If you think company you work for might be using cloak-and-dagger trickery to pick semi-random people to fire... Quit Now.
As a business practice what you describe is so randomly stupid that I have a hard time imagining it actually occurred outside the paranoid speculations of clueless peons.
and get strong typing, scoping, namespaces, and various other goodies that come with letting your compiler in on what you're doing. Preprocessor defines are a stupid hack necessitated by the limitations of languages that went obsolete 20 years ago.
You have (quite reasonably) misunderstood my "As a retailer" comment: I am not a retailer. Rather, Performance is both a retailer and a manufacturer or probably more acurately a retailer and an OEM Brand. I (as just a customer) dislike them in their role as a retailer, but I like their brand(s). Their various house brands are consistently inexpensive, nothing amazing, but adequate. This is great in an industry that is otherwise dominated by the stupidly-high-end vs. the utter garbage.
Beating the average LBS service on average is not exactly a ringing endorsement; the average bike store most places blows. As I am lucky enough to live in Boulder, CO, cycling central, there are 5 really excellent bike shops between me and the local Performance, 4 miles away. So maybe their service is comparatively good elsewhere, but around here, they're clueless morons.
You've probably gathered that despite my dislike, I shop there. This is because, as you say, their prices are good... IF you only buy things that are 20% off, which they will be, but maybe not when you need the thing. My problem is that their prices are inconsistent. Any given item will be "on sale" at least once a month. Any time I'm in there there will be a sign advertising an extra 10% off on some category of goods at some random (other) time during the week. Pay them 20$ a year and you can have 10% back as credit, which is useable for things on one sort of sale, but not for things on double-secret sale. Check the coupons in that junk-mail flyer, there's another random assortment of discounts! Despite the dizzying array of discounts with their byzantine conditions they always add up to 20% off; which is in turn, roughly the price at Nashbar.
Bleh. I just want to know how much the thing costs. Instead they make it abundantly clear that they set all their prices 20% higher than necessary in order to support throwing around gimicks and periodically confusing people into actually paying full price.
Performance Bike is not exactly a gold standard of reasonable pricing practices. They have a "Big Sale!" every other week during which a random assortment of things is marked way down to the price it would cost elsewhere. If you buy anything there that isn't marked "20% Off!!!", or anything high-end at all, you're paying too much.
As a retailer, I hate Performance mightily; I always leave with the assumption I've been ripped off. Unfortunately, they're excellent as a manufacturer if you're shopping for bike stuff in the low-end-but-adequate range.
"How about, if you take the drug out of the equation?"
OK, how do you propose to do that? Is criminalizing use of certain drugs doing a good job of that? Not as far as I can tell.
In any case, when people say "victimless crime" they mean something victimless by nature, not by chance. Reckless driving may be victimless if you're lucky. Getting stoned in your own living room is victimless period. So drop the straw man.
"Or how about someone walks into a bar with a pocket full of date rape drugs?"
One drug is involved in more date rapes than any other by a very very long way. It doesn't fit in pockets well, but bars serve it.
We have, in Alcohol, a fine example of a drug that has been both criminalized and legally regulated. Every negative effect on users or society was much worse under Prohibition. Regulation is simply a better way to mitigate problems related to drugs; it works, and prohibition doesn't. Not creating a market that supports violent criminal gangs, and not locking up huge numbers of non-violent otherwise innocent people are just nice side effects.
"Drugs" isn't a crime. It's not even a verb. Such atrocious vagueness is the very heart of the incredibly stupid War on Some Drug Users.
Please specify what the heck you're actually talking about and I imagine I will conclude that either it is victimless, or that "drugs" is not the problem.
Note that I do not endorse the other posters suggestion that undercover agents be outed. Undercover agents should not be outed, they should be quietly laid off.
I don't know that it would reduce fraudulent charges, but I was struck by this part of the summary:
" Because NPC processes the payment as an e-check with the Automated Clearing House (ACH), a network most commonly used for direct deposits, participating retailers bypass credit card companies such as Visa and Mastercard."
Retailers bypass the fees credit card companies charge, and the protection for the card-holder they provide. So you'd better hope it reduces fraud, but I don't think it will.
Of course, all the game companies I've had dealings with have had guards posted to keep from being smothered by hordes of people who can't wait to tell them their great idea.
