And now I look at the comment history it turns out to be the same moron, what d'you know.
Maybe that should tell you something about your reading comprehension skills.
*Nothing* about agile is unique to agile. It's an umbrella term for a set of best practices that have been proven to work well together. A little thought will show that all those practices *had* to exist before the term existed to be included in the term.
Like any other virtue, obedience to proper authority can be taken to such an extreme it becomes a vice. A democracy can't exist for long without a certain modicum of civil disobedience. It is only dictatorships that demand *absolute* obedience, even against the demands of reason.
If a law enforcement agency participates in a cover-up, the workers in that agency should disobey their superiors.
If a medical device regulatory agency has policies that a reasonable person would consider egregious, the workers in that agency should blow the whistle.
We could reasonably look at a whistleblower's claims, decide they are baseless, then fire or prosecute him. But we can't reasonably take that stance *before* we've examined the claims, based on some kind of duty obedience to the bureaucratic hierarchy. There *is* such a duty, but there is also a duty to the public. The public is paying the whistleblower's salary, and that of his superiors.
Well, agile's been around for something like a decade, so it can hardly be seen as trendy any longer.
"Agile" is an umbrella term that covers many "best practices" that cover interlocking areas of concern. Unit testing is one example that actually involves more up-front work. The reason automated testing is "agile" is that it is a safety net that allows programmers (or pair programming teams) to work with greater autonomy from each other. It allows you to catch any unexpected results of aggressive changes. This doesn't mean much if you don't have source code control, and notice how it adds considerable value to automated source control over seat-of-the-pants "I'll just save this version with a different name" management of old code.
This is also an example of how trying to just be "a little agile" it doesn't work. If you don't add unit testing and source control together, you may add only half of the conceptual and labor burden, but you get a lot less than half the benefit. This is why so many people don't see the point of "agile". They did implemented individual, agile-ish practices, but they've never really grasped the point of agile, which is to gain those precious nuggets of time when you can concentrate on a specific, identifiable problem without having to worry about interruptions (the boss walking in mid-morning and reodering your day's schedule) or unintended consequences (will this break what everyone else is doing?).
Neither is it really anything new AFAICT, it's just waterfall with shorter iterations.
And you don't think that's something new? Were you expecting magic? You have to set goals, and unless your project is utterly trivial you have to adapt it to evolving needs.
Having managed developers before and after "agile", I think Scrum-style sprints are the greatest thing that ever happened to managing software development. It doesn't *prevent* you from having year-long or even multi-year plans, it just provides a formal framework in which you can balance the need to get something identifiable done with the need to respond to new knowledge. That knowledge is not always imposed upon you externally by management. Sometimes you discover a risk or problem that could invalidate a lot of future work if you don't address it right away.
try to get more work out of people (it's agile! Crunch time is every sprint!).
If it's crunch time every sprint, it's not necessarily the managers who are at fault. It might be you. Are you honest in the estimates of what you can do, or do you tell the manager what he wants to hear? If a quality job on a target can't be done in the time they ask you to do it, are you assertive about that? Do you manage your own time so you can go home on time at the end of the sprint? I don't currently manage a team, but when I did I was a stickler for that. In an unexpected emergency, or if the muse was on you, I'd let you stay late but I'd make take comp time immediately. Why? Because as a manager I prefer repeatable, predictable processes to heroic displays of individual dedication. Those are needed occasionally, but they represent a failure of planning, and I don't believe in developing habits that paper over failure.
Now if a manager tells you to do something quicker than you think can reasonably be done, that's just bad management. Management should be based on reality, not wishful thinking.
In order to meet a Same Day Delivery promise Amazon will have to be LOCAL. So there went your major point. Poof.
I don't think so. There won't be nearly as many jobs working for Amazon's local distribution network as there are for local retail. Plus, they'll be jobs for different kinds of workers -- probably more like working at a UPS shipping facility where the emphasis is on physical speed and endurance rather than people skills.
Name-calling isn't very enlightening. Just because somebody is concerned about *a* change doesn't mean they are opposed to *all* change. Furthermore, reasoning by analogy this way is risky. The replacement of skilled artisanal labor with cheap factory labor enabled the emergence of consumerism, which in turn absorbed more labor than anyone could have dreamed of. It's hard to see consumers ratcheting up their consumption to absorb the loss of local retail jobs, especially if those jobs are lost to an emerging monopoly. In that case one can't expect prices to remain low for long.
Amazon is a double-edged sword for small retail businesses. On one hand Amazon offers any mom-and-pop retailer access to its digital and fulfillment infrastructure, giving an imaginative businessman access to a huge market for very little investment. On the other hand, get too successful and Amazon can come in and undercut you, because Amazon owns the platform.I think if this goes forward, we'll see in retail what we saw in software development in the early 90s under Microsoft's dominance of desktop software platforms. There was a feeling among developers that one wanted to avoid becoming *too* successful at anything Microsoft might be interested in duplicating. This was a big benefit to vertical market customers as software entrepreneurs tried to create portfolios of moderately successful vertical market apps, but led to high prices for applications where nobody could compete. Even today, you have to spend an astonishing $300 to get full retail MS Office license.
