I'm bored so I'll throw in. Please don't think I'm condescending. I'm just stuck in a hotel room.
People often get confused here. What is shifting is the magnetic pole, not the geographic pole. Both the North magnetic and South magnetic poles are shifting at some rate, the northern one moving more rapidly than the southern one. The geographic pole is not at issue here, only the magnetic one. The physical geographic north pole coincides with the rotational axis of the planet which "wobbles" by a known amount (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession)
The magnetic poles are both effects of some deeper physical process that occurs within the planet. The popular theory at the moment is that the Earth contains an iron core which is rotating rapidly, causing the magnetic field we know and love. It has been sufficiently proven (for a lot of people) that the poles:
1. Have shifted multiple times throughout history 2. Are not rigidly dipolar. Meaning that the southern magnetic pole is not directly opposite of the northern magnetic pole.
You can expect the magnetic poles to shift more rapidly as time goes on until they again stabilize at some point in the future.
As far as the glacial theory goes, what you've read concerns various theories that the outer crust of the Earth, known as the asthenosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthenosphere) has shifted rapidly and on a global scale. These shifts would present themselves catastrophically and have massive global effects, such as causing the "then" apparent geographic poles to rapidly move "somewhere else". It should be noted that only the outer crust of the planet would be expected to move (and everything on the crust along with it). The rest of the planet would maintain its previous rotational axis. This theory, while tantalizing, is not widely accepted among most geologists for a number of reasons. Refer to the following for more on that:
I don't know about that, it may be easier than a lot of people think.
When I was working operations for a company I got promoted and had to backfill my position before I could move up. So we started hiring people. Out of the 20ish people that applied, a lot of them were black. That's not a problem, we hire anyone who can do the job. The problem was that the first 4 people we actually hired could not, in fact, do the job (3 of them we're absolutely horrendous on the job and the 4th never showed up on time). The 5th person could, so he stuck around, but he wasn't black.
So, what would that look like to anyone outside the situation? We did nothing wrong, but set up what to most people would seem to be a pattern of discrimination.
The only way to defend against a lawsuit in this situation is to keep meticulous records of performance and attendance, and a lot of managers don't do that. That doesn't mean they're racist, just lazy, but would that stick in the courtroom? Possibly, but why increase your exposure if you don't need to.
Promises are worth the weight of words without action: absolutely nothing.
The point here is that when this promise will need to get called in, when VALVE is going under due to whatever, Gabe and everyone else still attached to the company will have much bigger fish to fry than trying to implement this. I've seen what happens when a company goes under or gets bought and its not pretty. People are much more concerned with things like getting paid, health insurance, and other non-essentials to even begin to care about DRM with a (at that point) failed distribution method.
Also, consider for a moment what it would mean to remove the DRM off of STEAM. It would effectively be a death-blow to the platform for most past and future publishers. So tell me why, at a time when Valve would already be facing hardship, would they consider killing they're own child? Also, take into consideration what happens if Valve gets bought by another company more concerned with money than principle (effectively all of them) and why They might want to do this to a potential source of revenue.
I like Valve, I think they've done a good job, but when the chips are down they're still human. Without something to back up that promise, I'm not buying.
The funny thing is how so many people want to blame the housing downturn on the "rich" or the "poor" when, in reality, the thing was caused by greedy loan officers, greedy loan vendors, and greedy (or ignorant) home buyers.
I'm a field engineer that flies to a different spot every week, 5 out of 6 weeks all year long.
None of my flights this year have been on time.
Not... A... Single... One...
I've spent more nights in Atlanta than I ever wanted too thanks to ATL, Delta, and the nightmare that is the entire northeast United States ATC right now.
It's gotten to a point where I'm considering a 33% pay cut just to stop traveling.
I wholeheartedly second this. I've trained a number of implementation engineers in the past couple of years, so I've seen firsthand the difference a this makes.
The trainees with good people skills do much better in the field than those without. In fact, the few engineers I've trained with very little technical knowledge are doing quite a bit better than those with highly technical backgrounds because they have better interpersonal abilities.
My suggestion is to take plenty of social classes that emphasize speech, writing, psychology, and even drama.
