I've always figured that the period after they declare they'll no longer support the product is that sweet spot when it will finally function predictably.
Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.
I worked for a physics professor that said Newton liked to say that because one of his rivals, Leibniz, was rather short. Like another poster said, (who attributed it to another reason), Newton, brilliant as he was, was quite an asshole.
Last night while sitting in my chair I pinged a host that wasn't there It wasn't there again today The host resolved to NSA.
Shakespeare of the net.
Several people are impressed by that. However, I'm the product of the American education system, so that parody has sailed completely over my head. Googling for the first line pretty much yields the parent post. Can you help enlighten me? What is that based on?
.That's because you're an asshole if you just let your phone ring. Every phone I've ever owned can be easily muted blindly
When thinking of the "let the phone ring" scenario, I was actually thinking of a group of people at a house with a landline. If you let the landline phone just ring, people get really antsy - as if it must be obeyed.
There is definitely a different response to letting a cellphone ring and it's more in the "annoyed" area.
It's a market economy with lots of morons as customers. As long as they find enough morons to pay their super-inflated prices, they don't have to justify anything. And if they don't find them, they just have to justify why they're not making profit in front of their shareholders.
The problem is that it's not an efficient market that has an artificially high barrier to entry. Few people can just go start a cell phone network. Even if they had the money, in many markets the government restricts placement of towers and cables so the ones already there have near complete control.
Actually, making a phone call is more "immediate" and intrusive than a text message. Try sitting in a group and just let the phone ring. Everyone will get antsy until the phone stops ringing. The same tension doesn't happen with a text message.
And, looking at a text message is much less convenient than a voice mail. If someone sends me a text, I can just look at my phone and read it. To get my voice mail, I have to call and wait through all the prompts to finally hear the message.
I will usually send a text when I want to send a message that I'm not worried when the person gets it or what I'm writing about is of low importance. I also often text a friend who is usually in the law library or on mass transit, or waiting in court and won't answer her phone in order to be polite to people around her.
Texts definitely have their good points and uses. But I also agree with you about not texting while driving and about the excessive costs.
As per the logical process in the quotes though, you don't necessarily have to destroy the other side's army (or robots).
Precisely! One's military power is actually the least important of the 3 necessities for war fighting. Much more important are the will to fight a war and the economic resources to wage war.
Besides, I still fail to see why a country which is likely to lose in the robotic war would accept these rules, when it makes a lot more sense to attack the other country's civil population - which in turn might reconsider the whole thing.
Of course, there is an Original Star Trek episode that takes this to the extreme. Two planets have been fighting a war for centuries. However, instead of sending real bombs, their computers collaborate to determine damage done in a "war game"... then a list of casualties is generated and they must report to a disintegration chamber.
If you're willing to subscribe to robotic rules of war where you can lose, why not a computer-driven simulation of war?
But I tend to agree that the weaker side will simply resort to guerrilla/terrorism tactics. These hurt the superiorly armed side much more than any kind of all-out attack. They'll "bring the war home" to the people who normally have the least skin in the game.
Well, that's all fine if they're in a job where their job entails them leaving "the rest" to be done. But far too often the work left is something they were supposed to be doing. And I've seen plenty of people who are supposed to do a hand-off type of job who only get part way through their part. If they tend to stop before completion, setting a shorter completion horizon may not be the best solution.
I'd add to that with my own anecdote. I've noticed that when I'm driving and traffic suddenly gets more complicated that I automatically reach down and turn off the radio.
Yet, when I'm driving in "boring" conditions, I can hardly go more than a minute or two without finding that I've reached down to turn on the radio. If I consciously try to resist turning on the radio (after stopping my hand in midway to the radio a few times), and I'm successful, I find that I eventually start singing or talking to myself.
Nobody here is practicing law, they are practicing their First Amendment Rights to freely express themselves including their opinions, commentary, and beliefs with regards to matters of law. I do not need a license nor even permission to do so in my country, only the permission of the website's owner to publish my opinion here.
IANALBMNI (IANAL But My Neighbor Is), and basically as soon as you step through the doors at law school, you are no longer legally allowed to dispense legal advice, except in specific situations (such as serving in the court as a certified law student under another lawyer). For example, my neighbor used to volunteer for a group that helped people who were facing eviction. Before she walked in the door of the law school that first day, she was legally entitled to provide the advice, forms, etc that her group did. But once she walked through that door on that first day, she was legally forbidden from dispensing legal advice. In essence, she opted to give up some of her 1st amendment rights in order to practice law.
