but offshore call centers make less - they have to They might make less in dollar terms, but not less in terms of purchasing power. While I was in Bombay I had a few friends who worked at call centers. For people who graduated from college, call centers with foreign clients were somewhere around the middle of the spectrum of payscales. The only reason people wouldn't work there more than a year or two is because it's such a mindnumbingly boring job.
True, but are people who limp really less likely to reproduce? Given long-term relationships that we humans have, and the tendency to equalize weaker members of society, I'm not sure that such selection is really occuring. Even though we have plenty of opportunities to reproduce (hey, I'll have an opportunity to reproduce later tonight, but won't thanks to a little piece or latex) most people only have a small number of kids.
Whether humans are still evolving in any significant way, and in what directions are interesting questions to think about, but we're getting way off topic here
Or maybe the senator-in-question decided not to try and sneak it in given that the EFF raised a ruckus and he'd actually be doing it in plain sight rather than "sneaking"? Are you so resigned to not being able to affect what congress does by writing and calling your senators?
Breaking legs doesn't alter ones DNA. Kids would be born with stronger bones only if bdit went around breaking the legs of a large fraction of the population, and the stronger legs among the population survived the breaking attempts. Also, you'd need people without broken legs to have more kids than people with broken legs.
Ok a few points. While the "average" person may not have heard of schools like UIUC an UT Austin because they're good in engineering and not so good when it comes to "traditional" fields like business and economics and education, people who make the hiring decisions at copmanies probably have.
You talk about people putting blind faith in rankings produced by US News. Fair enough, no "raking" can capture everything that's important in a program. But then you go on to slander the people who work there and make some absurd claims. Do you know any of the people who produced the rankings? Have you bothered to look at the criteria they use? Research spending is certainly not a major criteria used to judge undergraduate programs. Do you really think you're the only person in the world who knows that? You call the rankings "arbitrary". Do you really think they just sat there and pulled a random ranking out of their arse?
A ranking is a guideline, not a rule. Just one of the many pieces of information one would use.
There are qualified candidates everywhere, and the top students at any school will no doubt get placed very well. Nobody is saying MIT and Harvard are great and every other school is junk.
Plutonic relation" and "my arse". Sounds like doing it doggie style, I don't expect Slashdotters to know a lot about sex, but doggy style is still vaginal.
So of the people who listen to music, 25% don't download legally or illegally and purchase CDs or tapes or whatever.
Now I'd imagine all categories overlap... I'm sure a LOT of people buy some CDs, download others legally and also download illegal copies every now and then. So I don't know how those are accounted for.
He attended a public institution and studied a subject, engineering
He attended University of Illinois at Urbabna Champaign... I don't know about 1947, but today, UIUC is a top engineering school. #4 according to the 2006 USNews ranking. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that you *can't* be successful without a good education, but an overwhelming majority of people who have made groundbreaking discoveries have.
free thinking without the shackles of tradition... living environment which is comfortable (i.e. where people do not lie, cheat, and steal)
*Sob* I never reaized I was living in this paradise filled with saints. But you're right... I just looked out of the window and noticed the faint halos around all my fellow american's heads. Dear George W. Bush. Thank you for your unrelenting honesty, for not shovelling taxpayer's money into the pockets of a few cronies, and for eschewing religous and traditional shackles and allowing science to grow unfettered.
Dude seriously though. Open your eyes a little. The US is being left behind in more fields than I can count. While we debate whether to teach Creationism in schools instead of evolution, an increasing fraction of significant breakthroughs these days are coming from Japan, South Korea and China. Funding agencies like NSF have had their budgets slashed to the point where researchers who's have several grants funded a year have been unable to get a single grant in the past several years. DARPA has decided to stop funding research that doesn't produce and "immediate military benefit". NASA is being forced to work on ambitious projects without being given adequate funds to pursue those without cancelling their science projects.
This administration is pursuing a dangerously short-sighted policy, and while people like you are waving flags and sticking bumper stickers on your SUVs proclaiming how great America is, the rest of the world is rapidly catching up. Once existing grants run out (and we're at the point where that's starting to happen), graduate school enrollments will plummet and the wonderful research instututes that have kept America on top all this time will effectively have their throats cut.
