I'm glad someone unbiased and open-minded has finally arrived.
There was at least one windows malware that spread via _requiring_ users to actually enter passwords to decrypt zipfiles and run the resulting executables.
I guess you must also be against the use of condoms too. After all, some nitwits don't bother putting condoms on, and condoms do not work for every class of STDs. So by your logic, let's not take into account the actual transmission rate or the actual number of decreased infections, let's just stop promoting the use of condoms altogether.
Imagine if 90% of the desktop users in the world used Ubuntu/Suse as their desktop O/S and don't do the sort of thing you say you do for your windows box. You'd have the same problems all over again.
May be if Microsoft, AOL, or Comcast, owned that specific mainstream Linux distribution, then yes the same problems would slowly find their way there as well. And please, before you label me a "bigot" and close yourself to what I have to say, just listen to this argument:
The problem is really one of conflicts of interests. When a software company has a financial stake in a media-delivery system or an ad-delivery system (even Apple or Google could easily be tempted by this), whether it's through ownership or numerous partnerships, then it must exercise extreme caution and self-control not to turn the product it sells to its customers into ad-laden remote-controlware. Remote-controlware built for the financial gain of ones's friends, instead of the interest of the actual PC owner (or the actual users), makes an OS inherently insecure. That is why Microsoft gave us scripts that could be executed remotely through Outlook (without the user's intervention or even without their knowledge). That is why Microsoft DRM protection is causing all kinds of problems for users and developers. And that is why Microsoft delayed for years before making a pop-up blocker standard in Internet Explorer. It's not like those problems were not solved problems already, it's just that Microsoft had a financial reason not to solve them -- because it had (and still has) a very different purpose in mind for your PC than you do.
I nominate the Diebold Windows CE (Visual Basic for Applications) voting machines to the list.
After all, Diebold could have done worse and used Windows XP, or Windows Vista (not that it was out at the time), but I still nominate Diebold to the list for having chosen VBA (not that there is anything wrong with VBA, VBA has its uses -- it's just that it's really a poor choice for making supposedly secure and transparent voting machines).
And the reason why a website needs to have complex animations or applications is...
...is because people (and by people -- I mean developers, aspiring developers, and script kiddies) best learn by making their own mistakes.
If you don't like that, or if you don't believe in that system, then you're free to make your own internet of course. If Microsoft is certifying 'open source software', then you're certainly free to start certifying 'acceptable web sites' and 'acceptable web technologies'. With your refined editorial genius and my business acumen, we could start this new 'acceptable' internet together and make millions!
I did (French at 3 years), my brother did (English at 6 years).
In both cases, thrown into school/pre-school environment at the start of the school year in September - fluent *and accent-free* by Xmas.
I have Italian as a mother language, and I speak English, Norwegian, and I am learning German. I can guarantee you that you cannot learn a language in a matter of weeks. No-way-in-hell.
Just to be clear, I said 'twelve weeks or less' -- that's roughly the equivalent of three months or less.
You must be a monolingual English speaker to say this.
I am a native French speaker, but you're not too far from the truth in at least one thing. I'm the exception to the rule (that's why I was careful to qualify my claim with 'most people' -- not 'all people'). Even in my own native tongue when I was a toddler, I only said my first word a year late (they thought I was going to be mute), and even after I started speaking, I had all kinds of stuttering and pronunciation problems. The main reason I know English now is because my family moved from France to the United States when I was twelve years old. I seriously doubt I would have learned English with my natural abilities if I had remained in France and tried to learn it there.
That being said, I've done my share of French tutoring in the United States and I've done my share of English tutoring for French natives who now live in the United States. And while I agree that most high schools are not very good at teaching foreign languages, a typical high school is not what I'd call 'proper immersion'.
In the United States, any halfway decent University will give you some very effective language-learning classes (and even in the Summer, when their classes are just 12 weeks long, and more concentrated). As I said already, there are some things in a language that are more difficult for us to learn as adults, but as adults we also have the ability to learn a language more quickly than kids if we dedicate enough time to it. The key is dedication, persistence, and learning from as many sources as possible. A language University course requires that kind of learning, otherwise you'd flunk the course. Going to the country in question and living among the natives is also one other way (although, that should also be supplemented with other means).
