In my observations, it all comes down to what you're willing to pay for. If your insurance costs $500/yr you won't get the same level of care as somebody who pays $10k/yr for their insurance. Sure, the same company might write both policies, but they don't treat both customers in the same way.
It isn't like health care is a charity - in any country. Lots of people need to get paid to make it work. In some countries the sick are expected to pay, or at least the healthy are expected to pay in case they get sick (or they go without when they do). In some countries the pay comes in taxes (and if you want to know how humanitarian these governments are try to avoid paying those taxes). Neither way is ideal, and both ways have pros and cons. I tend to think that a hybrid approach is best, but who am I?
People who think that there is any panacea for healthcare are listening too much to their politicians ("just elect me and everybody will be happy!"). There is a legitimate debate on the topic, and people need to get a grip with reality and deal with the fact that at least presently not everybody can live to the age of 105 - not even in Europe...
In the US they're required to treat any acute medical condition that you have. So if you're bleeding they'll stop the bleeding. If your heart has stopped they'll get it pumping again (using any means available).
However, if you're able to walk out the door without dropping dead, then they pretty-much don't need to do anything regardless of how likely you are to drop dead in a week.
I'm not convinced that a completely-socialized approach to medicine will improve things overall, but I'm not opposed to measures to at least help out with folks who can't afford any care and who can be treated reasonably inexpensively. Ultimately, however, everybody dies - and you can't do much to change that. Spending loads of money to make somebody live a few months longer and do nothing else productive with their lives is probably not wise from a societal standpoint. Sure, lots of people might care about that person, but they're free to arrange treatment if those few months matter to them - why force others to pay for it?
It depends on your plan. If you opted for the cheapest plan money can buy, then you get treated exactly as you suggest. If you opt for a more expensive plan you tend to get much better care - because the insurer wants to promote the plan to people willing to pay more.
Note that it matters what PLAN you get - not what INSURER you get. They all have cheap plans and expensive plans, and they're all willing to deny all treatment or approve all kinds of stuff depending on what plan you're on.
If you shop for price you get a good price - if you shop for quality you get good quality. It is like anything. As long as some people care about their health there will be plans willing to cater to them - but don't expect them to be the cheapest ones out there. The difficulty is that most people get the plan their employer picks - and employers may or may not consider a good health plan a necessary perk to provide...
The person paying for it. In the US that would probably be an insurance carrier (those who pay a higher premium might get access to it). In most of the rest of the world it would be your government (if you are lucky you might get access to it).
I have only sympathy with what you went though - I've had someone close to me go through life-threatening medical problems as well. I'm all for improving the level of technology available. However, economics always comes into play - it just isn't politically-correct to admit it.
No nation on earth fully meets their medical needs financially - everybody rations care at some level. Every nation also faces questions like "is it better to spend $500M on one machine in one hospital that will cure 10 extra people per year, or $500M on something else that might save more lives?". The cost of one of those machines would also pay for a lot of doctors and nurses as well - you might save more lives just by giving patients more time with caregivers.
The problem in medicine is that nobody is allowed to discuss the hard questions like this without being branded as insensitive or inhuman. The problem is that the hard decisions get made one way or another, and without genuine debate the decisions are probably made in a less-than-ideal way. Money spent on particle accelerators saves lives - but so does money for food/education/sanitation/law-enforcement/doctors/clean-air/etc. There is only so much money to go around - and economics are all about spending it where it will do the most good...
Uh, the New Testament wasn't authored in Hebrew - it was originally written in Greek, which was the common language of the day (owing to Alexandar the Great's March across most of Western Europe/Asia).
What you are probably getting confused over is the fact that Matthew quotes from Isaiah - which was written in Hebrew originally. Matthew translated it when he quoted it (since he was writing in Greek - not that he was the first to translate the Hebrew bible to Greek).
The word used in Isaiah is probably best translated as young maiden. In using it to refer to the virgin birth Matthew translates it to Greek as virgin to go along with the rest of his account. It is obviously a more recent phenomenon than Isaiah, but it dates back to the first century - it isn't like this was a mistranslation from the middle ages. Matthew's intention of communicating that Mary was a virgin is very clear from the lengthy account of the whole story.
Now, if you think Matthew was full of it I suppose that is something else, but this isn't some invention of modern translators or anything like that.
