Is this a joke? The only example in that set holds true is food, because you might starve before it gets cheaper. I have heard many people say:
"I will wait buying a new car, because next year it is cheaper, and my current one still works fine."
Maybe yours doesn't work fine, but most people have a car that works, and if it doesn't, they can pay someone to repair it. The reason the phone example is better is because phones are much more noticeably improving in performance and lowering in costs than cars do, but cars also get cheaper and better as time passes.
Also look at mortgages: "I will wait with fully paying my mortgage, because I get to mortgage payments from my taxes, and investing in bitcoin might have a higher return". When I was a kid, I heard the same about student loans and the stock market. Now that Trump has a passed a tax cut, I am hearing "I will fully pay my mortgage this year, because of the tax cuts, my mortgage won't be deductible next year, so I'm paying it now".
Even with food, if you thought there was a half off sale tomorrow, but not today, you might wait on buying food. If you were very hungry, you might buy a day's worth of food today, and a week's worth of food tomorrow, rather than buy a week's worth of food today.
Deflation very much causes these effects. And I'm not convinced deflation is a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor. People who had bitcoin in the early days are now rich in bitcoin now. If you want to get that many bitcoins now, you will have exchange a lot more money (or electricity) than they did to get the same amount. Perhaps they were "poor" back then, but if you are poor now, that doesn't help you any.
Increase your estimate to longer than it will take, even with changing requirements. Tell your boss, "this part of the spec is undefined, but in the worst case, it will take X days." When you find out a spec change will increase your estimate, tell your boss immediately.
Estimation is definitely a skill, but it's one that can be developed.
Boss: We need to implement this.
Me: Okay, but it will take at least a few additional days, and I'll need to look at it closer before I can confirm that estimate.
Boss: But we can't give you additional time, we've already allocated the budget and the customer is expecting it on time!
Me: Well the original spec doesn't have it and I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.
Boss: But sales already told the customer that we already included that feature! Do it!
Considering my experience, estimation skills are actually skills in lying in the original estimate to give yourself enough time when the inevitable spec changes occur. And without spec changes, that "double all estimates" is still good advice, but the one I do is bump it up to the next unit of time (think it will take a day? tell them a week. Think it will take a week? Tell them a month.).
Also, bosses will come with ludicrous demands sometimes. The engineers at a previous place I worked at commonly told the bosses "don't schedule more than one miracle per project". The message we were trying to convey was yes, sometimes we can pull off miracles, but that's not something to rely on.
Humans don't eat insects much? I don't know where you live, but you need to get out more. In Mexico City there are huge sacks of grasshoppers for sale in the markets, and in Korea silkworm pupae (is that an insect? maybe I'm stretching it) is a common snack and sold everywhere.
I'm sure many people can come up with many other common examples that evade me because I don't travel everywhere in the world. Wikipedia says far more about health, nutrition, and popular examples in movies than where people eat insects.
I hear this all the time. Sweden is less population dense than the US is! Estonia is less population dense than the US is! Norway is much less population dense than the US is! Why does New York City and San Francisco (the most population dense areas in the United States) get slower and more expensive internet than rural areas in Germany? Hey, Mexico has slower and more expensive internet than the US, and it is more population dense! Maybe it's an inverse relationship after all!
If you plot population density vs internet quality in countries, I don't think you'll come up with any clear trend. And if you only look at urban environments, internet in the USA is still crappy, which is another reason not to bother considering population when wondering why US telcos charge lots of money for low quality service.
I love perl, but there is a great example of why I think perl gets a lot of hate. It's pretty rough.
Having tried to use livejournal, reddit, and a few others, I note that the most difficult to use projects seem to use perl (Livejournal I'm looking at you).
Having said that, I think a lot of people are looking for a good place that has a slashdot-like community talking about nerd stuff. Hacker News is pretty good, but there is quite a different focus there.
So explain to me why some of the most catholic countries in the world have some of the lowest birth rates in the world? Look at Italy (1.4 children/mother) and Spain (1.39 children/mother). Where as protestant Netherlands is 1.79. For an example in the Americas, Colombia (2.1 children/mother) ties the USA.
