Of course, journals also have names, which scientists can use to impress people. "I published in Nature" sounds impressive, and people simply assume that your work must have been "a cut above" work that was published elsewhere. After all, who has time to read so much as the abstract of an article, when you can stop at the name of the journal (and it's not as though anyone publishes the same article in 10 different journals, making only superficial tweaks to their work, right?)?
And that name / reputation is what makes this whole rotten system so hard to break. Nature has a monopoly on a very scarce good, their own name, because if you published in Nature, your career is made (and your ability to publish lame crap in future is substantially enhanced, as you can ride on your reputation for years.
The journal publishing industry is an obsolete industry, riding on nothing but its good name and an anachronistic method of promoting the spread of human knowledge for the benefit of society.
Agreed, and in addition it is heavily biased towards the incumbents (the publishers, and those who benefit from having made a name for themselves by publishing in the incumbent journals). Don't even get me started on the fact that the publishing system is single-blind only (author doesn't know who the reviewers are, reviewers know who the authors are and have been proven to show bias), the taxpayer pays for everything multiple times (subscriptions + open access fees + often salaries of the researchers), fraud and bias in the review process (hmmmm, interesting paper I've been asked to review here -- I'll just hold up its publication, redo the experiment and publish first), etc, etc.
Unfortunately, it is built to be broken in its current form -- any constructive ideas (based on proper economic incentives within the system) on how to break the industry gladly accepted.
Actuarial science is a specialised field, requiring a lot of understanding of the underlying calculations so that they can be properly implemented. The work that actuaries do also requires a lot of flexibility around changing the underlying model (e.g. to implement a new feature). Excel offers this quite well as a platform, and there are various suites of software commercially available which also meet those needs, tailored to actuarial work (and more importantly, workflow). Getting proper development processes in place (documentation, testing, specs) can be a challenge, but trying to solve the problem by writing your own system is knuckleheaded in the extreme. You will end up reimplementing Excel, badly.
For the record, I am or have been a developer, an actuary, a PM in charge of building an actuarial system, and a manager charged with making the best possible solutions available for our actuaries to work effectively (Excel + MoSes is what works for us, YMMV of course).
Fantastic -- distort the corn price through ethanol subsidies (so that a large chunk of corn which could be feed is used for ethanol production) and then give the ethanol producers a new market to sell their waste in. Your tax dollars at work, keeping the corn lobby happy, all day, every day.
When analysing the economics of the mafia, there has not yet been consensus reached on whether to analyse them as a business (producer-customer model) or as a government (entity wielding force, with tax-raising privileges).
While I appreciate your attempt to defend HFT, saying that it is a price resolution issue is complete, total and utter bullshit. Share prices on modern exchanges are to 6 decimal places (yes, 6), saying that a share is mispriced at the level of the 7th decimal place is nonsensical for a human investor. It only makes sense for an algorithm, so the only ones who get to play in that game are the algorithms (ie HFTs). This has nothing to do any more with actual investment, it has only to do with stealing the bid-offer spread out of a normal transaction (ie stiffing the seller in a normal trade).
Look at the comments below any newspaper article criticising the TSA. Filled with comments along the lines of "Stop whining about security, I don't care if I have to strip nekkid, as long as the evil ragheads don't blow up my airplane". No concept of relative cost vs risk, no realisation of the fact that this is all theatre, no understanding of the loss of liberties involved. Even the previous head of the TSA (Kip Hawley) by now says that most of the scanners etc are useless, but Joe Sixpack, he reckons the security will keep him alive.
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which?
So you're saying it's impossible to separate good teachers from bad ones? BS. It is hard (if not impossible) to set up a quantitative, objective metric for teacher (or programmer, or manager, or....) ability which is valid for all cases, but that doesn't mean they should all be paid the same. Paying them the same removes a very effective incentive for a) high performers to stay high performers, b) low performers to improve or get out.
