it shouldn't matter whether the person so filmed is gay or not.
Well, I think circumstances matter in making that determination.
Perhaps talking about "precise intent" is too vague, or perhaps too technical in a legal sense. Let's talk for a minute about what reasonable person would expect the consequences of an action would be. Are the likely consequences of distributing video of people having gay sex different from the likely consequences of distributing video of people having straight sex?
It depends on the circumstances. Suppose this happens in Afghanistan; either way you are exposing the people to potential Taliban assassination, so there'd be no difference.
In some places in the US exposing a gay person this way would be *more* likely to result in violence or discrimination than exposing a straight person, and therefore it is *more* morally repugnant *in this circumstance*. This doesn't amount to "special treatment" for gays in the law; the "special treatment" has already been applied by bigots on the street and the law would just be recognizing it. At other times in US history revealing that a black man had sex with a white woman would put that man at severe risk of lynching. In those circumstances a reasonable person would judge the harm done to the man to be greater than if it were same-race sex.
Now applying that principle of reasonable expectation in this circumstance, would a *reasonable person* expect this to result in the death of the victim? In general I don't think so, although it would be clear that this raises the risk to the victim of further violence and possibly suicide. The damage itself to the victim's privacy would be vile enough, but the crime wouldn't amount to murder.
Now suppose the perpetrator knew that the victim was psychologically vulnerable and was contemplating suicide. Wouldn't that change the reasonable expectations of the result? What if there had been a rash of murders of openly gay students on campus, and the person distributing the video knew the victim was a closeted gay man. Would that change the reasonable expectations of the result?
It's a common FUD. Nowaday Linux audio works just fine
Well, sometimes getting audio to work is beyond the control of the Linux kernel. If the system has integrated audio on the motherboard (e.g. a laptop) the ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) supplied by the manufacturer in the ROM can instruct the hardware to behave differently under different operating systems, or provide different descriptions of the hardware (e.g. audio inputs and outputs) to different operating systems. That's why it's common to have little glitches in Linux audio, like not having the right mixer controls.
The DSDT is written in a language called ACPI Source Language (ASL). Intel and Microsoft both provide compilers for ASL, but the MS compiler accepts buggy, non-compliant DSDTs. Since for some vendors (Toshiba) the job is considered done when stuff works under the current version of windows, they ship their laptops with DSDTs that won't work under anything but Windows and might not work in future versions of Windows.
Since the kernel writers have no way of knowing what specific hardware is in your machine except what your machine tells the kernel, they can't fix this. It's entirely the manufacturer's fault, although users blame Linux because everything works in Windows. Getting stuff working isn't exactly a nightmare, but it's beyond most users' capability. You extract the DSDT from ROM, decompile it, fix the bugy ASL, compile it, then put the fixed DSDT in your initramfs (remembering to do this again every time you install a new kernel). Sometimes using a linux boot parameter to masquerade as Windows to the hardware works.
So to recap: the Linux audio system may be fine, the hardware drivers may be fine, but if the manufacturer fails to supply a correct description of what the hardware contains to the Linux kernel, audio might not work.
Disclaimer -- this information is a few years out of date, as I've stopped using Toshiba laptops and use Asus instead. However I'm fairly sure it still exists with certain manufacturer's laptops, which have worked flawlessly for me under Linux.
Nothing. I think it's great that India has developed a large and productive middle class, and wish them progress.
What I object to is people who build companies, technologies and even industries losing their jobs because *their* elected representatives have created a program that is against their interests.
If by "economic social justice" you mean "ways I believe that I should spend your money" and if by "unjust" you mean "bad because it is not how I would allocate your resources," then maybe.
Straw man. In the context of environmental protection, "justice" would mean things that the air people in poor neighborhoods would be nearly as clean as the air people in wealthy suburbs breathe.
I'll give you another example. Some years ago there was a proposal to establish airline service at an air force base which for decades has been a research center that hasn't supported combat aircraft since the 50s. I remember walking into the break room at work and hearing two people who happened to live in a very affluent (median income $160K) suburb near the proposed airport talking about what a terrible idea it was, because of all the noise it would bring to their quiet neighborhoods. Having grown up in a poor urban neighborhood, I had to smirk. Airliners flew over us all the time. The very poorest people lived right smack next to the airport, and they almost never flew. *Not* establishing a second airport meant that as those suburban folks flew more and more, the number of flights coming in over *us* went up.
Now the world is full of inequalities, and some of them are just, but not *all* of them. It is a good thing to keep a quiet, bucolic suburb pristine, but is it right to do that at the expense of making somebody else's neighborhood worse? Rich people don't deserve peace and quiet *more* than poor people do. And if you stop an airport in your backyard, you should at least have the decency to support noise regulation for people who don't have the political power to stop airlines from routing more flights over their neighborhoods. I'd call at least attempting to reduce the impact of services on people who can't afford to use them progress toward "economic social justice".
