I've been suffering from depression for the last couple of years. My clinician thinks its related to a possible diagnosis of ADHD, but it's hard to say. The good thing is that things are finally getting better.
Two things were kind of strange for me regarding suicide. I never considered it in terms of "I'm so miserable I can't take it any more." Rather, in one case, I would have momentary urges that seemed to come out of no-where. For example, I would be driving home at night and there was suddenly an urge to swerve into oncoming traffic. It was like my hand was turning the wheel before I even realized the thought was there. THAT was frightening becuase I thought about what would happen if I didn't catch myself the next time.
In the other case, the thinking often was "is this all that there is? I'm consuming resources and struggling along and for what? Is there any point in really trying anymore?"
I feel really lucky. 3 months ago I was at my worst, but in the last month or so, the weight has lifted quite a bit - I feel like I can breath again and I don't feel like I'm being pulled into the ground.
Don't they say that half the people you meet are below average?
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public?
on
How does Google do it?
·
· Score: 1
If I were going to become a serious investor (in my mind, $millions) in a particular company, I would want to know certain details about it.
In your coca-cola example, I'd want to know some rough numbers about their production capacity. If thy're planning on taking on a new market, will they be able to meet the demand? If one facility goes offline (maybe a terrorist attack), can their other facilities absorb the needed supply?
I would want to know some similar things about google. I would need to know something about their infrastructure. How close are they to maxing their current resources? What will it take to add more? If they lose a data center, can they make up the load?
One of the biggest problems in the market these days is that people invest lots of money in things they don't understand. Then they wonder why they lose all their money. There's going to be a lot of ignorant people who will be investing lots of money in google just because someone else told them it's the next hottest thing. It might be, but that's a dumb reason to put money in it.
I think there was a Star Trek episode about this. They were all three the same man, who would have lived forever until he moved to another planet and made an android chick. She screwed it up, of course.
Really... have you ever seen Da Vinci, McGiver, and the Professor at the same time? Notice they all have 3 syllables?
Universities usually control all the communications access to the dorms. For example, universities have a monopoly on the phone lines going into their dormrooms. They use this monopoly to charge extra-high rates for long distance. (My university really hates that kids now have cellphones with unlimited long-distance. There was a huge revenue hit with that.)
When you live in the dorm, you can't just have another carrier handle your line, so you can't do DSL. You can't have another cable company handle your cable conneciton, so no cable-broadband. You may be able to do point-to-point wireless through a wireless ISP, but the Uni probably prohibits the antenna you'd need.
In short, you only get the service the uni provides, unless you can afford to move to your own place.
A Nasa guy was on NPR talking about this. He said that lay-people suggested all kinds of ideas like wipers, etc.
He said they chose to simply make the panels bigger than they really needed to be. That way as their power diminished (from dust and scratching), it was still enough to power the rover. That was the best solution in terms of weight and reliability.
I was just going to say that a linux cluster seems to scale well... just add more cheap machines. Crays, on the other hand, don't seem to scale well beyond the one machine, unless you're the government.
I think this is why the stealth bomber flies its missions out of the US, even when it's bombing things in Iraq & Afghanistan. If I correctly recall, the facility to resurface the stealth would be too expensive to relocate to another, closer, country.
And what you see in this article is that the US relies on its allies to spy on Americans while at the same time those allies rely on the US to spy on their citizens. Nasty way to get around the law.
The Average American (tm) seems too unwise to live up to the ideals this country was founded on. Like Franklin said, "[we have] A republic if you can keep it." I'm not sure we can.
I'm not sure what the Extraordinay American (tm) is supposed to do, other than move to another country. Maybe one with more civil liberties like Tajikistan.
Out of curiosity I went hunting for info on the United States Signals Intelligence Directives (USSIDs) I had to be aware of in a former line of work.
Much to my surprise, USSID 18, which outlines procedures for the NSA's collection of data on "U.S. persons" was declassified just over a year ago.
I thought the document might be of interest to IPers, especially at this time.
An introduction, and links to the archives can be found at:
http://cipherwar.com/news/00/nsa_surveillance.htm
(From the site above:)
In the aftermath of revelations in the 1970s about NSA interception of the communications of anti-war and other political activists new procedures were established governing the interception of communications involving Americans. The version of USSID 18 currently in force was issued in July 1993 and "prescribes policies and procedures and assigns responsibilities to ensure that the missions and functions of the United States SIGINT System (USSS) are conducted in a manner that safeguards the constitutional rights of U.S. persons."
