A funny observation from UK: although we are fully metric, officially, you stil buy things in some funny quantities, milk perhaps being the most obvious, which you still get in multiples of 0.568 litres (ie. pints).
It doesn't really make a lot of practical sense to hold on to incompatible and unwieldy systems of measurement; so why? Is it pride? Or possibly spite?
In support of your comment, anonymity is a requirement for free speech.
I disagree - courage is a requirement for free speech. Anonymity only protects paid shills and rabble rousers, and allows them to drown out the decent, but relatively mild mannered, ordinary people - the ones whose freedom society should protect. Anonymity is for those who prefer to operate under the cover of darkness: thieves and snipers, among others.
Sex, I grant you. But pictures of plasticky looking individuals going through the motions of something that they clearly don't give a shit about? That is clearly not good - sex should be something to look forward to when you are old enough, not something that screams mindless boredom.
If you want a secure computing environment, don't connect your computer to anything!
I do realise that you are joking, of course; but it strikes me that people always think that technology is the main ingredient in securing a system.
I have been a UNIX system manager for the last ~10 years (and I was a developer for many years before that, so I actually DO know how software works, unlike many others in my line of work), and I have seen many times that no matter how much you weigh your environment down with virus checkers, firewalls etc, there is always a gaping hole left open: people's stupidity.
These are my very simple, basic rules, that have kept my part of the world in good shape:
1. UNIX: not so many attacks in the first place. 2. Only I have the root password, and I don't give it away. It doesn't matter whether you are a VP or CEO - you won't get it from me. 3. I install all systems that go into my network, and I wipe all harddisks first.
We do have things like firewall and virus checks on all Windows desktops; but we have also had one or two virus outbreaks over the years - mostly because there are idiots who allow HTML emails without restriction, or who click 'OK' on pop-ups and open attachments without thinking.
So, we learned nothing of value except that studies like this have inconclusive results. Oh, and teenagers can experience psychosis before, during and after using drugs.
No quite - by far the most research is like this; it is only ever intended to add a very small bit of knowledge to the pool, and expecting it to deliver big, revolutionary insight is simply a misunderstanding. This study seems to confirm the very reasonable hypothesis, that there is a correlation between drug use and mental illness. At some point, there will be a large scale meta-analysis of all these small bits of data, and that will tell us much more, but right now we are simply collecting information.
What I don't agree with is the way these tiny results are always press-ganged into serving as "proof" for somebody's pet attitude. So this result will be taken as "proof" that "Dope Makes You Insane!!!". What we never hear sensationalised is that "Alcohol Makes You Insane", "Tobacco Use Makes You Insane" or "Watching Soap Operas Makes You Insane"; as far as I am aware, there are similar correlations between these behaviours and mental illness - it probably all revolves around a wish to escape an oppressive reality.
The best thing we could do as a society, would be to realise that all these things carry with them a certain, minor risk, and that we should learn to live with them in a responsible way. We already know now that from a physical health perspective it would be miles better if people stayed away from alcohol and tobacco and smoked pot instead. Even if it produced an increase in mental illness, I'm sure the savings on physical health would more than compensate, financially. Yes, that may seem like a very cynical way of looking at things, but money saved would then ideally be available for better education about how to use drugs sensibly, among other things. Besides, I don't think we would see an increase - after all, the number of alcohol related psychoses would probably go down more than cannabis related ones would go up, since alcohol is in objectively so much more damaging.
Botox injections, tightening the skin and making wrinkles and other signs of aging appear less pronounced...
Botulinum toxin does not tighten the skin - it paralyses muscles, and since many wrinkles are aggravated by muscles in the skin, paralysing them can make the wrinkles less pronounced. This paralysis is very evident on the faces of many aging celebrities - they simply struggle with producing facial expressions.
It's a strange thing, isn't it? Instead of accepting their age, people mistreat themselves so they look 'younger', at least when you're not too close. I think it is deeply sad; and it only makes you look less attractive.
