Question then becomes, can you still call it a stereotype if it's true?
I think the definition of stereotype is an exaggerated generalization, meaning that while it may be true, stating that it's true to a greater degree than factual is where it crosses the line.
"ALL the 7-11's in Seattle are staffed by Indians after 9pm" - stereotype
"80% of the 7-11's in Seattle are staffed by Indians after 9pm" - possibly fact.
I got the privilege of appearing on stage with Mr Wizard way back in gradeschool. Now there's someone that will be missed. He got us hooked on science in like 4th grade. That's what we need, not more people to fascinate us in college, we need to build interest in science in our youth much much earlier.
That's pretty awesome. And I thought I had a pretty good ability to use ambient sound, he just blows everything else away. I have hearing out in the higher frequency range (and as a result I think, my LF hearing stinks) so I can use a tv set in a room to sound out the room and hallways etc nearby, even behind closed doors. Unfortunately not many can hear up into the range of the flybacks on TVs. I bet if Ben could hear up in there he could carry around a sound generator on his belt or something and would take his skill to an even higher level. Too bad they say his hearing is normal.
Animal ears are complexly designed for good reason. Animals like cats have highly complex hearlobes and outer ear canals that deform the sound differently that comes in from different directions, and gives them information about the direction the sound came from without having to move their head during the sound. (allowing them to localize very brief sounds) Human ears aren't nearly as complex, but I bet it helps him a lot. I don't know if they were taking this into account with all their tests.
the new garmin units plug in like a usb thumb drive and you have direct access to their.GPX data files. The files are in flat XML, heavily documented, and very flexible. (apparently garmin has gone away from NMEA/serial, good riddance)
They come with two pieces of software, one that runs locally on your computer and the other is a browser plugin that I assume gives java control over the same things. I was very impressed with the software, but it does have its limits. (such as building routes) But since the files are xml you can use any off the shelf standard.GPX editing program (there are several, and I recently wrote my own too) to edit things how you need to. Some are free, most are pay. But the software for the garmin is free with it.
You can't ssh into the thing, but as far as file/format goes, this is about as "open" as it gets. FYI I have an Edge 605, use it on my bike. It's got a really small screen unfortunately but those are the breaks for small and long battery life.
They're trying to tick off all their associates and get them to call down to Raleigh,' Barrett said. 'I think that is pretty tacky.
Sounds like an excellent way to motivate your local associates to get their arses over to the capital and ride their representatives. There's not a great deal Amazon can do directly to fix this, they have to rely on their local affiliates to keep the local conditions amicable to their business. If the locals aren't moving, then it's time to light a fire under them.
Got their attention too didn't it? Sounds like it's working as intended to me...
This would make a good idle story rather than the 5 that have been stuck on idle off to the right for the last month.
That being said, that's pretty hilarious. Easy to find videos on youtube of various wild animals getting stoned or usually drunk. Fermented fruit seems to be popular that way. The drunk elephants are a riot!
agree. That, and if we were to have some sort of a committee to decide who could sell what to whom overseas, (beyond existing limits to say, military technology) we'd never be able to get anything sold overseas.
Is it really up to the public to decide who I can do business with overseas? I think not.
Sprint requires from people with poor credit ($500); or pre-paying the entire two-year plan on the spot. None of these was acceptable options,
We've been through this with the iPhone already. The law prevents them from requiring your ssn as terms of a sale. They can request it, but must offer an option, usually in the form of a much larger down payment or deposit. It's not uncommon for sales staff to not be educated on this policy since it's rarely invoked. From the sounds of it, you protested, and did finally get offered the option, which you turned down. You lose the right to complain.
Quite simply put, there's no law that says they're required to offer you an "acceptable option".
"This is the second notice that the manufacturer's warranty on your car is about to expire". Many many of them left on my machine. My car is a 1994 exploder and I don't need anyone telling me about my manufacturer's warranty thankyouverymuch.
Tho I was never home when they called, to play with them a bit.
The student released the source after the release date, which prevented any of his peers from cheating
Prevented them from cheating this semester. I'm sure the reason the prof wanted it taken down is so he could easily just copy-n-paste next semester's assignment. This is a lazy instructor working to maintain his laziness.