(And a bit from USSID 18, itself - any errors in transcription are my fault:)
SECTION 1 - PREFACE
1.1. (U) The Fourth Amendment ot the Unites States Constitution protects all U.S. persons anywhere in the world and all persons within the United States from unreasonable searches and seizures by any person or agency acting on behalf of the U.S. Government. The Supreme Court has ruled that the interception of electronic communications is a search and seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. It is therefore mandatory that signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations be conducted pursuant to procedures which meet the reasonableness requirements of the fourth amendment.
1.2. (U) In determining whether United States SIGING System (USSS) operations are "reasonable," it is necessary to balance the U.S. Government's need for foreign intelligence information and the privacy interests of persons protected by the Fourth Amendment. Striking that balance has consumed much time and effort by all branches of the United States Government. The results of that effort are reflected in the references listed in Section 2 below. Together, these references require the minimization of U.S. person information collected, processed, retained or disseminated by the USSS. The purpose of this document is to implement these minimization requirements.
1.3. (U) Several themes run throughout this USSID. The most important is that intelligence operation and the protection of constitutional rights are not incompatible. It is not necessary to deny legitimate foreign intelligence collection or suppress legitimate foreign intelligence information to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. Persons.
1.4. (U) Finally, these minimization procedures implement the constitutional principle of "reasonableness" by giving different categories of individuals and entities different levels of protection. These levels range from the stringent protection accorded U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens in the United States to provisions relating to foreign diplomats in the U.S. These differences reflect yet another main theme of these procedures, that is, that the focus of all foreign intelligence operation is on foreign entities and persons.
I wonder if "government employees" also counts contractors? I know that during my time in the army (1992-96), lots of jobs were contracted out, both in the army and in the government as a whole.
If these contractors don't count, then the increase in the number of government employees is even larger under Clinton that it seems.
I can't in good concsience vote again for Bush. But I can't stomach Kerry either. Oregon is a close vote, so I don't know what to do. They say campaign idealistically, but vote pragmatically.
When I tell a client that their motherboard has "gone bad", I'm not commenting on the morality of their motherboard. Rather, I'm saying that it no longer functions as expected, or that its functioning has negative consequences.
"bad" might not be the best word for describing a law, but "good vs bad" is not always the same as "good vs evil".
Maybe not the monitor, but it seems I've read about a system where the mice have tactile feedback. As you move the mouse across certain features of the screen (open space, title bars, window borders, etc), you get different kinds of tactile sensations with the mouse... eg, a "bump" when you cross a border.
It would be interesting to see if this has been used to help blind computer users.
On my laptop (a CTL), everything is normaly too small. At first I changed the resolution to make things larger, but this causes fuzziness due to interpolation.
I later discovered that I have a DPI setting. By adjusting that, and staying in my "default resolution", things can be made larger or smaller without the fuzziness.
I do not know, however, if this is a feature of Windows XP, or of the video driver that comes on my laptop (ATI Rage something).
I really like using my laptop, now that everything is larger and easier to read!
do you have any idea how to get get accents when using Open Office in KDE? In MS crap, you can hit ctrl' then e to get an e with accent aigu (sp?), and ctrl` then e to get an e with accent grave.
The best I can figure out in OO with KDE is to go to "insert symbol" and find the character I want. That's fine for one symbol here or there... but try typing a letter in French, and it's very irritating!
The help in both KDE and OO was quite unhelpful. Any ideas?
I just go about my day assuming everyone is stupid - stupider than I am. I'm usually right, and when I'm wrong, that smarter person just assumes I'm stupid like everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! Slashdot changes sigs interactively. That first one was the very depressing sig about sorrow being cumulative and joy being momentary.
I think it's time to change my sig too.
Thanks for writing what you wrote here.
I've been suffering from depression for the last couple of years. My clinician thinks its related to a possible diagnosis of ADHD, but it's hard to say. The good thing is that things are finally getting better.
Two things were kind of strange for me regarding suicide. I never considered it in terms of "I'm so miserable I can't take it any more." Rather, in one case, I would have momentary urges that seemed to come out of no-where. For example, I would be driving home at night and there was suddenly an urge to swerve into oncoming traffic. It was like my hand was turning the wheel before I even realized the thought was there. THAT was frightening becuase I thought about what would happen if I didn't catch myself the next time.