How about an analogy (since this is/.): The US Supreme Court issues a ruling in English based upon some treaty written in French. It turns out that the supreme court choose to use a less-common translation of a French phrase in the treaty as part of its ruling, and quotes it in English. In the USA the only binding law would be the Supreme Court's ruling, based on the alternate translation from French. The Supreme Court's ruling isn't really a translation-error per se since it is also an original creative work, and the Supreme Court's intention wasn't to just translate the treaty, but it chose to quote a part of it in English to further some larger purpose. You couldn't look at the ruling 100 years later and say that the Supreme Court didn't mean what they said because the translation of a line of French was debatable - the Supreme Court clearly meant what they said in the bulk of their ruling, and the translation was in support of the larger work. Now, you could choose to disagree with the Supreme Court, and that is neither here nor there.
So, while Isaiah is likely to have meant "young maiden" it doesn't really change the fact that Matthew was trying to communicate "virgin". And if you really are just interested in historicity then you'd probably tend to put more stock in a document written after Jesus's birth than 600 years before it when trying to figure out what happened.
FYI - if your main concern is apps consuming all your ram, just use ulimit. You can limit virtual or real memory use to however much you care to. I've found that java tends to require a load of virtual memory though - must be how it allocates addresses (it doesn't actually consume that much real memory).
Or we could just develop these technologies on the ground, and use robots for the actual flights. What exactly do we need to do with people in space anyway, that can't be done with a probe?
Sure, in the very long term colonizing other planets sounds like a good idea. However, there is no reason you have to have people in space to develop the technology to make this possible - go ahead and build a moon base - just don't put any people in it until there is a real reason for them to actually be there. You can develop lots of technology for a tenth of the cost and without any risk to life.
And there is no reason that much of this technology can't be tested out on earth first - put a proposed moon base design in the middle of a desert and have people live in it for 5 years. You can work out the bugs without any serious risk to life.
That is the whole problem with the manned space program - it doesn't actually accomplish anything other than putting people in space. Sure, there are technology spinoffs and all that, but you could have just funded blue sky R&D without putting anybody in space and gotten the same results...
True - but in most languages compilers can't optimize for parallelism too well - so you end up doing that part manually. But the appropriate parallel approach can be sensitive to how threads need to share data - so if you change the requirements your approach can become sub-optimal.
If you could make a high-level language that was more suitable for parallelism then the compiler would do more of the work.
I'd see maintainability being a big advantage of functional programming as well. By defining at a high level what needs to be done, and not how to do it, you can change the former with less impact on redoing the latter.
Imagine creating an elegant and efficient parallel solution to some problem. Somebody comes along and changes the requirements. Suddenly your whole algorithm breaks down and needs a major rewrite because the new requiremets have different cross-thread synchronization profiles. If you had a high-level functional solution to the problem then you just change the code and the compiler does the rest.
In most cases writing correct and maintainable code is more important than squeezing out every bit of performance. And this is VERY hard to do with locks/semaphores/etc. A high-level language that can scale to a cluster has a lot of usefulness.
Good calc - aside from the questionable linearity of heat vs clock speed. However, I have to nitpick one statement you made:
Total energy output of the Sun: "386 billion billion megawatts" (per second)
The power output is in megawatts - period. Not megawatts per second. The energy output would be 386 billion billion megajoules per second, though. Energy is not equal to power.
Is there any reason that absolutely ANY trivial fact can't be included in wikipedia?
Just have a ratings system to put less-noteworthy material someplace where people won't have to browse through it. Companies like google can specialize in finding data in these kinds of articles.
Disk space is getting to the point where an encyclopedia could be built capable of containing the continuous typing of every human on earth for the rest of time. So why not let them type?
Add to that list just about every single piece of industry-specific software out there. From a software-for-the-masses standpoint it really isn't up to the polish of even Openoffice.
However, these kinds of programs are EVERYWHERE. That's because the wonderful devs that develop beautiful open-source media players don't know anything about load distribution on airframes, or fluid flow in sewer lines, or hydrodynamics in a chemical reactor, or small-molecule binding to proteins, or how to manage the workflow of 4000 tax accountants, or how to track every package being delivered in a 8000-employee highrise.