If I want to disseminate and share factual information regarding our laws or legal system, I may do so.
If I want to make commentary and inject my opinion of such information, I may do so.
For an actual lawyer, dispensing such advice and opinions can be the establishment of a lawyer-client relationship, which exposes the lawyer to certain liabilities; even if it's in a public forum like this and it's "obvious" that there is no real relationship. People feeling the need to make disclaimers demonstrates that the lawyers know that the system is horribly screwed up and that a mere post on slashdot could be taken by someone as legal advice who may try to later sue the lawyer when things go badly - it's an admission that such suits and bar complaints can still be taken seriously and that there are juries dumb enough to hand over convictions even on stupid trumped up charges. It's like finding out that the doctors in town will not go to a certain hospital - probably a good indicator that you don't want to go there either.
A "normal" person can give all kinds of advice. But as soon as you enter certain professions, typically ones requiring certification by the state, you can often be required to give up some of your rights.
What would be interesting to consider is if an actual lawyer precedes his post with "IANAL", is that enough to still protect him?
Whenever these discussions come up I always think of my beset friend who lives in Kentucky. Below is the text of an actual resolution submitted in their House of Representatives.
A RESOLUTION encouraging the purchase and vigorous use of the USS Louisville 688 VLS Class submarine.
WHEREAS, in the past few years the scourge of the casino riverboat has been an increasingly significant presence on the Ohio River; and
WHEREAS, the Ohio River borders the Commonwealth of Kentucky; and
WHEREAS, the siren song of payola issuing from the discordant calliopes of these gambling vessels has led thousands of Kentucky citizens to vast disappointment and woe; and
WHEREAS, no good can come to the citizens of Kentucky hypnotized from the siren song issuing from these casino riverboats, the engines of which are fired by the hard-earned dollars lost from Kentucky citizens;
NOW, THEREFORE, Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky:
Section 1. The House of Representatives does hereby encourage the formation of the Kentucky Navy and subsequently immediately encourages the purchase and armament of one particularly effective submarine, namely, the USS Louisville 688 VLS Class Submarine, to patrol the portion of the Ohio River under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth to engage and destroy any casino riverboats that the submarine may encounter.
Section 2. The House of Representatives does hereby authorize the notification of the casino riverboat consulate of this Resolution and impending whoopin' so that they may remove their casino vessels to friendlier waters.
I think I would vote for any bill or resolution that has the phrase "impending whoopin'" in it.
In fact, we'd probably be better off. Don't start in about all the "goods" we'd be missing. So what! We'd make 'em here. They'd be more expensive, but, that'd be a good thing.
What you don't seem to be understanding is that these goods, while "made in china" are still sold by US Corporations for the most part. Many products take several months to get through a production development process. It takes even longer to get a production facility bought, built, and brought online. What are all those US Corporations going to sell (and consider, they have to sell things to make money to pay their employees) for the half a year or more it takes to get the first runs of production out of domestic factories?
So, it's not really the lack of goods for consumers to buy that will be the problem if our trade with China is suddenly cut off. It will the massive layoffs and economic destabilization before any significant factory production could be brought online domestically.
We USians gave the Chinese the stirrups, reins, and saddle in order to be able to get much higher margins on the products we sell (this is where the decisions were made, not by the consumer in the marketplace). We just have to realize that economically the Chinese can ride us any way they want and put us away wet... and there's not a whole hell of a lot we can do about it, especially in the short term.
The only two things I can think of are maybe that it's less susceptible to EM interference and probably doesn't expand and contract as much as copper will with changes in temperature.
I think you may be mistaken. Many salts have metals as part of the component, NaCl being a common variety. But salts are actually neutral molecules formed from the reaction of an acid and a base.
Ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) is an example of a non-metallic salt. You could argue that the H is a metal, but I don't think in the form NH3 or HCl it would be considered a metal - any more than iron rust would be considered a metal.
The government is making $Billions auctioning off the old analog TV spectrum. The money to subsidize these boxes is coming from that windfall, not from your tax dollars.
Oh right, because that money is no good for other things. Well, I'm glad they came up with something to do with it.
For my Christmas lights, I Just use a piece of cardboard - like the side cut out of a box, put a notch near one corner. I stick the end of the cord into that notch to hold it in place, then I just wrap the lights around the cardboard with the wires close like I were winding a coil. At the other end, I make another notch to hold the other end of the lights.
