If there isn't anything in particular holding you to where you're currently living, pack up and move closer to the Perl job.. Go for the job you are really going to enjoy.
But if you don't want to move, take the.Net job close to your house, rather than making that horrible commute. Losing those 4 hours of time just isn't worth it unless it is the only thing available to you.
There's actually been a fair amount of studies done on optimal sleep lengths.. but it really varies a lot from person to person, and also varies as people age. 8-9 hours is generally accepted as a healthy length for most people to sleep at night.
WebMD has some good advice about finding your optimal sleep length: "Starting on a Sunday, do not drink alcohol or caffeine; do not smoke; go to sleep about the same time every night; and get an uninterrupted seven to eight hours of sleep for the next six nights. Then, on Saturday morning, sleep in. See how long your body will let you sleep. If you sleep longer than you did during the week -- then you have a sleep debt. So you should consider getting more sleep each night to replenish that sleep debt."
Yeah, or how about if you had a high security safe in your house with a combination lock? Could you be forced to give them the combination, or could you tell them they had to get their safe-crackers and try to open it themselves?
Considering the fact that most of NPR's audience is probably older than dirt, when they get something before the "News for Nerds" does, we are in trouble.
I do understand you're making a joke, but according to the rather interesting stats from this PDF, 23% of NPR News listeners are 18-34, and 50% are 35-54.
Not sure what the age demographics of "nerds" would be, but based on IT staffing trends I've observed, NPR's listeners probably aren't really all that much older on average. Actually, I imagine there's a fair amount of overlap between the two groups.
Women with family incomes less than $15,000 obtain 28.7% of all abortions; Women with family incomes between $15,000 and $29,999 obtain 19.5%; Women with family incomes between $30,000 and $59,999 obtain 38.0%; Women with family incomes over $60,000 obtain 13.8%.
What I hear you saying is that as long as Google continues to inovate, they will be a successful company. True.
But what makes Google a potential one-hit-wonder is their limited revenue streams, not their limited product offerings. With the VAST majority of their revenue coming from Adwords, they leave themselves vulnerable.
That's why things like their enterprise search appliances are important. Not only do they need to continue to inovate their products, but they have to develop more different ways to make money.
I was referring to elections for president, not the House..
I think it would be awfully complicated to change House representation based on how many people from a state voted. How would that work? You could be running for an available seat, but because the turnout is low, the seat gets transferred to another state? That would be weird.
How do other countries do this sort of thing? Do they not bother with state representation and just have national parties.. you vote for the party, and depending on how many seats they win, they nominate people to fill their allotted seats? If so, who picks the individuals? That wouldn't be too terrible, I guess, but that's a pretty major change; I'm not really sure what the implications of a change like that would be..
I think what might work better is just to require a certain percentage of eligible voters to cast a vote -- say 60% or something -- for the election to be valid.
Then use instant runoff voting (IRV) and require a real runoff if no one gets a majority.
I do like your idea of having the Electoral College seats tied in some way to voting turnout, but I think one of the important things the Electoral College does is give small states a slightly larger piece of the pie than their actual populations would give them -- I think this is important to maintain.
1) Even if it has a "scratch-proof" surface, data gets much more delicate. Think about it, 45 GB of data on one disk. If this disk gets broken, you lose a whole lot more than having the data on 10 DVDs and losing one.
If that's what you're concerned about, just make 2 copies of each disk. What I'm concerned about is having to span disks to make something fit.. in that case, I'm twice as likely to have data loss that effects the entire backup..
It's essentially the RAID argument. Some people look at RAID 0 and say, "Why the heck would you do that, you don't get any redundancy?" So they choose RAID 1 or 5. Others say "I need one really big volume, and it better be fast." They use RAID 0.
So maybe having a bigger disk isn't a selling point for you, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. You can still decide you only want to put 4.5 GB on each disk and use those 10 disks..
Because a '30GB' tape drive which is of course only a 15GB tape drive costs $2,000 which is more than the price of most workstations these days and ten times the price of a hard drive.
You're certainly exagerating things a bit there. I recently priced out a Certance CL 400H LTO-2 external tape drive for about $2000; 200GB tapes are ~$50.
I opted not to go with that, and instead got a disk based solution coupled with remote storage. But tape certainly has its place.. it's actually really fast when you're backing up a ton of small files, and isn't particularly expensive.
Generally, tape gets slammed when people compare 3+ year old tape technology to anything else that's brand new.
