You should be modded troll. I have no idea from your post what your experience with tigers is (though I'd be interested to know). However the GP started his post with "I was watching a Discovery channel show on some guy". He wasn't claiming to be a tiger expert. Just someone interested who'd seen a documentary. Now the quality of documentaries varies wildly (no pun intended) - just take a look at the Steve Irwin tripe people seem to eat up without considering the man was a dangerous fool and not a conservationalist - so there's no reason to suspect this poor bloke was trying to do or say anything malicious and jump all over him. He just reported what he saw on the doco.
VB.NET should never have been named VB anything. It's not VB, it just has similar syntax. The mistakes they made stemmed from trying to make it sound like it would be an easy move from VB6. Marketing overruling engineering again.
I'm a computer science student in Australia with a big empty summer break (unless I find work)
There are lots of graduate programs in Australia. Contact some larger IT organizations and offer your services. If you're lucky you'll find work that'll look great on your resume and you'll make contacts you can use when you graduate. You don't sound like you care if you're paid or not, so that should make things easier. Google ain't the only employer in town. In fact in Aus it's not even a major player.
Most children didn't have a whole lot of choice regarding their participation.
Because most parents think that raising their children means indoctrinating them. Then again most people are awful parents. It's not an easy thing to do well.
Such a comment just confirms what I've said before about Atheists. They don't want people to really have an open mind. Yet they won't agree that everybody is open-minded until they agree with them!
Having an open mind when someone is saying something reasonable is one thing, but having an open mind to every person that professes to believe in things easily proven false to a very high degree of certainty is another.
Would you have an open mind if you had a conversation with a mass murder or a serial rapist?
Also do you realize that your argument isn't logically consistent since you're showing that you don't have an open mind to Atheists. Like everyone else you're making a judgement and selecting who you keep your mind open to.
I know enough about Astronomy (I have a degree in it) to close my mind off completely to Astrology and Astrologists. I've evaluated the arguments of moon conspiracy theorists enough to dismiss them completely. That doesn't make me closed minded. It just means I'm satisifed that these things are nutty and further effort evaluating their correctness and value is wasted.
I think you're wrong. It's easier to settle out of court for somewhere between $2000 - $6000 than selling that same person between 133 and 400 full price albums. There's definitely motivation there to stop selling and start suing.
I'm curious exactly what sort of logical transformation sequence allows you to equate these two sentences.
The part where you say it's cool to charge whatever you can.
In fact, it's fundamentally impossible to determine "what someone's worth" unambiguously. This is a philosophical and religious question to a variety of people have a variety of answers
Spare me the metaphysics. You as an individual put a value on a person's products or services whenever you buy something. Society puts a value on it's "artists" when it pays them.
The USSR had heavily socialized everything. For instance, socialized agriculture. There were no effective rewards for doing this agriculture effectively.
When did I say we should emulate the USSR?
However frankly we could do with a little less incentive for our young people to become rock stars and actors. Unlike agriculture, we don't need rock stars to survive. Historically, artists were rarely very wealthy.
To be fair, it sounds like the pulsar and the interstellar dust did all the hard work. The Australian astronomers just managed to notice it....Only if by notice it you mean develop new mathematical techniques for extracting the data. In the same way you might "notice" the orbit of mercury doesn't quite fit Newton's model of Gravity.
I had my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop dual booting with XP and Vista. On the weekend the hard drive started giving errors even on Dell diags, so I had it replaced. Before I did though I created a Vista complete PC restore backup. What a mistake that was! I should have just wiped the drive.
After the Dell technician replaced the drive I tried to restore from the backup. Not in an obvious spot on the menu so I had to wait for Vista to go through its driver load sequence from DVD several times but eventually worked it out. When I finally got to the right restore option, the restore deleted the existing partitions and created new ones matching the size on the backups. Then it promptly threw up an error complaining that one of the files were corrupt. I was left with no OS and backups that would not restore despite several attempts.
To add insult to injury I can read my backups just fine with tools from MS Virtual Server.