Meanwhile, they were desperate to find the tiny fraction of those people who can actually bring ideas to fruition.
The ideas behind the modules that will be submitted to this contest aren't worth squat. The fully functional, polished modules might have some minor value if they wanted to put out some assorted best-of compilation, but that's a stretch. Hard evidence that a potential job applicant can turn out a functional, polished module is really valuable.
For one thing, of course correlation implies causation. Correlation does not establish causation. If two factors are strongly correlated, it doesn't prove that one causes the other, but it's a bloody good hint there is some sort of causative relationship going on between the two, or possibly a third factor.
For another thing, it doesn't have anything to do with the case at hand. If we all agreed that Bill was a great manager as well as very rich, and we further agreed that very rich people tended to be great managers, we could debate whether richness and great managerhood were related by causation or mere correlation.
"And years of McMurdo and Amundsen/Scott winter-over crews?"
I know two people who have wintered over at the pole. That's a much larger group and shorter time than a space mission, yet I gather making sure sexual conflict does not lead to homicide is a significant concern.
The other posters description of how the branches of our government interact is essentially correct, yet the problem you describe for the most part doesn't happen.
Whatever could be responsible for this odd discrepancy?
Here's a couple hints to get you started:
There are nine Supreme Court Justices, and a vast number of lesser federal judges besides. Having hudreds of legislators, most of whom must agree to pass a law may not actually be conducive to passing huge numbers of obviously unconstitutional laws faster than judges can strike them down.
"...its possible that the LED produces more lumens per sq/in in its cone of coverage so would actually be brighter in that area than the CFL which casts light every which way."
To be pedantic, lumen, as a unit, already takes the area illuminated into account. "lumens per sq/in" is not meaningful.
LEDs typically produce a narrow cone only because of the lens they are molded into is designed to do that. Apropriate fixture design should balance any area-lighted differences.
Besides the durability you note, LEDs are great when you don't really need much light. Other lighting tech doesn't work at full efficiency at small scales; but an LED can run at full efficiency producing a very samll amount of light, which may be plenty, particularly along with a focussing lens. LEDs are also great when you wan't colored light anyway. An incandescent stop-light wastes vast amount of energy producing light in parts of the spectrum that just gets stopped by the red filter, while an led can just put all it's energy into producing red ligth in the first place.
"I confess I don't know what this expression means."
It means something is past it's prime. Typically it would refer specifically to a TV show, and would mean said show had exhausted whatever decent premise it may have had, and was now resorting to silly gimmicks, like jumping a motorcycle over a shark.
Try not to be confused by the usage in the article summary, which doesn't make any sense.
"Does it have anything to do with Henry Winkler and/or the Fonze?" Yes, everything.
"No I uderstand the Fed prints and releases money."
Uh, no. The Fed will trade actual paper currency for money that already exists as account credit but that has no effect on the money supply. The Fed increases or decreases the money supply by changing the interest rates they charge and pay. You, me and everybody increase the money supply by engaging in various sorts of productive activity, and decrease it by consuming things of value.
If you think you understand entirely how the money supply works, you are either way ahead of any Nobel winning economist, or wrong. If you think it's simple, you're just definitely wrong.
"when the Government issues bonds, (i.e. creates debt) they are in effect printing said money, and using it."
When the Government issues bonds they are borrowing money, just like when you take out a loan. That's all.
When a bank lends out 70% of the money it has in deposits, and that money goes out in the economy and does stuff and winds up as deposits in a bank that then lends out 70% of it and it goes out into the econmy, winds up in a bank that lends out 70% of it, etc... THAT creates money. But it works just the same if the banks are lending it to you or the government, and it works just the same if the country is on the gold standard or not.
As for the whole standard of living thing, note my disclaimer "the jury is still out on the very recent". I should perhaps have specified that in the scale of US history, I'd call the last 30 years or so "recent".
"Neither was really ever for the 'want to tweak snapshots' crowd."
Agreed. I mentioned that because you asked about redeye reduction. I wouldn't use either Paint or Gimp for that. I assume Gimp can do it, but I also assume it will take me at least several minutes to figure out how, while all the snapshot-tweaking specific apps I've got have some sort of red-collored eye icon on their main toolbar.
I use paint to:
- Crop down a screenshot to the part I want to show someone.
