In related news, RMS, upon hearing that the universe was potentially a simulation, demanded that the source code of said universe be released as free software. He further stated that because the universe contains a simulation of GNU software, it should be rightly termed "GNU/Universe".
Hey, put those tomatoes down. SOMEBODY had to do this joke.
How do galaxies get to the point of collision? If the universe began with the big bang that would indicate material being thrown outwards from a source point in pretty much an even pattern. As they continue to go outwards the space between them would increase, not decrease. Now, I know the debate about "are we expanding forever or not" but can someone in a nut shell explain to me what would cause a galaxy to alter trajectory so much as to collide with another - especially after this much time from the big bang? Thanks.
The universe did not have a "source point" where all matter spewed from in the big bang. Instead, its space itself that expands and carries everything along with it in more or less an even pace.
Use a balloon as an analogy. Take a balloon before blowing it up and use a felt-tip marker to put lots of dots on it. The dots represent galaxies and the balloon the fabric of space. Now blow up the balloon. All the dots recede from each other evenly, even though there is no source point. While you may think of the center of the balloon as a source point, it isn't really, because it exists outside the normal 2 dimensions of the surface of the balloon.
Increase all the dimensions by 1 and you have the situation you do in the universe. Space itself is expanding. Thus since everything has not been thrown out from a source point, there is plenty of time for gravity to pull together galaxies over great distances. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces but its effect stretches over the longest distance.
Also, when galaxies collide, in most cases there is very little star-to-star collisions, since there is so much empty space between the individual stars. What happens is the interplay of gravity between the stars warps the overall structure of the galaxy, which can have the effect of either stripping it of starmaking material and thus lead to the slow death of the galaxy, or concentrating it and leading to bursts of stellar births (and deaths, if the generated stars are very high mass and burn throught their hydrogen quickly).
A question: If this ever gets to court, will SCO have to reveal its proprietary code in open court in order to prove that Linux has ripped it off? If so, won't that just disseminate their code further ?
What I wish is for someone -- hopefully one of these interviewers -- to ask the RIGHT question of SCO, which is this:
When will you disclose the offending lines of code (assuming there even IS any) to the Linux community so they can change the code and eliminate the source of the problem?
I just don't see how disclosing the offending material under an NDA is going to help. I am sure that if the maintainers of the kernel code knew there was illicitly incorporated IP (again, I'm not saying there is, this is hypothetical), they would remove it in an instant. There, no more offending IP, no more problem.
Yes, we can all say that SCO is not going to do this so they can keep making unfounded claims against Linux. But why hasn't some interviewer asked this question, at least to get a response from SCO, even if it was to evade the question? At least it would get the issue out in the open.
Everyone's trying to produce an average seller. Licenses sell titles to the uninformed, and game review websites are bought for the price of a few free games and banner ads. Truth is, there aren't enough people left in the industry who actually care about making a good game anymore.
There's another reason you didn't mention for what the game companies continue to put out crappy products.
People buy them.
Think about it. We may all complain and whine about sucky games with been-there done-that themes, but they would not be produced in the first place if no one bought them.
Time to face the sad truth. The majority of the game-buying public wants the tried-and-true, the familiar, the bland. From the comments to this article, it appears that the/. crowd has a little more sophistication than the unwashed masses, but we're a minority. Only geeks, nerds, and intellectuals want new, creative games. The rest of the world wants more of same-old, same-old.
Gov Owens has banked his popularity on the Colorado economy which is heavily dependant on the 'New' economy of IT,internet, prog etc. Owens has touted that he is resonsible for making Colorado a prominent player in this economy. Very much so in the last election.
Not many people realize what a substantial presence tech has in Colorado. Sun Microsystems in Denver (where I work) for one, and HP in Fort Collins for another. Qwest and Level 3 are headquartered in Denver as well. A lot of people that visit Denver get off the plane, get one whiff of manure if the wind is just right, and assume its just one big cowtown. While ranching is still a big business in Colorado as a whole, there is more to the place than that.
True, there were layoffs here when the economy went south, but no more than any other tech center in the country.
I am glad Governor Owens made the right decision (hence the reason I sent in the story). To be honest, its one of the first decisions he's made that I agreed with.
