Second, if they're the same "strategic vision" that the article is talking about
They're not, from another helpful article from FiveThirtyEight
Why would you pick the name "Strategic Vision, LLC" for your company when the name "Strategic Vision, Inc." was already in use by an extremely well regarded, San Diego-based research firm that has been in business for more than 30 years? Are you deliberately trying to confuse your potential clients and leverage Strategic Vision, Inc.'s much stronger brand name?
You're looking at the page from the well regarded Strategic Vision, Inc. Funny that SV LLC seems to be so happy to sue Nate Silver, it would seem that SV Inc has a far stronger case against SV LLC.
Could be an interesting intersection of Trademark/Slander laws...
Yeah! How unethical of them to try to hire workers away with better pay!!
No one said it's unethical, just that it's unimaginative, lazy, and maybe even outright dumb.
I think they'd do better trying to find people who are already MS fans to work there, instead of trying to poach Apple employees, who are usually serious Apple fans, and probably are not highly competent in MS products anyway.
That is an issue but not every Apple store employee is a fanboy, and the better ones are going to be able to translate the concepts and technologies between the different systems.
Besides, someone who is good at technology retail is probably more useful than someone who really loves the products.
Heck, MS should just advertise here on Slashdot. There's tons of MS fans and shills here.
I'm not sure but that sounds like you're talking about me.
Which would be odd.
Since I haven't even owned a computer with Windows installed for 5 years (although I have a couple vmware machines for work purposes). And I've run Linux as my primary operating system, at home and work, since 2002.
At my last company I held out for the better part of a year against my manager's attempts to switch me from Linux to Windows (I never did switch and ended up leaving for unrelated, but happy, reasons).
Don't assume that because someone defends one aspect of Microsoft's practices that they're an MS fan or shill. I despise MS and Windows for a number of very good and very valid reasons.
It's one thing for companies in a fairly diverse competitive market to do this, it's quite another when a convicted monopolist does it.
That should definitely bite them in some areas but not here. They're not really leveraging their monopoly and among activities I'd like to restrict luring workers away with better offers isn't one of them.
I wish anything Microsoft does would still surprise me...
Yeah! How unethical of them to try to hire workers away with better pay!!
This isn't particularly newsworthy, I don't think it's unusual for retails stores moving into an area to go after the employees of their local competition. It makes sense for MS to go after employees experienced in the market they're entering, I'd expect they're looking for employees from any technology retailer, not just apple.
Heck, this is giant corporations competing to hire the little guy, this is the part of capitalism we're supposed to like!!
The essential implication seems to be that your longevity in employment has absolutely nothing to do with your actual work. Rather, it has everything to do with someone else's perception of you
That's true no matter what, a manager, or a customer, can't measure your work directly, only their perception of your work.
and said perception doesn't necessarily need to have any honest or factual relationship with your work output whatsoever.
If this is the case, I seriously wonder how much longer contemporary human society can last. Is it really so completely, unsparingly rotten out there these days?
I'm not sure I got the same impression. I think the basic message is that managers and customers can only make decisions on what they know about your work. If they have an inaccurate impression of your work that's eventually going to bite you and it's your responsibility to make sure they know what you do.
Of course you can claim it's dishonest to say we'll only play up the good stuff, but are you really going to tell the boss you spend half an hour cruising/. ? Besides, if you over brag it's going to become pretty clear that you don't walk the walk.
This is kinda vicious but my strategy is if someone else's coding isn't good enough or they make massive mistakes, I don't just let it fly. You don't have to be their boss, you only have to be working on the same project as them because you're the one putting up with missing object methods and bad documentation and poorly written code. Tell em to rewrite it before you can use it and correct them and generally let them know that it has to be acceptable or they get to fix it. If anyone asks about project delays, don't hesitate to throw them under the bus and accurately report that they were the reason for the delay because their code didn't work. Soon it'll become really obvious that they're the inferior employee who should be replaced if possible. Do note that if you're the one always screwing up, I hope you expect the same thing to be done to you. Get better at programming or get a different job.
