I have most of the Sun Java J2EE developer stack (just missing web services) and I'll be the first to admit that I'm a mid-level J2EE developer. The cert just says you understand the concepts, but in the real world you'll need to deal with numerous third-party libraries and their interactions, plus volumes of legacy code written by people who DIDN't understand the concepts. And that's before you get into how the party line is sometimes crap -- nobody voluntarily uses EJB but that's all the "business components" cert covers.
However I still recommend going for a Sun cert (or any other hard cert) for one simple reason. It forces you to become competent in all areas. When preparing for every cert I've discovered major gaps in my knowledge. I'm still weak in those areas, but now know enough to know how to ask intelligent questions so I can learn more.
Don't forget slander. Uncovering real abuse is important, but at what cost? Some of it is laughable, but a lot of it will be taken at face value by people with little net savvy but real power to hire and fire, etc. With "untraceable, uncensorable" content you can never remove the lies no matter how throughly they've been proven to be false and malicious. "Fight bad speech with good speech" is a good argument against prior censorship, but nobody would say it's a good idea once said speech has been found to be legally indefensible in court.
Then there's the whole issue of "not necessarily criminal but really stupid". The address of the local domestic violence 'safe house'. Pictures of every detective on the local police force (keeping them from doing any undercover work, e.g., stringing out somebody looking for a murder-for-hire).
That's been discussed in the personal finance books. There's not the same tactile feedback -- you "know" you're spending $50 instead of $20, but you can't "feel" it. It's the same thing with checks -- you know you're paying $400 instead of $250 for a new monitor, but you aren't actually counting out over 50% more bills.
Yes, but that's just a scientific explanation for a long-known behavior, and it sounds like the study just showed that everyone does it the pleasure/pain analysis unconsciously. Some of us just raise the pain level a bit.
I was shocked when I started doing this five years ago or so, and now the only places I use credit cards (or even retail checks) are situations where my behavior wouldn't be changed (e.g., at gas stations) and when it's a big ticket item and I want the legal protection credit cards provide.
This is why the financial advice that you always pay cash, not by check or credit card, helps you keep within your budget. I seem to recall that people cut expenses by 30% or so once they started forking over 2-3 $20s for dinner with a friend instead of a little piece of plastic.
MySQL? Be sure you have a robust database first and work around that. I don't know if MySQL can handle high loads gracefully now, but in the past it's been known to flake out and corrupt the database. Not a good thing if that takes out your phones.
Performance is always an issue, but there are some standard techniques for that. E.g., connection pooling (where a single connection is reused for 100-ish queries or 15 seconds before being discarded), caching read-mostly data, pushing as much of your logic into stored procedures as possible, etc.
(Remember that it's always far cheaper to do things in the database itself than it is to push data to your application and then push the results back. I have some updates that take ~15 minutes in my app optimized to minimize queries... and ~10 seconds when done via a loop in a stored procedure even though the latter uses a less efficient algorithm!)
BTW I like PostgreSQL. Solid referential integrity, triggers, stored procedures, etc. Even support for user-defined types and functions written in native C.
The games is based on the wretched (as a theological work even more than as a literary work) "Left Behind" series.
I can't recommend Slacktivist highly enough. He's a true evangelical associated with a seminary and has been writing "Left Behind Fridays" dissecting the first book for over a year. (He also discusses many other things.)
For those who have only seen screeching TV evangelicals, Fred ("Slacktivist") is an old school one. As he has repeatedly said, he reaches out through hospitality. Here, I see you are tired. Let me offer you a chair. Are you hungry, let me check my kitchen. You're free to ask him how he can be so pleasant and helpful and he'll tell you about Christ. You're equally free to enjoy his hospitality and then move on.
It should go without saying that he's appalled by this game.
P.S., I'm now more Buddhist than anything else, but I wouldn't hesitate to go to a weekly sermon by him. I rarely come away from his blog without fresh insights.
Someone upstream posted a cite to the actual law covering this. Suits require that the plantiff can provide remedy. Jim has absolutely no control over what Mary says and can neither compel or to say something nor restrain her from saying it. (Modulo an actual advertising contract, of course.)
A lawyer could file the paperwork anyway, but it wouldn't survive the first encounter with a judge and the lawyer would know that. That means threats are nothing but intimidation, not legitimate attempts to get redress, an state and federal bars take a dim view of that.
BTW I think others have made a compelling case that this is a bogus story anyway.
Google is the one ranking entries. The blogger has absolutely no control over what Google does. So why is this even his question?