- Grab the board image from an abstract strategy game I play online, and shove around the peices while I figure out waht play to make.
- slap together a quick-and-dirty collage of a couple images.
That's the most recent three examples off the top of my head. I am not a graphic artist of any sort. For image manipulation tasks I do that aren't handled by the snapshot-tweakers, Paint is entirely sufficient. In fact, it's optimal, because it DOESN'T have lots and lots of stuff. I can find the feature I want in under a minute every time, because I can go through every feature it has in that time.
"Anything that's generally useful in paint probably should be in a viewer or the file manager."
I've got rotate-90-degrees, redeye reduction, and crop (I think) in my file manager. I don't see putting cut/paste, flood-fill, or the drawing tools there, though they're pretty useful. Actually, I suppose you could, but that's just making Paint your viewer.
99% of the time I draw something with a pen and paper it's not art; it's a hastily scrawled little diagram on a handy peice of scrap paper. Paint is electronic equivalent.
I'm sure the Gimp is great for people with different needs than me.
For most of the things I do with non-photograph images, Paint is better than Gimp. I'm in and out in 30 seconds - I've never managed to do anything in Gimp in less than an hour.
For dealing with photographs, I've got Picassa, MS Photo Editor, or a couple programs that came free with digital cameras I've bought. Any of those will do redeye reduction and basic color/contrast tweaking plenty good enough for the family photo album and I can figure out how to do what I want in a minute or two. And, as you suggest, several basic operations are integrated into the file manager in XP Media Center (and I assume some flavors of Vista)
As a non-professional, Gimp looks to me like a tool that might be great for professionals. it may well be the way to go for people who use it regularly to do complex stuff. For occasional lightweight amatuer use, Gimp is not worth talking about (and probaly shoudln't try to be). Comparing it to Paint is ridiculous; the two programs don't have remotely the same target.
"When money was tied to gold the government had a very tough time going into debt."
What are you smoking? They went into debt the same way they do now, by borrowing money, generally by issuing bonds. They didn't do it on nearly so grand a scale as the last few Republican Administrations, but that's just because they were smart. It didn't have anything to do with the gold standard. The gold standard doesn't do anything to prevent anyone from making loans, to the government or otherwise.
Wait a second... Are you really under the impression that "the government" prints up more money and just adds it to the budget? That's hilarious. That's not how the Federal Reserve works. When the money supply is increased by lowering interest rates, the government doesn't get the money.
"This effects the poor to a greater degree, as their wages do not typically keep up with inflation."
That depends a lot on how you define "the poor"; standards of living have consistently increased in the course of US history across pretty much all sectors (the jury is still out on the very recent), implying incomes have generally outpaced inflation.
You are certain that with the right approach you can be very successful when a random stranger shoots you as is likely to happen in todays Sudan? The "right approach" in today's Sudan is to get a gun, head for the border, and shoot anyone who tries to stop you from getting the hell out. I think Sudan is not as good a place to live right now as Canada. I think Canadian society is not just different, but indisputably much, much better than Sudanese society. If you think the successfulness of a person in Canada vs one in Sudan is just a matter of who they are, and has nothing to do with where they happen to live, you are an incredible moron.
You can call something Social Darwinism if you want, but don't expect the truth of Biological Darwinism to lend any credence to your theory that what you call Social Darwinism is desirable.
I'm really just saying that compared to quite a lot of places I think Canada is a nicer place to live. One such as yourself who takes responsibility for their own life is more likely to have the chance to make what they want of their life in Canada that someone whose just going to get randomly killed in a crossfire in Sudan. These nice things about Canada may have something to do with social policies that help those who need it whether they deserve it or not. Since you choose to live in Canada, I think it's a bit hypocritical to say you don't want to pay for these policies, now that they've already made a nice place for you.
Darwinism is a description of a biological reality over the long term. It has squat to do with social policy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think company you work for might be using cloak-and-dagger trickery to pick semi-random people to fire... Quit Now.
As a business practice what you describe is so randomly stupid that I have a hard time imagining it actually occurred outside the paranoid speculations of clueless peons.
In a GOOD C++ app, you'll use
const int ALIENS_LEVEL_MAX = 20;
and get strong typing, scoping, namespaces, and various other goodies that come with letting your compiler in on what you're doing. Preprocessor defines are a stupid hack necessitated by the limitations of languages that went obsolete 20 years ago.