This is not to say that Microsoft had no competitors in their spaces (Novell, Watcom, Lotus), or that quixotic entrepreneurs didn't take up the fight. In the end the most quixotic idea of all is what prevailed: *free* software. Maybe if Amazon comes to dominate *all* retail, non-retail models like barter markets will take off.
Maybe you're right about some in the government fearing armed citizens. But there are plenty of gun rights friendly politicians who are more than happy to intrude on individual liberty in other ways, so they at least aren't particularly scared that Americans with guns will rise up and demand their liberties. This ridiculous scanner program was started under an administration that received NRA's endorsement, and was continued under an administration that did not, so I'd say "gun rights" as defined by the premier gun rights organization in the country have nothing to do with this particular invasion of liberty.
Guns are not the sine qua non of revolution. You point out the thing we really need yourself: fearlessness, and thinking outside the framing boxes drawn by your political masters. If the US electorate had the determination and courage to use guns to bring down the government, we wouldn't need guns to bring down the government. Not until the election system is completely subverted by non-auditable voting machines. Do you want a revolution? Get people to stop paying attention to political advertising. Get them to question propaganda masquerading as journalism. Open their mind to ideas they've been taught to regard as scary. Then you'd have a revolution.
Guns are neither good nor bad. Or rather guns are in themselves *good*, but can be misused for evil. Most people who own guns own them for sport or self-defense, but obviously those same guns could be used for robbery. A gun that can be used in a democratic revolution can be used to suppress other citizens who disagree with you. So guns alone won't secure anyone's liberty. Before you can turn to the gun, you've got to free peoples' minds.
It calls into doubt the idea that global warming itself is a catastrophe. It suggests that humanity thrived on a significantly hotter world than any living person has known.
Possibly. The actual paper is far less glib in its conclusions than the article linked in The Register. It suggests that data from Scandinavia might require climate researches to recalibrate their tree ring models -- which if true makes the scenario you describe *a possibility*, but that is far from proof. That possibility is interesting, but obviously it'll take more than tree ring data from one small corner of Europe to overturn the scientific consensus.
It's silly to jump up and say "aha!" when something like this comes up, because things like this have come up in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Every theory has contradictory data; in fact 5% of papers can be expected to report spuriously significant results. That's why individual papers can't overturn the scientific consensus, because that asks: where does the current preponderance of evidence lead? There's always been some evidence that weighs against AGW. For example I remember a similar back in the 80s (before AGW was a political football) about t unhe accuracy of Royal Navy sea temperatures recorded in the 1700's and 1800's. They collected the water to be measured in canvas bags, which would have cooled their contents by evaporation. When something like this comes up you've got to ask (1) is it real? (2) how practically significant is it?
This paper may or may not prove to be scientifically important. But what is unquestionably important is that this paper shows it *is* possible to publish papers which weigh against the scientific consensus in climate research, and to do so in a prestigious peer reviewed journal. Researchers will pig pile on this researcher's claims, because that's the way the process works. If the paper stands up to that, then it *might* be the start of a shift in consensus. But I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Papers that *might* be the start of a shift are far, far more common than lines of inquiry which successfully lead to such a shift.
Well, I'll grant you Ft. Hood, although arguably that's a workplace shooting. The Times Square bombing didn't happen, so it doesn't count. The point is with the millions of Muslims here if Muslim==terrorist there should be hundreds, if not thousands of deaths per year. There isn't.
My point is the fear is hysterical. People are much more likely to call the Muslim Brotherhood an "Islamic Terrorist Group", than they are to call the KKK a "Christian Terrorist Group", although that is more accurate.
Do you seriously think that in any situation that could reasonably be described as a "national emergency", any US administration *wouldn't* take control over privately owned infrastructure?
In the event of something like a coordinated cyberattack (like what we, or perhaps the Israelis, did against Iran, but possibly worse), in the absence of previously established policies security officials would simply make up what they're allowed to do as they go along. If the effects were severe enough, these officials would do this with the enthusiastic support of the public.
Personally, I think it is sounder government to make the claims about what you are allowed to do *before* the emergency comes up, giving people who disagree with you a chance to have at it. It'd be easy for an administration to claim it'd never do something like this, because it'd know damn well that all those assurances would go out the window the instant the electorate felt threatened.
It'd be interesting to know how many of the people killed were Muslims themselves. I'd guess a majority in any year. If a bomber blows up a couple dozen police recruits in an Iraqi city, we chalk those up as deaths due to Islamic terrorism, which strictly speaking they are, but they could just as easily chalked up a civil war deaths.
There are 2.6 million Muslims in the US. That's a lot of people. If, say, 10% were what our media like to call "jihadis", that'd be 260,000 people living here who want to kill us because we're not Muslims. If 1% of those jihadis made at least one attempt each year, that'd be at least 2,600 domestic Islamic terror attacks. It'd be easy for them too. They live here, they know our weaknesses, often can pass as non-muslim if need be -- that's not counting their recent converts of European ancestry (we know converts are usually among the most zealous in any religion). They don't need Al Qaeda to teach them how to make bombs when they have the Internet.
So how many people in the US have been killed since 9/11 by this fifth column? So far as I can see, none. If Muslim==terrorist, there should be thousands of people killed every year here. Probably tens of thousands killed a year. Why isn't anyone keeping track?