And even if you don't have the possibility to go abroad or to study this in University, you should still try to learn a foreign language from as many sources and from as many varied sources at the same time. This includes getting the tapes from multiple language schools for that specific language (personally, for French and for many of the other European languages, I strongly recommend that you pick the ones by "Michel Thomas". Michel Thomas doesn't have a perfect accent. And his stuff is not sufficient all by itself -- as he claims it is -- but his way of breaking down a European language and his way of teaching that language is the best one I have ever seen). In addition to that, you should get a foreign girlfriend (or a foreign boyfriend) who is willing to only speak that language to you (just never apologize for your mistakes and don't ask for corrections all the time, the errors are fine, it's just the constant correction-seeking and the approval-seeking that may drive them completely nuts). Also in addition to getting the tapes, (possibly) the girlfriend, you should also try to get some friends, some grammar books, a dictionary, multiple (beginner) books, some comic books, any cable television channel, internet radio, original foreign movies, and pretty much anything else you can get your hands on that was made in that specific language you want to learn.
Learning a foreign language is not easy, it can not be just a burst of activity a couple of days a week, it requires lots of free time and consistent daily effort. It also requires you not to mind looking foolish, looking foolish is the only way to learn. Also, as an adult don't expect to get the perfect accent, some people can, and some people can't. That's just the way it is (although, proper professional instructions does help in that area, it just does not have a 100% suc
It is much easier to learn a foreign language when you are younger.
This is part truth and part old wife's tale. Yes, there are some things in a language that are more difficult to learn once you're older.
But no, the reality is that with proper immersion most adults can learn a new foreign language in twelve weeks or less (and in some cases depending on the language itself, that includes a rudimentary level of reading and writing in that language as well). Now how many 2 year olds, 6 year olds, or 10 year olds, do you know that can do the same in twelve weeks or less?
The truth is that with proper immersion, most kids will learn a new foreign language over a year -- or over several years, it's just that we don't really count their time -- the same way we adults count our own time (after all, we have things to do as adults, and them -- the kids -- the kids seem like they're wasting their time watching things like Pokemon). And it's also partly based on the fact that for those of us who did learn a foreign language as a kid, we didn't really remember how we learned it -- so we just assume -- that in hindsight -- it must have been really easy and really fast.
The thing I don't get is why, given Saddam's previous behavior, everyone seemed willing to give Iraq a pass.
Actually, if you're speaking of the genocide against the Kurds, there was international outrage, it made the front page of every major European newspapers, and UN sanctions were going to be imposed against Iraq. It's just that the US vetoed those sanctions and shortly after -- the US gave Iraq one billion dollars in loans (that never got paid back by the way).
The international community has no mechanism with which to deal with people like him.
Like I said, it did have a mechanism, but the US vetoed it. At the time of the genocide, the US government supported Saddam, and more importantly -- it supported Saddam when there was an international backlash against him for that specific War Crime. So, you've got it completely backwards.
Does anyone really think they would not have tried to make a bomb as soon as he could?
Him and countless others. It's not as if North Korea was a big surprise for instance.
Even if they couldn't achieve fission, they had the technology to refine it enough to make a bunch of dirty bombs, load them on scuds and contaminate large swaths of territory.
Him and countless others. By the way, are you even aware that we're contaminating our very own soldiers (in addition to the locals) by using depleted uranium as heavy ammo? This is 'Agent Orange' all over again. Make the soldiers handle something toxic (and by the way, I am not a tree-hugger -- I am aware that not all radiation is toxic, but in this case depleted uranium and even pulvarized depleted uranium is tremendously toxic). Tell your own soldiers that it's perfectly safe. Deny everything for as long as possible. Label all the critics conspiracy theorists (not that this label is not sometimes correctly warranted). And watch your former soldiers drop like flies ten to thirty years from now.
I guess the central question is this: At what point does war become the right course of action?
Do you know a little bit about dog training? Forgive the analogy, but dogs are pack animals just like we are, and when I use that term -- I mean no disrespect by it. But when a country does something wrong, you must come down on it immediately -- not ten or twenty years later -- otherwise your intervention will seem self-serving (or at the very least completely disconnected from the original event). And when one of your friends (or one of your family members) does something horribly wrong, let's say that a family member of yours commits a genocide -- well you stop him -- or at the very least you stop supporting him -- and you do that immediately. This ethics of "You're either for us, or you're against us" is the most retarded tribal thinking there ever was. This kind of tribal thinking is something I would expect from Iraqi or Iranian people, not from the President of the United States. When someone does something wrong, whether they're with us or against us, you come down hard on them. Same thing if our very own people have done those horrible things, we take care and punish of our own people for Crimes of War as swiftly, as transparently, and as fairly as we do it for others. That's the only way we can stop this kind of tribal feuding in the long-run.
How bad does it have to get?
How bad? But the neo-cons wanted to invade Iraq a long time ago, and for reasons of strategic hegemony -- not supposedly because things were "bad" in Iraq. This is documented, from their very own mouths. Asking this question implies that you do not seem to know this.