I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Believe it or not, the vast majority of Desktop support functions can now be offshored. Don't trust me? Ask the company I just left. I got to watch the entire support team undergo a 90% reduction in force while still supporting the same number of units. They went from 15 - 20 local people supporting a couple thousand desktops to 2 local people and 10 remote people.
How did they do it? Easily. Purchase Windows XP and a couple of offshore software integraters to push out a remote software packager and installer. Now that Windows includes a remote assistance feature, no one has to be local for software problems. What's left for support? Hardware malfunctions? Guess again. Our OEM Desktop vendor offers a warranty support contract that includes a field rep to come out and "fix" (read as: "replace") broken units. They do this for a fraction of the cost of maintaining a local hardware support team.
Pair all of that up with one or two people to make sure the network hardware stays up, and all that's left for local desktop support is to fix the remote assistance suite for Windows. Take a wild guess at how many heads that takes.
Give it a few more years, and these are features that will be available to all, not just the large corporations. Why would a small office pay a local grunt to fix things, when they can get hardware support from a retailer/OEM and software support from an offshore offering for half the cost? And don't believe for a second that the local retailer can't package and sell them any number of file/print servers configured however they want.
I seem to remember that humiliation was the key. Cast it, enchant it, and then pelt your opponent to death with it. Back in middle-school, killing someone with an ornithopter was bragging rights.
DO NOT point a firearm at someone unless you are being threatend and intend to shoot that person if matters escalate.
I'd take that one step further. DO NOT point a firearm at someone unless it has already escalated and you have every intention of shooting. The old rule still applies, "don't point a gun at anything you're not willing to destroy immediately and irrevocably". I'm sorry, but if someone points a firearm at me, then my life is in danger, and I will not stop shooting until the threat is gone.
I should also point out that if this means that I'll get shot by the first thief with a gun, then I'm willing to get shot. I'd be willing to bet my life that the crime rate would drop significantly if everyone would take a similar view.
Actually, there have been a few sc-fi books written in semi-plausable scenarios where the lawyer is held with the accused. If the defendant is found guilty, then the lawyer gets a share of the punishment.
This actually used to be one of my responsibilities at work. Since the company I worked for was too cheap to pay for "real" disposal equipment, they often handed me the media (hdd's, tapes, etc...) and told me to have fun. Fun it was, you know how neat it is to spend a day doing nothing more than discovering new and creative ways to destroy magnetic media.... Talk about working out some frustration.
Until about 3 years ago when Caldera started smoking the crack pipe, they had some of the most advanced distros on the market. The E series (desktop and server) packages included some of the best, most polished administrative tools available. In fact, I was a die hard fan until they started the rather ugly process of dying from neglect. After that, it was Debian all the way.
Tell me about it. I've been up since 3am trying to track down the "owner" of a database for a problem that's not mine to begin with. I feel like the ugly frickin duckling: "Are you my DBA?" Waddle waddle waddle "Are YOU my DBA?"... someone shoot me
I thought of that feature years ago so I learned Perl in order to do it. Now I've got a 50ish line perl script that does just that... just type the script name and the url and you're done.
Not to nitpick, but its actually the exact opposite. We only know about those things that DO occur in nature. We then have to base our known models around that behavoir. We can't really say that nature doesn't want something to occur because that sort of logic can't be definitaly proven.
What he's refering to is the idea that naturally occuring complex systems form methods to deal with inconsistencies. To take his original example further, a child with two directions of action, "Have fun" and "Be careful", would mitigate both directions to a common path or direction. This mitigation only occurs because the child's brain is capable of understanding two directions and forming logical decisions based upon the needs of both. If the child was not able to perform this mitigation, you would see various neurosis form. The child might decide to follow only one original direction, to the exclusion of the other, or he or she might decide to do neither and sit in a corner. If this were to happen, we have names for these disorders. We might say the child is 'depressed', or the child is 'obsessive compulsive'. In evolutionary terms, natural selection would weed out those that did not have the ability to perform this mitigation.