Of course if I end up working with you on a project I'm now going to have to be paranoid that you'll throw me under the bus the first chance you get. And as a result I'm going to be that much less forthcoming about issues I'm encountering as I don't want you to be able to use them as ammunition against me the next time you talk to the boss.
The assumption that people are perfectly rational, completely fair agents is something that will consistently get you in trouble, we have social mores for a good reason.
Spoiler Alert: According to the book, the calorie balance hypothesis is wrong. Numerous studies over the years failed to link high-calorie diet with weight gain, but this fact was overlooked because it challenged nutritional and medical orthodoxy. The real culprit, as the title suggests, is the composition of the diet, not the absolute calories it contains. It's a fascinating read, well researched, and worth the trip to the library.
Uhh... I'm pretty sure if you can burn more calories than you consume, while still gaining/maintaining weight, then you could quite comfortably claim the Randi Challenge prize. And then you could sell your body to science for billions.
Wow, it never occurred to me that everyone on/. needed a lesson on basic thermodynamics!
It has to do with hunger, I don't care what you think you have for willpower or if your spreadsheet says no more calories today, if you're hungry enough you're going to eat. Any weight loss strategy should remember that fact.
Losing fat comes down to a simple equation. If calories in is less than calories burnt, you WILL lose weight. Its as simple as that. No amount of "glandular" problem is going to make you put on weight if you are eating less calories than you use in your daily activites. So you need to either eat less, or do more ecercise, or both. Exercise helps because as you get fitter and have more muscle, as just having more muscle makes you burn more energy - so in that respect it is easier for a fit person to stay slim, but there is no reason in the world that anyone needs to be fat, regardless of any "glandular" problem. Getting more excercise is trivial too. It takes no more 5 minutes to do 30 pushups and 60 crunches - you can do them last thing at night before going to bed. Likewise, you can get off the bus/train one stop earlier ( or walk to the next stop along from where you get on) and easily get a 15 to 30 min walk in a day. Losing weight doesnt have to mean hours and hours in the Gym - just a bit of self motivation to be a bit more active in your daily routine.
I do think this is a bit deceptive, there is a significant genetic component and in my experience the people who claim that weight loss is simply some relatively simple triumph of will are generally the ones who are naturally skinny.
Now I'm definitely not obese but am a bit overweight (6ft & ~190lb). I've always eaten relatively healthily and tried to eat reasonable amounts. The problem is hunger. If you are hungry you will eat, as it happens some people get hungrier than others, these people tend to be larger as they have to eat to make the hunger go away.
Physical activity helps and I've always been fairly active but it's not the only factor, I was 195 and went from running ~20k/week to 45k/week, I'm not a great runner but I did a sub 4hr marathon which is respectable enough. This made absolutely no difference to my weight, I simply get hungrier and eat more.
For the last 6 months I've gone up to 60km/week (~37 miles), for the first three months this made absolutely no difference to my weight, again I simply ate more because I was hungrier. Finally I figured out that olive oil works as a decent appetite suppressant (or the Shangri-la diet is actually legit) and have been able to reduce my appetite enough to go down 5lbs in the last 3 months (probably looking at a 3:20 marathon now).
Yes diet makes a difference, as does exercise (during one period with very poor exercise and diet I hit 205) but if I can stay 30lbs over my desired weight while watching my diet and running 60k/week than I'm willing to believe that larger people might be doing a lot of work while still staying large.
One other thing - Diet drinks - stay the hell away from them. Ever see slim people in the supermarket buying diet coke? no - its always the huge people. Diet drinks have less calories, but there's an interesting littlel experiment they did, where two groups of rats were allowed to eat as much as they wanted - one group was given diet drinks, and the other normal non diet drinks. The ones on diet drinks porked up. The theory: The sweetners give your body signals to get ready to deal with a lot of sugar. When the sugar doesnt arrive, your body goes "Holy crap - we're starving! better eat more!" So diet drinks may actually make you fatter by making you have a bigger appetite. Here's a not very authoritive link http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/06/its_been_recognized_for_a.php to one article about this - Im sure with a more thorough search the actual paper would turn up somewhere.
