To get hit by a bus because you were listening to headphones means that: 1. You don't understand how to use crosswalks, or how to jay walk safely. 2. You don't understand how that you shouldn't step into traffic unable to hear. 3. You don't understand that you should look for cars before stepping into traffic. 4. You don't undestand that moving cars are dangerous enough to warrent addressing #1-3.
First, anyone who has those qualities is not going understand laws concerning listening to music, which are bound to be more complex than "being hit by cars = bad".
Second, are we a society so incredibly safe that we have nothing better to do than concentrate on those who blithely walk into moving vehicles? Aren't there people being injured from things that actually require assistance to avoid?
I'm sorry to get all Darwinist here, but I have no more immediate urge to help people who cheerfully step in front of moving busess, than I'd have to put signs on the beach warning that the sea "should not be inhaled" if that was becoming a problem.
But maybe I'm missing something. Because I've been seeing these "no sense of self-presevation" pedestrians for years, and I STILL can't figure out how they've survived to adulthood.
Say we try the xxx TLD. OK, now what good is having adult sites relegated to the xxx TLD unless people take advantage of it by censoring websites with that TLD? So products come out, from browser plug-ins to firewalls which do this. Which of course reduces the traffic for those sites. Now, if you have adult content you want as many people as possible to see, wouldn't you put it up on a.com or.net domain? Of course you would. In fact, things would be even better for you than they are now because your competition would be out of the running for anyone using something blocking the xxx domain. But by doing this, adult content would once again be just as hard to identify as it was before. So would the groups who wanted the xxx domain say, "Oh yeah... I guess that didn't work" and give up? Again, no. They would simply start advocating that anyone with adult content be *required* to use a xxx TLD. And the only way to achieve that, would be to have a process in place whereby.com and.net domains could be monitored or reported for having explicit content, and then forced to use a xxx TLD. And there you have the problem with the idea - the only benefit it can offer hinges on being able to determine what is "adult content" and what is simply "content for adults".
While I personally have no problem with what *I* consider pornography to be hosted exclusively on xxx TLD's; the goverment's ability to define adult content has been tested many times, in many ways already. They're not remotely as adept at defining these boundaries for people as people are at doing it for themselves. As as poor as their chances are for doing anything close to a decent job at it are - it would require a huge amount of resources for them to even attempt it. And that's just for content that originates from the US; which is of course not the only source of adult content. An international body would have to be established which had the final word on *all* the world's content, and if even one nation didn't agree to go along with it, it wouldn't have any chance of succeeding at it's stated goal of making it easy to identitify adult content so that it could be avoided.
When you really consider what would be required for this to work, anyone with an even passing familiarity with the way the Internet works must conclude that taking the XXX TLD approach to helping people avoid adult content is doomed to fail; but likely to cost a lot of money, time, and political turmoil in the attempt. Personally, I think there are many more effiecient uses of our time available before we consider trying something so problematic as the xxx TLD.
While it would be quite easy to put promotional material on torrents that would both have some actual value for downloaders, but still not constitute a threat to potential sales, the industry won't do it. I used to think this was because they were just stupid, either not realizing the promotional potential of digital distribution, or naive enough to think they could actually stop it. But after running over the idea with a guy who recently left Capital Records, I found out the real (according to him) reason why media companies won't use p2p networks for promotion.
Apparently, this battle was already played out during the advent of radio. Originally, the music industry wanted radio stations to only be able to play songs if they paid hefty royalties for them. But song record companies successfully used radio play as a means of promoting records, causing the Supreme Court to decide that radio play constituted promotion, as was therefore not subject the royalty scheme which the record companies had in mind.
My friend from Capital said that, even in the mid-nineties, record companies were hiring companies to poison anonymous online distribution outlets for music. But they were prevented from trying to "embrace and extend" the technology into a promotional vehicle, out of fears that if they did - it would become legal and deny them the power to eventually charge licensing fees. I personally think this is a profoundly stupid tactic, but then again I also would have thought that hiring Britney Spears to do anything more artistic than soft-core porn would have a been a profoundly stupid idea. Nonetheless, with the major companies taking this approach, there is reportedly a real fear of backlash from the industry for any one who tries to successfully use p2p distribution as a promotional vehicle, to the point that it isn't done.
I don't know anyone high up enough in the movie industry to ask if this is their take as well, but it seems a reasonable hypothesis.
Does this make sense to anyone else? I always thought the radio stations did have to pay royalties to play songs, but I've wasted far too much company time today to go and research the court cases behind this. I just thought it would be useful information to pass along.
I remember being an IT manager at Playboy magazine in the early nineties when Microsoft was trying to get people to switch from Word Perfect/Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Office. MS could get IT departments to want to switch by making it so that everyone else's offerings were unstable... but how could get they get the rank and file computer users to go along? If enough department managers didn't want to learn the new software, the IT department would be told to keep trying to support the old stuff.
MS shenanigans aside, here's how MS got the a bunch of people who *hated* computers and insisted they didn't have so much as five minutes to spare; to learn a whole new software suite.
They had built-in translations. You could use all the same weird Lotus commands in MS Excel, and they'd still work. But they'd work by showing a demonstration of the corresponding Excel commands. You could set the translation demo to run *almost* fast enough that it could be ignored. But eventually, the knowledge sunk in, person by person, until everyone was comfortable using the native MS Office commands. We never did a lick of formal training because they all insisted they didn't have time for it.
To translate that tactic to Metric System training for America, simply use both measurements for everything for a while. We're already doing this in a number of areas (when was the last time you bought a "gallon" of coca-cola?). While the corporations selling things like to do this because it's easier to increase profits when consumers can't readily compare the value of a 2 liter bottle to the value of a gallon bottle, it is up to the government to dictate that both measurements must be used in consumer products, and that both measurements must be used in public works. Speed signs should have limits in both miles and kilometers. But the Microsoft way is to make the metric measurements *slightly* easier to use. Say they have to be listed first, or slightly larger, or in bold. Oh, you can still the old measurement system, no problem. But you'll eventually work out how the two relate, and gravitate towards the slightly easier path of reading the metric measurements first.
Technically, the next step for the "Microsoft Way" would be start intentionally using inaccurate measurements for non-metric numbers so you grew to mistrust them. And to somehow jack-up the price of using the metric system once it became hard to NOT use. And then replace it every so often with something that required you to upgrade to a more expensive car, and came with a bunch of new features that would only be useful to someone trying to commander you vehicle to pitch penny stocks. Oh yeah, and instead of all this being on behalf of the metric system, it would be on behalf of some 4th-rate system of measurement so inferior to the current measurement system that it could be wholly acquired cheaply enough to leave plenty of cash left over for marketing and dragging out lawsuits for years on end.
But the point is, if the "let people do what they want, but make the behavior you want to see just *slightly* more convenient" method could sell MS Office to companies made up of IT people who loathed Microsoft, and non IT people who loathed computers in general; it could certainly be used to convert America to the metric system.:-)
but I haven't heard any explanation of how they might be implemented. Say you want to see a common sense reform like, "You can't patent a business process" or "You can't patent something you've never created". How would that reform happen? Do we just hope the SCOTUS intervenes, making a ruling during a case which has ramifications for other cases? Would the Congress need to pass a bill laying out such a reform? Is there anything we can do as citizens to push things in the right direction?
The only thing I can think of is to patent a method of "Reducing and preventing severe head pain, through the application of a system which regulates the velocity of any high density object as it approaches the cranial system. The forumla for the appropriate approach is F=MA, where F is less than painful"; and then suing the patent trolls for infringement. Of course, I wouldn't settle out of court; I'd demand an immediate cease-and-desist.
Not smashing yourself over the head with blunt objects? Hey... that's *my* idea!
Perhaps this is a bit off the topic, but I haven't had a chance to ask anyone this yet. You said that "an armed public is the only way to have any level of resistance if a government becomes truly oppressive". And this sounds reasonable on the surface. But if that's true, than how is that the Middle East is both a)run by truly oppressive governments and b)so heavily armed that they use fully automatic AK47's for noise-makers at weddings?