As other people are telling you, the fertility rate correlates far better to wealth and education than religion, or even what type of religion.
"Unique" - are you serious? Sorry, but the amount of nationalist conceit in that statement makes me want to barf.
I don't know what country you are from.
You can pick on the word "unique", but whether it is unique or not, I am going to hope for and work toward a government that is free from corruption. It may be a bit idealistic to do so, but I am going to argue that it is just not the way things are done here, and if they are done that way, it is broken.
If someone says "America is supposed to be unique in being a country where that is not how things work", yes it is nationalistic think that America should be unique that way, but I believe it is very important that people think that things should not work that way in their country. Because if you believe it should work that way, you won't try to change it.
And if all you see in that comment is the nationalism, not someone trying to say "hey we should be better than that", I can suggest a thousand other things to focus on. Nationalism may be used for good or ill, and I know a great many people who think it is used for ill more often than not, and a slightly nicer/less snarky comment would be "I'm from _____ -- and things are not supposed to work that way here either.:P".
Thank you for explaining that, as I didn't even figure out that from the summary.
After a little research (karma link whoring, here I come!) I figured out the web page providing links to where other entities hosts files is here: http://sideload.com/
As far as I can tell, it is run by the same guy who runs mp3tunes.com, and is pretty well integrated, but by just going to mp3tunes.com I did not find anything what you are describing. I found it by going through his blog and reading some of his own descriptions of the lawsuits.
Unfortunately, it's a dreadful interface. I was hoping for something to open up in Songbird and hit play, instead, each song opens up a new webpage, and then, if you're using Songbird, only that one track is on the webpage. If you're using a proper web browser, they have javascript players, "load to locker", "load to mobile", with "Download this track" in small font in comparisons to all the javascript options that actually does link to the file in question.
The company I work for has a lot of long-distance commuters. Rather than telecommuting, it instituted a four-day, ten-hour work week. That shaves 20% off the driving time right there, without any difficulties. And all those people who were already working ten hour days got a free day off each week.
For the rest of us, the three day weekends are awesome! Ten hour days... well that three day weekend every week pretty much makes up for it.
I thought I heard cash for flights and one-way are possible indicators of potential issues. I did not dream that one up, you get harassed if you do that these days. just like if you change airlines last minute you get the special search. No, you didn't dream that up, it was a flag for "issues" for a long time. I'm not sure it still is. Cash isn't, if you go through a travel agency (it doesn't really show up anywhere except there) and I doubt you could actually buy a ticket with cash direct from an airline (I've bought a ticket with cash recently from a travel agent, didn't even notice the difference). Regarding one-way, I don't really know, I haven't flown one-way in a long time. They don't look at you funny when you book a flight to one city, and return from another, I can tell you that much.
My argument is that this shouldn't be considered suspicious behaviour. Cash is looked at suspiciously in general, which it shouldn't be, and I personally have been enough situations where I had to get from here to there to here and only one leg is via airplane.
I will allow the exception for immigrations officials to look at you funny for one way tickets. Although a couple years ago, my boss flew to Tahiti, took a boat from there to Santiago, Chile, returned from there, I never did ask him how the immigrations officials felt about that.
I think people that pay cash for a one-way airline ticket need extra scrutiny. Huh, why?
The other two I can see and understand. But one-way tickets? More common (and commonly needed) than you might imagine. Cash? You're well-identified on an airplane ticket. Perhaps you don't have to show identity before you buy one, but you pretty much have to at the gate. And it has to match the name on the ticket, or all sorts of kerfluffle appears (and I've witnessed people missing flights for a simple misspelling of a name).
And I think that was part of the point--if you're going to look at something that has a huge false rate (one-way tickets), you're wasting a lot of time.
OTOH, I agree with you, some security checking should be done, it'll never be perfect, but we do need to minimize chasing red herrings.
I remember on my Apple II, when you first turned it on, the screen was filled with inverse '@' symbols. Then the screen would quickly blank (or be replaced by spaces) and the startup sequence would go.