Think about it. No matter how frustrating it may be, can Bob sue Jim because Mary said Jim was a better lover? Of course not.
For that matter, if a lawyer is involved hasn't this already gone far enough to bring in the state bar? Lawyers can push the envelope, but they can't threaten to sue somebody when they know they have absolutely no chance of prevailing.
A few years ago a local city learned that somebody was planning to establish a group home for sex offenders on parole. The community freaked and demanded a law that unrelated sex offenders couldn't live together.
The professional (and some sex offenders) said that was a Really Bad Idea since the offenders didn't encourage each other or share tips. They offered support to each other when temptation occurred, the support that only somebody who's been there can offer. I think they even had statistics that showed that recidivision rates of offenders in group homes was substantially lower than offenders on their own, but there may be a selection effect on that.
It didn't sway the community, but I can see an online support group where offenders could turn if they're feeling shaky. In fact, I can see that online support group being anonymous, so offenders feel like they can ask for help without risking an unruly mob with pitchforks outside their door.
It's been said elsewhere, but bears repeating since the parent post has been moderated 'insightful' (snerk)
The problem isn't "hello, world!", it's maintaining the site after it's been live for awhile. JSP can use embedded scriptlets just like PHP, but unlike the latter we learned years ago how painful that is during later development and maintainance. So now it's standard practice to use MVC. It's a modest amount of extra work on the front end, but that's more than offset when (not if) we need to make substantial changes to the app.
Focusing on "hello, world!" is as silly as only looking at the first 5 seconds after jumping out of an airplane. At that point it doesn't matter that you skipped the parachute, but you'll be in a world of pain in a few minutes.
The constitution already has a mechanism for amendment. If we decide to drop the Second Amendment, we can ratify a second amendment (no pun intended) that revokes the current one.
We did that with prohibition.
What we have now (and ongoing) is a question over what the terms actually mean today. That's a subtle question on many levels, esp. in a country where you have millions of people who live in cities with substantial police forces, and other people who live in rural counties where there may be one deputy on duty and it will take him 2 hours to answer a summons for help.
BTW, don't use the term 'egghead'. That anti-intellectual term comes from Nazi brownshirts referring to how easily intellectual's heads shattered, or something equally violent. We have enough anti-intellectualism in this country already. Just look at those damn Geico commercials.
(Seriously. The 'modern' humans are assholes who can mock or outshout the cavemen but that's all... and don't feel any shame about it. The 'cavemen' are the ones who clearly articulate their opinion and accomplishments.)
And don't use the term 'egghead'. It's origin is Nazi brown-shirts referring to how the skulls of intellectuals shatter when they hit the ground. (Or something equally violent.) We have enough anti-intellectualism in this country already.
Look at why water cannons aren't used much in the US, although they are used elsewhere.
It's not because we're cool cats afraid to get wet.
It's because water cannons were the "crowd control" measure of choice when putting down civil rights protestors. These were people marching for the right of "negroes" to be treated like human beings, and the authorities found that unacceptable and dispused the crowds with high pressure water. Don't forget that this was an era when governors would shut down universities rather than let a black man attend classes, and there were many small towns with dirt lots which had been public swimming pools, but filled when dirt when courts ruled that the black children must also be allowed to play in them.
We hope that millimeter-wave crowd control will only be used to break up riots after superbowl games.
We pray that millimeter-wave crowd control will never be used to break up peaceful protests after the public gets fed up with burying yet another soldier because of a pointless war. Vietnam, Iraq, Liechenstein. Whatever.
We may be talking about different things with polar bears. It's not just that populations are declining or underweight, it's -how- they're dying. Drowning, esp., is uncharacteristic in a species that can easily swim tens of miles in arctic water. Something profound is going on.
An analogy that came to mind is lung cancer. In the 19th Century lung cancer was so rare that a doctor may only see it a few times in his career, and always the topic of discussion in the local community when it occurred.
A century later lifespans were significantly longer, overall health is significantly higher... and lung disease has remained the #1 or #2 killer for decades. It's worthwhile to look at what's changed in the environment, even if it appears to be unrelated.
The answer (we believe now) was the commercialization and social acceptance of cigarette smoking and industrial/vehicular air pollution. The latter was effectively handled by the "clean air act" (which the republicans have been trying to repeal, btw), but the tobacco industry managed to create an illusion of controversy over the impact of cigarette smoke for decades.
Even though lung cancer rates were clearly linked to cummulative usage... and there was a significant drop-off once people kicked the habit.