And besides, even people who supposedly confess to crimes often do so under duress -- a 20 hour interogation, a plea deals to save someone else from punishment, mental illness, and so on. A confession absent of overwhelming evidence shouldn't be sufficient to execute someone.
I like your idea that such people be incarcerated until cured - of course what that means in the vast majority of these cases is a life sentence with no parole. How economically feasible is that?
According to this page many states already require "sexual offenders judged likely to reoffend to be civilly committed until they were judged to be no longer at risk." And as of 1998 it was confirmed to be constitutionally acceptable by the US Supreme Court. (Not sure if it was struck down since then, but I doubt it.)
Because the rate of recidivism for violent sex offenders is nearly 100%, which means that they will almost certainly rape or murder someone it the future.
You know I thought it was really high, too, but according to these myths and facts about sex offenders, the majority of sex offenders do NOT reoffend. Also, I was very surprised to read that sex offenders are less likely to reoffend than non-sex offenders.
On the flip side, there's this analysis of multiple studies which reports some pretty high recidivism rates for various types of sex offenders.. and really demonstrates how complicated it is when factoring in the type of crime, and especially the extreme underreporting of sex crimes. I suspect that the overall lower rate is probably because of the underreporting and the grouping of all sex crimes together.
But in any case, I don't think your "nearly 100%" number can be substantiated. The biggest numbers in the studies analyzed, showed 52% of child molesters facing rearrested (not necessarily convicted) within a 25 year period. Oh, and Exhibitionists had a very high recidivism rate (41%-71%).
As a side note, people who are released from prison early and wear tracking systems have been deemed safe enough to be released, and unlikely to reoffend -- otherwise they wouldn't have been released early. What they're talking about here, is using it for people who have already served out their entire sentences.
Recidivism rates are actually much higher. Florida's overall recidivism rate was 12.5% within 6 months for men.. sex offense were much higher, especially over time. See this article and this report.
But what makes it complicated is how "sexual offender" is defined -- in Florida, committing, attempting, conspiring or soliciting to commit "Distribution of obscene materials to minor under the age of 18". So that means that an 18 year old buys porn for his 17 year old friend, and gets caught, he could become a "sex offender".
Is that really the sort of people we want to be wearing one of these GPS systems the rest of their lives?
Florida does have a legal definition of "sexual preditor" -- some states do not, as I understand it -- which is someone who is:
Convicted of a "one is enough" offense: violent crimes on children and adults
Convicted of a lesser sex crime, with a prior felony conviction in the past 10 years (doesn't have to be a sex crime, as I understand it).
So I think it would be quite reasonable to restrict these GPS units things to Sexual Predators.. maybe they'd have to restrict it to only those convicted from now on, though.
It would be reasonable for it to use your last known GPS coordinates.. remember that you have to have access to an internet connection to make a call anyway. Sure, someplace where they outfit subways with wifi, you'd really screw things up, but for the most part if you go into a building and lose the GPS signal, the coordinates of the door you went in is probably close enough for emergency services.
I think by law, access to the E911 database is nondiscriminatory -- meaning any provider can access it for the same fee as all the big providers. So VoIP providers may end up passing along that fee to customers, just like other providers, but database access shouldn't be a barrier... if I'm understanding your point correctly.
It's not really a showcase, just a funny slideshow done with SVG. If you aren't familiar with it yet, it's about time.
I'm using Firefox without plugins.. guess I should have just flipped over to IE -- I did that just now and it worked fine with Acrobat (as someone else noted), although it did crash my all my IE browser windows when it finished!
I'd never heard of SVG before.. thanks for everyone's follow up posts.
So you need Opera to view that link.. which makes it easily available to everyone that already runs Opera, but keeps it "secret" from everyone who's not using the software yet.. perhaps to add an extra incentive to those who haven't yet had enough incentives to try it out.
To me it comes off as pretty dumb. Why would you showcase a "feature" that providess content that's only useable by 1% of the browsing population? Or is this some sort of content standard that only Opera has implemented yet, and they're just ahead of the curve??
Well, perhaps they're not as impressive as the egyptian pyramids, but I think it is pretty well established that the Mayans used extensive slave labor when constructing cities like Chichen Itza, Tikal, and Calakmul.
And I imagine slave labor might have been used in the building of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but for all I know that's just as bogus as slaves with the pyramids..
