I object to "crowd-pandering" - I'll accept off-topic and reactionary:)
As for reaction to Sudan's behavior: In my mind, Sudan does not play in the same league as the US - what happens there matter a great deal less, due to the variations in economic and cultural influence. The US is one of the world's largest economic and military powers, and classically part of western civilization. When the US start to demolish the rule of law it has a much larger impact than when Sudan does the same.
As military action in Sudan: I don't know if that would have utility or not, as I don't know enough about the conflict. As it is, the ability to use military force legitimately and effectively has been severely hampered by the activity in Iraq, especially in a conflict involving Arab interest. Until I know of an alternative that seems clearly better than attempting to work with diplomacy - something with higher overall utility - I won't be outraged by somebody not going for that alternative.
Change your label for the people you are thinking of from "terrorists" to "people we do not know if are innocent or not".
Feel that thought.
Think about reducing the number of automobile accidents by 2%. Would you accept this behavior for that reduction? Would you accept the disabling of the constitution and the random torture of some innocent and some guilty people to get that 2% reduction?
That's the number of lives we are talking about. And I've rounded up.
Whether there are atrocities in Darfur is irrelevant. What scares me is if people like you are willing to give up having their country be a decent world citizen and a country of law in order to get that 2% reduction. Because "everybody" agree that Darfur is horrible. The question is getting YOU to accept that there are atrocities in the 'civilized' world, too, and that these must stop if we are to have legitimacy in working against other atrocities.
Speculation provide market depth (ie, always allowing trades to be made), which is of value to the "real users" of the market (the original producers and investors).
It is also considered that speculation helps give correct prices, though that is more arguable. It is fairly difficult to put a dividing line to where investment ends and speculation begins, anyway.
Your argument has been covered at talk.origins (the standard site for checking background on evolutionary "counter"-arguments.)
Please, find the time to have pride in yourself and humility in your opinions: Be proud enough to not express an opinion until you have checked it, and be humble enough to accept that the sum total of people that work in a field, having deep knowledge of it, have a large chance of having thought about the same things as you - and possibly thought better. Then, when you find a case where they haven't, even when you've checked, you can make a real contribution:)
The redundancy is there to make it possible to understand speech. You could use a more compact format for printed text (which is high quality to begin with); for speech, we already have misunderstandings fairly often (even with the redundancy and the high amount of context people use to guess at what was said).
There's challenges related to marketing machinery that are more or less orthogonal to the actual software engineering. One part is writing the software, the other part is actually getting people to use it.
Why should we discount things that look at the actual video and audio?
One example of a kind of technology I could envision is streaming through the video, look for areas of the more or less same color inside a video stream, and code it with the approximate position on the screen (say, what 1/4 of the screen it start in in each direction, and which it end in) and which frames it stay in.
One such piece alone gives almost zero identification value. The sequence and duration of such pieces gives fairly high identification value, and using Bayesian statistics, you should be able to fairly easily correlate to any particular degree of identification.
I'm sure there are people that are more expert at image recognition than me that could come up with other schemes.
So, you're a non-programmer, or program in something other than the C and derivatives space? Or maybe you're young? 'cause AltGr-7 to get { is a pain when programming. It's a wrist killer. My wrists aren't worth "having the labels match what I type" - I don't look at the keyboard when I type anyway. Og det burde ikke du heller, hvis du vil skrive raskt og riktig og uten å ødelegge håndleddene...
While it isn't telepathy, it *is* mindreading. I know how you feel, I think - as I've learned the skill, not having it previously.
Things that helped me:
Copying other people's body language. There's no way better way to become aware of how people move that copying them.
Sitting down and focusing on one point in a public area and attempting to follow everything that is going on, without moving my focal point. This increase "focus width".
Trying to notice how people in a public area relate to each other, just by noticing body position.
Playing guessing games with friends: Think of something negative. Think of something positive. Think of something negative. Think of something positive. Think of something positive *or* something negative - I'll guess which.
It still took me years to learn to get to a "high normal" level. It's worthwhile, though - it makes communicating with people much easier and more interesting. The only problem is that it's fun - it make people much more distracting from technical stuff.