The problem with H-1B isn't that it encourages engineers to come here. The problem is that it encourages them to go home.
If the program had the same number of seats, but encouraged the participants to settle here permanently, the number of engineering jobs in the US would increase because firms go where there are engineers to be hired. San Jose and Des Moines rank near each other in the rankings of US cities by livability, with Des Moines scoring slightly better. So given a choice, where would you open a software business? San Jose, where it's easier to hire engineers.
The dirty secret of H-1B is that it isn't structured to bring engineering expertise into to the US; it's structure to *export* it. It is a technology transfer program that helps US companies to move jobs overseas.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa
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HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
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· Score: 3, Funny
Nice idea except the HP CEO *appears to be* a woman.
There, FTFY.
Women are people, and people have souls, therefore Meg Whitman is not a woman.
Look, I went to MIT, and I can tell you that (a) the people there are remarkably bright and (b) I wouldn't particularly want to put my trust in the political or economic opinions of some randomly chosen person from there, right wing, left wing, or requiring more dimensions than string theory to characterize politically.
Really smart people often have amazingly insightful opinions, but there's nothing like a brilliant person to have unshakable confidence in an unassailably stupid idea, like Schockley (the inventor of the transistor) and his theories of white racial supremacy. Or like my friend who had an affair with a married man because he promised her that his wife would be cool with it. It was impossible to convince her of the obvious fact this was stupid, bat-shit crazy idea because as smart as I was, she was way, way smarter. Having an argument with her was like climbing into the ring with Ali in his prime for a few bare knuckle rounds. You couldn't lay a glove on her. That taught me that sometimes a friend's role is to wait and be there when life gives your friend an unavoidable hard lesson.
Really brilliant people are used to being right when everyone else around them is wrong. They're hard to argue out of a wrong position, and when you get enough of them together that they can sort themselves into loony birds of a feather even reality can't make a dent in their opinions. And brilliance in one area doesn't translate into competence in every area. There are people I'd trust to design an aircraft I had to fly in or a sub I had to dive in, but that I wouldn't trust managing by checking account.
Well, having spent a number of years watching J2ME, I'd say the problem wasn't that J2ME was feature limited. I had things I could do even in MIDP that were quite useful, to say nothing of the Personal Basis Profile.
As an early app developer, we had two concerns with J2ME: how to get our app in our users' hands, not getting tied to a particular carrier (and thus losing access to corporate customers who used different carriers) or even handset. You got your J2ME SDK from the handset vendor and the handset vendors were the mobile carriers' slaves. The same phone would have different capabilities on different carriers because they deleted features the carriers didn't want (for price positioning or because the features conflicted with the carriers' laughable ambitions to become content companies).
When Apple came along with the iPhone, they did three important things. First, they didn't take any crap from the carrier (AT&T), they defined the product themselves. Second, they made it possible to run an app on any iOS device (originally just the iPhone, but later the iPod Touch too). Third, they had a simple mechanism for getting your app into the customer's hands. That made it possible to create a successful product for iOS in a way it had never been possible in J2ME.
I believe the fact that it Apple made it easy to sell apps for iOS is what is responsible for the success of attracting developers to the platform early on. It wasn't some kind of Apple UI secret sauce, although touch screens standard was a big advance. J2ME could have been an entrenched mobile standard years before the iPhone came out, if Sun had only taken steps to create a market (not necessarily an app store) for developers to target.
Then Android came along, and it was everything I'd ever hoped for: well thought out, robust, open source, feature-rich, vendor independent, even *app store* independent. But by then I was out of the business.
While this is true using the common meaning of the adjective "managed", "managed bankruptcy" is a term for a specific kind of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in which the stockholders pre-approve a reorganization plan prior to filing. This cuts down on the time the company spends being insolvent, and protects the shareholders' interest in the company.
Every bankruptcy is 'managed,' the only difference here is who was doing the managing. Normally it is a judge, and the rule of law, in this case politicians inserted their own desires.
This is not correct. Both GM and Chrysler filed for plain old Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which in GM's case was overseen by the US Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Manhattan. The controversy here wasn't whether to go into "managed bankruptcy" or not, it was where the money to keep the companies running as going concerns was going to come from. Mitt Romney's position was that it would be better for that money to come from private capital. While that is undoubtedly true, this was being discussed in the first half of 2009, during which you will recall we were having a massive credit crisis. There were no private equity firms willing or able to step up to handle this. Without a government bailout these companies would have been liquidated under Chapter 7.
Having the government underwrite the restructuring did not effect the priority of creditors, since the restructuring was governed by Chapter 11.