Good profs at the very least work on a 4 semester rotation of courses where you're going to have to dig up a student from a few years ago at least before you have an easy "tweak and resubmit" assignment. Any instructor that dishes out the exact same projects semester after semester isn't showing any commitment, and certainly isn't staying with the times. Computer science is in such a continuous state of flux that any prof that isn't consistently reworking their coursework isn't doing their job.
Catching these sorts of cheats isn't too difficult either even if you don't want to start projects from scratch. Just a matter of properly adjusting the project. Make a few fundamental changes that make it look different, update as needed, and subtly tweak a few things. (make a small change to limits etc) This makes it fresh and new, and is fairly easy to spot a cheat since they will blatantly be meeting subtle goals from the wrong project.
I specialized in programming languages in general in school. I'm one of those people that can honestly say he has forgotten more languages than most people will ever learn. While fortran isn't a language I ever intend to use, having learned it was a useful experience. Other odd languages like lisp, algol, assy, sequence/state, etc, also provide you with unique insight into how to do things. I occasionally run into problems today where I think "that would be SO much easier to do in (name a language)", and that gets me to thinking of how to modify the simple solution in the other language to the language I'm currently working with. It's a bit like the towers of hanoi problem, it seems dreadfully complicated until you realize that done correctly the solution is very simple, and you just need to change your point of view.
This also makes you extremely flexible. I have absolute confidence that I can sit down at any new job using any language I've never so much as heard of before, and be able to read and understand the existing code immediately, write useful code that same day, and be highly proficient with it in under a week. The only reason I can do this is I've "seen it all" for the most part and so I've already beaten the basic obstacles like "object oriented", "pointers", "procedural based" etc that a new language might throw at me and would at least temporarily derail/disorient another newbie.
For those of you who have been doing this a lot longer, how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?"
Firstly, being a jerk isn't the "last resort" option to getting respect... that approach will never work.
The most important thing you can do as any service provider is build your image as the solution, not the problem. People are naturally going to treat you better if they have positive things associated with you. You can't force or coerce that sort of response, you have to build the right environment for it to grow on its own terms.
Different situations will affect the difficulty of this task. Bad management or policies can make it very hard to stay on top of things, and if that's the case where you work, you will also need to work on those problems because you can't really work around them.
1. track your work. if there isn't a trouble ticket system in place, make one. never lose a request. nothing pisses off people like forgetting about them. Every time someone has to remind you that they are still having the same problem builds your image as a part of the problem. 2. narrow your reporting to a single or a handful of methods and make sure everyone knows them. If a new person asks how to get ahold of IT for help, whoever they ask should have one or two options at most to give them. If they say "you can email support, or email rob directly, or try his manager. his desk phone is xxx, or you can page him. I have his cell number if you need it." then you need to consolidate. Having fewer, more reliable ways to get ahold of you will improve your image of reachability. 3. respond promptly. prioritize. If someone is upset that you are not helping them first, give them the option if you can. "I'm headed to set up the conference room right now, can this wait 20 minutes?" (make sure you have support of your manager on this) Nothing puts a screamer in check like their manager asking them why they pulled you off an important task (that got THEM yelled at) for something unimportant. This is the only way to handle screamers. 4. make sure the problem is fixed. Don't take their word for it. Sometimes people are embarrassed and don't want to look stupid if they don't "get it". Ask a few probing questions before you leave to make sure everything is the way they need it. 5. followup. Nothing improves your respect more than following up on a fix. Followup even if you know it's fixed. 15% of the time you'll find that the fix was either incomplete or not what they needed, and you have an immediate opportunity to correct it. (even if they didn't accurately or completely describe the problem, that doesn't matter) The other 85% of the time you get good-will points for following up and "taking good care of them". Users that have repeated problems of the same nature warrant occasional check-ins to see if anything has broken recently that they just haven't had time to call you about yet. This is a powerful way to build your image as the solution rather than the problem
I've found it's also important to read people and figure out what sort of service they are looking for. Some people want you to flash in, fix it, and disappear. Others want you to fix it and hang around. A few will want you to show them how you fixed it so they can do it again. It's very important to learn quickly which of the three types each person is. DO NOT GUESS. Guessing wrong in any combination produces bad to very-bad results. eg: someone that hints they may be interested in knowing how to fix the problem next time themselves, you explain the problem and walk them through the fix. they thank you and depart. Little did you know it went WOOSH over their head and they were too embarrassed to say they didn't understand a word you said, and feel belittled by you. Do not guess. Ask them. They will surprise you more often than not until you figure them out.