The series didn't do that well when "aired", and did very very well on DVD. The same with the movie: Not so good in theatres, good on DVD.
The presumed reason for the series not doing well on television - and why I put "aired" in quotes - is that it was shown at random times and out of order.
I personally find the series brilliant and the movie OK; on the other hand, I don't really find Star Wars brilliant, either.
Instead of doing everything to validate the contributors, let's validate the articles.
Let the logged in users vouch for "I've read through this revision and it looks OK to me", along with a rating of "How expert" they are in the field in question, and a comment.
Ratings could be something like
5. I'm a generally recognized expert working the field
4. I work in the field
3. I've studied the field at university/college level
2. I'm a generally interested bystander, having done self-study of the field to some depth
1. I'm a generally interested bystander having tried to follow the field for a few years
Comments could be something like what sources you have checked against, or a deeper description of qualifications.
Ratings like these would allow us to do a lot of stuff. We could turn users that seem to do a good job of voting in their particular areas (and staying off voting in other areas) into an officially sanctioned editorial board retroactively, for instance - by just giving their ratings weight. Or we could let people look at "Last version of article vouched for by a 5-authority", or show the differences from that version, or whatever we feel like.
The important thing is to start collecting the data. And that can be done NOW, trivially.
Actually, there are very substantial differences that can be deeply annoying because they're about the way the basic system works. Details like which control panel applet you use to start or stop services (e.g.) aren't as annoying (to me) as the lack of feedback when a program is starting (KDE does have some feedback, but it doesn't show if the program wasn't started from the window manager, whereas Windows will show it however you start your program). This can't be fixed easily in Linux: it needs the kernel to provide feedback to the window manager to inform it when a graphical subsystem program is in the process of starting up. Linux doesn't have such a thing as a graphical subsystem program, and the window manager is not a special process that could easily receive such feedback from the kernel. Actually, this can be done using progressive loading and normal IPC (interprocess communication), outside the kernel. Basically, you have a tiny little program that start up and give the notification, and then that program continue loading the rest, using dlopen and friends.
One thing I presently do not get is where the energy leaked from red shifted photons go.
Every photon is quantized. It is a particle, emitted when an atom change from an excited to a less excited state (basically, an electron change from an outer to an inner position). This photon get different levels of energy depending on how far they jump, and different frequencies of light correspond to the photons in that light having a higher energy level.
Now, enter cosmology: The universe expands, so "hot" photons that are old have red-shifted ("cooled") to a very low temperature (about 4K, as far as I remember). This the background microwave radiation.
My question is: "Where has the energy gone?"
At a wave level, this isn't really a problem - there's just more waves going over more distance with the same energy. However, when we quantizise this, we should still have the same number of photons, with less energy per photon. So, where did the energy go?
Or - did I (and my aunt, who's a physics teacher and originally introduced me to the question) miss something semi-obvious?
DDB is in FreeBSD, too, since always. In fact, DDB was ported from Mach to 386BSD, which predates the FreeBSD/NetBSD split / diverge, which again predates the NetBSD/OpenBSD split.
As sales, you _need_ to be focussing on what's great, why it's fantastic, and why this is exactly the thing they need in their business, beyond anything else.
My problem was/is that that's a bit too much like lying. You're telling your customer that yours is absolutely the best for them, and unless you're in a small subset of occurances, this is not the case. You have worked sales a sucky place.
Seriously.
The best sales reps I've worked with were all completely honest, and the best sales coaches[1] seems to all recommend being completely honest.
I've come across some fairly effective sales people that didn't care, that would cut a corner to get a sale, that didn't care if what they sold were possible or not. But the best have all been doing "I want the customer to have this product because this product is great! I think this product will be the right one for this customer!", and dropped at least half their sales because they found that the product wasn't right for that customer. And - if the product they were selling wasn't the best for many customers, they switched to a different company (or a different product).
I've worked a bit as a sales rep. The primary danger I see with being a techie and going into sales - or at least what was the primary danger for me - was that I felt that I had to know everything about the product, to be able to answer any question, before I could sell it, and I too easily worked the logical side of the customer instead of the emotional. I went back to pure tech work because the place I worked with sales turned out to suck (deliver lousy value to the customers.)