Blind patriotism like yours is counterproductive and dangerous.
See the "research."? See the ~pablo? This is one of MSR's researchers publishing a piece of academic research. Of course, it's not a product, because it's not intended to be. Researchers often will build a prototype, but don't have the time or the inclination to produce production-quality code. Do you think Microsoft would be openly publishing the design details if it were intended to be a product?
There is no FUD and no vaporware and no conspiracy. This whole storm in a teacup over Avalanche is probably a good example of why publishing research papers openly on the web for other people (i.e. people who don't understand research) to see can be a bad idea.
Yes, Microsoft research is funded by the rest of Microsoft Corp. but people who work for MSR are primarily academic researchers and have a wide latitude in their work. MSR is to Microsoft what Bell Labs was to AT&T, PARC was to Xerox and TJ Watson Research Center is to IBM.
MSR researchers publish in all the same conferences as academics at Universities and National Labs, go through the same peer-review process as everyone else, and have too much reputation at stake to publish junk papers or overtly push an agenda.
Yes, their research may be nudged in directions that MS wants to go, but it is real research and not a part of a conspiracy.
The difference is that with Usenet and E-mail and stuff, good users don't cancel out the bad users. On Wikipedia, bad edits usually get reverted quickly. Apart from a relatively small number of pathological cases, vandals usually get bored and leave if their "work" is quickly removed.
Did the LATimes Wiki have a "protect" mechanism? A lot of pages that are linked to from here quickly end up protected from edits because of repeated vandalism.
I have, his arguments just show that he knows nothing about erasure coding.
1. You don't need to have a code across the whole file. You can encode in (say) 100 block chunks. The memory and I/O needed for that is trivial on modern systems.
2. The argument about hashes is just plain nonsense, because the torrent can have hashes of the FEC blocks in addition to the data blocks.
Many researchers I've met at academic P2P conferences have tried talking to Brah Chohen and found him to be an arrogant asshole who thinks that he knows everything, and won't listen to reason. The fact is that bittorrent is very easy to game, and it's a widely recognised fact that tit-for-tat accounting would be far better for lots of reasons. Bram is convinced though that he's God and nobody else knows better. and he won't listen.
Why do you think a lot of websites are having to implement tracking systems that track your upload ratio over time?
1. Party X proposes legislation, concerns raised by party Y. 2. Safeguards added to legislation to satisfy party Y 3. Congress passes legislation 4. Party X president snips out safeguards and passes the rest 5. ??? 6. Police state!!!!
I happen to think that having the "OK" button in corner is a logical and predictable place for the most frequently used button to me. Just because Windows does it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
You could make that argument for everything, and say that we should all either be using Windows or that other applications should aim solely to duplicate the windows UI.
thinks like being unable to cancel a lot of actions Like what?
hiding all the useful options so you can't configure the damned thing any more That's what GConf-edit is for. You can find all the settings the application has, including documentation for every setting. Makes more sense to me to have things hidden away behind a standardised interface than to have a menu/dialog option for options you're unlikely to change more than once
font/style settings instead of a global one That's just plain baloney
not to mention putting the OK/Cancel buttons the wrong way around for the sole reason that it's 'different to microsoft'. The "right" way being defined as the way Microsoft does it? Or do you have a real argument for why it's more "right"?
You know... register? You don't have to enter real data. That way you don't have to use anything generator, and can just click through directly to the article, while simultaneously not appearing childish for whining everytime an NYT link is posted.
1. You're an idiot if you're going to write your data on to a CD and hope that it's going to last 60 years. The whole point of digital technology is that unlike analog technology you can make a perfect copy. An average person has the capability to make their digital images last indefinitely.... that's not true of film. Dig out that old album from your mom's moldy rat infested attic if you don't believe me.
2. Just because there are newer cameras out there doesn't mean you have to buy them. It's not like your camera stops working when a new model is released.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck getting around without a car. Even the worst-paid Indian can afford to take the bus or train
but offshore call centers make less - they have to
They might make less in dollar terms, but not less in terms of purchasing power. While I was in Bombay I had a few friends who worked at call centers. For people who graduated from college, call centers with foreign clients were somewhere around the middle of the spectrum of payscales. The only reason people wouldn't work there more than a year or two is because it's such a mindnumbingly boring job.