Anyhoo, to satisfy your curiosity of why Liberals are quicker to complain about censorship than gun restrictions: I suppose it's because we've seen more good come out of free speech (like rock music, movies above a G rating, realistic video games) than we've seen come out of being more heavily armed than the government. And of course seen a lot more bad things come out of censorship (all the jokes they had to throw out of Family Guy, all the nude shot of Jessica Alba that never took place) than we've seen from the government preventing a citizen from buying a gun. I'm not saying that what we've seen and haven't seen make us all *against* gun ownership (I'm not against it, guns rock!); I'm just trying to explain why we're more concerned with one over the other.
I've made quite the science out of beating the ill-effects of procrastination. It's actually the whole reason I learned programming to begin with. I spent my first seven years as a programmer designing a voice-activated sort of "personal efficiency coach". The program itself was tabled after attaining the goal of knowing me better than I knew myself, and still being ineffective due to social dominance reasons. But the one trick it learned that proved consistently effective was this (you can do this with nothing more than a piece of paper and a clock):
1. Take a piece of paper and create a blank list with 6 items on it. 2. Pick something you're having a hell of time getting to (or three things), and enter them in items 2,4, and 6. 3. Then pick a different type of task (something mental if 2,4, & 6 are physical tasks, something physical if they're mental tasks) and enter them after items 1,3, and 5. 4. Then look at the clock, and pick the next even 10 minute interval(ie. 10:20, 10:30, 10:40) to start. Don't do a damn thing until then, just sit and stare at the clock. 5. Once you begin, spend exactly 10 minutes on each task - for a total of one hour. Do NOT keep going or stop early.
Although a comprehensive anti-procrastination strategy has to address the real reasons behind the procrastination, this approach works well because no matter what the reason, you can do anything for 10 minutes. In 10 minutes, you don't have to worry about running out of energy, or getting hopelessly confused, or bored, or failing, or even succeeding - because that's just not going to take place in 10 minutes. You alternate between mental and physical tasks because the idea doing your taxes is a lot more appealing when you're currently scrubbing your bathtub, and the idea of scrubbing your bathtub is a lot more appealing when yo'r currently doing your taxes. But neither one is has any appeal at all while you're happily reading Slashdot. And don't worry if you try to begin and find you're not prepared (you have to go to the store for cleaner, or email some company to request a W2); just spend the 10 minutes doing that.
This approach works great for everything except studying, if you're the type who's adept at cramming. I used it one semester and it was the first time in my life when I never felt guilty about all the school work I hadn't done, and that my apartment was actually clean. But I totally zonked 2 tests that I had cumulatively studied more for than I'd probably ever studied for any test in my life. Why? Because I was so used to cramming a semester's worth of information into my head for short periods of time, that I'd never developed the skill to actually retain knowledge for longer than about 15 hours. And by the time the test came around, I couldn't remember the stuff I'd learned weeks or months in the past nearly as well as if I'd just learned it the previous evening. Yeah, I "reviewed" the material - but not nearly as vigorously as I would have if I'd never seen it before. Other than that though, the method works great. It's called doing a "round" by the way.
As a developer, there have been quite a few times when I was infuriated enough at Microsoft to write to them about an issue. The issues themselves are quite diverse, but they all came from the same source: very poor design decisions that proved to be driven by petty marketing concerns rather than incompetence. As much as this fury is directed at Microsoft when it happens (some problem that wastes 3 days of my time at a crucial development juncture) - it's really just an inevitable by-product of using tools created by a for-profit corporation. A corporation's purpose is to make a profit, not to make my life easier, or my job possible. If they can do all of those things, they will, but whenever they have to chose just one of those things, they will always choose profit. In a way, you can't blame them, they're only doing what any corporation that thrives will do. Microsoft just happens to be particularly good, ruthlessly so, at it. But yeah, I still "hate" them because I care more about doing good work than making just a little extra money - and Microsoft wisely pretends to share those values, and wisely *doesn't* share them (as their market cap illustrates). Oh yeah, I also "hate" Microsoft because when an opportunity arises where they can make more profit by destroying a superior technology with dirty tricks, they take it; thus denying the world a much needed better alternative.
I switched to open source programming languages/databases/OS's for part of one job, and when I saw the glaring difference of working with the tools created by people who's first priority was creating good tools; I cheerfully abandoned my 15 years of Microsoft development experience and sort of started my career over again. As a result, I make about 25% less than I used to, but my days are much, much happier. The work I produce is much better, and when something doesn't work, I *know* I can fix it, not merely hope that I've eventually identified the problem area and attempt to code around it.
And yes, being able to take that level of pride in my work, is well worth the $25,000 a year I've given up in salary. Which is probably one of the geekiest sentiments I've expressed this week.
I am lead programmer at a design company. I was brought on when the studio was doing work for non-profits, who's purpose was not at odds with my own values. My projects when great, we won lots of awards, and then a bunch of other companies started soliciting our business. Some of these, although very well funded, were think tanks that were diametrically opposed to my own values. The head of our company suggested that we charge these guys through the nose, and use the excess profits to fund causes we agreed with. While there was a certain logic to that, I said that I would simply not work for these companies - regardless of how it was handled. I was calm about it, it was just something I couldn't bring myself to do. I *love* my work, and I love doing a job for people that really goes beyond what they ever expected in terms of quality, functionality, and stability. If I were to be working on behalf of causes that went against my own values completely - I would no longer enjoy my work. As work is a huge part of my life, this is too big of a sacrifice to make. I'd rather work a retail store stocking shelves than program for people who'd, frankly, just as soon see people like me in ovens.
My company ultimately turned down the business. I don't know if was because they didn't feel they could take the work without my help, or if my attitude made it easier to not sell out their own values.
The point is, you should take great pride in your work and your life. Not only for how you do it, but for how it affects your world. I believe that doing that will give you a much happier life than more money will. But then again, I haven't really tried the alternative yet.
Scary, huh? I was going to apply there, because it's always been my dream to be at least partially to blame for when the robots come for us. But... I don't know. These guys are actively *trying* to make unstoppable killbots (and succeeding, from the look of it). When their robots come for us... where's the sense of adventure? I mean, it looks like they'll be doing exactly what somebody wrote out in a functional spec somewhere. So if they run amock, word'll get back to BAE and they'll be able to fix whatever went wrong I bet. That takes all the fun out of it. My dream always involved the army calling up the company behind the robots to find out what went wrong, and having a conversation like this:
Army guy: "Damn it! Why are the robots killing everyone???"; My company: "I don't know... they weren't designed to do that." Army guy: "No sh_t, Sherlock. You think we would have put an order in for 20,000 units that were designed to run amock and kill everyone?" My company: "No, no. I mean, you don't understand. The scenario you've described... picking locks, stealing parts, making self-modifications... they weren't simply not designed to do those types of things... they weren't designed to be *capable* of doing those types of things!" Army guy: "So wait a minute, you're saying that... hold on. Who's that yelling 'Woo-hoo!' in the background?" My company: "Huh? Oh, that's just one of our coders. Pipe down, Rex, we've got a serious problem over here!" Army guy: "OK, that's better. So you're saying these units have what, evolved or something?" My company: "Well no. Technically this would be adapting. You can't say they've evolved until they start reproducing." Army guy: "They can reproduce?" My company: "Lemme check. Hey Rex, can the robots we sold the army reproduce?" Me: "You think I'd be working until 10 PM every day if I'd figured out how to make them reproduce yet?" My company: "Whaddya mean, yet?" Me: "Oh... nothing" My company: "So why are they killing everyone?" Me: "Probably because they can't reproduce. Seriously, a few more months of not getting laid and I might join them." My company: "No no no. I mean how is this happening?" Me: "Oh the killing everyone thing? Well, I was getting kind of tired of feature creep, so I just made the code kinda flexible." My company: "Flexible? How flexible?" Me: "Um, apparently 'changing-their-programming-and-then-killing-every one' flexible." My company: "Well how the hell do we stop them?" Me: "I'd have to take a look at the code. To be perfectly honest, I don't remember a tiny fraction of what I wrote. That's why I commented it so heavily!" My company: "Yeah, I know. The guys we have looking at the code are currently reading about how a particular television show inspired a new technique of callbacks in the NLP module. They're up to the part where you describe the ingredients of the drinks you were serving while watching it..." Me: "Oh yeah, I forgot all about those drinks. Those were killer." Army guy: "What the hell is going on over there???" My company: "Uh, we're looking into the problem now" Army guy: "OK. You call me the split second you come up with anything". My company: "Will do. Rex, you let me know the split second you... hey, where are you going?" Me: "I have rehearsal" My company: "But the Robots... killing everyone..." Me: "Oh relax, there's like, what? Six billion of us?" My company: "Yeah, eight years ago. There's 10 billion people on the planet these days". Me: "No, I mean left. I just checked the news. See? Six billion left." My company: "Holy crap!" Me: "Six billion's still plenty. I guarantee I get things sorted out before we're down to 5." My company: "Down to five!!!" Me: "Well, four tops. Three at the outside. But absolutely, positively no less than two." My company: "That's unconscionable!" Me: "I know, especially considering that they'd o
Personal anecdote: I was in a head on collision 2 year ago. Head through the windshield, while my neck was turned to the side. Very painful... no health insurance = no hospital.