Here's the thing that always interested me. Why don't console games crash? I'm sure they do sometimes, but I've got a Dreamcast and about 50 games. I've seen a small bug here and there, but I've never seen the machine blue-screen or whatever DC's do when the OS lunches itself. I realize that the standardized hardware platform has a lot to do with it, but games are every bit as complex as other software, perhaps more so. So why don't these games crash? Well, if they did, they would never sell.
This is one point (and a good one), but the truth is that games get a lot more testing than other software. The main reason for this is that most games could be considered a realtime system, whereas your spreadsheet program is not.
What I mean by this is the fact that a program that needs to respond instantly to user input while at the same time spewing out millions of triangles a second of 3D graphics data has a much lower tolerance for error than your spreadsheet program that spends 90% of its time just sitting there as you type stuff into cells.
Spreadsheet fubar'ed because of some odd value you input? Oops. Oh well, reload from the autosaved copy and try again.
Your game fubar'ed because of some object collision detection glitch? Arrggghh, my character got killed!! I had the game's ultimate superpowered megaboss down to 1 friggin' hit point!! NOOOOOO!!!
Perhaps this example also makes a statement about the priorities we place on how excited we get over games vs productivity software:)
It's never the user's fault. No matter what the user does, the program should recover gracefully.
Reminds me of an argument I once had with a Sun tech (ironic that I work for Sun now, but I digress...). I was working as a contractor to US West (before they were acquired) when we had a Sun tech over to look at a problem with a Solaris box. It kept going into a kernel panic on a page fault when a certain combination of apps were running on the machine.
The tech explained that the problem had something to do with a timing window where two apps were trying to access the same page of memory and the kernel could not resolve the conflict (this is a vast oversimplification of the problem, mind you). I nodded and asked him when Sun was going to fix the problem. That's when things got interesting.
He claimed it was not Sun's problem. He says we overloaded the machine, running too many apps for the small amount of memory in the workstation. Now, technically, this was true, but the machine panicking was not the behavior I expected.
The tech's solution was still "don't run so many apps". I tried to explain to him that since none of the apps in question was running as root, an ordinary user should not be able to hose up the machine like that, hence this was a bug in the kernel. He continued to insist it was not Sun's fault, that the user was at fault. I must have argued with the man for about a half hour before he finally walked away in disgust, STILL insisting that there was nothing for Sun to fix.
Now, this was probably more a case of one stupid tech, since the problem I outlined was actually fixed in the very next Solaris revision, and the techs I have been exposed to inside Sun are a hell of a lot more clueful than this, but it just goes to show the attitude that is prevalent out there.
It's amazing to me that this comment was modded "Insightful". Chimps have had 4-7 million years since we split from a common ancestor (according to the article) and they're still swinging in trees. Humans are reaching for the stars.
And its amazing that yours in turn was moderated so highly because your post is simply an exercise in falacious logic. You are looking at the way humans and chimps are now and extrapolating backwards and stating "see? that proves there's something special about us."
This reasoning is incorrect. If I can be forgiven for anthropomorphizing evolution to illustrate a point, evolution does not go around saying "hey, let's select for tool use because that means that species can found civilization, discover argriculture, invent industry, launch spacecraft at the stars!". No. Evolution is more likely to say, "Hey, let select for tool use because that will give this species an edge in a changing climate."
Evolution does NOT select for sentience or the ability to found a civilization, as your post seems to imply. These are indirect consequences of totally different environmental pressures that selected for higher intelligence. There's a reason only a very small handful of species reached this far (exactly two: Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis, and the latter has since died out).
Naturally, I'm approaching this from a scientific standpoint. Once you introduce religious faith (perhaps that is what you meant?), then you can say anything you want about the "specialness" of humans, but just stating it does not make it so.
Are humans special now? Yes, most definitely. Were we "destined" for that? I have no evidence of this.
This business model will collapse in short order, and here's how:
Picture Joe Familyman. He's stretching the budget to make ends meet for his family. He sees these movies out on disposable DVDs for a fraction of the normal cost. He spies a DVD in this format of a movie that Junior really wants to see because all his friends have seen it and (using typical 5-10 year old logic) you're a total dork if you don't see it.
So Joe Familyman buys the DVD, plays it for Junior, who loves it. Two days later, the DVD goes out in the trash.
A week or two later, Junior wants to see the movie again (I'm basing this prediction on what others have told me about their children wanting to see favorite movies and shows over and over ad nauseum). But, alas, the movie was thrown out. So Junior throws a tantrum. So Joe Familyman buys the movie again.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Same thing happens another week down the road, at which point Joe Familyman says "fuck this" (though probably not in front of Junior -- think of the children, and all that), and goes and buys the permanent version.
