This was for the forest service...so you would work for 12 hours in 100 degrees weather in a place that just happens to be on fire hitting the ground with a pulaski. I think they were worried about dehydration. I still find that I will drink 4 liters on a good day's bicycle ride.
Actually, I found that Orange juice seems to be a much better alternative.
Plain water is much better than any of the sugared waters available. I just did a quick web search...most mentioned that people should drink 2.5 liters of water a day. If it is hot, you need to drink more. When I was on fire crew, they demanded we drink 4 liters or water a day. Drinking that much orange juice will make you rotund. I would have maybe a glass of OJ in the morning and 9 glasses of water throughout the day.
The Danish skeptics are being skeptical about the skeptic. Sounds very fishy. I wonder how the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty. Unfortunately groups like this tend to project what they are doing on to other people. BTW, a skeptic who is pointing out onesidedness on an issue will end up showing one sided data. Lets say group A fudged data 5% of the time. Well, if I were rebutting them them, I would show each of the times they fudged data...hence 100% of my cases would be about fudged data.
The biggest problem is that politically popular ideas rarely get enough rebuttal or public scrutiny. The fact that Dr. Bjorn Lomborg has been actively trying to poke wholes in the global warming argument is good for the debate, even if it is not the absolute best science. There is a lot of "not the best science" that goes on to prove politically popular causes, that rarely get called by Scientific Dishonesty circles.
If violent video games served as impetus for violent crime even 1% of the time...
If 1% of the people who played violent video games turned violent, then we would have a nation crisis. Even 1 in a 1000 would be scary.
Make a specific statement for "loser pays": anyone suing under using this legislation who loses the case pays for the legal costs of both parties.
So, when you want to do frivolous law suits, you need to create a special limited liability company first for the lawsuit to avoid costs when you lose. This will help create a lot of new businesses (that is, if you consider a shell business for risk management a new business).
Ensure that American laws apply only to American citizens with the express wording that products purchased in other parts of the world which belong to the consumer are theirs to do with as they please.
Yes, the purging of US tech jobs is not going fast enough. I agree with any law that gives a burden to US firms and leaves non-US firms to do as they please, as this will shorten the time to a level playing field. I hope India will start allowing emigration soon!!!!!!! It would be great to be able to get a job there before the real estate bubble makes it as unaffordable as the US.
but unless we propose alternatives and compromises, are we really doing anything but venting?
I agree wholly with your statement. I would even go further. The "information wants to be free" rhetoric, and the mantra that there is no such thing as "intellectual property" or that the internet will bring an end to capital created a climate where bad laws would get passed, as it was easy to dismiss those arguing for reform as music pirates.
On the bright side, the disgust that so many people have for the legal hassling of SCO will make way for a new debate.
For the first programming job I had (at an insurance agency) they were using 9/9/99 as infinity. So, if your benefits mysteriously stopped a few years ago...hey, it wasn't my fault!
The most interesting time related bug I came across was with a RDBMS called Advanced Revelation. The program counted days from 1/1/1970. In May 1997 the sequence counter went from 4 to 5 digits. It was interesting, the database was stable, but there were quite a few reports and add ons that were designed to expect a 4 digit number.
BTW, I built a 3/3/3333 into a program that I wrote for a company.
I recall, several decades ago, there were health agencies screaming about a big rise in the number of cancer deaths. Fatalities of all the other major diseases were going down, but the percent of deaths from cancer kept rising. Some cancer researchers were making the increase in cancer related deaths sound like an epidemic. Everyone was paranoid about anything that might be carcinogenic...until someone realized that all of the percentages had to add up to 100, and that the primary cause for the increased cancer rate was longevity. When longevity was identified as a carcinogen, then the rhetoric cooled down, while opening opportunities for sick humor on/.
Personally, I think the biggest health threat the world has right now is the increasing drug resistence of many of the historical diseases that plagued the past. I think the most promising things we are discovering right now is how our bodies work as ecosystems. My hope is that doctors will stop over prescribing antibiotics and take a more holistic approach to diseases. Designer, symbiotic organisms might encourage more thought on the body as a whole system.