How low does suspicion have to go before you chuck it out the window? 99.99%? Well that 1 in 10,000. Applied to the 2.6 million Muslims in the US, that's 260 American Muslim terrorists. That's almost surely too high, given the lack of any deaths in the US from home-grown Muslim terrorists, but let's go with that. Your chance of running into a Muslim terrorist here in the US is about the same (under these unfavorable assumptions) as bumping into a retired NASA astronaut.
The idea that Islam somehow makes someone inclined to terror does not hold up if you control for circumstances (e.g. look at American Muslims).
Without grammar *of some sort* our ability to communicate would be hobbled. You'd be able to point to a mammoth and say "big!", but nobody could be absolutely sure whether you meant "The girls back at the cave will be impressed when we bring that home!" or "Better pass on this one, he'll kick our ass!"
Most of what we call "ungrammatical" is just non-standard grammar; it is neither consistently better nor consistently worse than standard grammar. African American Vernacular English has a "habitual be" construct missing in Standard American English: "He be taking her to the Friday dance," doesn't mean the same thing as "He *is* taking her to the Friday dance," it means that "He takes her to the Friday dance every week." Oddly enough, SAE while lacking a present tense habitual mood has a *past tense* habitual mood: "He used to take her to the Friday dance."
Their are two reasons to write in standard or prestige dialect. The first is to demonstrate your education, as in a job application cover letter. The second is that sometimes the standard usage is more clear.Consider, "Mary loved Ted more than me." This sets of a lot of muddle headed argument about whether "than" is a preposition and thus takes the objective pronoun ("me"), or a conjunction and thus requires a subject pronoun ("... than I", is short for "... than I do."). In the dictionary "than" is classified as both a conjunction and a preposition -- along with many other words. The problem with this sentence is ambiguity. It's not clear whether Mary loves Ted more than she loves *me*, or whether Mary loves Ted more than *I* love Ted. In the latter case I should write, "Mary loves Ted more than I."
There's no good solution for saying "Mary loves Ted more than she loves me," in a more compact form, because informal speech uses "me" both ways. You have to figure it out from context. I tend to think that "Mary loves Ted more than me," compares her feelings for Ted and for me, but few people would parse the sentence "Mary drinks more Diet Coke than me," the same way. Humans use grammar plus context to understand what's being said.
So, write so that your meaning is as precise as possible without sounding strange. Most often applying the rules of standard grammar will result in more precise writing, although there are times where you'll prefer commonplace grammar that's less precise. Writing fictional dialog is one example. It's more important to make people sound spontaneous than to make them sound correct.
Also be aware that grammatical rules are subject to misapplication. For example the rules say you can't end a sentence with a preposition, and "over" is a preposition, but the sentence "When I read the promotion list I discovered that I'd been passed over," is perfectly grammatical. The reason is that "over" doesn't function as a preposition, it's part of the phrasal verb "passed over". Nonetheless, many misguided grammar prigs would correct that sentence.
Great. Now dude, fucking leave if you don't like it here!
At times like this, I am reminded of the words of General George S. Patton: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."
In that spirit I invite you to leave while the getting is good, because I sure as hell won't leave my country so buzzards like you can pick it apart.
You're missing two important factors here: fear and anger.
Fear is a favorite tool of politicians, because once it's ignited it makes people irrational. Emotions are "refractory" (they resist going away), and fear is the most refractory of all emotions. Once somebody is afraid, you can't talk them down with reason. The other favorite tool is anger, which works very nicely with fear. Once somebody is afraid of someone, it's easy to turn the object of that fear into a hated scapegoat.
This is why people vote in politicians who do nothing for them, or worse, work against their interests. People who let themselves be scared and riled up with hatred are brain-dead in the voting booth.
Scratch that, British Airways should already be fully aware of the British people's contempt for such phoney chumminess.
Understandable. If I'd ever had a strange guy with an Irish accent come up to me in a crowd and whisper in my ear, "We know where you live, boyo," I'd be tad skittish too.
Actually, I think most of the problem is being threatened by what other people think. If you could fix that a lot of the world's evils would go away.
There's the fear of people who don't think the same way you do, of course, but what we're seeing here is the same thing that allowed the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal to reach epic scale: fear of what other people think of us. If you give in to those kinds of fears, it actually doesn't matter *what* you believe, because your actions aren't going to have anything to do with your beliefs. That's why people kill in the name of peace, shelter child abusers in the name of teaching morality, or censor in the name of liberty.
Alright, you're old-fashioned. And you're mixing up apples and oranges.
I think what most people these days are talking about is not just having some kind of online analytics data resource, but having a system where having that resource is taken as a given and the task is to use mathematics and AI to classify records, discover patterns and relationships, locate unusual data (without necessarily specifying the nature of the anomaly in advance), and whatnot.
A spreadsheet is fine for doing simple summaries of small, heterogeneous, tabular datasets (calculating averages and whatnot). But it's not going to help you find one record out of millions where your search criteria are too complex to be expressed in a SQL where clause.
I live in what the Europeans like to call the backwater redneck racist Christian "fly-over" part of America.
It's those Europeans and their 35 hour work weeks and thirty days of paid leave per year. They have so much time on their hands they have nothing better to do than think about you and dream up long-winded, patronizing ways to talk about you.
