Those of us in Maricopa County can worry about our sheriff; the rest of the country can worry about theirs.
Not when he started to investigate Obama's birth certificate. Arpaio is the one trying to put the Maricopa sheriff's office on the national stage, and when he does that the people who elected him have to take the criticism that provokes.
Why was that a moronic answer? I'm sure the reason is apparent but for the life of me I'm unable to see it...
Because waiting until you are critically ill and then going to the emergency room is the absolute worst way to treat a chronic condition like coronary artery disease. It's paying much, much more to get worse results to use the ER instead of screening and management of the disease through office visits.
I could go on for pages for all the unnecessary financial and social costs of using the ER as the main delivery vehicle of health care, but it all boils down to the fact it's better AND cheaper to prevent emergencies than it is to fix them. We pay more per capita in this country for health care than any other country on earth, by a wide margin. While some of that medicine is very impressive, if you look at the statistics our outcomes are about the worst of all the advanced economies.
39 countries in the world do a better job of preventing infant mortality (pre-natal care is prevention) ranking just behind Cuba, which pays $495 per person to our $7164, 12% of their GDP to our staggering **15.2%**. We're just behind Cuba in life expectancy too (they live 1/10 year longer than our 78.2 years). The country with the highest life expectancy is Japan which spend 72% less per person ($2817 per person per year or 8.3% of GDP) and people live to 82.7 years. Look next door to Canada, which does much better than us in infant mortality rate and where they live on average two and a half years longer than we do. Canadians spend about half as much per person on health care as we do and get better results.
We might not want to make the same choices Canada does. Maybe we *do* want to spend twice as much on health care, but *we should get better outcomes as a result*. The fact that our outcomes are substantially *worse* means we're doing it in a profoundly stupid way (e.g. using the ER instead of a primary care physician).
The problem here isn't "brilliant jerks", it's people who made important contributions to the company in the past, but whose *current* behavior is harming the company. Many "brilliant jerks" are a mixed bag, but continue to be of great value to the company (for example Steve Jobs).
The answer is much simpler when you define the problem as the employee having become a net negative contributor. If you can't fix that fast, you get rid of those guys. I personally learned the hard way that by trying too hard to fix a troublesome employee, you end up being unfair to all the people who have to work with him.
If gratitude is a psychological obstacle, give the guy a fat bonus and then fire him. Suppose the employee is costing you a million dollars a year. That's not hard for a well placed bad employee, who can wreck projects multiple teams are working on, lose key customers, and mire you in consequences for years to come. So the guy is going to cost you a million bucks next year. *Split it with him*. Give him a half-million dollars to go away, and you're *both* a half-million ahead of where you would have been. That sounds insane, but it's less insane than burning a million bucks and *nobody* benefiting.
As for actual "brilliant jerks", their contribution and net impact have to be regularly evaluated.
Well --- daring to speak your mind is admirable, provided you've thought through what you ought to say. Saying whatever pops into your head is just stupid.
Now I'm a lifelong liberal Democrat and currently a strong Obama partisan, but I watched the remarks in question by Governor Romney before weighing in on them. After watching them several times my take is that Romney was making a joke, but he was so stiff it wasn't immediately apparent. He's not good at off the cuff remarks, and under the circumstances it's understandable that he wasn't comfortable.
Now, when Romney was asked "Isn't it the government's responsibility to provide health care to the fifty million people who don't have it today?" he answered, "“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance. If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and — and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care." Now that was a f**cking moronic answer, and he deserves to be mocked for it.
But these warlords unite to fight against "infidels".
I know it makes things simpler to lump all Muslims in together; but don't forget, the Pakistani Taliban is hostile to the government in Islamabad, and it kills other Pakistani Muslims pretty much exclusively. It particularly targets Sufi pilgrimage sites which are wildly popular there.
Imagine you're an ambitious senior military officer with a secular lifestyle, a career dependent upon US military aid, and a Punjabi family with Sufi religious affiliations. Would you want to help a fanatical Pashtun tribesman who just blew up a bunch of your family members while they were worshiping? Or his Arab ally who wants to make Pakistan part of an Arab dominated caliphate? Hell no. If this guy had Osama bin Laden in his crosshairs we could count on him to pull the trigger. The problem is this guy probably has people working for him who are Taliban sympathizers, and they don't necessarily advertise the fact. That's why we had to send US SEALs to kill OBL, but in doing so we handed our friendly officer a triple humiliation, demonstrating that the Pakistanis couldn't find OBL, couldn't be trusted with the whereabouts of OBL, and couldn't stop America from doing whatever the hell we pleased on Pakistani soil.
The drone strikes are similar. There's good reasons to do them, but at the same time they humiliate and weaken our allies and radicalize everyone else. It is possible that those strikes are the right thing to do, but we have to be realistic about the unintended consequences. Pakistan is uniquely dangerous in that it is a nuclear power in an unstable region with significant potential for radical power shifts. We do not want to screw this up.
Explain to them that version control is the cornerstone of practically all modern software development best practices, whether they be agile or waterfall oriented. It's open and shut. You can't do best coding practices without version control. Period. The reason is that version control is fundamental to collaboration. Without it collaboration is awkward, time consuming and error prone.
If the project is small with only a single developer, collaboration includes handing off responsibility for the system to that developer's successor. No more dumpster diving through the old guy's hard drive to find all the files that make up the system (and wondering if you got the right ones). The new guy simply checks out the current version from the source control server and he's ready to roll. Not only does he have the current version, he has a *complete* history of *all* the changes made to the software and why. You can toss the old guy's hard drive in the trash. This is even more so if you have a build automation tool like Maven that allows you to retrieve all the library and framework files you need to set up a build system on a new machine.
For teams working on software simultaneously, source control eliminates the kind of three-legged race you have to run to make sure all your changes work together. Sure, some of the time you have reconcile incompatible changes, but it's much easier when you can retrieve, compare, even *merge* different versions of any file in the system.