That's why it's not important whether it's one bear or three, it's the overall nature of the bears. It's a problem when all of the bears are underweight, when infant mortality skyrockets (from lack of nutritional resources), when bears are drowning because they're too weak or the ice pack has gotten too thin. Something's going on.
A huge step is to put in unit testing / regression testing that's run nightly, and idealy with every build. You should at least cover the basics, e.g., at the persistence level can you create/read/update/delete a record? If you load a parent object, do dependent objects get loaded as well? At the presentation layer you can verify that a missing field will set the right error message.
You still need to do additional testing, but this will catch the underlying errors that can cause flakiness -- and worse, bad workaround -- at the higher levels in your code.
The established Democrats wanted to focus on a handful of races in a few safe states. BFD -- the Democrats might have won a few seats but been totally unable to pull of a landslide.
In contrast, Dean insisted on rebuilding the party in all fifty states, even "when hell freezes over" states like Montana and Wyoming, and the "webroots" gave a forum for candidates (and way for them to raise money $5 and $10 at a time from hundreds or thousands of small contributors). Almost all of the "red to blue" races started out on the webroots, and every established pol would have insisted you were crazy if you told them that Cheney AND Bush would be in WYOMING, of all places, the week before the election to shore up the Republican candidate. People were openly ridiculed for suggesting that 80 seats would be in play, not 15 or so, yet the last I heard the number of seats in serious contention was 72 and climbing.
The world has changed. Get used to it.
BTW, go to the corner and put on the dunce cap if you think Dean shot off his mouth in 2004. He was trying to speak over a loud crowd after a long day, of course his voice was hoarse. The thing that Faux and ABC didn't bother telling you is that the mike was right in front of him and somehow able to filter out the crowd noise. (I don't know if it was mechanical shielding or if they did it electronically.) How do you think you would sound if someone had miked you in a crowded and extremely loud bar? Now multiply that ten-fold since you weren't talking all day. The mainstream media long ago decided to focus on 'reactions' instead of actually covering the news and they ran with the story primarily because the Republicans were oh so happy to make a strong contender look like an idiot.
I disagree. The defendant can reasonably ask that the RIAA name, specifically, what music files the RIAA believes he has illegally downloaded. I think it's safe to assume that the RIAA would never agree to this, but that bounces it to the judge and any judge willing to hold the RIAA to the usual standards is probably unlikely to sign off on an unrestricted fishing expedition.
After all there's no harm to the RIAA in requiring it to demonstrate it has reasonable cause to proceed. If they say the defendant has 100 illegal files and the search only finds 70, that's still good enough to warrant an unrestricted search for all audio files on the disk. But if the search can't find any of those files then it's clear that the RIAA would just be on a fishing expedition and it would needlessly harm the defendant to proceed.
This is NOT a First Amendment issue. The FA only applies to government entities and organizations acting on its behalf. It does not apply to private entities.
Second, even the FA is not absolute. It's well-established that the government can limit the "time, manner and place" of public speech. E.g., you can't use a blowhorn on a public street in a residential neighborhood at 3 AM. There's also that whole 'FALSELY yelling fire in a crowded theater' point, but let's not go there since it does not mean what people think it means. Just look at how it's usually misquoted. (*)
Finally, "freedom of speech" is actually better described as "freedom to dissent" and refers to political speech. You have absolutely no right to demand that I pay attention to you. You have absolutely no right to demand that I not pay attention to Bob when Bob tells me to pay no attention to you.
To be honest I can't understand why the case wasn't thrown out immediately. I'm not even a lawyer yet I can think of several solid grounds for immediate dismissal with prejudice.
(*) Let us be absolutely clear. If you're in a crowded theater and you don't warn others of a fire, esp. in the late 19th/early 20th century when it was common to have massive loss of life in pre-fire-retardant theater fires, then you are a despicable human being not even worthy of being spat upon. You ignored an imminent threat to life and property, and towards what end?
In fact that very threat is why FALSELY yelling fire was so reprehensible. Anyone who did it had to know that people would panic and some would probably be injured. Broken bones are better than death, in the event of an actual fire, but if there is no fire....
A contemporary analogy may be going to the airport with a box of baking soda and flinging it across a concourse while shouting "anthrax!". Do you think people should just quietly leave if they think they see someone actually spreading anthrax spores?
Do you have any idea about how long 500 million years really is? Reputable scientists usually focus on the last few million years since the continents have been in approximately the same locations, solar output has been the same, etc.
Go back further and the earth is so different that it's hard to make meaningful correlations. How do you compare temps today vs. the temps when there was ocean circulation through the wide gap between North and South America? Or before the Himalayans rose and dominated weather patterns in south Asia?