It took me 4 months to get that damned PC the way I wanted it. I guess I'll have it back again in a few months after more hours of my life wasted.
I find I lose more than half my memory when I load Vista.
Yesterday I learnt that if rely on Vista Backup and Restore you also end up side-effects with "missing time" and deja0-vu as you then have to play the reinstall game. (Fun for all the family)
When we were doing "peacekeeping" in Bosnia, there was a fairly large payout for pretty much everything from property damage caused by raids to vehicle damage caused in accidents. As a result, locals would often damage their own property in order to try and claim "compensation". They'd even go so far as to intentionally cause a head-on collision between a honda-civic sized shitbox and an armoured personnel carrier, which, unsurprisingly, most often lead to the death of the driver.
Isn't paying out large settlements to record companies for copyright infringement similarly a bad idea, and for similar reasons? Pretty soon they're not interested in making/distributing/promoting music as much as they are interested in suing people for copyright infringement whether or not it actually occurred.
If you gather some scraps of raw material and make it into a guitar, and then sell it, you get whatever you can convince the buyer to pay for it.
In other words, lets worship rampant capitalism because this system is without flaws.
Linking material reward towards something as fuzzy as goodness and deservingness is a massive quagmire, as such things are impossible to measure, hotly debated, and subject to all sorts of abuse.
In other words, it's too hard to work out what someone's worth or work out how to distribute it to them, so let's not bother.
It also tends to reduce the rewards for making Material Rewards so everyone ends up with less material reward in the end.
Simply not true. Consider if the same wealth were distributed amongst more artists. 1 artist suffers for 100 who gain.
You'll probably call me a communist or a socialist but surely there has to be SOME way that isn't so flawed and open to the corruption of any of these systems (capitalism, communism, socialism).
Part of the problem here is that the same work (music, acting) is being paid for multiple times by multiple people. It's not like a guitar that's sold to one buyer at all. I simply don't think society can afford to pay the same person 100,000 times for one performance.
Basically said, "Do you know who I am, and what I've done? I'm the biggest activist in the world, who are you peons to criticize me? I'll hire whoever I like."
For me, no one has successfully argued why even a really good artist deserves to make millions. A good school teacher, who works just as hard doesn't. A good doctor who works longer hours and has more responsibility shouldn't (I know there are some that do, but those that are in it to do good certainly don't charge their patients exorbitant rates). Why should a musician or a film or tv star make millions? Then record companies and event organizers make ten times the money on top of that. We over-value these people.
The shop across the street was unionized. The manager at my dad's plant said, "I'll give you everything the union shop gets, no questions asked. They can go on strike, get a better deal, and then you'll get that deal. Plus, you don't have to miss that pay while you'd be out on strike."
Do you think there would have been any incentive to offer these things if the union didn't exist? So in other words despite the fact that your dad wasn't in the union the existence of the union benefitted him. Seems like a pro- not anti- union argument to me.
Our phones have been tapped almost since their inception; all the changes is who's calling the shots, what "evil" group is being targeted, and whose definition of "legal" is being used.
You left one thing out. Technology has improved. That means they can automatically tap and filter a lot more phones. Instead of infringing on the rights of a few people of interest, now everyone's under surveillance (or it's getting damned close to that being the case). Technology puts a lot more power in the hand of officials and left unchecked absolute power corrupts.
Just don't look up anything in a reference book in front of your patients (or in the case of a vet, the owner of your patients).
I'm actually encouraged when a doctor looks something up. It means they're not just guessing or relying on memory of a similar case they came across a long time ago. The only GP I currently trust proverbially as far as I can throw is one who when I presented a medical problem offered to do some research and ring me the following night from home.
My boss is a pilot, and he told me a story about how he took up a friend for a flight once, and when coming in for the landing, he got out his checklist to go through the proper landing procedures. The guy got all freaked out because he thought that he was looking in a manual, and didn't know what he was doing.
Your boss' friend is an ignorant idiot. Not only does this friend not know that checklists are common in aviation, but he decides to freak out when the pilot's workload is highest. My response in your boss' shoes would be to politely explain how it works, then lose the friend (certainly never take that friend flying again).