Source control is essential for support and for responsible management of software development investment. It allows you to find out not only what changed, but why. It allows you to recreate your software (or web site) at any point in the past, by version number or by date, do whatever you need with that data, and then simply toss your copy of the source files away -- all that old information can be instantly recreated any time you wish. No more confusing and redundant files and directories on your development machines (e.g. "myfiles.save.c" -- why was I saving that? "myfile.new.c" -- when was it new, and what was new about it? That kind of malarkey is unprofessional).
By removing the clutter, bookkeeping, and errors created by juggling versions of files on your hard disk, version control becomes a kind of safety net that allows you to be more creative, trying things that might break the system in full confidence that you can get anything you want back any time you want. You can also branch of speculative versions of the system, throw them away if you don't want them (and get them back if you change your mind), and merge those branches (with a some work of course, but it's a lot easier knowing you can't possibly screw anything up).
Version control is so immensely useful, I think people should use it for *everything*, including personal documents, papers, proposals... anything whose integrity or history is important. Researchers who keep data in Excel spreadsheets or Access databases ought to use version control on those. They ought to put their scholarly papers in version control too. The problem is that most source control systems are overkill, but if you have an in-house expert (a professional developer) he can train people on the stuff they need. I keep all my personal writing in bzr, which isn't necessarily the system I'd choose for software development, but it's simple, easy to use and cross platform.
Is the Pakistani government an enemy of the US and often works against US interests?
Yes.
Is the Pakistani government an ally of the US that shares intelligence with the US and often allows US military to operate on Pakistani soil?
Yes.
Isn't that schizophrenic?
Yep.
Like the US, Pakistan has an elected government. Unlike the US, it has governmental organs that aren't fully under the control of civilian elected officials. The Pakistani military and intelligence services are independent national institutions (Egypt is this way as well) and within those institutions you have various fiefdoms and power centers. The Egyptian military is this way as well, almost forming a distinct society within the society with its own economic and social welfare programs.
Imagine you have a country governed by warlords. There might be some order of precedence or honor which theoretically unifies the country, but still some of the those warlords might be your "friends" and others your enemies. There's nothing mystifying about that. Now imagine those petty rulers aren't warlords who control territory, but bureaucrats that control various state functions. It's not that different.
I'm an early adopter here both of CFLs and LED bulbs. While I'm generally pleased with the LED lights, I should note that performance varies quite a bit between brands, particularly the off-brand.Chinese LED bulbs. For example I have a Utilitech 7.5 watt flood bulb that's almost a perfect replacement for a 65 watt incandescent reflector bulb both in brightness and angle of illumination. I have a off-brand Chinese LED bulb with identical specs which looks exactly the same -- I wouldn't be surprised if it was manufactured in the same factory -- but is dimmer, narrower beamed, has an objectionable flicker, and has a color temperature at least 3000K higher than rated.
So one LED bulb is a clearly superior replacement for a 65W PAR30 incandescent, and is available in your choice of daylight or warm white. The other, similarly spec'd, is a piece of junk that will give you a headache and cataracts. They're both made in China, possibly by the same factory. Caveat emptor.
Hmm. The only CFLs I've bought that take longer then ten seconds to come to near full brightness are candelbara base globes. I have E26 base CFLs throughout the house and they all work fine. They're mainly Sylvania brand, but some are Ott or Utilitech. I suspect Philips or Osram are probably just as good.
I guess the reason the candelabra bulbs don't light quickly is that they can't fit a decent ballast circuit in the form factor.. If you have an E26 base CFL and it doesn't light to near full intensity almost immediately I'm guessing the manufacturer skimped on the ballast, maybe leaving out the autotransformer or using a lower power-factor circuit.
I wonder whether Walmart has something to do with this experience people have of CFLs that don't light up or which fail prematurely. Walmart has a history of using its clout to force manufacturers to produce versions that look like their normal products but which cost less. Try buying a name brand bulb from Home Depot or yourg local hardware store.
One caveat about my positive experience is that I prefer higher color temperature bulbs 4500K-6000K which approximate sunlight. Many people who are used to incandescent lamps will perceive the daylight spectrum bulbs as harsh (although I perceive incandescent bulbs as "dingy"). You can get warmer color temperature CFLs, but it is possible that they perform differently. I can't speak to that.
Should be a tax. Encourage people to make the right choices, but don't screw people who have special circumstances or are willing to compensate society for the cost of their preference.
I'd be for that, if there actually were special circumstances where a traditional incandescent bulb was the best choice. Note that the EU regs only apply to non-directional lights; reflectorized incandescent bulbs are still allowed because suitable replacements in the same form factor don't exist.
About the only use I can think of for your standard A19 bulb with an E26 is renovating and flipping properties were you don't intend to pay for the bulb's operation or replacement. That and whipping people into a hysteria over change.
Well, it'll be a long, long time before electric cars are "practical" if by "practical" you mean "meets *all* of everyone's needs."
Even if there were charge stations all around, the charge time compared to refueling with gasoline or diesel will make electric cars as a "solution for everything" unattractive. With 300 miles per charge within sight, the limitation isn't *range*, it's *refueling time*. Short of having battery exchanges (which I think would be a good idea) electrical vehicles won't be practical for multi-day driving trips.
But something doesn't have to be a "solution for everything" to be practical.
I live next door to family with two teenagers. The household has a total of *four* gasoline cars. If two of those cars were electric, they could be topped off by morning for most of the city driving, and two would be available for business or vacation travel.
What part of running a commercial network has any bearing on end users updating consumer products?
Consumers want the current stuff because that is what consumers want. Deliver it and you make money. Fail to deliver it and you end up circling the bowl.
Spoken like an pointy-haired boss with no knowledge of engineering and little experience in real world marketing.