You have (quite reasonably) misunderstood my "As a retailer" comment: I am not a retailer. Rather, Performance is both a retailer and a manufacturer or probably more acurately a retailer and an OEM Brand. I (as just a customer) dislike them in their role as a retailer, but I like their brand(s). Their various house brands are consistently inexpensive, nothing amazing, but adequate. This is great in an industry that is otherwise dominated by the stupidly-high-end vs. the utter garbage.
Beating the average LBS service on average is not exactly a ringing endorsement; the average bike store most places blows. As I am lucky enough to live in Boulder, CO, cycling central, there are 5 really excellent bike shops between me and the local Performance, 4 miles away. So maybe their service is comparatively good elsewhere, but around here, they're clueless morons.
You've probably gathered that despite my dislike, I shop there. This is because, as you say, their prices are good... IF you only buy things that are 20% off, which they will be, but maybe not when you need the thing. My problem is that their prices are inconsistent. Any given item will be "on sale" at least once a month. Any time I'm in there there will be a sign advertising an extra 10% off on some category of goods at some random (other) time during the week. Pay them 20$ a year and you can have 10% back as credit, which is useable for things on one sort of sale, but not for things on double-secret sale. Check the coupons in that junk-mail flyer, there's another random assortment of discounts! Despite the dizzying array of discounts with their byzantine conditions they always add up to 20% off; which is in turn, roughly the price at Nashbar.
Bleh. I just want to know how much the thing costs. Instead they make it abundantly clear that they set all their prices 20% higher than necessary in order to support throwing around gimicks and periodically confusing people into actually paying full price.
</rant>
Performance Bike is not exactly a gold standard of reasonable pricing practices.
They have a "Big Sale!" every other week during which a random assortment of things is marked way down to the price it would cost elsewhere.
If you buy anything there that isn't marked "20% Off!!!", or anything high-end at all, you're paying too much.
As a retailer, I hate Performance mightily; I always leave with the assumption I've been ripped off. Unfortunately, they're excellent as a manufacturer if you're shopping for bike stuff in the low-end-but-adequate range.
Actually, I think it clearly falls in the "Not a copy, so get bent" exception to copyright law.
As lab-bound proofs of concept that will add up numbers as long as the result is less than 4, sure.
As practical devices for getting anything done, or whose limitations and capabilities can be meaningfully discussed? No.
One company says they've got one inside this black box here. No you can't see it. Yes, we're seeking investors... Right.
Quantum computers have that one nagging flaw: they don't actually exist.
"How about, if you take the drug out of the equation?"
OK, how do you propose to do that? Is criminalizing use of certain drugs doing a good job of that? Not as far as I can tell.
In any case, when people say "victimless crime" they mean something victimless by nature, not by chance. Reckless driving may be victimless if you're lucky. Getting stoned in your own living room is victimless period. So drop the straw man.
"Or how about someone walks into a bar with a pocket full of date rape drugs?"
One drug is involved in more date rapes than any other by a very very long way. It doesn't fit in pockets well, but bars serve it.
We have, in Alcohol, a fine example of a drug that has been both criminalized and legally regulated. Every negative effect on users or society was much worse under Prohibition. Regulation is simply a better way to mitigate problems related to drugs; it works, and prohibition doesn't. Not creating a market that supports violent criminal gangs, and not locking up huge numbers of non-violent otherwise innocent people are just nice side effects.
"Drugs" isn't a crime. It's not even a verb. Such atrocious vagueness is the very heart of the incredibly stupid War on Some Drug Users.
Please specify what the heck you're actually talking about and I imagine I will conclude that either it is victimless, or that "drugs" is not the problem.
Note that I do not endorse the other posters suggestion that undercover agents be outed. Undercover agents should not be outed, they should be quietly laid off.
Also using 2.0.0.3, and I am talking about the same thing, and it works fine.
I don't know that it would reduce fraudulent charges, but I was struck by this part of the summary:
" Because NPC processes the payment as an e-check with the Automated Clearing House (ACH), a network most commonly used for direct deposits, participating retailers bypass credit card companies such as Visa and Mastercard."