True, but are people who limp really less likely to reproduce? Given long-term relationships that we humans have, and the tendency to equalize weaker members of society, I'm not sure that such selection is really occuring. Even though we have plenty of opportunities to reproduce (hey, I'll have an opportunity to reproduce later tonight, but won't thanks to a little piece or latex) most people only have a small number of kids.
Whether humans are still evolving in any significant way, and in what directions are interesting questions to think about, but we're getting way off topic here
It does if the cold is enough to alter survival (or reproduction) chances but not enough to wipe out the entire population.
Or maybe the senator-in-question decided not to try and sneak it in given that the EFF raised a ruckus and he'd actually be doing it in plain sight rather than "sneaking"? Are you so resigned to not being able to affect what congress does by writing and calling your senators?
You have no idea how evolution works, do you?
Breaking legs doesn't alter ones DNA. Kids would be born with stronger bones only if bdit went around breaking the legs of a large fraction of the population, and the stronger legs among the population survived the breaking attempts. Also, you'd need people without broken legs to have more kids than people with broken legs.
You must be a troll or a racist, for you certainly act like one.
Ok a few points. While the "average" person may not have heard of schools like UIUC an UT Austin because they're good in engineering and not so good when it comes to "traditional" fields like business and economics and education, people who make the hiring decisions at copmanies probably have.
You talk about people putting blind faith in rankings produced by US News. Fair enough, no "raking" can capture everything that's important in a program. But then you go on to slander the people who work there and make some absurd claims. Do you know any of the people who produced the rankings? Have you bothered to look at the criteria they use? Research spending is certainly not a major criteria used to judge undergraduate programs. Do you really think you're the only person in the world who knows that? You call the rankings "arbitrary". Do you really think they just sat there and pulled a random ranking out of their arse?
A ranking is a guideline, not a rule. Just one of the many pieces of information one would use.
There are qualified candidates everywhere, and the top students at any school will no doubt get placed very well. Nobody is saying MIT and Harvard are great and every other school is junk.
Plutonic relation" and "my arse". Sounds like doing it doggie style,
I don't expect Slashdotters to know a lot about sex, but doggy style is still vaginal.
So of the people who listen to music, 25% don't download legally or illegally and purchase CDs or tapes or whatever.
Now I'd imagine all categories overlap... I'm sure a LOT of people buy some CDs, download others legally and also download illegal copies every now and then. So I don't know how those are accounted for.
He attended a public institution and studied a subject, engineering
He attended University of Illinois at Urbabna Champaign... I don't know about 1947, but today, UIUC is a top engineering school. #4 according to the 2006 USNews ranking. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that you *can't* be successful without a good education, but an overwhelming majority of people who have made groundbreaking discoveries have.
free thinking without the shackles of tradition... living environment which is comfortable (i.e. where people do not lie, cheat, and steal)
*Sob* I never reaized I was living in this paradise filled with saints. But you're right... I just looked out of the window and noticed the faint halos around all my fellow american's heads. Dear George W. Bush. Thank you for your unrelenting honesty, for not shovelling taxpayer's money into the pockets of a few cronies, and for eschewing religous and traditional shackles and allowing science to grow unfettered.
Dude seriously though. Open your eyes a little. The US is being left behind in more fields than I can count. While we debate whether to teach Creationism in schools instead of evolution, an increasing fraction of significant breakthroughs these days are coming from Japan, South Korea and China. Funding agencies like NSF have had their budgets slashed to the point where researchers who's have several grants funded a year have been unable to get a single grant in the past several years. DARPA has decided to stop funding research that doesn't produce and "immediate military benefit". NASA is being forced to work on ambitious projects without being given adequate funds to pursue those without cancelling their science projects.
This administration is pursuing a dangerously short-sighted policy, and while people like you are waving flags and sticking bumper stickers on your SUVs proclaiming how great America is, the rest of the world is rapidly catching up. Once existing grants run out (and we're at the point where that's starting to happen), graduate school enrollments will plummet and the wonderful research instututes that have kept America on top all this time will effectively have their throats cut.
Blind patriotism like yours is counterproductive and dangerous.