...just so long as it stays a $5/month tax. What's to prevent tax creep such that it becomes $30/month. Now that'd still be a good deal for a lot of music lovers BUT what if I want to use my connection for business purposes (I know I use it to do support from home and don't listen to much music).
The tax should be optional. Downloading without paying the tax should be illegal. Like a fishing license for music. If I don't go fishing I don't pay a tax on fishing. If I don't go hunting music I should not have to pay.
It all depends on how you define a task, but I don't agree that communicating on the radio is simply part of the pilot's task. They have a mantra in the industry: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. Three tasks, in that order of priority. Fly the plane, and when that's in control get it navigating correctly and when those two are okay move on to communicating.
Similarly your description of treage is the ideal not the norm, and by the way if you're in an ER because your life is about to end if you're not treated you don't get to choose where you're going to be treated. You'd better hope you've been brought into a hospital that does it well.
I don't "love" or "believe in" multitasking. I think it's a necessary evil. It just so happens that many things happen simultaneously in life and if you're not able to deal with things simultaneously pretty soon you drop the ball on something important.
Looking at the flaws in IQ testing is an interesting hobby
I'll put the elitist condescending tone aside for just a moment. It's not a hobby to call something that pretends to be science a pseudo-science.
but nevertheless the results of IQ tests are predictive of success
Prophecies can be self fulfilling. Treat your students like they're incapable of greatness, give them fewer opportunities and talk down to them and pretty soon they're giving you the mediocre results you expect.
It's not perfect, but it is a tool with statistical value.
It's not perfect in the same way that horoscopes aren't perfect. In other words it is based on unscientific rubbish and its useless.
For example Einstein had an IQ that was estimated to be low given he was a genius (140 to 180).
That is of course just one example of a scientist that didn't fit well. In any case if you were his teacher would you have recognised his potential as an unremarkable student early on? Some people need more help early on and get a lot better at what they do. Using an IQ test as a predictor to write off certain students is bone headed, lazy and destructive. You should help all your students be what they can be.
It is obvious, from observing people, that we're not brilliant (ie not as good as machines) at task switching and that we therefore have quite an overhead when we try to "multi-task". However you're right the chemical processes involved aren't obvious. I'd like to see more corroberation of this article before being convinced about the article's conclusions.
IQ testing is pseudo-science. For starters the testing is never independent of your previous problem solving experience so those that have seen similar problems before will have an advantage.
Instead of focusing on an IQ number, how about asking ALL your students what they're going to do with their abilities?
There are a whole set of professions - many essential to society as we know it - where the nature of the job means that there are competing critical tasks to deal with. Think of a doctor at an Emergency room. (The medical profession needs a serious overhaul but I can't see that situation ever going away). Think of a pilot having to fly and communicate at the same time. Think of combat situations.
It's very easy to categorically suggest that people move jobs if they're being asked to multitask, but most people are in their current job for good reasons - it's the only one they can get or it's something they love doing or they believe in what they are doing etc.
Being overwhelmed with a large task and not knowing how to break it up into smaller ones is a totally different problem to the multitasking one. A better example would be if your friend has children learning to get the cleaning done while simultaneously minding the children. Unless you delay or delegate one of the tasks (hire a maid or a babysitter) you have to do both at the same time. In reality if your friend was a housewife with kids she might also need to keep an eye on dinner at the same time. If dinner takes 4 hours to cook, again you can either delay or delgate (buy takeout).
I know when I do the cleaning at home I've usually got some sort of computer task happening in the background. I'm helping getting a room ready for our first child this long weekend (Australia day here). In the meantime I've got a laptop with a dying hard-drive. So I'll set up a backup of the hard disk and let it run for a few hours with occassional monitoring then go work on the room.