In the other case, the thinking often was "is this all that there is? I'm consuming resources and struggling along and for what? Is there any point in really trying anymore?"
I feel really lucky. 3 months ago I was at my worst, but in the last month or so, the weight has lifted quite a bit - I feel like I can breath again and I don't feel like I'm being pulled into the ground.
Thanks again!
Finding a boat on top of a mountain only proves there is a boat on top of a mountain. Let's not forget:
Submarine found in Colombian Andes
Don't they say that half the people you meet are below average?
If I were going to become a serious investor (in my mind, $millions) in a particular company, I would want to know certain details about it.
In your coca-cola example, I'd want to know some rough numbers about their production capacity. If thy're planning on taking on a new market, will they be able to meet the demand? If one facility goes offline (maybe a terrorist attack), can their other facilities absorb the needed supply?
I would want to know some similar things about google. I would need to know something about their infrastructure. How close are they to maxing their current resources? What will it take to add more? If they lose a data center, can they make up the load?
One of the biggest problems in the market these days is that people invest lots of money in things they don't understand. Then they wonder why they lose all their money. There's going to be a lot of ignorant people who will be investing lots of money in google just because someone else told them it's the next hottest thing. It might be, but that's a dumb reason to put money in it.
I think there was a Star Trek episode about this. They were all three the same man, who would have lived forever until he moved to another planet and made an android chick. She screwed it up, of course.
Really... have you ever seen Da Vinci, McGiver, and the Professor at the same time? Notice they all have 3 syllables?
Universities usually control all the communications access to the dorms. For example, universities have a monopoly on the phone lines going into their dormrooms. They use this monopoly to charge extra-high rates for long distance. (My university really hates that kids now have cellphones with unlimited long-distance. There was a huge revenue hit with that.)
When you live in the dorm, you can't just have another carrier handle your line, so you can't do DSL. You can't have another cable company handle your cable conneciton, so no cable-broadband. You may be able to do point-to-point wireless through a wireless ISP, but the Uni probably prohibits the antenna you'd need.
In short, you only get the service the uni provides, unless you can afford to move to your own place.
A Nasa guy was on NPR talking about this. He said that lay-people suggested all kinds of ideas like wipers, etc.
He said they chose to simply make the panels bigger than they really needed to be. That way as their power diminished (from dust and scratching), it was still enough to power the rover. That was the best solution in terms of weight and reliability.
I was just going to say that a linux cluster seems to scale well... just add more cheap machines. Crays, on the other hand, don't seem to scale well beyond the one machine, unless you're the government.
I think this is why the stealth bomber flies its missions out of the US, even when it's bombing things in Iraq & Afghanistan. If I correctly recall, the facility to resurface the stealth would be too expensive to relocate to another, closer, country.
I agree with you that it's very troubling.
And what you see in this article is that the US relies on its allies to spy on Americans while at the same time those allies rely on the US to spy on their citizens. Nasty way to get around the law.
The Average American (tm) seems too unwise to live up to the ideals this country was founded on. Like Franklin said, "[we have] A republic if you can keep it." I'm not sure we can.
I'm not sure what the Extraordinay American (tm) is supposed to do, other than move to another country. Maybe one with more civil liberties like Tajikistan.
Actually... it has apparently been declassified:
s ting-people/200110/msg00157.html
From http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/intere
Out of curiosity I went hunting for info on the United States Signals
Intelligence Directives (USSIDs) I had to be aware of in a former line of work.
Much to my surprise, USSID 18, which outlines procedures for the NSA's
collection of data on "U.S. persons" was declassified just over a year ago.
I thought the document might be of interest to IPers, especially at this time.
An introduction, and links to the archives can be found at:
http://cipherwar.com/news/00/nsa_surveillance.htm
(From the site above:)
In the aftermath of revelations in the 1970s about NSA interception of the
communications of anti-war and other political activists new procedures
were established governing the interception of communications involving
Americans. The version of USSID 18 currently in force was issued in July
1993 and "prescribes policies and procedures and assigns responsibilities
to ensure that the missions and functions of the United States SIGINT
System (USSS) are conducted in a manner that safeguards the constitutional
rights of U.S. persons."