By the time I had health insurance, it was discovered I had a herniated disc in my neck, and I was prescribed Hydrocodene (aka Perkocet). The doctor claimed people used this drug to get high, and I had heard that myself - but even when I was in enough pain to take over the maximum dosage, I never felt remotely high, just not in terrible pain.
Once though, when I wasn't in much pain at all, I took two anyway. And oh yeah, *then* I could tell how this drug could get you high.
Another anecdote: When I studied drug abuse in university, our professor was an ex-junkie. Seriously. And one curious thing he said about heroin was "No pain, no gain", which was how he encapsulated the effect of taking heroin when you weren't in some sort of emotional (or withdrawl induced) pain. He said both he and friends had tried the drug when they were genuinely happy, and it didn't feel "good", just different. I myself tried heroin once when I was a pretty happy camper, and experienced the same phenomenon. It made my nose itch a lot, and I found it very easy to envision poorly drawn comic strips when I closed my eyes for some odd reason - but I didn't feel "good" or "better" or anything like that.
Putting these 2 experiences together, I'd say that 1. Painkillers kill pain. 2. If you have pain, having it gone feels real nice. 3. If you don't have pain, painkillers have nothing to kill, so you will not feel any of the those effects if you take them. 4. Painkillers *primarily* kill pain, but they do other things to. If you have no pain and take them, you'll just feel those things. 5. Given the unpleasant way that ingesting painkillers interferes with our built-in ability to control pain (and the screwy way we've dealt with that problem as a society), humans will either involve into creatures who can avoid, either through their actions or through enhanced neurochemical production, the pain that modern life involves, or creatures who can use drugs responsibly. 6. If the we involve into the former, we better hope that those dolphins get better at singing, 'cause our music is gonna suck.
Why go through the embarrasment of violating yet another cease-fire agreement, only hours after you've signed it? With Xerox's new "Transient Document" technology, your commitments on paper vanish just as fast as they do in real life!
Also perfect for: -Disaster relief promises -Nuclear non-proliferation treaties -Campaign position press releases -Celebrity Marriage Certificates -Much, much more!
Xerox: Bring the concept of "Not worth the paper it's written on", into the 21st Century.
My second programming language was VB 2.0 (on the heels of 2 months of QBasic). It was a great way for a self-taught and over-worked beginner programmer to knock out quick windows solutions. I stayed true to it, and developed amazing robust and stable applications, all the way until VB.net. VB.net is IMHO, nothing more than a copy of C#.net, that had it's syntax mangled in order for it to bare a passing resemblence to the VB of old. A beginner who uses it is not only going to wind up discouraged by it's complexity and rigidity; but led further away from other programming languages by it's pointless tributes to the once simple RAD. If you're going to start on the.net platform, start with C#.net. There a few minor IDE features missing that you'd get in VB.net; but at least you'll be able to read articles featuring C, C++, or even PHP and understand what you're looking at. VB was a great way let people get a taste of programming before they've committed to it as a career. If people want to get their feet wet like that these days; they're much better off playing around with VBA or something.
Technically, it would be "transfering date", ie. "The suggestion that recipient engage in immediate and vigorous self-fornication" in a "neutral form", ie. "In a non-proprietary format that is readily understood by all recepients, regardless of location".
Seriously, this practice of granting overly general patents is getting completely ridiculous. The standard should be, "I invented something which does something nothing else on earth can do, or could do unless it copies the way I did it". And you should have to *produce* a working version of that invention.
And if you're ever found to have patented something which is "patently ridiculous", you should be forced to pay the same licensing fee you tried to charge others, everytime YOU use the idea.
Say... that's a pretty good idea. I should probably patent it.
For those of us who aren't happy with the idea of a judge who will make the GOP's philosophy the law of our land, for the rest of our lives, tough cookies. You had you're chance to change who'd be appointing our judges (or lawyers who will become judges) in 2004, and you blew it.
Regardless of *why* you think the left blew it (poor candidates, poor campaign strategies, failing to remove Diebold from the equation, whatever), it doesn't change the fact that the GOP alone is calling the shots on what people can and can't do for the next 3, and their judges will be doing it for the rest of your natural lives.
If people don't like this nominee, and she is defeated, Bush will merely appoint someone else who is as similiar to her as he can. And sooner or later, *one* of his nominees will be confirmed, and set the rules we'll all have to live by.
The only way that's going to change, is if people are *so* dissatisfied with the people he chooses that the gradually elect enough people who are similarly dissatisfied, and those people change the rule that judicial appointments are for life.
And the odds of that happening in our lifetimes is pretty freakin' slim, considering that only about 30% of us actually bother to vote in the first place.
I know this seems harsh to the left, but keep in mind this is coming from someone who's probably farther to the left that you are. I'd vote for Clippy before voting for a Republican. I just think we need to pick our battles at this point. And trying to fight against the inevitable outcome that our most conservative president yet, will put the most conservative people he can get into lifetime judicial appointments, just seems like spending an awful lot of effort to close the barn doors after the horses are long gone.
As technology experts, I think we'd get more out of spending our efforts pointing better ways of doing electronic voting, advocating better science and technology polices, and soon... devising 100% full-proof methods of birth control. And of course, developing reliable open-source data-compression that makes the outcomes of lawsuits relating to it failing, moot.;-).
A few month ago, my company got a job to reverse engineer a windows app. But, being a design firm, I was instructed to replace it with a web app - even though from a programming perspective, it would have been the wrong approach. The GUI was very complex, making very heavy use of excel-like spreadsheets, and it also had to run very fast because it was used by very experienced sales people to quickly create large and complex orders while on the phone with clients they had been working with for several years.
I figured I could probably do it, but I warned our client that the end result would probably be significantly slower than their current application since web technologies simply could not be expected to run as fast as native windows applications.
However, as I began developing the app, using PHP5, MySQL, AJAX enabled forms, and an AJAX enabled excel like grid from a company called eBusiness; I was quite surprised when the demo's of the screen turned out to be not only as fast as the original app... but actually quite a bit faster.
Although I invested a lot of time putting together the middle ware that made this possible; at this point we can put together a new screen with several data-aware grids that easily interact with each other in a fraction of the time it would take me to do the same thing in a language like C#.net.
The caveat in all this is that I've had to restrict the browser to IE, because in addition to needing a few elements of the IE DOM which aren't yet available in Firefox; merely adding code to fork the functionality based on the browser used is enough to make the app slower than a native windows app. It also would not run as fast if we had to use PHP4, which is not nearly as object-oriented. For us, this isn't a problem right now because we aren't really building a public web site, but simply replacing an internal system where we can control everything we need to on both the server and the clients. But the next phase of the project will be to create a public interface where the company's clients can enter their orders in themselves; and we certainly can't count on them all using IE, nor can we necessarily find a web host using PHP5 or MySQL5.
The company that makes the grid says their coming out with a cross-browser version soon, and I feel pretty confident that by the time the site goes public, there will be enough hosts that have the server elements we need, or at least most of them. But even if that's not the case, no one expects a public web site to run something as fast as a native windows app right now, so it's not exactly a deal breaker.