If you want to know how to do this, look at how Jobs managed Apple product development. He didn't figure out what customers wanted then figure out how to do it. He figured out what he could do then figured out how to make customers want it.
You listen to customers, but you don't take what they say at face value. I once had a customer complain, "Every time you guys do something for me you want money." I didn't stop charging him; instead I developed a deal in which he pre-paid us for a bundle of services and support time so he could call us without getting an invoice. It was actually more profitable for us.
It's not always possible to resolve customer desires so successfully. Some customers want bleeding edge releases, stable predictable operation, and not to have to pay much for support. You can have at most two of the three. In a multi-vendor situation, sometimes one of the vendors makes out by making another vendor eat the support costs. Apple has a long history of screwing it's "partners", which is why I swore off developing for and supporting Apple platforms years ago, although I've always liked their products and use them myself. If a customer wanted me to do an iOS app, I'd do it, but I prefer not to build a business dependent upon Apple's ongoing goodwill.
[note 1] So is there a line where antarctic should wait until summer ice at the other pole entirely disappear? [note 2] Regarding your faith into predictions, here is infamous Jim Mercer's 1978 article in Nature which predicted 5-10C increase in the antarctic during next 50 years. [note 3] You see, polar amplification is entirely symmetric effect, if it works at one pole, it should do at the other as well.
(1) Straw man. (2) Cherry picking. (3) Citation needed. "Stands to reason" doesn't count. Look at a map, or better yet, a globe. The Arctic and Antarctic are geographically very different.
The Antarctic is a different situation entirely than the Arctic. Much of the sea ice there is annual, and winter ice doesn't have the effect on local weather that summer ice in the Arctic does.
In any case climate models do not predict a dramatic change in Antarctic sea ice. The change is predicted to come first in the Arctic then the Antarctic. The reason is that the Arctic ocean is surrounded by land. The Antarctic ocean is surrounded by vast extents of moderating ocean. Region-wide changes under a warming scenario would come to the Arctic before the Antarctic. The Antarctic would see local changes, depending on the prevailing winds.
This is similar to the situation in temperate continental weather. Under an AGW scenario not every place gets warmer; some get cooler. What you get is a very subtle shift in averages over large areas of the globe punctuated by unusual events like drought and excessive rainfall. If you throw all that into a pot you get a slight change in the global average. It'd be better to call "global warming" "more energetic global climate".
As other have pointed out, melting ice that is is *entirely floating* (important proviso) does not alter the level of the water body it is floating in. Adding water to that body -- in liquid or solid form -- does. So sea level rise is produced entirely by water that is on land (mainly in glaciers or ice sheets) entering the sea.
But melting sea ice can still raise sea levels through effects on land ice that are indirect but potentially dramatic. The greatest concern in the Arctic is sea ice loss leading to warmer summer temperatures as the Arctic Ocean reflects less summer sunlight back into space. Higher temperatures increase the rate at which land ice enters the sea, for example by glaciers calving icebergs. Since sea ice itself is affected by warmer summer temperatures, you have a positive feedback mechanism that can result in rapid, dramatic changes in the Arctic like we're seeing here.
As for looking out your window, even a dramatic change in sea level like the half a meter might not look like much on a nice day. The beach that once stretched hundreds of yards from your door might only be ten yards wide. But the big change you'll see isn't in your routine daily view, it's in extreme events. The once-in-a-decade hurricane surge which once would have brought the sea to your doorstep now sweeps your house away. These events will have huge economic impacts. People take note of past flood events, and build right up to a line the reckon is unlikely to get flooded except maybe once in a hundred years. Move the hundred year flood line just ten or twenty meters back and suddenly a lot of stuff is routinely flooded every few years.
Now I live in Boston, which has a rolling landscape and enormous three meter tides (the record high tide is almost exactly 5m). The way people have built here, ten or twenty centimeters in sea level rise will have little effect on us. A city that is built on flat terrain adjacent to an ocean body with small tides is more vulnerable. Cities like New Orleans or Galveston. On a day to day basis there things would look unchanged from present, but when a big ten year storm rolls through turning everything on its head, the area over which it does that is greatly increased.
On what basis to do you imagine that? Why is it that in this country, where we assume the government can't do anything right, somehow we assume it is near *perfect* when it comes to condemning people to death?
If it turned out to be one in a hundred, then we would need to take a serious look at the processes involved. However, I have no problem with an error rate of one in ten thousand death penalty convictions being wrong.
Alright, how did you decide that 1/100 is unacceptable, but 1/10000 is? Do you have a rational basis for where you draw the line, or are you going by your gut feeling? If you are going by your gut feeling, what makes you think that's a reasonable basis for deciding to execute somebody?
There are two common styles of ethical reasoning you can use to approach a question like this.There is utilitarian reasoning, which maximizes the public good. At least under utilitarian reasoning at least you *could* come up with a conclusion that 1/100 errors is unacceptable but 1/10000 is, but you'd have to have to identify some approximately measurable good which you can set against the costs of executing an innocent man. You can't appeal to "justice", because that belongs to a *different* style of ethical reasoning: deontological ethics, which deals in rights and obligations. In that case it doesn't matter of the innocent defendant is 1/100 or 1/10000, his rights cannot be violated unless you can show that *not* executing him violates somebody else's superior right.
In either case your feeling good or bad, satisfied or dissatisfied about executions has no bearing on the morality of capital punishment.
This little strawman is always a fun one. Let me turn it around on you. If I knew for a fact that my child committed a crime that merited the death penalty, heck, even if I am the one who turned him in, I still wouldn't stand outside the prison with a sign that says, 'Fry the bastard.'
I'll go out on a limb here and guess you don't actually have any children.
Ever hear of StarOffice? It was a proprietary, free-as-in-free-beer office suite in the late 90s that was acquired by Sun. Sun opened the source around 2001, which became OO v1. It continued to release proprietary versions of OO as "StarOffice" until it was acquired by Oracle, which released a single version rebranded as "Oracle Open Office" in 2010 then promptly axed the project.