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You should be modded troll. I have no idea from your post what your experience with tigers is (though I'd be interested to know). However the GP started his post with "I was watching a Discovery channel show on some guy". He wasn't claiming to be a tiger expert. Just someone interested who'd seen a documentary. Now the quality of documentaries varies wildly (no pun intended) - just take a look at the Steve Irwin tripe people seem to eat up without considering the man was a dangerous fool and not a conservationalist - so there's no reason to suspect this poor bloke was trying to do or say anything malicious and jump all over him. He just reported what he saw on the doco.
VB.NET should never have been named VB anything. It's not VB, it just has similar syntax. The mistakes they made stemmed from trying to make it sound like it would be an easy move from VB6. Marketing overruling engineering again.
I'm a computer science student in Australia with a big empty summer break (unless I find work)
There are lots of graduate programs in Australia. Contact some larger IT organizations and offer your services. If you're lucky you'll find work that'll look great on your resume and you'll make contacts you can use when you graduate. You don't sound like you care if you're paid or not, so that should make things easier. Google ain't the only employer in town. In fact in Aus it's not even a major player.
Most children didn't have a whole lot of choice regarding their participation.
Because most parents think that raising their children means indoctrinating them. Then again most people are awful parents. It's not an easy thing to do well.
Such a comment just confirms what I've said before about Atheists. They don't want people to really have an open mind. Yet they won't agree that everybody is open-minded until they agree with them!
Having an open mind when someone is saying something reasonable is one thing, but having an open mind to every person that professes to believe in things easily proven false to a very high degree of certainty is another.
Would you have an open mind if you had a conversation with a mass murder or a serial rapist?
Also do you realize that your argument isn't logically consistent since you're showing that you don't have an open mind to Atheists. Like everyone else you're making a judgement and selecting who you keep your mind open to.
I know enough about Astronomy (I have a degree in it) to close my mind off completely to Astrology and Astrologists. I've evaluated the arguments of moon conspiracy theorists enough to dismiss them completely. That doesn't make me closed minded. It just means I'm satisifed that these things are nutty and further effort evaluating their correctness and value is wasted.
I think you're wrong. It's easier to settle out of court for somewhere between $2000 - $6000 than selling that same person between 133 and 400 full price albums. There's definitely motivation there to stop selling and start suing.
I'm curious exactly what sort of logical transformation sequence allows you to equate these two sentences.
The part where you say it's cool to charge whatever you can.
In fact, it's fundamentally impossible to determine "what someone's worth" unambiguously. This is a philosophical and religious question to a variety of people have a variety of answers
Spare me the metaphysics. You as an individual put a value on a person's products or services whenever you buy something. Society puts a value on it's "artists" when it pays them.
The USSR had heavily socialized everything. For instance, socialized agriculture. There were no effective rewards for doing this agriculture effectively.
When did I say we should emulate the USSR?
However frankly we could do with a little less incentive for our young people to become rock stars and actors. Unlike agriculture, we don't need rock stars to survive. Historically, artists were rarely very wealthy.
To be fair, it sounds like the pulsar and the interstellar dust did all the hard work. The Australian astronomers just managed to notice it. ...Only if by notice it you mean develop new mathematical techniques for extracting the data. In the same way you might "notice" the orbit of mercury doesn't quite fit Newton's model of Gravity.
I had my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop dual booting with XP and Vista. On the weekend the hard drive started giving errors even on Dell diags, so I had it replaced. Before I did though I created a Vista complete PC restore backup. What a mistake that was! I should have just wiped the drive.
After the Dell technician replaced the drive I tried to restore from the backup. Not in an obvious spot on the menu so I had to wait for Vista to go through its driver load sequence from DVD several times but eventually worked it out. When I finally got to the right restore option, the restore deleted the existing partitions and created new ones matching the size on the backups. Then it promptly threw up an error complaining that one of the files were corrupt. I was left with no OS and backups that would not restore despite several attempts.
To add insult to injury I can read my backups just fine with tools from MS Virtual Server.
It took me 4 months to get that damned PC the way I wanted it. I guess I'll have it back again in a few months after more hours of my life wasted.
I find I lose more than half my memory when I load Vista.