Naturally, given many children's proclivities, this is when Junior will lose all interest in the movie because his peers have now all decided that it sucked after all since something better came along, but you see my point.
Cars represent freedom here, plain and simple. Until that mindset changes, we won't have a car-free city for all the urban planning in the world.
Thank you for that simple yet very important point.
Nothing sticks in my craw more than the claim that having a car represents freedom. For the first 22 years of my life I lived without a car. I lived in NYC and took the subway everywhere. Then I got my first real job and the best job I could get in my field at the time was in New Jersey. So I had to learn to drive AND buy a car. And along with this comes this baggage:
Auto insurance
Auto repairs and maintenance
Parking
Idiots on the road who think driving 75 in a 55 zone with freezing rain is safe.
I'm still waiting for that freedom to show up.
Since moving to Denver and then getting our first house only 5 miles from my present job, this has been alleviated some, but what if I get laid off next year and have to find another job? I could very easily wind up with another horrendous commute.
Yet people still consider this "freedom". Unbelievable.
So thank you again for this point. People need to wake up to the fact that we're turning into slaves for our cars.
I really don't care how hard you work as my employee. All I care about is results. If I need a project working flawlessly by next week, and its done, I don't care if you spent half the time playing Quake.
As a programmer myself, I know that code often gets done in spurts, and that a break (especially a nap!) can improve productivity quite a bit.
This is an excellent point, and your employees are lucky to have a boss that knows what it's like.
In another post I mentioned that I worked 40 hours a week. I'm pretty scrupulous about this. Unless an emergency comes up (and everyone knows how to reach me at home if I'm not there when one does come up, and I live 5 minutes away from my job), that's all I work, since I tend to work fast and I get the job done. I don't see busting my ass for 50, 60, even 70 hours a week just to get evaluated in the top 5% or something. Any bonus I would get for that, dollar for dollar, is not worth the extra stress.
Fortunately, all my boss cares about is the end result, and I'm damn good at what I do, so it works out.
Had this article come out about a year ago, I might have used some of these techniques just to prove to some people I was doing the work that I was legitimately doing.
On my present job, I am blessed with having a boss that allows me to set my own hours. I typically come in at the crack of dawn (6 AM), have lunch at my desk, and leave by 2:30PM. Combine this with needing only 5 hours of sleep a night and it gives me lots of free time (handy considering my wife and I have a new house with landscaping that is in awful shape, so I suppose "free time" is really a misnomer here:) ).
About a year ago, though, I had trouble with people from other groups thinking I wasn't working my 40 hours a week (which I was), and a whispering campaign started. My boss fortunately stood up for me, since she knows I work those hours, but I had to prove it to everyone else. So I got in the habit of answering all my email from the previous day the moment I got in at 6AM.
Finally one of the ones that I suspect complained about me tested me by coming in early and dropping in at my desk at 6:15 AM. Surprise, surprise, I was actually there like I said all along.
Would that be the same constitution that guarantees a set of basic rights for the citizens of the country and specifically limits the scope of government, and which came about while most of Europe was still under the control of monarchs, kings, and dictators? That constitution?
By no stretch of the imagination is America perfect, but your universal condemnation of the US is uncalled for. Read the damn posts on Slashdot and you'll see that most of us abhor it when things happen like this that we feel are contrary to free expression.
I forget the name of the episode (it was the one where they get zapped back in time to 20th century Earth and accidentally beam the Air Force pilot on board)
Replying to my own post to correct my faulty memory. This was not the episode this line appeared in, it was the episode Bread and Circuses, where they found the Earthlike planet with a 20th century Roman Empire ruling it. That'll teach me to make Slashdot posts after midnight.
There is one thing that the article is not completely clear on, and that is whether or not there is a definite drop in the number of children watching cartoons at all. In other words, is it just that they can now watch cartoons anytime they want, or are they also watching less?
From other trends I have seen, it could very well be that the current generation of children are too busy doing other things to look at TV (something that the article does mention), at least not as extensively as the generation before them. But if this is true, think of this: Today's cartoon-watchers are tomorrow's primetime TV watchers. If they're not watching TV much now, will they suddenly turn around and start watching it when they get older? I think not.
