Besides, if the implication is that their source of funding makes them unreliable, doesn't that mean that similar analysis of the funding for climatologists on the other side of the issue is also fair?
You don't ask climatologists where's the best place in the ground to poke a hole in order to find petroleum now do you ? So why the fuck would you want the opinion of a glorified rock collector on climate modeling and measurement ?!?
Yes, and the most funny thing is that the Mac, which was for a decade and a half a pure GUI system, now has a perfectly usable command line bash shell !
Saying patently false things about someone that you know are false *should* be a crime, IMO
I wholly agree, be it related to libel, or pundit talk shows that make up 'statistics' on the spot. If you are using public airwave, there should be an obligation not to lie (good faith disclaimer, etc), and get fined or even lose your broadcast license otherwise. I mean, it's a lot more important than seeing half a tit for a split second, no ?
The idea of forcing people to enter PINs into any machine controlled by a retailer was ridiculous from day one
Much less than simply having the retailer get the card number and your signature (which isn't even checked). Another case of Not Invented Here syndrome in the US.
Everybody has copying stories from their student days, although here they seem to be referring more to plagiarizing than copying. Anyway, here's my story... Back when I was a student in CS about 20 years ago, we had a 2 hour exam of assembly language... to be done on a sheet of paper with no computer in sight (those were the days). Since I had been coding in assembly for more than a decade already, it was a piece of cake for me and maybe one or 2 other students. The 200 or so others had no idea what this was about. So in the days previous to the exam my popularity surged as I was bombarded with requests from friends to help them out.
I came up with a simple scheme: I would do the assignment, make a copy, go to the bathroom and leave a copy there. But the word spread that I would do that, so after I dropped my copy and came back to my seat, one, two, five, fifteen people started to get up to head for the bathroom. After a while the teacher grew suspicious and went to check and caught something like 15 student fighting over my few lines of assembly...
I wonder what is going to happen after we hit the population ceiling for Earth.
The same thing that has always happened in the past when we did hit the ceiling population of any specific region: starvation, epidemics and wars as very effective population control methods.
As energy costs approach zero, the cost of everything in the world approaches zero and requires no human oversight. Everyone will be unemployed and own 40 houses.
As past experience with increase in production have shown, it will sum up in 4000 houses for each of the few still indispensable people, and a shack for all the others.
The ability to draw valid conclusions from incomplete information. There you have it. And that purposefully exclude bullshit new-agey stuff like naturalistic 'Intelligence', spatial 'intelligence', interpersonal 'Intelligence' (empathy), musical 'intelligence', kinesthetic Intelligence (dance!), etc...
As a software engineer who has spent 20 years coding in research labs, I can say with certainty that the code written by many, if not most, scientists is utter garbage. As an example, a colleague of mine was approached recently to debug a piece of code: "Oh, it's going to be easy, it was written by one of our postdocs on his last day here...". 600 lines of code in the main, no functions, no comments. He's been at it for 2 months.
I'm perfectly OK with the fact that their job is science and not coding, but would they go to the satellite assembly guys and start gluing parts at random ?
I used to think the house of lords was a ridiculous system, particularly when it was inherited. But now I recognize the need for a permanent govt structure with long term goals and stability. I think a system like that would work well with its members being elected for life based on various criteria: some named by the govt, some voted, some through some lifetime achievements (a few famous actors, journalists, artists, sportsmen, winners of work trade awards, persons nominated for civilian bravery, etc) in order to maximize variety. You don't want pro politicians in a system like that.
The problem is the really competent people almost never actually call customer service, because they know better
Sometimes it goes beyond words. I just spent 6 weeks without ADSL internet after moving. I called twice a week to inquire about the status. At one point after escalation I talked to a guy who was actually helpful, told me he'd get a different process started and asked me to call his service next time, just to ask the drone to pass me his service.
On the next call the drone REFUSED to pass me the right service without going through his entire script first. Note that I was calling from a cell phone, so $$$. Then he passed me the wrong service. Then again. And again. 6 FUCKING TIMES. Those assholes do that on purpose if you even hint at knowing more than them. 45 minutes on the phone instead of 10 seconds.