While I agree with the spirit of your comment, it may not be strictly correct because between "need to stay alive" and "don't need at all" there are varying levels of need, as in "probably would benefit from," or "might possibly benefit from," or even "definitely would benefit from but to a marginal degree."
Suppose you have moderately elevated blood pressure. Do you need to take medication for that? Well it depends. How elevated? What is your family history of cardiovascular disease? Your age? Have you attempted other interventions without success? It's not necessarily cut-and-dried. This is more the case when you talk about psychiatric medications (Ritalin), or quality of life medications (Viagra).
There may be many people who could benefit from a drug who aren't in a life-and-death need situation and haven't considered taking it. The problem with putting the pharmaceutical companies in charge of this is that they aren't disinterested parties. They can't be trusted to to give objective, impartial advice, even when they are acting in good faith.
Well, until people can be persuaded to distrust comments they agree with, people distrusting those they disagree with is the only thing standing between us and total public credulousness.
Well, this is what you get when you take a term that means a specific thing in economics ("free market"), turn it into a glittering generality, then worship it.
The US would have to have a rare earth mine to buy. Last I heard the only one near production was in CA and not presently mining.
That's normal in a commodity market -- practically a textbook example of the price-demand curve. At any given price, there are producers who could physically supply that commodity but won't bother because they'd only break even. A marginal increase brings these producers on-line. A marginal decrease shuts down producers who are barely making a profit.
I've personally visited inactive gold mines that weren't tapped out; they just didn't have a high enough concentration of gold in their ore to turn a profit at the current prices -- then somewhere around $650/oz. After the financial crisis hit around 08 or so the price went north of $1000, and today stands at over $1500. Those mines might have gone into production in 08 or 10, depending on how long the owners expected gold prices to remain high (or futures contracts they could sell).
So if China shuts us off, it's not back to flint-knapping for us. It just means manufacturers will buy the stuff from more expensive suppliers and pass the cost increase on to the consumer.
This by the way is why we'll never "run out of oil". What'll happen is that petroleum will become too expensive to put in cars, but there'll still be oil in the ground. There'll still be people pumping it out of the ground in a places where production is unusually cheap. That will continue until the commodity price drops so low nobody anywhere can produce it for a price anyone anywhere is willing to pay for it. That'll take a long, long time. There are still companies that make horse drawn carriages, although they haven't been economically significant for over a century and the price is no doubt quite high compared to what you'd have paid for an equivalent product in the 1800s.
When I was a youngster at MIT in the early 80s, the Reagan administration came in and shook up research priorities. Suddenly applied researchers who weren't doing military research were looking for jobs, and researchers who were doing military research had to show results or walk.
I was working on a lab that had a DOE grant (energy, not education), and we hired as an engineer a physics researcher who'd lost his ONR grant. We got him and his project, a new, advanced type of electron microscope, which we were using as a spare vacuum tank. "It's those damn ROTC graduates," he said. "Back in the day I'd have told them it was a death ray, but those damn ROTC graduates know damn well the only way you'd ever be able to kill someone with this is drop it on him. 'Deaths per dollar', that's all they want to hear about, 'deaths per dollar.'"
Back at the dorm I mentioned this, and we kicked the 'deaths per dollar' around, trying to come up with various ways of maximizing it. Finally I proposed this scenario. Find a construction site, and root through the dumpster until you find a length of 2x4 three to four feet long. Then walk down the street and when you encountered someone, beat him over the head with your piece of lumber.
"No good," one of the other students said. "You're assuming your time is free."
"Well," I replied, "it *is* a government project."
Well you can't look at a vote without looking at the alternatives on the table. It wasn't so simple as "pro science if and only if pro SSC." There were at least two other debates going on here: "big science vs. small science" and "pure vs. applied." There were a lot of scientists who were against the SSC because they thought it was sucking away funding from many worthy small projects of individual researchers and small teams.
At the time of the cancellation, there was a sharp partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats over the funding of applied science, precipitated by radical changes in funding requests by Reagan and George HW Bush. The Reagan administration was strongly against any public funding of applied research unless it had military applications.
This led to a sharp difference in funding priorities between Republicans and Democrats. In the you-say-potato world of Washington politics, this made the SSC a political issue. It was easy for Republicans to get behind the SSC because it was a matter of national prestige and it didn't violate their funding ideology. The Democratic attitude towards the SSC was initially more apathetic than antipathetic; Republican support for the SSC made it easier for them to reason that we didn't really need it that much.
Even so, it wasn't quite the kind of sharp partisan divide we're familiar with today. Many Republicans were unenthusiastic about the project, and Democrats were pretty close to evenly split. Clinton was a supporters, although not a strong one. I don't think that the SSC funding issue of pro-science vs. anti-science, but a more complex one involving fiscal conservatism and ideologies about government spending.
These days we've moved on, and science controversies have become much more divided along partisan lines (climate change research, support for "creation science"). Iindividual lawmakers are voting more party-line than they used to.
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And now I look at the comment history it turns out to be the same moron, what d'you know.
Maybe that should tell you something about your reading comprehension skills.
*Nothing* about agile is unique to agile. It's an umbrella term for a set of best practices that have been proven to work well together. A little thought will show that all those practices *had* to exist before the term existed to be included in the term.