So now, let me ask you. When we know that our own government is making bad decisions, and when we know that our own government is clearly contradicting the constitution (for instance, the Constitution makes t
Its not the 'smoking gun' that would finally exonerate Mr Bush, but it sure does point in the right direction.
No, this is the 'smoking gun' that only confirms Wilson was telling the truth. Wilson was already saying that the new purchase of Yellow-cake from Niger made absolutely no sense because Iraq had plenty of it already.
[On July 22 2002, Deputy National Security Advisor Steven] Hadley said that this second memo [this one made by Wilson] detailed some weakness in the evidence, the fact that the effort was not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1595
I couldn't find the direct quote from Joe Wilson, but if anyone is willing to do a search through youtube/NPR -- I remember Wilson also repeating this fact several times during his NPR interviews.
Can anyone recommend some good software for giving you feedback when singing? I saw a television program on one, and it seemed pretty good -- I just don't remember its name.
Kimba, Thanks for the backup, but this isn't what I was talking about. I wish I had taken a screenshot of it. When I did that same exact whois search, the information was completely different. It returned correctly, but it contained the organization's name and nothing else.
I would consider this whois info you just posted valid information (as far as I'm aware). I don't think an organization should be faulted for having multiple addresses -- many organizations do have multiple addresses. Also, according to their own rules they would have 15 days to make that information valid, and if you're willing to trust my biased semi-anonymous internet testimony (which isn't much I must admit) they updated their records in less than 24 hours after my remark -- thus obeying their own rules (although the whois record itself clearly shows it was last updated on June 27th -- not yesterday, so if you didn't see the change yourself, I would expect most of you to think that I didn't really know what I was talking about).
I certainly hope they make IE8 faster. My (admittedly very anecdotal) experience is that IE7 is an absolute dog on startup and in browsing. There's a real lag there, that Firefox simply does not have.
I'm not disputing your claim, but you may want to make sure both browsers are either fully prefetched or not prefetched at all before you run a comparison between the two. For me the opposite is happening, Firefox is the slower one, IE7 is in the middle, Opera is ahead, but then again I am used to having so many Firefox extensions running, and those Firefox extensions are precisely the reasons why I couldn't do without Firefox as my default browser -- so this isn't even a contest for me.
Probably never. At least for this model of OpenMoko. It doesn't support 3G, which is what most of the European networks are now flogging for mobile video/audio/broadband/etc
Flogging? Is that a British idiom?
In any case, it looks like you can still can get gsm access in the UK, and will be able to do so in the near future.
...but what about the processes that are slow and plodding and sequential?
You got it. That's the current bottleneck right now. Many of those processes have to be re-conceptualized and rewritten from scratch. For instance, many games say they require multiple processors, but the truth is that most games haven't taken full of advantage of those multiple processors yet. It's a new way of programming for most programmers. It will take time to get those guys converted.
And of course, once this bottleneck gets taken care of, other bottlenecks will follow, but right now the current bottleneck is mostly human.
All true. But what does that have to do with the decision to eliminate secondary accounts?
It's in Netflix's financial interest to convert the bulk of its movie transactions onto their online delivery system. In 2005, I seem to recall Netflix was operating at a loss as it was losing money on every extra DVD it had to ship out. I don't know if this is still the case, I don't think it is, but I still believe that getting rid of the secondary profiles was a way to shift many users onto their online delivery system (without having to violate the current one-user DRM agreements they have in place).
So because they couldn't allow secondary accounts to stream movies, they decided to do away with the secondary accounts? That doesn't make sense.
It does make sense if you take into account the following.
US Post Office mail is expensive, Netflix's marginal cost for snail mail delivery and return is much higher than for its online distribution. Also, Netflix doesn't pay content title owners for the actual number of films viewed online. Netflix pre-purchases the "rights" from content-owners to redistribute those movies online to a potential number of people. Netflix also tries to sponsor its own productions, and it does purchase lifetime unlimited rights to some Indie productions, but that effort still represents a very small fraction of its accumulated offerings.
By structuring the agreements in this way, in other words by paying for the potential number of downloads instead of paying for the actual number of downloads, Netflix is limiting its financial exposure should a film become more popular than initially projected, it's decreasing its distribution marginal expenses, and it's holding a growing portfolio of assets that analysts say will almost certainly appreciate in value over time.
I'm not sure I understand why the decision was so bad. They obviously did it so that people who watch movies separately would have to buy separate subscriptions. Aside from the fact that they weren't honest about why they were doing it (a repeat of their behavior when they were throttling heavy users, and pretending they weren't), that actually seems pretty equitable.