So, what's a foreign law? Do international treaties, like the Geneva Convention count? As I remember, the US Constitution explicitly states that international treaties approved by the Senate are Federal law.
Do you have a reference for this? I've been wondering about that for awhile now, but wasn't able to find a reference myself. It certainly makes sense; why else would they need to be ratified?
Sorry, I didn't mean to be insulting or patronizing. I apologize for coming off that way.
For a rebuttle you can read the two people who posted before I did about how neither of them (one heterosexual the other homosexual) about how neither of them had had sexual experience before becoming aware of their sexual orientation.
What I didn't like about your post was that you phrased it as a blanket statement not just applying to people in the same specific situations described.. and you described it as fact, not just what some people in some situations have experienced based on this limited research.
I'm certainly not an expert on the topic either, and am actually quite undecided about whether sexual orientation is a "learned" behavior which can be changed, a fixed from-birth characteristic, both, or something entirely different.. but I am interested in learning the truth, and thought you were making a logic misstep and thought I'd point it out.
About half the gay people I know were previously married to a person of the opposite sex.. they got married (and often had kids) because that's what people did, but later realized that marriage, sex, etc. never changed who they really were.
On the flip side, I know an evangelical christian who was gay and now says God healed him of his homosexuality and he's now been happily married to a woman for about 10 years.
All I know is that it's a whole lot more complicated than people on both sides tend to make it out to be.
200 years ago black people were not considered humans either. We can logically assume that 200 years from now there will be -- say monkeys and dolphins -- who will be given some sort of consideration.
Heck, if monkeys, dolphins or even AI become so cognitively aware that they can be considered "consenting adults" then they should be able to marry. Future lawmakers can decide whether they want to allow inter-species marriages (think of some of they very successful inter-species Star Trek marriages here), but they should at least be able to marry within their species.
But at least until they are adults able to give informed, voluntary consent, you can't marry your monkey, dog, or a child.
You can thus deduce that it's something that you can choose to enter into and leave...
I think your logic is flawed. You used a few specific examples to "prove" your assertion, but that is far from showing that it is applicable for everyone in all situations.
You can use just a few examples to disprove something, or use a very large number of examples to reasonably demonstrate a correlation, but really all you've shown is that given some specific extreme conditioning, people can be forced to behave in certain ways.
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If there isn't anything in particular holding you to where you're currently living, pack up and move closer to the Perl job.. Go for the job you are really going to enjoy.
.Net job close to your house, rather than making that horrible commute. Losing those 4 hours of time just isn't worth it unless it is the only thing available to you.
But if you don't want to move, take the
There's actually been a fair amount of studies done on optimal sleep lengths.. but it really varies a lot from person to person, and also varies as people age. 8-9 hours is generally accepted as a healthy length for most people to sleep at night.
WebMD has some good advice about finding your optimal sleep length:
"Starting on a Sunday, do not drink alcohol or caffeine; do not smoke; go to sleep about the same time every night; and get an uninterrupted seven to eight hours of sleep for the next six nights. Then, on Saturday morning, sleep in. See how long your body will let you sleep. If you sleep longer than you did during the week -- then you have a sleep debt. So you should consider getting more sleep each night to replenish that sleep debt."
Yeah, or how about if you had a high security safe in your house with a combination lock? Could you be forced to give them the combination, or could you tell them they had to get their safe-crackers and try to open it themselves?
Considering the fact that most of NPR's audience is probably older than dirt, when they get something before the "News for Nerds" does, we are in trouble.
I do understand you're making a joke, but according to the rather interesting stats from this PDF, 23% of NPR News listeners are 18-34, and 50% are 35-54.
Not sure what the age demographics of "nerds" would be, but based on IT staffing trends I've observed, NPR's listeners probably aren't really all that much older on average. Actually, I imagine there's a fair amount of overlap between the two groups.
From here:
Women with family incomes less than $15,000 obtain 28.7% of all abortions; Women with family incomes between $15,000 and $29,999 obtain 19.5%; Women with family incomes between $30,000 and $59,999 obtain 38.0%; Women with family incomes over $60,000 obtain 13.8%.
What I hear you saying is that as long as Google continues to inovate, they will be a successful company. True.
But what makes Google a potential one-hit-wonder is their limited revenue streams, not their limited product offerings. With the VAST majority of their revenue coming from Adwords, they leave themselves vulnerable.