But if it hadn't been off for very long, not all the memory would go to zero (chr$('\0') is the inverse '@'). So, if you turned your computer back on with in a certain time, you could either see the screen it had when it shut off, or more likely, rows of the screen would be inverse '@'s, and rows would be the previous screen. Sometimes with garbage characters interspersed, depending on how long the computer was off.
I never did investigate how long the non-screen portions of the memory lasted, but the screen-portions (starting at $300, I think) would be gone in ten seconds.
- He complains about telnet.exe not being available, despite the fact that he doesn't use it normally in the first place?
I'd complain about that too. Despite that we should all use ssh, muds have much better clients than telnet would ever be, and weather underground no longer has a telnet interface, it happens just often enough that you need a telnet client. Perhaps to test port 80. Perhaps to test another port you are trying to program for. And I too don't normally use the builtin telnet (I installed cygwin's telnet last time I tried), it does happens often enough that if I do need telnet for some bizzaro reason, frequently I don't have the computer I use every day. And the amount of space the telnet.exe takes up might as well be a rounding error in Vista hard disk requirements.
Most of the posts here simply ignore the "sexual selection" part of the evolution.
It's because the only people who don't get laid are either people who don't want to, or spend all their time whining about how they don't get laid.
Seriously. For all the jokes "slashdotters can't get laid", we all know people who will sleep with anyone, and if you really want to get your genes passed on, it's really up to choice whether you have kids or not.
It is the women who do the selecting, and they are more choosy than ever.
Actually, my anecdotal evidence says that most men generally don't want children, and most of the women are looking for someone who does. Granted, most of them are looking for someone "who will make a good father", but they aren't that fussy, and will pass on the stud muffin (or the brain surgeon) in exchange for someone who also wants children.
But I doubt my experience is entirely representative. What I should say is "Citation needed".
The proof of this could be the fact that people in rich countries have fewer children.
Almost every country is experiencing lower birth rates. Ethiopia has gone from 7 kids/woman to 5 kids/woman between 2000 and 2007. Between 1990 and 2000 it was more dramatic (maybe not for Ethiopia but for the world as a whole, I don't have the statistics immediately on hand). Of course, one might argue that the whole world is getting richer, but I don't think that is the cause.
You say some interesting things but I have no idea how true they are. If you can point me to some things that back up what you say, I'd be interested.
Can I pester you about your website? The website looks like it hasn't been updated since February 2005. The mailing list looks like it had a message in June of 2004.
But I'm inferring from the way you are talking about the group that it is still active. Is there more info? Is the group in stasis but you (or others trying) to revive it?
I think you missed my point. If you get refused because the border guard thinks he needs to make a quota or is just having a pissy day, it means next time you'll be subject to higher scrutiny. And likely refused with the reason "was refused before".
You can argue "his papers weren't in order" but that's not how the system is supposed to work--the airports are supposed to make sure he has his papers in order _before_ he leaves.
This may not affect you--unless you go on holiday somewhere and when you return they decide your passport is a fake--but it affects me because my family will no longer visit me due to US rules. And they live in countries with visa waiver agreements with the US.
There are a great many stories out there regarding US refusing entry to people who otherwise look like they have no suspicion. And that google search I linked to can not seem to find most of them. My google-fu is weak today.:(
Uh, yah. Try going to a number of so-called 'free' countries in Europe, like say, Germany. Or France. Or Great Britain.
You think they don't collect information about you, your purpose in visiting, your destination, etc, for future reference? Do you think they destroy that information once they're 'done with it'? Where did this illusion that you can update/correct/view any of this information comes from? What kind of idiotic self-important ignorant prick seriously thinks that he has any chance of doing so?
Of those, the only country that asks me my purpose in visiting and my destination when I enter is Great Britain.
Unfortunately, what happens when you have to choose between lying and getting into the US in a timely manner for something you didn't do? There are many stories of people honestly answer yes to
# Have you ever been refused admission to the U.S.
for reasons beyond their control, but later, get refused again for being refused before. A google search will help you find all sorts of stories about being refused entry, including a Belgian UN diplomat, Robert Fisk, many others (though not the one about a violin teacher I was looking for).