What about Pangaea, or during the massive basalt flows as that supercontinent broke up?
Yet all of that is recent history when you're looking back 500 MY. Trying to compare these numbers is as silly as comparing your ability to lift a 20 kg box today vs. your ability to do it when you were 12.
On the technical side, I tend to agree with you that people pushing their certs are usually the people who can't push something experience. But that isn't necessarily a Bad Thing -- e.g., I had many years of experience as a C developer before migrating to Java. Sun certs showed that I was making a serious effort to transition, not just grabbing a copy of "Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours" and assuming that that was enough.
But businesses are not driven by the techies.
HR? They have no way to prioritize the hundreds of resumes they see. Third party certs, unless the techies tell them explicitly that certain certs are worthless, will move resumes to the top of the pile. In fact that's the main reason why I got my certs.
Sales? It won't matter in many shops, but if you sell your services it can be a selling point to be able to assure the clients that your development team is certified. In fact this process, run amok, is why the Microsoft certs became so disreputable a while back. Many shops started making it a condition of employment, and that made less qualified people get one just to get in the door. Then there's the people who cheated.... That's one of the reasons why many certs now require X years of experience.
Finally, on the technical side STUDYING FOR certs is a good way to ensure you have a good breadth of knowledge. It's far too easy to focus on what we know well and let the rest slip without even realizing it.
Network algorithms are useful in an astoundishing number of places, especially in those cases where all flows are either 0 or 1. You just need to expand you idea about what the networks and flows represent.
E.g., my professor used network algorithms when writing the software that matches medical schools and students. Each school prioritizes it's candidate students, each student prioritizes his schools. The program finds the best matches. He said it had taken many hours (12 hours?) to do originally, but with the network flow it was a few minutes on an old kaypro.
Another example was determining when teams are mathematically eliminated from playoffs. It sounds like a simple problem, but it isn't since a team could lose a game yet remain in the running because a different team lost its own game.
A decade ago these algorithms would be overkill for a kernel. Today... I can definitely see how these algorithms could make a difference in some places.
Remember the details of this case! Foley could have had sex with these teenagers, they were over the age of consent.
The reason why this case should end the career of Haskert et al isn't that Foley was creepy and didn't understand that "workplace" sex is always fraught with peril, it's:
1) there's a new federal law criminalizing sexual messages with anyone under 18. This is repub-stupid since many states have age of consent (for both sex and marriage) well under that age. It's one thing to protect teenagers from being haunted for a stupid mistake (which is the justification for covering 17 year olds under the 'kiddie porn' law), it's another thing to say what two HS seniors can send to each other.
But it's the law.
2) Foley was responsible for pushing that law through Congress.
So he knew the details of that law.
3) Foley has had a bad rep among the pages for years. Last I heard it was five years and counting.
So others knew he was taking far too much interest in these HS students.
Put it all together and Foley's actions are criminal but he's not some raving pedophile out of control. He's not even a "Dateline NBC" predator out for sex with underage minors. It can't be overstated that it would have been perfectly legal for him to meet these kids at the park then go home and **** like bunnies. He had a profound lack of judgement and is and will be paying for it.
But the GOP leadership... it has got to go. There is absolutely no way to defend keeping this information from the two other members of the Page supervisory committee... but rushing to inform the representative in charge of electing republicans to congress (NRCC) about the situation when the latest details emerged nearly a year ago. They're partisan hacks who put the interests of their party above the well-being of their underage charges and they should step down from their leadership positions immediately.
That's why you won't see Haskert and the others (Reynolds?) appearing in public much during the rest of the election cycle. They've done the indefensible and they know it.
The one thing this case doesn't involve is "children" and "IM". Children are under the age of consent and Foley would be facing very different charges. "IM" is already far stricter than what he could have said in person or on the phone, sent via postal mail, etc.
There are places in the west where a 500 mile range would be very useful. I've driven several 100+ sections of interstate, and it's probably an extra 50 miles to the next station beyond that.
How difficult will it be to deliver that much power (for an interstate!) to a remote location? What if that station is down for some reason?
P.S., in the worst cases you learn to fill up at every station. It's not that the distance to the next service station is so long, it's that the road may be blocked (rockslide, avalanche, etc.) just miles from that station and you'll be forced to backtrack.