Now, in complex systems that are not naturally occuring, these mitigation directives must be literally designed into the system itself. For instance, let's say you have two programs running with mutually exclusive goals. One programs goal would be to decrease thermal radiation by rewriting and redesigning circuitry. The other's goal would be to increase data throughput by doing the same things. How would they reconcile? Generally, a major way of decreasing thermal radiation is to reduce electrical input. But this also has a side effect of increasing the chance of data errors when the receiving component is not capable of distinguishing a signal from the backgrund noise. This decreases total data throughput. Now, if the two programs were not given explicit instructions on how to work cooperatively, they might do such things as form infinite loops by changing something the other program has already changed. One might find areas of circuitry that it has exclusive access to and change that circuitry with impunity. To anyone watching this process, the resulting circuitry would be hard to explain. Some components might become extremely fast while giving off enough heat to melt the sourrounding board, yet others would be slowed while running at a nice pleasant room temperature. Doesn't this sound like the equivelant of a neurosis?
If you haven't done so already, I'd recommend reading The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl with C. M. Kornbluth. It's a wonderful book, and it highlights where stuff like this can go in the not-too-distant future.
Re:I recognize that I don't know anime very well .
on
NY Times on Anime
·
· Score: 1
Don't forget the classic Ninja Scroll. It has a very good blend of Japanese artistry and plot. More importantly though, it's a posterboy for the classical eastern Taoist viewpoint.
While that is very nice in a simple closed model, it cannot hold true as a model for the supposed existance or non-existance of extra-terrestrial life. While we, as a people, would like to imagine that we comprehend the rules governing the 'array' of intelligent beings, we do not. We cannot comprehend the number of elements in the array without comprehending one of the following:
1. The requirements for elements in the array
2. The number of element in the array
Since knowing the number of elements in the array is presumptious for the nature of this discussion, let us reason that the only possible way to know the total number of elements in the array is to derive the requirements for all elements in the array. Since we have yet to fathom these requirements, we cannot formulate the statistical likelyhood that if we exist as Array(N) then there exists Array(N+1).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm bored so I'll throw in. Please don't think I'm condescending. I'm just stuck in a hotel room.
People often get confused here. What is shifting is the magnetic pole, not the geographic pole. Both the North magnetic and South magnetic poles are shifting at some rate, the northern one moving more rapidly than the southern one. The geographic pole is not at issue here, only the magnetic one. The physical geographic north pole coincides with the rotational axis of the planet which "wobbles" by a known amount (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession)
The magnetic poles are both effects of some deeper physical process that occurs within the planet. The popular theory at the moment is that the Earth contains an iron core which is rotating rapidly, causing the magnetic field we know and love. It has been sufficiently proven (for a lot of people) that the poles:
1. Have shifted multiple times throughout history
2. Are not rigidly dipolar. Meaning that the southern magnetic pole is not directly opposite of the northern magnetic pole.
You can expect the magnetic poles to shift more rapidly as time goes on until they again stabilize at some point in the future.
As far as the glacial theory goes, what you've read concerns various theories that the outer crust of the Earth, known as the asthenosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthenosphere) has shifted rapidly and on a global scale. These shifts would present themselves catastrophically and have massive global effects, such as causing the "then" apparent geographic poles to rapidly move "somewhere else". It should be noted that only the outer crust of the planet would be expected to move (and everything on the crust along with it). The rest of the planet would maintain its previous rotational axis. This theory, while tantalizing, is not widely accepted among most geologists for a number of reasons. Refer to the following for more on that:
http://survive2012.com/index.php/how-do-poles-shift.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_hancock
I love those theories, they're interesting as heck, but I have to admit the evidence to support them is more than a little thin.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
I don't know about that, it may be easier than a lot of people think.
When I was working operations for a company I got promoted and had to backfill my position before I could move up. So we started hiring people. Out of the 20ish people that applied, a lot of them were black. That's not a problem, we hire anyone who can do the job. The problem was that the first 4 people we actually hired could not, in fact, do the job (3 of them we're absolutely horrendous on the job and the 4th never showed up on time). The 5th person could, so he stuck around, but he wasn't black.
So, what would that look like to anyone outside the situation? We did nothing wrong, but set up what to most people would seem to be a pattern of discrimination.
The only way to defend against a lawsuit in this situation is to keep meticulous records of performance and attendance, and a lot of managers don't do that. That doesn't mean they're racist, just lazy, but would that stick in the courtroom? Possibly, but why increase your exposure if you don't need to.