So we could be seeing the beginning of the end of the era of television itself. It will be a very slow death, but it may come nevertheless. Even now primetime TV is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for fresh ideas. I doubt the next generation of potential TV watchers will be satisfied with this.
This makes me think of a throwaway line of dialogue from an episode of the original Star Trek. I forget the name of the episode (it was the one where they get zapped back in time to 20th century Earth and accidentally beam the Air Force pilot on board). At one point Spock said something like (paraphrased) "Television died out as an entertainment medium sometime in the 21st century."
Damn dude, you know something called the "Omega Laser" is just doomed to end up malfunctioning and destroying the world. It sounds like something that Dr. Robotnik would build...
That's ridiculous. The world will NOT be destroyed. A blue hedgehog in sneakers will show up at the right moment to stop it.
Re:Sexist.
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ScavHunt211
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· Score: 4, Interesting
A "mobius stripper"? Why is it always with the nerdy population that we find such blatant sexism and a desire to exploit women? Are you people still wondering why no women want to enter the fields of engineering or computer science? It's a hostile environment, plain and simple, and you assholes are the cause.
You need to take this stuff with a grain of salt. I happen to be in the software field, and there are a lot of women in my office doing the same or similar job as me, and everything is as professional as you can get it. Yet these are the same people that would laugh at this in a context other than the office. Hell, I've met some of these women outside of the office, and they like off-color humor just as much as the guys. In the office, yes, it would be inappropriate. But what we're talking about here can hardly be considered in this context.
Want another example? Americans prefer "marbled" beef, where fat and lean meat are interleaved. The best way to achieve that is to have the cows feed on corn (most beef you can buy in the US come from cows that have never tasted grass). Unfortunately, cows can't digest corn, so they are also fed antibiotics to keep them alive. They are also fed hormones to accelerate their growth to slaughter weight, from about five years down to just 18 months.
And the great irony of this is that feeding them grass would eliminate the need for most antibiotics, since digesting grass produces a gas that kills E-coli.
Before I met my wife, I used to have occassional, nasty digestive problems. My wife switched me to all organically-raised meat. No antibiotics or hormones. Not only does it taste better, I haven't had a digestive problem since. The only downside is that its twice as expensive as the non-organic stuff.
I am not wholesale against genetic engineering. Far from it. But it should be used judiciously, and not solve problems that a little common sense can solve instead.
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Why the hell is this moderated a troll? Get a clue, moderators. This quote is trying to make a point, and a damn good one.
While I am not about to jump on the "America is a police state!" bandwagon, it is unfortunately very true that someone who knows how to work the system, or has a great deal of charisma, or both, can often bring people of a country around to a way of thinking that, in the long run, can prove disastrous, especially in times of crisis, whether real or perceived.
This can be linked to the discussion at hand. One could, in a way, consider the current ease at which people can communicate with each other a "dangerous technology", in that someone able to mold human emotions and human will the way Hitler could would be able to reach millions of people very quickly and very easily.
At the same time, this goes both ways. The same technology has fostered a sense of openess that has lead to the formation of several subcultures that value openness to the point where the people that tend to become the de-facto leaders that people look up to tend to get there by passing a sort of unofficial peer review. So perhaps Goering's statement does not ring as true today as it once did, but to ignore that danger and become complacent is to fail to learn from history and thus be doomed to repeat it. This is why when the US Congress started passing legislation that infringed on American citizens' rights, I was very happy when not everyone simply accepted this as necessary and actually spoke out against it.
Slashdot Mirror
In related news, RMS, upon hearing that the universe was potentially a simulation, demanded that the source code of said universe be released as free software. He further stated that because the universe contains a simulation of GNU software, it should be rightly termed "GNU/Universe".
Hey, put those tomatoes down. SOMEBODY had to do this joke.
#include "heisenberg.h";
I hear that using sunblock rated at least SPF 3.4e+25 helps with that.
The universe did not have a "source point" where all matter spewed from in the big bang. Instead, its space itself that expands and carries everything along with it in more or less an even pace.
Use a balloon as an analogy. Take a balloon before blowing it up and use a felt-tip marker to put lots of dots on it. The dots represent galaxies and the balloon the fabric of space. Now blow up the balloon. All the dots recede from each other evenly, even though there is no source point. While you may think of the center of the balloon as a source point, it isn't really, because it exists outside the normal 2 dimensions of the surface of the balloon.