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I have most of the Sun Java J2EE developer stack (just missing web services) and I'll be the first to admit that I'm a mid-level J2EE developer. The cert just says you understand the concepts, but in the real world you'll need to deal with numerous third-party libraries and their interactions, plus volumes of legacy code written by people who DIDN't understand the concepts. And that's before you get into how the party line is sometimes crap -- nobody voluntarily uses EJB but that's all the "business components" cert covers.
However I still recommend going for a Sun cert (or any other hard cert) for one simple reason. It forces you to become competent in all areas. When preparing for every cert I've discovered major gaps in my knowledge. I'm still weak in those areas, but now know enough to know how to ask intelligent questions so I can learn more.
Don't forget slander. Uncovering real abuse is important, but at what cost? Some of it is laughable, but a lot of it will be taken at face value by people with little net savvy but real power to hire and fire, etc. With "untraceable, uncensorable" content you can never remove the lies no matter how throughly they've been proven to be false and malicious. "Fight bad speech with good speech" is a good argument against prior censorship, but nobody would say it's a good idea once said speech has been found to be legally indefensible in court.
Then there's the whole issue of "not necessarily criminal but really stupid". The address of the local domestic violence 'safe house'. Pictures of every detective on the local police force (keeping them from doing any undercover work, e.g., stringing out somebody looking for a murder-for-hire).
That's been discussed in the personal finance books. There's not the same tactile feedback -- you "know" you're spending $50 instead of $20, but you can't "feel" it. It's the same thing with checks -- you know you're paying $400 instead of $250 for a new monitor, but you aren't actually counting out over 50% more bills.
Yes, but that's just a scientific explanation for a long-known behavior, and it sounds like the study just showed that everyone does it the pleasure/pain analysis unconsciously. Some of us just raise the pain level a bit.
I was shocked when I started doing this five years ago or so, and now the only places I use credit cards (or even retail checks) are situations where my behavior wouldn't be changed (e.g., at gas stations) and when it's a big ticket item and I want the legal protection credit cards provide.
This is why the financial advice that you always pay cash, not by check or credit card, helps you keep within your budget. I seem to recall that people cut expenses by 30% or so once they started forking over 2-3 $20s for dinner with a friend instead of a little piece of plastic.
MySQL? Be sure you have a robust database first and work around that. I don't know if MySQL can handle high loads gracefully now, but in the past it's been known to flake out and corrupt the database. Not a good thing if that takes out your phones.
Performance is always an issue, but there are some standard techniques for that. E.g., connection pooling (where a single connection is reused for 100-ish queries or 15 seconds before being discarded), caching read-mostly data, pushing as much of your logic into stored procedures as possible, etc.
(Remember that it's always far cheaper to do things in the database itself than it is to push data to your application and then push the results back. I have some updates that take ~15 minutes in my app optimized to minimize queries... and ~10 seconds when done via a loop in a stored procedure even though the latter uses a less efficient algorithm!)
BTW I like PostgreSQL. Solid referential integrity, triggers, stored procedures, etc. Even support for user-defined types and functions written in native C.
I can't recommend Slacktivist highly enough. He's a true evangelical associated with a seminary and has been writing "Left Behind Fridays" dissecting the first book for over a year. (He also discusses many other things.)
For those who have only seen screeching TV evangelicals, Fred ("Slacktivist") is an old school one. As he has repeatedly said, he reaches out through hospitality. Here, I see you are tired. Let me offer you a chair. Are you hungry, let me check my kitchen. You're free to ask him how he can be so pleasant and helpful and he'll tell you about Christ. You're equally free to enjoy his hospitality and then move on.
It should go without saying that he's appalled by this game.
P.S., I'm now more Buddhist than anything else, but I wouldn't hesitate to go to a weekly sermon by him. I rarely come away from his blog without fresh insights.
Someone upstream posted a cite to the actual law covering this. Suits require that the plantiff can provide remedy. Jim has absolutely no control over what Mary says and can neither compel or to say something nor restrain her from saying it. (Modulo an actual advertising contract, of course.)
A lawyer could file the paperwork anyway, but it wouldn't survive the first encounter with a judge and the lawyer would know that. That means threats are nothing but intimidation, not legitimate attempts to get redress, an state and federal bars take a dim view of that.
BTW I think others have made a compelling case that this is a bogus story anyway.
Google is the one ranking entries. The blogger has absolutely no control over what Google does. So why is this even his question?
Think about it. No matter how frustrating it may be, can Bob sue Jim because Mary said Jim was a better lover? Of course not.
For that matter, if a lawyer is involved hasn't this already gone far enough to bring in the state bar? Lawyers can push the envelope, but they can't threaten to sue somebody when they know they have absolutely no chance of prevailing.