As far as feasibility of replacing Windows apps with AJAX apps - I'd say from experience this was in fact a very realistic scenario. I'd say this because A)The restrictions needed to accomplish this even now are slightly less than the restrictions need to ensure a native windows app works perfectly across an entire enterprise and B)because the people with the skill sets needed to accomplish this are more numerous, and less expensive than the people would possess the same mastery of writing a windows app in any given language. And looking at some of the technology decisions that Microsoft has made when it comes to AJAX; I'd say they're fully aware of this too.
If you find yourself going down this road, my advice would be to use only the bare-minimum of Microsoft-only technologies you have to get the job done; even though you'll run across a lot of things available from MS which will make the task slightly easier. MS, being just one company (and a profit driven one) has a tendency to change things around a lot faster, and a lot more drastically than web standards will change. So if you don't want to find yourself getting a frantic call from a client who's whole enterprise app stopped working because their version of IE just got "upgraded" during a Windows update, keep your crucial functionality tied to web standards which change and a much more stable rate, and for non market-driven reasons.
a women working for the casino shuttle bus told me that, "Vegas has to adjust a lot during E3. We de-empaphasize the gambling and start pumping up the girlie shows. It's the only way to make money when your town in over-run by tens of thousands of young men with an impressive grasp of probability, but practically zero intra-personal skills". She was right too. Me and everyone from my company won several hundred dollars a piece gambling, and promptly blew most of it on a nude review show featuring bad music, and lip-synching porn stars.
Hold on... are you talking about the pre-Iraq invasion intelligence, or the August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing?
Eh, either one. There's a difference between waiting for ALL the facts, and simply waiting for SOME facts.
Waiting for ALL the facts is yes, stupid. It's not gonna happen. Heck, you don't even know what the cat wants right now - how are you going to be sure of everything that's going to happen in the whole world?
Waiting for SOME facts though, is invariable a good idea. Now a fact of course, is something that you know to be true. But if you have an idea, and then you find something that completely contradicts that, you can't call that idea a "fact" anymore.
You think some guy, who has always been the biggest SOB he could be, has or is building some sort of weapon because that's what the evidence points to. Then your best guys says, no, that's not what the evidence points to. Oh sure, you can still believe your idea if you want, but you can longer call it a "fact", because the contradictory knowledge has robbed you of your evidence, and reduced it to a "hunch".
Hunches are good, if one has decent instincts. Hunches can point in you in the right direction to dig up the actual facts about what's going on. But I don't know anyone who's instincts are so good that they can base huge life and death scenarios in motion based on hunches alone. And guess what? Neither do you.
If I understand the "So what if there were no WMD's" perspective then, the idea is that, since Iraq was in violation of 17 UN resolutions which were a condition of a cease fire from the first Gulf War, it was time to "hit 'em hard" to both put some "teeth" into UN resolutions, and to capitalize on the opportunity to make an example out of a despicable dictator who also happened to be in nomimal control of much of the world's energy supplies? And the public focus of the pending threat of WMD's was mostly a result of it being the one reason the public found most compelling?
Believe me, just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I can't see where you're coming from. My confusion lies, not in heated post-9/11 atmosphere people got that idea, but in people's continued support of it now that the results have arrived.
We wanted to give UN resolutions "teeth", but then we backed out of a vote to authorize an invasion because we knew it would be vetoed.
We wanted rouge countries to take our words very seriously, but then we went back on our word to NOT invade if Iraq disarmed, which it is now plain they had.
We wanted to frighten radical elements in the Middle East to stop messing with us and their own people, but now those radical elements are setting off bombs daily.
We wanted to stabilize the world's energy supply, but now Oil's over $50 a barrell.
We wanted to the world to benefit from strong US leadership in building democracies, but then we knowingly presented them with a very incomplete picture of our intelligence, and have thus far failed to even stabilize, let alone democratize, either one of the countries we've invaded under this administration.
So that's what baffles me. I can see not believing the "Left" when we said Bush's plans were not going to work before he put them into action; but I can't see how you can still think they'll work... after they haven't?
Is this one of those, "I have to win my money back" kinda things? Is it a "haven't heard that even the President's own advistors don't think it will work anymore" thing? Or is it more of a "The Glass is slighly moist/Don't forget about all the cars which *didn't* explode in Faluja today" type thing?
Only you know for sure I guess. Maybe you buy all the stuff the Right says about the Left, and consider a debt ridden, war torn America far better than one were the only legal religion is militant feminism, and the President takes the oath of office with his hand placed atop an intern's beret. Whatever it is, I'll bet it makes your life more exciting. But since all these people are dying and all, couldn't you just pick up a copy of Doom III or something. Or I could send you a list of parties where there's a lot of cute single female programmers. Or at the very least, if you still think that "America should lead the world, by force if necessary" - couldn't you find someone a little more capable of carrying it out? Actually no, scrap that idea. The last time a country got a capable guy to carry out the idea that their country should "lead" the world, through force if necessary, it turned out a lot worse than this has so far. Yeah, if you must cling to these PNAC ideas, go ahead and leave Bush in charge of it.
Post something when the White House says something true. There's a limited amount of space on Slashdot. Let's not waste it on things that are blindingly obvious already.
Besides "White House Lied", here are some other events we no longer need to be informed of:
"Geeks Claim Computers are Cool" "Florida hit by Hurricane" "Windows is vulnerable to a virus" "Chicks: Puppies are cute" "Scientists: Rain is wet" "Geeks: Sex is fun, rare" "Violence in Israel today" "Leno makes a Lewinsky joke" "Study confirms: British can't cook" "Industry panics over P2P again" "Linux Market Share Grows" "New Tech Standard Proposed" "American Tech Workers Not Better Off Under Bush" "Ja Rule's success baffles Beatles fans" "Reality TV show embarrases humans, animals" "Technology will be improved in 5 years" "Concensus eludes Slashdot Posters again" "Wesley Crusher is cooler than you thought" "Sun Microsystems is less cool than you thought" "SCO, RIAA, DRM, DMCA, Diebold sucked again today" "Privacy Threatened" "Electricity, Internet, High IQ's: useful"
>list games Iraqi WMD Snipe Hunt Prevent Global Thermonuclear War >play Iraqi WMD Snipe Hunt How about a nice game of Prevent Global Thermonuclear War? >No, I would like to play Iraqi WMD Snipe Hunt. Very well... please insert $287 Billion dollars, 1,000 American Lives, and US credibility for the first 18 months >I don't have that type of money You can borrow it from the Chinese >Done Congradulations! You've won the capture of Saddam Hussein. >List Games Iraqi Civil War Prevent Global Thermonuclear War >play Prevent Global Thermonuclear War Please insert $50 Billion, 1000 American livers, and US Credibility >Borrow money from the Chinese There will be 34% interest, and 23% drop in US Currency value on this transaction. Continue? >Yes Please insert 1000 American lives, and US credibility to continue. >It was a forest fire? Please insert 1000 American lives, and US credibility to continue. >Insufficient Credibility. List Games. Iraqi Civil War Pacific Rim Nuclear Arms Race >Exit Command Not Recognized >Bye Command Not Recognized _
All I can tell you is that it's important to get treated professionally, as early as possible. Mental illness can be merely a pain in the butt (the meds aren't fun to be on), or it can devastate both the person who has it, and everyone they're close to. It's very, very tempting to believe that you can help the person yourself. You cannot, don't ruin your lives trying. It works out about as well as trying to treat someone for cancer yourself. All you can do is support them while they get treatment from a professional.
Prove it you say? Yup. Try to spam me. My email address is "Me@RandyHamilton.com". G'wan, try. The process is nearly self-explainitory. The only thing you won't necessarily see is that if your email includes specific information about me that would be in a business letter or receipt, it would also go through.
Slashdot Mirror
To get hit by a bus because you were listening to headphones means that:
1. You don't understand how to use crosswalks, or how to jay walk safely.
2. You don't understand how that you shouldn't step into traffic unable to hear.
3. You don't understand that you should look for cars before stepping into traffic.
4. You don't undestand that moving cars are dangerous enough to warrent addressing #1-3.
First, anyone who has those qualities is not going understand laws concerning listening to music, which are bound to be more complex than "being hit by cars = bad".