You are confusing "Agile" with "Scrum".
Like any other virtue, obedience to proper authority can be taken to such an extreme it becomes a vice. A democracy can't exist for long without a certain modicum of civil disobedience. It is only dictatorships that demand *absolute* obedience, even against the demands of reason.
If a law enforcement agency participates in a cover-up, the workers in that agency should disobey their superiors.
If a medical device regulatory agency has policies that a reasonable person would consider egregious, the workers in that agency should blow the whistle.
We could reasonably look at a whistleblower's claims, decide they are baseless, then fire or prosecute him. But we can't reasonably take that stance *before* we've examined the claims, based on some kind of duty obedience to the bureaucratic hierarchy. There *is* such a duty, but there is also a duty to the public. The public is paying the whistleblower's salary, and that of his superiors.
WOW. You think unit testing and *source control* are properties of an Agile workflow?
Wow. You think you can have Agile workflow without them?
Well, agile's been around for something like a decade, so it can hardly be seen as trendy any longer.
"Agile" is an umbrella term that covers many "best practices" that cover interlocking areas of concern. Unit testing is one example that actually involves more up-front work. The reason automated testing is "agile" is that it is a safety net that allows programmers (or pair programming teams) to work with greater autonomy from each other. It allows you to catch any unexpected results of aggressive changes. This doesn't mean much if you don't have source code control, and notice how it adds considerable value to automated source control over seat-of-the-pants "I'll just save this version with a different name" management of old code.
This is also an example of how trying to just be "a little agile" it doesn't work. If you don't add unit testing and source control together, you may add only half of the conceptual and labor burden, but you get a lot less than half the benefit. This is why so many people don't see the point of "agile". They did implemented individual, agile-ish practices, but they've never really grasped the point of agile, which is to gain those precious nuggets of time when you can concentrate on a specific, identifiable problem without having to worry about interruptions (the boss walking in mid-morning and reodering your day's schedule) or unintended consequences (will this break what everyone else is doing?).
Neither is it really anything new AFAICT, it's just waterfall with shorter iterations.
And you don't think that's something new? Were you expecting magic? You have to set goals, and unless your project is utterly trivial you have to adapt it to evolving needs.
Having managed developers before and after "agile", I think Scrum-style sprints are the greatest thing that ever happened to managing software development. It doesn't *prevent* you from having year-long or even multi-year plans, it just provides a formal framework in which you can balance the need to get something identifiable done with the need to respond to new knowledge. That knowledge is not always imposed upon you externally by management. Sometimes you discover a risk or problem that could invalidate a lot of future work if you don't address it right away.
try to get more work out of people (it's agile! Crunch time is every sprint!).
If it's crunch time every sprint, it's not necessarily the managers who are at fault. It might be you. Are you honest in the estimates of what you can do, or do you tell the manager what he wants to hear? If a quality job on a target can't be done in the time they ask you to do it, are you assertive about that? Do you manage your own time so you can go home on time at the end of the sprint? I don't currently manage a team, but when I did I was a stickler for that. In an unexpected emergency, or if the muse was on you, I'd let you stay late but I'd make take comp time immediately. Why? Because as a manager I prefer repeatable, predictable processes to heroic displays of individual dedication. Those are needed occasionally, but they represent a failure of planning, and I don't believe in developing habits that paper over failure.
Now if a manager tells you to do something quicker than you think can reasonably be done, that's just bad management. Management should be based on reality, not wishful thinking.
In order to meet a Same Day Delivery promise Amazon will have to be LOCAL. So there went your major point. Poof.
I don't think so. There won't be nearly as many jobs working for Amazon's local distribution network as there are for local retail. Plus, they'll be jobs for different kinds of workers -- probably more like working at a UPS shipping facility where the emphasis is on physical speed and endurance rather than people skills.
A lot in common with THESE people.
Name-calling isn't very enlightening. Just because somebody is concerned about *a* change doesn't mean they are opposed to *all* change. Furthermore, reasoning by analogy this way is risky. The replacement of skilled artisanal labor with cheap factory labor enabled the emergence of consumerism, which in turn absorbed more labor than anyone could have dreamed of. It's hard to see consumers ratcheting up their consumption to absorb the loss of local retail jobs, especially if those jobs are lost to an emerging monopoly. In that case one can't expect prices to remain low for long.
Amazon is a double-edged sword for small retail businesses. On one hand Amazon offers any mom-and-pop retailer access to its digital and fulfillment infrastructure, giving an imaginative businessman access to a huge market for very little investment. On the other hand, get too successful and Amazon can come in and undercut you, because Amazon owns the platform.I think if this goes forward, we'll see in retail what we saw in software development in the early 90s under Microsoft's dominance of desktop software platforms. There was a feeling among developers that one wanted to avoid becoming *too* successful at anything Microsoft might be interested in duplicating. This was a big benefit to vertical market customers as software entrepreneurs tried to create portfolios of moderately successful vertical market apps, but led to high prices for applications where nobody could compete. Even today, you have to spend an astonishing $300 to get full retail MS Office license.
This is not to say that Microsoft had no competitors in their spaces (Novell, Watcom, Lotus), or that quixotic entrepreneurs didn't take up the fight. In the end the most quixotic idea of all is what prevailed: *free* software. Maybe if Amazon comes to dominate *all* retail, non-retail models like barter markets will take off.