Another time my internet connection just stopped. I call and all the guy wants to know is how many plugs I have in the house. Wrong asnwer: "I'm a network engineer and it doesn't matter how many plugs there are as it's been working fine for the last 2 years". The guy would laugh each time I gave him some diagnostics and always come back asking for how many plugs there were. After 40 minutes like this, the call gets disconnected while I'm talking. As I redial the number in rage, the connection comes back. He'd been fucking with me all this time and just had to press a button to bring the connection back.
Agree. I fought back bullies for the first time when I was ~16 (cracked skull on one of the aggressors). After that the bullying stopped outright. I wonder why I didn't do that 10 years before, and that's one thing I'll be sure to teach kids. Like they say: "Violence solves problems. If it didn't work, then you aren't using enough of it !"
Well said. I'll complement what you said about the drivers complaining that cyclists don't respect the driving laws: a bike is not a car ! So it's only common sense that it doesn't follow the same rules, even if the Law ignores this. Drivers have no problem with laws being different for walkers, now don't they ? Bikes, and roller skates as well as a bunch of other means of transportation, are intermediate. I fail to see why one person in a car should be somehow more important than one person on a bike.
Just one example: you can hear and see a lot better around you when on a bike than inside a car with tinted windows and a blasting stereo, so when you get to a stop sign you know pretty much if the road is free or not. Same for red lights. But of course the law ignores that. And when silent electric cars become common, it may imply some unkind but natural selection.
Personally I think that any driver guilty of dangerous driving (DUI, cell phone, muscle car accelerations, etc...) should be forced to ride a bike for a while (no public transportation allowed) in order to get a perspective on how to share the road.
I still remember the first Far Side comic I saw, of the truck smashed into a single palm tree in the middle of a desert. It was so bizarre, so absurd that I laughed out loud.
Talking about calculators, here's one simple thing I haven't manage to find a solution to, while it would seem a pretty obvious 'Unix philosophy' thing: how do you pipe a series of numbers from the command line and get a simple, auto-scaled graph ? For instance:
cut -d" " -f1 access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | someplotcommand
in order to get a histogram of the first column of numbers. I tried with gnuplot and various others, even asked on forums.
Scam there are a dozen out there. Start by the billion dollard homeopathy industry (motto: selling sugar pills to the gullible since 1886).
As much as I agree on the uselessness of homeopathy, I've recently come to the conclusion that it has this place. When a frantic mum goes to a (real) doctor because the little darling doesn't sleep well (or other mostly imaginary or harmless ailments), what would you prefer: that the doc prescribes a strong soporific hooking them on drugs for maybe the rest of their life, or some homeopathy and everybody leaves happy ? Many similar example.
That doesn't justify the price of those sugar pills though, but studies have shown that the more costly the placebo, the more effective (and also the bitterer, etc). I think it should be produced at the cost of sugar, but sold way higher, with the difference going to finance public health programs instead of some fat cat CEOs.
The most impressive cold engine start I've seen was on big Caterpilars and such in Antarctica, at the end of the winterover. With the truck having just spent 10 months unused at temps down to -80C, and a current temp of -60C. One guy gets inside and turns the key in the ignition while the other sprays some 'start pilot' (whatever that is) in the air intake. Broooom! There it goes. I've never been so impressed by hardcore mechanical engineering.
The point ? Well, let's see if I can get you to see it the same way I'm currently thinking about getting one of those beasts. I live in a city that's very bike-friendly: bike paths are everywhere and the entire city is flat. A normal bike is perfect. But the city is surrounded by mountains. If you live 20km from downtown, chances are you already have more than 500m to go up, so that's a bit much for a daily commute. And the roads are few and crowded. An electric bike is allowed on bike paths (but not an electric scooter or even a moped). And if you want to have fun on the way down, cutting through mountain / forest trails, you need a decent mountain bike. Also the roads are often icy / wet, precluding a standard motorbike (an electric bike is slower and doesn't use the road on the way down, so hopefully that implies less risk).