until you're inside the event horizon, at which point there is no escape. Thus, outside the event horizon, objects will tend to orbit the black hole just as they'd orbit a star of equal mass.
that would also seem to imply that nothing can orbit a black hole inside it's EH. (since the EH is basically the distance at which photons orbit the black hole, if they get any closer, they de-orbit)
Gaensicke and colleagues envision two scenarios that might explain the object. In one, a carbon-rich star gets too close to a middle- or heavy-weight black hole, which tears the star apart. Some of this material is absorbed by the black hole, and some is blasted away in a flare that was eventually seen from Earth as SCP 06F6.
I'm not educated in astrophysics and everytime I read something like this I wonder, how does anything manage to get "blasted away" from a black hole? I was under the impression anything that got close to it was absorbed?
it's a great business model if you can afford front the startup costs without any initial customers. Attracts a lot more initial customers because you get a lot of people that normally would not pay for your service, but once they've had a sample of it they change their mind. Of course you'll lose a bunch of people when you switch to pay, but the only hit you'll take on that is what you've already fronted them with so it doesn't come as a surprise or a bad hit you didn't see coming or couldn't calculate/prepare for.
Slashdot Mirror
that's 512 0-9A-F (or 65536 0-1 I suppose) to write down. And I thought trying to enter a WEP key in windows was bad...
Question then becomes, can you still call it a stereotype if it's true?
I think the definition of stereotype is an exaggerated generalization, meaning that while it may be true, stating that it's true to a greater degree than factual is where it crosses the line.
"ALL the 7-11's in Seattle are staffed by Indians after 9pm" - stereotype
"80% of the 7-11's in Seattle are staffed by Indians after 9pm" - possibly fact.
Free +5 funny for whoever follows up with a comment about US beer
like oh, "americans like their beer cold?
Its usually backed up on a post-it note somewhere.
For a root CA private key, better be a big post-it note
(or written in really small letters)
I got the privilege of appearing on stage with Mr Wizard way back in gradeschool. Now there's someone that will be missed. He got us hooked on science in like 4th grade. That's what we need, not more people to fascinate us in college, we need to build interest in science in our youth much much earlier.
RIP Don Herbert
That's pretty awesome. And I thought I had a pretty good ability to use ambient sound, he just blows everything else away. I have hearing out in the higher frequency range (and as a result I think, my LF hearing stinks) so I can use a tv set in a room to sound out the room and hallways etc nearby, even behind closed doors. Unfortunately not many can hear up into the range of the flybacks on TVs. I bet if Ben could hear up in there he could carry around a sound generator on his belt or something and would take his skill to an even higher level. Too bad they say his hearing is normal.
Animal ears are complexly designed for good reason. Animals like cats have highly complex hearlobes and outer ear canals that deform the sound differently that comes in from different directions, and gives them information about the direction the sound came from without having to move their head during the sound. (allowing them to localize very brief sounds) Human ears aren't nearly as complex, but I bet it helps him a lot. I don't know if they were taking this into account with all their tests.
the new garmin units plug in like a usb thumb drive and you have direct access to their .GPX data files. The files are in flat XML, heavily documented, and very flexible. (apparently garmin has gone away from NMEA/serial, good riddance)
They come with two pieces of software, one that runs locally on your computer and the other is a browser plugin that I assume gives java control over the same things. I was very impressed with the software, but it does have its limits. (such as building routes) But since the files are xml you can use any off the shelf standard .GPX editing program (there are several, and I recently wrote my own too) to edit things how you need to. Some are free, most are pay. But the software for the garmin is free with it.
You can't ssh into the thing, but as far as file/format goes, this is about as "open" as it gets. FYI I have an Edge 605, use it on my bike. It's got a really small screen unfortunately but those are the breaks for small and long battery life.
They're trying to tick off all their associates and get them to call down to Raleigh,' Barrett said. 'I think that is pretty tacky.