Maybe you're right about some in the government fearing armed citizens. But there are plenty of gun rights friendly politicians who are more than happy to intrude on individual liberty in other ways, so they at least aren't particularly scared that Americans with guns will rise up and demand their liberties. This ridiculous scanner program was started under an administration that received NRA's endorsement, and was continued under an administration that did not, so I'd say "gun rights" as defined by the premier gun rights organization in the country have nothing to do with this particular invasion of liberty.
Guns are not the sine qua non of revolution. You point out the thing we really need yourself: fearlessness, and thinking outside the framing boxes drawn by your political masters. If the US electorate had the determination and courage to use guns to bring down the government, we wouldn't need guns to bring down the government. Not until the election system is completely subverted by non-auditable voting machines. Do you want a revolution? Get people to stop paying attention to political advertising. Get them to question propaganda masquerading as journalism. Open their mind to ideas they've been taught to regard as scary. Then you'd have a revolution.
Guns are neither good nor bad. Or rather guns are in themselves *good*, but can be misused for evil. Most people who own guns own them for sport or self-defense, but obviously those same guns could be used for robbery. A gun that can be used in a democratic revolution can be used to suppress other citizens who disagree with you. So guns alone won't secure anyone's liberty. Before you can turn to the gun, you've got to free peoples' minds.
It calls into doubt the idea that global warming itself is a catastrophe. It suggests that humanity thrived on a significantly hotter world than any living person has known.
Possibly. The actual paper is far less glib in its conclusions than the article linked in The Register. It suggests that data from Scandinavia might require climate researches to recalibrate their tree ring models -- which if true makes the scenario you describe *a possibility*, but that is far from proof. That possibility is interesting, but obviously it'll take more than tree ring data from one small corner of Europe to overturn the scientific consensus.
It's silly to jump up and say "aha!" when something like this comes up, because things like this have come up in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Every theory has contradictory data; in fact 5% of papers can be expected to report spuriously significant results. That's why individual papers can't overturn the scientific consensus, because that asks: where does the current preponderance of evidence lead? There's always been some evidence that weighs against AGW. For example I remember a similar back in the 80s (before AGW was a political football) about t unhe accuracy of Royal Navy sea temperatures recorded in the 1700's and 1800's. They collected the water to be measured in canvas bags, which would have cooled their contents by evaporation. When something like this comes up you've got to ask (1) is it real? (2) how practically significant is it?
This paper may or may not prove to be scientifically important. But what is unquestionably important is that this paper shows it *is* possible to publish papers which weigh against the scientific consensus in climate research, and to do so in a prestigious peer reviewed journal. Researchers will pig pile on this researcher's claims, because that's the way the process works. If the paper stands up to that, then it *might* be the start of a shift in consensus. But I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Papers that *might* be the start of a shift are far, far more common than lines of inquiry which successfully lead to such a shift.
Well, I'll grant you Ft. Hood, although arguably that's a workplace shooting. The Times Square bombing didn't happen, so it doesn't count. The point is with the millions of Muslims here if Muslim==terrorist there should be hundreds, if not thousands of deaths per year. There isn't.
My point is the fear is hysterical. People are much more likely to call the Muslim Brotherhood an "Islamic Terrorist Group", than they are to call the KKK a "Christian Terrorist Group", although that is more accurate.
Do you seriously think that in any situation that could reasonably be described as a "national emergency", any US administration *wouldn't* take control over privately owned infrastructure?
In the event of something like a coordinated cyberattack (like what we, or perhaps the Israelis, did against Iran, but possibly worse), in the absence of previously established policies security officials would simply make up what they're allowed to do as they go along. If the effects were severe enough, these officials would do this with the enthusiastic support of the public.
Personally, I think it is sounder government to make the claims about what you are allowed to do *before* the emergency comes up, giving people who disagree with you a chance to have at it. It'd be easy for an administration to claim it'd never do something like this, because it'd know damn well that all those assurances would go out the window the instant the electorate felt threatened.
85% of all BMW owners Ive met are assholes. Strangely this doesnt apply to Mercedes owners.
Maybe the Mercedes owners encounter a different population of BMW owners than you do.
It'd be interesting to know how many of the people killed were Muslims themselves. I'd guess a majority in any year. If a bomber blows up a couple dozen police recruits in an Iraqi city, we chalk those up as deaths due to Islamic terrorism, which strictly speaking they are, but they could just as easily chalked up a civil war deaths.
There are 2.6 million Muslims in the US. That's a lot of people. If, say, 10% were what our media like to call "jihadis", that'd be 260,000 people living here who want to kill us because we're not Muslims. If 1% of those jihadis made at least one attempt each year, that'd be at least 2,600 domestic Islamic terror attacks. It'd be easy for them too. They live here, they know our weaknesses, often can pass as non-muslim if need be -- that's not counting their recent converts of European ancestry (we know converts are usually among the most zealous in any religion). They don't need Al Qaeda to teach them how to make bombs when they have the Internet.
So how many people in the US have been killed since 9/11 by this fifth column? So far as I can see, none. If Muslim==terrorist, there should be thousands of people killed every year here. Probably tens of thousands killed a year. Why isn't anyone keeping track?
