The Olympics contracts with its host nations. If the host nation wants the Olympics, it has to follow the Olympics' rules. If they don't, they won't get the Olympics.
Part of the criteria for locating the Olympics, and inviting athletes, should include the kind of morality I was talking about.
The safety issues involved in a thousand-mile ribbon falling to Earth are totally intractable.
The dynamics of this thing in weather will be impossible to prevent.
The reaction of it to pertubations in the Earth's motion will be impossible to compensate. (Oh yes, kids, the Earth does not turn like a perfect sphere in your imagination; it sloshes side-to-side, and its period is not close enough to a constant for this to be feasible.)
The idea that these people have tested a device that can climb a wire being any sort of proof of any concept worthy of funding the attempted launch of the real thing is laughable. I can point to any window-washing rig as an example of that sort of technology. They've done nothing significantly new.
Someone is taking the money-men to the cleaners on this boondoggle.
Um, no. 50-50 is not "no better than chance" when it comes to the tone of emails. That would imply that 50% of emails are friendly and 50% are unfriendly, and readers are getting half of both wrong.
Given this utter lack of understanding of probability and statistics, I'm going to have to doubt everything else the author says.
He'll probably take that as an insult. Well, fuck him.
You can be eaten, burned as fuel, rendered for industrial grease and glue, and used to make lovely seatcovers.
Do not ever mistake the sedentary state of the masses for an inability to take what is theirs by dint of number. When you become as dehumanized as your corporate interest makes them, it's not as sanitary.
you can usually pay a couple of hundred workers out of the CEO's pay alone
so if the company is running so poorly that it can't afford to pay 20% of its workers, why not just tell the CEO to take the same pay as one of them, and pay the rest?
because your analogy is a strawman, just like mine, that's why
Correct, but it's screwed up by design, and it was designed centuries ago under a buttonwood tree.
Stock = ownership. Jobs = cost.
When you cut costs, you please ownership.
Do not pretend that being allowed to buy and sell stock in public markets means you care for employees. It does the opposite. It makes you yell at CEOs to constantly improve production rates while reducing costs. In the end, this non-resident-owner system results in a totally amoral business climate. People do not matter, and tenths of a penny per share per quarter do.
If the SEC required CEOs to measure and report employee happiness, and the shareholders considered that part of the value of their holdings, then it might be important to care. But none of that happens, so people are meaningless except as high-maintenance capital machines.
Humans tend to understand that popularity is determined by quality; we learn that good things are recommended and bad things are not. So, absent other quality information, we use popularity as an indicator of quality.
Which means people are actually smart for making such an induction, not simply stupid for following the crowd.
The record industry has known of this heuristic for decades. In launching an unknown product, they pretend it's already famous and popular, as well as insisting it's good.
Of course, the only reason they even bothered with Ashlee Simpson is because they were paid to.
Just the other day there was a similar rumor that Google was going to buy nVidia...
People are just loopy sometimes. Google is investing its IPO capital in itself. And it doesn't care about the stock price. They have a policy of not trying to make quarterly numbers.
Telecoms used to be the most profitable companies on Earth.
Now it's (again) energy companies.
The telcos are jealous. They can't modulate supply and induce demand the way the energy companies can to maximize profit on a day-to-day basis. They can just run a line and charge you a lease rate, and if they try to raise that rate they run into the city, county, state, and federal regulators.
But, hell, that's what they get for being a monopoly in every neighborhood.
They reaped it, they can sow it. I'm not crying for them.
Verrry tricky, appending an extra '/' to the end of the URL to make us think it was a broken link. I have added this to my bag of tradecraft for future use, at a time when you least expect it.
I was for the war before I was against it. (Yes, and John Kerry made the right choice, too.)
I was for the war when Bush said he had "darned good evidence" that Iraq had WMDs and WMD programs. Because I know what goes on in the land of the spooks, and much of it you and I never hear. Because the entire government could not be going along with this push for war without someone pointing out the Emperor Has No Clothes.