Actually, it depends on storage. Beer reacts with light to form off-flavor sulfur molecules -- particularly green light if I recall correctly. So that beer that's been sitting in a green bottle illuminated by the store's fluorescent lights (which have a greenish tint) is slowly changing into skunk spray. It probably doesn't matter if the beer just came off the delivery truck, but if brewers all used brown or opaque glass their product would be more consistent.
1.3 Billion? That's 5 F-35 Lightning II's the DoD will have to cut out of it's budget! (Yes I know the A version costs "only" 197 million, but just wait...)
In any case, sequestration will hit the DoD (and Veterans Affairs) as well. If you weren't paying attention, last year Congress refused to raise the misleading named "debt ceiling" -- which is not a ceiling on actual *debt*, but rather securitizing *debt* already incurred. In other words, they wouldn't allow the treasury to issue notes or bonds to pay for expenses already budgeted, authorized and incurred. In order to avoid sovereign default, the administration worked out a deal where it would iron out the budget differences with Congress after the election. To give that commmitment teeth they arranged for automatic budget cuts, split evenly between DoD and the rest of the federal budget, if they failed to achieve 1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.
Since this voluntary deficit reduction will almost certainly have to be achieved without tax increases or defense spending cuts, NASA's prospects don't look any brighter if we avoid sequestration. Without a huge and probably unrealistic economic boom we're going to be cutting stuff that the public cares about a lot more than NASA. Sure, NASA's costing the average taxpayer less than 20 cents a day, but we'll be scrounging under the sofa cushions for pennies.
In any case IIRC the point of the fork is to funnel users to their web based apps, so even if the fork is released open source the users are still locked in.
Well, if we're going to play Microsoft analogies, you could say that Alibaba is attempting to play "embrace and extingush". They wan to take advantage of the Android ecosystem while channeling users onto their proprietary platform.
In any case, You haven't established the validity of your analogy. What Microsoft did was refuse to sell Windows to OEMs who also offered competitive products like DR-DOS. Plenty of vendors offer Android competitors on their phones. What Google is doing is withholding cooperation from a company that is effectively using Android as the basis for a competitive product. The competitive product would be bootstrapped by having access to Android apps while steering customers toward apps that run exclusively on the network operator's service.
Where have we seen that carrier lock-in strategy before? Everywhere. That was the world of smartphone apps before iPhone, and having developed such apps before iPhone I can tell you it sucked for everyone except the carrier and handset maker.
IIRC Android is licensed under Apache, so Google can't "cut off" Alibaba from Android. Alibaba can continue to offer Android devices, even develop non-compatible Android derivatives, but they won't get help from Google. No technical assistance, no advance notice of plans, no labeling their products as "android" phones, no offering on-line access to the Android app store (although users could still side-load). Is that evil? Maybe, maybe not.
Corporations *are* people. They have the same rights as the individuals that formed them (and not an iota more).
OK, hold it right there. What you're describing isn't a corporation. It's called a "general partnership". The general partnership exists in the state of nature. You don't need a system of laws to create it, you just get together with other people and pool your resources.
A corporation is a different animal. It has features *defined by the law* that an association doesn't have, the chief of which is a legal personhood distinct from that of its owners. You, as an stockholder, are not responsible for its contractual promises. Nor are you responsible for its debts, any more than you are responsible for your cousin Vinnie's car loans, because the corporation, like Vinnie, is a *different person than you*.
Let's say you and Vinnie own a motel as a general partnership. If you sneak into an empty room one night with your girlfriend, you're just exercising the ownership rights you have jointly with Vinnie. If you own stock in Holiday Inn and try that at one of their hotels, you're trespassing. The hotel isn't owned by *you* it's owned by Holiday Inn, a different person from you. True, you do have a kind of property relationship to the hotel, but it doesn't include any of the usage rights you'd have if you owned it in a partnership.
So rights and obligations do not transfer from the corporation to its stockholders. Nor do they go the other way. Corporate legal personhood is compatible with the notion that rights and obligations are shared in any way with their owners. Indeed that's the single most important benefit of incorporating.
So you can't assume that a corporation automatically has some particular right because humans have that right or the stockholders have that right. You *can* argue that corporations have inherent and inalienable political rights, but it doesn't follow automatically from their owners having those rights, or from the corporation's legal "personhood". The burden of proof is upon you to demonstrate those rights exist independently.
[Item 1]simply converting the United States alone to organic standards would require substantial additional cropland.
[Item 2]Taking additional farmland... is the leading cause of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
Note that item 1 and item 2 have no bearing on each other whatsoever. The deforestation in the Amazon is not the result of adopting sustainable organic farming methods. Requiring more cropland is not such a terrible thing if it is farmed more sustainably, and in any case this doesn't necessarily address the actual food needs of the US population.
Your conclusion boils down to this: organic farming is not sustainable. However that conclusion is not supported by your argument.
It looks to me like they tweaked the saturation. I was wondering about that because I saw the same pictures elsewhere and the color is not nearly so dramatic -- at least if you're not conditioned to having the river look one way or the other.
My wife is a physical oceanographer and her first reaction when she heard about this is that it was some kind of phytoplankton bloom. Some pictures I've seen make it look like some kind of dye, which is more plausible than you might think.
When my brother was a civil engineering co-op student he caused a local news sensation . He'd been given the job of doing a dye study looking for illegal sewer connections. What happens is that developers assume the first pipe they come to is the right one to hook the sanitary sewer lines up to. He only needed half a teaspoon of dye powder, but the smallest quantity he could order was a two gallon pail. So he flushed the whole pail down the toilet, and hit the jackpot, dyeing the whole harbor of Salem Mass fluorescent green.
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Those of us in Maricopa County can worry about our sheriff; the rest of the country can worry about theirs.