Increase all the dimensions by 1 and you have the situation you do in the universe. Space itself is expanding. Thus since everything has not been thrown out from a source point, there is plenty of time for gravity to pull together galaxies over great distances. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces but its effect stretches over the longest distance.
Also, when galaxies collide, in most cases there is very little star-to-star collisions, since there is so much empty space between the individual stars. What happens is the interplay of gravity between the stars warps the overall structure of the galaxy, which can have the effect of either stripping it of starmaking material and thus lead to the slow death of the galaxy, or concentrating it and leading to bursts of stellar births (and deaths, if the generated stars are very high mass and burn throught their hydrogen quickly).
Hope this helps a little.
What I wish is for someone -- hopefully one of these interviewers -- to ask the RIGHT question of SCO, which is this:
When will you disclose the offending lines of code (assuming there even IS any) to the Linux community so they can change the code and eliminate the source of the problem?
I just don't see how disclosing the offending material under an NDA is going to help. I am sure that if the maintainers of the kernel code knew there was illicitly incorporated IP (again, I'm not saying there is, this is hypothetical), they would remove it in an instant. There, no more offending IP, no more problem.
Yes, we can all say that SCO is not going to do this so they can keep making unfounded claims against Linux. But why hasn't some interviewer asked this question, at least to get a response from SCO, even if it was to evade the question? At least it would get the issue out in the open.
There's another reason you didn't mention for what the game companies continue to put out crappy products.
People buy them.
Think about it. We may all complain and whine about sucky games with been-there done-that themes, but they would not be produced in the first place if no one bought them.
Time to face the sad truth. The majority of the game-buying public wants the tried-and-true, the familiar, the bland. From the comments to this article, it appears that the /. crowd has a little more sophistication than the unwashed masses, but we're a minority. Only geeks, nerds, and intellectuals want new, creative games. The rest of the world wants more of same-old, same-old.
Not many people realize what a substantial presence tech has in Colorado. Sun Microsystems in Denver (where I work) for one, and HP in Fort Collins for another. Qwest and Level 3 are headquartered in Denver as well. A lot of people that visit Denver get off the plane, get one whiff of manure if the wind is just right, and assume its just one big cowtown. While ranching is still a big business in Colorado as a whole, there is more to the place than that.
True, there were layoffs here when the economy went south, but no more than any other tech center in the country.
I am glad Governor Owens made the right decision (hence the reason I sent in the story). To be honest, its one of the first decisions he's made that I agreed with.
This is one point (and a good one), but the truth is that games get a lot more testing than other software. The main reason for this is that most games could be considered a realtime system, whereas your spreadsheet program is not.
What I mean by this is the fact that a program that needs to respond instantly to user input while at the same time spewing out millions of triangles a second of 3D graphics data has a much lower tolerance for error than your spreadsheet program that spends 90% of its time just sitting there as you type stuff into cells.
Spreadsheet fubar'ed because of some odd value you input? Oops. Oh well, reload from the autosaved copy and try again.
Your game fubar'ed because of some object collision detection glitch? Arrggghh, my character got killed!! I had the game's ultimate superpowered megaboss down to 1 friggin' hit point!! NOOOOOO!!!
Perhaps this example also makes a statement about the priorities we place on how excited we get over games vs productivity software :)
Reminds me of an argument I once had with a Sun tech (ironic that I work for Sun now, but I digress ...). I was working as a contractor to US West (before they were acquired) when we had a Sun tech over to look at a problem with a Solaris box. It kept going into a kernel panic on a page fault when a certain combination of apps were running on the machine.
The tech explained that the problem had something to do with a timing window where two apps were trying to access the same page of memory and the kernel could not resolve the conflict (this is a vast oversimplification of the problem, mind you). I nodded and asked him when Sun was going to fix the problem. That's when things got interesting.
He claimed it was not Sun's problem. He says we overloaded the machine, running too many apps for the small amount of memory in the workstation. Now, technically, this was true, but the machine panicking was not the behavior I expected.
The tech's solution was still "don't run so many apps". I tried to explain to him that since none of the apps in question was running as root, an ordinary user should not be able to hose up the machine like that, hence this was a bug in the kernel. He continued to insist it was not Sun's fault, that the user was at fault. I must have argued with the man for about a half hour before he finally walked away in disgust, STILL insisting that there was nothing for Sun to fix.