Eivind.
[1] Check out Brian Tracy for technical stuff and Zig Ziglar for pure motivation.
Will it? This is not 100% clear, as you're including personal emotional investment by people. This investment in Perl is high, given the complexity of Perl. And you include the size of the Perl community doing advocacy, usually without properly knowing the alternatives.
What I humourously tried to convey is that pushing people towards Perl may be a destructive act. What those of us that see it as a potentially destructive act should do, in my opinion, is (A) refrain from pushing people towards Perl ourselves, and (B) telling those that push people towards Perl that we see their behaviour as potentially destructive.
What I'm hoping will happen, of course, is that you take the time to investigate the alternatives, learning why I and other people with a lot of Perl experience see advocating Perl as destructive.
And posting things to make it easier to find ways to get to learn Perl is a way to make more people that don't know Perl go towards Perl - instead of maybe leaving them undecided and going for something else after having checked things out.
So, effectively, you are interfering with people learning other things. This is against what you said above;)
I know Perl, I can read it in both directions, I know the magic of the typeglobs and the XS and the various geekery that goes on. It has paid my rent more days than any other language. I can read it in both directions. I think it is time for it to go to its resting place, with its kids (Ruby, Python) taking over, with their ability to do most of the same things, cleaner, clearer, and more consistently.
What should those of us that want people to NOT pick up Perl do?
I first started programming in Perl since 1996. I know what the difference between $main::{fool} = $geek and *fool = $geek is. And I think it is time we let Perl die, letting the new and better generation (Ruby, Python) take over.
Fair enough, assuming that they get to torture to death any motorist that hit and kill or maim a pedestrian.
Otherwise, having a speed limit of 25MPH seems reasonable in an area where there are pedestrians. The fact that you're used to driving too fast for safety doesn't really make that behaviour reasonable; and when I was in Atlanta, the traffic was in my opinion FAR from reasonable or safe.
Are you sure that people with families tend to be right-wing? That would be the opposite statistic of how it is here - people with families tend to be left-wing.
I also question whether the "successful" group that lack time is large enough to matter.
Anyway, just to place things in perspective: I tend to lean more to the right than to the left myself, though I do see myself as an intellectual. Depends a bit on the definitions of "right" and "left", of course.
I suspect it's as simple as intellectuals being more left wing, and intellectuals also being more likely to be active on the net. Without any value judgement as to whether being an intellectual is a good or bad thing or being "left wing" (in US terms) is a good or bad thing.
Eivind.
Making the users an editorial board
on
Is Wikipedia Failing?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Let the logged in users vouch for "I've read through this revision and it looks OK to me", along with a rating of "How expert" they are in the field in question, and a comment.
Ratings could be something like
5. I'm a generally recognized expert working the field
4. I work in the field
3. I've studied the field at university/college level
2. I'm a generally interested bystander, having done self-study of the field to some depth
1. I'm a generally interested bystander having tried to follow the field for a few years
Comments could be something like what sources you have checked against, or a deeper description of qualifications.
Ratings like these would allow us to do a lot of stuff. We could turn users that seem to do a good job of voting in their particular areas (and staying off voting in other areas) into an officially sanctioned editorial board retroactively, for instance - by just giving their ratings weight. Or we could let people look at "Last version of article vouched for by a 5-authority", or show the differences from that version, or whatever we feel like.
The important thing is to start collecting the data. And that can be done NOW, trivially.
Slashdot Mirror
As for reaction to Sudan's behavior: In my mind, Sudan does not play in the same league as the US - what happens there matter a great deal less, due to the variations in economic and cultural influence. The US is one of the world's largest economic and military powers, and classically part of western civilization. When the US start to demolish the rule of law it has a much larger impact than when Sudan does the same.
As military action in Sudan: I don't know if that would have utility or not, as I don't know enough about the conflict. As it is, the ability to use military force legitimately and effectively has been severely hampered by the activity in Iraq, especially in a conflict involving Arab interest. Until I know of an alternative that seems clearly better than attempting to work with diplomacy - something with higher overall utility - I won't be outraged by somebody not going for that alternative.