Travelling by air has become much less pleasant than it was,...
Oh yes, hasn't it just. I remember a couple of years ago I was going to Beijing, from London. I always choose the cheapest flight, so this time it was Aeroflot - yes, THAT Aeroflot - and then the weather turned bad (almost an inch of snow, woooo, but that is enough to cause major disruptions in UK). My flight was cancelled, and when I finally got on the way, it was on an Aeroflot plane apparently built in the sixties.
And that is where it turned weird: it was miles better than any modern airline. Leather on the seats, loads of leg room, and so on and so on. Sadly, the air hostesses were from that same period too... But think of that: A modern plane is worse than what Aeroflot used in the sixties or so.
- is not so much about the existence of intelligence, but the idea that we have understood it well enough to have pinned it down some 100 years ago, or that it would be a feature that could easily be seen in a brain scan. I didn't bother to read the article - it hardly seemed worth the effort - but I somehow doubt that any serious study of intelligence or brain funtionality would be as superficial as this; it is probably an artifact of whoever popularised the results.
What one has to understand is, that the concept of intelligence is an abstraction - a measure of 'ability'. But the human brain has a large number of abilities, most of which we don't know, and we don't have any clear picture of which ones are 'fundamental' and which ones are derived from a combination of fundamental abilities.
If I were to guess at what the study actually looked at, I would say that it highlighted the fact that our current IQ concept is useless because it does not produce consistent results. The right way forward, if we want to define IQ, is to first understand what we mean by 'ability', which ones are fundamental and how we can measure them. Once that is in place, we can start defining any number of reliable IQ measures.
The way Chinese influence in all spheres of life has been growing and is set to grow, this seems pretty obvious. Just look back to 2000 - the idea that China was making any sort of inways to the world market was mostly welcomed as a sort of funny curiosity, and look at them now.
School children in many European countries are learning Chinese as the second foreign language after English (at least that is what I have heard) - it used to be German or French. So if you want to do yourself a favour, learn Chinese. It is actually really easy too - none of this indo-european nonsense with cases, tenses and inflections; in fact, to a Westerner, Chinese seems to have grammar at all. OK, the letters are a bit crinkly, but not even that is too bad.
China might be better in many respects: Fewer earthquakes, money's definitely no problem, science shouldn't be a problem, and it will encourage even more cooperation with the West.
You seem a bit agitated; that alone detracts from your credibility.
Lets start with what Wikipedia has to say:
Government corruption occurs when an elected representative makes decisions that are influenced by vested interest rather than their own personal or party ideological beliefs.
Loosely speaking, a politician is said to be corrupt if they sell their political power for money. They may well be *morally* corrupt, which is a different thing, and much more subjective, but I don't think you have any evidence to support that the Swedish goverment is corrupt in the common sense.
That they are influenced by the US government is not corruption, despicable though it seems. Governments cooperate in many ways - NATO etc etc. Sweden no doubt tries to influence American decisions as well some times too, even if one can suspect that America has more weight behind their arguments.
Jesus wept! To consider atheism a religion is to completely belittle actual religion
On the contrary - it is belittling atheism. Unlike theism, atheism is at least a falsifiable hypothesis: all that is needed to disprove atheism, is for some god to manifest him/her/itself in a clear, measurable way, that can be verified by independent researchers. The God hypothesis isn't falsifiable; it makes no predictions, and all the lacking evidence for God's existence is explained away with "God moves in mysterious ways". While science is not necessarily atheism, atheism is certainly scientific.
Religion, in my view, is what you substitute when you have no faith. To mind at least, it seems that if you really trust in God as the ultimate truth, then you should be happy to follow the truth whichever way it leads you - so, it would seem that scientists have more faith than those who have already decided what the truth must be. If God IS real, even if he doesn't reply in a loud voice when you pray, then all you have to do is trust him. He has created this reality, along with common sense and logic, he is good, he would not set traps for the faithful.