This is more useful advice (though I don't drink diet drinks), really I think weight loss needs to focus less on willpower and more on hacking the bodies appetite mechanisms.
Agreed. I originally thought the post was about trees that were CONTINUING to evolve. But simply having old adaptations is pretty uninteresting.... nay, normal.
Well I do think it's a neat adaptation but yes, it's completely expected that it would still be around.
Especially for trees, which repopulate very slowly compared to say, fruitflies.
Anyway, the only reason for a species to "unevolve" changes that are no longer necessary is if they are very expensive, and no other side-effects make them beneficial. Barbed leaves may collect more rain and retain heat better than unbarbed leaves, and plenty of tree species have similarly pointed leaves, even when they're grown and well fed in managed woods and public parks.
Not entirely, if the adaptation is neutral it will eventually go away just from random genetic drift, it needs to be actively selected for to remain in the population. That being said it doesn't have to be the adaptation itself that being selected, the underlying genes could have other important roles to play and remain around on that regard.
Wouldn't it be better to really get the government out of science altogether and let the actual scientists decide what to research instead of having some politically and/or religiously motivated bureaucrat making those decisions for them? Federal funding has always come with politically motivated restrictions. When Obama said he was getting the government "out of" science by increasing governmental funding I couldn't help but roll my eyes.
The problem is that returns are too long and intermittent for private industry to fund basic research, the government has to provide the money if it's going to get done.
And once the money is being supplied there has to be some kind of oversight, the only hope is that the oversight is based on legitimate scientific and moral grounds, not politics.
Pushing embryonic stem cells is more about justifying abortion than actual stem cell treatments. Adult stem cells have shown the best treatment options while embryonic stem cells would have the same issues as organ transplants. Cord blood would likely be as effective as embryonic but does not help the abortion stance. Pharmaceuticals benefits as well in making drugs to prevent rejection from treatments made with embryonic sources.
It is more about politics and money at the cost of ethics and good science.
Yeah, funny how they've found more treatments using the types of stem cells they're allowed to study as opposed to the stem cells they're not allowed to study.
It must be that all the researchers are lying about the potential because harvesting stem cells from extra embryos that would be discarded regardless will help push forward their plans to kill babies.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that a bad law can't cause a lot of damage.
Kids are being extorted for thousands by the RIAA.
Old movies and other pieces of our culture are rotting away because they're still under copyright and no one can recover them.
Countries are considering laws to remove your internet privileges for file sharing.
People are having to waste countless time and resources fighting them and working around the laws.
And we don't even know what great technologies the law has stopped. The next YouTube? The next Google?
Jumping through a few loops to play DVDs on Linux is the least of our worries, these laws could get a lot worse, and they will if whichever RIAA lackey Obama appoints gets his way.
Just because they can't win doesn't mean we don't lose.
How much would be wasted every year waiting for those same machines to boot back up, relaunching applications and reopening documents so people can get back to work?
Joke or not, there is something in the "modern" environment that's making autism worse. Yeah, sure, it's always been around and was mostly un-noticed before, but it's getting noticed now because the severity is ratcheting up - fast.
Is it?
Most of the studies I've seen indicate that autism rates haven't really changed. What has changed is the range of stuff that we classify as autism.
Of course it's also possible that one of the disorders lumped in with autism is increasing in prevalence from some environmental factor. But as for the massive increases in diagnoses that's due to improved detection and a wider swath of disorders.
Oh come on now! The entire point of the show is he's satire of self promoting grandstanding media figures, I have to tell you this? He's also broadcast on cable in the US as well, right after The Daily Show, which he used to on. I think many of the people who don't like Colbert simply think he's being serious, when he's simply being incredibly serious about the satire. Only the court jester can tell the whole truthiness.