A large number of the different creatures living inside people have symbiotic relations with the host. I would not be surprised if they found natural viruses with a tendency to attack cancers. Genetically modifying the viruses might just be a matter of increasing natural tendencies.
I hope it succeeds too. As a geneticly engineered virus that gets released into the general population, we will all probably end up with some of it in our system within a decade or so of its release.
So, if it is a failure, we might all end up hating life.
If you look at the historical records, you will see a marked jump in the percent of people who die of cancer after the introduction of antibiotics. Food does the same thing. In times of famine and wars (for that matter) very few people die of cancer.
does that mean the Cold kicks Cancers ass for most annoying thing to get in you?
It makes sense to fight disease with disease.
There's a whole ecosystem of single celled creatures living inside people. Some things like acidophilous are quite good for the system. IMHO, the occasional cold seems to help keep the immune system in tune.
I think it is healthier to think in terms of maintaining a good balance in the ecosystem than to try and prevent all exposure to disease. Personally, I avoid antibiotics except for extreme diseases. BTW, when people do take antibiotics, they need to take the full subscription, other wise you will turn into a fun little biology experiment where the germs resistent to the anti-biotic can work on their evolution. I read arguments by some doctors that think the government should curtail the use of antibiotics to extreme cases so that we can halt the evolution of antibiotic resistent diseases.
According the the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the CPI dropped in November by.03%. The main inflationary pressure in the US right now is from the weaker dollar. The economist and other right wing rags have been lauding the the weaker dollar as it should end up helping the US labor market while increasing the value of the cash in other countries to help increase their consumer spending. The xmas index is just about a small bag of goods with wild price swings.
The CPI is calculated over a rather large shopping bag of goods.
The big fuss is that the e-voting systems are being pushed because the last US presidential election fell within the margin of error of the voting system. This created an atmosphere of crisis. So rather than having an evolution of voting machines, we are getting a substandard product of crisis politics. Even worse, the crisis is being used as a justification for a great deal of pork barrel politics.
The evoting systems are coming from a flawed decision making process.
The development of closed source voting systems is also very anti-democratic. Ideally, voting sytems would have each logical step in the process open for criticism and review. Electronic voting is part of the democratic process. So this is a very good place for people favoring OSS to show case their ideals.
Sorry to break the bad news, but you live in a world full of people. The first thing that will be on the minds of lawyers is how this affects law. The first thing on the mind of investors would be the effect on their portfolio. The first thing on the mind of politicians would be the effect on the next election and the first thing on the mind of the scientists will be who gets top billing on research paper and if their name is spelled correctly. The first thing on the mind of the avid/.ers is who will get first post, and will they get good karma in what will be lively thread. It will probably be that guy who welcomes evil overlords.
And, yes, I am joking about human nature, but realize that there will be profound effects on all of our fundamental theories of nature. BTW, I suspect that there are lawyers at SETI already thinking about this.
SETI actually brings up a very interesting issue. So let's say they do find an alien civilization, would SETI get to copyright and patent the material that they gleen from the alien civilization?
Could we use any of the alien stuff as prior art to refute patent claims we don't like?
Considering the amount of money at stake, I have no doubt the SETI lawyers will play the SCO game and resist any actually release of data.
Last month, The International Herald Tribune convened a roundtable at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan to discuss how job migration is changing the landscape.
What a waste! We could have as good a conversation between pundits in Bangalore for a tenth the cost!
Rented cops with guns in Ca theatres trolling for cell phones. Damn, I think California just might return to those good old wild west days yet. Watching the audience will be as interesting as watching the movie...
It is sad that we never got any real local competition. Big business improverishes society. The only way to have any meaningful competition is with hundreds of thousands of small companies.
I suspect that in the next several years we will see an occasional token drop in published prices, while the big boys pull games to control usage and line their pockets with hidden fees.
The first part of the internet revolution was dominated by the shear technical challenge of getting people wired to the Internet. I suspect this new phase will be about marketers trying to find clever ways to corral all of profits from the technology into the smallest number of hands possible.
For the most part what happens is that a library will buy twenty copies of a best seller when there is a long queue for the book, then sell the best sellers when the demand dies down.