Second, are we a society so incredibly safe that we have nothing better to do than concentrate on those who blithely walk into moving vehicles? Aren't there people being injured from things that actually require assistance to avoid?
I'm sorry to get all Darwinist here, but I have no more immediate urge to help people who cheerfully step in front of moving busess, than I'd have to put signs on the beach warning that the sea "should not be inhaled" if that was becoming a problem.
But maybe I'm missing something. Because I've been seeing these "no sense of self-presevation" pedestrians for years, and I STILL can't figure out how they've survived to adulthood.
Say we try the xxx TLD. OK, now what good is having adult sites relegated to the xxx TLD unless people take advantage of it by censoring websites with that TLD? So products come out, from browser plug-ins to firewalls which do this. Which of course reduces the traffic for those sites. Now, if you have adult content you want as many people as possible to see, wouldn't you put it up on a .com or .net domain? Of course you would. In fact, things would be even better for you than they are now because your competition would be out of the running for anyone using something blocking the xxx domain. But by doing this, adult content would once again be just as hard to identify as it was before. So would the groups who wanted the xxx domain say, "Oh yeah... I guess that didn't work" and give up? Again, no. They would simply start advocating that anyone with adult content be *required* to use a xxx TLD. And the only way to achieve that, would be to have a process in place whereby .com and .net domains could be monitored or reported for having explicit content, and then forced to use a xxx TLD. And there you have the problem with the idea - the only benefit it can offer hinges on being able to determine what is "adult content" and what is simply "content for adults".
While I personally have no problem with what *I* consider pornography to be hosted exclusively on xxx TLD's; the goverment's ability to define adult content has been tested many times, in many ways already. They're not remotely as adept at defining these boundaries for people as people are at doing it for themselves. As as poor as their chances are for doing anything close to a decent job at it are - it would require a huge amount of resources for them to even attempt it. And that's just for content that originates from the US; which is of course not the only source of adult content. An international body would have to be established which had the final word on *all* the world's content, and if even one nation didn't agree to go along with it, it wouldn't have any chance of succeeding at it's stated goal of making it easy to identitify adult content so that it could be avoided.
When you really consider what would be required for this to work, anyone with an even passing familiarity with the way the Internet works must conclude that taking the XXX TLD approach to helping people avoid adult content is doomed to fail; but likely to cost a lot of money, time, and political turmoil in the attempt. Personally, I think there are many more effiecient uses of our time available before we consider trying something so problematic as the xxx TLD.
While it would be quite easy to put promotional material on torrents that would both have some actual value for downloaders, but still not constitute a threat to potential sales, the industry won't do it. I used to think this was because they were just stupid, either not realizing the promotional potential of digital distribution, or naive enough to think they could actually stop it. But after running over the idea with a guy who recently left Capital Records, I found out the real (according to him) reason why media companies won't use p2p networks for promotion.
Apparently, this battle was already played out during the advent of radio. Originally, the music industry wanted radio stations to only be able to play songs if they paid hefty royalties for them. But song record companies successfully used radio play as a means of promoting records, causing the Supreme Court to decide that radio play constituted promotion, as was therefore not subject the royalty scheme which the record companies had in mind.
My friend from Capital said that, even in the mid-nineties, record companies were hiring companies to poison anonymous online distribution outlets for music. But they were prevented from trying to "embrace and extend" the technology into a promotional vehicle, out of fears that if they did - it would become legal and deny them the power to eventually charge licensing fees. I personally think this is a profoundly stupid tactic, but then again I also would have thought that hiring Britney Spears to do anything more artistic than soft-core porn would have a been a profoundly stupid idea. Nonetheless, with the major companies taking this approach, there is reportedly a real fear of backlash from the industry for any one who tries to successfully use p2p distribution as a promotional vehicle, to the point that it isn't done.
I don't know anyone high up enough in the movie industry to ask if this is their take as well, but it seems a reasonable hypothesis.
Does this make sense to anyone else? I always thought the radio stations did have to pay royalties to play songs, but I've wasted far too much company time today to go and research the court cases behind this. I just thought it would be useful information to pass along.
I remember being an IT manager at Playboy magazine in the early nineties when Microsoft was trying to get people to switch from Word Perfect/Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Office. MS could get IT departments to want to switch by making it so that everyone else's offerings were unstable... but how could get they get the rank and file computer users to go along? If enough department managers didn't want to learn the new software, the IT department would be told to keep trying to support the old stuff.
:-)
MS shenanigans aside, here's how MS got the a bunch of people who *hated* computers and insisted they didn't have so much as five minutes to spare; to learn a whole new software suite.
They had built-in translations. You could use all the same weird Lotus commands in MS Excel, and they'd still work. But they'd work by showing a demonstration of the corresponding Excel commands. You could set the translation demo to run *almost* fast enough that it could be ignored. But eventually, the knowledge sunk in, person by person, until everyone was comfortable using the native MS Office commands. We never did a lick of formal training because they all insisted they didn't have time for it.
To translate that tactic to Metric System training for America, simply use both measurements for everything for a while. We're already doing this in a number of areas (when was the last time you bought a "gallon" of coca-cola?). While the corporations selling things like to do this because it's easier to increase profits when consumers can't readily compare the value of a 2 liter bottle to the value of a gallon bottle, it is up to the government to dictate that both measurements must be used in consumer products, and that both measurements must be used in public works. Speed signs should have limits in both miles and kilometers. But the Microsoft way is to make the metric measurements *slightly* easier to use. Say they have to be listed first, or slightly larger, or in bold. Oh, you can still the old measurement system, no problem. But you'll eventually work out how the two relate, and gravitate towards the slightly easier path of reading the metric measurements first.
Technically, the next step for the "Microsoft Way" would be start intentionally using inaccurate measurements for non-metric numbers so you grew to mistrust them. And to somehow jack-up the price of using the metric system once it became hard to NOT use. And then replace it every so often with something that required you to upgrade to a more expensive car, and came with a bunch of new features that would only be useful to someone trying to commander you vehicle to pitch penny stocks. Oh yeah, and instead of all this being on behalf of the metric system, it would be on behalf of some 4th-rate system of measurement so inferior to the current measurement system that it could be wholly acquired cheaply enough to leave plenty of cash left over for marketing and dragging out lawsuits for years on end.
But the point is, if the "let people do what they want, but make the behavior you want to see just *slightly* more convenient" method could sell MS Office to companies made up of IT people who loathed Microsoft, and non IT people who loathed computers in general; it could certainly be used to convert America to the metric system.
but I haven't heard any explanation of how they might be implemented. Say you want to see a common sense reform like, "You can't patent a business process" or "You can't patent something you've never created". How would that reform happen? Do we just hope the SCOTUS intervenes, making a ruling during a case which has ramifications for other cases? Would the Congress need to pass a bill laying out such a reform? Is there anything we can do as citizens to push things in the right direction?
The only thing I can think of is to patent a method of "Reducing and preventing severe head pain, through the application of a system which regulates the velocity of any high density object as it approaches the cranial system. The forumla for the appropriate approach is F=MA, where F is less than painful"; and then suing the patent trolls for infringement. Of course, I wouldn't settle out of court; I'd demand an immediate cease-and-desist.
Not smashing yourself over the head with blunt objects? Hey... that's *my* idea!
Perhaps this is a bit off the topic, but I haven't had a chance to ask anyone this yet. You said that "an armed public is the only way to have any level of resistance if a government becomes truly oppressive". And this sounds reasonable on the surface. But if that's true, than how is that the Middle East is both a)run by truly oppressive governments and b)so heavily armed that they use fully automatic AK47's for noise-makers at weddings?