Honestly I do think there is some truth to the accusation of self-promotion. He obviously likes publicity (he went into show-biz for a reason) and even if it started as satire that kind of ego-boost is addictive. He still does a great service with his show and I love to watch but I do think his self-promotion schemes go beyond satire.
When I write NOT NULL in a column, it doesn't necessarily mean I want to enforce that I MUST supply a value during any INSERT (and indeed then have to check that my INSERT actually worked and check for possible returned errors, coding exceptions etc). Therefore I always supply a DEFAULT value, that the DB can safely insert in that column, IF I haven't specified anything different during the INSERT.
That's fine if you like those defaults but you are the minority. Generally if you don't want to allow a NULL value that means that the value needs to be set, not that there's some safe arbitrary default that the programmer didn't even explicitly set.
Sorry if I missed something critical, but it seems like you are trying to put all the load onto the programmer just so you can have a "cleaner" table definition ? Seems a bit counter-productive to me. Especially when you read that table definition, which says somethig like "nulls are not allowed, and the default value is null" ???
This creates a cleaner data definition and helps the programmer. NOT NULL is a godsend, I grab my data and can know that foo.bar is a actual valid number, and when I screw up an insert it tells me right away, not at some point in the future when I'm wondering "Huh? Did I set that to 0 or did the DB??".
Honestly I feel mysql suffers from an extreme case of what ails some of the scripting languages. I suspect that mysql chose this behavior because it results in faster initial code and fewer initial developer frustrations. Basically it allows you to write some sloppy code without the DB yelling that you left X null or violated some constraint.
The problem is that programming needs strong rigorous logic, short cuts come back to bite you almost every time. NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL isn't for the benefit of the DBA, it's for the benefit of you the developer, it gives you that indication that says "Hey! Somethings not right here!" before it develops into a more subtle bug.
We were mislead at the end of Season 3. After Starbuck reappears, we're taken on a tour of the galaxies and shown Earth, implying that this is what Starbuck found: http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Earth_(RDM).jpg
You can clearly make out the United States of America.
I don't know if we saw continents once Galactica actually made it to Earth. Haven't found a screenshot of that.
The planets independently evolved genetically compatible humans.
That the planets also looked the same chances the odds from infinity:1 to infinity:1.
The god explanation is such a cop out. It doesn't explain Kara or why it doesn't just try and influence or outright stop the genocide in the first place.
Coming to think of it I don't think the new name is the big problem. I don't think it's a particularly good name but I don't have a problem with them re-branding so when someone talks about them it's clearly about them and not science fiction in general. If they just said they were changing to Syfy for branding purposes there would be some wincing and head shakes but people wouldn't mind that much.
I think the problem is that they stated fairly clearly that they're changing their name because they don't respect their current fan base.
Now I think this reaction is slightly exaggerated since it's not fully clear from the article that the quote calling the fans "geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that" doesn't actually come from the network (though it comes from a former executive there), there's a lot of negative interpretation in there. Nevertheless quotes like "more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand" do give the impression that they don't think much of their current audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, if they're the same "strategic vision" that the article is talking about
They're not, from another helpful article from FiveThirtyEight
Why would you pick the name "Strategic Vision, LLC" for your company when the name "Strategic Vision, Inc." was already in use by an extremely well regarded, San Diego-based research firm that has been in business for more than 30 years? Are you deliberately trying to confuse your potential clients and leverage Strategic Vision, Inc.'s much stronger brand name?
You're looking at the page from the well regarded Strategic Vision, Inc. Funny that SV LLC seems to be so happy to sue Nate Silver, it would seem that SV Inc has a far stronger case against SV LLC.
Could be an interesting intersection of Trademark/Slander laws...
Yeah! How unethical of them to try to hire workers away with better pay!!
No one said it's unethical, just that it's unimaginative, lazy, and maybe even outright dumb.
I think they'd do better trying to find people who are already MS fans to work there, instead of trying to poach Apple employees, who are usually serious Apple fans, and probably are not highly competent in MS products anyway.
