Actually, it's unfortunate that our ability to provide for our offspring goes up (for most people, lower middle class on up) as our ability to successfully create them goes down. What if fertility could be postponed until after you have a job? And if you live hundreds of (healthy) years, it doesn't hurt as much to say, "I'm going to be putting my child through college when I'm seventy!" (or "teaching my child to drive when I'm on Social Security.")
Tehanu was published in 1990/1991; The Other Wind was published in 2001. LeGuin calls them "The Books of Earthsea."
But why only the first two books, anyway? Are they planning on following up with the rest? After reading Wizard, I kept wondering, "Why am I here?" while reading Tombs. Farthest Shore helped make sense of that.
Car ownership in Europe is distinctly different then the US. Also, bikes are more common in Europe, which means that drivers are more accustomed to looking out for bike riders.
And I'm not sure how much it's changed, but in Belgium in '95, a helmet cost the equivalent of USD80, as opposed to USD15 for a helmet (admittedly commodity, not specialty) in the states. My wife was nearly killed that summer (before the Belgium trip) by a sixteen-year-old passing a line of stopped traffic on the right, through a parking lot, at 25 mph--there was a helmet-shaped indentation in her windshield after she t-boned my wife. (We didn't get helmets in Belgium, but we don't ride without them here.)
The driver was never cited, by the way. As the investigating police officer said when the exact traffic code infraction was pointed out to him, "I'm just a policeman, ma'am. It's not my job to know the law." Welcome to cycling in the USofA, where YOYO (You're On Your Own) when it comes to the idiots.
Ooh! My usual sig sounds even more preachy after this post;)
The estate tax was not a result of industrialists; that tax was on of our earliest taxes, in pre-industrialist society.
Otherwise, your reasoning is correct; the founding fathers (a pretty wealthy bunch themselves) saw the hereditary aristocracy as one of the evils they fought to free themselves (and their posterity) from.
Single-loop induction sensors can't be tuned high enough for bicycles (not sure about motorcycles) without "bleeding" and registering everything. But double-loop (figure-eight) sensors "cancel" outside the lane, and can be made much more sensitive. Talk to your local traffic control department about getting double-loop sensors installed in the right lane for bicycles (some places already have them in the left turn lane, to avoid "false positives" that stop oncoming traffic).
Regarding the "red-light running," it's part of the Uniform Traffic Code (DOT proposal that most states have adopted with a few changes) that an "inoperative" traffic light may be treated like a stop sign. Any light I can't trigger is, by definition, inoperative. You don't need a special law to provide for "waiting long enough."
Of course, if I have a car coming up behind me, I know that will trigger it, so I just wait.
... it keeps the least popular candidates out of office.
Well, that depends on how you define "least popular." Did you get down to the end, with the "And the winner is..." example? Here's a summary: With three candidates, Milk, Wine, and Beer, and fifteen people voting, six people rank the candidates "MWB", five rank them "BWM", and four rank them "WBM". (So? Nobody voted any of the other three permutations? Well, then they voted according to your "voting cards".)
By the simple pluralistic vote, M has six first-place votes, and wins. By the "instant run-off" version, W is eliminated (fewest first-place votes), and then B has nine votes to W's six, and wins. By the Borda (weighted) system, M has twelve votes (6 * 2 + 9 * 0), W has nineteen (11 * 1 + 4 * 2), and B has fourteen (5 * 2 + 4 * 1).
Obviously the "pluralistic" vote doesn't discard the "least popular". But which is least popular? M, who is least popular (ranked last) among the majority of the voters, or W, who has the fewest first-place votes?
Another poster describes the Australian system (I don't live there) as simply adding in the second-place, third-place,..., n-th place rankings until someone finally has a clear majority. Given our votes, then, nobody has a majority of first-place votes. With the second-place votes added in, W has exactly half the votes (fifteen out of thirty). Add in third-place votes, and everyone has fifteen votes. It's not clear to me who wins.
I know of another system that the author does not mention. It is used in sailboat races, and is known as the "regatta" system. In a regatta, multiple races are run (each voter's ballot, ranking all the candidates, counts as a "race"). The winning boat gets half a point, and every other boat gets as many points as its finishing position (two for second, three for third, etc.). The overall winner is the one with the fewest points.
This biases toward first-place votes, but strongly punishes the candidate who can't stay near the top on most ballots. In the example, then, W has only twenty-four points, while B has twenty-eight and a half, and M has thirty (a result of finishing dead last on most ballots). So W wins handily.
I've noticed that, between the two teams, one tends to go for the "smaller, lighter" and the other for the "brute" solution. What happens if both teams go for the same approach? Are the "experts" prepped to suggest different approaches, perhaps based on a team's apparent bias?