No, they did it because of online DRM content distribution. People were already complaining that they could only stream DRM movies from their main account-only.
Netflix sees its future as an online distributor, but apparently it got itself in a bind the way it negotiated online DRM content distribution.
ZDNet Zero-Day blogger Nate McFeters has asked the question, 'Should vulnerabilities be treated as defects?' McFeters claims that if vulnerabilities were treated as product defects, companies would have an effective way of forcing developers and business units to focus on security issue. McFeters suggests providing bonuses for good developers, and taking away from bonuses for those that can't keep up. It's an interesting approach that if used, might force companies to take a stronger stance on security related issues.
When I think of defects and total quality management, I think of Edward Demings.
Edward Demings saw the problem of defects as a systems issue, not an individual performance issue. And his theory was that paying someone based on performance would have the unintended consequence of increasing the number of defects, not decrease them (Here is the list of Deming's 14 principles with my emphasis added in bold).
Deming offered fourteen key principles for management for transforming business effectiveness. The points were first presented in his book Out of the Crisis (p. 23-24)[19].
Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.
Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease cost.
Institute training on the job.
Institute leadership (see Point 12 and Ch. 8 of "Out of the Crisis"). The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (See Ch. 3 of "Out of the Crisis")
Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective (See CH. 3 of "Out of the Crisis").
Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's work.
How do you keep the lines of communications open against the opposition of either the local warlord or whoever represents legitimate - centralized - authority? It can shorten your life to be in possession of a radio. The mesh network has the potential to expose everyone who is part of the mesh.
Exactly. In Ethiopia at least, because protesters used text messaging to inform of each other of current events and when and where each protest would occur, the government purposefully shut down the entire text messaging infrastructure. (The last I've checked, their SMS infrastructure was down for at least two years, and that was several years ago, and I have no idea if that part of their service has been re-enabled -- or not.)
Sites collapse under their own weight when people get greedy. If the advertising remains reasonable the provider can make money and have some longevity.
Another better example of a site doing it well is Craigslist. Craig just laughs at the people claiming that his site is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If his site was really sold for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars, it's very obvious they would have to fire everybody (even Craig) and they would end up alienating all craigslist users. It's one thing to generate enough revenue to justify 15 to 20 programmers/staff. It's another thing to generate so much revenue as to recoup the ridiculous valuations and ridiculous investments being made.
So, I don't really understand their business model here.
You don't need to understand their business model. Sometimes the first thing people do is cut and paste content from a site onto their own web site to use as some kind of place holder. It doesn't mean they're going to make any money on this. Sometimes, the people that try to set up online businesses are just twelve year old kids, or they're people that have just gotten on the web six months ago.
Search engines actually penalize web sites with duplicate content. They don't penalize the original web site, they penalize the site that's trying do the copying. And in the case of Google if you use Google's anti-spyware reputation thingy, and if someone copies an entire site wholesale like they seems to have done, that web site will most likely show up as a suspicious phishing/spyware/trojan web site, and it will continue to have such a tarnished reputation even six months after -- its content has been updated not to be a copy anymore.
Which is why I don't believe that invisible monsters could possibly make fresh tomatoes bad for you.
It sounds like you didn't get a very good education. Showing kids the effect of the invisible stuff on their hands through the use of petri dishes and agar, both before they wash their hands and after they wash their hands, can be very educational. To make it more relevant to current events, such an experiment can easily be replicated with cheap tomatoes (usually those are tomatoes that have already fallen to the ground and been picked up from there) and tomatoes with their vines still attached to them (those types of tomatoes probably wouldn't have touched the ground, and hopefully the equipment and the pickers hands that handle them afterward would have been properly sanitized). To replicate the effect of a tomato with salmonella on it, you'll just have to spread some of your feces on it, wait, and then wash it with cold water -- so that the smears are no longer visible. You should get plenty of salmonella and many kinds of other good stuff on it that way. If your kid starts wondering how the feces (or the dung) got on the tomatoes, just take him to a farm where there are many cows, take some fresh hot soil samples for your petri dishes, look for where the water runs off, then take him to a tomato garden (or make him grow his own tomato garden in a flower pot), I doubt you'll be lucky enough to find a tomato field with cows freely roaming on it -- that would be too easy of a smoking gun.
The next thing you could have him do is have him draw an epidemiological map, and make him try to find the farm(s)/the packaging plants where the contaminated tomatoes are coming from.