(And a bit from USSID 18, itself - any errors in transcription are my fault:)
SECTION 1 - PREFACE
1.1. (U) The Fourth Amendment ot the Unites States Constitution protects
all U.S. persons anywhere in the world and all persons within the United
States from unreasonable searches and seizures by any person or agency
acting on behalf of the U.S. Government. The Supreme Court has ruled that
the interception of electronic communications is a search and seizure
within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. It is therefore mandatory that
signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations be conducted pursuant to
procedures which meet the reasonableness requirements of the fourth
amendment.
1.2. (U) In determining whether United States SIGING System (USSS)
operations are "reasonable," it is necessary to balance the U.S.
Government's need for foreign intelligence information and the privacy
interests of persons protected by the Fourth Amendment. Striking that
balance has consumed much time and effort by all branches of the United
States Government. The results of that effort are reflected in the
references listed in Section 2 below. Together, these references require
the minimization of U.S. person information collected, processed, retained
or disseminated by the USSS. The purpose of this document is to implement
these minimization requirements.
1.3. (U) Several themes run throughout this USSID. The most important is
that intelligence operation and the protection of constitutional rights are
not incompatible. It is not necessary to deny legitimate foreign
intelligence collection or suppress legitimate foreign intelligence
information to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. Persons.
1.4. (U) Finally, these minimization procedures implement the
constitutional principle of "reasonableness" by giving different categories
of individuals and entities different levels of protection. These levels
range from the stringent protection accorded U.S. citizens and permanent
resident aliens in the United States to provisions relating to foreign
diplomats in the U.S. These differences reflect yet another main theme of
these procedures, that is, that the focus of all foreign intelligence
operation is on foreign entities and persons.
The laws that govern this activity are classified.
The funny thing about that is that the computer is perfectly capable of keeping time in 1 minute, or even 1 second increments.
I imagine it's just some dumb legacy thing where the old paper timesheet was only good to 15 minutes, so we have to make the computer just as stupid.
I wonder if "government employees" also counts contractors? I know that during my time in the army (1992-96), lots of jobs were contracted out, both in the army and in the government as a whole.
If these contractors don't count, then the increase in the number of government employees is even larger under Clinton that it seems.
I can't in good concsience vote again for Bush. But I can't stomach Kerry either. Oregon is a close vote, so I don't know what to do. They say campaign idealistically, but vote pragmatically.
What I want to know is how many slashdot IDs are simply quasi-intelligent bots. I mean, it wouldn't take much to hit the median level around here!
yeah, trying to remember all the keystrokes will drive you insane
Too late! I'm already insane, but now I understand why!
When I tell a client that their motherboard has "gone bad", I'm not commenting on the morality of their motherboard. Rather, I'm saying that it no longer functions as expected, or that its functioning has negative consequences.
"bad" might not be the best word for describing a law, but "good vs bad" is not always the same as "good vs evil".
I think they're trying to muck up statistics based filtering by sending junk in addition to spam.
Maybe not the monitor, but it seems I've read about a system where the mice have tactile feedback. As you move the mouse across certain features of the screen (open space, title bars, window borders, etc), you get different kinds of tactile sensations with the mouse... eg, a "bump" when you cross a border.
It would be interesting to see if this has been used to help blind computer users.
On my laptop (a CTL), everything is normaly too small. At first I changed the resolution to make things larger, but this causes fuzziness due to interpolation.
I later discovered that I have a DPI setting. By adjusting that, and staying in my "default resolution", things can be made larger or smaller without the fuzziness.
I do not know, however, if this is a feature of Windows XP, or of the video driver that comes on my laptop (ATI Rage something).
I really like using my laptop, now that everything is larger and easier to read!
Speaking of KDE...
do you have any idea how to get get accents when using Open Office in KDE? In MS crap, you can hit ctrl' then e to get an e with accent aigu (sp?), and ctrl` then e to get an e with accent grave.
The best I can figure out in OO with KDE is to go to "insert symbol" and find the character I want. That's fine for one symbol here or there... but try typing a letter in French, and it's very irritating!
The help in both KDE and OO was quite unhelpful. Any ideas?
PS I won't even start with Arabic in OO...
Naw... rotten bastardism!
I'm male, which is irrelevant.
I just go about my day assuming everyone is stupid - stupider than I am. I'm usually right, and when I'm wrong, that smarter person just assumes I'm stupid like everyone else.