I usually make the piece of cardboard smaller than the lights' original box so I can just slide the whole bunch back into that box.
I worked for a summer with a flooring contractor before going to basic training in the army. They did a cool technique with their extension cords where they basically made a long loose crochet chain out of them. A 50 ft cord would end up about 10 feet long and then they'd toss them all in their big "contractor box".
For some reason, cords that were already looped up like this didn't tend to knot up with each other. Which makes me wonder if there is a maximum knotty potential... straight un-knotted cords have a higher probability of knotting while ones that are already knotted will be less likely to. It seems I read something recently, maybe out of the "Book of Ignorance" (http://www.amazon.com/Book-General-Ignorance-John-Mitchinson/dp/0307394913), said that straight hair tends to get knotted more then curly hair.
It's amazing to me that seemingly simple things end up yielding entire fields of math and science.
Except that a few years ago, the government doubled funding for the NIH and the number of published articles did not correlate. The grant funding rate that you quote is from the period of rapid budget INCREASES.
Forgive me for being very skeptical of your claims that we need to throw even MORE money at the NIH, since y'all were just as productive when we spent half as much money on you.
So do you really think that the number of articles published is any real indicator of the productivity of NIH funded research? If that's the case, we should just ask the researchers to write more articles. Maybe they can split their bigger articles into smaller pieces? If each researcher split their articles in half we could easily double productivity!
For $10,000 I could build a modest "super computer" (imagine a beowulf cluster) to study problems in Agent Based Simulation (and there are many such problems that are health-related). For $100,000, I could build an even better "super computer" and study more interesting problems or go deeper into my problems of interest. I really only have the capacity to produce 4 papers in a year. From which scenario do you think I'll have the opportunity to produce the most interesting papers and most useful research?
I guess we can always just earmark the money for war-fighting instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Good joke, but just an FYI, privates don't "sir" sergeants, seeing that sergeants work for a living.
(In the US Army, at least, "sir" is reserved for male officers and warrant officers.)
I've always figured that the period after they declare they'll no longer support the product is that sweet spot when it will finally function predictably.
I stand corrected!
Clearly my giant isn't as tall as yours!
Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.
I worked for a physics professor that said Newton liked to say that because one of his rivals, Leibniz, was rather short. Like another poster said, (who attributed it to another reason), Newton, brilliant as he was, was quite an asshole.
Last night while sitting in my chair
I pinged a host that wasn't there
It wasn't there again today
The host resolved to NSA.
Shakespeare of the net.
Several people are impressed by that. However, I'm the product of the American education system, so that parody has sailed completely over my head. Googling for the first line pretty much yields the parent post. Can you help enlighten me? What is that based on?
.That's because you're an asshole if you just let your phone ring. Every phone I've ever owned can be easily muted blindly
When thinking of the "let the phone ring" scenario, I was actually thinking of a group of people at a house with a landline. If you let the landline phone just ring, people get really antsy - as if it must be obeyed.
There is definitely a different response to letting a cellphone ring and it's more in the "annoyed" area.
It's a market economy with lots of morons as customers. As long as they find enough morons to pay their super-inflated prices, they don't have to justify anything. And if they don't find them, they just have to justify why they're not making profit in front of their shareholders.
The problem is that it's not an efficient market that has an artificially high barrier to entry. Few people can just go start a cell phone network. Even if they had the money, in many markets the government restricts placement of towers and cables so the ones already there have near complete control.
Actually, making a phone call is more "immediate" and intrusive than a text message. Try sitting in a group and just let the phone ring. Everyone will get antsy until the phone stops ringing. The same tension doesn't happen with a text message.
And, looking at a text message is much less convenient than a voice mail. If someone sends me a text, I can just look at my phone and read it. To get my voice mail, I have to call and wait through all the prompts to finally hear the message.
I will usually send a text when I want to send a message that I'm not worried when the person gets it or what I'm writing about is of low importance. I also often text a friend who is usually in the law library or on mass transit, or waiting in court and won't answer her phone in order to be polite to people around her.
Texts definitely have their good points and uses. But I also agree with you about not texting while driving and about the excessive costs.
As per the logical process in the quotes though, you don't necessarily have to destroy the other side's army (or robots).
Precisely! One's military power is actually the least important of the 3 necessities for war fighting. Much more important are the will to fight a war and the economic resources to wage war.