I understand people feel strongly about government intervention in the private sector being the start of a slippery slope, but in this case the nightmare scenario simply didn't happen.
It's just a made up controversy being used to make political hay.
Speaking as a Democrat, I think that's not *entirely* true. There is the question of whether Solyndra received favorable treatment because of its connections to the Obama campaign, something I would not dismiss out of hand. I think it beggars belief that lobbying didn't have something to do with the expedited loan guarantee, although I suspect the proximate cause was the desire to have a photo op of the president encouraging high tech manufacturing jobs.
The problem is that when something like this happens people form up into two groups depending on whether they are in the same party as the person who got caught this time: those who say absolutely nothing improper happened, and those who say it was out-and-out bribery, *but don't want to change anything so they can get their share next time around*.
It all comes down to the absurd notion that "paying for access" is a perfectly benign practice. Nobody pays for "access"; they pay for *results*. Access is simply the means by which they obtain results that others with less money to burn can't get. I'll even grant both Republicans and Democrats who sell "access" the benefit of the doubt and assume they aren't selling favors -- not because I believe that, because it makes no practical difference. Even if all they are selling is access and openness to the buyer's idea, the system is still corrupt and undemocratic.
Here's something to consider: while Congress is in session, your representative spends more time each day lining up donations for his next election than he does working on government business. Listen to this: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/take-the-money-and-run-for-office. A typical representative in a competitive district has to go to *400* fundraisers a year.
I have special knowledge about the recyclables/trash issue because of weird working hours.
OK, I'll comment on this. I'd say you have knowledge of the particular cleaning service that works in your building.
In my town we have separate trucks them come around for recycling. They take the contents of our red bins to a recycling center where the glass and different grades of plastic are separated and ground into feed materials for more stuff. We also have a volunteer led recycling group that organizes regular hazardous waste and large item recycling days that makes it really easy to deal with crap like old paint you've got lying around the house if you don't mind waiting in line for forty-five minutes on one of the two occasions per year they do this. They'll take anything except electronics which is handle separately and requires a sticker you buy at city hall. Your town might not do this, but my liberal, republican leaning town (yes, such places exist) seems to do pretty well.
It's no big deal to do it reasonably right. Does it make a difference? Well, my family's recycling bin is usually full. If I multiply that by fifty weeks, then by the number of houses in my town, that is a staggering mountain of junk that won't be dumped in a landfill.
While I agree text could be used more effectively, language is prone to exactly this same effect. It's called a "dead metaphor" -- an expression whose figurative meaning is clear to us but whose literal meaning is unfamiliar.
Broadcast -- to throw seads in a wide area as you walk.
Panache -- a plume of horse hair on the crest of a war helmet.
Branches (of government) -- sections of a plant's stem that separate from a common trunk.
Push the envelope -- to approach the boundary of a mathematical region (envelope) in which an aircraft can safely operate.
Current (electricity) -- the flow of water as in a stream or river.
(World wide) Web - a structure formed by interweaving wibers, e.g. a spider's web.
Figurative speech is inherent in the way people communicate with each other, whether it be with graphical symbols or words, and until people learn to be completely literal we'll have cliches that become dead metaphors. They really should be called "undead metaphors." Even though the figurative nature of a dead metaphor is obscure, the meaning is perfectly clear. Therefore, there's nothing wrong with using words that are a dead metaphor, in fact we'd hobble our ability to communicate if we tried to do that. Likewise there's nothing wrong with using a visual dead metaphor like radio buttons. Can you imagine trying to purge user interfaces of those?
Take a look at the bio of the guy who is the proximate cause of this debacle. He's got quite a solid background in public safety, but in 2009 when the money bomb dropped he had no experience whatsoever in procuring and managing technology. So why didn't they hire somebody who knew what he was doing? Because they were required to spend the money right away. You can't hire somebody in government right away. It just doesn't happen. But you *can* hire a contractor or vendor.
I've seen this before. You give a local or state agency with little or no experience with technology a bundle of money to solve some pressing problem like bioterrorism, and you order them to spend it on technology *immediately* or lose it. They don't have time to figure out how to spend the money reasonably because they've got to get the purchase orders cut *right away*. You've basically handed them a golden hot potato.
If you remember the big debate over the fiscal stimulus, the people you'd have expected to vote against it were grumbling, but they voted for it, provided that the money was channeled into "shovel ready" projects. Think about the assumption behind that, which is that the anticipation of income in the near future has no stimulative effect on current hiring or private spending. I actually think that's backward. People are more likely to invest their own money if their is money coming down the pike; if it has to be spent right now they aren't going to hire or invest, they're just going to pass it on.