Then, about a month before the war was to begin, some of the "darned good evidence" began appearing in Administration presentations, as they wanted to make it concrete for better persuasive impact.
Two things stood out: Aluminum Tubes and Yellow Cake.
Why did they stand out?
Because over the past year the Aluminum Tubes had become a total joke in the diplomatic world; we all just assumed that it was a codeword for "shut up and let us inspect". The idea that these tubes were suitable for manufacturing any kind of missile was well-known to be debunked. Yet there they were, the Bush Administration, claiming these were rock-solid evidence.
And because some time before that the Yellow Cake Memo (purporting that Saddam tried to buy this substance containing Uranium) had been debunked, as well, and very publicly, as had been reported in the American and world press. By the time Bush was using it we hadn't heard of Joe Wilson. Everyone already knew it was bullshit.
It was at this moment that I realized that the Bush people were not using any of our intelligence resources, were not even attempting to base the war on righteous evidence, and had no intention of considering the spending of American lives on a military misadventure a "last resort."
That's when I stopped supporting the war.
Anyone who still supports it is either a liar, a dupe, or a traitor.
The accurate part follows all that bullshit about 9-to-5 droids.
You can still be a balls-out code-monkey if the verification-analysis-requirements-code loop in your organization is well designed.
The part about blame is important, too. The fact that gangs of humans are applying a vast store of partially-learned rules to a purely imagined set of requirements through a skein of lossy transmission lines with any number of distractions means that noise is inevitable, and in something as literal as code for Von Neumann machines, any noise means error.
So it's not your fault, as long as you're honest about it. And if people accept that, you won't try to hide things, and that means the feedback processes will work to iteratively smooth out the kinks until the entire feature space and code set is 100% covered by correct functionality and test.
Assuming all of the requirements are valid, for which there are only heuristic tools and few guarantees...
I typically negotiate the asking price up 5-10 dollars per hour, kill on the job, and get asked to work more, but leave anyway, because I have talent and free will.
If you just take whatever you can get, you might as well remove your balls and your consciousness, because you're actively turning yourself into a cipher and a tool.
Simple solution: change the "keep parents of children together" perks to actually say "parents of children who stay together" instead of "married people".
Because gating the benefits using marriage is a back-door way to use government to coerce people into undergoing a religious rite (even when there's no religion involved, the "ceremony" is a rite that has no basis in reality other than to promote ceremonialism, making, at the very least, the judiciary into a priesthood).
P.S. Neal Boortz, the prophet of libertarianism, explained to me in a personal email that Libertarians are exactly described as Republicans who don't commingle politics and religion. I couldn't find a way to disagree with him, though every "libertarian" I've ever given the same analogy has disagreed and insisted they aren't like Republicans at all. Just thought you should know who you've thrown in with by accepting the Libertarian appellation...
Slashdot Mirror
The Olympics contracts with its host nations. If the host nation wants the Olympics, it has to follow the Olympics' rules. If they don't, they won't get the Olympics.
Part of the criteria for locating the Olympics, and inviting athletes, should include the kind of morality I was talking about.
The Olympic Committee should have a morality that would force a black-hating nation to accept a black athlete for the games.
And if they refuse, the OC should move the games.
Likewise, they should ban criminals from competing, and bar countries that allow criminals to compete.
The Olympics should have a sense of law unto itself.
This "space elevator" thing can't be for real.
The safety issues involved in a thousand-mile ribbon falling to Earth are totally intractable.
The dynamics of this thing in weather will be impossible to prevent.
The reaction of it to pertubations in the Earth's motion will be impossible to compensate. (Oh yes, kids, the Earth does not turn like a perfect sphere in your imagination; it sloshes side-to-side, and its period is not close enough to a constant for this to be feasible.)
The idea that these people have tested a device that can climb a wire being any sort of proof of any concept worthy of funding the attempted launch of the real thing is laughable. I can point to any window-washing rig as an example of that sort of technology. They've done nothing significantly new.