What about support sites for sex offenders?
No, not that! Serious sites.
A few years ago a local city learned that somebody was planning to establish a group home for sex offenders on parole. The community freaked and demanded a law that unrelated sex offenders couldn't live together.
The professional (and some sex offenders) said that was a Really Bad Idea since the offenders didn't encourage each other or share tips. They offered support to each other when temptation occurred, the support that only somebody who's been there can offer. I think they even had statistics that showed that recidivision rates of offenders in group homes was substantially lower than offenders on their own, but there may be a selection effect on that.
It didn't sway the community, but I can see an online support group where offenders could turn if they're feeling shaky. In fact, I can see that online support group being anonymous, so offenders feel like they can ask for help without risking an unruly mob with pitchforks outside their door.
It's been said elsewhere, but bears repeating since the parent post has been moderated 'insightful' (snerk)
The problem isn't "hello, world!", it's maintaining the site after it's been live for awhile. JSP can use embedded scriptlets just like PHP, but unlike the latter we learned years ago how painful that is during later development and maintainance. So now it's standard practice to use MVC. It's a modest amount of extra work on the front end, but that's more than offset when (not if) we need to make substantial changes to the app.
Focusing on "hello, world!" is as silly as only looking at the first 5 seconds after jumping out of an airplane. At that point it doesn't matter that you skipped the parachute, but you'll be in a world of pain in a few minutes.
The constitution already has a mechanism for amendment. If we decide to drop the Second Amendment, we can ratify a second amendment (no pun intended) that revokes the current one.
We did that with prohibition.
What we have now (and ongoing) is a question over what the terms actually mean today. That's a subtle question on many levels, esp. in a country where you have millions of people who live in cities with substantial police forces, and other people who live in rural counties where there may be one deputy on duty and it will take him 2 hours to answer a summons for help.
http://cultureofchemistry.blogspot.com/2005/11/rad ar-and-chocolate-bar.html
BTW, don't use the term 'egghead'. That anti-intellectual term comes from Nazi brownshirts referring to how easily intellectual's heads shattered, or something equally violent. We have enough anti-intellectualism in this country already. Just look at those damn Geico commercials.
(Seriously. The 'modern' humans are assholes who can mock or outshout the cavemen but that's all... and don't feel any shame about it. The 'cavemen' are the ones who clearly articulate their opinion and accomplishments.)
http://cultureofchemistry.blogspot.com/2005/11/rad ar-and-chocolate-bar.html
And don't use the term 'egghead'. It's origin is Nazi brown-shirts referring to how the skulls of intellectuals shatter when they hit the ground. (Or something equally violent.) We have enough anti-intellectualism in this country already.
Look at why water cannons aren't used much in the US, although they are used elsewhere.
It's not because we're cool cats afraid to get wet.
It's because water cannons were the "crowd control" measure of choice when putting down civil rights protestors. These were people marching for the right of "negroes" to be treated like human beings, and the authorities found that unacceptable and dispused the crowds with high pressure water. Don't forget that this was an era when governors would shut down universities rather than let a black man attend classes, and there were many small towns with dirt lots which had been public swimming pools, but filled when dirt when courts ruled that the black children must also be allowed to play in them.
We hope that millimeter-wave crowd control will only be used to break up riots after superbowl games.
We pray that millimeter-wave crowd control will never be used to break up peaceful protests after the public gets fed up with burying yet another soldier because of a pointless war. Vietnam, Iraq, Liechenstein. Whatever.
We may be talking about different things with polar bears. It's not just that populations are declining or underweight, it's -how- they're dying. Drowning, esp., is uncharacteristic in a species that can easily swim tens of miles in arctic water. Something profound is going on.
An analogy that came to mind is lung cancer. In the 19th Century lung cancer was so rare that a doctor may only see it a few times in his career, and always the topic of discussion in the local community when it occurred.
A century later lifespans were significantly longer, overall health is significantly higher... and lung disease has remained the #1 or #2 killer for decades. It's worthwhile to look at what's changed in the environment, even if it appears to be unrelated.
The answer (we believe now) was the commercialization and social acceptance of cigarette smoking and industrial/vehicular air pollution. The latter was effectively handled by the "clean air act" (which the republicans have been trying to repeal, btw), but the tobacco industry managed to create an illusion of controversy over the impact of cigarette smoke for decades.
Even though lung cancer rates were clearly linked to cummulative usage... and there was a significant drop-off once people kicked the habit.