At the time I thought the "shovel ready" emphasis was a recipe for fraud and abuse, because I'd seen the golden hot potato effect at work in the post 9/11 rush to spend money on homeland security. I saw agencies that were competent at their job and well-intentioned, but chronically underfunded suddenly find themselves with a big pot of money to spend on things they had no experience with. Now how do you think *that* was likely to go? Under the circumstances the only way to get rid of the golden hot potato was to hand it to a contractor who had the experience and administrative capability to absorb a lot of federal money quickly. It's a specialized skill; not every vendor has the accounting infrastructure to suck up hundreds of thousands or millions of federal dollars overnight with all the bogus "controls" attached to it.
I'm convinced the golden hot potato effect is no accident. Somebody always makes a ridiculous profit off these things. The ultimate cause of this problem isn't the guy who's handed the hot potato. It's politicians doing their cronies a favor buy turning a federal grant into something that can't possibly be spent wisely.
Who do you want to perform surgery on you in 30 years?
An H-1B doctor from India, naturally. Of course given the inconsistency I've seen in H-1B labor, that's a nightmare scenario, but we're not paying the price now.
This is the problem with direct democracy in California. To govern or manage anything, you have to make trade offs, but ballot propositions don't do that. They ask people "do you want to stop the growth of taxation?" Of course the answer is yes. "Would you like more services?" Of course the answer is yes. It's no wonder the state is a financial and educational basket case.
The public schools have become a jobs program contaminated by labor politics.
Well, let's accept that is true for a moment. That is an unpleasant fact, but shouldn't the *results* of public education matter?
Some years ago somebody who worked with me came to me with a problem. He had a friend who made high quality penny whistles. The friend new how to make a penny whistle tuned to A below middle C, and had the formula for going up a half step. The problem is he wanted to make an A-flat whistle, but didn't know how to rearrange the formula. So my coworker brought the formula to me, I rearranged it, calculated the correct length then checked the answer by running it back through the original formula. I asked the guy, "Didn't you take algebra in high school?" He said, "I did well in it, but I don't know how to use it." This was a highly educated person with a PhD in anthropology.
Now I have kids in public high school, and their entire public education has placed a much higher emphasis on reasoning skills. They started in on word problems *in the first grade*, and by now most of the kids entering high school could easily solve the penny whistle problem.
The education my kids have received is in almost every particular head and shoulders over anything anybody I knew in my generation got, and that's the way it should be. Every generation should produce a following generation better educated than itself. If the schools in your town or state aren't doing that, then don't blame it on the unions, because we have unions in our town and the unionized teachers are doing a much better job than they were thirty years ago. You might dislike unions for *other* reasons, and those reasons may be legitimate, but it is certainly not the case that unionized teachers automatically do a crummy job. If yours are doing a crummy job the unions might be contributing to that, but the fundamental problem rests in the people of your town and state. If they cared enough, they'd have done their duty to the next generation.
Right. There is no benefit to you at all from living in a country with an educated population. None.
And indeed there is a downside. Being around educated people can make you feel inferior. Have you noticed how "elite" when applied to someone's knowledge or intellectual accomplishments is now a pejorative -- excuse me, I mean a bad word? Curiously it's not a bad word when applied to people who are "elite" due to their power or wealth.
While i'm from MA, and I'm quite happy that my state is tied for first... but... 44%?????
Well, you can produce any percentage of "pass" you want to get by choosing the corresponding height for the bar. For years people wrung their hands over declining SAT scores, but what they didn't know is that the SATs were recalibrated every year to produce a desired mean score. And before you break out your tinfoil hat, there turns out to be a good reason for the engineering declining scores from the 60s to the 80s: the percentage of high school students headed to college was increasing, so students who would not have considered going to college in 1960 felt they had to in 1990.
In any case no matter what grade level or proficiency level you choose, MA is at or near the top of the heap in national rankings. No other state is so consistently at the top of the rankings, which is a glass half empty/half full situation for you. Mass students are the best all-around educated in the country (yay), but that's not all that hard (uh oh).
Well, the problem with facts is that there are so many of them, and so many kinds.
Yes, you want students to come out with a pretty good database of factual knowledge, but ultimately it's futile if they don't have the ability to evaluate putative facts critically, even (or especially) the ones they're *supposed* to believe.
So well proven that skepticism is deemed irrational.
If we saw genuine skepticism in the denialist camp we'd consider that a good thing. What we see is a non-negatable faith in the the opposite position to scientific consensus.
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So you think that a person's intent in performing an action is clearly distinct from what he expects the consequences of that action to be?
it shouldn't matter whether the person so filmed is gay or not.
Well, I think circumstances matter in making that determination.
Perhaps talking about "precise intent" is too vague, or perhaps too technical in a legal sense. Let's talk for a minute about what reasonable person would expect the consequences of an action would be. Are the likely consequences of distributing video of people having gay sex different from the likely consequences of distributing video of people having straight sex?