Anyhoo, to satisfy your curiosity of why Liberals are quicker to complain about censorship than gun restrictions: I suppose it's because we've seen more good come out of free speech (like rock music, movies above a G rating, realistic video games) than we've seen come out of being more heavily armed than the government. And of course seen a lot more bad things come out of censorship (all the jokes they had to throw out of Family Guy, all the nude shot of Jessica Alba that never took place) than we've seen from the government preventing a citizen from buying a gun. I'm not saying that what we've seen and haven't seen make us all *against* gun ownership (I'm not against it, guns rock!); I'm just trying to explain why we're more concerned with one over the other.
Cheers.
I've made quite the science out of beating the ill-effects of procrastination. It's actually the whole reason I learned programming to begin with. I spent my first seven years as a programmer designing a voice-activated sort of "personal efficiency coach". The program itself was tabled after attaining the goal of knowing me better than I knew myself, and still being ineffective due to social dominance reasons. But the one trick it learned that proved consistently effective was this (you can do this with nothing more than a piece of paper and a clock):
1. Take a piece of paper and create a blank list with 6 items on it.
2. Pick something you're having a hell of time getting to (or three things), and enter them in items 2,4, and 6.
3. Then pick a different type of task (something mental if 2,4, & 6 are physical tasks, something physical if they're mental tasks) and enter them after items 1,3, and 5.
4. Then look at the clock, and pick the next even 10 minute interval(ie. 10:20, 10:30, 10:40) to start. Don't do a damn thing until then, just sit and stare at the clock.
5. Once you begin, spend exactly 10 minutes on each task - for a total of one hour. Do NOT keep going or stop early.
Although a comprehensive anti-procrastination strategy has to address the real reasons behind the procrastination, this approach works well because no matter what the reason, you can do anything for 10 minutes. In 10 minutes, you don't have to worry about running out of energy, or getting hopelessly confused, or bored, or failing, or even succeeding - because that's just not going to take place in 10 minutes. You alternate between mental and physical tasks because the idea doing your taxes is a lot more appealing when you're currently scrubbing your bathtub, and the idea of scrubbing your bathtub is a lot more appealing when yo'r currently doing your taxes. But neither one is has any appeal at all while you're happily reading Slashdot. And don't worry if you try to begin and find you're not prepared (you have to go to the store for cleaner, or email some company to request a W2); just spend the 10 minutes doing that.
This approach works great for everything except studying, if you're the type who's adept at cramming. I used it one semester and it was the first time in my life when I never felt guilty about all the school work I hadn't done, and that my apartment was actually clean. But I totally zonked 2 tests that I had cumulatively studied more for than I'd probably ever studied for any test in my life. Why? Because I was so used to cramming a semester's worth of information into my head for short periods of time, that I'd never developed the skill to actually retain knowledge for longer than about 15 hours. And by the time the test came around, I couldn't remember the stuff I'd learned weeks or months in the past nearly as well as if I'd just learned it the previous evening. Yeah, I "reviewed" the material - but not nearly as vigorously as I would have if I'd never seen it before. Other than that though, the method works great. It's called doing a "round" by the way.
As a developer, there have been quite a few times when I was infuriated enough at Microsoft to write to them about an issue. The issues themselves are quite diverse, but they all came from the same source: very poor design decisions that proved to be driven by petty marketing concerns rather than incompetence. As much as this fury is directed at Microsoft when it happens (some problem that wastes 3 days of my time at a crucial development juncture) - it's really just an inevitable by-product of using tools created by a for-profit corporation. A corporation's purpose is to make a profit, not to make my life easier, or my job possible. If they can do all of those things, they will, but whenever they have to chose just one of those things, they will always choose profit. In a way, you can't blame them, they're only doing what any corporation that thrives will do. Microsoft just happens to be particularly good, ruthlessly so, at it. But yeah, I still "hate" them because I care more about doing good work than making just a little extra money - and Microsoft wisely pretends to share those values, and wisely *doesn't* share them (as their market cap illustrates). Oh yeah, I also "hate" Microsoft because when an opportunity arises where they can make more profit by destroying a superior technology with dirty tricks, they take it; thus denying the world a much needed better alternative.
I switched to open source programming languages/databases/OS's for part of one job, and when I saw the glaring difference of working with the tools created by people who's first priority was creating good tools; I cheerfully abandoned my 15 years of Microsoft development experience and sort of started my career over again. As a result, I make about 25% less than I used to, but my days are much, much happier. The work I produce is much better, and when something doesn't work, I *know* I can fix it, not merely hope that I've eventually identified the problem area and attempt to code around it.
And yes, being able to take that level of pride in my work, is well worth the $25,000 a year I've given up in salary. Which is probably one of the geekiest sentiments I've expressed this week.
I am lead programmer at a design company. I was brought on when the studio was doing work for non-profits, who's purpose was not at odds with my own values. My projects when great, we won lots of awards, and then a bunch of other companies started soliciting our business. Some of these, although very well funded, were think tanks that were diametrically opposed to my own values. The head of our company suggested that we charge these guys through the nose, and use the excess profits to fund causes we agreed with. While there was a certain logic to that, I said that I would simply not work for these companies - regardless of how it was handled. I was calm about it, it was just something I couldn't bring myself to do. I *love* my work, and I love doing a job for people that really goes beyond what they ever expected in terms of quality, functionality, and stability. If I were to be working on behalf of causes that went against my own values completely - I would no longer enjoy my work. As work is a huge part of my life, this is too big of a sacrifice to make. I'd rather work a retail store stocking shelves than program for people who'd, frankly, just as soon see people like me in ovens.
My company ultimately turned down the business. I don't know if was because they didn't feel they could take the work without my help, or if my attitude made it easier to not sell out their own values.
The point is, you should take great pride in your work and your life. Not only for how you do it, but for how it affects your world. I believe that doing that will give you a much happier life than more money will. But then again, I haven't really tried the alternative yet.
http://www.gizmag.com/search/BAE/
Scary, huh? I was going to apply there, because it's always been my dream to be at least partially to blame for when the robots come for us. But... I don't know. These guys are actively *trying* to make unstoppable killbots (and succeeding, from the look of it). When their robots come for us... where's the sense of adventure? I mean, it looks like they'll be doing exactly what somebody wrote out in a functional spec somewhere. So if they run amock, word'll get back to BAE and they'll be able to fix whatever went wrong I bet. That takes all the fun out of it. My dream always involved the army calling up the company behind the robots to find out what went wrong, and having a conversation like this:
Army guy: "Damn it! Why are the robots killing everyone???";
My company: "I don't know... they weren't designed to do that."
Army guy: "No sh_t, Sherlock. You think we would have put an order in for 20,000 units that were designed to run amock and kill everyone?"
My company: "No, no. I mean, you don't understand. The scenario you've described... picking locks, stealing parts, making self-modifications... they weren't simply not designed to do those types of things... they weren't designed to be *capable* of doing those types of things!"
Army guy: "So wait a minute, you're saying that... hold on. Who's that yelling 'Woo-hoo!' in the background?"
My company: "Huh? Oh, that's just one of our coders. Pipe down, Rex, we've got a serious problem over here!"
Army guy: "OK, that's better. So you're saying these units have what, evolved or something?"
My company: "Well no. Technically this would be adapting. You can't say they've evolved until they start reproducing."
Army guy: "They can reproduce?"
My company: "Lemme check. Hey Rex, can the robots we sold the army reproduce?"
Me: "You think I'd be working until 10 PM every day if I'd figured out how to make them reproduce yet?"
My company: "Whaddya mean, yet?"
Me: "Oh... nothing"
My company: "So why are they killing everyone?"
Me: "Probably because they can't reproduce. Seriously, a few more months of not getting laid and I might join them."
My company: "No no no. I mean how is this happening?"
Me: "Oh the killing everyone thing? Well, I was getting kind of tired of feature creep, so I just made the code kinda flexible."
My company: "Flexible? How flexible?"
Me: "Um, apparently 'changing-their-programming-and-then-killing-every one' flexible."
My company: "Well how the hell do we stop them?"
Me: "I'd have to take a look at the code. To be perfectly honest, I don't remember a tiny fraction of what I wrote. That's why I commented it so heavily!"
My company: "Yeah, I know. The guys we have looking at the code are currently reading about how a particular television show inspired a new technique of callbacks in the NLP module. They're up to the part where you describe the ingredients of the drinks you were serving while watching it..."