Have you seen anything being said by Microsoft's PR department? I haven't
It's an academic research paper that was published at IEEE Infocom, a very prominent academic conference. Look at the URL:m
http://research.microsoft.com/~pablo/avalanche.ht
See the "research."? See the ~pablo? This is one of MSR's researchers publishing a piece of academic research. Of course, it's not a product, because it's not intended to be. Researchers often will build a prototype, but don't have the time or the inclination to produce production-quality code. Do you think Microsoft would be openly publishing the design details if it were intended to be a product?
There is no FUD and no vaporware and no conspiracy. This whole storm in a teacup over Avalanche is probably a good example of why publishing research papers openly on the web for other people (i.e. people who don't understand research) to see can be a bad idea.
Yes, Microsoft research is funded by the rest of Microsoft Corp. but people who work for MSR are primarily academic researchers and have a wide latitude in their work. MSR is to Microsoft what Bell Labs was to AT&T, PARC was to Xerox and TJ Watson Research Center is to IBM.
MSR researchers publish in all the same conferences as academics at Universities and National Labs, go through the same peer-review process as everyone else, and have too much reputation at stake to publish junk papers or overtly push an agenda.
Yes, their research may be nudged in directions that MS wants to go, but it is real research and not a part of a conspiracy.
The difference is that with Usenet and E-mail and stuff, good users don't cancel out the bad users. On Wikipedia, bad edits usually get reverted quickly. Apart from a relatively small number of pathological cases, vandals usually get bored and leave if their "work" is quickly removed.
It's only a temporary measure, usually for just a few hours
Did the LATimes Wiki have a "protect" mechanism? A lot of pages that are linked to from here quickly end up protected from edits because of repeated vandalism.
I have, his arguments just show that he knows nothing about erasure coding.
1. You don't need to have a code across the whole file. You can encode in (say) 100 block chunks. The memory and I/O needed for that is trivial on modern systems.
2. The argument about hashes is just plain nonsense, because the torrent can have hashes of the FEC blocks in addition to the data blocks.
Many researchers I've met at academic P2P conferences have tried talking to Brah Chohen and found him to be an arrogant asshole who thinks that he knows everything, and won't listen to reason. The fact is that bittorrent is very easy to game, and it's a widely recognised fact that tit-for-tat accounting would be far better for lots of reasons. Bram is convinced though that he's God and nobody else knows better. and he won't listen.
Why do you think a lot of websites are having to implement tracking systems that track your upload ratio over time?
Whether or not that's true is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand (which is whether line-item veto is a good idea or not)
line-item veto has very real risks
1. Party X proposes legislation, concerns raised by party Y.
2. Safeguards added to legislation to satisfy party Y
3. Congress passes legislation
4. Party X president snips out safeguards and passes the rest
5. ???
6. Police state!!!!
I happen to think that having the "OK" button in corner is a logical and predictable place for the most frequently used button to me. Just because Windows does it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
You could make that argument for everything, and say that we should all either be using Windows or that other applications should aim solely to duplicate the windows UI.
thinks like being unable to cancel a lot of actions
Like what?
hiding all the useful options so you can't configure the damned thing any more
That's what GConf-edit is for. You can find all the settings the application has, including documentation for every setting. Makes more sense to me to have things hidden away behind a standardised interface than to have a menu/dialog option for options you're unlikely to change more than once
font/style settings instead of a global one
That's just plain baloney
not to mention putting the OK/Cancel buttons the wrong way around for the sole reason that it's 'different to microsoft'.
The "right" way being defined as the way Microsoft does it? Or do you have a real argument for why it's more "right"?
You know... register? You don't have to enter real data. That way you don't have to use anything generator, and can just click through directly to the article, while simultaneously not appearing childish for whining everytime an NYT link is posted.
If it's lost because people have lost interest, who cares?
1. You're an idiot if you're going to write your data on to a CD and hope that it's going to last 60 years. The whole point of digital technology is that unlike analog technology you can make a perfect copy. An average person has the capability to make their digital images last indefinitely.... that's not true of film. Dig out that old album from your mom's moldy rat infested attic if you don't believe me.
2. Just because there are newer cameras out there doesn't mean you have to buy them. It's not like your camera stops working when a new model is released.