Promises are worth the weight of words without action: absolutely nothing.
The point here is that when this promise will need to get called in, when VALVE is going under due to whatever, Gabe and everyone else still attached to the company will have much bigger fish to fry than trying to implement this. I've seen what happens when a company goes under or gets bought and its not pretty. People are much more concerned with things like getting paid, health insurance, and other non-essentials to even begin to care about DRM with a (at that point) failed distribution method.
Also, consider for a moment what it would mean to remove the DRM off of STEAM. It would effectively be a death-blow to the platform for most past and future publishers. So tell me why, at a time when Valve would already be facing hardship, would they consider killing they're own child? Also, take into consideration what happens if Valve gets bought by another company more concerned with money than principle (effectively all of them) and why They might want to do this to a potential source of revenue.
I like Valve, I think they've done a good job, but when the chips are down they're still human. Without something to back up that promise, I'm not buying.
The funny thing is how so many people want to blame the housing downturn on the "rich" or the "poor" when, in reality, the thing was caused by greedy loan officers, greedy loan vendors, and greedy (or ignorant) home buyers.
I'm a field engineer that flies to a different spot every week, 5 out of 6 weeks all year long.
None of my flights this year have been on time.
Not... A... Single... One...
I've spent more nights in Atlanta than I ever wanted too thanks to ATL, Delta, and the nightmare that is the entire northeast United States ATC right now.
It's gotten to a point where I'm considering a 33% pay cut just to stop traveling.
I wholeheartedly second this. I've trained a number of implementation engineers in the past couple of years, so I've seen firsthand the difference a this makes.
The trainees with good people skills do much better in the field than those without. In fact, the few engineers I've trained with very little technical knowledge are doing quite a bit better than those with highly technical backgrounds because they have better interpersonal abilities.
My suggestion is to take plenty of social classes that emphasize speech, writing, psychology, and even drama.
I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Believe it or not, the vast majority of Desktop support functions can now be offshored. Don't trust me? Ask the company I just left. I got to watch the entire support team undergo a 90% reduction in force while still supporting the same number of units. They went from 15 - 20 local people supporting a couple thousand desktops to 2 local people and 10 remote people.
How did they do it? Easily. Purchase Windows XP and a couple of offshore software integraters to push out a remote software packager and installer. Now that Windows includes a remote assistance feature, no one has to be local for software problems. What's left for support? Hardware malfunctions? Guess again. Our OEM Desktop vendor offers a warranty support contract that includes a field rep to come out and "fix" (read as: "replace") broken units. They do this for a fraction of the cost of maintaining a local hardware support team.
Pair all of that up with one or two people to make sure the network hardware stays up, and all that's left for local desktop support is to fix the remote assistance suite for Windows. Take a wild guess at how many heads that takes.
Give it a few more years, and these are features that will be available to all, not just the large corporations. Why would a small office pay a local grunt to fix things, when they can get hardware support from a retailer/OEM and software support from an offshore offering for half the cost? And don't believe for a second that the local retailer can't package and sell them any number of file/print servers configured however they want.
I seem to remember that humiliation was the key. Cast it, enchant it, and then pelt your opponent to death with it. Back in middle-school, killing someone with an ornithopter was bragging rights.
DO NOT point a firearm at someone unless you are being threatend and intend to shoot that person if matters escalate.
I'd take that one step further. DO NOT point a firearm at someone unless it has already escalated and you have every intention of shooting. The old rule still applies, "don't point a gun at anything you're not willing to destroy immediately and irrevocably". I'm sorry, but if someone points a firearm at me, then my life is in danger, and I will not stop shooting until the threat is gone.
I should also point out that if this means that I'll get shot by the first thief with a gun, then I'm willing to get shot. I'd be willing to bet my life that the crime rate would drop significantly if everyone would take a similar view.
Actually, there have been a few sc-fi books written in semi-plausable scenarios where the lawyer is held with the accused. If the defendant is found guilty, then the lawyer gets a share of the punishment.
Not too shabby eh?
I would rather have 50 nuclear power plants in my "back yard", than 1 coal or oil plant.