You are correct in realizing the danger that online sale pose to the repository portions of the library. The natural library cycle dumps best sellers at the bottom of the market. The big money is in the hard to find books and out of print books. Out of print books can sell for more than the original publishing price.
There is a big danger that local politicians might see the library's repository as a cash cow and start selling off the older books. This would be a big loss for the community. This is probably the main reason libraries have not pushed selling books for fair market value.
Maybe if we gave the libraries more actual funding
I agree, this was a very poorly thought through statement. I encourage and vote for funding and give friends of the library donations to the local University library. Regardless of the amount of funding, there isn't an excuse to spend the funding poorly.
U.S. Libraries should be run in the tradition of Ben Franklin and watch each and every penny. They should get every dime they can from book sales. By undercutting the market with subsidized book sales, they end up undercutting the entire literary community. People in the literary community need money for their coffee and fancy goatee facial trims.
You have a very good point that the people who start movements rarely use oppositional rhetoric. It is the people who decide they want to latch onto the coattails of a movement, or people pontificating on the sideline. Likewise, almost all of the early adapters of Linux and UNIX were in there for the fun.
As it stands, people could probably make a pretty penny by going to the public library, buying up the books for a quarter a piece then selling them online. It would be a good way to turn a $50 investment into $500.. (I've been tempted, I've noticed several of the books I bought from Amazon marketplace have library marks on them. So there are people who've fallen for the temptation.)
Personally, I love the fact that the library's bargain basement sales would give a small library to people who otherwise would not have a library. However, the internet has created a market where the books are more likely to be snagged by people looking for a quick buck. It would be better to let the community to keep the quick bucks to be made from the massive amounts of money the community pours into the library.
The only big downside, is that library's book processing cycle tends to sell the books at the bottom of the market. For example, our local library's bought several hundred Harry Potter books. I suspect they will sell them off as soon as the demand dies...That is, when the books are going for a penny a shot on Amazon.
Nebraska is flat...no mountains in the way, making it ideal for a few cell towers. For remote mountainous terrain, try central Idaho. I was thinking of places like Colbalt, Shoup or other truly isolated places outside Cobalt and Shoup. Regardless, if it costs $10,000 to get a line to your remote address, then what gives you the divine moral right to make other people pay for your service? The millionaires who own ranch land outside Stanley and expect cheap subsidized phone service to their summer home turn my stomache.
Getting phone service to these people is no small task and the costs can far exceed what the phone companies can recoup even in 30 years of billing these customers.
Sounds to me like the phone company needs to charge more in these areas...or perhaps there should be a cooperative where people buy the communication equipment, and provide the service that best fits the region. The subsidized phone lines have accomplished two things: It has redistributed money from people who are living more efficiently, and it stopped the evolution of alternative communication technologies.
For example, if you can see the tower from your house, there should be an antenna on your house boosting the signal from the tower. If you need your cell phone on your 10,000 acre field, then you should have booster that broadcasts over your field.
Let's say the phone company has spent an average of $10,000 a year to maintain your phone service. Is that really a good use of the money? If people in rural areas were investing their own money, they likely would have evolved a system that better suits the needs of the rural community. This thing where telecos get to take money from one group to spend on another encourages them to spend the money poorly.
First off, I think the competition is good. One of the big advantages of OSS is that it allows competition at the object level...not just the application or office suite level.
I was referring to situations where we raise ideological concerns to the top of the heap and let ideological or personality battles dictate other decisions. The challenge and promise of OSS is that it can eventually evolve into a nice little system where we can configure systems at multiple levels.
The article's desire for getting down to one or two main linux installs is counter to the goal of OSS. I mean why would we really need to be able to read the source if there is only one install and one configuration? You need open source so that you can configure and support a wide variety of options.
For that matter, the argument that all linux installs must work on all machines could be considered a ideological concern trying to override other concerns.
I don't believe we have ever had or will ever have the ability to communicate fully. There are degrees. There are some epistemologies that help us communicate better than others. (a gtood example is people who preview, spell check and proof read their posts generally have more success communicating with the world.)
Oppositional logic (where a group raises one thesis/antithesis conflict over all other concerns) tends to kill the ability for people not in that group to communicate with that group. The internal communications seems great until they try to move off the great conflict.