How low does suspicion have to go before you chuck it out the window? 99.99%? Well that 1 in 10,000. Applied to the 2.6 million Muslims in the US, that's 260 American Muslim terrorists. That's almost surely too high, given the lack of any deaths in the US from home-grown Muslim terrorists, but let's go with that. Your chance of running into a Muslim terrorist here in the US is about the same (under these unfavorable assumptions) as bumping into a retired NASA astronaut.
The idea that Islam somehow makes someone inclined to terror does not hold up if you control for circumstances (e.g. look at American Muslims).
Without grammar *of some sort* our ability to communicate would be hobbled. You'd be able to point to a mammoth and say "big!", but nobody could be absolutely sure whether you meant "The girls back at the cave will be impressed when we bring that home!" or "Better pass on this one, he'll kick our ass!"
Most of what we call "ungrammatical" is just non-standard grammar; it is neither consistently better nor consistently worse than standard grammar. African American Vernacular English has a "habitual be" construct missing in Standard American English: "He be taking her to the Friday dance," doesn't mean the same thing as "He *is* taking her to the Friday dance," it means that "He takes her to the Friday dance every week." Oddly enough, SAE while lacking a present tense habitual mood has a *past tense* habitual mood: "He used to take her to the Friday dance."
Their are two reasons to write in standard or prestige dialect. The first is to demonstrate your education, as in a job application cover letter. The second is that sometimes the standard usage is more clear.Consider, "Mary loved Ted more than me." This sets of a lot of muddle headed argument about whether "than" is a preposition and thus takes the objective pronoun ("me"), or a conjunction and thus requires a subject pronoun ("... than I", is short for "... than I do."). In the dictionary "than" is classified as both a conjunction and a preposition -- along with many other words. The problem with this sentence is ambiguity. It's not clear whether Mary loves Ted more than she loves *me*, or whether Mary loves Ted more than *I* love Ted. In the latter case I should write, "Mary loves Ted more than I."
There's no good solution for saying "Mary loves Ted more than she loves me," in a more compact form, because informal speech uses "me" both ways. You have to figure it out from context. I tend to think that "Mary loves Ted more than me," compares her feelings for Ted and for me, but few people would parse the sentence "Mary drinks more Diet Coke than me," the same way. Humans use grammar plus context to understand what's being said.
So, write so that your meaning is as precise as possible without sounding strange. Most often applying the rules of standard grammar will result in more precise writing, although there are times where you'll prefer commonplace grammar that's less precise. Writing fictional dialog is one example. It's more important to make people sound spontaneous than to make them sound correct.
Also be aware that grammatical rules are subject to misapplication. For example the rules say you can't end a sentence with a preposition, and "over" is a preposition, but the sentence "When I read the promotion list I discovered that I'd been passed over," is perfectly grammatical. The reason is that "over" doesn't function as a preposition, it's part of the phrasal verb "passed over". Nonetheless, many misguided grammar prigs would correct that sentence.
Great. Now dude, fucking leave if you don't like it here!
At times like this, I am reminded of the words of General George S. Patton: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."
In that spirit I invite you to leave while the getting is good, because I sure as hell won't leave my country so buzzards like you can pick it apart.
You're missing two important factors here: fear and anger.
Fear is a favorite tool of politicians, because once it's ignited it makes people irrational. Emotions are "refractory" (they resist going away), and fear is the most refractory of all emotions. Once somebody is afraid, you can't talk them down with reason. The other favorite tool is anger, which works very nicely with fear. Once somebody is afraid of someone, it's easy to turn the object of that fear into a hated scapegoat.
This is why people vote in politicians who do nothing for them, or worse, work against their interests. People who let themselves be scared and riled up with hatred are brain-dead in the voting booth.
I personally like that it exists because of the idea it represents,
You like the idea of slowing down the process of strong nations imposing their will on weak ones and applying a thin veneer of civilization to it?
Scratch that, British Airways should already be fully aware of the British people's contempt for such phoney chumminess.
Understandable. If I'd ever had a strange guy with an Irish accent come up to me in a crowd and whisper in my ear, "We know where you live, boyo," I'd be tad skittish too.
Actually, I think most of the problem is being threatened by what other people think. If you could fix that a lot of the world's evils would go away.
There's the fear of people who don't think the same way you do, of course, but what we're seeing here is the same thing that allowed the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal to reach epic scale: fear of what other people think of us. If you give in to those kinds of fears, it actually doesn't matter *what* you believe, because your actions aren't going to have anything to do with your beliefs. That's why people kill in the name of peace, shelter child abusers in the name of teaching morality, or censor in the name of liberty.
Alright, you're old-fashioned. And you're mixing up apples and oranges.
I think what most people these days are talking about is not just having some kind of online analytics data resource, but having a system where having that resource is taken as a given and the task is to use mathematics and AI to classify records, discover patterns and relationships, locate unusual data (without necessarily specifying the nature of the anomaly in advance), and whatnot.
A spreadsheet is fine for doing simple summaries of small, heterogeneous, tabular datasets (calculating averages and whatnot). But it's not going to help you find one record out of millions where your search criteria are too complex to be expressed in a SQL where clause.