Eivind.
Hang with me two seconds.
Change your label for the people you are thinking of from "terrorists" to "people we do not know if are innocent or not".
Feel that thought.
Think about reducing the number of automobile accidents by 2%. Would you accept this behavior for that reduction? Would you accept the disabling of the constitution and the random torture of some innocent and some guilty people to get that 2% reduction?
That's the number of lives we are talking about. And I've rounded up.
Whether there are atrocities in Darfur is irrelevant. What scares me is if people like you are willing to give up having their country be a decent world citizen and a country of law in order to get that 2% reduction. Because "everybody" agree that Darfur is horrible. The question is getting YOU to accept that there are atrocities in the 'civilized' world, too, and that these must stop if we are to have legitimacy in working against other atrocities.
Eivind.
It is also considered that speculation helps give correct prices, though that is more arguable. It is fairly difficult to put a dividing line to where investment ends and speculation begins, anyway.
Eivind.
I suspect most of your peers are less mature than you, and therefore get annoyed by the introduction of an adult smile. You can tell them I said so ;)
Eivind.
Chromosome count mutations are fairly well understood, and are separate from the genetic mutations they're talking about here.
Your argument has been covered at talk.origins (the standard site for checking background on evolutionary "counter"-arguments.)
Please, find the time to have pride in yourself and humility in your opinions: Be proud enough to not express an opinion until you have checked it, and be humble enough to accept that the sum total of people that work in a field, having deep knowledge of it, have a large chance of having thought about the same things as you - and possibly thought better. Then, when you find a case where they haven't, even when you've checked, you can make a real contribution :)
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
One example of a kind of technology I could envision is streaming through the video, look for areas of the more or less same color inside a video stream, and code it with the approximate position on the screen (say, what 1/4 of the screen it start in in each direction, and which it end in) and which frames it stay in.
One such piece alone gives almost zero identification value. The sequence and duration of such pieces gives fairly high identification value, and using Bayesian statistics, you should be able to fairly easily correlate to any particular degree of identification.
I'm sure there are people that are more expert at image recognition than me that could come up with other schemes.
Eivind.
So, you're a non-programmer, or program in something other than the C and derivatives space? Or maybe you're young? 'cause AltGr-7 to get { is a pain when programming. It's a wrist killer. My wrists aren't worth "having the labels match what I type" - I don't look at the keyboard when I type anyway. Og det burde ikke du heller, hvis du vil skrive raskt og riktig og uten å ødelegge håndleddene...
Things that helped me:
- Copying other people's body language. There's no way better way to become aware of how people move that copying them.
- Sitting down and focusing on one point in a public area and attempting to follow everything that is going on, without moving my focal point. This increase "focus width".
- Trying to notice how people in a public area relate to each other, just by noticing body position.
- Playing guessing games with friends: Think of something negative. Think of something positive. Think of something negative. Think of something positive. Think of something positive *or* something negative - I'll guess which.
It still took me years to learn to get to a "high normal" level. It's worthwhile, though - it makes communicating with people much easier and more interesting. The only problem is that it's fun - it make people much more distracting from technical stuff.Eivind.
The presumed reason for the series not doing well on television - and why I put "aired" in quotes - is that it was shown at random times and out of order.
I personally find the series brilliant and the movie OK; on the other hand, I don't really find Star Wars brilliant, either.
Eivind.
Let the logged in users vouch for "I've read through this revision and it looks OK to me", along with a rating of "How expert" they are in the field in question, and a comment.
Ratings could be something like
5. I'm a generally recognized expert working the field
4. I work in the field
3. I've studied the field at university/college level
2. I'm a generally interested bystander, having done self-study of the field to some depth
1. I'm a generally interested bystander having tried to follow the field for a few years
Comments could be something like what sources you have checked against, or a deeper description of qualifications.
Ratings like these would allow us to do a lot of stuff. We could turn users that seem to do a good job of voting in their particular areas (and staying off voting in other areas) into an officially sanctioned editorial board retroactively, for instance - by just giving their ratings weight. Or we could let people look at "Last version of article vouched for by a 5-authority", or show the differences from that version, or whatever we feel like.