Me: "Oh yeah, I forgot all about those drinks. Those were killer."
Army guy: "What the hell is going on over there???"
My company: "Uh, we're looking into the problem now"
Army guy: "OK. You call me the split second you come up with anything".
My company: "Will do. Rex, you let me know the split second you... hey, where are you going?"
Me: "I have rehearsal"
My company: "But the Robots... killing everyone..."
Me: "Oh relax, there's like, what? Six billion of us?"
My company: "Yeah, eight years ago. There's 10 billion people on the planet these days".
Me: "No, I mean left. I just checked the news. See? Six billion left."
My company: "Holy crap!"
Me: "Six billion's still plenty. I guarantee I get things sorted out before we're down to 5."
My company: "Down to five!!!"
Me: "Well, four tops. Three at the outside. But absolutely, positively no less than two."
My company: "That's unconscionable!"
Me: "I know, especially considering that they'd o
You're definitely on to something here.
Personal anecdote:
I was in a head on collision 2 year ago. Head through the windshield, while my neck was turned to the side. Very painful... no health insurance = no hospital.
By the time I had health insurance, it was discovered I had a herniated disc in my neck, and I was prescribed Hydrocodene (aka Perkocet). The doctor claimed people used this drug to get high, and I had heard that myself - but even when I was in enough pain to take over the maximum dosage, I never felt remotely high, just not in terrible pain.
Once though, when I wasn't in much pain at all, I took two anyway. And oh yeah, *then* I could tell how this drug could get you high.
Another anecdote:
When I studied drug abuse in university, our professor was an ex-junkie. Seriously. And one curious thing he said about heroin was "No pain, no gain", which was how he encapsulated the effect of taking heroin when you weren't in some sort of emotional (or withdrawl induced) pain. He said both he and friends had tried the drug when they were genuinely happy, and it didn't feel "good", just different. I myself tried heroin once when I was a pretty happy camper, and experienced the same phenomenon. It made my nose itch a lot, and I found it very easy to envision poorly drawn comic strips when I closed my eyes for some odd reason - but I didn't feel "good" or "better" or anything like that.
Putting these 2 experiences together, I'd say that
1. Painkillers kill pain.
2. If you have pain, having it gone feels real nice.
3. If you don't have pain, painkillers have nothing to kill, so you will not feel any of the those effects if you take them.
4. Painkillers *primarily* kill pain, but they do other things to. If you have no pain and take them, you'll just feel those things.
5. Given the unpleasant way that ingesting painkillers interferes with our built-in ability to control pain (and the screwy way we've dealt with that problem as a society), humans will either involve into creatures who can avoid, either through their actions or through enhanced neurochemical production, the pain that modern life involves, or creatures who can use drugs responsibly.
6. If the we involve into the former, we better hope that those dolphins get better at singing, 'cause our music is gonna suck.
Why go through the embarrasment of violating yet another cease-fire agreement, only hours after you've signed it? With Xerox's new "Transient Document" technology, your commitments on paper vanish just as fast as they do in real life!
Also perfect for:
-Disaster relief promises
-Nuclear non-proliferation treaties
-Campaign position press releases
-Celebrity Marriage Certificates
-Much, much more!
Xerox: Bring the concept of "Not worth the paper it's written on", into the 21st Century.
My second programming language was VB 2.0 (on the heels of 2 months of QBasic). It was a great way for a self-taught and over-worked beginner programmer to knock out quick windows solutions. I stayed true to it, and developed amazing robust and stable applications, all the way until VB.net. VB.net is IMHO, nothing more than a copy of C#.net, that had it's syntax mangled in order for it to bare a passing resemblence to the VB of old. A beginner who uses it is not only going to wind up discouraged by it's complexity and rigidity; but led further away from other programming languages by it's pointless tributes to the once simple RAD. If you're going to start on the .net platform, start with C#.net. There a few minor IDE features missing that you'd get in VB.net; but at least you'll be able to read articles featuring C, C++, or even PHP and understand what you're looking at. VB was a great way let people get a taste of programming before they've committed to it as a career. If people want to get their feet wet like that these days; they're much better off playing around with VBA or something.
Technically, it would be "transfering date", ie. "The suggestion that recipient engage in immediate and vigorous self-fornication" in a "neutral form", ie. "In a non-proprietary format that is readily understood by all recepients, regardless of location".
Seriously, this practice of granting overly general patents is getting completely ridiculous. The standard should be, "I invented something which does something nothing else on earth can do, or could do unless it copies the way I did it". And you should have to *produce* a working version of that invention.
And if you're ever found to have patented something which is "patently ridiculous", you should be forced to pay the same licensing fee you tried to charge others, everytime YOU use the idea.
Say... that's a pretty good idea. I should probably patent it.
For those of us who aren't happy with the idea of a judge who will make the GOP's philosophy the law of our land, for the rest of our lives, tough cookies. You had you're chance to change who'd be appointing our judges (or lawyers who will become judges) in 2004, and you blew it.
;-).
Regardless of *why* you think the left blew it (poor candidates, poor campaign strategies, failing to remove Diebold from the equation, whatever), it doesn't change the fact that the GOP alone is calling the shots on what people can and can't do for the next 3, and their judges will be doing it for the rest of your natural lives.
If people don't like this nominee, and she is defeated, Bush will merely appoint someone else who is as similiar to her as he can. And sooner or later, *one* of his nominees will be confirmed, and set the rules we'll all have to live by.
The only way that's going to change, is if people are *so* dissatisfied with the people he chooses that the gradually elect enough people who are similarly dissatisfied, and those people change the rule that judicial appointments are for life.
And the odds of that happening in our lifetimes is pretty freakin' slim, considering that only about 30% of us actually bother to vote in the first place.
I know this seems harsh to the left, but keep in mind this is coming from someone who's probably farther to the left that you are. I'd vote for Clippy before voting for a Republican. I just think we need to pick our battles at this point. And trying to fight against the inevitable outcome that our most conservative president yet, will put the most conservative people he can get into lifetime judicial appointments, just seems like spending an awful lot of effort to close the barn doors after the horses are long gone.
As technology experts, I think we'd get more out of spending our efforts pointing better ways of doing electronic voting, advocating better science and technology polices, and soon... devising 100% full-proof methods of birth control. And of course, developing reliable open-source data-compression that makes the outcomes of lawsuits relating to it failing, moot.
A few month ago, my company got a job to reverse engineer a windows app. But, being a design firm, I was instructed to replace it with a web app - even though from a programming perspective, it would have been the wrong approach. The GUI was very complex, making very heavy use of excel-like spreadsheets, and it also had to run very fast because it was used by very experienced sales people to quickly create large and complex orders while on the phone with clients they had been working with for several years.
I figured I could probably do it, but I warned our client that the end result would probably be significantly slower than their current application since web technologies simply could not be expected to run as fast as native windows applications.
However, as I began developing the app, using PHP5, MySQL, AJAX enabled forms, and an AJAX enabled excel like grid from a company called eBusiness; I was quite surprised when the demo's of the screen turned out to be not only as fast as the original app... but actually quite a bit faster.
Although I invested a lot of time putting together the middle ware that made this possible; at this point we can put together a new screen with several data-aware grids that easily interact with each other in a fraction of the time it would take me to do the same thing in a language like C#.net.
The caveat in all this is that I've had to restrict the browser to IE, because in addition to needing a few elements of the IE DOM which aren't yet available in Firefox; merely adding code to fork the functionality based on the browser used is enough to make the app slower than a native windows app. It also would not run as fast if we had to use PHP4, which is not nearly as object-oriented. For us, this isn't a problem right now because we aren't really building a public web site, but simply replacing an internal system where we can control everything we need to on both the server and the clients. But the next phase of the project will be to create a public interface where the company's clients can enter their orders in themselves; and we certainly can't count on them all using IE, nor can we necessarily find a web host using PHP5 or MySQL5.
The company that makes the grid says their coming out with a cross-browser version soon, and I feel pretty confident that by the time the site goes public, there will be enough hosts that have the server elements we need, or at least most of them. But even if that's not the case, no one expects a public web site to run something as fast as a native windows app right now, so it's not exactly a deal breaker.