That is an issue but not every Apple store employee is a fanboy, and the better ones are going to be able to translate the concepts and technologies between the different systems.
Besides, someone who is good at technology retail is probably more useful than someone who really loves the products.
Heck, MS should just advertise here on Slashdot. There's tons of MS fans and shills here.
I'm not sure but that sounds like you're talking about me.
Which would be odd.
Since I haven't even owned a computer with Windows installed for 5 years (although I have a couple vmware machines for work purposes). And I've run Linux as my primary operating system, at home and work, since 2002.
At my last company I held out for the better part of a year against my manager's attempts to switch me from Linux to Windows (I never did switch and ended up leaving for unrelated, but happy, reasons).
Don't assume that because someone defends one aspect of Microsoft's practices that they're an MS fan or shill. I despise MS and Windows for a number of very good and very valid reasons.
But this story is not one of them.
It's one thing for companies in a fairly diverse competitive market to do this, it's quite another when a convicted monopolist does it.
That should definitely bite them in some areas but not here. They're not really leveraging their monopoly and among activities I'd like to restrict luring workers away with better offers isn't one of them.
I think people just find it amusing. You're not going to see Apple poaching Microsoft employees en masse, for example.
I don't think people are suggesting there's something wrong ethically with the situation. If MS can pay the employees better, that's great.
I can just picture the line of black-clad employees clapping and cheering and giving high-fives everytime a customer walks into an MS retail store...
Though it wasn't long ago that there were some stories here about google poaching a lot of MS developers.
The reason Apple isn't trying to poach MS people is that Apple is the established player, they have their own people.
I'll agree that most people found it amusing or uninteresting but I think the poster I replied to was certainly reacting with an anti-MS slant.
I wish anything Microsoft does would still surprise me...
Yeah! How unethical of them to try to hire workers away with better pay!!
This isn't particularly newsworthy, I don't think it's unusual for retails stores moving into an area to go after the employees of their local competition. It makes sense for MS to go after employees experienced in the market they're entering, I'd expect they're looking for employees from any technology retailer, not just apple.
Heck, this is giant corporations competing to hire the little guy, this is the part of capitalism we're supposed to like!!
Just like sleeping with large numbers of the same sex does not make one gay
fixed that for you
--Ted Haggard
The essential implication seems to be that your longevity in employment has absolutely nothing to do with your actual work. Rather, it has everything to do with someone else's perception of you
That's true no matter what, a manager, or a customer, can't measure your work directly, only their perception of your work.
and said perception doesn't necessarily need to have any honest or factual relationship with your work output whatsoever.
If this is the case, I seriously wonder how much longer contemporary human society can last. Is it really so completely, unsparingly rotten out there these days?
I'm not sure I got the same impression. I think the basic message is that managers and customers can only make decisions on what they know about your work. If they have an inaccurate impression of your work that's eventually going to bite you and it's your responsibility to make sure they know what you do.
Of course you can claim it's dishonest to say we'll only play up the good stuff, but are you really going to tell the boss you spend half an hour cruising /. ? Besides, if you over brag it's going to become pretty clear that you don't walk the walk.
This is kinda vicious but my strategy is if someone else's coding isn't good enough or they make massive mistakes, I don't just let it fly. You don't have to be their boss, you only have to be working on the same project as them because you're the one putting up with missing object methods and bad documentation and poorly written code. Tell em to rewrite it before you can use it and correct them and generally let them know that it has to be acceptable or they get to fix it. If anyone asks about project delays, don't hesitate to throw them under the bus and accurately report that they were the reason for the delay because their code didn't work. Soon it'll become really obvious that they're the inferior employee who should be replaced if possible. Do note that if you're the one always screwing up, I hope you expect the same thing to be done to you. Get better at programming or get a different job.
Of course if I end up working with you on a project I'm now going to have to be paranoid that you'll throw me under the bus the first chance you get. And as a result I'm going to be that much less forthcoming about issues I'm encountering as I don't want you to be able to use them as ammunition against me the next time you talk to the boss.