Not when he started to investigate Obama's birth certificate. Arpaio is the one trying to put the Maricopa sheriff's office on the national stage, and when he does that the people who elected him have to take the criticism that provokes.
Why was that a moronic answer? I'm sure the reason is apparent but for the life of me I'm unable to see it...
Because waiting until you are critically ill and then going to the emergency room is the absolute worst way to treat a chronic condition like coronary artery disease. It's paying much, much more to get worse results to use the ER instead of screening and management of the disease through office visits.
I could go on for pages for all the unnecessary financial and social costs of using the ER as the main delivery vehicle of health care, but it all boils down to the fact it's better AND cheaper to prevent emergencies than it is to fix them. We pay more per capita in this country for health care than any other country on earth, by a wide margin. While some of that medicine is very impressive, if you look at the statistics our outcomes are about the worst of all the advanced economies.
39 countries in the world do a better job of preventing infant mortality (pre-natal care is prevention) ranking just behind Cuba, which pays $495 per person to our $7164, 12% of their GDP to our staggering **15.2%**. We're just behind Cuba in life expectancy too (they live 1/10 year longer than our 78.2 years). The country with the highest life expectancy is Japan which spend 72% less per person ($2817 per person per year or 8.3% of GDP) and people live to 82.7 years. Look next door to Canada, which does much better than us in infant mortality rate and where they live on average two and a half years longer than we do. Canadians spend about half as much per person on health care as we do and get better results.
We might not want to make the same choices Canada does. Maybe we *do* want to spend twice as much on health care, but *we should get better outcomes as a result*. The fact that our outcomes are substantially *worse* means we're doing it in a profoundly stupid way (e.g. using the ER instead of a primary care physician).
is mislabeling the problem.
The problem here isn't "brilliant jerks", it's people who made important contributions to the company in the past, but whose *current* behavior is harming the company. Many "brilliant jerks" are a mixed bag, but continue to be of great value to the company (for example Steve Jobs).
The answer is much simpler when you define the problem as the employee having become a net negative contributor. If you can't fix that fast, you get rid of those guys. I personally learned the hard way that by trying too hard to fix a troublesome employee, you end up being unfair to all the people who have to work with him.
If gratitude is a psychological obstacle, give the guy a fat bonus and then fire him. Suppose the employee is costing you a million dollars a year. That's not hard for a well placed bad employee, who can wreck projects multiple teams are working on, lose key customers, and mire you in consequences for years to come. So the guy is going to cost you a million bucks next year. *Split it with him*. Give him a half-million dollars to go away, and you're *both* a half-million ahead of where you would have been. That sounds insane, but it's less insane than burning a million bucks and *nobody* benefiting.
As for actual "brilliant jerks", their contribution and net impact have to be regularly evaluated.
Well --- daring to speak your mind is admirable, provided you've thought through what you ought to say. Saying whatever pops into your head is just stupid.
Now I'm a lifelong liberal Democrat and currently a strong Obama partisan, but I watched the remarks in question by Governor Romney before weighing in on them. After watching them several times my take is that Romney was making a joke, but he was so stiff it wasn't immediately apparent. He's not good at off the cuff remarks, and under the circumstances it's understandable that he wasn't comfortable.
Now, when Romney was asked "Isn't it the government's responsibility to provide health care to the fifty million people who don't have it today?" he answered, "“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance. If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and — and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care." Now that was a f**cking moronic answer, and he deserves to be mocked for it.
But these warlords unite to fight against "infidels".
I know it makes things simpler to lump all Muslims in together; but don't forget, the Pakistani Taliban is hostile to the government in Islamabad, and it kills other Pakistani Muslims pretty much exclusively. It particularly targets Sufi pilgrimage sites which are wildly popular there.
Imagine you're an ambitious senior military officer with a secular lifestyle, a career dependent upon US military aid, and a Punjabi family with Sufi religious affiliations. Would you want to help a fanatical Pashtun tribesman who just blew up a bunch of your family members while they were worshiping? Or his Arab ally who wants to make Pakistan part of an Arab dominated caliphate? Hell no. If this guy had Osama bin Laden in his crosshairs we could count on him to pull the trigger. The problem is this guy probably has people working for him who are Taliban sympathizers, and they don't necessarily advertise the fact. That's why we had to send US SEALs to kill OBL, but in doing so we handed our friendly officer a triple humiliation, demonstrating that the Pakistanis couldn't find OBL, couldn't be trusted with the whereabouts of OBL, and couldn't stop America from doing whatever the hell we pleased on Pakistani soil.
The drone strikes are similar. There's good reasons to do them, but at the same time they humiliate and weaken our allies and radicalize everyone else. It is possible that those strikes are the right thing to do, but we have to be realistic about the unintended consequences. Pakistan is uniquely dangerous in that it is a nuclear power in an unstable region with significant potential for radical power shifts. We do not want to screw this up.
Explain to them that version control is the cornerstone of practically all modern software development best practices, whether they be agile or waterfall oriented. It's open and shut. You can't do best coding practices without version control. Period. The reason is that version control is fundamental to collaboration. Without it collaboration is awkward, time consuming and error prone.
If the project is small with only a single developer, collaboration includes handing off responsibility for the system to that developer's successor. No more dumpster diving through the old guy's hard drive to find all the files that make up the system (and wondering if you got the right ones). The new guy simply checks out the current version from the source control server and he's ready to roll. Not only does he have the current version, he has a *complete* history of *all* the changes made to the software and why. You can toss the old guy's hard drive in the trash. This is even more so if you have a build automation tool like Maven that allows you to retrieve all the library and framework files you need to set up a build system on a new machine.
For teams working on software simultaneously, source control eliminates the kind of three-legged race you have to run to make sure all your changes work together. Sure, some of the time you have reconcile incompatible changes, but it's much easier when you can retrieve, compare, even *merge* different versions of any file in the system.