And one final point is that you are allowed to take a bus with a bike. I hoped I summed up why I'm currently considering it.
Interesting thread. I've been biking to school/work regularly ever since I was a kid, but I just moved 25km away from work, but there's also 800m of altitude gain, so that's a bit much for a daily commute. I've been pondering the electric bike option, but until I looked at your model, the only ones I could find were city bikes, where I'd like to come down the mountain trails in the morning and electric ride on the road on way back. One problem is of course the price of your toy. But also the fact that in my country electric bikes have a hardware speed limit of 25km/h, which is not enough IMO to ride back. Yours is the first one I see with a claimed speed limit higher than that.
So my question is: can it go 25km uphill (+800m) at speeds above 25km/h on a single charge ? And can it ride down any mountain trail without breaking ?
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Besides, if the implication is that their source of funding makes them unreliable, doesn't that mean that similar analysis of the funding for climatologists on the other side of the issue is also fair?
You don't ask climatologists where's the best place in the ground to poke a hole in order to find petroleum now do you ? So why the fuck would you want the opinion of a glorified rock collector on climate modeling and measurement ?!?
Yes, and the most funny thing is that the Mac, which was for a decade and a half a pure GUI system, now has a perfectly usable command line bash shell !
Saying patently false things about someone that you know are false *should* be a crime, IMO
I wholly agree, be it related to libel, or pundit talk shows that make up 'statistics' on the spot. If you are using public airwave, there should be an obligation not to lie (good faith disclaimer, etc), and get fined or even lose your broadcast license otherwise. I mean, it's a lot more important than seeing half a tit for a split second, no ?
The idea of forcing people to enter PINs into any machine controlled by a retailer was ridiculous from day one
Much less than simply having the retailer get the card number and your signature (which isn't even checked). Another case of Not Invented Here syndrome in the US.
I came up with a simple scheme: I would do the assignment, make a copy, go to the bathroom and leave a copy there. But the word spread that I would do that, so after I dropped my copy and came back to my seat, one, two, five, fifteen people started to get up to head for the bathroom. After a while the teacher grew suspicious and went to check and caught something like 15 student fighting over my few lines of assembly...
Now get off my lawn!
I wonder what is going to happen after we hit the population ceiling for Earth.
The same thing that has always happened in the past when we did hit the ceiling population of any specific region: starvation, epidemics and wars as very effective population control methods.
As energy costs approach zero, the cost of everything in the world approaches zero and requires no human oversight. Everyone will be unemployed and own 40 houses.
As past experience with increase in production have shown, it will sum up in 4000 houses for each of the few still indispensable people, and a shack for all the others.
Please define "intelligence."
The ability to draw valid conclusions from incomplete information. There you have it. And that purposefully exclude bullshit new-agey stuff like naturalistic 'Intelligence', spatial 'intelligence', interpersonal 'Intelligence' (empathy), musical 'intelligence', kinesthetic Intelligence (dance!), etc...
I'm perfectly OK with the fact that their job is science and not coding, but would they go to the satellite assembly guys and start gluing parts at random ?
I used to think the house of lords was a ridiculous system, particularly when it was inherited. But now I recognize the need for a permanent govt structure with long term goals and stability. I think a system like that would work well with its members being elected for life based on various criteria: some named by the govt, some voted, some through some lifetime achievements (a few famous actors, journalists, artists, sportsmen, winners of work trade awards, persons nominated for civilian bravery, etc) in order to maximize variety. You don't want pro politicians in a system like that.
Huh? I got Google Maps on my HTC hero from the get go. Just go and download it !
If only we funded NASA the Way we funded the Pentagon
You mean by killing people and taking their possessions ?!?
The problem is the really competent people almost never actually call customer service, because they know better
Sometimes it goes beyond words. I just spent 6 weeks without ADSL internet after moving. I called twice a week to inquire about the status. At one point after escalation I talked to a guy who was actually helpful, told me he'd get a different process started and asked me to call his service next time, just to ask the drone to pass me his service.