IIRC, the NY State Thruway used this method of speed limit enforcement until it was thrown out on Fifth Amendement grounds: You must turn in your ticket, but you cannot be coerced into testifying against yourself. The Mean Value Theorem is quite simple to demonstrate in a court of law, but you were "forced" to give them your average speed by turning in the ticket.
"Give the copyright to the employee that created the work."
Do I and my team, then, have to copyright each line we write in a piece of shared source? Do I
have to get permission of the original author before I fix a bug? Maybe these issues have been worked out in the Open Source Movement, but I haven't been involved in any such projects yet.
My employer holds the copyright to code its employees produce for the simple reason that the corporation has the right to modify, copy, license, blah blah blah. It's not a matter of each individual contributor giving a perpetual license to the corporation. Many ideas in our code were created in cooperation ("corporately") anyway. The individual programmers take "ownership" through comments that indicate who changed what, when; but the copyright is held by the corporation so any agent of the corporation can modify it at any time.
The numbers in my.sig have been cooked to make the answer come out nice.
"Ask Your Boss" is absolutely the right answer. I have been telecommuting for three and a half years now, after working in the office for four (long enough to be the secondmost senior developer). When I first moved a hundred miles from the home office, my boss offered to let me telecommute. Three years later, when I moved a thousand miles away, I asked if he wanted to continue the arrangement, and he agreed.
He pays for the second phone line and the internet connection, period. I send him all the (paid) receipts, and he deducts it as a business expense. If I was suffering the kind of downtime you were, I would be pushing my boss to pay for the business class line. If I did have a significant downtime, we could overnight mass storage media (CDROM, Jaz disk, whatever you've got) so that I always had work to do. Never say "I can't do work" (and eat into your vacation time!) just because your connection is down. Let your boss make the business decision whether the frequent overnighting is more expensive then the line upgrade.
I know telecommuting is a sweet deal for those of us with the discipline for it, but if you (or I) become a liability rather than an asset, you can be fired just like anyone else. But the extra bucks a month is probably less than last year's raise.
---------
Please don't reply about my sig; I'm a recovering math teacher, and I picked the numbers to make the answer come out to less than a minute!
Insurance is a sucker's bet, in the real world as much as in Vegas.
You've left out one of the basic concepts of insurance: utility. Basically, that means that the "cost" to a decision maker of a sudden, unpredictable loss of wealth is greater than that of a predictable loss of slightly more wealth (especially if the predictable loss, i.e. insurance premium, can be spread out over time).
Utility theory is discussed in Chapter One of any thorough actuarial textbook, because it's as much a part of the premium calculation as the agent's commission.
It is a shame that authors are required to give up copyright, but I have to take issue with the idea that these publishers are "making a killing." Dead-tree publishing is expensive, especially with such small print runs. Think of how many commercial (i.e., supported by advertising revenue) magazines go under with readership numbers that would make academic publishers squeal with delight.
The peer reviewers may be volunteer, but the editors are not--and you need good, smart editors in academic work.
How much did you pay for your alumni directory? $30? $50? $80? Those are about the cheapest things to produce: the publisher gets a database from the alumni association, massages it a little, and sets the type electronically (my company used to have a directory publishing division). Many have little or no advertising, and they have a clearly limited readership, just as academic journals do. Now add trickier typesetting (formulae, etc.) and good editing, and watch the price go up.
>The moral: if everyone speeds, you won't be driving as long, and cause fewer accidents!
Actually, that's part of my point. 75 and 65 are only for example. Basically, if it only costs a minute to travel at traffic speed rather than trying to "beat" everyone, then everyone is safer. But it's hard to put all this in a sig!
As a math instructor at the Univ of Michigan, I assigned all homework in a couple of my classes as group homework; but each individual reported separately on both their own contribution and that of others in the group (just a sentence or two).
In groups of four or so, this self-reporting was almost always an easy way to keep track of who was working and who wasn't. Quizzes and tests also revealed some slackers.
I only had one truly fractured group in those terms, where none of the reports agreed. I broke them up and changed some groups.
I would do it again. Not only did I grade fewer homework papers:), but the students learned to work together, assign responsibilities, and evaluate performance within their group, which are all important workplace skills.
Gee, I only need 33,333,333 of those advanced 3V, 10u-amp "batteries" to generate a kW. Put on the suit, hook it up to the microwave, and 20 minutes of dancing gives me dinner!
As a former resident of Hillsdale, MI (pop < 1e4), just down the road from Coldwater (mentioned in the article), I was all in favor of the local utility bringing fiber to the curb. They are issuing revenue bonds (paid through subscription fees only, not taxes) to bring cable tv & cable modem access to all. They already know how to run lines; the only thing they need to learn is to help people configure their new broadband modems, which you can print on two sides of a laminated 8.5x11 and cover at least four OSs.