Sounds like an excellent way to motivate your local associates to get their arses over to the capital and ride their representatives. There's not a great deal Amazon can do directly to fix this, they have to rely on their local affiliates to keep the local conditions amicable to their business. If the locals aren't moving, then it's time to light a fire under them.
Got their attention too didn't it? Sounds like it's working as intended to me...
This would make a good idle story rather than the 5 that have been stuck on idle off to the right for the last month.
That being said, that's pretty hilarious. Easy to find videos on youtube of various wild animals getting stoned or usually drunk. Fermented fruit seems to be popular that way. The drunk elephants are a riot!
Someone that popular is "news for anybody", regardless of who you are. Maybe to a lesser degree for some, but still.
love that graph. incredible spike last night, tapering off (some) into 4am, and then right back up and over yesterday's high, and still climbing.
Wonder when it will return to normal? I bet we see this for a week.
agree. That, and if we were to have some sort of a committee to decide who could sell what to whom overseas, (beyond existing limits to say, military technology) we'd never be able to get anything sold overseas.
Is it really up to the public to decide who I can do business with overseas? I think not.
Sprint requires from people with poor credit ($500); or pre-paying the entire two-year plan on the spot. None of these was acceptable options,
We've been through this with the iPhone already. The law prevents them from requiring your ssn as terms of a sale. They can request it, but must offer an option, usually in the form of a much larger down payment or deposit. It's not uncommon for sales staff to not be educated on this policy since it's rarely invoked. From the sounds of it, you protested, and did finally get offered the option, which you turned down. You lose the right to complain.
Quite simply put, there's no law that says they're required to offer you an "acceptable option".
and there were no criminal charges filed against them.
What I found interesting were the priors for some of these people. You'd expect related charges, but they're totally off-base:
- indecent exposure
- obstruction
- trespassing
- battery
- filing a false report of a bomb
- firearm violations
That's quite an interesting assortment.
And although I got robocalled a lot, I never did get any of their postcards. I'm not on the DNC registry.
My calls went a little differently...
"This is the second notice that the manufacturer's warranty on your car is about to expire". Many many of them left on my machine. My car is a 1994 exploder and I don't need anyone telling me about my manufacturer's warranty thankyouverymuch.
Tho I was never home when they called, to play with them a bit.
The student released the source after the release date, which prevented any of his peers from cheating
Prevented them from cheating this semester. I'm sure the reason the prof wanted it taken down is so he could easily just copy-n-paste next semester's assignment. This is a lazy instructor working to maintain his laziness.
Good profs at the very least work on a 4 semester rotation of courses where you're going to have to dig up a student from a few years ago at least before you have an easy "tweak and resubmit" assignment. Any instructor that dishes out the exact same projects semester after semester isn't showing any commitment, and certainly isn't staying with the times. Computer science is in such a continuous state of flux that any prof that isn't consistently reworking their coursework isn't doing their job.
Catching these sorts of cheats isn't too difficult either even if you don't want to start projects from scratch. Just a matter of properly adjusting the project. Make a few fundamental changes that make it look different, update as needed, and subtly tweak a few things. (make a small change to limits etc) This makes it fresh and new, and is fairly easy to spot a cheat since they will blatantly be meeting subtle goals from the wrong project.
I specialized in programming languages in general in school. I'm one of those people that can honestly say he has forgotten more languages than most people will ever learn. While fortran isn't a language I ever intend to use, having learned it was a useful experience. Other odd languages like lisp, algol, assy, sequence/state, etc, also provide you with unique insight into how to do things. I occasionally run into problems today where I think "that would be SO much easier to do in (name a language)", and that gets me to thinking of how to modify the simple solution in the other language to the language I'm currently working with. It's a bit like the towers of hanoi problem, it seems dreadfully complicated until you realize that done correctly the solution is very simple, and you just need to change your point of view.
This also makes you extremely flexible. I have absolute confidence that I can sit down at any new job using any language I've never so much as heard of before, and be able to read and understand the existing code immediately, write useful code that same day, and be highly proficient with it in under a week. The only reason I can do this is I've "seen it all" for the most part and so I've already beaten the basic obstacles like "object oriented", "pointers", "procedural based" etc that a new language might throw at me and would at least temporarily derail/disorient another newbie.
For those of you who have been doing this a lot longer, how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?"