Throughout those experiments, make your kid keep a notebook, keep your own notebook as well, make him formulate different hypotheses and help him design the experiments that could confirm or disprove his own hypothesis. And the point shouldn't be that he gets all the correct answers, he won't get them, and that's ok. Don't aim for perfection here. Germ theory wasn't fleshed out in one day, don't push your kid to flesh it out in one day either. Just get him to get used to that thinking process of formulating hypotheses and trying to disprove them. And do make sure to keep those notebooks up-to-date, this way every time you get back to your experiments -- you can get back to the last place you just left of. And after a while, you'll be able to point to those notebooks to get a real sense of all the work you've done.
After you're done with that, I recommend you tackle the problem of plaque and gum disease, that's another invisible monster that many kids/adults don't really believe in. There are some disclosing tablets (available in most pharmacies) that will make those bacteria perfectly visible to you. Then, you should design some experiments to scrape those bacteria, place them within petri dishes, and try to replicate some of the damage those types of bacteria can do to animal meat and bone/enamel (just ask your local butcher for some animal teeth for your kid's experiment, instead of just throwing them away -- he can just keep some on the side for you -- for the next time you come in).
Wow, that must have been ages ago. How old are you?
Well he couldn't have been older than six years old in 1975, otherwise his bedrock example of scientific knowledge would have been that the world as we knew it was going to end by Global Cooling, not Global Warming.
Can we all agree that no chair is perfect for everyone?
Agreed. Also, I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet, but one needs multiple kinds of chairs. I often rotate between chairs myself. Sometimes, I even work standing up, my LCD screen is big enough, and its stand allows me to easily flip it or put it on a counter.
Same goes with computer mouses, I have multiple kinds of mouses, I often rotate between them. The first time I did this, my right wrist was starting to hurt, and I took a left-handed mouse from an empty cubicle. So using a left-handed mouse at work, and using a completely different kind of right-hand mouse at home (from the one I was used to previously) also completely cured my pain in the wrist. This was ten years ago by the way.
By all means, get a good chair, but don't forget to vary the routine, rotate the chairs from time to time, set up a kitchen timer, and get in the habit of doing various minor exercises at regular intervals.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I think you're thinking of astrology and David Copperfield. As far as I'm aware, astrophysicists do not reproduce.
I'm glad someone unbiased and open-minded has finally arrived.
I guess you must also be against the use of condoms too. After all, some nitwits don't bother putting condoms on, and condoms do not work for every class of STDs. So by your logic, let's not take into account the actual transmission rate or the actual number of decreased infections, let's just stop promoting the use of condoms altogether.
May be if Microsoft, AOL, or Comcast, owned that specific mainstream Linux distribution, then yes the same problems would slowly find their way there as well. And please, before you label me a "bigot" and close yourself to what I have to say, just listen to this argument:
The problem is really one of conflicts of interests. When a software company has a financial stake in a media-delivery system or an ad-delivery system (even Apple or Google could easily be tempted by this), whether it's through ownership or numerous partnerships, then it must exercise extreme caution and self-control not to turn the product it sells to its customers into ad-laden remote-controlware. Remote-controlware built for the financial gain of ones's friends, instead of the interest of the actual PC owner (or the actual users), makes an OS inherently insecure. That is why Microsoft gave us scripts that could be executed remotely through Outlook (without the user's intervention or even without their knowledge). That is why Microsoft DRM protection is causing all kinds of problems for users and developers. And that is why Microsoft delayed for years before making a pop-up blocker standard in Internet Explorer. It's not like those problems were not solved problems already, it's just that Microsoft had a financial reason not to solve them -- because it had (and still has) a very different purpose in mind for your PC than you do.
I nominate the Diebold Windows CE (Visual Basic for Applications) voting machines to the list.
After all, Diebold could have done worse and used Windows XP, or Windows Vista (not that it was out at the time), but I still nominate Diebold to the list for having chosen VBA (not that there is anything wrong with VBA, VBA has its uses -- it's just that it's really a poor choice for making supposedly secure and transparent voting machines).
...is because people (and by people -- I mean developers, aspiring developers, and script kiddies) best learn by making their own mistakes.
If you don't like that, or if you don't believe in that system, then you're free to make your own internet of course. If Microsoft is certifying 'open source software', then you're certainly free to start certifying 'acceptable web sites' and 'acceptable web technologies'. With your refined editorial genius and my business acumen, we could start this new 'acceptable' internet together and make millions!
I stand corrected. Thank you for sharing.
Just to be clear, I said 'twelve weeks or less' -- that's roughly the equivalent of three months or less.