The local cable company (Comcast) had no interest in bringing broadband to such a small customer base. Switching from copper to fiber would cost them too much, they said, and customers wouldn't stand for the fee increase.
Then the citizens voted to allow the local public utility (water & electric, and now, cable) to start running fiber. Boy, did Comcast sit up then! After fighting like a pit bull to get us to vote "No," that is. Now Comcast is also running fiber, and the citizens of little ol' Hillsdale are going to have some *choice* (most of the people I knew without cable, or satellite, didn't watch tv, as there were only two or three stations you could get).
Sometimes the only way the "free" market can operate is if the gov't provides the competition itself.
I'd worked for a small software firm for about four years when my wife got a job about two hours away. When I said "It's been fun," my boss said, "Have you considered telecommuting?"
I traveled to the home office about once every two weeks. I have since moved again, and now live 1100 miles from my employer. When I asked how he'd feel about a Tampa office, he said, "Well, you won't be able to come in as often."
YMMV; you have to be able to quit if you give your boss the binary option of losing your services or letting you telecommute.
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Actually, it's unfortunate that our ability to provide for our offspring goes up (for most people, lower middle class on up) as our ability to successfully create them goes down. What if fertility could be postponed until after you have a job? And if you live hundreds of (healthy) years, it doesn't hurt as much to say, "I'm going to be putting my child through college when I'm seventy!" (or "teaching my child to drive when I'm on Social Security.")
But why only the first two books, anyway? Are they planning on following up with the rest? After reading Wizard, I kept wondering, "Why am I here?" while reading Tombs. Farthest Shore helped make sense of that.
And I'm not sure how much it's changed, but in Belgium in '95, a helmet cost the equivalent of USD80, as opposed to USD15 for a helmet (admittedly commodity, not specialty) in the states. My wife was nearly killed that summer (before the Belgium trip) by a sixteen-year-old passing a line of stopped traffic on the right, through a parking lot, at 25 mph--there was a helmet-shaped indentation in her windshield after she t-boned my wife. (We didn't get helmets in Belgium, but we don't ride without them here.)
The driver was never cited, by the way. As the investigating police officer said when the exact traffic code infraction was pointed out to him, "I'm just a policeman, ma'am. It's not my job to know the law." Welcome to cycling in the USofA, where YOYO (You're On Your Own) when it comes to the idiots.
Ooh! My usual sig sounds even more preachy after this post ;)
Otherwise, your reasoning is correct; the founding fathers (a pretty wealthy bunch themselves) saw the hereditary aristocracy as one of the evils they fought to free themselves (and their posterity) from.
Regarding the "red-light running," it's part of the Uniform Traffic Code (DOT proposal that most states have adopted with a few changes) that an "inoperative" traffic light may be treated like a stop sign. Any light I can't trigger is, by definition, inoperative. You don't need a special law to provide for "waiting long enough."
Of course, if I have a car coming up behind me, I know that will trigger it, so I just wait.
Honestly, we have enough bugs that we can't reproduce on our in-house testing facilities because our end-user
How could we tell this from them finding a "bug" with a binary they compiled from a mucked version of the source?
Well, that depends on how you define "least popular." Did you get down to the end, with the "And the winner is..." example? Here's a summary: With three candidates, Milk, Wine, and Beer, and fifteen people voting, six people rank the candidates "MWB", five rank them "BWM", and four rank them "WBM". (So? Nobody voted any of the other three permutations? Well, then they voted according to your "voting cards".)
By the simple pluralistic vote, M has six first-place votes, and wins. By the "instant run-off" version, W is eliminated (fewest first-place votes), and then B has nine votes to W's six, and wins. By the Borda (weighted) system, M has twelve votes (6 * 2 + 9 * 0), W has nineteen (11 * 1 + 4 * 2), and B has fourteen (5 * 2 + 4 * 1).
Obviously the "pluralistic" vote doesn't discard the "least popular". But which is least popular? M, who is least popular (ranked last) among the majority of the voters, or W, who has the fewest first-place votes?
Another poster describes the Australian system (I don't live there) as simply adding in the second-place, third-place, ..., n-th place rankings until someone finally has a clear majority. Given our votes, then, nobody has a majority of first-place votes. With the second-place votes added in, W has exactly half the votes (fifteen out of thirty). Add in third-place votes, and everyone has fifteen votes. It's not clear to me who wins.