That's why it's not important whether it's one bear or three, it's the overall nature of the bears. It's a problem when all of the bears are underweight, when infant mortality skyrockets (from lack of nutritional resources), when bears are drowning because they're too weak or the ice pack has gotten too thin. Something's going on.
A huge step is to put in unit testing / regression testing that's run nightly, and idealy with every build. You should at least cover the basics, e.g., at the persistence level can you create/read/update/delete a record? If you load a parent object, do dependent objects get loaded as well? At the presentation layer you can verify that a missing field will set the right error message.
You still need to do additional testing, but this will catch the underlying errors that can cause flakiness -- and worse, bad workaround -- at the higher levels in your code.
Everything HAS changed.
The established Democrats wanted to focus on a handful of races in a few safe states. BFD -- the Democrats might have won a few seats but been totally unable to pull of a landslide.
In contrast, Dean insisted on rebuilding the party in all fifty states, even "when hell freezes over" states like Montana and Wyoming, and the "webroots" gave a forum for candidates (and way for them to raise money $5 and $10 at a time from hundreds or thousands of small contributors). Almost all of the "red to blue" races started out on the webroots, and every established pol would have insisted you were crazy if you told them that Cheney AND Bush would be in WYOMING, of all places, the week before the election to shore up the Republican candidate. People were openly ridiculed for suggesting that 80 seats would be in play, not 15 or so, yet the last I heard the number of seats in serious contention was 72 and climbing.
The world has changed. Get used to it.
BTW, go to the corner and put on the dunce cap if you think Dean shot off his mouth in 2004. He was trying to speak over a loud crowd after a long day, of course his voice was hoarse. The thing that Faux and ABC didn't bother telling you is that the mike was right in front of him and somehow able to filter out the crowd noise. (I don't know if it was mechanical shielding or if they did it electronically.) How do you think you would sound if someone had miked you in a crowded and extremely loud bar? Now multiply that ten-fold since you weren't talking all day. The mainstream media long ago decided to focus on 'reactions' instead of actually covering the news and they ran with the story primarily because the Republicans were oh so happy to make a strong contender look like an idiot.
P.S. Olbermann (MSNBC) Rocks!
I disagree. The defendant can reasonably ask that the RIAA name, specifically, what music files the RIAA believes he has illegally downloaded. I think it's safe to assume that the RIAA would never agree to this, but that bounces it to the judge and any judge willing to hold the RIAA to the usual standards is probably unlikely to sign off on an unrestricted fishing expedition.
After all there's no harm to the RIAA in requiring it to demonstrate it has reasonable cause to proceed. If they say the defendant has 100 illegal files and the search only finds 70, that's still good enough to warrant an unrestricted search for all audio files on the disk. But if the search can't find any of those files then it's clear that the RIAA would just be on a fishing expedition and it would needlessly harm the defendant to proceed.
(ObDisclaimer: IANAL)
Good grief, Charlie Brown!
This is NOT a First Amendment issue. The FA only applies to government entities and organizations acting on its behalf. It does not apply to private entities.
Second, even the FA is not absolute. It's well-established that the government can limit the "time, manner and place" of public speech. E.g., you can't use a blowhorn on a public street in a residential neighborhood at 3 AM. There's also that whole 'FALSELY yelling fire in a crowded theater' point, but let's not go there since it does not mean what people think it means. Just look at how it's usually misquoted. (*)
Finally, "freedom of speech" is actually better described as "freedom to dissent" and refers to political speech. You have absolutely no right to demand that I pay attention to you. You have absolutely no right to demand that I not pay attention to Bob when Bob tells me to pay no attention to you.
To be honest I can't understand why the case wasn't thrown out immediately. I'm not even a lawyer yet I can think of several solid grounds for immediate dismissal with prejudice.
(*) Let us be absolutely clear. If you're in a crowded theater and you don't warn others of a fire, esp. in the late 19th/early 20th century when it was common to have massive loss of life in pre-fire-retardant theater fires, then you are a despicable human being not even worthy of being spat upon. You ignored an imminent threat to life and property, and towards what end?
In fact that very threat is why FALSELY yelling fire was so reprehensible. Anyone who did it had to know that people would panic and some would probably be injured. Broken bones are better than death, in the event of an actual fire, but if there is no fire....
A contemporary analogy may be going to the airport with a box of baking soda and flinging it across a concourse while shouting "anthrax!". Do you think people should just quietly leave if they think they see someone actually spreading anthrax spores?
Do you have any idea about how long 500 million years really is? Reputable scientists usually focus on the last few million years since the continents have been in approximately the same locations, solar output has been the same, etc.