If you really have faith, then you will throw away your religion and accept science.
It doesn't really matter in practice whether it is a US or UN body that controls this; it is mostly symbolic, although my sympathies lie with the UN. If at any point the rest of the world gets tired enough of the status quo, they will find another way - hasn't that always been the case? ICANN only has any power because they have done the job well enough, but DNS is like a phone book - you can go and use an alternative if you prefer. So far the benefits of using ICANN have outweighed the costs, that's all.
And for the same reasons, it is nonsense to go on about how it would be a huge blow to freedom or whatever, if UN took over, because somehow Iran would then have enormous influence. As far as I can see, this is no more than what Freud called castration anxiety: the irrational fear that the US would lose her manhood (hmm, there is something not quite comforting about the associations this invokes).
Aha! I like the 'Stamina Training Unit'; if it has a network port I might get away with calling it an STU an have it approved on the budget. Now that's a thought.
I am confused by the question. If you're already doing the job, don't you know the tools you need?
Yes, I do have a good idea about what I have needed in the past, but that is not to say that I shouldn't get some good advice. Jusst because I have managed to get by with an old kitchen knife and a wire hanger, doesn't mean that these are the best tools. One should always try to become cleverer.
It is with some smugness that I think back to the good old days, when this kind of things were always written in COBOL - it's clunky and wonky and not at all funky, but it does have one advantage:
I see most people recommend that you go with just one or the other database; I don't agree, though - I think it might be better to broaden your scope.
My background: I'm the system manager for a smallish R&D department, and I have the enviable task of getting databases to run across a number of architectures - on LUW this is DB2, Oracle, Informix, Sybase/MSSQL and MySQL, but also things like Adabas, and on the mainframe, IMS and flat-file.
In my experience there isn't so much call for the very deep knowledge of each architecture, but knowing how to port applications across is very valuable. Especially if you know your way around MVS, there's a lot of money in that, believe you me.
Sorry for not answering to everybody individually, but there has already been loads of good ideas. Some of them I already have or thought of, but there are many that I hadn't thought of.
And I note that my budget of a few hundred GBP seems too low - I should have guessed, since/. is predominantly American. I work for an American company here in UK, and while we try to get by on a meagre budget, our colleagues in the States aren't as shy about the zeroes at the end of the numbers. Maybe we just need to upgrade our case hose:-)
I think I understood most of this, but SOG? I had a quick search, and it seems to be either Society Of Genealogist, Surrey Ornithological Group or a manufacturer of organic toilets; I assume that it must be the latter - that would be for those occasions where you can't leave what you are doing, but you really, really have to go?
Man points? Who cares about man points? A real man is not afraid of looking stupid, if he needs to learn. The only stupid question is the one you don't dare to ask.
This is the dumbest question posted here (in a long time).
You may well be right. However, the stupidest question is always the one that isn't asked.
Because right now you sound like a complete ignorant who don't even know what a server is.
And you sound like somebody who feels the urge to put somebody down because it makes you feel a bit less bad about yourself. Alas, it didn't work - I don't really give a toss about what you say; if you believed in yourself, then you wouldn't be afraid of asking, even if it makes you look less than divine.
And if you look around at the answers I've got, you will see that a number of people have given some very good advice. Some of it I already know, but there are some good, new ideas that I hadn't thought of.
Slashdot Mirror
A funny observation from UK: although we are fully metric, officially, you stil buy things in some funny quantities, milk perhaps being the most obvious, which you still get in multiples of 0.568 litres (ie. pints).
It doesn't really make a lot of practical sense to hold on to incompatible and unwieldy systems of measurement; so why? Is it pride? Or possibly spite?
In support of your comment, anonymity is a requirement for free speech.