Someone is taking the money-men to the cleaners on this boondoggle.
but the conclusion implies that people will still get it wrong 50% of the time under normal conditions, in which the tone is not so indistinguishable
>no better than chance
Um, no. 50-50 is not "no better than chance" when it comes to the tone of emails. That would imply that 50% of emails are friendly and 50% are unfriendly, and readers are getting half of both wrong.
Given this utter lack of understanding of probability and statistics, I'm going to have to doubt everything else the author says.
He'll probably take that as an insult. Well, fuck him.
You can be eaten, burned as fuel, rendered for industrial grease and glue, and used to make lovely seatcovers.
Do not ever mistake the sedentary state of the masses for an inability to take what is theirs by dint of number. When you become as dehumanized as your corporate interest makes them, it's not as sanitary.
you can usually pay a couple of hundred workers out of the CEO's pay alone
so if the company is running so poorly that it can't afford to pay 20% of its workers, why not just tell the CEO to take the same pay as one of them, and pay the rest?
because your analogy is a strawman, just like mine, that's why
Correct, but it's screwed up by design, and it was designed centuries ago under a buttonwood tree.
Stock = ownership.
Jobs = cost.
When you cut costs, you please ownership.
Do not pretend that being allowed to buy and sell stock in public markets means you care for employees. It does the opposite. It makes you yell at CEOs to constantly improve production rates while reducing costs. In the end, this non-resident-owner system results in a totally amoral business climate. People do not matter, and tenths of a penny per share per quarter do.
If the SEC required CEOs to measure and report employee happiness, and the shareholders considered that part of the value of their holdings, then it might be important to care. But none of that happens, so people are meaningless except as high-maintenance capital machines.
They didn't prove what they say they proved.
Humans tend to understand that popularity is determined by quality; we learn that good things are recommended and bad things are not. So, absent other quality information, we use popularity as an indicator of quality.
Which means people are actually smart for making such an induction, not simply stupid for following the crowd.
The record industry has known of this heuristic for decades. In launching an unknown product, they pretend it's already famous and popular, as well as insisting it's good.
Of course, the only reason they even bothered with Ashlee Simpson is because they were paid to.
It's been done. Quotezart, the musical stock tracker. (Doesn't work on my rig; ymmv.)
Just the other day there was a similar rumor that Google was going to buy nVidia...
People are just loopy sometimes. Google is investing its IPO capital in itself. And it doesn't care about the stock price. They have a policy of not trying to make quarterly numbers.
Telecoms used to be the most profitable companies on Earth.
Now it's (again) energy companies.
The telcos are jealous. They can't modulate supply and induce demand the way the energy companies can to maximize profit on a day-to-day basis. They can just run a line and charge you a lease rate, and if they try to raise that rate they run into the city, county, state, and federal regulators.
But, hell, that's what they get for being a monopoly in every neighborhood.
They reaped it, they can sow it. I'm not crying for them.
Aha! I have defeated your information cloaking to see the secrets within:
Global Hawk http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=1
Desert Hawk http://www.defense-update.com/products/d/desertha
Verrry tricky, appending an extra '/' to the end of the URL to make us think it was a broken link. I have added this to my bag of tradecraft for future use, at a time when you least expect it.
Good day.
</neurosis>
Semantic problem. The two comments about 1,000 rounds don't scan.
The commander's comment tells the story. "Very hard to hit."
They probably didn't hit it with more than a couple of those rounds.
If they'd strafed it with 50-mm cannon fire, they'd have shredded a stripe across it, and it would have outgassed and plummeted.
What a crock of crap.
Maturity doesn't "set in".
It's forced on you by circumstance.
Send a child to war and he'll grow up instantly.
Send a poor little rich kid to the White House and, well...
I was for the war before I was against it. (Yes, and John Kerry made the right choice, too.)
I was for the war when Bush said he had "darned good evidence" that Iraq had WMDs and WMD programs. Because I know what goes on in the land of the spooks, and much of it you and I never hear. Because the entire government could not be going along with this push for war without someone pointing out the Emperor Has No Clothes.