Retailers bypass the fees credit card companies charge, and the protection for the card-holder they provide. So you'd better hope it reduces fraud, but I don't think it will.
Of course, all the game companies I've had dealings with have had guards posted to keep from being smothered by hordes of people who can't wait to tell them their great idea.
Meanwhile, they were desperate to find the tiny fraction of those people who can actually bring ideas to fruition.
The ideas behind the modules that will be submitted to this contest aren't worth squat. The fully functional, polished modules might have some minor value if they wanted to put out some assorted best-of compilation, but that's a stretch. Hard evidence that a potential job applicant can turn out a functional, polished module is really valuable.
For one thing, of course correlation implies causation. Correlation does not establish causation. If two factors are strongly correlated, it doesn't prove that one causes the other, but it's a bloody good hint there is some sort of causative relationship going on between the two, or possibly a third factor.
For another thing, it doesn't have anything to do with the case at hand. If we all agreed that Bill was a great manager as well as very rich, and we further agreed that very rich people tended to be great managers, we could debate whether richness and great managerhood were related by causation or mere correlation.
"And years of McMurdo and Amundsen/Scott winter-over crews?"
I know two people who have wintered over at the pole. That's a much larger group and shorter time than a space mission, yet I gather making sure sexual conflict does not lead to homicide is a significant concern.
The other posters description of how the branches of our government interact is essentially correct, yet the problem you describe for the most part doesn't happen.
Whatever could be responsible for this odd discrepancy?
Here's a couple hints to get you started:
There are nine Supreme Court Justices, and a vast number of lesser federal judges besides. Having hudreds of legislators, most of whom must agree to pass a law may not actually be conducive to passing huge numbers of obviously unconstitutional laws faster than judges can strike them down.
"IMHO a simple motion detector could do the same, so why infrared?"
Because infared is how simple motion detectors work?
"...its possible that the LED produces more lumens per sq/in in its cone of coverage so would actually be brighter in that area than the CFL which casts light every which way."
To be pedantic, lumen, as a unit, already takes the area illuminated into account. "lumens per sq/in" is not meaningful.
LEDs typically produce a narrow cone only because of the lens they are molded into is designed to do that. Apropriate fixture design should balance any area-lighted differences.
Besides the durability you note, LEDs are great when you don't really need much light. Other lighting tech doesn't work at full efficiency at small scales; but an LED can run at full efficiency producing a very samll amount of light, which may be plenty, particularly along with a focussing lens. LEDs are also great when you wan't colored light anyway. An incandescent stop-light wastes vast amount of energy producing light in parts of the spectrum that just gets stopped by the red filter, while an led can just put all it's energy into producing red ligth in the first place.
"I confess I don't know what this expression means."
It means something is past it's prime. Typically it would refer specifically to a TV show, and would mean said show had exhausted whatever decent premise it may have had, and was now resorting to silly gimmicks, like jumping a motorcycle over a shark.
Try not to be confused by the usage in the article summary, which doesn't make any sense.
"Does it have anything to do with Henry Winkler and/or the Fonze?"
Yes, everything.
Ignoring the obvious question of whether Penrose is correct...
What makes you think this machine is not affected by cosmic rays?
"No I uderstand the Fed prints and releases money."
Uh, no. The Fed will trade actual paper currency for money that already exists as account credit but that has no effect on the money supply. The Fed increases or decreases the money supply by changing the interest rates they charge and pay. You, me and everybody increase the money supply by engaging in various sorts of productive activity, and decrease it by consuming things of value.
If you think you understand entirely how the money supply works, you are either way ahead of any Nobel winning economist, or wrong. If you think it's simple, you're just definitely wrong.
"when the Government issues bonds, (i.e. creates debt) they are in effect printing said money, and using it."
When the Government issues bonds they are borrowing money, just like when you take out a loan. That's all.
When a bank lends out 70% of the money it has in deposits, and that money goes out in the economy and does stuff and winds up as deposits in a bank that then lends out 70% of it and it goes out into the econmy, winds up in a bank that lends out 70% of it, etc... THAT creates money. But it works just the same if the banks are lending it to you or the government, and it works just the same if the country is on the gold standard or not.
As for the whole standard of living thing, note my disclaimer "the jury is still out on the very recent". I should perhaps have specified that in the scale of US history, I'd call the last 30 years or so "recent".