The assumption that people are perfectly rational, completely fair agents is something that will consistently get you in trouble, we have social mores for a good reason.
Spoiler Alert: According to the book, the calorie balance hypothesis is wrong. Numerous studies over the years failed to link high-calorie diet with weight gain, but this fact was overlooked because it challenged nutritional and medical orthodoxy. The real culprit, as the title suggests, is the composition of the diet, not the absolute calories it contains. It's a fascinating read, well researched, and worth the trip to the library.
Uhh... I'm pretty sure if you can burn more calories than you consume, while still gaining/maintaining weight, then you could quite comfortably claim the Randi Challenge prize. And then you could sell your body to science for billions.
Wow, it never occurred to me that everyone on /. needed a lesson on basic thermodynamics!
It has to do with hunger, I don't care what you think you have for willpower or if your spreadsheet says no more calories today, if you're hungry enough you're going to eat. Any weight loss strategy should remember that fact.
Losing fat comes down to a simple equation.
If calories in is less than calories burnt, you WILL lose weight. Its as simple as that.
No amount of "glandular" problem is going to make you put on weight if you are eating less calories than you use in your daily activites.
So you need to either eat less, or do more ecercise, or both. Exercise helps because as you get fitter and have more muscle, as just having more muscle makes you burn more energy - so in that respect it is easier for a fit person to stay slim, but there is no reason in the world that anyone needs to be fat, regardless of any "glandular" problem.
Getting more excercise is trivial too. It takes no more 5 minutes to do 30 pushups and 60 crunches - you can do them last thing at night before going to bed.
Likewise, you can get off the bus/train one stop earlier ( or walk to the next stop along from where you get on) and easily get a 15 to 30 min walk in a day. Losing weight doesnt have to mean hours and hours in the Gym - just a bit of self motivation to be a bit more active in your daily routine.
I do think this is a bit deceptive, there is a significant genetic component and in my experience the people who claim that weight loss is simply some relatively simple triumph of will are generally the ones who are naturally skinny.
Now I'm definitely not obese but am a bit overweight (6ft & ~190lb). I've always eaten relatively healthily and tried to eat reasonable amounts. The problem is hunger. If you are hungry you will eat, as it happens some people get hungrier than others, these people tend to be larger as they have to eat to make the hunger go away.
Physical activity helps and I've always been fairly active but it's not the only factor, I was 195 and went from running ~20k/week to 45k/week, I'm not a great runner but I did a sub 4hr marathon which is respectable enough. This made absolutely no difference to my weight, I simply get hungrier and eat more.
For the last 6 months I've gone up to 60km/week (~37 miles), for the first three months this made absolutely no difference to my weight, again I simply ate more because I was hungrier. Finally I figured out that olive oil works as a decent appetite suppressant (or the Shangri-la diet is actually legit) and have been able to reduce my appetite enough to go down 5lbs in the last 3 months (probably looking at a 3:20 marathon now).
Yes diet makes a difference, as does exercise (during one period with very poor exercise and diet I hit 205) but if I can stay 30lbs over my desired weight while watching my diet and running 60k/week than I'm willing to believe that larger people might be doing a lot of work while still staying large.
One other thing - Diet drinks - stay the hell away from them. Ever see slim people in the supermarket buying diet coke? no - its always the huge people. Diet drinks have less calories, but there's an interesting littlel experiment they did, where two groups of rats were allowed to eat as much as they wanted - one group was given diet drinks, and the other normal non diet drinks. The ones on diet drinks porked up. The theory: The sweetners give your body signals to get ready to deal with a lot of sugar. When the sugar doesnt arrive, your body goes "Holy crap - we're starving! better eat more!"
So diet drinks may actually make you fatter by making you have a bigger appetite. Here's a not very authoritive link http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/06/its_been_recognized_for_a.php to one article about this - Im sure with a more thorough search the actual paper would turn up somewhere.