Once you are refused, for any reason, even if it's a mistake or "your papers were not in order", it becomes much harder to be allowed entry again. And I could see people lying about that, just so they can make it to their UN meetings on time.
Because it is offtopic. Ratchet and Clank being a good game has nothing to do with the PlayStation being a "Hacker's Paradise", even if Ratchet and Clank were mentioned in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a joke? The only example in that set holds true is food, because you might starve before it gets cheaper. I have heard many people say:
"I will wait buying a new car, because next year it is cheaper, and my current one still works fine."
Maybe yours doesn't work fine, but most people have a car that works, and if it doesn't, they can pay someone to repair it. The reason the phone example is better is because phones are much more noticeably improving in performance and lowering in costs than cars do, but cars also get cheaper and better as time passes.
Also look at mortgages: "I will wait with fully paying my mortgage, because I get to mortgage payments from my taxes, and investing in bitcoin might have a higher return". When I was a kid, I heard the same about student loans and the stock market. Now that Trump has a passed a tax cut, I am hearing "I will fully pay my mortgage this year, because of the tax cuts, my mortgage won't be deductible next year, so I'm paying it now".
Even with food, if you thought there was a half off sale tomorrow, but not today, you might wait on buying food. If you were very hungry, you might buy a day's worth of food today, and a week's worth of food tomorrow, rather than buy a week's worth of food today.
Deflation very much causes these effects. And I'm not convinced deflation is a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor. People who had bitcoin in the early days are now rich in bitcoin now. If you want to get that many bitcoins now, you will have exchange a lot more money (or electricity) than they did to get the same amount. Perhaps they were "poor" back then, but if you are poor now, that doesn't help you any.
You've never written code in perl, have you?
I've met several people who live in Old Lyme and they're always thrilled to tell someone it's where Lyme's disease was named after.
Oregon has no annual inspection. Multnomah county does (the area around Portland) but the rest of the state does not.
Boss: We need to implement this.
Me: Okay, but it will take at least a few additional days, and I'll need to look at it closer before I can confirm that estimate.
Boss: But we can't give you additional time, we've already allocated the budget and the customer is expecting it on time!
Me: Well the original spec doesn't have it and I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.
Boss: But sales already told the customer that we already included that feature! Do it!
Considering my experience, estimation skills are actually skills in lying in the original estimate to give yourself enough time when the inevitable spec changes occur. And without spec changes, that "double all estimates" is still good advice, but the one I do is bump it up to the next unit of time (think it will take a day? tell them a week. Think it will take a week? Tell them a month.).
Also, bosses will come with ludicrous demands sometimes. The engineers at a previous place I worked at commonly told the bosses "don't schedule more than one miracle per project". The message we were trying to convey was yes, sometimes we can pull off miracles, but that's not something to rely on.
Using more than 4GB was a big reason I upgraded from WinXP.
Other than that... well I use XP in virtual machines a lot still, and for work, and...
Humans don't eat insects much? I don't know where you live, but you need to get out more. In Mexico City there are huge sacks of grasshoppers for sale in the markets, and in Korea silkworm pupae (is that an insect? maybe I'm stretching it) is a common snack and sold everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper#As_food
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi
I'm sure many people can come up with many other common examples that evade me because I don't travel everywhere in the world. Wikipedia says far more about health, nutrition, and popular examples in movies than where people eat insects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy#Current_examples
I hear this all the time. Sweden is less population dense than the US is! Estonia is less population dense than the US is! Norway is much less population dense than the US is! Why does New York City and San Francisco (the most population dense areas in the United States) get slower and more expensive internet than rural areas in Germany? Hey, Mexico has slower and more expensive internet than the US, and it is more population dense! Maybe it's an inverse relationship after all!
If you plot population density vs internet quality in countries, I don't think you'll come up with any clear trend. And if you only look at urban environments, internet in the USA is still crappy, which is another reason not to bother considering population when wondering why US telcos charge lots of money for low quality service.
I've tried to run slashcode before.
I love perl, but there is a great example of why I think perl gets a lot of hate. It's pretty rough.