I am a native French speaker, but you're not too far from the truth in at least one thing. I'm the exception to the rule (that's why I was careful to qualify my claim with 'most people' -- not 'all people'). Even in my own native tongue when I was a toddler, I only said my first word a year late (they thought I was going to be mute), and even after I started speaking, I had all kinds of stuttering and pronunciation problems. The main reason I know English now is because my family moved from France to the United States when I was twelve years old. I seriously doubt I would have learned English with my natural abilities if I had remained in France and tried to learn it there.
That being said, I've done my share of French tutoring in the United States and I've done my share of English tutoring for French natives who now live in the United States. And while I agree that most high schools are not very good at teaching foreign languages, a typical high school is not what I'd call 'proper immersion'.
In the United States, any halfway decent University will give you some very effective language-learning classes (and even in the Summer, when their classes are just 12 weeks long, and more concentrated). As I said already, there are some things in a language that are more difficult for us to learn as adults, but as adults we also have the ability to learn a language more quickly than kids if we dedicate enough time to it. The key is dedication, persistence, and learning from as many sources as possible. A language University course requires that kind of learning, otherwise you'd flunk the course. Going to the country in question and living among the natives is also one other way (although, that should also be supplemented with other means).
And even if you don't have the possibility to go abroad or to study this in University, you should still try to learn a foreign language from as many sources and from as many varied sources at the same time. This includes getting the tapes from multiple language schools for that specific language (personally, for French and for many of the other European languages, I strongly recommend that you pick the ones by "Michel Thomas". Michel Thomas doesn't have a perfect accent. And his stuff is not sufficient all by itself -- as he claims it is -- but his way of breaking down a European language and his way of teaching that language is the best one I have ever seen). In addition to that, you should get a foreign girlfriend (or a foreign boyfriend) who is willing to only speak that language to you (just never apologize for your mistakes and don't ask for corrections all the time, the errors are fine, it's just the constant correction-seeking and the approval-seeking that may drive them completely nuts). Also in addition to getting the tapes, (possibly) the girlfriend, you should also try to get some friends, some grammar books, a dictionary, multiple (beginner) books, some comic books, any cable television channel, internet radio, original foreign movies, and pretty much anything else you can get your hands on that was made in that specific language you want to learn.
Learning a foreign language is not easy, it can not be just a burst of activity a couple of days a week, it requires lots of free time and consistent daily effort. It also requires you not to mind looking foolish, looking foolish is the only way to learn. Also, as an adult don't expect to get the perfect accent, some people can, and some people can't. That's just the way it is (although, proper professional instructions does help in that area, it just does not have a 100% suc
This is part truth and part old wife's tale. Yes, there are some things in a language that are more difficult to learn once you're older.
But no, the reality is that with proper immersion most adults can learn a new foreign language in twelve weeks or less (and in some cases depending on the language itself, that includes a rudimentary level of reading and writing in that language as well). Now how many 2 year olds, 6 year olds, or 10 year olds, do you know that can do the same in twelve weeks or less?
The truth is that with proper immersion, most kids will learn a new foreign language over a year -- or over several years, it's just that we don't really count their time -- the same way we adults count our own time (after all, we have things to do as adults, and them -- the kids -- the kids seem like they're wasting their time watching things like Pokemon). And it's also partly based on the fact that for those of us who did learn a foreign language as a kid, we didn't really remember how we learned it -- so we just assume -- that in hindsight -- it must have been really easy and really fast.
Actually, if you're speaking of the genocide against the Kurds, there was international outrage, it made the front page of every major European newspapers, and UN sanctions were going to be imposed against Iraq. It's just that the US vetoed those sanctions and shortly after -- the US gave Iraq one billion dollars in loans (that never got paid back by the way).
Like I said, it did have a mechanism, but the US vetoed it. At the time of the genocide, the US government supported Saddam, and more importantly -- it supported Saddam when there was an international backlash against him for that specific War Crime. So, you've got it completely backwards.
Him and countless others. It's not as if North Korea was a big surprise for instance.
Him and countless others. By the way, are you even aware that we're contaminating our very own soldiers (in addition to the locals) by using depleted uranium as heavy ammo? This is 'Agent Orange' all over again. Make the soldiers handle something toxic (and by the way, I am not a tree-hugger -- I am aware that not all radiation is toxic, but in this case depleted uranium and even pulvarized depleted uranium is tremendously toxic). Tell your own soldiers that it's perfectly safe. Deny everything for as long as possible. Label all the critics conspiracy theorists (not that this label is not sometimes correctly warranted). And watch your former soldiers drop like flies ten to thirty years from now.
