unenforceable anyway, but I explained that I was coming to them as a consultant and would have other jobs contemporaneously; they struck the section entirely.
I'm sure there are more. (1) in particular has happened several times, and (2) has happened at least twice.
But the point is, you can negotiate most contracts as long as your requests are reasonable. If you can't, that's probably a warning sign that the company is going to be unreasonable in other areas.
It was because of ignorance of the law. Exactly like I said. That's an escape that doesn't work for regular crimes. Only white collar workers who cost people millions of dollars get off saying, "I didn't know it was wrong."
Tax evasion and all kinds of other white collar crimes don't require knowledge of the law. Obstruction of justice is a specific crime alleging that you intentionally hindered a criminal investigation, and so requires knowledge of the illegitimacy of your actions. It is not "ignorance of the law" as a defense; the allegation is not that AA didn't know that obstruction of justice was illegal, but did not believe that their actions constituted obstruction and hence lacked the willfullness required for that particular crime.
It's not a white collar/blue collar thing. There are several blue-collar crimes that require specific intent and/or willfullness, and most white collar crimes do not.
Well, using the name of a city in place of the types of businesses a city has is a bit of synecdoche. It's clear enough to a native speaker, and there is context in the particular sentence to boot. However, it's quite possible someone other than a native speaker of English could miss the subtlety.
I hope you're not suggesting that we should avoid using literate English in a full-length book so that people with a minimal grasp of the language can understand everything.
In road signs or medicine instructions, limiting the language to simple sentences with a 5th-grade vocabulary may make sense. In a book, artful and expressive use of English is often one of the primary goals.
No, I'm getting at the fact that people that are drug users or drug dealers may be imprisoned solely for other crimes because that's what they are convicted of
That would fall under my second option ("If what you're getting at is that these people may be drug users/dealers independent of the crimes that they were convicted for").
the prohibition of drugs (whether that policy is on balance justified or not) makes it more likely that any drug user or seller will be involved in violence
Absolutely true. Still, we don't say that people are in jail for poverty when they get busted stealing stuff, or for alcohol use when they commit violent crimes after having several drinks.
My main interest in correcting the GGP is that I'm in favor of re-examining drug prohibition, and I think the numbers are stark enough when presented without an obvious bias.
Trying to claim that state prisons are mostly in for drug use/dealing makes opponents of reform likely to turn a deaf ear when they look at the numbers and see that that is certainly not obviously true, and requires drawing a lot of tenuous implications to defend.
It undermines the argument to present contorted conclusions as fact, and if you want to make the more complex case you should take the time to do so fully; if you just want a quick stat, saying that more than half of our federal prisoners are in for drug crimes and another quarter-million prisoners in state prisons are there for drug crimes (1 in 5 state prisoners).
Your claim and the statistics you point to indicate that you think that "drug users/dealers" and "violent criminals" are exclusive sets, and that conviction of a non-drug offense means that one is not a "drug user/dealer".
If you're getting at the fact that people can be imprisoned for multiple offenses, that still doesn't change the fact that the majority of state prisoners are _not_ in for drug-related crimes. And even if _all_ of the drug-related prisoners were also in for some violent crime, there are still more violent-crime-only prisoners in state prisons.
If what you're getting at is that these people may be drug users/dealers independent of the crimes that they were convicted for, that's certainly true. If you read the thread, it's also clearly not what was being discussed. The post I responded to said in part:
Clearly the discussion was about drug users/dealers in the context of those who are actually prosecuted for (and convicted of) such crimes.
The proportion of people serving time for drug-related crimes is quite high, and does in fact form a majority of federal prisoners. On the other hand, the intimation that the majority of state prisoners are in for drug-related crimes is simply incorrect.
Federal prison is mainly big-time drug users and drug dealers.
Correct. Well, I dunno that it's all big-time, but it mainly drug users/dealers.
State prison is mainly small-time drug users and drug dealers
Incorrect. There are far more violent criminals than drug users/dealers in state prisons.
I can't find a link in 2 minutes of googling, but the proportions haven't changed much since 2000:
-- http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm
No shit. This is bizarre to me:
For many years I have been using LaTeX to compose scientific documents, but truly I am getting tired of its complexity. You have to install new packages for new features, compatibility issues are everywhere
LaTeX is the pinnacle of "what you did 10 years ago will work beautifully today". If you are installing new packages willy-nilly, something is horribly wrong.
I have assignments I wrote for a group theory class in 1993 that render exactly the same today as they did then. That is, in fact, the reason that Metafont uses e (2.718...) and TeX uses pi (3.1415...) as their version numbers. There are no changes in functionality these days; they only correct true bugs.
Indeed, Knuth has said the reason for that is so that documents written today will render the same in 20 or 100 years. New versions are legally not allowed to change the behavior or typesetting of the program without changing the name to something other than TeX. And as a user, that's completely true. If you learned it in 1995, you know it now.
The story is really, truly bizarre to me. Given that it's railing against a central tenet of TeX, I would expect some explanation other than "truth by assertion".
On a laptop I don't care about the noise.
It's for the appliances (e.g. music player in the bedroom, DVR, etc) that are much more convenient as true instant-on devices where silence is a driving factor.
Fanless PSUs, CPUs, and graphics cards are relatively easy to find if you care. Silent storage of sufficient size is tough (I've used CF-to-IDE adapters in the past but size is limited and they have a lot of drawbacks), so you wind up having to run a second machine in a closet with networked disks or something.