Besides, I still fail to see why a country which is likely to lose in the robotic war would accept these rules, when it makes a lot more sense to attack the other country's civil population - which in turn might reconsider the whole thing.
Of course, there is an Original Star Trek episode that takes this to the extreme. Two planets have been fighting a war for centuries. However, instead of sending real bombs, their computers collaborate to determine damage done in a "war game"... then a list of casualties is generated and they must report to a disintegration chamber.
If you're willing to subscribe to robotic rules of war where you can lose, why not a computer-driven simulation of war?
But I tend to agree that the weaker side will simply resort to guerrilla/terrorism tactics. These hurt the superiorly armed side much more than any kind of all-out attack. They'll "bring the war home" to the people who normally have the least skin in the game.
So what.
Well, that's all fine if they're in a job where their job entails them leaving "the rest" to be done. But far too often the work left is something they were supposed to be doing. And I've seen plenty of people who are supposed to do a hand-off type of job who only get part way through their part. If they tend to stop before completion, setting a shorter completion horizon may not be the best solution.
I'd add to that with my own anecdote. I've noticed that when I'm driving and traffic suddenly gets more complicated that I automatically reach down and turn off the radio.
Yet, when I'm driving in "boring" conditions, I can hardly go more than a minute or two without finding that I've reached down to turn on the radio. If I consciously try to resist turning on the radio (after stopping my hand in midway to the radio a few times), and I'm successful, I find that I eventually start singing or talking to myself.
Nobody here is practicing law, they are practicing their First Amendment Rights to freely express themselves including their opinions, commentary, and beliefs with regards to matters of law. I do not need a license nor even permission to do so in my country, only the permission of the website's owner to publish my opinion here.
IANALBMNI (IANAL But My Neighbor Is), and basically as soon as you step through the doors at law school, you are no longer legally allowed to dispense legal advice, except in specific situations (such as serving in the court as a certified law student under another lawyer). For example, my neighbor used to volunteer for a group that helped people who were facing eviction. Before she walked in the door of the law school that first day, she was legally entitled to provide the advice, forms, etc that her group did. But once she walked through that door on that first day, she was legally forbidden from dispensing legal advice. In essence, she opted to give up some of her 1st amendment rights in order to practice law.
If I want to disseminate and share factual information regarding our laws or legal system, I may do so.
If I want to make commentary and inject my opinion of such information, I may do so.
For an actual lawyer, dispensing such advice and opinions can be the establishment of a lawyer-client relationship, which exposes the lawyer to certain liabilities; even if it's in a public forum like this and it's "obvious" that there is no real relationship. People feeling the need to make disclaimers demonstrates that the lawyers know that the system is horribly screwed up and that a mere post on slashdot could be taken by someone as legal advice who may try to later sue the lawyer when things go badly - it's an admission that such suits and bar complaints can still be taken seriously and that there are juries dumb enough to hand over convictions even on stupid trumped up charges. It's like finding out that the doctors in town will not go to a certain hospital - probably a good indicator that you don't want to go there either.
A "normal" person can give all kinds of advice. But as soon as you enter certain professions, typically ones requiring certification by the state, you can often be required to give up some of your rights.
What would be interesting to consider is if an actual lawyer precedes his post with "IANAL", is that enough to still protect him?
Whenever these discussions come up I always think of my beset friend who lives in Kentucky. Below is the text of an actual resolution submitted in their House of Representatives.
A RESOLUTION encouraging the purchase and vigorous use of the USS Louisville 688 VLS Class submarine.
WHEREAS, in the past few years the scourge of the casino riverboat has been an increasingly significant presence on the Ohio River; and
WHEREAS, the Ohio River borders the Commonwealth of Kentucky; and
WHEREAS, the siren song of payola issuing from the discordant calliopes of these gambling vessels has led thousands of Kentucky citizens to vast disappointment and woe; and
WHEREAS, no good can come to the citizens of Kentucky hypnotized from the siren song issuing from these casino riverboats, the engines of which are fired by the hard-earned dollars lost from Kentucky citizens;
NOW, THEREFORE,
Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky:
Section 1. The House of Representatives does hereby encourage the formation of the Kentucky Navy and subsequently immediately encourages the purchase and armament of one particularly effective submarine, namely, the USS Louisville 688 VLS Class Submarine, to patrol the portion of the Ohio River under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth to engage and destroy any casino riverboats that the submarine may encounter.