Having tried to use livejournal, reddit, and a few others, I note that the most difficult to use projects seem to use perl (Livejournal I'm looking at you).
Having said that, I think a lot of people are looking for a good place that has a slashdot-like community talking about nerd stuff. Hacker News is pretty good, but there is quite a different focus there.
it's fairly clear cut and simple to know what is piracy and what is pornography
Actually, no, no it's not, and what is piracy and pornography can be considered widely different in different places.
So explain to me why some of the most catholic countries in the world have some of the lowest birth rates in the world? Look at Italy (1.4 children/mother) and Spain (1.39 children/mother). Where as protestant Netherlands is 1.79. For an example in the Americas, Colombia (2.1 children/mother) ties the USA.
As other people are telling you, the fertility rate correlates far better to wealth and education than religion, or even what type of religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate
"Unique" - are you serious? Sorry, but the amount of nationalist conceit in that statement makes me want to barf.
I don't know what country you are from.
You can pick on the word "unique", but whether it is unique or not, I am going to hope for and work toward a government that is free from corruption. It may be a bit idealistic to do so, but I am going to argue that it is just not the way things are done here, and if they are done that way, it is broken.
If someone says "America is supposed to be unique in being a country where that is not how things work", yes it is nationalistic think that America should be unique that way, but I believe it is very important that people think that things should not work that way in their country. Because if you believe it should work that way, you won't try to change it.
And if all you see in that comment is the nationalism, not someone trying to say "hey we should be better than that", I can suggest a thousand other things to focus on. Nationalism may be used for good or ill, and I know a great many people who think it is used for ill more often than not, and a slightly nicer/less snarky comment would be "I'm from _____ -- and things are not supposed to work that way here either. :P".
Thank you for explaining that, as I didn't even figure out that from the summary.
After a little research (karma link whoring, here I come!) I figured out the web page providing links to where other entities hosts files is here:
http://sideload.com/
As far as I can tell, it is run by the same guy who runs mp3tunes.com, and is pretty well integrated, but by just going to mp3tunes.com I did not find anything what you are describing. I found it by going through his blog and reading some of his own descriptions of the lawsuits.
Unfortunately, it's a dreadful interface. I was hoping for something to open up in Songbird and hit play, instead, each song opens up a new webpage, and then, if you're using Songbird, only that one track is on the webpage. If you're using a proper web browser, they have javascript players, "load to locker", "load to mobile", with "Download this track" in small font in comparisons to all the javascript options that actually does link to the file in question.
The company I work for has a lot of long-distance commuters. Rather than telecommuting, it instituted a four-day, ten-hour work week. That shaves 20% off the driving time right there, without any difficulties. And all those people who were already working ten hour days got a free day off each week.
For the rest of us, the three day weekends are awesome! Ten hour days... well that three day weekend every week pretty much makes up for it.
My argument is that this shouldn't be considered suspicious behaviour. Cash is looked at suspiciously in general, which it shouldn't be, and I personally have been enough situations where I had to get from here to there to here and only one leg is via airplane.
I will allow the exception for immigrations officials to look at you funny for one way tickets. Although a couple years ago, my boss flew to Tahiti, took a boat from there to Santiago, Chile, returned from there, I never did ask him how the immigrations officials felt about that.
The other two I can see and understand. But one-way tickets? More common (and commonly needed) than you might imagine. Cash? You're well-identified on an airplane ticket. Perhaps you don't have to show identity before you buy one, but you pretty much have to at the gate. And it has to match the name on the ticket, or all sorts of kerfluffle appears (and I've witnessed people missing flights for a simple misspelling of a name).
And I think that was part of the point--if you're going to look at something that has a huge false rate (one-way tickets), you're wasting a lot of time.
OTOH, I agree with you, some security checking should be done, it'll never be perfect, but we do need to minimize chasing red herrings.
I suspect he is.
I remember on my Apple II, when you first turned it on, the screen was filled with inverse '@' symbols. Then the screen would quickly blank (or be replaced by spaces) and the startup sequence would go.