It depends on the circumstances. Suppose this happens in Afghanistan; either way you are exposing the people to potential Taliban assassination, so there'd be no difference.
In some places in the US exposing a gay person this way would be *more* likely to result in violence or discrimination than exposing a straight person, and therefore it is *more* morally repugnant *in this circumstance*. This doesn't amount to "special treatment" for gays in the law; the "special treatment" has already been applied by bigots on the street and the law would just be recognizing it. At other times in US history revealing that a black man had sex with a white woman would put that man at severe risk of lynching. In those circumstances a reasonable person would judge the harm done to the man to be greater than if it were same-race sex.
Now applying that principle of reasonable expectation in this circumstance, would a *reasonable person* expect this to result in the death of the victim? In general I don't think so, although it would be clear that this raises the risk to the victim of further violence and possibly suicide. The damage itself to the victim's privacy would be vile enough, but the crime wouldn't amount to murder.
Now suppose the perpetrator knew that the victim was psychologically vulnerable and was contemplating suicide. Wouldn't that change the reasonable expectations of the result? What if there had been a rash of murders of openly gay students on campus, and the person distributing the video knew the victim was a closeted gay man. Would that change the reasonable expectations of the result?
It's a common FUD. Nowaday Linux audio works just fine
Well, sometimes getting audio to work is beyond the control of the Linux kernel. If the system has integrated audio on the motherboard (e.g. a laptop) the ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) supplied by the manufacturer in the ROM can instruct the hardware to behave differently under different operating systems, or provide different descriptions of the hardware (e.g. audio inputs and outputs) to different operating systems. That's why it's common to have little glitches in Linux audio, like not having the right mixer controls.
The DSDT is written in a language called ACPI Source Language (ASL). Intel and Microsoft both provide compilers for ASL, but the MS compiler accepts buggy, non-compliant DSDTs. Since for some vendors (Toshiba) the job is considered done when stuff works under the current version of windows, they ship their laptops with DSDTs that won't work under anything but Windows and might not work in future versions of Windows.
Since the kernel writers have no way of knowing what specific hardware is in your machine except what your machine tells the kernel, they can't fix this. It's entirely the manufacturer's fault, although users blame Linux because everything works in Windows. Getting stuff working isn't exactly a nightmare, but it's beyond most users' capability. You extract the DSDT from ROM, decompile it, fix the bugy ASL, compile it, then put the fixed DSDT in your initramfs (remembering to do this again every time you install a new kernel). Sometimes using a linux boot parameter to masquerade as Windows to the hardware works.
So to recap: the Linux audio system may be fine, the hardware drivers may be fine, but if the manufacturer fails to supply a correct description of what the hardware contains to the Linux kernel, audio might not work.
Disclaimer -- this information is a few years out of date, as I've stopped using Toshiba laptops and use Asus instead. However I'm fairly sure it still exists with certain manufacturer's laptops, which have worked flawlessly for me under Linux.
Actually it will be a water wheel. Apple's new renewable energy source: the tears of Chinese workers.
Nothing. I think it's great that India has developed a large and productive middle class, and wish them progress.
What I object to is people who build companies, technologies and even industries losing their jobs because *their* elected representatives have created a program that is against their interests.
If by "economic social justice" you mean "ways I believe that I should spend your money" and if by "unjust" you mean "bad because it is not how I would allocate your resources," then maybe.
Straw man. In the context of environmental protection, "justice" would mean things that the air people in poor neighborhoods would be nearly as clean as the air people in wealthy suburbs breathe.
I'll give you another example. Some years ago there was a proposal to establish airline service at an air force base which for decades has been a research center that hasn't supported combat aircraft since the 50s. I remember walking into the break room at work and hearing two people who happened to live in a very affluent (median income $160K) suburb near the proposed airport talking about what a terrible idea it was, because of all the noise it would bring to their quiet neighborhoods. Having grown up in a poor urban neighborhood, I had to smirk. Airliners flew over us all the time. The very poorest people lived right smack next to the airport, and they almost never flew. *Not* establishing a second airport meant that as those suburban folks flew more and more, the number of flights coming in over *us* went up.
Now the world is full of inequalities, and some of them are just, but not *all* of them. It is a good thing to keep a quiet, bucolic suburb pristine, but is it right to do that at the expense of making somebody else's neighborhood worse? Rich people don't deserve peace and quiet *more* than poor people do. And if you stop an airport in your backyard, you should at least have the decency to support noise regulation for people who don't have the political power to stop airlines from routing more flights over their neighborhoods. I'd call at least attempting to reduce the impact of services on people who can't afford to use them progress toward "economic social justice".
The problem with H-1B isn't that it encourages engineers to come here. The problem is that it encourages them to go home.