Firstly, being a jerk isn't the "last resort" option to getting respect... that approach will never work.
The most important thing you can do as any service provider is build your image as the solution, not the problem. People are naturally going to treat you better if they have positive things associated with you. You can't force or coerce that sort of response, you have to build the right environment for it to grow on its own terms.
Different situations will affect the difficulty of this task. Bad management or policies can make it very hard to stay on top of things, and if that's the case where you work, you will also need to work on those problems because you can't really work around them.
1. track your work. if there isn't a trouble ticket system in place, make one. never lose a request. nothing pisses off people like forgetting about them. Every time someone has to remind you that they are still having the same problem builds your image as a part of the problem.
2. narrow your reporting to a single or a handful of methods and make sure everyone knows them. If a new person asks how to get ahold of IT for help, whoever they ask should have one or two options at most to give them. If they say "you can email support, or email rob directly, or try his manager. his desk phone is xxx, or you can page him. I have his cell number if you need it." then you need to consolidate. Having fewer, more reliable ways to get ahold of you will improve your image of reachability.
3. respond promptly. prioritize. If someone is upset that you are not helping them first, give them the option if you can. "I'm headed to set up the conference room right now, can this wait 20 minutes?" (make sure you have support of your manager on this) Nothing puts a screamer in check like their manager asking them why they pulled you off an important task (that got THEM yelled at) for something unimportant. This is the only way to handle screamers.
4. make sure the problem is fixed. Don't take their word for it. Sometimes people are embarrassed and don't want to look stupid if they don't "get it". Ask a few probing questions before you leave to make sure everything is the way they need it.
5. followup. Nothing improves your respect more than following up on a fix. Followup even if you know it's fixed. 15% of the time you'll find that the fix was either incomplete or not what they needed, and you have an immediate opportunity to correct it. (even if they didn't accurately or completely describe the problem, that doesn't matter) The other 85% of the time you get good-will points for following up and "taking good care of them". Users that have repeated problems of the same nature warrant occasional check-ins to see if anything has broken recently that they just haven't had time to call you about yet. This is a powerful way to build your image as the solution rather than the problem
I've found it's also important to read people and figure out what sort of service they are looking for. Some people want you to flash in, fix it, and disappear. Others want you to fix it and hang around. A few will want you to show them how you fixed it so they can do it again. It's very important to learn quickly which of the three types each person is. DO NOT GUESS. Guessing wrong in any combination produces bad to very-bad results. eg: someone that hints they may be interested in knowing how to fix the problem next time themselves, you explain the problem and walk them through the fix. they thank you and depart. Little did you know it went WOOSH over their head and they were too embarrassed to say they didn't understand a word you said, and feel belittled by you. Do not guess. Ask them. They will surprise you more often than not until you figure them out.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=recursion
thanks for those links, that second one from milkw0rm is just jaw-dropping...
would be awful tough to move flaps on an airbus with mechanical pedals... pilot better be working out after he clocks out
until you're inside the event horizon, at which point there is no escape. Thus, outside the event horizon, objects will tend to orbit the black hole just as they'd orbit a star of equal mass.
that would also seem to imply that nothing can orbit a black hole inside it's EH. (since the EH is basically the distance at which photons orbit the black hole, if they get any closer, they de-orbit)
Gaensicke and colleagues envision two scenarios that might explain the object. In one, a carbon-rich star gets too close to a middle- or heavy-weight black hole, which tears the star apart. Some of this material is absorbed by the black hole, and some is blasted away in a flare that was eventually seen from Earth as SCP 06F6.
I'm not educated in astrophysics and everytime I read something like this I wonder, how does anything manage to get "blasted away" from a black hole? I was under the impression anything that got close to it was absorbed?
otherwise, long lost languages like sanskrit which virtually operate on a flowchart could be used as well
We can't use any long lost languages until we find them again.
Sanscrit has long since been rediscovered.
The first hit's always free...
it's a great business model if you can afford front the startup costs without any initial customers. Attracts a lot more initial customers because you get a lot of people that normally would not pay for your service, but once they've had a sample of it they change their mind. Of course you'll lose a bunch of people when you switch to pay, but the only hit you'll take on that is what you've already fronted them with so it doesn't come as a surprise or a bad hit you didn't see coming or couldn't calculate/prepare for.