Section 2. The House of Representatives does hereby authorize the notification of the casino riverboat consulate of this Resolution and impending whoopin' so that they may remove their casino vessels to friendlier waters.
I think I would vote for any bill or resolution that has the phrase "impending whoopin'" in it.
Unfortunately, the bottom of the summary points out the larger creationist museum in Kentucky is thriving.
Mod US science -2
On the other hand, we do have the best entertainment media in the world!
Hell yeah! I just got back from Costco with a case of Brawndo just in time to watch a 24 hour marathon of "Ow, My Balls!"
America, F*ck Yeah!
Obligatory Monty Python quote:
"All I said was this piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah!"
In fact, we'd probably be better off. Don't start in about all the "goods" we'd be missing. So what! We'd make 'em here. They'd be more expensive, but, that'd be a good thing.
What you don't seem to be understanding is that these goods, while "made in china" are still sold by US Corporations for the most part. Many products take several months to get through a production development process. It takes even longer to get a production facility bought, built, and brought online. What are all those US Corporations going to sell (and consider, they have to sell things to make money to pay their employees) for the half a year or more it takes to get the first runs of production out of domestic factories?
So, it's not really the lack of goods for consumers to buy that will be the problem if our trade with China is suddenly cut off. It will the massive layoffs and economic destabilization before any significant factory production could be brought online domestically.
We USians gave the Chinese the stirrups, reins, and saddle in order to be able to get much higher margins on the products we sell (this is where the decisions were made, not by the consumer in the marketplace). We just have to realize that economically the Chinese can ride us any way they want and put us away wet... and there's not a whole hell of a lot we can do about it, especially in the short term.
The only two things I can think of are maybe that it's less susceptible to EM interference and probably doesn't expand and contract as much as copper will with changes in temperature.
I think you may be mistaken. Many salts have metals as part of the component, NaCl being a common variety. But salts are actually neutral molecules formed from the reaction of an acid and a base.
Ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) is an example of a non-metallic salt. You could argue that the H is a metal, but I don't think in the form NH3 or HCl it would be considered a metal - any more than iron rust would be considered a metal.
The government is making $Billions auctioning off the old analog TV spectrum. The money to subsidize these boxes is coming from that windfall, not from your tax dollars.
Oh right, because that money is no good for other things. Well, I'm glad they came up with something to do with it.
For my Christmas lights, I Just use a piece of cardboard - like the side cut out of a box, put a notch near one corner. I stick the end of the cord into that notch to hold it in place, then I just wrap the lights around the cardboard with the wires close like I were winding a coil. At the other end, I make another notch to hold the other end of the lights.
I usually make the piece of cardboard smaller than the lights' original box so I can just slide the whole bunch back into that box.
I worked for a summer with a flooring contractor before going to basic training in the army. They did a cool technique with their extension cords where they basically made a long loose crochet chain out of them. A 50 ft cord would end up about 10 feet long and then they'd toss them all in their big "contractor box".
For some reason, cords that were already looped up like this didn't tend to knot up with each other. Which makes me wonder if there is a maximum knotty potential... straight un-knotted cords have a higher probability of knotting while ones that are already knotted will be less likely to. It seems I read something recently, maybe out of the "Book of Ignorance" (http://www.amazon.com/Book-General-Ignorance-John-Mitchinson/dp/0307394913), said that straight hair tends to get knotted more then curly hair.
It's amazing to me that seemingly simple things end up yielding entire fields of math and science.
Except that a few years ago, the government doubled funding for the NIH and the number of published articles did not correlate. The grant funding rate that you quote is from the period of rapid budget INCREASES.
Forgive me for being very skeptical of your claims that we need to throw even MORE money at the NIH, since y'all were just as productive when we spent half as much money on you.
So do you really think that the number of articles published is any real indicator of the productivity of NIH funded research? If that's the case, we should just ask the researchers to write more articles. Maybe they can split their bigger articles into smaller pieces? If each researcher split their articles in half we could easily double productivity!
For $10,000 I could build a modest "super computer" (imagine a beowulf cluster) to study problems in Agent Based Simulation (and there are many such problems that are health-related). For $100,000, I could build an even better "super computer" and study more interesting problems or go deeper into my problems of interest. I really only have the capacity to produce 4 papers in a year. From which scenario do you think I'll have the opportunity to produce the most interesting papers and most useful research?
I guess we can always just earmark the money for war-fighting instead.
Well, it's certainly not like a bunch of oxen carts.