If the program had the same number of seats, but encouraged the participants to settle here permanently, the number of engineering jobs in the US would increase because firms go where there are engineers to be hired. San Jose and Des Moines rank near each other in the rankings of US cities by livability, with Des Moines scoring slightly better. So given a choice, where would you open a software business? San Jose, where it's easier to hire engineers.
The dirty secret of H-1B is that it isn't structured to bring engineering expertise into to the US; it's structure to *export* it. It is a technology transfer program that helps US companies to move jobs overseas.
Nice idea except the HP CEO *appears to be* a woman.
There, FTFY.
Women are people, and people have souls, therefore Meg Whitman is not a woman.
Look, I went to MIT, and I can tell you that (a) the people there are remarkably bright and (b) I wouldn't particularly want to put my trust in the political or economic opinions of some randomly chosen person from there, right wing, left wing, or requiring more dimensions than string theory to characterize politically.
Really smart people often have amazingly insightful opinions, but there's nothing like a brilliant person to have unshakable confidence in an unassailably stupid idea, like Schockley (the inventor of the transistor) and his theories of white racial supremacy. Or like my friend who had an affair with a married man because he promised her that his wife would be cool with it. It was impossible to convince her of the obvious fact this was stupid, bat-shit crazy idea because as smart as I was, she was way, way smarter. Having an argument with her was like climbing into the ring with Ali in his prime for a few bare knuckle rounds. You couldn't lay a glove on her. That taught me that sometimes a friend's role is to wait and be there when life gives your friend an unavoidable hard lesson.
Really brilliant people are used to being right when everyone else around them is wrong. They're hard to argue out of a wrong position, and when you get enough of them together that they can sort themselves into loony birds of a feather even reality can't make a dent in their opinions. And brilliance in one area doesn't translate into competence in every area. There are people I'd trust to design an aircraft I had to fly in or a sub I had to dive in, but that I wouldn't trust managing by checking account.
Not being able to write code doesn't mean you're stupid.
However, equating them means you're ignorant and arrogant.
Ah, but if I *know* I'm arrogant, I'm not ignorant.
J2ME is a pretty feature-limited version of Java
Well, having spent a number of years watching J2ME, I'd say the problem wasn't that J2ME was feature limited. I had things I could do even in MIDP that were quite useful, to say nothing of the Personal Basis Profile.
As an early app developer, we had two concerns with J2ME: how to get our app in our users' hands, not getting tied to a particular carrier (and thus losing access to corporate customers who used different carriers) or even handset. You got your J2ME SDK from the handset vendor and the handset vendors were the mobile carriers' slaves. The same phone would have different capabilities on different carriers because they deleted features the carriers didn't want (for price positioning or because the features conflicted with the carriers' laughable ambitions to become content companies).
When Apple came along with the iPhone, they did three important things. First, they didn't take any crap from the carrier (AT&T), they defined the product themselves. Second, they made it possible to run an app on any iOS device (originally just the iPhone, but later the iPod Touch too). Third, they had a simple mechanism for getting your app into the customer's hands. That made it possible to create a successful product for iOS in a way it had never been possible in J2ME.
I believe the fact that it Apple made it easy to sell apps for iOS is what is responsible for the success of attracting developers to the platform early on. It wasn't some kind of Apple UI secret sauce, although touch screens standard was a big advance. J2ME could have been an entrenched mobile standard years before the iPhone came out, if Sun had only taken steps to create a market (not necessarily an app store) for developers to target.
Then Android came along, and it was everything I'd ever hoped for: well thought out, robust, open source, feature-rich, vendor independent, even *app store* independent. But by then I was out of the business.
Every bankruptcy is 'managed',
While this is true using the common meaning of the adjective "managed", "managed bankruptcy" is a term for a specific kind of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in which the stockholders pre-approve a reorganization plan prior to filing. This cuts down on the time the company spends being insolvent, and protects the shareholders' interest in the company.
Every bankruptcy is 'managed,' the only difference here is who was doing the managing. Normally it is a judge, and the rule of law, in this case politicians inserted their own desires.
This is not correct. Both GM and Chrysler filed for plain old Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which in GM's case was overseen by the US Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Manhattan. The controversy here wasn't whether to go into "managed bankruptcy" or not, it was where the money to keep the companies running as going concerns was going to come from. Mitt Romney's position was that it would be better for that money to come from private capital. While that is undoubtedly true, this was being discussed in the first half of 2009, during which you will recall we were having a massive credit crisis. There were no private equity firms willing or able to step up to handle this. Without a government bailout these companies would have been liquidated under Chapter 7.
Having the government underwrite the restructuring did not effect the priority of creditors, since the restructuring was governed by Chapter 11.
I understand people feel strongly about government intervention in the private sector being the start of a slippery slope, but in this case the nightmare scenario simply didn't happen.