I disagree - courage is a requirement for free speech. Anonymity only protects paid shills and rabble rousers, and allows them to drown out the decent, but relatively mild mannered, ordinary people - the ones whose freedom society should protect. Anonymity is for those who prefer to operate under the cover of darkness: thieves and snipers, among others.
Sex act by itself is a part of nature.
Sex, I grant you. But pictures of plasticky looking individuals going through the motions of something that they clearly don't give a shit about? That is clearly not good - sex should be something to look forward to when you are old enough, not something that screams mindless boredom.
If you want a secure computing environment, don't connect your computer to anything!
I do realise that you are joking, of course; but it strikes me that people always think that technology is the main ingredient in securing a system.
I have been a UNIX system manager for the last ~10 years (and I was a developer for many years before that, so I actually DO know how software works, unlike many others in my line of work), and I have seen many times that no matter how much you weigh your environment down with virus checkers, firewalls etc, there is always a gaping hole left open: people's stupidity.
These are my very simple, basic rules, that have kept my part of the world in good shape:
1. UNIX: not so many attacks in the first place.
2. Only I have the root password, and I don't give it away. It doesn't matter whether you are a VP or CEO - you won't get it from me.
3. I install all systems that go into my network, and I wipe all harddisks first.
We do have things like firewall and virus checks on all Windows desktops; but we have also had one or two virus outbreaks over the years - mostly because there are idiots who allow HTML emails without restriction, or who click 'OK' on pop-ups and open attachments without thinking.
So, we learned nothing of value except that studies like this have inconclusive results. Oh, and teenagers can experience psychosis before, during and after using drugs.
No quite - by far the most research is like this; it is only ever intended to add a very small bit of knowledge to the pool, and expecting it to deliver big, revolutionary insight is simply a misunderstanding. This study seems to confirm the very reasonable hypothesis, that there is a correlation between drug use and mental illness. At some point, there will be a large scale meta-analysis of all these small bits of data, and that will tell us much more, but right now we are simply collecting information.
What I don't agree with is the way these tiny results are always press-ganged into serving as "proof" for somebody's pet attitude. So this result will be taken as "proof" that "Dope Makes You Insane!!!". What we never hear sensationalised is that "Alcohol Makes You Insane", "Tobacco Use Makes You Insane" or "Watching Soap Operas Makes You Insane"; as far as I am aware, there are similar correlations between these behaviours and mental illness - it probably all revolves around a wish to escape an oppressive reality.
The best thing we could do as a society, would be to realise that all these things carry with them a certain, minor risk, and that we should learn to live with them in a responsible way. We already know now that from a physical health perspective it would be miles better if people stayed away from alcohol and tobacco and smoked pot instead. Even if it produced an increase in mental illness, I'm sure the savings on physical health would more than compensate, financially. Yes, that may seem like a very cynical way of looking at things, but money saved would then ideally be available for better education about how to use drugs sensibly, among other things. Besides, I don't think we would see an increase - after all, the number of alcohol related psychoses would probably go down more than cannabis related ones would go up, since alcohol is in objectively so much more damaging.
Botox injections, tightening the skin and making wrinkles and other signs of aging appear less pronounced...
Botulinum toxin does not tighten the skin - it paralyses muscles, and since many wrinkles are aggravated by muscles in the skin, paralysing them can make the wrinkles less pronounced. This paralysis is very evident on the faces of many aging celebrities - they simply struggle with producing facial expressions.
It's a strange thing, isn't it? Instead of accepting their age, people mistreat themselves so they look 'younger', at least when you're not too close. I think it is deeply sad; and it only makes you look less attractive.
Travelling by air has become much less pleasant than it was,...
Oh yes, hasn't it just. I remember a couple of years ago I was going to Beijing, from London. I always choose the cheapest flight, so this time it was Aeroflot - yes, THAT Aeroflot - and then the weather turned bad (almost an inch of snow, woooo, but that is enough to cause major disruptions in UK). My flight was cancelled, and when I finally got on the way, it was on an Aeroflot plane apparently built in the sixties.