Go back further and the earth is so different that it's hard to make meaningful correlations. How do you compare temps today vs. the temps when there was ocean circulation through the wide gap between North and South America? Or before the Himalayans rose and dominated weather patterns in south Asia?
What about Pangaea, or during the massive basalt flows as that supercontinent broke up?
Yet all of that is recent history when you're looking back 500 MY. Trying to compare these numbers is as silly as comparing your ability to lift a 20 kg box today vs. your ability to do it when you were 12.
On the technical side, I tend to agree with you that people pushing their certs are usually the people who can't push something experience. But that isn't necessarily a Bad Thing -- e.g., I had many years of experience as a C developer before migrating to Java. Sun certs showed that I was making a serious effort to transition, not just grabbing a copy of "Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours" and assuming that that was enough.
But businesses are not driven by the techies.
HR? They have no way to prioritize the hundreds of resumes they see. Third party certs, unless the techies tell them explicitly that certain certs are worthless, will move resumes to the top of the pile. In fact that's the main reason why I got my certs.
Sales? It won't matter in many shops, but if you sell your services it can be a selling point to be able to assure the clients that your development team is certified. In fact this process, run amok, is why the Microsoft certs became so disreputable a while back. Many shops started making it a condition of employment, and that made less qualified people get one just to get in the door. Then there's the people who cheated.... That's one of the reasons why many certs now require X years of experience.
Finally, on the technical side STUDYING FOR certs is a good way to ensure you have a good breadth of knowledge. It's far too easy to focus on what we know well and let the rest slip without even realizing it.
Network algorithms are useful in an astoundishing number of places, especially in those cases where all flows are either 0 or 1. You just need to expand you idea about what the networks and flows represent.
E.g., my professor used network algorithms when writing the software that matches medical schools and students. Each school prioritizes it's candidate students, each student prioritizes his schools. The program finds the best matches. He said it had taken many hours (12 hours?) to do originally, but with the network flow it was a few minutes on an old kaypro.
Another example was determining when teams are mathematically eliminated from playoffs. It sounds like a simple problem, but it isn't since a team could lose a game yet remain in the running because a different team lost its own game.
A decade ago these algorithms would be overkill for a kernel. Today... I can definitely see how these algorithms could make a difference in some places.
Remember the details of this case! Foley could have had sex with these teenagers, they were over the age of consent.
The reason why this case should end the career of Haskert et al isn't that Foley was creepy and didn't understand that "workplace" sex is always fraught with peril, it's:
1) there's a new federal law criminalizing sexual messages with anyone under 18. This is repub-stupid since many states have age of consent (for both sex and marriage) well under that age. It's one thing to protect teenagers from being haunted for a stupid mistake (which is the justification for covering 17 year olds under the 'kiddie porn' law), it's another thing to say what two HS seniors can send to each other.
But it's the law.
2) Foley was responsible for pushing that law through Congress.
So he knew the details of that law.
3) Foley has had a bad rep among the pages for years. Last I heard it was five years and counting.
So others knew he was taking far too much interest in these HS students.
Put it all together and Foley's actions are criminal but he's not some raving pedophile out of control. He's not even a "Dateline NBC" predator out for sex with underage minors. It can't be overstated that it would have been perfectly legal for him to meet these kids at the park then go home and **** like bunnies. He had a profound lack of judgement and is and will be paying for it.
But the GOP leadership... it has got to go. There is absolutely no way to defend keeping this information from the two other members of the Page supervisory committee... but rushing to inform the representative in charge of electing republicans to congress (NRCC) about the situation when the latest details emerged nearly a year ago. They're partisan hacks who put the interests of their party above the well-being of their underage charges and they should step down from their leadership positions immediately.
That's why you won't see Haskert and the others (Reynolds?) appearing in public much during the rest of the election cycle. They've done the indefensible and they know it.
The one thing this case doesn't involve is "children" and "IM". Children are under the age of consent and Foley would be facing very different charges. "IM" is already far stricter than what he could have said in person or on the phone, sent via postal mail, etc.
There are places in the west where a 500 mile range would be very useful. I've driven several 100+ sections of interstate, and it's probably an extra 50 miles to the next station beyond that.
How difficult will it be to deliver that much power (for an interstate!) to a remote location? What if that station is down for some reason?
P.S., in the worst cases you learn to fill up at every station. It's not that the distance to the next service station is so long, it's that the road may be blocked (rockslide, avalanche, etc.) just miles from that station and you'll be forced to backtrack.