It's just a made up controversy being used to make political hay.
Speaking as a Democrat, I think that's not *entirely* true. There is the question of whether Solyndra received favorable treatment because of its connections to the Obama campaign, something I would not dismiss out of hand. I think it beggars belief that lobbying didn't have something to do with the expedited loan guarantee, although I suspect the proximate cause was the desire to have a photo op of the president encouraging high tech manufacturing jobs.
The problem is that when something like this happens people form up into two groups depending on whether they are in the same party as the person who got caught this time: those who say absolutely nothing improper happened, and those who say it was out-and-out bribery, *but don't want to change anything so they can get their share next time around*.
It all comes down to the absurd notion that "paying for access" is a perfectly benign practice. Nobody pays for "access"; they pay for *results*. Access is simply the means by which they obtain results that others with less money to burn can't get. I'll even grant both Republicans and Democrats who sell "access" the benefit of the doubt and assume they aren't selling favors -- not because I believe that, because it makes no practical difference. Even if all they are selling is access and openness to the buyer's idea, the system is still corrupt and undemocratic.
Here's something to consider: while Congress is in session, your representative spends more time each day lining up donations for his next election than he does working on government business. Listen to this: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/take-the-money-and-run-for-office. A typical representative in a competitive district has to go to *400* fundraisers a year.
I'm hostile toward them because I'm too smart.
No comment.
I have special knowledge about the recyclables/trash issue because of weird working hours.
OK, I'll comment on this. I'd say you have knowledge of the particular cleaning service that works in your building.
In my town we have separate trucks them come around for recycling. They take the contents of our red bins to a recycling center where the glass and different grades of plastic are separated and ground into feed materials for more stuff. We also have a volunteer led recycling group that organizes regular hazardous waste and large item recycling days that makes it really easy to deal with crap like old paint you've got lying around the house if you don't mind waiting in line for forty-five minutes on one of the two occasions per year they do this. They'll take anything except electronics which is handle separately and requires a sticker you buy at city hall. Your town might not do this, but my liberal, republican leaning town (yes, such places exist) seems to do pretty well.
It's no big deal to do it reasonably right. Does it make a difference? Well, my family's recycling bin is usually full. If I multiply that by fifty weeks, then by the number of houses in my town, that is a staggering mountain of junk that won't be dumped in a landfill.
This is the problem with BS whether in marketing or politics. Facts take time and effort to hunt down, but BS can be conjured from thin air.
While I agree text could be used more effectively, language is prone to exactly this same effect. It's called a "dead metaphor" -- an expression whose figurative meaning is clear to us but whose literal meaning is unfamiliar.
Broadcast -- to throw seads in a wide area as you walk.
Panache -- a plume of horse hair on the crest of a war helmet.
Branches (of government) -- sections of a plant's stem that separate from a common trunk.
Push the envelope -- to approach the boundary of a mathematical region (envelope) in which an aircraft can safely operate.
Current (electricity) -- the flow of water as in a stream or river.
(World wide) Web - a structure formed by interweaving wibers, e.g. a spider's web.
Figurative speech is inherent in the way people communicate with each other, whether it be with graphical symbols or words, and until people learn to be completely literal we'll have cliches that become dead metaphors. They really should be called "undead metaphors."
Even though the figurative nature of a dead metaphor is obscure, the meaning is perfectly clear. Therefore, there's nothing wrong with using words that are a dead metaphor, in fact we'd hobble our ability to communicate if we tried to do that. Likewise there's nothing wrong with using a visual dead metaphor like radio buttons. Can you imagine trying to purge user interfaces of those?
As someone who's experienced some tinnitus from just going to some shows, these horrify me.
I'm horrified about idiots being put in charge of some detainment facilities and given "non-lethal" weapons to use against the inmates.
Take a look at the bio of the guy who is the proximate cause of this debacle. He's got quite a solid background in public safety, but in 2009 when the money bomb dropped he had no experience whatsoever in procuring and managing technology. So why didn't they hire somebody who knew what he was doing? Because they were required to spend the money right away. You can't hire somebody in government right away. It just doesn't happen. But you *can* hire a contractor or vendor.
I've seen this before. You give a local or state agency with little or no experience with technology a bundle of money to solve some pressing problem like bioterrorism, and you order them to spend it on technology *immediately* or lose it. They don't have time to figure out how to spend the money reasonably because they've got to get the purchase orders cut *right away*. You've basically handed them a golden hot potato.
If you remember the big debate over the fiscal stimulus, the people you'd have expected to vote against it were grumbling, but they voted for it, provided that the money was channeled into "shovel ready" projects. Think about the assumption behind that, which is that the anticipation of income in the near future has no stimulative effect on current hiring or private spending. I actually think that's backward. People are more likely to invest their own money if their is money coming down the pike; if it has to be spent right now they aren't going to hire or invest, they're just going to pass it on.