Now, this was probably more a case of one stupid tech, since the problem I outlined was actually fixed in the very next Solaris revision, and the techs I have been exposed to inside Sun are a hell of a lot more clueful than this, but it just goes to show the attitude that is prevalent out there.
You had transistors?? What a spoiled brat. I had only three vaccuum tubes, an abacus, and a photo of ENIAC. And I was grateful!!
And its amazing that yours in turn was moderated so highly because your post is simply an exercise in falacious logic. You are looking at the way humans and chimps are now and extrapolating backwards and stating "see? that proves there's something special about us."
This reasoning is incorrect. If I can be forgiven for anthropomorphizing evolution to illustrate a point, evolution does not go around saying "hey, let's select for tool use because that means that species can found civilization, discover argriculture, invent industry, launch spacecraft at the stars!". No. Evolution is more likely to say, "Hey, let select for tool use because that will give this species an edge in a changing climate."
Evolution does NOT select for sentience or the ability to found a civilization, as your post seems to imply. These are indirect consequences of totally different environmental pressures that selected for higher intelligence. There's a reason only a very small handful of species reached this far (exactly two: Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis, and the latter has since died out).
Naturally, I'm approaching this from a scientific standpoint. Once you introduce religious faith (perhaps that is what you meant?), then you can say anything you want about the "specialness" of humans, but just stating it does not make it so.
Are humans special now? Yes, most definitely. Were we "destined" for that? I have no evidence of this.
This business model will collapse in short order, and here's how:
Picture Joe Familyman. He's stretching the budget to make ends meet for his family. He sees these movies out on disposable DVDs for a fraction of the normal cost. He spies a DVD in this format of a movie that Junior really wants to see because all his friends have seen it and (using typical 5-10 year old logic) you're a total dork if you don't see it.
So Joe Familyman buys the DVD, plays it for Junior, who loves it. Two days later, the DVD goes out in the trash.
A week or two later, Junior wants to see the movie again (I'm basing this prediction on what others have told me about their children wanting to see favorite movies and shows over and over ad nauseum). But, alas, the movie was thrown out. So Junior throws a tantrum. So Joe Familyman buys the movie again.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Same thing happens another week down the road, at which point Joe Familyman says "fuck this" (though probably not in front of Junior -- think of the children, and all that), and goes and buys the permanent version.
Naturally, given many children's proclivities, this is when Junior will lose all interest in the movie because his peers have now all decided that it sucked after all since something better came along, but you see my point.
Thank you for that simple yet very important point.
Nothing sticks in my craw more than the claim that having a car represents freedom. For the first 22 years of my life I lived without a car. I lived in NYC and took the subway everywhere. Then I got my first real job and the best job I could get in my field at the time was in New Jersey. So I had to learn to drive AND buy a car. And along with this comes this baggage:
I'm still waiting for that freedom to show up.
Since moving to Denver and then getting our first house only 5 miles from my present job, this has been alleviated some, but what if I get laid off next year and have to find another job? I could very easily wind up with another horrendous commute.
Yet people still consider this "freedom". Unbelievable.
So thank you again for this point. People need to wake up to the fact that we're turning into slaves for our cars.
This is an excellent point, and your employees are lucky to have a boss that knows what it's like.
In another post I mentioned that I worked 40 hours a week. I'm pretty scrupulous about this. Unless an emergency comes up (and everyone knows how to reach me at home if I'm not there when one does come up, and I live 5 minutes away from my job), that's all I work, since I tend to work fast and I get the job done. I don't see busting my ass for 50, 60, even 70 hours a week just to get evaluated in the top 5% or something. Any bonus I would get for that, dollar for dollar, is not worth the extra stress.
Fortunately, all my boss cares about is the end result, and I'm damn good at what I do, so it works out.
Had this article come out about a year ago, I might have used some of these techniques just to prove to some people I was doing the work that I was legitimately doing.
On my present job, I am blessed with having a boss that allows me to set my own hours. I typically come in at the crack of dawn (6 AM), have lunch at my desk, and leave by 2:30PM. Combine this with needing only 5 hours of sleep a night and it gives me lots of free time (handy considering my wife and I have a new house with landscaping that is in awful shape, so I suppose "free time" is really a misnomer here :) ).
About a year ago, though, I had trouble with people from other groups thinking I wasn't working my 40 hours a week (which I was), and a whispering campaign started. My boss fortunately stood up for me, since she knows I work those hours, but I had to prove it to everyone else. So I got in the habit of answering all my email from the previous day the moment I got in at 6AM.