That's why things like their enterprise search appliances are important. Not only do they need to continue to inovate their products, but they have to develop more different ways to make money.
I was referring to elections for president, not the House..
I think it would be awfully complicated to change House representation based on how many people from a state voted. How would that work? You could be running for an available seat, but because the turnout is low, the seat gets transferred to another state? That would be weird.
How do other countries do this sort of thing? Do they not bother with state representation and just have national parties.. you vote for the party, and depending on how many seats they win, they nominate people to fill their allotted seats? If so, who picks the individuals? That wouldn't be too terrible, I guess, but that's a pretty major change; I'm not really sure what the implications of a change like that would be..
I think what might work better is just to require a certain percentage of eligible voters to cast a vote -- say 60% or something -- for the election to be valid.
Then use instant runoff voting (IRV) and require a real runoff if no one gets a majority.
I do like your idea of having the Electoral College seats tied in some way to voting turnout, but I think one of the important things the Electoral College does is give small states a slightly larger piece of the pie than their actual populations would give them -- I think this is important to maintain.
1) Even if it has a "scratch-proof" surface, data gets much more delicate. Think about it, 45 GB of data on one disk. If this disk gets broken, you lose a whole lot more than having the data on 10 DVDs and losing one.
If that's what you're concerned about, just make 2 copies of each disk. What I'm concerned about is having to span disks to make something fit.. in that case, I'm twice as likely to have data loss that effects the entire backup..
It's essentially the RAID argument. Some people look at RAID 0 and say, "Why the heck would you do that, you don't get any redundancy?" So they choose RAID 1 or 5. Others say "I need one really big volume, and it better be fast." They use RAID 0.
So maybe having a bigger disk isn't a selling point for you, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. You can still decide you only want to put 4.5 GB on each disk and use those 10 disks..
Because a '30GB' tape drive which is of course only a 15GB tape drive costs $2,000 which is more than the price of most workstations these days and ten times the price of a hard drive.
You're certainly exagerating things a bit there. I recently priced out a Certance CL 400H LTO-2 external tape drive for about $2000; 200GB tapes are ~$50.
I opted not to go with that, and instead got a disk based solution coupled with remote storage. But tape certainly has its place.. it's actually really fast when you're backing up a ton of small files, and isn't particularly expensive.
Generally, tape gets slammed when people compare 3+ year old tape technology to anything else that's brand new.
And besides, even people who supposedly confess to crimes often do so under duress -- a 20 hour interogation, a plea deals to save someone else from punishment, mental illness, and so on. A confession absent of overwhelming evidence shouldn't be sufficient to execute someone.
I like your idea that such people be incarcerated until cured - of course what that means in the vast majority of these cases is a life sentence with no parole. How economically feasible is that?
According to this page many states already require "sexual offenders judged likely to reoffend to be civilly committed until they were judged to be no longer at risk." And as of 1998 it was confirmed to be constitutionally acceptable by the US Supreme Court. (Not sure if it was struck down since then, but I doubt it.)
Because the rate of recidivism for violent sex offenders is nearly 100%, which means that they will almost certainly rape or murder someone it the future.
You know I thought it was really high, too, but according to these myths and facts about sex offenders, the majority of sex offenders do NOT reoffend. Also, I was very surprised to read that sex offenders are less likely to reoffend than non-sex offenders.
On the flip side, there's this analysis of multiple studies which reports some pretty high recidivism rates for various types of sex offenders.. and really demonstrates how complicated it is when factoring in the type of crime, and especially the extreme underreporting of sex crimes. I suspect that the overall lower rate is probably because of the underreporting and the grouping of all sex crimes together.
But in any case, I don't think your "nearly 100%" number can be substantiated. The biggest numbers in the studies analyzed, showed 52% of child molesters facing rearrested (not necessarily convicted) within a 25 year period. Oh, and Exhibitionists had a very high recidivism rate (41%-71%).
As a side note, people who are released from prison early and wear tracking systems have been deemed safe enough to be released, and unlikely to reoffend -- otherwise they wouldn't have been released early. What they're talking about here, is using it for people who have already served out their entire sentences.
But what makes it complicated is how "sexual offender" is defined -- in Florida, committing, attempting, conspiring or soliciting to commit "Distribution of obscene materials to minor under the age of 18". So that means that an 18 year old buys porn for his 17 year old friend, and gets caught, he could become a "sex offender".
Is that really the sort of people we want to be wearing one of these GPS systems the rest of their lives?
