Different people have different drives, and different responses to stimuli. People (especially doctors) like you are exactly why we have a problem. They say, "I don't have a problem, I can control my eating and be happy - so obviously everyone else is a lazy slob." Why should people have to choose between being hungry all the time and being fat? Do you have to make that choice?
Some people have a higher threshold to pain. Some people don't get hungry as easily.
What is needed is education on methods of eating that can help elimate getting fat and hunger. Claiming that the problem doesn't exist is not helpful.
Choosing to be fat is just like choosing to be gay. If you are gay, you are attracked to the same sex - but you could still close your eyes and behave just like everyone else. It would just make you miserable.
If you are highly dispositioned to be fat, you can ignore it and exercise and eat nothing and fight it all day. But in the end, you are miserable - your body wants something that you cannot give it.
People are each different. There are real reasons to fight obesidy. But people do not get obese because they are weaker than you - people get obese because they are different from you!
(Me, I got obese because I had a relapse and couldn't walk for 6 months, which sucked. But I'm now losing the weight and hate it. My wife is losing weight doing exactly the same thing, and loving it. We are all different!)
Even in this, parents must be assumed to know better about their children than the government. Otherwise, the government could go around confiscating children on the basis of "we could train them better than you", and other such things. Yes, if there is child abuse then the government needs to get involved - but this is not child abuse.
You say it is worse. Others say it is better. If this were a democracy, whichever group was larger would simply force the other to obey their wims - and you would be circumcising your children.
Fortunately, we do not live in a democracy - so you will still be allowed to make your unpopular choice.
And did you know that people die each year from penicillin shock?
Maybe that is too extreme, because the number of people that die from penus infections is very low - you can see that the more people live due to penicillin than are killed by it. OK, but what about plastic surgery? A few people each year die getting nose jobs, breast implants, etc. What about Lasic? Creating blind people, how awful! All these should be outlawed immediately!
Or wait, maybe we should just leave it up to the individual, rather than forcing them to accept your worldview.
Seriously, if you want it changed, educate people - don't try to hold a gun to them!
Since it was previously considered a "quality issue" but not a security one, I would expect that Apache fixed these errors long ago. At Microsoft, a quality issue is an unaddressed issue - crashes were seen as "avoid when convenient" instead of as a failing. To open source programmers, however, their own pay is kudos on clean code - so they fix things that aren't technically even errors, but instead are quality issues...
Um, Microsoft is not giving up their patents. They are saying this:
"Look, guys, we haven't really had any new ideas in a while, and we're tired of paying so much for ideas. Let's have Congress pass a law that makes it really hard for future people to get patents, but allows us to keep our patents! That way we can still threaten to sue Linux users, but they can't do anything to us! Woot!"
This is true, if we don't have privacy. Otherwise, you're goiong to have to explain why the pentagon was hit, why we are missing two towers in Manhatan, and why except for chance we would have lost Congress.
If we have privacy, we don't need to attack the military (its pointless to do that anyway). And if there was an uprising against a real Hitler-type dictator, most of the military would probably refuse to do anything anyway.
And please remember that those UAVs are not sentient or something. A citizen still controls them.
I'll respond to you, though others have expressed this sentiment.
This is patently not true. Regan was shot. Lincoln was killed.
You don't have to destroy the government to keep it honest. You have to be a background threat.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that anyone shooting the president is sane - see the previous two attempts. But that is the price we (and they) pay to live in a democracy. Eternal vigilance, and hopefully nothing ever actually requires it.
To me, this is the only acceptable reason for privacy. It is the same reason that individuals have unalienable rights to own guns. If we ever get to where we can't destroy the government by force, then government will drift towards dictatorship. If we have guns, we can take the government back when it goes to far - but without privacy, those guns cannot organize an effective resistance.
So we need privacy just like we need guns, to keep the government honest. It is expensive, in lives lost to criminals and similar, just like gun ownership. But it is the only reason the government will not become a dictatorship.
But then, every once in a while, you need something truly earthshaking...
While that is true, it is irrelevant to software engineering. When I write software to simlulate rocket engine fluid dynamics, I do not assume that I should understand fluid dynamics. I get an expert to help with that. That does not make the expert a software engineer - he is a physics expert.