This actually used to be one of my responsibilities at work. Since the company I worked for was too cheap to pay for "real" disposal equipment, they often handed me the media (hdd's, tapes, etc...) and told me to have fun. Fun it was, you know how neat it is to spend a day doing nothing more than discovering new and creative ways to destroy magnetic media.... Talk about working out some frustration.
Until about 3 years ago when Caldera started smoking the crack pipe, they had some of the most advanced distros on the market. The E series (desktop and server) packages included some of the best, most polished administrative tools available. In fact, I was a die hard fan until they started the rather ugly process of dying from neglect. After that, it was Debian all the way.
Tell me about it. I've been up since 3am trying to track down the "owner" of a database for a problem that's not mine to begin with. I feel like the ugly frickin duckling: ...
"Are you my DBA?"
Waddle waddle waddle
"Are YOU my DBA?"
someone shoot me
I thought of that feature years ago so I learned Perl in order to do it. Now I've got a 50ish line perl script that does just that... just type the script name and the url and you're done.
Not to nitpick, but its actually the exact opposite. We only know about those things that DO occur in nature. We then have to base our known models around that behavoir. We can't really say that nature doesn't want something to occur because that sort of logic can't be definitaly proven.
Right, just let me wihp out my handy pocket subatomic particle entangler.
I suppose this would be as good a time as any to start begging for another system shock sequel.
Delete all the logs you want. But if you do it after you've been handed a subpeona for said logs, you could be in some serious hot water.
There's always going to be some kind of friction. All you can do is minimize it. e.g. placing the spheres in as near a vacuum as humanly posible.
What he's refering to is the idea that naturally occuring complex systems form methods to deal with inconsistencies. To take his original example further, a child with two directions of action, "Have fun" and "Be careful", would mitigate both directions to a common path or direction. This mitigation only occurs because the child's brain is capable of understanding two directions and forming logical decisions based upon the needs of both. If the child was not able to perform this mitigation, you would see various neurosis form. The child might decide to follow only one original direction, to the exclusion of the other, or he or she might decide to do neither and sit in a corner. If this were to happen, we have names for these disorders. We might say the child is 'depressed', or the child is 'obsessive compulsive'. In evolutionary terms, natural selection would weed out those that did not have the ability to perform this mitigation.
Now, in complex systems that are not naturally occuring, these mitigation directives must be literally designed into the system itself. For instance, let's say you have two programs running with mutually exclusive goals. One programs goal would be to decrease thermal radiation by rewriting and redesigning circuitry. The other's goal would be to increase data throughput by doing the same things. How would they reconcile? Generally, a major way of decreasing thermal radiation is to reduce electrical input. But this also has a side effect of increasing the chance of data errors when the receiving component is not capable of distinguishing a signal from the backgrund noise. This decreases total data throughput. Now, if the two programs were not given explicit instructions on how to work cooperatively, they might do such things as form infinite loops by changing something the other program has already changed. One might find areas of circuitry that it has exclusive access to and change that circuitry with impunity. To anyone watching this process, the resulting circuitry would be hard to explain. Some components might become extremely fast while giving off enough heat to melt the sourrounding board, yet others would be slowed while running at a nice pleasant room temperature. Doesn't this sound like the equivelant of a neurosis?
If you haven't done so already, I'd recommend reading The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl with C. M. Kornbluth. It's a wonderful book, and it highlights where stuff like this can go in the not-too-distant future.
Don't forget the classic Ninja Scroll. It has a very good blend of Japanese artistry and plot. More importantly though, it's a posterboy for the classical eastern Taoist viewpoint.
While that is very nice in a simple closed model, it cannot hold true as a model for the supposed existance or non-existance of extra-terrestrial life. While we, as a people, would like to imagine that we comprehend the rules governing the 'array' of intelligent beings, we do not. We cannot comprehend the number of elements in the array without comprehending one of the following:
1. The requirements for elements in the array
2. The number of element in the array
Since knowing the number of elements in the array is presumptious for the nature of this discussion, let us reason that the only possible way to know the total number of elements in the array is to derive the requirements for all elements in the array. Since we have yet to fathom these requirements, we cannot formulate the statistical likelyhood that if we exist as Array(N) then there exists Array(N+1).