Do you know a little bit about dog training? Forgive the analogy, but dogs are pack animals just like we are, and when I use that term -- I mean no disrespect by it. But when a country does something wrong, you must come down on it immediately -- not ten or twenty years later -- otherwise your intervention will seem self-serving (or at the very least completely disconnected from the original event). And when one of your friends (or one of your family members) does something horribly wrong, let's say that a family member of yours commits a genocide -- well you stop him -- or at the very least you stop supporting him -- and you do that immediately. This ethics of "You're either for us, or you're against us" is the most retarded tribal thinking there ever was. This kind of tribal thinking is something I would expect from Iraqi or Iranian people, not from the President of the United States. When someone does something wrong, whether they're with us or against us, you come down hard on them. Same thing if our very own people have done those horrible things, we take care and punish of our own people for Crimes of War as swiftly, as transparently, and as fairly as we do it for others. That's the only way we can stop this kind of tribal feuding in the long-run.
How bad? But the neo-cons wanted to invade Iraq a long time ago, and for reasons of strategic hegemony -- not supposedly because things were "bad" in Iraq. This is documented, from their very own mouths. Asking this question implies that you do not seem to know this.
So now, let me ask you. When we know that our own government is making bad decisions, and when we know that our own government is clearly contradicting the constitution (for instance, the Constitution makes t
No, this is the 'smoking gun' that only confirms Wilson was telling the truth. Wilson was already saying that the new purchase of Yellow-cake from Niger made absolutely no sense because Iraq had plenty of it already.
I couldn't find the direct quote from Joe Wilson, but if anyone is willing to do a search through youtube/NPR -- I remember Wilson also repeating this fact several times during his NPR interviews.
Can anyone recommend some good software for giving you feedback when singing? I saw a television program on one, and it seemed pretty good -- I just don't remember its name.
Kimba, Thanks for the backup, but this isn't what I was talking about. I wish I had taken a screenshot of it. When I did that same exact whois search, the information was completely different. It returned correctly, but it contained the organization's name and nothing else.
I would consider this whois info you just posted valid information (as far as I'm aware). I don't think an organization should be faulted for having multiple addresses -- many organizations do have multiple addresses. Also, according to their own rules they would have 15 days to make that information valid, and if you're willing to trust my biased semi-anonymous internet testimony (which isn't much I must admit) they updated their records in less than 24 hours after my remark -- thus obeying their own rules (although the whois record itself clearly shows it was last updated on June 27th -- not yesterday, so if you didn't see the change yourself, I would expect most of you to think that I didn't really know what I was talking about).
I'm not disputing your claim, but you may want to make sure both browsers are either fully prefetched or not prefetched at all before you run a comparison between the two. For me the opposite is happening, Firefox is the slower one, IE7 is in the middle, Opera is ahead, but then again I am used to having so many Firefox extensions running, and those Firefox extensions are precisely the reasons why I couldn't do without Firefox as my default browser -- so this isn't even a contest for me.
It's obvious they didn't follow their own rules by providing valid whois contact information.
Flogging? Is that a British idiom?
In any case, it looks like you can still can get gsm access in the UK, and will be able to do so in the near future.
http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_gb.shtml
You got it. That's the current bottleneck right now. Many of those processes have to be re-conceptualized and rewritten from scratch. For instance, many games say they require multiple processors, but the truth is that most games haven't taken full of advantage of those multiple processors yet. It's a new way of programming for most programmers. It will take time to get those guys converted.
And of course, once this bottleneck gets taken care of, other bottlenecks will follow, but right now the current bottleneck is mostly human.
It's in Netflix's financial interest to convert the bulk of its movie transactions onto their online delivery system. In 2005, I seem to recall Netflix was operating at a loss as it was losing money on every extra DVD it had to ship out. I don't know if this is still the case, I don't think it is, but I still believe that getting rid of the secondary profiles was a way to shift many users onto their online delivery system (without having to violate the current one-user DRM agreements they have in place).
It does make sense if you take into account the following.
US Post Office mail is expensive, Netflix's marginal cost for snail mail delivery and return is much higher than for its online distribution. Also, Netflix doesn't pay content title owners for the actual number of films viewed online. Netflix pre-purchases the "rights" from content-owners to redistribute those movies online to a potential number of people. Netflix also tries to sponsor its own productions, and it does purchase lifetime unlimited rights to some Indie productions, but that effort still represents a very small fraction of its accumulated offerings.
By structuring the agreements in this way, in other words by paying for the potential number of downloads instead of paying for the actual number of downloads, Netflix is limiting its financial exposure should a film become more popular than initially projected, it's decreasing its distribution marginal expenses, and it's holding a growing portfolio of assets that analysts say will almost certainly appreciate in value over time.