And that is where it turned weird: it was miles better than any modern airline. Leather on the seats, loads of leg room, and so on and so on. Sadly, the air hostesses were from that same period too... But think of that: A modern plane is worse than what Aeroflot used in the sixties or so.
- is not so much about the existence of intelligence, but the idea that we have understood it well enough to have pinned it down some 100 years ago, or that it would be a feature that could easily be seen in a brain scan. I didn't bother to read the article - it hardly seemed worth the effort - but I somehow doubt that any serious study of intelligence or brain funtionality would be as superficial as this; it is probably an artifact of whoever popularised the results.
What one has to understand is, that the concept of intelligence is an abstraction - a measure of 'ability'. But the human brain has a large number of abilities, most of which we don't know, and we don't have any clear picture of which ones are 'fundamental' and which ones are derived from a combination of fundamental abilities.
If I were to guess at what the study actually looked at, I would say that it highlighted the fact that our current IQ concept is useless because it does not produce consistent results. The right way forward, if we want to define IQ, is to first understand what we mean by 'ability', which ones are fundamental and how we can measure them. Once that is in place, we can start defining any number of reliable IQ measures.
Chinese.
The way Chinese influence in all spheres of life has been growing and is set to grow, this seems pretty obvious. Just look back to 2000 - the idea that China was making any sort of inways to the world market was mostly welcomed as a sort of funny curiosity, and look at them now.
School children in many European countries are learning Chinese as the second foreign language after English (at least that is what I have heard) - it used to be German or French. So if you want to do yourself a favour, learn Chinese. It is actually really easy too - none of this indo-european nonsense with cases, tenses and inflections; in fact, to a Westerner, Chinese seems to have grammar at all. OK, the letters are a bit crinkly, but not even that is too bad.
China might be better in many respects: Fewer earthquakes, money's definitely no problem, science shouldn't be a problem, and it will encourage even more cooperation with the West.
Of COURSE Sweden's system is corrupt as hell.
You seem a bit agitated; that alone detracts from your credibility.
Lets start with what Wikipedia has to say:
Government corruption occurs when an elected representative makes decisions that are influenced by vested interest rather than their own personal or party ideological beliefs.
Loosely speaking, a politician is said to be corrupt if they sell their political power for money. They may well be *morally* corrupt, which is a different thing, and much more subjective, but I don't think you have any evidence to support that the Swedish goverment is corrupt in the common sense.
That they are influenced by the US government is not corruption, despicable though it seems. Governments cooperate in many ways - NATO etc etc. Sweden no doubt tries to influence American decisions as well some times too, even if one can suspect that America has more weight behind their arguments.
Jesus wept! To consider atheism a religion is to completely belittle actual religion
On the contrary - it is belittling atheism. Unlike theism, atheism is at least a falsifiable hypothesis: all that is needed to disprove atheism, is for some god to manifest him/her/itself in a clear, measurable way, that can be verified by independent researchers. The God hypothesis isn't falsifiable; it makes no predictions, and all the lacking evidence for God's existence is explained away with "God moves in mysterious ways". While science is not necessarily atheism, atheism is certainly scientific.
Religion, in my view, is what you substitute when you have no faith. To mind at least, it seems that if you really trust in God as the ultimate truth, then you should be happy to follow the truth whichever way it leads you - so, it would seem that scientists have more faith than those who have already decided what the truth must be. If God IS real, even if he doesn't reply in a loud voice when you pray, then all you have to do is trust him. He has created this reality, along with common sense and logic, he is good, he would not set traps for the faithful.
If you really have faith, then you will throw away your religion and accept science.
It doesn't really matter in practice whether it is a US or UN body that controls this; it is mostly symbolic, although my sympathies lie with the UN. If at any point the rest of the world gets tired enough of the status quo, they will find another way - hasn't that always been the case? ICANN only has any power because they have done the job well enough, but DNS is like a phone book - you can go and use an alternative if you prefer. So far the benefits of using ICANN have outweighed the costs, that's all.