And more to the point, all the really good programmers I know do not work out their heavily optimized code based on math - they look at what they have available, and put it together. Mathmatical abstractions are helpful sometimes, but if you are trying to get something to run faster you seldom turn to them - instead you pull out your CPU's manual, and see what works the fastest.
So, yes, software engineers should pay attention to what goes on in algorithm development. But algorithm development is not software engineering - and forcing people to learn algorithm development in order to become software engineers is a little strange.
(But I'm self-taught, so I don't really care. My code runs several hundred million $, so something must be working right...)
Um, did anyone here read the article (I know, stupid question...)
So this guy was a lawyer for a man (and his organization) that was officially suspected of being a terrorist organization at the time. He knew that. He accepted that, and was working to get them delisted as a terrorist organization. That's not evil, perhaps even laudable, but a reasonable person might conclude that performing such an act might just get you looked at by the government...
This is not some innocent bystander - this is exactly what the NSA has said they were doing, minitoring the communications of people talking to suspected terrorists. (Of course, they were idiots for not following the procedures and getting wiretap rulings - but we aren't talking about things that got out of hand, we are talking about going back before things get out of hand!)
By the way, the guy he was talking to is now officially a terrorist. I know that you probably think that proves his innocence, but you need to realize that you are in the minority on that.
Actually, an inflatible object (propperly designed) is better protected than a more conventional one. What you have to understand is that the physics of an orbital collision are very different from a more mundane one.
In an orbital velocity collision, you can't do anything to prevent impact damage. when the objects hit, their kinetic energy (~25MJ/kg) is converted to heat. That means that no matter what your shield is made from, it vaporizes - nothing you can do about it. So now you have an extremely hot vapor that has just passed your shielding and is heading towards your hull. But vapors tend to spread out, so if you give it enough room it will just apply a few nanometers of additional metal shell to your hull instead of breaking through. So the key is to make sure that there is adequate spacing between your shield and your hull.
Since the size of object hit you can survive is basically proportional to the spacing between your shield and your hull, you want that to be as big as possible. On an inflatible station, you can have it bigger than on something that has to fit in a launch vehicle.
Most people's desire for reproduction does seem to decline with affluence - but not all. Religious people, in particular, are one such group. So let's say that one in a hundred affluent people still reproduce at normal rates - fast forward 100 years and everyone that was not reproducing is cleansed from the gene pool, and all that are left are the rapidly reproducing people.
Affluence is a recent, large change in our environment. The low birth rate is evolution in action - people are self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool. The only thing that is certain is that the people around in 200 years will be the ones that either geneticaly are sociologicaly favor high birth rates.
The point being, it's disingenuous of the President to claim...
I sort of agree - with a caviot that I don't think it is unexpected that a politician presents data in the best light possible...
However the article was awful! (I know, your not supposed to read it...)
So let me get this straight, Bush is evil because he "cherry picked" a year, 1997, which is not the same year that the European Union "cherry picked" (1990)? Wow, the irony.
And the only other claim, Bush is evil because he reported on only CO2, instead of the mix of gasses again chosen by the European Union? Blasphemy! Wait - weren't you guys saying that CO2 was the problem recently?
I mean really, the European politicians are not immune to "cherry picking" dates and gas mixtures any more than the US ones are. The strange thing is that so many Americans trust the EU's goals more than our own government...
The biggest cost in space exploration right now is in the fuel and systems needed to get out of the gravity well.
Interestingly enough, this is precisely wrong. The current fuel cost of sending a pound of mass to orbit is less than $20. The expense is primarily people and infrastructure.
So your solution - to build a larger, more expensive infrastructure - seems unfulfilling somehow...
Heh.
I am currently working on a space vehicle where the cost of fuel will matter. This will change everything! (I hope...)
As a human, we are finally able to force our surroundings to adapt to us, rather than us adapting to our surroundings. As nature gave us this, it is natural - and shows a marvelous work of evolution (or god, if you want).
So seeking to destroy Microsoft when it is being annoying is completely natural, and in line with the actions of a highly evolved being.
Well, technically, it you believe in creationism then it is no stretch to believe that oil was put in the "propper" place, etc. For example, there are religions that believe that Earth was built modeled after another world. If that was true, you would expect normal geology even if it was built in 7 days.