No, they did it because of online DRM content distribution. People were already complaining that they could only stream DRM movies from their main account-only.
Netflix sees its future as an online distributor, but apparently it got itself in a bind the way it negotiated online DRM content distribution.
When I think of defects and total quality management, I think of Edward Demings.
Edward Demings saw the problem of defects as a systems issue, not an individual performance issue. And his theory was that paying someone based on performance would have the unintended consequence of increasing the number of defects, not decrease them (Here is the list of Deming's 14 principles with my emphasis added in bold).
Exactly. In Ethiopia at least, because protesters used text messaging to inform of each other of current events and when and where each protest would occur, the government purposefully shut down the entire text messaging infrastructure. (The last I've checked, their SMS infrastructure was down for at least two years, and that was several years ago, and I have no idea if that part of their service has been re-enabled -- or not.)
You don't need to understand their business model. Sometimes the first thing people do is cut and paste content from a site onto their own web site to use as some kind of place holder. It doesn't mean they're going to make any money on this. Sometimes, the people that try to set up online businesses are just twelve year old kids, or they're people that have just gotten on the web six months ago.
Search engines actually penalize web sites with duplicate content. They don't penalize the original web site, they penalize the site that's trying do the copying. And in the case of Google if you use Google's anti-spyware reputation thingy, and if someone copies an entire site wholesale like they seems to have done, that web site will most likely show up as a suspicious phishing/spyware/trojan web site, and it will continue to have such a tarnished reputation even six months after -- its content has been updated not to be a copy anymore.
It sounds like you didn't get a very good education. Showing kids the effect of the invisible stuff on their hands through the use of petri dishes and agar, both before they wash their hands and after they wash their hands, can be very educational. To make it more relevant to current events, such an experiment can easily be replicated with cheap tomatoes (usually those are tomatoes that have already fallen to the ground and been picked up from there) and tomatoes with their vines still attached to them (those types of tomatoes probably wouldn't have touched the ground, and hopefully the equipment and the pickers hands that handle them afterward would have been properly sanitized). To replicate the effect of a tomato with salmonella on it, you'll just have to spread some of your feces on it, wait, and then wash it with cold water -- so that the smears are no longer visible. You should get plenty of salmonella and many kinds of other good stuff on it that way. If your kid starts wondering how the feces (or the dung) got on the tomatoes, just take him to a farm where there are many cows, take some fresh hot soil samples for your petri dishes, look for where the water runs off, then take him to a tomato garden (or make him grow his own tomato garden in a flower pot), I doubt you'll be lucky enough to find a tomato field with cows freely roaming on it -- that would be too easy of a smoking gun.
The next thing you could have him do is have him draw an epidemiological map, and make him try to find the farm(s)/the packaging plants where the contaminated tomatoes are coming from.
Throughout those experiments, make your kid keep a notebook, keep your own notebook as well, make him formulate different hypotheses and help him design the experiments that could confirm or disprove his own hypothesis. And the point shouldn't be that he gets all the correct answers, he won't get them, and that's ok. Don't aim for perfection here. Germ theory wasn't fleshed out in one day, don't push your kid to flesh it out in one day either. Just get him to get used to that thinking process of formulating hypotheses and trying to disprove them. And do make sure to keep those notebooks up-to-date, this way every time you get back to your experiments -- you can get back to the last place you just left of. And after a while, you'll be able to point to those notebooks to get a real sense of all the work you've done.
After you're done with that, I recommend you tackle the problem of plaque and gum disease, that's another invisible monster that many kids/adults don't really believe in. There are some disclosing tablets (available in most pharmacies) that will make those bacteria perfectly visible to you. Then, you should design some experiments to scrape those bacteria, place them within petri dishes, and try to replicate some of the damage those types of bacteria can do to animal meat and bone/enamel (just ask your local butcher for some animal teeth for your kid's experiment, instead of just throwing them away -- he can just keep some on the side for you -- for the next time you come in).
Agreed. Also, I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet, but one needs multiple kinds of chairs. I often rotate between chairs myself. Sometimes, I even work standing up, my LCD screen is big enough, and its stand allows me to easily flip it or put it on a counter.
Same goes with computer mouses, I have multiple kinds of mouses, I often rotate between them. The first time I did this, my right wrist was starting to hurt, and I took a left-handed mouse from an empty cubicle. So using a left-handed mouse at work, and using a completely different kind of right-hand mouse at home (from the one I was used to previously) also completely cured my pain in the wrist. This was ten years ago by the way.
By all means, get a good chair, but don't forget to vary the routine, rotate the chairs from time to time, set up a kitchen timer, and get in the habit of doing various minor exercises at regular intervals.