This is more useful advice (though I don't drink diet drinks), really I think weight loss needs to focus less on willpower and more on hacking the bodies appetite mechanisms.
Agreed. I originally thought the post was about trees that were CONTINUING to evolve. But simply having old adaptations is pretty uninteresting.... nay, normal.
Well I do think it's a neat adaptation but yes, it's completely expected that it would still be around.
Especially for trees, which repopulate very slowly compared to say, fruitflies.
Anyway, the only reason for a species to "unevolve" changes that are no longer necessary is if they are very expensive, and no other side-effects make them beneficial. Barbed leaves may collect more rain and retain heat better than unbarbed leaves, and plenty of tree species have similarly pointed leaves, even when they're grown and well fed in managed woods and public parks.
Not entirely, if the adaptation is neutral it will eventually go away just from random genetic drift, it needs to be actively selected for to remain in the population. That being said it doesn't have to be the adaptation itself that being selected, the underlying genes could have other important roles to play and remain around on that regard.
Stallman suggests requiring proprietary software to also release its code within five years to even the balance of power.
Why not require the source code to be submitted with the copyright registration?
And every time they release a patch.
And make sure there's an easy to use build system. And the sources for those tools are all available as well.
I understand Stallman's desire but I just don't see a practical way to achieve this.
Wouldn't it be better to really get the government out of science altogether and let the actual scientists decide what to research instead of having some politically and/or religiously motivated bureaucrat making those decisions for them? Federal funding has always come with politically motivated restrictions. When Obama said he was getting the government "out of" science by increasing governmental funding I couldn't help but roll my eyes.
The problem is that returns are too long and intermittent for private industry to fund basic research, the government has to provide the money if it's going to get done.
And once the money is being supplied there has to be some kind of oversight, the only hope is that the oversight is based on legitimate scientific and moral grounds, not politics.
Pushing embryonic stem cells is more about justifying abortion than actual stem cell treatments. Adult stem cells have shown the best treatment options while embryonic stem cells would have the same issues as organ transplants. Cord blood would likely be as effective as embryonic but does not help the abortion stance. Pharmaceuticals benefits as well in making drugs to prevent rejection from treatments made with embryonic sources.
It is more about politics and money at the cost of ethics and good science.
Yeah, funny how they've found more treatments using the types of stem cells they're allowed to study as opposed to the stem cells they're not allowed to study.
It must be that all the researchers are lying about the potential because harvesting stem cells from extra embryos that would be discarded regardless will help push forward their plans to kill babies.
A few years back I was at a slightly geeky party.
Me and a few friends were discussing different distros, debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.
At which point a fairly inebriated guy turned around and proclaimed in a loud voice.
"I've been a Slackware user since 1996 and I'll be a Slackware user till the day I die!"
I can't remember the rest of the night but I seem to recall some people complaining about a certain GCC patch.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that a bad law can't cause a lot of damage.
Kids are being extorted for thousands by the RIAA.
Old movies and other pieces of our culture are rotting away because they're still under copyright and no one can recover them.
Countries are considering laws to remove your internet privileges for file sharing.
People are having to waste countless time and resources fighting them and working around the laws.
And we don't even know what great technologies the law has stopped. The next YouTube? The next Google?
Jumping through a few loops to play DVDs on Linux is the least of our worries, these laws could get a lot worse, and they will if whichever RIAA lackey Obama appoints gets his way.
Just because they can't win doesn't mean we don't lose.
I guess you don't know about the 'Save this session' option.
I don't use windows so I don't know how it works but I'm doubtful that it saves the state of the RAM and I'm sure it still takes a while to start up.
I don't know how the numbers balance out but I think it's important to remember that electricity isn't the only cost to consider.
How much would be wasted every year waiting for those same machines to boot back up, relaunching applications and reopening documents so people can get back to work?
Who cares if his audience thinks it's hilarious?
I'm part of his audience and I think it goes a little too far. Whether I'm typical or not I don't know, but that's my opinion.