On the other hand, the true test is:
1) find a black hole 50,000 light years away 2) build a telescope big enough to see Earth at 100,000 light years distance 3) look at the edge of the black hole, using it as a mirror to reflect back the light that left Earth 100,000 years ago
Well, for one thing sometimes it is nice to know if your employees are currently breaking the law.
You do know that it is against the law to take drugs, even on your own time, right?
For another thing, if I do not test you for drugs and then you (run over someone with the company car),(cause an industrial accident),(stub someone's toe) and then test postive for drugs at the police station, I am held negligent and my livelihood (and the business I've spent years creating) is destroyed.
Sorry, you don't have the right to put me at financial risk. You don't have a right to a job - you have to work for those...
if someone in the US mails a death threat to someone else in Mexico
In short, yes. If you commit a crime, you submit to the legal system. If your crime crosses borders, you submit to the international treaties that apply. Anything else is anarchy.
There are agreements in place as to how to handle these matters. The agreements are pretty reasonable - especially since the acused gets a hearing in their own country first. This guy was flagrantly violating the law, and then expected to be protected by the law?
What you have to realize is that you are projecting European problems/values on Americans. In Europe, for the most part, you are culturally the same. You share the same morals, so you don't argue about morals. You have varying ideas about socialism, so that is what you argue (from the American perspective, you are arguing about how close to disaster you can dance).
In the US, everyone is from a different culture. Everyone has different morals. Those things are hard for us to agree on, and we debate them endlessly...
But everyone in the US (except for the Native Americans) left your type of country and came here in search of freedom, fro the most part economic freedom. So we really do agree for the most part that socialism is bad. We are starting to disagree about that, because the pioneering heritage is slowly leaving us, but it still is not the thing that divides us the most.
By the way, this really bothers those of us that really do want economic freedom - the country we fought for (we are the ones in the military for the most part) is being subverted into a socialist place we would not want to live.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are an average European family housewife, with 1 child, no.
If you are an average US family housewife, with 2.3 children, yes.
What are they supposed to do with the kids while they drive off in their (in reality) single seater?
Eating less and exercising more does work.
Amputation also is 100% effective.
Different people have different drives, and different responses to stimuli. People (especially doctors) like you are exactly why we have a problem. They say, "I don't have a problem, I can control my eating and be happy - so obviously everyone else is a lazy slob." Why should people have to choose between being hungry all the time and being fat? Do you have to make that choice?
Some people have a higher threshold to pain. Some people don't get hungry as easily.
What is needed is education on methods of eating that can help elimate getting fat and hunger. Claiming that the problem doesn't exist is not helpful.
THANK YOU!
Choosing to be fat is just like choosing to be gay. If you are gay, you are attracked to the same sex - but you could still close your eyes and behave just like everyone else. It would just make you miserable.
If you are highly dispositioned to be fat, you can ignore it and exercise and eat nothing and fight it all day. But in the end, you are miserable - your body wants something that you cannot give it.
People are each different. There are real reasons to fight obesidy. But people do not get obese because they are weaker than you - people get obese because they are different from you!
(Me, I got obese because I had a relapse and couldn't walk for 6 months, which sucked. But I'm now losing the weight and hate it. My wife is losing weight doing exactly the same thing, and loving it. We are all different!)
Even in this, parents must be assumed to know better about their children than the government. Otherwise, the government could go around confiscating children on the basis of "we could train them better than you", and other such things. Yes, if there is child abuse then the government needs to get involved - but this is not child abuse.
You say it is worse. Others say it is better. If this were a democracy, whichever group was larger would simply force the other to obey their wims - and you would be circumcising your children.
Fortunately, we do not live in a democracy - so you will still be allowed to make your unpopular choice.
And did you know that people die each year from penicillin shock?
Maybe that is too extreme, because the number of people that die from penus infections is very low - you can see that the more people live due to penicillin than are killed by it. OK, but what about plastic surgery? A few people each year die getting nose jobs, breast implants, etc. What about Lasic? Creating blind people, how awful! All these should be outlawed immediately!
Or wait, maybe we should just leave it up to the individual, rather than forcing them to accept your worldview.
Seriously, if you want it changed, educate people - don't try to hold a gun to them!
Since it was previously considered a "quality issue" but not a security one, I would expect that Apache fixed these errors long ago. At Microsoft, a quality issue is an unaddressed issue - crashes were seen as "avoid when convenient" instead of as a failing. To open source programmers, however, their own pay is kudos on clean code - so they fix things that aren't technically even errors, but instead are quality issues...