Yesterday I learnt that if rely on Vista Backup and Restore you also end up side-effects with "missing time" and deja0-vu as you then have to play the reinstall game. (Fun for all the family)
When we were doing "peacekeeping" in Bosnia, there was a fairly large payout for pretty much everything from property damage caused by raids to vehicle damage caused in accidents. As a result, locals would often damage their own property in order to try and claim "compensation". They'd even go so far as to intentionally cause a head-on collision between a honda-civic sized shitbox and an armoured personnel carrier, which, unsurprisingly, most often lead to the death of the driver.
Isn't paying out large settlements to record companies for copyright infringement similarly a bad idea, and for similar reasons? Pretty soon they're not interested in making/distributing/promoting music as much as they are interested in suing people for copyright infringement whether or not it actually occurred.
BTW, is there anything known about diseases where people don't see tools as an extension of the body?
Yes, they have special schools for these unfortunate people. The schools are called MBA schools and the people are called upper management.
I've had managers who I was convinced did nothing but play with their tools all day.
If you gather some scraps of raw material and make it into a guitar, and then sell it, you get whatever you can convince the buyer to pay for it.
In other words, lets worship rampant capitalism because this system is without flaws.
Linking material reward towards something as fuzzy as goodness and deservingness is a massive quagmire, as such things are impossible to measure, hotly debated, and subject to all sorts of abuse.
In other words, it's too hard to work out what someone's worth or work out how to distribute it to them, so let's not bother.
It also tends to reduce the rewards for making Material Rewards so everyone ends up with less material reward in the end.
Simply not true. Consider if the same wealth were distributed amongst more artists. 1 artist suffers for 100 who gain.
You'll probably call me a communist or a socialist but surely there has to be SOME way that isn't so flawed and open to the corruption of any of these systems (capitalism, communism, socialism).
Part of the problem here is that the same work (music, acting) is being paid for multiple times by multiple people. It's not like a guitar that's sold to one buyer at all. I simply don't think society can afford to pay the same person 100,000 times for one performance.
"If they make me clean out the fry vats again, I'm gonna burn this fucking place down..."
Milton Waddams? Is that you?
Basically said, "Do you know who I am, and what I've done? I'm the biggest activist in the world, who are you peons to criticize me? I'll hire whoever I like."
For me, no one has successfully argued why even a really good artist deserves to make millions. A good school teacher, who works just as hard doesn't. A good doctor who works longer hours and has more responsibility shouldn't (I know there are some that do, but those that are in it to do good certainly don't charge their patients exorbitant rates). Why should a musician or a film or tv star make millions? Then record companies and event organizers make ten times the money on top of that. We over-value these people.
The shop across the street was unionized. The manager at my dad's plant said, "I'll give you everything the union shop gets, no questions asked. They can go on strike, get a better deal, and then you'll get that deal. Plus, you don't have to miss that pay while you'd be out on strike."
Do you think there would have been any incentive to offer these things if the union didn't exist? So in other words despite the fact that your dad wasn't in the union the existence of the union benefitted him. Seems like a pro- not anti- union argument to me.
Our phones have been tapped almost since their inception; all the changes is who's calling the shots, what "evil" group is being targeted, and whose definition of "legal" is being used.
You left one thing out. Technology has improved. That means they can automatically tap and filter a lot more phones. Instead of infringing on the rights of a few people of interest, now everyone's under surveillance (or it's getting damned close to that being the case). Technology puts a lot more power in the hand of officials and left unchecked absolute power corrupts.
Just don't look up anything in a reference book in front of your patients (or in the case of a vet, the owner of your patients).
I'm actually encouraged when a doctor looks something up. It means they're not just guessing or relying on memory of a similar case they came across a long time ago. The only GP I currently trust proverbially as far as I can throw is one who when I presented a medical problem offered to do some research and ring me the following night from home.
My boss is a pilot, and he told me a story about how he took up a friend for a flight once, and when coming in for the landing, he got out his checklist to go through the proper landing procedures. The guy got all freaked out because he thought that he was looking in a manual, and didn't know what he was doing.