And for the same reasons, it is nonsense to go on about how it would be a huge blow to freedom or whatever, if UN took over, because somehow Iran would then have enormous influence. As far as I can see, this is no more than what Freud called castration anxiety: the irrational fear that the US would lose her manhood (hmm, there is something not quite comforting about the associations this invokes).
According to my comprehensive French dictionary:
dicfour, 'dicque fourre': a game of skill and manual dexterity, popular in boy schools in France around the beginning of the 20th century.
Aha! I like the 'Stamina Training Unit'; if it has a network port I might get away with calling it an STU an have it approved on the budget. Now that's a thought.
I am confused by the question. If you're already doing the job, don't you know the tools you need?
Yes, I do have a good idea about what I have needed in the past, but that is not to say that I shouldn't get some good advice. Jusst because I have managed to get by with an old kitchen knife and a wire hanger, doesn't mean that these are the best tools. One should always try to become cleverer.
It is with some smugness that I think back to the good old days, when this kind of things were always written in COBOL - it's clunky and wonky and not at all funky, but it does have one advantage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal
In COBOL this is built in at the level of syntax and very, very easy to use, and you don't end up with binary overrun.
Hah, they don't make 'em like they used to. (I've just become a granddad, so I have the right to say this sort of thing).
I see most people recommend that you go with just one or the other database; I don't agree, though - I think it might be better to broaden your scope.
My background: I'm the system manager for a smallish R&D department, and I have the enviable task of getting databases to run across a number of architectures - on LUW this is DB2, Oracle, Informix, Sybase/MSSQL and MySQL, but also things like Adabas, and on the mainframe, IMS and flat-file.
In my experience there isn't so much call for the very deep knowledge of each architecture, but knowing how to port applications across is very valuable. Especially if you know your way around MVS, there's a lot of money in that, believe you me.
Sorry for not answering to everybody individually, but there has already been loads of good ideas. Some of them I already have or thought of, but there are many that I hadn't thought of.
And I note that my budget of a few hundred GBP seems too low - I should have guessed, since /. is predominantly American. I work for an American company here in UK, and while we try to get by on a meagre budget, our colleagues in the States aren't as shy about the zeroes at the end of the numbers. Maybe we just need to upgrade our case hose :-)
I think I understood most of this, but SOG? I had a quick search, and it seems to be either Society Of Genealogist, Surrey Ornithological Group or a manufacturer of organic toilets; I assume that it must be the latter - that would be for those occasions where you can't leave what you are doing, but you really, really have to go?
Ah, you get turned on by the sight of the raw computing power? Me too.
PS: What is a fleshlight? Is it just 'flashlight' as pronounced by 'Her Mejesty'?
You listed a lathe on a budget of a few hundred GBP?
That one was a joke - it's something we are prone to in UK, sorry.
I thought of suggesting a scythe, but that sounded kind of rural, so ..., well you know how it is.
You lose a man point for even asking that.
Man points? Who cares about man points? A real man is not afraid of looking stupid, if he needs to learn. The only stupid question is the one you don't dare to ask.
This is the dumbest question posted here (in a long time).
You may well be right. However, the stupidest question is always the one that isn't asked.
Because right now you sound like a complete ignorant who don't even know what a server is.
And you sound like somebody who feels the urge to put somebody down because it makes you feel a bit less bad about yourself. Alas, it didn't work - I don't really give a toss about what you say; if you believed in yourself, then you wouldn't be afraid of asking, even if it makes you look less than divine.
And if you look around at the answers I've got, you will see that a number of people have given some very good advice. Some of it I already know, but there are some good, new ideas that I hadn't thought of.
Don't forget this the UK; crowbars may be a bit difficult to come by.