The important thing is to start collecting the data. And that can be done NOW, trivially.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I know I'm not alone (for instance, my girlfriend is the same, and has been since before we met.)
Eivind.
One thing I presently do not get is where the energy leaked from red shifted photons go.
Every photon is quantized. It is a particle, emitted when an atom change from an excited to a less excited state (basically, an electron change from an outer to an inner position). This photon get different levels of energy depending on how far they jump, and different frequencies of light correspond to the photons in that light having a higher energy level.
Now, enter cosmology: The universe expands, so "hot" photons that are old have red-shifted ("cooled") to a very low temperature (about 4K, as far as I remember). This the background microwave radiation.
My question is: "Where has the energy gone?"
At a wave level, this isn't really a problem - there's just more waves going over more distance with the same energy. However, when we quantizise this, we should still have the same number of photons, with less energy per photon. So, where did the energy go?
Or - did I (and my aunt, who's a physics teacher and originally introduced me to the question) miss something semi-obvious?
Eivind.
Eivind.
Seriously.
The best sales reps I've worked with were all completely honest, and the best sales coaches[1] seems to all recommend being completely honest.
I've come across some fairly effective sales people that didn't care, that would cut a corner to get a sale, that didn't care if what they sold were possible or not. But the best have all been doing "I want the customer to have this product because this product is great! I think this product will be the right one for this customer!", and dropped at least half their sales because they found that the product wasn't right for that customer. And - if the product they were selling wasn't the best for many customers, they switched to a different company (or a different product).
I've worked a bit as a sales rep. The primary danger I see with being a techie and going into sales - or at least what was the primary danger for me - was that I felt that I had to know everything about the product, to be able to answer any question, before I could sell it, and I too easily worked the logical side of the customer instead of the emotional. I went back to pure tech work because the place I worked with sales turned out to suck (deliver lousy value to the customers.)
Eivind.
[1] Check out Brian Tracy for technical stuff and Zig Ziglar for pure motivation.
Eivind.
What I humourously tried to convey is that pushing people towards Perl may be a destructive act. What those of us that see it as a potentially destructive act should do, in my opinion, is (A) refrain from pushing people towards Perl ourselves, and (B) telling those that push people towards Perl that we see their behaviour as potentially destructive.
What I'm hoping will happen, of course, is that you take the time to investigate the alternatives, learning why I and other people with a lot of Perl experience see advocating Perl as destructive.
And posting things to make it easier to find ways to get to learn Perl is a way to make more people that don't know Perl go towards Perl - instead of maybe leaving them undecided and going for something else after having checked things out.
So, effectively, you are interfering with people learning other things. This is against what you said above ;)
Eivind.
Eivind.
I first started programming in Perl since 1996. I know what the difference between $main::{fool} = $geek and *fool = $geek is. And I think it is time we let Perl die, letting the new and better generation (Ruby, Python) take over.
Eivind.
Otherwise, having a speed limit of 25MPH seems reasonable in an area where there are pedestrians. The fact that you're used to driving too fast for safety doesn't really make that behaviour reasonable; and when I was in Atlanta, the traffic was in my opinion FAR from reasonable or safe.
Eivind.
I also question whether the "successful" group that lack time is large enough to matter.
Anyway, just to place things in perspective: I tend to lean more to the right than to the left myself, though I do see myself as an intellectual. Depends a bit on the definitions of "right" and "left", of course.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Ratings could be something like
5. I'm a generally recognized expert working the field 4. I work in the field 3. I've studied the field at university/college level 2. I'm a generally interested bystander, having done self-study of the field to some depth 1. I'm a generally interested bystander having tried to follow the field for a few years
Comments could be something like what sources you have checked against, or a deeper description of qualifications.
Ratings like these would allow us to do a lot of stuff. We could turn users that seem to do a good job of voting in their particular areas (and staying off voting in other areas) into an officially sanctioned editorial board retroactively, for instance - by just giving their ratings weight. Or we could let people look at "Last version of article vouched for by a 5-authority", or show the differences from that version, or whatever we feel like.
The important thing is to start collecting the data. And that can be done NOW, trivially.
Eivind.