In terms of software usage, you can split people into broadly three groups: beginners, intermediates and experts. Most of your people are in the intermediate group for a piece of software they regularly use. Getting from "beginner" to "intermediate" generally takes only a few hours. The main problem with the ribbon is that it is aimed squarely at the beginner user (find stuff easily), but is annoying to the intermediate (who wants to "do the stuff I want to do, easily") and exceptionally annoying to the advanced user ("do lots of stuff quickly and efficiently"). On top of that, there is no way to switch the damned thing off and go back to button bars (which are great for intermediate/advanced users). So you end up annoying everyone except the people who are using your tool for the first time.
TL;DR: Ribbon is designed to annoy 80%+ of all users, epic fail.
Read a book if you want more detail, good place to start would be "About Face 3: Essentials of interaction design" by Alan Cooper.
I'm ok with paying federal employees more than the private sector, after all, we want good people who do good work. I'm not sure we're getting our money's worth, though.
As long as the federal employees are subject to the same risks (job insecurity) and are also measured on merit, no problem. Out in the private sector, inefficiency/incompetence is punished through markets (your competitors eat your lunch). As a state, you usually have no competitors (it's not as if we can go and buy a military from someone else), so a key factor driving efficiency is simply not there, so states (often) end up inefficient and bloated.
Do this honestly / properly then -- make all multiplayer cost 10USD per game. If it was "factored in" to the original price, then drop the retail price by 10USD (or more, as the 10USD will be inflated several times by margins through the retail chain). Discriminating against 2nd-hand buyers is silly.
I'm sure there are a lot more reasons to use the Swastika than the ones you listed (satire, for one) but hey, as long as YOU don't think they're ok, let's ban them all. Have you noticed how close you are to being dictatorial?
And yes, I have more than enough cultural background to be able to argue this - raised German-speaking but outside Germany and then lived there for years. You guys have been brainwashed for 3 generations and it's understandable that it's hard for you to figure that out.
The South African govt is considering this for water heaters (on a mandatory basis) to deal with the lack of capacity (caused by their lack of planning).
Fully agreed -- the biggest pain when flying is the "amateur traveller" who does not think ahead ("Oh, I need my passport again, I have it right here in this envelope in the bottom of my suitcase - just give me moment to unpack"). Furrfu.
I used to think they should get separate boarding queues, by now I think they should get a separate airport.
Why not just do your job and fix their computer like they asked you to. Would you like your waiter to try and convince you to change your order because they don't think it's right to eat lamb?
Insightful, my a$$. Your job is to leave them with a computer which does what they want it to do (read emails, surf, whatever) long term. If you think that Linux/OSX or whatever is better, suggest it and see what the client says. More like the waiter saying "You ordered the fish sticks -- if you would like a fish dish today, may I suggest the fillet of sole?"
Today, the iPod may be your device of choice, but what if, tomorrow, a company comes out with a much, much better device. Will you still be happy? You won't if you bought Rights Restricted songs from Apple.
Ummmmm - burn song to CD, rerip song, anyone (as supported by iTunes and the Apple DRM)? Yes, it is inconvenient, but you can still get at your music.
How many Euros? Where in Yurup are you? The following (German) prices are from www.mac-kauf.de and all include shipping:
15Gb iPod is 329 EUR from amazon.de 20Gb iPod is 419 from amazon (417 from novodrom) 40GB iPod is 519 at amazon, can get it for 500 from other shops. iPod mini is 249 EUR at amazon and a few other stores.
Yeah, Apple stuff is a bit more expensive here than in the USA (c'mon Steve, drop the prices on the iTMS -- 1,20USD per song is a bit rich), but nowhere near the 450 EUR for the 15Gb iPod you were quoting.
Alt-tab works better under Windows then the MacOS equivalent.
I disagree. After getting used to the OSX Alt-Tab, the one on windows now cheeses me off. In OSX I can press Alt-Tab and then use the mouse or arrow keys to select my app (quickly -- e.g. selecting the one third from the right with the mouse). Also, the Alt-Tab under XP only shows 15 apps, not all open windows, which is useless for my purposes as I usually have many more docs than that open, made worse by the "let's have a window for each document" metaphor you also mention.
You are right that OSX has annoyances as well but overall I find that I spend less time fighting with the interface than under windows (heavy business/technical user -- Excel, Word, LaTeX, Mail).