At the time I thought the "shovel ready" emphasis was a recipe for fraud and abuse, because I'd seen the golden hot potato effect at work in the post 9/11 rush to spend money on homeland security. I saw agencies that were competent at their job and well-intentioned, but chronically underfunded suddenly find themselves with a big pot of money to spend on things they had no experience with. Now how do you think *that* was likely to go? Under the circumstances the only way to get rid of the golden hot potato was to hand it to a contractor who had the experience and administrative capability to absorb a lot of federal money quickly. It's a specialized skill; not every vendor has the accounting infrastructure to suck up hundreds of thousands or millions of federal dollars overnight with all the bogus "controls" attached to it.
I'm convinced the golden hot potato effect is no accident. Somebody always makes a ridiculous profit off these things. The ultimate cause of this problem isn't the guy who's handed the hot potato. It's politicians doing their cronies a favor buy turning a federal grant into something that can't possibly be spent wisely.
Who do you want to perform surgery on you in 30 years?
An H-1B doctor from India, naturally. Of course given the inconsistency I've seen in H-1B labor, that's a nightmare scenario, but we're not paying the price now.
This is the problem with direct democracy in California. To govern or manage anything, you have to make trade offs, but ballot propositions don't do that. They ask people "do you want to stop the growth of taxation?" Of course the answer is yes. "Would you like more services?" Of course the answer is yes. It's no wonder the state is a financial and educational basket case.
The public schools have become a jobs program contaminated by labor politics.
Well, let's accept that is true for a moment. That is an unpleasant fact, but shouldn't the *results* of public education matter?
Some years ago somebody who worked with me came to me with a problem. He had a friend who made high quality penny whistles. The friend new how to make a penny whistle tuned to A below middle C, and had the formula for going up a half step. The problem is he wanted to make an A-flat whistle, but didn't know how to rearrange the formula. So my coworker brought the formula to me, I rearranged it, calculated the correct length then checked the answer by running it back through the original formula. I asked the guy, "Didn't you take algebra in high school?" He said, "I did well in it, but I don't know how to use it." This was a highly educated person with a PhD in anthropology.
Now I have kids in public high school, and their entire public education has placed a much higher emphasis on reasoning skills. They started in on word problems *in the first grade*, and by now most of the kids entering high school could easily solve the penny whistle problem.
The education my kids have received is in almost every particular head and shoulders over anything anybody I knew in my generation got, and that's the way it should be. Every generation should produce a following generation better educated than itself. If the schools in your town or state aren't doing that, then don't blame it on the unions, because we have unions in our town and the unionized teachers are doing a much better job than they were thirty years ago. You might dislike unions for *other* reasons, and those reasons may be legitimate, but it is certainly not the case that unionized teachers automatically do a crummy job. If yours are doing a crummy job the unions might be contributing to that, but the fundamental problem rests in the people of your town and state. If they cared enough, they'd have done their duty to the next generation.
Right. There is no benefit to you at all from living in a country with an educated population. None.
And indeed there is a downside. Being around educated people can make you feel inferior. Have you noticed how "elite" when applied to someone's knowledge or intellectual accomplishments is now a pejorative -- excuse me, I mean a bad word? Curiously it's not a bad word when applied to people who are "elite" due to their power or wealth.
While i'm from MA, and I'm quite happy that my state is tied for first... but... 44%?????
Well, you can produce any percentage of "pass" you want to get by choosing the corresponding height for the bar. For years people wrung their hands over declining SAT scores, but what they didn't know is that the SATs were recalibrated every year to produce a desired mean score. And before you break out your tinfoil hat, there turns out to be a good reason for the engineering declining scores from the 60s to the 80s: the percentage of high school students headed to college was increasing, so students who would not have considered going to college in 1960 felt they had to in 1990.
In any case no matter what grade level or proficiency level you choose, MA is at or near the top of the heap in national rankings. No other state is so consistently at the top of the rankings, which is a glass half empty/half full situation for you. Mass students are the best all-around educated in the country (yay), but that's not all that hard (uh oh).
Well, the problem with facts is that there are so many of them, and so many kinds.
Yes, you want students to come out with a pretty good database of factual knowledge, but ultimately it's futile if they don't have the ability to evaluate putative facts critically, even (or especially) the ones they're *supposed* to believe.
And yet, when I force them to do something like wire up a "2 way lighting circuit" with batteries and an LED
I have logged and forwarded that to your state Department of Youth Protection.
So well proven that skepticism is deemed irrational.
If we saw genuine skepticism in the denialist camp we'd consider that a good thing. What we see is a non-negatable faith in the the opposite position to scientific consensus.