"Neither was really ever for the 'want to tweak snapshots' crowd."
Agreed. I mentioned that because you asked about redeye reduction. I wouldn't use either Paint or Gimp for that. I assume Gimp can do it, but I also assume it will take me at least several minutes to figure out how, while all the snapshot-tweaking specific apps I've got have some sort of red-collored eye icon on their main toolbar.
I use paint to:
- Crop down a screenshot to the part I want to show someone.
- Grab the board image from an abstract strategy game I play online, and shove around the peices while I figure out waht play to make.
- slap together a quick-and-dirty collage of a couple images.
That's the most recent three examples off the top of my head. I am not a graphic artist of any sort. For image manipulation tasks I do that aren't handled by the snapshot-tweakers, Paint is entirely sufficient. In fact, it's optimal, because it DOESN'T have lots and lots of stuff. I can find the feature I want in under a minute every time, because I can go through every feature it has in that time.
"Anything that's generally useful in paint probably should be in a viewer or the file manager."
I've got rotate-90-degrees, redeye reduction, and crop (I think) in my file manager. I don't see putting cut/paste, flood-fill, or the drawing tools there, though they're pretty useful. Actually, I suppose you could, but that's just making Paint your viewer.
99% of the time I draw something with a pen and paper it's not art; it's a hastily scrawled little diagram on a handy peice of scrap paper. Paint is electronic equivalent.
I'm sure the Gimp is great for people with different needs than me.
For most of the things I do with non-photograph images, Paint is better than Gimp. I'm in and out in 30 seconds - I've never managed to do anything in Gimp in less than an hour.
For dealing with photographs, I've got Picassa, MS Photo Editor, or a couple programs that came free with digital cameras I've bought. Any of those will do redeye reduction and basic color/contrast tweaking plenty good enough for the family photo album and I can figure out how to do what I want in a minute or two. And, as you suggest, several basic operations are integrated into the file manager in XP Media Center (and I assume some flavors of Vista)
As a non-professional, Gimp looks to me like a tool that might be great for professionals.
it may well be the way to go for people who use it regularly to do complex stuff. For occasional lightweight amatuer use, Gimp is not worth talking about (and probaly shoudln't try to be). Comparing it to Paint is ridiculous; the two programs don't have remotely the same target.
"When money was tied to gold the government had a very tough time going into debt."
What are you smoking? They went into debt the same way they do now, by borrowing money, generally by issuing bonds. They didn't do it on nearly so grand a scale as the last few Republican Administrations, but that's just because they were smart. It didn't have anything to do with the gold standard. The gold standard doesn't do anything to prevent anyone from making loans, to the government or otherwise.
Wait a second... Are you really under the impression that "the government" prints up more money and just adds it to the budget? That's hilarious. That's not how the Federal Reserve works. When the money supply is increased by lowering interest rates, the government doesn't get the money.
"This effects the poor to a greater degree, as their wages do not typically keep up with inflation."
That depends a lot on how you define "the poor"; standards of living have consistently increased in the course of US history across pretty much all sectors (the jury is still out on the very recent), implying incomes have generally outpaced inflation.
You are certain that with the right approach you can be very successful when a random stranger shoots you as is likely to happen in todays Sudan? The "right approach" in today's Sudan is to get a gun, head for the border, and shoot anyone who tries to stop you from getting the hell out. I think Sudan is not as good a place to live right now as Canada. I think Canadian society is not just different, but indisputably much, much better than Sudanese society. If you think the successfulness of a person in Canada vs one in Sudan is just a matter of who they are, and has nothing to do with where they happen to live, you are an incredible moron.
You can call something Social Darwinism if you want, but don't expect the truth of Biological Darwinism to lend any credence to your theory that what you call Social Darwinism is desirable.
I'm really just saying that compared to quite a lot of places I think Canada is a nicer place to live. One such as yourself who takes responsibility for their own life is more likely to have the chance to make what they want of their life in Canada that someone whose just going to get randomly killed in a crossfire in Sudan. These nice things about Canada may have something to do with social policies that help those who need it whether they deserve it or not. Since you choose to live in Canada, I think it's a bit hypocritical to say you don't want to pay for these policies, now that they've already made a nice place for you.
Darwinism is a description of a biological reality over the long term. It has squat to do with social policy.