BTW I find OSX gets significantly more useable if you have lots of screen real estate (I use a 1600x1200 external monitor on my Powerbook in addition to the main screen).
Not that I let my email client load images anyway, but just because I'm spiteful, I think I'll go add "127.0.0.1 didthereadit.com" to my/etc/hosts file.
Good (though unoriginal) idea, you might want to spell the domain name correctly though. Add in doubleclick.net while you're at it, too:)
if you get right down into the details of each case, it turns out that the vast majority of these lawsuits are justified.
What do you base this on? The fact that in a lot of these lawsuits there is a verdict and damages are paid? Circular logic, methinks. Frivolous means passing a "reasonable person" test, not seeing whether you could get the sympathy of a jury and convincing them that "there is no real victim, as the insurance company will pay the fine".
The american legal framework, which allows "no-win, no-fee", has spawned a huge number of frivolous lawsuits. As long as you these lawsuits continue to win money for the stupid, you cannot justifiably argue that the american legal system is based upon taking responsibility for one's actions (as the parent was stating).
I think the americans have just started to accept things as normal (but how could she have known the coffee was hot, the poor dear?) which a right-thinking person wouldn't. A lawyer comes up to you and says "we can sue, if we win you get $$$$, if you don't, no fee". Where's the catch?
The catch is that EVERYBODY's costs rise (wasted time, higher insurance premiums, less of a desire to help someone from fear of getting sued) and only a few people benefit (the plaintiffs and to a much greater extent the landsharks^Wlawyers). This gets worsened by the fact that the american legal system uses punitive damages, which increases the potential amount the plaintiff could get by a massive amount which further raises the incentive to sue.
You should not be putting a hairdryer on a wet countertop anyway. A (single) hairdryer which arcs because of a manufacturing defect should be returned, not become the subject of a multimillion dollar lawsuit.
This is not cynicism, this is observation of fact. I work for a (Non-US) insurer and there is a reason why the first question on any insurance business is "Is it in the US?".
Slashdot Mirror
You should never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
If you're going to sound profound, at least cite sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Of course, journals also have names, which scientists can use to impress people. "I published in Nature" sounds impressive, and people simply assume that your work must have been "a cut above" work that was published elsewhere. After all, who has time to read so much as the abstract of an article, when you can stop at the name of the journal (and it's not as though anyone publishes the same article in 10 different journals, making only superficial tweaks to their work, right?)?
And that name / reputation is what makes this whole rotten system so hard to break. Nature has a monopoly on a very scarce good, their own name, because if you published in Nature, your career is made (and your ability to publish lame crap in future is substantially enhanced, as you can ride on your reputation for years.
The journal publishing industry is an obsolete industry, riding on nothing but its good name and an anachronistic method of promoting the spread of human knowledge for the benefit of society.
Agreed, and in addition it is heavily biased towards the incumbents (the publishers, and those who benefit from having made a name for themselves by publishing in the incumbent journals). Don't even get me started on the fact that the publishing system is single-blind only (author doesn't know who the reviewers are, reviewers know who the authors are and have been proven to show bias), the taxpayer pays for everything multiple times (subscriptions + open access fees + often salaries of the researchers), fraud and bias in the review process (hmmmm, interesting paper I've been asked to review here -- I'll just hold up its publication, redo the experiment and publish first), etc, etc.
Unfortunately, it is built to be broken in its current form -- any constructive ideas (based on proper economic incentives within the system) on how to break the industry gladly accepted.
Actuarial science is a specialised field, requiring a lot of understanding of the underlying calculations so that they can be properly implemented. The work that actuaries do also requires a lot of flexibility around changing the underlying model (e.g. to implement a new feature). Excel offers this quite well as a platform, and there are various suites of software commercially available which also meet those needs, tailored to actuarial work (and more importantly, workflow). Getting proper development processes in place (documentation, testing, specs) can be a challenge, but trying to solve the problem by writing your own system is knuckleheaded in the extreme. You will end up reimplementing Excel, badly.
For the record, I am or have been a developer, an actuary, a PM in charge of building an actuarial system, and a manager charged with making the best possible solutions available for our actuaries to work effectively (Excel + MoSes is what works for us, YMMV of course).