On the next call the drone REFUSED to pass me the right service without going through his entire script first. Note that I was calling from a cell phone, so $$$. Then he passed me the wrong service. Then again. And again. 6 FUCKING TIMES. Those assholes do that on purpose if you even hint at knowing more than them. 45 minutes on the phone instead of 10 seconds.
Another time my internet connection just stopped. I call and all the guy wants to know is how many plugs I have in the house. Wrong asnwer: "I'm a network engineer and it doesn't matter how many plugs there are as it's been working fine for the last 2 years". The guy would laugh each time I gave him some diagnostics and always come back asking for how many plugs there were. After 40 minutes like this, the call gets disconnected while I'm talking. As I redial the number in rage, the connection comes back. He'd been fucking with me all this time and just had to press a button to bring the connection back.
Agree. I fought back bullies for the first time when I was ~16 (cracked skull on one of the aggressors). After that the bullying stopped outright. I wonder why I didn't do that 10 years before, and that's one thing I'll be sure to teach kids. Like they say: "Violence solves problems. If it didn't work, then you aren't using enough of it !"
Just one example: you can hear and see a lot better around you when on a bike than inside a car with tinted windows and a blasting stereo, so when you get to a stop sign you know pretty much if the road is free or not. Same for red lights. But of course the law ignores that. And when silent electric cars become common, it may imply some unkind but natural selection.
Personally I think that any driver guilty of dangerous driving (DUI, cell phone, muscle car accelerations, etc...) should be forced to ride a bike for a while (no public transportation allowed) in order to get a perspective on how to share the road.
I still remember the first Far Side comic I saw, of the truck smashed into a single palm tree in the middle of a desert. It was so bizarre, so absurd that I laughed out loud.
Unfortunately it's a true story...
It's very unusual for a first-grader to use words like "arboreal" and "ichthyoid"
I was surprised too when my nephew of the same age quoted a whole bunch of dinosaurs, using their correct latin names...
Talking about calculators, here's one simple thing I haven't manage to find a solution to, while it would seem a pretty obvious 'Unix philosophy' thing: how do you pipe a series of numbers from the command line and get a simple, auto-scaled graph ? For instance: cut -d" " -f1 access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | someplotcommand in order to get a histogram of the first column of numbers. I tried with gnuplot and various others, even asked on forums.
Scam there are a dozen out there. Start by the billion dollard homeopathy industry (motto: selling sugar pills to the gullible since 1886).
As much as I agree on the uselessness of homeopathy, I've recently come to the conclusion that it has this place. When a frantic mum goes to a (real) doctor because the little darling doesn't sleep well (or other mostly imaginary or harmless ailments), what would you prefer: that the doc prescribes a strong soporific hooking them on drugs for maybe the rest of their life, or some homeopathy and everybody leaves happy ? Many similar example.
That doesn't justify the price of those sugar pills though, but studies have shown that the more costly the placebo, the more effective (and also the bitterer, etc). I think it should be produced at the cost of sugar, but sold way higher, with the difference going to finance public health programs instead of some fat cat CEOs.
Tell me about it. When I moved to the US my friends made fun of me because I thought Velveeta was a feminine higiene product... Actually...
The most impressive cold engine start I've seen was on big Caterpilars and such in Antarctica, at the end of the winterover. With the truck having just spent 10 months unused at temps down to -80C, and a current temp of -60C. One guy gets inside and turns the key in the ignition while the other sprays some 'start pilot' (whatever that is) in the air intake. Broooom! There it goes. I've never been so impressed by hardcore mechanical engineering.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions, I'll look it up to try to do an informed purchase...
But an electric scooter is not allowed on bike paths, which in my town saves a LOT of time.
And one final point is that you are allowed to take a bus with a bike. I hoped I summed up why I'm currently considering it.
So my question is: can it go 25km uphill (+800m) at speeds above 25km/h on a single charge ? And can it ride down any mountain trail without breaking ?