Your boss' friend is an ignorant idiot. Not only does this friend not know that checklists are common in aviation, but he decides to freak out when the pilot's workload is highest. My response in your boss' shoes would be to politely explain how it works, then lose the friend (certainly never take that friend flying again).
...just so long as it stays a $5/month tax. What's to prevent tax creep such that it becomes $30/month. Now that'd still be a good deal for a lot of music lovers BUT what if I want to use my connection for business purposes (I know I use it to do support from home and don't listen to much music).
The tax should be optional. Downloading without paying the tax should be illegal. Like a fishing license for music. If I don't go fishing I don't pay a tax on fishing. If I don't go hunting music I should not have to pay.
It all depends on how you define a task, but I don't agree that communicating on the radio is simply part of the pilot's task. They have a mantra in the industry: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. Three tasks, in that order of priority. Fly the plane, and when that's in control get it navigating correctly and when those two are okay move on to communicating.
Similarly your description of treage is the ideal not the norm, and by the way if you're in an ER because your life is about to end if you're not treated you don't get to choose where you're going to be treated. You'd better hope you've been brought into a hospital that does it well.
I don't "love" or "believe in" multitasking. I think it's a necessary evil. It just so happens that many things happen simultaneously in life and if you're not able to deal with things simultaneously pretty soon you drop the ball on something important.
Looking at the flaws in IQ testing is an interesting hobby
I'll put the elitist condescending tone aside for just a moment. It's not a hobby to call something that pretends to be science a pseudo-science.
but nevertheless the results of IQ tests are predictive of success
Prophecies can be self fulfilling. Treat your students like they're incapable of greatness, give them fewer opportunities and talk down to them and pretty soon they're giving you the mediocre results you expect.
It's not perfect, but it is a tool with statistical value.
It's not perfect in the same way that horoscopes aren't perfect. In other words it is based on unscientific rubbish and its useless.
For example Einstein had an IQ that was estimated to be low given he was a genius (140 to 180).
http://www.geocities.com/einstein_library/iq.htm
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_IQ_of_albert_einstein
That is of course just one example of a scientist that didn't fit well. In any case if you were his teacher would you have recognised his potential as an unremarkable student early on? Some people need more help early on and get a lot better at what they do. Using an IQ test as a predictor to write off certain students is bone headed, lazy and destructive. You should help all your students be what they can be.
It is obvious, from observing people, that we're not brilliant (ie not as good as machines) at task switching and that we therefore have quite an overhead when we try to "multi-task". However you're right the chemical processes involved aren't obvious. I'd like to see more corroberation of this article before being convinced about the article's conclusions.
IQ testing is pseudo-science. For starters the testing is never independent of your previous problem solving experience so those that have seen similar problems before will have an advantage.
Instead of focusing on an IQ number, how about asking ALL your students what they're going to do with their abilities?
There are a whole set of professions - many essential to society as we know it - where the nature of the job means that there are competing critical tasks to deal with. Think of a doctor at an Emergency room. (The medical profession needs a serious overhaul but I can't see that situation ever going away). Think of a pilot having to fly and communicate at the same time. Think of combat situations.
It's very easy to categorically suggest that people move jobs if they're being asked to multitask, but most people are in their current job for good reasons - it's the only one they can get or it's something they love doing or they believe in what they are doing etc.
Being overwhelmed with a large task and not knowing how to break it up into smaller ones is a totally different problem to the multitasking one. A better example would be if your friend has children learning to get the cleaning done while simultaneously minding the children. Unless you delay or delegate one of the tasks (hire a maid or a babysitter) you have to do both at the same time. In reality if your friend was a housewife with kids she might also need to keep an eye on dinner at the same time. If dinner takes 4 hours to cook, again you can either delay or delgate (buy takeout).
I know when I do the cleaning at home I've usually got some sort of computer task happening in the background. I'm helping getting a room ready for our first child this long weekend (Australia day here). In the meantime I've got a laptop with a dying hard-drive. So I'll set up a backup of the hard disk and let it run for a few hours with occassional monitoring then go work on the room.