I live in what the Europeans like to call the backwater redneck racist Christian "fly-over" part of America.
It's those Europeans and their 35 hour work weeks and thirty days of paid leave per year. They have so much time on their hands they have nothing better to do than think about you and dream up long-winded, patronizing ways to talk about you.
While I agree with the spirit of your comment, it may not be strictly correct because between "need to stay alive" and "don't need at all" there are varying levels of need, as in "probably would benefit from," or "might possibly benefit from," or even "definitely would benefit from but to a marginal degree."
Suppose you have moderately elevated blood pressure. Do you need to take medication for that? Well it depends. How elevated? What is your family history of cardiovascular disease? Your age? Have you attempted other interventions without success? It's not necessarily cut-and-dried. This is more the case when you talk about psychiatric medications (Ritalin), or quality of life medications (Viagra).
There may be many people who could benefit from a drug who aren't in a life-and-death need situation and haven't considered taking it. The problem with putting the pharmaceutical companies in charge of this is that they aren't disinterested parties. They can't be trusted to to give objective, impartial advice, even when they are acting in good faith.
Why because he says something you dont like?
Well, until people can be persuaded to distrust comments they agree with, people distrusting those they disagree with is the only thing standing between us and total public credulousness.
Well, this is what you get when you take a term that means a specific thing in economics ("free market"), turn it into a glittering generality, then worship it.
The US would have to have a rare earth mine to buy. Last I heard the only one near production was in CA and not presently mining.
That's normal in a commodity market -- practically a textbook example of the price-demand curve. At any given price, there are producers who could physically supply that commodity but won't bother because they'd only break even. A marginal increase brings these producers on-line. A marginal decrease shuts down producers who are barely making a profit.
I've personally visited inactive gold mines that weren't tapped out; they just didn't have a high enough concentration of gold in their ore to turn a profit at the current prices -- then somewhere around $650/oz. After the financial crisis hit around 08 or so the price went north of $1000, and today stands at over $1500. Those mines might have gone into production in 08 or 10, depending on how long the owners expected gold prices to remain high (or futures contracts they could sell).
So if China shuts us off, it's not back to flint-knapping for us. It just means manufacturers will buy the stuff from more expensive suppliers and pass the cost increase on to the consumer.
This by the way is why we'll never "run out of oil". What'll happen is that petroleum will become too expensive to put in cars, but there'll still be oil in the ground. There'll still be people pumping it out of the ground in a places where production is unusually cheap. That will continue until the commodity price drops so low nobody anywhere can produce it for a price anyone anywhere is willing to pay for it. That'll take a long, long time. There are still companies that make horse drawn carriages, although they haven't been economically significant for over a century and the price is no doubt quite high compared to what you'd have paid for an equivalent product in the 1800s.
When I was a youngster at MIT in the early 80s, the Reagan administration came in and shook up research priorities. Suddenly applied researchers who weren't doing military research were looking for jobs, and researchers who were doing military research had to show results or walk.
I was working on a lab that had a DOE grant (energy, not education), and we hired as an engineer a physics researcher who'd lost his ONR grant. We got him and his project, a new, advanced type of electron microscope, which we were using as a spare vacuum tank. "It's those damn ROTC graduates," he said. "Back in the day I'd have told them it was a death ray, but those damn ROTC graduates know damn well the only way you'd ever be able to kill someone with this is drop it on him. 'Deaths per dollar', that's all they want to hear about, 'deaths per dollar.'"
Back at the dorm I mentioned this, and we kicked the 'deaths per dollar' around, trying to come up with various ways of maximizing it. Finally I proposed this scenario. Find a construction site, and root through the dumpster until you find a length of 2x4 three to four feet long. Then walk down the street and when you encountered someone, beat him over the head with your piece of lumber.
"No good," one of the other students said. "You're assuming your time is free."
"Well," I replied, "it *is* a government project."
Well you can't look at a vote without looking at the alternatives on the table. It wasn't so simple as "pro science if and only if pro SSC." There were at least two other debates going on here: "big science vs. small science" and "pure vs. applied." There were a lot of scientists who were against the SSC because they thought it was sucking away funding from many worthy small projects of individual researchers and small teams.
At the time of the cancellation, there was a sharp partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats over the funding of applied science, precipitated by radical changes in funding requests by Reagan and George HW Bush. The Reagan administration was strongly against any public funding of applied research unless it had military applications.
This led to a sharp difference in funding priorities between Republicans and Democrats. In the you-say-potato world of Washington politics, this made the SSC a political issue. It was easy for Republicans to get behind the SSC because it was a matter of national prestige and it didn't violate their funding ideology. The Democratic attitude towards the SSC was initially more apathetic than antipathetic; Republican support for the SSC made it easier for them to reason that we didn't really need it that much.
Even so, it wasn't quite the kind of sharp partisan divide we're familiar with today. Many Republicans were unenthusiastic about the project, and Democrats were pretty close to evenly split. Clinton was a supporters, although not a strong one. I don't think that the SSC funding issue of pro-science vs. anti-science, but a more complex one involving fiscal conservatism and ideologies about government spending.
These days we've moved on, and science controversies have become much more divided along partisan lines (climate change research, support for "creation science"). Iindividual lawmakers are voting more party-line than they used to.