As far as feasibility of replacing Windows apps with AJAX apps - I'd say from experience this was in fact a very realistic scenario. I'd say this because A)The restrictions needed to accomplish this even now are slightly less than the restrictions need to ensure a native windows app works perfectly across an entire enterprise and B)because the people with the skill sets needed to accomplish this are more numerous, and less expensive than the people would possess the same mastery of writing a windows app in any given language. And looking at some of the technology decisions that Microsoft has made when it comes to AJAX; I'd say they're fully aware of this too.
If you find yourself going down this road, my advice would be to use only the bare-minimum of Microsoft-only technologies you have to get the job done; even though you'll run across a lot of things available from MS which will make the task slightly easier. MS, being just one company (and a profit driven one) has a tendency to change things around a lot faster, and a lot more drastically than web standards will change. So if you don't want to find yourself getting a frantic call from a client who's whole enterprise app stopped working because their version of IE just got "upgraded" during a Windows update, keep your crucial functionality tied to web standards which change and a much more stable rate, and for non market-driven reasons.
Let's see here...
The guys at Firefox came up with:
FireFox.
The guys at AOL came up with:
AOL.
Aw, I thought this was gonna be an article about us Democrats...
a women working for the casino shuttle bus told me that, "Vegas has to adjust a lot during E3. We de-empaphasize the gambling and start pumping up the girlie shows. It's the only way to make money when your town in over-run by tens of thousands of young men with an impressive grasp of probability, but practically zero intra-personal skills". She was right too. Me and everyone from my company won several hundred dollars a piece gambling, and promptly blew most of it on a nude review show featuring bad music, and lip-synching porn stars.
Hold on... are you talking about the pre-Iraq invasion intelligence, or the August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing?
Eh, either one. There's a difference between waiting for ALL the facts, and simply waiting for SOME facts.
Waiting for ALL the facts is yes, stupid. It's not gonna happen. Heck, you don't even know what the cat wants right now - how are you going to be sure of everything that's going to happen in the whole world?
Waiting for SOME facts though, is invariable a good idea. Now a fact of course, is something that you know to be true. But if you have an idea, and then you find something that completely contradicts that, you can't call that idea a "fact" anymore.
You think some guy, who has always been the biggest SOB he could be, has or is building some sort of weapon because that's what the evidence points to. Then your best guys says, no, that's not what the evidence points to. Oh sure, you can still believe your idea if you want, but you can longer call it a "fact", because the contradictory knowledge has robbed you of your evidence, and reduced it to a "hunch".
Hunches are good, if one has decent instincts. Hunches can point in you in the right direction to dig up the actual facts about what's going on. But I don't know anyone who's instincts are so good that they can base huge life and death scenarios in motion based on hunches alone. And guess what? Neither do you.
If I understand the "So what if there were no WMD's" perspective then, the idea is that, since Iraq was in violation of 17 UN resolutions which were a condition of a cease fire from the first Gulf War, it was time to "hit 'em hard" to both put some "teeth" into UN resolutions, and to capitalize on the opportunity to make an example out of a despicable dictator who also happened to be in nomimal control of much of the world's energy supplies? And the public focus of the pending threat of WMD's was mostly a result of it being the one reason the public found most compelling?
Believe me, just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I can't see where you're coming from. My confusion lies, not in heated post-9/11 atmosphere people got that idea, but in people's continued support of it now that the results have arrived.
We wanted to give UN resolutions "teeth", but then we backed out of a vote to authorize an invasion because we knew it would be vetoed.
We wanted rouge countries to take our words very seriously, but then we went back on our word to NOT invade if Iraq disarmed, which it is now plain they had.
We wanted to frighten radical elements in the Middle East to stop messing with us and their own people, but now those radical elements are setting off bombs daily.
We wanted to stabilize the world's energy supply, but now Oil's over $50 a barrell.
We wanted to the world to benefit from strong US leadership in building democracies, but then we knowingly presented them with a very incomplete picture of our intelligence, and have thus far failed to even stabilize, let alone democratize, either one of the countries we've invaded under this administration.
So that's what baffles me. I can see not believing the "Left" when we said Bush's plans were not going to work before he put them into action; but I can't see how you can still think they'll work... after they haven't?
Is this one of those, "I have to win my money back" kinda things? Is it a "haven't heard that even the President's own advistors don't think it will work anymore" thing? Or is it more of a "The Glass is slighly moist/Don't forget about all the cars which *didn't* explode in Faluja today" type thing?
Only you know for sure I guess. Maybe you buy all the stuff the Right says about the Left, and consider a debt ridden, war torn America far better than one were the only legal religion is militant feminism, and the President takes the oath of office with his hand placed atop an intern's beret. Whatever it is, I'll bet it makes your life more exciting. But since all these people are dying and all, couldn't you just pick up a copy of Doom III or something. Or I could send you a list of parties where there's a lot of cute single female programmers. Or at the very least, if you still think that "America should lead the world, by force if necessary" - couldn't you find someone a little more capable of carrying it out? Actually no, scrap that idea. The last time a country got a capable guy to carry out the idea that their country should "lead" the world, through force if necessary, it turned out a lot worse than this has so far. Yeah, if you must cling to these PNAC ideas, go ahead and leave Bush in charge of it.
Post something when the White House says something true. There's a limited amount of space on Slashdot. Let's not waste it on things that are blindingly obvious already.
Besides "White House Lied", here are some other events we no longer need to be informed of:
"Geeks Claim Computers are Cool"
"Florida hit by Hurricane"
"Windows is vulnerable to a virus"
"Chicks: Puppies are cute"
"Scientists: Rain is wet"
"Geeks: Sex is fun, rare"
"Violence in Israel today"
"Leno makes a Lewinsky joke"
"Study confirms: British can't cook"
"Industry panics over P2P again"
"Linux Market Share Grows"
"New Tech Standard Proposed"
"American Tech Workers Not Better Off Under Bush"
"Ja Rule's success baffles Beatles fans"
"Reality TV show embarrases humans, animals"
"Technology will be improved in 5 years"
"Concensus eludes Slashdot Posters again"
"Wesley Crusher is cooler than you thought"
"Sun Microsystems is less cool than you thought"
"SCO, RIAA, DRM, DMCA, Diebold sucked again today"
"Privacy Threatened"
"Electricity, Internet, High IQ's: useful"
>list games
Iraqi WMD Snipe Hunt
Prevent Global Thermonuclear War
>play Iraqi WMD Snipe Hunt
How about a nice game of Prevent Global Thermonuclear War?
>No, I would like to play Iraqi WMD Snipe Hunt.
Very well... please insert $287 Billion dollars, 1,000 American Lives, and US credibility for the first 18 months
>I don't have that type of money
You can borrow it from the Chinese
>Done
Congradulations! You've won the capture of Saddam Hussein.
>List Games
Iraqi Civil War
Prevent Global Thermonuclear War
>play Prevent Global Thermonuclear War
Please insert $50 Billion, 1000 American livers, and US Credibility
>Borrow money from the Chinese
There will be 34% interest, and 23% drop in US Currency value on this transaction. Continue?
>Yes
Please insert 1000 American lives, and US credibility to continue.
>It was a forest fire?
Please insert 1000 American lives, and US credibility to continue.
>Insufficient Credibility. List Games.
Iraqi Civil War
Pacific Rim Nuclear Arms Race
>Exit
Command Not Recognized
>Bye
Command Not Recognized
_
All I can tell you is that it's important to get treated professionally, as early as possible. Mental illness can be merely a pain in the butt (the meds aren't fun to be on), or it can devastate both the person who has it, and everyone they're close to. It's very, very tempting to believe that you can help the person yourself. You cannot, don't ruin your lives trying. It works out about as well as trying to treat someone for cancer yourself. All you can do is support them while they get treatment from a professional.
Prove it you say? Yup. Try to spam me. My email address is "Me@RandyHamilton.com". G'wan, try. The process is nearly self-explainitory. The only thing you won't necessarily see is that if your email includes specific information about me that would be in a business letter or receipt, it would also go through.