Florida does have a legal definition of "sexual preditor" -- some states do not, as I understand it -- which is someone who is:
So I think it would be quite reasonable to restrict these GPS units things to Sexual Predators.. maybe they'd have to restrict it to only those convicted from now on, though.
It would be reasonable for it to use your last known GPS coordinates.. remember that you have to have access to an internet connection to make a call anyway. Sure, someplace where they outfit subways with wifi, you'd really screw things up, but for the most part if you go into a building and lose the GPS signal, the coordinates of the door you went in is probably close enough for emergency services.
One of the popular features of VoIP is its mobility. .. you can plug into a network anywhere and use it as your phone.
Using an alias like that wouldn't work too well with this mobility.. not that I can think of a better way to do it.
I think by law, access to the E911 database is nondiscriminatory -- meaning any provider can access it for the same fee as all the big providers. So VoIP providers may end up passing along that fee to customers, just like other providers, but database access shouldn't be a barrier... if I'm understanding your point correctly.
It's not really a showcase, just a funny slideshow done with SVG. If you aren't familiar with it yet, it's about time.
I'm using Firefox without plugins.. guess I should have just flipped over to IE -- I did that just now and it worked fine with Acrobat (as someone else noted), although it did crash my all my IE browser windows when it finished!
I'd never heard of SVG before.. thanks for everyone's follow up posts.
Wow, that's lame.
So you need Opera to view that link.. which makes it easily available to everyone that already runs Opera, but keeps it "secret" from everyone who's not using the software yet.. perhaps to add an extra incentive to those who haven't yet had enough incentives to try it out.
To me it comes off as pretty dumb. Why would you showcase a "feature" that providess content that's only useable by 1% of the browsing population? Or is this some sort of content standard that only Opera has implemented yet, and they're just ahead of the curve??
Well, perhaps they're not as impressive as the egyptian pyramids, but I think it is pretty well established that the Mayans used extensive slave labor when constructing cities like Chichen Itza, Tikal, and Calakmul.
And I imagine slave labor might have been used in the building of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but for all I know that's just as bogus as slaves with the pyramids..
So, what's a foreign law? Do international treaties, like the Geneva Convention count? As I remember, the US Constitution explicitly states that international treaties approved by the Senate are Federal law.
Do you have a reference for this? I've been wondering about that for awhile now, but wasn't able to find a reference myself. It certainly makes sense; why else would they need to be ratified?
Sorry, I didn't mean to be insulting or patronizing. I apologize for coming off that way.
For a rebuttle you can read the two people who posted before I did about how neither of them (one heterosexual the other homosexual) about how neither of them had had sexual experience before becoming aware of their sexual orientation.
What I didn't like about your post was that you phrased it as a blanket statement not just applying to people in the same specific situations described.. and you described it as fact, not just what some people in some situations have experienced based on this limited research.
I'm certainly not an expert on the topic either, and am actually quite undecided about whether sexual orientation is a "learned" behavior which can be changed, a fixed from-birth characteristic, both, or something entirely different.. but I am interested in learning the truth, and thought you were making a logic misstep and thought I'd point it out.
About half the gay people I know were previously married to a person of the opposite sex.. they got married (and often had kids) because that's what people did, but later realized that marriage, sex, etc. never changed who they really were.
On the flip side, I know an evangelical christian who was gay and now says God healed him of his homosexuality and he's now been happily married to a woman for about 10 years.
All I know is that it's a whole lot more complicated than people on both sides tend to make it out to be.
200 years ago black people were not considered humans either. We can logically assume that 200 years from now there will be -- say monkeys and dolphins -- who will be given some sort of consideration.
Heck, if monkeys, dolphins or even AI become so cognitively aware that they can be considered "consenting adults" then they should be able to marry. Future lawmakers can decide whether they want to allow inter-species marriages (think of some of they very successful inter-species Star Trek marriages here), but they should at least be able to marry within their species.
But at least until they are adults able to give informed, voluntary consent, you can't marry your monkey, dog, or a child.
You can thus deduce that it's something that you can choose to enter into and leave...
I think your logic is flawed. You used a few specific examples to "prove" your assertion, but that is far from showing that it is applicable for everyone in all situations.
You can use just a few examples to disprove something, or use a very large number of examples to reasonably demonstrate a correlation, but really all you've shown is that given some specific extreme conditioning, people can be forced to behave in certain ways.