Source control is essential for support and for responsible management of software development investment. It allows you to find out not only what changed, but why. It allows you to recreate your software (or web site) at any point in the past, by version number or by date, do whatever you need with that data, and then simply toss your copy of the source files away -- all that old information can be instantly recreated any time you wish. No more confusing and redundant files and directories on your development machines (e.g. "myfiles.save.c" -- why was I saving that? "myfile.new.c" -- when was it new, and what was new about it? That kind of malarkey is unprofessional).
By removing the clutter, bookkeeping, and errors created by juggling versions of files on your hard disk, version control becomes a kind of safety net that allows you to be more creative, trying things that might break the system in full confidence that you can get anything you want back any time you want. You can also branch of speculative versions of the system, throw them away if you don't want them (and get them back if you change your mind), and merge those branches (with a some work of course, but it's a lot easier knowing you can't possibly screw anything up).
Version control is so immensely useful, I think people should use it for *everything*, including personal documents, papers, proposals ... anything whose integrity or history is important. Researchers who keep data in Excel spreadsheets or Access databases ought to use version control on those. They ought to put their scholarly papers in version control too. The problem is that most source control systems are overkill, but if you have an in-house expert (a professional developer) he can train people on the stuff they need. I keep all my personal writing in bzr, which isn't necessarily the system I'd choose for software development, but it's simple, easy to use and cross platform.
Is the Pakistani government an enemy of the US and often works against US interests?
Yes.
Is the Pakistani government an ally of the US that shares intelligence with the US and often allows US military to operate on Pakistani soil?
Yes.
Isn't that schizophrenic?
Yep.
Like the US, Pakistan has an elected government. Unlike the US, it has governmental organs that aren't fully under the control of civilian elected officials. The Pakistani military and intelligence services are independent national institutions (Egypt is this way as well) and within those institutions you have various fiefdoms and power centers. The Egyptian military is this way as well, almost forming a distinct society within the society with its own economic and social welfare programs.
Imagine you have a country governed by warlords. There might be some order of precedence or honor which theoretically unifies the country, but still some of the those warlords might be your "friends" and others your enemies. There's nothing mystifying about that. Now imagine those petty rulers aren't warlords who control territory, but bureaucrats that control various state functions. It's not that different.
I'm an early adopter here both of CFLs and LED bulbs. While I'm generally pleased with the LED lights, I should note that performance varies quite a bit between brands, particularly the off-brand.Chinese LED bulbs. For example I have a Utilitech 7.5 watt flood bulb that's almost a perfect replacement for a 65 watt incandescent reflector bulb both in brightness and angle of illumination. I have a off-brand Chinese LED bulb with identical specs which looks exactly the same -- I wouldn't be surprised if it was manufactured in the same factory -- but is dimmer, narrower beamed, has an objectionable flicker, and has a color temperature at least 3000K higher than rated.
So one LED bulb is a clearly superior replacement for a 65W PAR30 incandescent, and is available in your choice of daylight or warm white. The other, similarly spec'd, is a piece of junk that will give you a headache and cataracts. They're both made in China, possibly by the same factory. Caveat emptor.
Hmm. The only CFLs I've bought that take longer then ten seconds to come to near full brightness are candelbara base globes. I have E26 base CFLs throughout the house and they all work fine. They're mainly Sylvania brand, but some are Ott or Utilitech. I suspect Philips or Osram are probably just as good.
I guess the reason the candelabra bulbs don't light quickly is that they can't fit a decent ballast circuit in the form factor.. If you have an E26 base CFL and it doesn't light to near full intensity almost immediately I'm guessing the manufacturer skimped on the ballast, maybe leaving out the autotransformer or using a lower power-factor circuit.
I wonder whether Walmart has something to do with this experience people have of CFLs that don't light up or which fail prematurely. Walmart has a history of using its clout to force manufacturers to produce versions that look like their normal products but which cost less. Try buying a name brand bulb from Home Depot or yourg local hardware store.
One caveat about my positive experience is that I prefer higher color temperature bulbs 4500K-6000K which approximate sunlight. Many people who are used to incandescent lamps will perceive the daylight spectrum bulbs as harsh (although I perceive incandescent bulbs as "dingy"). You can get warmer color temperature CFLs, but it is possible that they perform differently. I can't speak to that.
Should be a tax. Encourage people to make the right choices, but don't screw people who have special circumstances or are willing to compensate society for the cost of their preference.
I'd be for that, if there actually were special circumstances where a traditional incandescent bulb was the best choice. Note that the EU regs only apply to non-directional lights; reflectorized incandescent bulbs are still allowed because suitable replacements in the same form factor don't exist.
About the only use I can think of for your standard A19 bulb with an E26 is renovating and flipping properties were you don't intend to pay for the bulb's operation or replacement. That and whipping people into a hysteria over change.
Well, it'll be a long, long time before electric cars are "practical" if by "practical" you mean "meets *all* of everyone's needs."
Even if there were charge stations all around, the charge time compared to refueling with gasoline or diesel will make electric cars as a "solution for everything" unattractive. With 300 miles per charge within sight, the limitation isn't *range*, it's *refueling time*. Short of having battery exchanges (which I think would be a good idea) electrical vehicles won't be practical for multi-day driving trips.
But something doesn't have to be a "solution for everything" to be practical.
I live next door to family with two teenagers. The household has a total of *four* gasoline cars. If two of those cars were electric, they could be topped off by morning for most of the city driving, and two would be available for business or vacation travel.
What part of running a commercial network has any bearing on end users updating consumer products?
Consumers want the current stuff because that is what consumers want. Deliver it and you make money. Fail to deliver it and you end up circling the bowl.
Spoken like an pointy-haired boss with no knowledge of engineering and little experience in real world marketing.