Um, Microsoft is not giving up their patents. They are saying this:
"Look, guys, we haven't really had any new ideas in a while, and we're tired of paying so much for ideas. Let's have Congress pass a law that makes it really hard for future people to get patents, but allows us to keep our patents! That way we can still threaten to sue Linux users, but they can't do anything to us! Woot!"
Too true!
POKE 53281,0 POKE 53280,0
;-}
No, no NO!
loop:
inc 53281
inc 53280
jmp loop
This is true, if we don't have privacy. Otherwise, you're goiong to have to explain why the pentagon was hit, why we are missing two towers in Manhatan, and why except for chance we would have lost Congress.
If we have privacy, we don't need to attack the military (its pointless to do that anyway). And if there was an uprising against a real Hitler-type dictator, most of the military would probably refuse to do anything anyway.
And please remember that those UAVs are not sentient or something. A citizen still controls them.
I'll respond to you, though others have expressed this sentiment.
This is patently not true. Regan was shot. Lincoln was killed.
You don't have to destroy the government to keep it honest. You have to be a background threat.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that anyone shooting the president is sane - see the previous two attempts. But that is the price we (and they) pay to live in a democracy. Eternal vigilance, and hopefully nothing ever actually requires it.
their selected leader was chosen by God
Hey, leave Gore out of this!
To me, this is the only acceptable reason for privacy. It is the same reason that individuals have unalienable rights to own guns. If we ever get to where we can't destroy the government by force, then government will drift towards dictatorship. If we have guns, we can take the government back when it goes to far - but without privacy, those guns cannot organize an effective resistance.
So we need privacy just like we need guns, to keep the government honest. It is expensive, in lives lost to criminals and similar, just like gun ownership. But it is the only reason the government will not become a dictatorship.
But then, every once in a while, you need something truly earthshaking...
While that is true, it is irrelevant to software engineering. When I write software to simlulate rocket engine fluid dynamics, I do not assume that I should understand fluid dynamics. I get an expert to help with that. That does not make the expert a software engineer - he is a physics expert.
And more to the point, all the really good programmers I know do not work out their heavily optimized code based on math - they look at what they have available, and put it together. Mathmatical abstractions are helpful sometimes, but if you are trying to get something to run faster you seldom turn to them - instead you pull out your CPU's manual, and see what works the fastest.
So, yes, software engineers should pay attention to what goes on in algorithm development. But algorithm development is not software engineering - and forcing people to learn algorithm development in order to become software engineers is a little strange.
(But I'm self-taught, so I don't really care. My code runs several hundred million $, so something must be working right...)
Um, did anyone here read the article (I know, stupid question...)
So this guy was a lawyer for a man (and his organization) that was officially suspected of being a terrorist organization at the time. He knew that. He accepted that, and was working to get them delisted as a terrorist organization. That's not evil, perhaps even laudable, but a reasonable person might conclude that performing such an act might just get you looked at by the government...
This is not some innocent bystander - this is exactly what the NSA has said they were doing, minitoring the communications of people talking to suspected terrorists. (Of course, they were idiots for not following the procedures and getting wiretap rulings - but we aren't talking about things that got out of hand, we are talking about going back before things get out of hand!)
By the way, the guy he was talking to is now officially a terrorist. I know that you probably think that proves his innocence, but you need to realize that you are in the minority on that.
Actually, an inflatible object (propperly designed) is better protected than a more conventional one. What you have to understand is that the physics of an orbital collision are very different from a more mundane one.
In an orbital velocity collision, you can't do anything to prevent impact damage. when the objects hit, their kinetic energy (~25MJ/kg) is converted to heat. That means that no matter what your shield is made from, it vaporizes - nothing you can do about it. So now you have an extremely hot vapor that has just passed your shielding and is heading towards your hull. But vapors tend to spread out, so if you give it enough room it will just apply a few nanometers of additional metal shell to your hull instead of breaking through. So the key is to make sure that there is adequate spacing between your shield and your hull.
Since the size of object hit you can survive is basically proportional to the spacing between your shield and your hull, you want that to be as big as possible. On an inflatible station, you can have it bigger than on something that has to fit in a launch vehicle.
There is a problem with this thought process.