Joke or not, there is something in the "modern" environment that's making autism worse. Yeah, sure, it's always been around and was mostly un-noticed before, but it's getting noticed now because the severity is ratcheting up - fast.
Is it?
Most of the studies I've seen indicate that autism rates haven't really changed. What has changed is the range of stuff that we classify as autism.
Of course it's also possible that one of the disorders lumped in with autism is increasing in prevalence from some environmental factor. But as for the massive increases in diagnoses that's due to improved detection and a wider swath of disorders.
Oh come on now! The entire point of the show is he's satire of self promoting grandstanding media figures, I have to tell you this? He's also broadcast on cable in the US as well, right after The Daily Show, which he used to on. I think many of the people who don't like Colbert simply think he's being serious, when he's simply being incredibly serious about the satire. Only the court jester can tell the whole truthiness.
Honestly I do think there is some truth to the accusation of self-promotion. He obviously likes publicity (he went into show-biz for a reason) and even if it started as satire that kind of ego-boost is addictive. He still does a great service with his show and I love to watch but I do think his self-promotion schemes go beyond satire.
When I write NOT NULL in a column, it doesn't necessarily mean I want to enforce that I MUST supply a value during any INSERT (and indeed then have to check that my INSERT actually worked and check for possible returned errors, coding exceptions etc). Therefore I always supply a DEFAULT value, that the DB can safely insert in that column, IF I haven't specified anything different during the INSERT.
That's fine if you like those defaults but you are the minority. Generally if you don't want to allow a NULL value that means that the value needs to be set, not that there's some safe arbitrary default that the programmer didn't even explicitly set.
Sorry if I missed something critical, but it seems like you are trying to put all the load onto the programmer just so you can have a "cleaner" table definition ? Seems a bit counter-productive to me. Especially when you read that table definition, which says somethig like "nulls are not allowed, and the default value is null" ???
This creates a cleaner data definition and helps the programmer. NOT NULL is a godsend, I grab my data and can know that foo.bar is a actual valid number, and when I screw up an insert it tells me right away, not at some point in the future when I'm wondering "Huh? Did I set that to 0 or did the DB??".
Honestly I feel mysql suffers from an extreme case of what ails some of the scripting languages. I suspect that mysql chose this behavior because it results in faster initial code and fewer initial developer frustrations. Basically it allows you to write some sloppy code without the DB yelling that you left X null or violated some constraint.
The problem is that programming needs strong rigorous logic, short cuts come back to bite you almost every time. NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL isn't for the benefit of the DBA, it's for the benefit of you the developer, it gives you that indication that says "Hey! Somethings not right here!" before it develops into a more subtle bug.
We were mislead at the end of Season 3. After Starbuck reappears, we're taken on a tour of the galaxies and shown Earth, implying that this is what Starbuck found:
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Earth_(RDM).jpg
You can clearly make out the United States of America.
I don't know if we saw continents once Galactica actually made it to Earth. Haven't found a screenshot of that.
The planets independently evolved genetically compatible humans.
That the planets also looked the same chances the odds from infinity:1 to infinity:1.
The god explanation is such a cop out. It doesn't explain Kara or why it doesn't just try and influence or outright stop the genocide in the first place.
Clearly it's the Christian God :)
How about SFC?
Coming to think of it I don't think the new name is the big problem. I don't think it's a particularly good name but I don't have a problem with them re-branding so when someone talks about them it's clearly about them and not science fiction in general. If they just said they were changing to Syfy for branding purposes there would be some wincing and head shakes but people wouldn't mind that much.
I think the problem is that they stated fairly clearly that they're changing their name because they don't respect their current fan base.
Now I think this reaction is slightly exaggerated since it's not fully clear from the article that the quote calling the fans "geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that" doesn't actually come from the network (though it comes from a former executive there), there's a lot of negative interpretation in there. Nevertheless quotes like "more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand" do give the impression that they don't think much of their current audience.