But if it hadn't been off for very long, not all the memory would go to zero (chr$('\0') is the inverse '@'). So, if you turned your computer back on with in a certain time, you could either see the screen it had when it shut off, or more likely, rows of the screen would be inverse '@'s, and rows would be the previous screen. Sometimes with garbage characters interspersed, depending on how long the computer was off.
I never did investigate how long the non-screen portions of the memory lasted, but the screen-portions (starting at $300, I think) would be gone in ten seconds.
- He complains about telnet.exe not being available, despite the fact that he doesn't use it normally in the first place?
I'd complain about that too. Despite that we should all use ssh, muds have much better clients than telnet would ever be, and weather underground no longer has a telnet interface, it happens just often enough that you need a telnet client. Perhaps to test port 80. Perhaps to test another port you are trying to program for. And I too don't normally use the builtin telnet (I installed cygwin's telnet last time I tried), it does happens often enough that if I do need telnet for some bizzaro reason, frequently I don't have the computer I use every day. And the amount of space the telnet.exe takes up might as well be a rounding error in Vista hard disk requirements.
Most of the posts here simply ignore the "sexual selection" part of the evolution.
It's because the only people who don't get laid are either people who don't want to, or spend all their time whining about how they don't get laid.
Seriously. For all the jokes "slashdotters can't get laid", we all know people who will sleep with anyone, and if you really want to get your genes passed on, it's really up to choice whether you have kids or not.
It is the women who do the selecting, and they are more choosy than ever.
Actually, my anecdotal evidence says that most men generally don't want children, and most of the women are looking for someone who does. Granted, most of them are looking for someone "who will make a good father", but they aren't that fussy, and will pass on the stud muffin (or the brain surgeon) in exchange for someone who also wants children.
But I doubt my experience is entirely representative. What I should say is "Citation needed".
The proof of this could be the fact that people in rich countries have fewer children.
Almost every country is experiencing lower birth rates. Ethiopia has gone from 7 kids/woman to 5 kids/woman between 2000 and 2007. Between 1990 and 2000 it was more dramatic (maybe not for Ethiopia but for the world as a whole, I don't have the statistics immediately on hand). Of course, one might argue that the whole world is getting richer, but I don't think that is the cause.
You say some interesting things but I have no idea how true they are. If you can point me to some things that back up what you say, I'd be interested.
Can I pester you about your website? The website looks like it hasn't been updated since February 2005. The mailing list looks like it had a message in June of 2004.
But I'm inferring from the way you are talking about the group that it is still active. Is there more info? Is the group in stasis but you (or others trying) to revive it?
Thank you for you time.
Did you miss the part where there is only one company that provides navigation data?
I think you missed my point. If you get refused because the border guard thinks he needs to make a quota or is just having a pissy day, it means next time you'll be subject to higher scrutiny. And likely refused with the reason "was refused before".
Belgians don't need visas to enter the US, anyway:
http://theroadtothehorizon.blogspot.com/2007/02/day-i-got-exiled-from-us.html
You can argue "his papers weren't in order" but that's not how the system is supposed to work--the airports are supposed to make sure he has his papers in order _before_ he leaves.
This may not affect you--unless you go on holiday somewhere and when you return they decide your passport is a fake--but it affects me because my family will no longer visit me due to US rules. And they live in countries with visa waiver agreements with the US.
There are a great many stories out there regarding US refusing entry to people who otherwise look like they have no suspicion. And that google search I linked to can not seem to find most of them. My google-fu is weak today.
Of those, the only country that asks me my purpose in visiting and my destination when I enter is Great Britain.
I was born in Great Britain.
# Have you ever been refused admission to the U.S.
for reasons beyond their control, but later, get refused again for being refused before. A google search will help you find all sorts of stories about being refused entry, including a Belgian UN diplomat, Robert Fisk, many others (though not the one about a violin teacher I was looking for). Once you are refused, for any reason, even if it's a mistake or "your papers were not in order", it becomes much harder to be allowed entry again. And I could see people lying about that, just so they can make it to their UN meetings on time.
Because it is offtopic. Ratchet and Clank being a good game has nothing to do with the PlayStation being a "Hacker's Paradise", even if Ratchet and Clank were mentioned in the article.