If you want to know how to do this, look at how Jobs managed Apple product development. He didn't figure out what customers wanted then figure out how to do it. He figured out what he could do then figured out how to make customers want it.
You listen to customers, but you don't take what they say at face value. I once had a customer complain, "Every time you guys do something for me you want money." I didn't stop charging him; instead I developed a deal in which he pre-paid us for a bundle of services and support time so he could call us without getting an invoice. It was actually more profitable for us.
It's not always possible to resolve customer desires so successfully. Some customers want bleeding edge releases, stable predictable operation, and not to have to pay much for support. You can have at most two of the three. In a multi-vendor situation, sometimes one of the vendors makes out by making another vendor eat the support costs. Apple has a long history of screwing it's "partners", which is why I swore off developing for and supporting Apple platforms years ago, although I've always liked their products and use them myself. If a customer wanted me to do an iOS app, I'd do it, but I prefer not to build a business dependent upon Apple's ongoing goodwill.
[note 1] So is there a line where antarctic should wait until summer ice at the other pole entirely disappear? [note 2] Regarding your faith into predictions, here is infamous Jim Mercer's 1978 article in Nature which predicted 5-10C increase in the antarctic during next 50 years. [note 3] You see, polar amplification is entirely symmetric effect, if it works at one pole, it should do at the other as well.
(1) Straw man.
(2) Cherry picking.
(3) Citation needed. "Stands to reason" doesn't count. Look at a map, or better yet, a globe. The Arctic and Antarctic are geographically very different.
The Antarctic is a different situation entirely than the Arctic. Much of the sea ice there is annual, and winter ice doesn't have the effect on local weather that summer ice in the Arctic does.
In any case climate models do not predict a dramatic change in Antarctic sea ice. The change is predicted to come first in the Arctic then the Antarctic. The reason is that the Arctic ocean is surrounded by land. The Antarctic ocean is surrounded by vast extents of moderating ocean. Region-wide changes under a warming scenario would come to the Arctic before the Antarctic. The Antarctic would see local changes, depending on the prevailing winds.
This is similar to the situation in temperate continental weather. Under an AGW scenario not every place gets warmer; some get cooler. What you get is a very subtle shift in averages over large areas of the globe punctuated by unusual events like drought and excessive rainfall. If you throw all that into a pot you get a slight change in the global average. It'd be better to call "global warming" "more energetic global climate".
As other have pointed out, melting ice that is is *entirely floating* (important proviso) does not alter the level of the water body it is floating in. Adding water to that body -- in liquid or solid form -- does. So sea level rise is produced entirely by water that is on land (mainly in glaciers or ice sheets) entering the sea.
But melting sea ice can still raise sea levels through effects on land ice that are indirect but potentially dramatic. The greatest concern in the Arctic is sea ice loss leading to warmer summer temperatures as the Arctic Ocean reflects less summer sunlight back into space. Higher temperatures increase the rate at which land ice enters the sea, for example by glaciers calving icebergs. Since sea ice itself is affected by warmer summer temperatures, you have a positive feedback mechanism that can result in rapid, dramatic changes in the Arctic like we're seeing here.
As for looking out your window, even a dramatic change in sea level like the half a meter might not look like much on a nice day. The beach that once stretched hundreds of yards from your door might only be ten yards wide. But the big change you'll see isn't in your routine daily view, it's in extreme events. The once-in-a-decade hurricane surge which once would have brought the sea to your doorstep now sweeps your house away. These events will have huge economic impacts. People take note of past flood events, and build right up to a line the reckon is unlikely to get flooded except maybe once in a hundred years. Move the hundred year flood line just ten or twenty meters back and suddenly a lot of stuff is routinely flooded every few years.
Now I live in Boston, which has a rolling landscape and enormous three meter tides (the record high tide is almost exactly 5m). The way people have built here, ten or twenty centimeters in sea level rise will have little effect on us. A city that is built on flat terrain adjacent to an ocean body with small tides is more vulnerable. Cities like New Orleans or Galveston. On a day to day basis there things would look unchanged from present, but when a big ten year storm rolls through turning everything on its head, the area over which it does that is greatly increased.
but I imagine the numbers will be very low.
On what basis to do you imagine that? Why is it that in this country, where we assume the government can't do anything right, somehow we assume it is near *perfect* when it comes to condemning people to death?
If it turned out to be one in a hundred, then we would need to take a serious look at the processes involved. However, I have no problem with an error rate of one in ten thousand death penalty convictions being wrong.
Alright, how did you decide that 1/100 is unacceptable, but 1/10000 is? Do you have a rational basis for where you draw the line, or are you going by your gut feeling? If you are going by your gut feeling, what makes you think that's a reasonable basis for deciding to execute somebody?
There are two common styles of ethical reasoning you can use to approach a question like this.There is utilitarian reasoning, which maximizes the public good. At least under utilitarian reasoning at least you *could* come up with a conclusion that 1/100 errors is unacceptable but 1/10000 is, but you'd have to have to identify some approximately measurable good which you can set against the costs of executing an innocent man. You can't appeal to "justice", because that belongs to a *different* style of ethical reasoning: deontological ethics, which deals in rights and obligations. In that case it doesn't matter of the innocent defendant is 1/100 or 1/10000, his rights cannot be violated unless you can show that *not* executing him violates somebody else's superior right.
In either case your feeling good or bad, satisfied or dissatisfied about executions has no bearing on the morality of capital punishment.
This little strawman is always a fun one. Let me turn it around on you. If I knew for a fact that my child committed a crime that merited the death penalty, heck, even if I am the one who turned him in, I still wouldn't stand outside the prison with a sign that says, 'Fry the bastard.'
I'll go out on a limb here and guess you don't actually have any children.
Ever hear of StarOffice? It was a proprietary, free-as-in-free-beer office suite in the late 90s that was acquired by Sun. Sun opened the source around 2001, which became OO v1. It continued to release proprietary versions of OO as "StarOffice" until it was acquired by Oracle, which released a single version rebranded as "Oracle Open Office" in 2010 then promptly axed the project.