BSD vs Linux. Gnome vs KDE. Debian vs Red Hat. For every interesting Open Source technology, there are two bitterly feuding camps that spend as much time taking potshots at each other as in improving their own products.
It seems to me that a problem with a large number of movements is that they are based first and foremost on an oppositional logic and rhetoric. Rather than simply providing a model for open debate and getting things done, the oppositional rhetoric gives us infighting and great wars about the composition of naval lint and the direction of the great social revolution.
Of course, this is just a problem in OSS, it seems to be occuring just about everywhere. People are subdividing into camps based on whatever thesis/antithesis group the rant about, and are gradually losing the ability to community with the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
This was for the forest service...so you would work for 12 hours in 100 degrees weather in a place that just happens to be on fire hitting the ground with a pulaski. I think they were worried about dehydration. I still find that I will drink 4 liters on a good day's bicycle ride.
This is about companies that actually create things...not law firms.
The Danish skeptics are being skeptical about the skeptic. Sounds very fishy. I wonder how the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty. Unfortunately groups like this tend to project what they are doing on to other people. BTW, a skeptic who is pointing out onesidedness on an issue will end up showing one sided data. Lets say group A fudged data 5% of the time. Well, if I were rebutting them them, I would show each of the times they fudged data...hence 100% of my cases would be about fudged data.
The biggest problem is that politically popular ideas rarely get enough rebuttal or public scrutiny. The fact that Dr. Bjorn Lomborg has been actively trying to poke wholes in the global warming argument is good for the debate, even if it is not the absolute best science. There is a lot of "not the best science" that goes on to prove politically popular causes, that rarely get called by Scientific Dishonesty circles.
If 1% of the people who played violent video games turned violent, then we would have a nation crisis. Even 1 in a 1000 would be scary.
So, when you want to do frivolous law suits, you need to create a special limited liability company first for the lawsuit to avoid costs when you lose. This will help create a lot of new businesses (that is, if you consider a shell business for risk management a new business).
Yes, the purging of US tech jobs is not going fast enough. I agree with any law that gives a burden to US firms and leaves non-US firms to do as they please, as this will shorten the time to a level playing field. I hope India will start allowing emigration soon!!!!!!! It would be great to be able to get a job there before the real estate bubble makes it as unaffordable as the US.
I agree wholly with your statement. I would even go further. The "information wants to be free" rhetoric, and the mantra that there is no such thing as "intellectual property" or that the internet will bring an end to capital created a climate where bad laws would get passed, as it was easy to dismiss those arguing for reform as music pirates.
On the bright side, the disgust that so many people have for the legal hassling of SCO will make way for a new debate.
Regardless, there is not an easy solution.
2038 will be a big mess.
For the first programming job I had (at an insurance agency) they were using 9/9/99 as infinity. So, if your benefits mysteriously stopped a few years ago...hey, it wasn't my fault!
The most interesting time related bug I came across was with a RDBMS called Advanced Revelation. The program counted days from 1/1/1970. In May 1997 the sequence counter went from 4 to 5 digits. It was interesting, the database was stable, but there were quite a few reports and add ons that were designed to expect a 4 digit number.
BTW, I built a 3/3/3333 into a program that I wrote for a company.
Personally, I think the biggest health threat the world has right now is the increasing drug resistence of many of the historical diseases that plagued the past. I think the most promising things we are discovering right now is how our bodies work as ecosystems. My hope is that doctors will stop over prescribing antibiotics and take a more holistic approach to diseases. Designer, symbiotic organisms might encourage more thought on the body as a whole system.
A large number of the different creatures living inside people have symbiotic relations with the host. I would not be surprised if they found natural viruses with a tendency to attack cancers. Genetically modifying the viruses might just be a matter of increasing natural tendencies.
I hope it succeeds too. As a geneticly engineered virus that gets released into the general population, we will all probably end up with some of it in our system within a decade or so of its release.
So, if it is a failure, we might all end up hating life.
If you look at the historical records, you will see a marked jump in the percent of people who die of cancer after the introduction of antibiotics. Food does the same thing. In times of famine and wars (for that matter) very few people die of cancer.