I know of another system that the author does not mention. It is used in sailboat races, and is known as the "regatta" system. In a regatta, multiple races are run (each voter's ballot, ranking all the candidates, counts as a "race"). The winning boat gets half a point, and every other boat gets as many points as its finishing position (two for second, three for third, etc.). The overall winner is the one with the fewest points.
This biases toward first-place votes, but strongly punishes the candidate who can't stay near the top on most ballots. In the example, then, W has only twenty-four points, while B has twenty-eight and a half, and M has thirty (a result of finishing dead last on most ballots). So W wins handily.
Do I and my team, then, have to copyright each line we write in a piece of shared source? Do I have to get permission of the original author before I fix a bug? Maybe these issues have been worked out in the Open Source Movement, but I haven't been involved in any such projects yet.
My employer holds the copyright to code its employees produce for the simple reason that the corporation has the right to modify, copy, license, blah blah blah. It's not a matter of each individual contributor giving a perpetual license to the corporation. Many ideas in our code were created in cooperation ("corporately") anyway. The individual programmers take "ownership" through comments that indicate who changed what, when; but the copyright is held by the corporation so any agent of the corporation can modify it at any time.
The numbers in my .sig have been cooked to make the answer come out nice.
He pays for the second phone line and the internet connection, period. I send him all the (paid) receipts, and he deducts it as a business expense. If I was suffering the kind of downtime you were, I would be pushing my boss to pay for the business class line. If I did have a significant downtime, we could overnight mass storage media (CDROM, Jaz disk, whatever you've got) so that I always had work to do. Never say "I can't do work" (and eat into your vacation time!) just because your connection is down. Let your boss make the business decision whether the frequent overnighting is more expensive then the line upgrade.
I know telecommuting is a sweet deal for those of us with the discipline for it, but if you (or I) become a liability rather than an asset, you can be fired just like anyone else. But the extra bucks a month is probably less than last year's raise.
---------
Please don't reply about my sig; I'm a recovering math teacher, and I picked the numbers to make the answer come out to less than a minute!
You've left out one of the basic concepts of insurance: utility. Basically, that means that the "cost" to a decision maker of a sudden, unpredictable loss of wealth is greater than that of a predictable loss of slightly more wealth (especially if the predictable loss, i.e. insurance premium, can be spread out over time).
Utility theory is discussed in Chapter One of any thorough actuarial textbook, because it's as much a part of the premium calculation as the agent's commission.
The peer reviewers may be volunteer, but the editors are not--and you need good, smart editors in academic work.
How much did you pay for your alumni directory? $30? $50? $80? Those are about the cheapest things to produce: the publisher gets a database from the alumni association, massages it a little, and sets the type electronically (my company used to have a directory publishing division). Many have little or no advertising, and they have a clearly limited readership, just as academic journals do. Now add trickier typesetting (formulae, etc.) and good editing, and watch the price go up.
Actually, that's part of my point. 75 and 65 are only for example. Basically, if it only costs a minute to travel at traffic speed rather than trying to "beat" everyone, then everyone is safer. But it's hard to put all this in a sig!
In groups of four or so, this self-reporting was almost always an easy way to keep track of who was working and who wasn't. Quizzes and tests also revealed some slackers.
I only had one truly fractured group in those terms, where none of the reports agreed. I broke them up and changed some groups.
I would do it again. Not only did I grade fewer homework papers :), but the students learned to work together, assign responsibilities, and evaluate performance within their group, which are all important workplace skills.
Gee, I only need 33,333,333 of those advanced 3V, 10u-amp "batteries" to generate a kW. Put on the suit, hook it up to the microwave, and 20 minutes of dancing gives me dinner!
The local cable company (Comcast) had no interest in bringing broadband to such a small customer base. Switching from copper to fiber would cost them too much, they said, and customers wouldn't stand for the fee increase.
Then the citizens voted to allow the local public utility (water & electric, and now, cable) to start running fiber. Boy, did Comcast sit up then! After fighting like a pit bull to get us to vote "No," that is. Now Comcast is also running fiber, and the citizens of little ol' Hillsdale are going to have some *choice* (most of the people I knew without cable, or satellite, didn't watch tv, as there were only two or three stations you could get).
Sometimes the only way the "free" market can operate is if the gov't provides the competition itself.
If only the movie were any good. Lucas should get Kasdan in on this one, too. "Yippee," indeed.
I'd worked for a small software firm for about four years when my wife got a job about two hours away. When I said "It's been fun," my boss said, "Have you considered telecommuting?"
I traveled to the home office about once every two weeks. I have since moved again, and now live 1100 miles from my employer. When I asked how he'd feel about a Tampa office, he said, "Well, you won't be able to come in as often."
YMMV; you have to be able to quit if you give your boss the binary option of losing your services or letting you telecommute.