Actually, it depends on storage. Beer reacts with light to form off-flavor sulfur molecules -- particularly green light if I recall correctly. So that beer that's been sitting in a green bottle illuminated by the store's fluorescent lights (which have a greenish tint) is slowly changing into skunk spray. It probably doesn't matter if the beer just came off the delivery truck, but if brewers all used brown or opaque glass their product would be more consistent.
1.3 Billion? That's 5 F-35 Lightning II's the DoD will have to cut out of it's budget! (Yes I know the A version costs "only" 197 million, but just wait...)
In any case, sequestration will hit the DoD (and Veterans Affairs) as well. If you weren't paying attention, last year Congress refused to raise the misleading named "debt ceiling" -- which is not a ceiling on actual *debt*, but rather securitizing *debt* already incurred. In other words, they wouldn't allow the treasury to issue notes or bonds to pay for expenses already budgeted, authorized and incurred. In order to avoid sovereign default, the administration worked out a deal where it would iron out the budget differences with Congress after the election. To give that commmitment teeth they arranged for automatic budget cuts, split evenly between DoD and the rest of the federal budget, if they failed to achieve 1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.
Since this voluntary deficit reduction will almost certainly have to be achieved without tax increases or defense spending cuts, NASA's prospects don't look any brighter if we avoid sequestration. Without a huge and probably unrealistic economic boom we're going to be cutting stuff that the public cares about a lot more than NASA. Sure, NASA's costing the average taxpayer less than 20 cents a day, but we'll be scrounging under the sofa cushions for pennies.
It can be under the Apache license.
In any case IIRC the point of the fork is to funnel users to their web based apps, so even if the fork is released open source the users are still locked in.
Well, if we're going to play Microsoft analogies, you could say that Alibaba is attempting to play "embrace and extingush". They wan to take advantage of the Android ecosystem while channeling users onto their proprietary platform.
In any case, You haven't established the validity of your analogy. What Microsoft did was refuse to sell Windows to OEMs who also offered competitive products like DR-DOS. Plenty of vendors offer Android competitors on their phones. What Google is doing is withholding cooperation from a company that is effectively using Android as the basis for a competitive product. The competitive product would be bootstrapped by having access to Android apps while steering customers toward apps that run exclusively on the network operator's service.
Where have we seen that carrier lock-in strategy before? Everywhere. That was the world of smartphone apps before iPhone, and having developed such apps before iPhone I can tell you it sucked for everyone except the carrier and handset maker.
IIRC Android is licensed under Apache, so Google can't "cut off" Alibaba from Android. Alibaba can continue to offer Android devices, even develop non-compatible Android derivatives, but they won't get help from Google. No technical assistance, no advance notice of plans, no labeling their products as "android" phones, no offering on-line access to the Android app store (although users could still side-load). Is that evil? Maybe, maybe not.
Now back to reality.
Corporations *are* people. They have the same rights as the individuals that formed them (and not an iota more).
OK, hold it right there. What you're describing isn't a corporation. It's called a "general partnership". The general partnership exists in the state of nature. You don't need a system of laws to create it, you just get together with other people and pool your resources.
A corporation is a different animal. It has features *defined by the law* that an association doesn't have, the chief of which is a legal personhood distinct from that of its owners. You, as an stockholder, are not responsible for its contractual promises. Nor are you responsible for its debts, any more than you are responsible for your cousin Vinnie's car loans, because the corporation, like Vinnie, is a *different person than you*.
Let's say you and Vinnie own a motel as a general partnership. If you sneak into an empty room one night with your girlfriend, you're just exercising the ownership rights you have jointly with Vinnie. If you own stock in Holiday Inn and try that at one of their hotels, you're trespassing. The hotel isn't owned by *you* it's owned by Holiday Inn, a different person from you. True, you do have a kind of property relationship to the hotel, but it doesn't include any of the usage rights you'd have if you owned it in a partnership.
So rights and obligations do not transfer from the corporation to its stockholders. Nor do they go the other way. Corporate legal personhood is compatible with the notion that rights and obligations are shared in any way with their owners. Indeed that's the single most important benefit of incorporating.
So you can't assume that a corporation automatically has some particular right because humans have that right or the stockholders have that right. You *can* argue that corporations have inherent and inalienable political rights, but it doesn't follow automatically from their owners having those rights, or from the corporation's legal "personhood". The burden of proof is upon you to demonstrate those rights exist independently.
[Item 1]simply converting the United States alone to organic standards would require substantial additional cropland.
[Item 2]Taking additional farmland ... is the leading cause of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
Note that item 1 and item 2 have no bearing on each other whatsoever. The deforestation in the Amazon is not the result of adopting sustainable organic farming methods. Requiring more cropland is not such a terrible thing if it is farmed more sustainably, and in any case this doesn't necessarily address the actual food needs of the US population.
Your conclusion boils down to this: organic farming is not sustainable. However that conclusion is not supported by your argument.
It looks to me like they tweaked the saturation. I was wondering about that because I saw the same pictures elsewhere and the color is not nearly so dramatic -- at least if you're not conditioned to having the river look one way or the other.
My wife is a physical oceanographer and her first reaction when she heard about this is that it was some kind of phytoplankton bloom. Some pictures I've seen make it look like some kind of dye, which is more plausible than you might think.
When my brother was a civil engineering co-op student he caused a local news sensation . He'd been given the job of doing a dye study looking for illegal sewer connections. What happens is that developers assume the first pipe they come to is the right one to hook the sanitary sewer lines up to. He only needed half a teaspoon of dye powder, but the smallest quantity he could order was a two gallon pail. So he flushed the whole pail down the toilet, and hit the jackpot, dyeing the whole harbor of Salem Mass fluorescent green.
No.