It makes sense to fight disease with disease.
There's a whole ecosystem of single celled creatures living inside people. Some things like acidophilous are quite good for the system. IMHO, the occasional cold seems to help keep the immune system in tune.
I think it is healthier to think in terms of maintaining a good balance in the ecosystem than to try and prevent all exposure to disease. Personally, I avoid antibiotics except for extreme diseases. BTW, when people do take antibiotics, they need to take the full subscription, other wise you will turn into a fun little biology experiment where the germs resistent to the anti-biotic can work on their evolution. I read arguments by some doctors that think the government should curtail the use of antibiotics to extreme cases so that we can halt the evolution of antibiotic resistent diseases.
According the the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the CPI dropped in November by .03%. The main inflationary pressure in the US right now is from the weaker dollar. The economist and other right wing rags have been lauding the the weaker dollar as it should end up helping the US labor market while increasing the value of the cash in other countries to help increase their consumer spending. The xmas index is just about a small bag of goods with wild price swings.
The CPI is calculated over a rather large shopping bag of goods.
The big fuss is that the e-voting systems are being pushed because the last US presidential election fell within the margin of error of the voting system. This created an atmosphere of crisis. So rather than having an evolution of voting machines, we are getting a substandard product of crisis politics. Even worse, the crisis is being used as a justification for a great deal of pork barrel politics.
The evoting systems are coming from a flawed decision making process.
The development of closed source voting systems is also very anti-democratic. Ideally, voting sytems would have each logical step in the process open for criticism and review. Electronic voting is part of the democratic process. So this is a very good place for people favoring OSS to show case their ideals.
Give Slashdot to your competitors. Come to think of it, give it to that coworker or manager that is in the way of your political aspirations.
Sorry to break the bad news, but you live in a world full of people. The first thing that will be on the minds of lawyers is how this affects law. The first thing on the mind of investors would be the effect on their portfolio. The first thing on the mind of politicians would be the effect on the next election and the first thing on the mind of the scientists will be who gets top billing on research paper and if their name is spelled correctly. The first thing on the mind of the avid /.ers is who will get first post, and will they get good karma in what will be lively thread. It will probably be that guy who welcomes evil overlords.
And, yes, I am joking about human nature, but realize that there will be profound effects on all of our fundamental theories of nature. BTW, I suspect that there are lawyers at SETI already thinking about this.
SETI actually brings up a very interesting issue. So let's say they do find an alien civilization, would SETI get to copyright and patent the material that they gleen from the alien civilization?
Could we use any of the alien stuff as prior art to refute patent claims we don't like?
Considering the amount of money at stake, I have no doubt the SETI lawyers will play the SCO game and resist any actually release of data.
What a waste! We could have as good a conversation between pundits in Bangalore for a tenth the cost!
Rented cops with guns in Ca theatres trolling for cell phones. Damn, I think California just might return to those good old wild west days yet. Watching the audience will be as interesting as watching the movie...
Cell Phone } baling, baling, baling...
Rent-a-cop w/ gun } blam, blam, blam...
Innocent bystander } shriek! faint.
dewd, pass me the popcorn, this is getting intense.
It is sad that we never got any real local competition. Big business improverishes society. The only way to have any meaningful competition is with hundreds of thousands of small companies.
I suspect that in the next several years we will see an occasional token drop in published prices, while the big boys pull games to control usage and line their pockets with hidden fees.
The first part of the internet revolution was dominated by the shear technical challenge of getting people wired to the Internet. I suspect this new phase will be about marketers trying to find clever ways to corral all of profits from the technology into the smallest number of hands possible.
For the most part what happens is that a library will buy twenty copies of a best seller when there is a long queue for the book, then sell the best sellers when the demand dies down.
You are correct in realizing the danger that online sale pose to the repository portions of the library. The natural library cycle dumps best sellers at the bottom of the market. The big money is in the hard to find books and out of print books. Out of print books can sell for more than the original publishing price.
There is a big danger that local politicians might see the library's repository as a cash cow and start selling off the older books. This would be a big loss for the community. This is probably the main reason libraries have not pushed selling books for fair market value.