Then, about a month before the war was to begin, some of the "darned good evidence" began appearing in Administration presentations, as they wanted to make it concrete for better persuasive impact.
Two things stood out: Aluminum Tubes and Yellow Cake.
Why did they stand out?
Because over the past year the Aluminum Tubes had become a total joke in the diplomatic world; we all just assumed that it was a codeword for "shut up and let us inspect". The idea that these tubes were suitable for manufacturing any kind of missile was well-known to be debunked. Yet there they were, the Bush Administration, claiming these were rock-solid evidence.
And because some time before that the Yellow Cake Memo (purporting that Saddam tried to buy this substance containing Uranium) had been debunked, as well, and very publicly, as had been reported in the American and world press. By the time Bush was using it we hadn't heard of Joe Wilson. Everyone already knew it was bullshit.
It was at this moment that I realized that the Bush people were not using any of our intelligence resources, were not even attempting to base the war on righteous evidence, and had no intention of considering the spending of American lives on a military misadventure a "last resort."
That's when I stopped supporting the war.
Anyone who still supports it is either a liar, a dupe, or a traitor.
I didn't just call bullshit. I emailed it directly to the website.
(Note: they screwed up the form as well; who knows where it sent the email, really...)
>Remember, whatever the shortcoming is, the cure is for the implementers to study at the knee of the manager and become more like him.
I detect sarcasm.
If none is meant, then it should be.
Software managers are, to a man, lacking in applicable skill, or they'd still be using their skills.
See, it's not the manager that teaches, it's the guru in the corner.
Most of them understand that. Many don't.
The accurate part follows all that bullshit about 9-to-5 droids.
You can still be a balls-out code-monkey if the verification-analysis-requirements-code loop in your organization is well designed.
The part about blame is important, too. The fact that gangs of humans are applying a vast store of partially-learned rules to a purely imagined set of requirements through a skein of lossy transmission lines with any number of distractions means that noise is inevitable, and in something as literal as code for Von Neumann machines, any noise means error.
So it's not your fault, as long as you're honest about it. And if people accept that, you won't try to hide things, and that means the feedback processes will work to iteratively smooth out the kinks until the entire feature space and code set is 100% covered by correct functionality and test.
Assuming all of the requirements are valid, for which there are only heuristic tools and few guarantees...
I would not replace it line-by-line.
If the problem is decomposed properly, it can be replaced object-by-object or function-by-function, and still make sense.
If it is not, it can still be so replaced, but there will be times it doesn't make sense (probably right from the start all the way to the end).
I could tell you, but then I'd have to bill you.
Another sucker for the poker game.
YAASA. STFU.
I typically negotiate the asking price up 5-10 dollars per hour, kill on the job, and get asked to work more, but leave anyway, because I have talent and free will.
If you just take whatever you can get, you might as well remove your balls and your consciousness, because you're actively turning yourself into a cipher and a tool.
And while you two were modding my lament as Offtopic, someone else modded my original post up as Insightful.
Revenge is best served. Cold or hot, I couldn't care less, so long as you feel stupid.
Simple solution: change the "keep parents of children together" perks to actually say "parents of children who stay together" instead of "married people".
Because gating the benefits using marriage is a back-door way to use government to coerce people into undergoing a religious rite (even when there's no religion involved, the "ceremony" is a rite that has no basis in reality other than to promote ceremonialism, making, at the very least, the judiciary into a priesthood).
P.S. Neal Boortz, the prophet of libertarianism, explained to me in a personal email that Libertarians are exactly described as Republicans who don't commingle politics and religion. I couldn't find a way to disagree with him, though every "libertarian" I've ever given the same analogy has disagreed and insisted they aren't like Republicans at all. Just thought you should know who you've thrown in with by accepting the Libertarian appellation...
I want to thank the author of the study for modding my post as flamebait.
Just goes to show, some people don't know how to use a ComboBox...