Most people's desire for reproduction does seem to decline with affluence - but not all. Religious people, in particular, are one such group. So let's say that one in a hundred affluent people still reproduce at normal rates - fast forward 100 years and everyone that was not reproducing is cleansed from the gene pool, and all that are left are the rapidly reproducing people.
Affluence is a recent, large change in our environment. The low birth rate is evolution in action - people are self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool. The only thing that is certain is that the people around in 200 years will be the ones that either geneticaly are sociologicaly favor high birth rates.
Well here in Chicago we have a walking path that has to be repaved every year or so.
Of course, it's under water half the winter, and frozen the rest...
The point being, it's disingenuous of the President to claim...
I sort of agree - with a caviot that I don't think it is unexpected that a politician presents data in the best light possible...
However the article was awful! (I know, your not supposed to read it...)
So let me get this straight, Bush is evil because he "cherry picked" a year, 1997, which is not the same year that the European Union "cherry picked" (1990)? Wow, the irony.
And the only other claim, Bush is evil because he reported on only CO2, instead of the mix of gasses again chosen by the European Union? Blasphemy! Wait - weren't you guys saying that CO2 was the problem recently?
I mean really, the European politicians are not immune to "cherry picking" dates and gas mixtures any more than the US ones are. The strange thing is that so many Americans trust the EU's goals more than our own government...
Can't say I totally blame them, though.
The biggest cost in space exploration right now is in the fuel and systems needed to get out of the gravity well.
Interestingly enough, this is precisely wrong. The current fuel cost of sending a pound of mass to orbit is less than $20. The expense is primarily people and infrastructure.
So your solution - to build a larger, more expensive infrastructure - seems unfulfilling somehow...
Heh.
I am currently working on a space vehicle where the cost of fuel will matter. This will change everything! (I hope...)
As a human, we are finally able to force our surroundings to adapt to us, rather than us adapting to our surroundings. As nature gave us this, it is natural - and shows a marvelous work of evolution (or god, if you want).
So seeking to destroy Microsoft when it is being annoying is completely natural, and in line with the actions of a highly evolved being.
Makes me worry about you, frankly...
Well, technically, it you believe in creationism then it is no stretch to believe that oil was put in the "propper" place, etc. For example, there are religions that believe that Earth was built modeled after another world. If that was true, you would expect normal geology even if it was built in 7 days.
On the other hand, the true test is:
1) find a black hole 50,000 light years away
2) build a telescope big enough to see Earth at 100,000 light years distance
3) look at the edge of the black hole, using it as a mirror to reflect back the light that left Earth 100,000 years ago
Who says that creationism is untestable? Not me!
why are drug tests allowed?
Well, for one thing sometimes it is nice to know if your employees are currently breaking the law.
You do know that it is against the law to take drugs, even on your own time, right?
For another thing, if I do not test you for drugs and then you (run over someone with the company car),(cause an industrial accident),(stub someone's toe) and then test postive for drugs at the police station, I am held negligent and my livelihood (and the business I've spent years creating) is destroyed.
Sorry, you don't have the right to put me at financial risk. You don't have a right to a job - you have to work for those...
if someone in the US mails a death threat to someone else in Mexico
In short, yes. If you commit a crime, you submit to the legal system. If your crime crosses borders, you submit to the international treaties that apply. Anything else is anarchy.
There are agreements in place as to how to handle these matters. The agreements are pretty reasonable - especially since the acused gets a hearing in their own country first. This guy was flagrantly violating the law, and then expected to be protected by the law?
What you have to realize is that you are projecting European problems/values on Americans. In Europe, for the most part, you are culturally the same. You share the same morals, so you don't argue about morals. You have varying ideas about socialism, so that is what you argue (from the American perspective, you are arguing about how close to disaster you can dance).
In the US, everyone is from a different culture. Everyone has different morals. Those things are hard for us to agree on, and we debate them endlessly...
But everyone in the US (except for the Native Americans) left your type of country and came here in search of freedom, fro the most part economic freedom. So we really do agree for the most part that socialism is bad. We are starting to disagree about that, because the pioneering heritage is slowly leaving us, but it still is not the thing that divides us the most.
By the way, this really bothers those of us that really do want economic freedom - the country we fought for (we are the ones in the military for the most part) is being subverted into a socialist place we would not want to live.