Fantastic -- distort the corn price through ethanol subsidies (so that a large chunk of corn which could be feed is used for ethanol production) and then give the ethanol producers a new market to sell their waste in. Your tax dollars at work, keeping the corn lobby happy, all day, every day.
When analysing the economics of the mafia, there has not yet been consensus reached on whether to analyse them as a business (producer-customer model) or as a government (entity wielding force, with tax-raising privileges).
While I appreciate your attempt to defend HFT, saying that it is a price resolution issue is complete, total and utter bullshit. Share prices on modern exchanges are to 6 decimal places (yes, 6), saying that a share is mispriced at the level of the 7th decimal place is nonsensical for a human investor. It only makes sense for an algorithm, so the only ones who get to play in that game are the algorithms (ie HFTs). This has nothing to do any more with actual investment, it has only to do with stealing the bid-offer spread out of a normal transaction (ie stiffing the seller in a normal trade).
You mean Hanlon's Razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Look at the comments below any newspaper article criticising the TSA. Filled with comments along the lines of "Stop whining about security, I don't care if I have to strip nekkid, as long as the evil ragheads don't blow up my airplane". No concept of relative cost vs risk, no realisation of the fact that this is all theatre, no understanding of the loss of liberties involved. Even the previous head of the TSA (Kip Hawley) by now says that most of the scanners etc are useless, but Joe Sixpack, he reckons the security will keep him alive.
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which?
So you're saying it's impossible to separate good teachers from bad ones? BS. It is hard (if not impossible) to set up a quantitative, objective metric for teacher (or programmer, or manager, or ....) ability which is valid for all cases, but that doesn't mean they should all be paid the same. Paying them the same removes a very effective incentive for a) high performers to stay high performers, b) low performers to improve or get out.
In terms of software usage, you can split people into broadly three groups: beginners, intermediates and experts. Most of your people are in the intermediate group for a piece of software they regularly use. Getting from "beginner" to "intermediate" generally takes only a few hours. The main problem with the ribbon is that it is aimed squarely at the beginner user (find stuff easily), but is annoying to the intermediate (who wants to "do the stuff I want to do, easily") and exceptionally annoying to the advanced user ("do lots of stuff quickly and efficiently"). On top of that, there is no way to switch the damned thing off and go back to button bars (which are great for intermediate/advanced users). So you end up annoying everyone except the people who are using your tool for the first time.
TL;DR: Ribbon is designed to annoy 80%+ of all users, epic fail.
Read a book if you want more detail, good place to start would be "About Face 3: Essentials of interaction design" by Alan Cooper.
I'm ok with paying federal employees more than the private sector, after all, we want good people who do good work. I'm not sure we're getting our money's worth, though.
As long as the federal employees are subject to the same risks (job insecurity) and are also measured on merit, no problem. Out in the private sector, inefficiency/incompetence is punished through markets (your competitors eat your lunch). As a state, you usually have no competitors (it's not as if we can go and buy a military from someone else), so a key factor driving efficiency is simply not there, so states (often) end up inefficient and bloated.
Do this honestly / properly then -- make all multiplayer cost 10USD per game. If it was "factored in" to the original price, then drop the retail price by 10USD (or more, as the 10USD will be inflated several times by margins through the retail chain). Discriminating against 2nd-hand buyers is silly.
Career advice for trial lawyers:
- If the law is against you, bang on the facts
- If the facts are against you, bang on the law
- If both are against you, bang on the table
Attribution: Seen on /. but couldn't find it again now for proper attribution
I'm sure there are a lot more reasons to use the Swastika than the ones you listed (satire, for one) but hey, as long as YOU don't think they're ok, let's ban them all. Have you noticed how close you are to being dictatorial?
And yes, I have more than enough cultural background to be able to argue this - raised German-speaking but outside Germany and then lived there for years. You guys have been brainwashed for 3 generations and it's understandable that it's hard for you to figure that out.
The South African govt is considering this for water heaters (on a mandatory basis) to deal with the lack of capacity (caused by their lack of planning).