I agree, this was a very poorly thought through statement. I encourage and vote for funding and give friends of the library donations to the local University library. Regardless of the amount of funding, there isn't an excuse to spend the funding poorly.
U.S. Libraries should be run in the tradition of Ben Franklin and watch each and every penny. They should get every dime they can from book sales. By undercutting the market with subsidized book sales, they end up undercutting the entire literary community. People in the literary community need money for their coffee and fancy goatee facial trims.
You have a very good point that the people who start movements rarely use oppositional rhetoric. It is the people who decide they want to latch onto the coattails of a movement, or people pontificating on the sideline. Likewise, almost all of the early adapters of Linux and UNIX were in there for the fun.
As it stands, people could probably make a pretty penny by going to the public library, buying up the books for a quarter a piece then selling them online. It would be a good way to turn a $50 investment into $500.. (I've been tempted, I've noticed several of the books I bought from Amazon marketplace have library marks on them. So there are people who've fallen for the temptation.)
Personally, I love the fact that the library's bargain basement sales would give a small library to people who otherwise would not have a library. However, the internet has created a market where the books are more likely to be snagged by people looking for a quick buck. It would be better to let the community to keep the quick bucks to be made from the massive amounts of money the community pours into the library.
The only big downside, is that library's book processing cycle tends to sell the books at the bottom of the market. For example, our local library's bought several hundred Harry Potter books. I suspect they will sell them off as soon as the demand dies...That is, when the books are going for a penny a shot on Amazon.
Nebraska is flat...no mountains in the way, making it ideal for a few cell towers. For remote mountainous terrain, try central Idaho. I was thinking of places like Colbalt, Shoup or other truly isolated places outside Cobalt and Shoup. Regardless, if it costs $10,000 to get a line to your remote address, then what gives you the divine moral right to make other people pay for your service? The millionaires who own ranch land outside Stanley and expect cheap subsidized phone service to their summer home turn my stomache.
Sounds to me like the phone company needs to charge more in these areas...or perhaps there should be a cooperative where people buy the communication equipment, and provide the service that best fits the region. The subsidized phone lines have accomplished two things: It has redistributed money from people who are living more efficiently, and it stopped the evolution of alternative communication technologies.
For example, if you can see the tower from your house, there should be an antenna on your house boosting the signal from the tower. If you need your cell phone on your 10,000 acre field, then you should have booster that broadcasts over your field.
Let's say the phone company has spent an average of $10,000 a year to maintain your phone service. Is that really a good use of the money? If people in rural areas were investing their own money, they likely would have evolved a system that better suits the needs of the rural community. This thing where telecos get to take money from one group to spend on another encourages them to spend the money poorly.
First off, I think the competition is good. One of the big advantages of OSS is that it allows competition at the object level...not just the application or office suite level.
I was referring to situations where we raise ideological concerns to the top of the heap and let ideological or personality battles dictate other decisions. The challenge and promise of OSS is that it can eventually evolve into a nice little system where we can configure systems at multiple levels.
The article's desire for getting down to one or two main linux installs is counter to the goal of OSS. I mean why would we really need to be able to read the source if there is only one install and one configuration? You need open source so that you can configure and support a wide variety of options.
For that matter, the argument that all linux installs must work on all machines could be considered a ideological concern trying to override other concerns.
Sorry about the typo.
I don't believe we have ever had or will ever have the ability to communicate fully. There are degrees. There are some epistemologies that help us communicate better than others. (a gtood example is people who preview, spell check and proof read their posts generally have more success communicating with the world.)
Oppositional logic (where a group raises one thesis/antithesis conflict over all other concerns) tends to kill the ability for people not in that group to communicate with that group. The internal communications seems great until they try to move off the great conflict.
It seems to me that a problem with a large number of movements is that they are based first and foremost on an oppositional logic and rhetoric. Rather than simply providing a model for open debate and getting things done, the oppositional rhetoric gives us infighting and great wars about the composition of naval lint and the direction of the great social revolution.
Of course, this is just a problem in OSS, it seems to be occuring just about everywhere. People are subdividing into camps based on whatever thesis/antithesis group the rant about, and are gradually losing the ability to community with the rest of the world.