Finally one of the ones that I suspect complained about me tested me by coming in early and dropping in at my desk at 6:15 AM. Surprise, surprise, I was actually there like I said all along.
I haven't had any trouble since.
Would that be the same constitution that guarantees a set of basic rights for the citizens of the country and specifically limits the scope of government, and which came about while most of Europe was still under the control of monarchs, kings, and dictators? That constitution?
By no stretch of the imagination is America perfect, but your universal condemnation of the US is uncalled for. Read the damn posts on Slashdot and you'll see that most of us abhor it when things happen like this that we feel are contrary to free expression.
Replying to my own post to correct my faulty memory. This was not the episode this line appeared in, it was the episode Bread and Circuses, where they found the Earthlike planet with a 20th century Roman Empire ruling it. That'll teach me to make Slashdot posts after midnight.
There is one thing that the article is not completely clear on, and that is whether or not there is a definite drop in the number of children watching cartoons at all. In other words, is it just that they can now watch cartoons anytime they want, or are they also watching less?
From other trends I have seen, it could very well be that the current generation of children are too busy doing other things to look at TV (something that the article does mention), at least not as extensively as the generation before them. But if this is true, think of this: Today's cartoon-watchers are tomorrow's primetime TV watchers. If they're not watching TV much now, will they suddenly turn around and start watching it when they get older? I think not.
So we could be seeing the beginning of the end of the era of television itself. It will be a very slow death, but it may come nevertheless. Even now primetime TV is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for fresh ideas. I doubt the next generation of potential TV watchers will be satisfied with this.
This makes me think of a throwaway line of dialogue from an episode of the original Star Trek. I forget the name of the episode (it was the one where they get zapped back in time to 20th century Earth and accidentally beam the Air Force pilot on board). At one point Spock said something like (paraphrased) "Television died out as an entertainment medium sometime in the 21st century."
Life imitating art, perhaps?
Or its even more obscure but related tongue, "Wife".
humor n. 1) A comical quality 2) the ability to express what is funny, amusing, etc 3) the expression of this 4) what you are seriously lacking.
That's ridiculous. The world will NOT be destroyed. A blue hedgehog in sneakers will show up at the right moment to stop it.
You need to take this stuff with a grain of salt. I happen to be in the software field, and there are a lot of women in my office doing the same or similar job as me, and everything is as professional as you can get it. Yet these are the same people that would laugh at this in a context other than the office. Hell, I've met some of these women outside of the office, and they like off-color humor just as much as the guys. In the office, yes, it would be inappropriate. But what we're talking about here can hardly be considered in this context.
This is not the right battle to fight.
... Like the fact that cheap nuclear fusion is just ten more years away and Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now.
And the great irony of this is that feeding them grass would eliminate the need for most antibiotics, since digesting grass produces a gas that kills E-coli.
Before I met my wife, I used to have occassional, nasty digestive problems. My wife switched me to all organically-raised meat. No antibiotics or hormones. Not only does it taste better, I haven't had a digestive problem since. The only downside is that its twice as expensive as the non-organic stuff.
I am not wholesale against genetic engineering. Far from it. But it should be used judiciously, and not solve problems that a little common sense can solve instead.
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Why the hell is this moderated a troll? Get a clue, moderators. This quote is trying to make a point, and a damn good one.
While I am not about to jump on the "America is a police state!" bandwagon, it is unfortunately very true that someone who knows how to work the system, or has a great deal of charisma, or both, can often bring people of a country around to a way of thinking that, in the long run, can prove disastrous, especially in times of crisis, whether real or perceived.
This can be linked to the discussion at hand. One could, in a way, consider the current ease at which people can communicate with each other a "dangerous technology", in that someone able to mold human emotions and human will the way Hitler could would be able to reach millions of people very quickly and very easily.
At the same time, this goes both ways. The same technology has fostered a sense of openess that has lead to the formation of several subcultures that value openness to the point where the people that tend to become the de-facto leaders that people look up to tend to get there by passing a sort of unofficial peer review. So perhaps Goering's statement does not ring as true today as it once did, but to ignore that danger and become complacent is to fail to learn from history and thus be doomed to repeat it. This is why when the US Congress started passing legislation that infringed on American citizens' rights, I was very happy when not everyone simply accepted this as necessary and actually spoke out against it.
So someone mod the parent up a few points.