Fully agreed -- the biggest pain when flying is the "amateur traveller" who does not think ahead ("Oh, I need my passport again, I have it right here in this envelope in the bottom of my suitcase - just give me moment to unpack"). Furrfu.
I used to think they should get separate boarding queues, by now I think they should get a separate airport.
.... but it also becomes a lot more difficult to sell the stolen iPod once it's modded that way. "It's the iPod gangsta edition, honest"
Why not just do your job and fix their computer like they asked you to. Would you like your waiter to try and convince you to change your order because they don't think it's right to eat lamb?
Insightful, my a$$. Your job is to leave them with a computer which does what they want it to do (read emails, surf, whatever) long term. If you think that Linux/OSX or whatever is better, suggest it and see what the client says. More like the waiter saying "You ordered the fish sticks -- if you would like a fish dish today, may I suggest the fillet of sole?"
Ummmmm - burn song to CD, rerip song, anyone (as supported by iTunes and the Apple DRM)? Yes, it is inconvenient, but you can still get at your music.
How many Euros? Where in Yurup are you? The following (German) prices are from www.mac-kauf.de and all include shipping:
15Gb iPod is 329 EUR from amazon.de
20Gb iPod is 419 from amazon (417 from novodrom)
40GB iPod is 519 at amazon, can get it for 500 from other shops.
iPod mini is 249 EUR at amazon and a few other stores.
Yeah, Apple stuff is a bit more expensive here than in the USA (c'mon Steve, drop the prices on the iTMS -- 1,20USD per song is a bit rich), but nowhere near the 450 EUR for the 15Gb iPod you were quoting.
Alt-tab works better under Windows then the MacOS equivalent.
I disagree. After getting used to the OSX Alt-Tab, the one on windows now cheeses me off. In OSX I can press Alt-Tab and then use the mouse or arrow keys to select my app (quickly -- e.g. selecting the one third from the right with the mouse). Also, the Alt-Tab under XP only shows 15 apps, not all open windows, which is useless for my purposes as I usually have many more docs than that open, made worse by the "let's have a window for each document" metaphor you also mention.
You are right that OSX has annoyances as well but overall I find that I spend less time fighting with the interface than under windows (heavy business/technical user -- Excel, Word, LaTeX, Mail).
BTW I find OSX gets significantly more useable if you have lots of screen real estate (I use a 1600x1200 external monitor on my Powerbook in addition to the main screen).
Good (though unoriginal) idea, you might want to spell the domain name correctly though. Add in doubleclick.net while you're at it, too
You mean parse the XML, right -- get with the times though.
The math geeks of course connect to port 443 and decode the ssl in their heads.
What do you base this on? The fact that in a lot of these lawsuits there is a verdict and damages are paid? Circular logic, methinks. Frivolous means passing a "reasonable person" test, not seeing whether you could get the sympathy of a jury and convincing them that "there is no real victim, as the insurance company will pay the fine".
The american legal framework, which allows "no-win, no-fee", has spawned a huge number of frivolous lawsuits. As long as you these lawsuits continue to win money for the stupid, you cannot justifiably argue that the american legal system is based upon taking responsibility for one's actions (as the parent was stating).
I think the americans have just started to accept things as normal (but how could she have known the coffee was hot, the poor dear?) which a right-thinking person wouldn't. A lawyer comes up to you and says "we can sue, if we win you get $$$$, if you don't, no fee". Where's the catch?
The catch is that EVERYBODY's costs rise (wasted time, higher insurance premiums, less of a desire to help someone from fear of getting sued) and only a few people benefit (the plaintiffs and to a much greater extent the landsharks^Wlawyers). This gets worsened by the fact that the american legal system uses punitive damages, which increases the potential amount the plaintiff could get by a massive amount which further raises the incentive to sue.
You should not be putting a hairdryer on a wet countertop anyway. A (single) hairdryer which arcs because of a manufacturing defect should be returned, not become the subject of a multimillion dollar lawsuit.
This is not cynicism, this is observation of fact. I work for a (Non-US) insurer and there is a reason why the first question on any insurance business is "Is it in the US?".
Grenades are user friendly, they're just picky about who they make friends with.....