Welcome to the world of industry-specific apps. EVERY industry has them, and you don't learn about them in your computer science program. They're unpolished, and some still even run on green-screens. And if they stop working the guy who made them stop working is fired, blacklisted, and possibly hunted down by a hitman. Companies pay $2000/seat for licenses and they look like they were written for Windows 3.11.
These apps are precisely the reason that nobody in the industrial world is using Vista. Some guy in the desktop engineering ivory tower says "why do you use that lousy software?" - and then some guy in an IT service org on the factory floor points to the 500 robots putting cars together and asks when Microsoft Robot is being released. They might not be pretty, but these apps are essential to any industry - large or small.
You were wise not to stay though. I agree - the time for retention bonuses and concessions is BEFORE somebody turns in their resignation. If they can't treat you well before you quit, then they won't treat you well for long afterwards. It also leads to a strained relationship.
Employers would be well-served to consider just how important key staff are. Not everybody is essential to retain, but a LOT of people are. More than just your well-paid managers.
There was a time when jobs offered benefits, job security, and respect for their employees.
As others have pointed out, this was more of an anamoly than anything else. It really comes down to supply and demand, and also global markets.
There was once a time when people bought stuff from the store down the street - because they didn't know that the one 40 miles away had the same item on sale for ten cents less. Today you run a search on froogle for anything of any value at all, and you pick the vendor that offers the best quality for the lowest price. And that selection can be ruthless - if you find an item listed by two vendors that you consider completely trustworthy and the item is literally 5 cents cheaper at one of them, you'll probably buy it there.
As a result EVERYBODY is at an intense level of competition. That translates all the way to the workforce. if paying your employees more can lead to better sales then it may happen - but those employees might be expected to work long hours or otherwise earn their keep.
There will always be market segments that can compete on something other than just price or hours-worked - but they still have to compete on something. If you're extremely innovative or creative or intelligent you might be able to get by without constant pager abuse or whatever. But if you're fairly typical then you'll be treated in a fairly typical way - and if you don't play ball somebody else will get picked for the team.
Sure, it doesn't sound nice on one level, although it does lead to a far more efficient society. Whether or not the perfect society ought to be perfectly efficient is open to debate. However, this isn't a matter of greedy employers - it is a matter of greedy EVERYBODY. If you buy stock in companies with the highest returns, or always buy the better product for the cheapest price, or expect a competitive wage then you're just part of the big everybody-looks-out-for-number-one system.
Asking an employer to work an employee for 40 hours per week when 90% of his competition is willing to work for 50 hours is like asking a consumer to buy a 12" TV for $500 when the store down the street sells the same model for $60. If you don't tolerate paying more than your have to how can you expect your boss to do otherwise?
And for the record I'm fine with moderate workplace regulations to keep things safe and to reasonably regulate things like this. As long as the regs are fair and don't cause the entire economy to tank - the US (or wherever you live) is in competition as well. I don't consider a perfectly efficient society an ideal one, but we have to be realistic about drawing the lines otherwise in 50 years we'll find ourself invaded by somebody who can build tanks for half the price that we can...
And to think that once upon a time graphics programmers were excited by the prospect of a PC with bitblt capability (which was standard on other archs long before)...
Well, I can think of a military aircraft as well - the Valkyrie.
Granted, it never went into full production, but it was a Mach 3 cruise bomber. It would probably still be the fastest military cruise speed in the world if it went active. Granted, for maximum range it would have spent most of its time subsonic, but it could have sprinted for the better part of an hour over enemy airspace.
If only SAMs didn't obsolete it before it could be fully developed...
The lessons had been learnt so well that in Vietnam the US spent a fortune bombing the jungle - then in Cambodia.
The issue with Vietnam is that there was nothing else to bomb. The US was fighting a limited war, which was doomed from the start. The US no longer does that kind of stuff - it has never worked historically to my knowledge, unless you are fighting an isolated enemy who has no other access to supplies and you have absolutely overwhelming force and want to play really nice.
The problem was that rather than bombing the factory making the guns/missles/etc, the US would try to bomb the trucks carrying this stuff through the jungle. The factory is an easy concentrated target that doesn't move - the trucks would have been hard to hit back then even if they were in an open field.
Same with anti-air activities. Instead of taking out enemy airfields the US would try to engage planes in the sky - which was obviously a lot harder and more dangerous. In a modern battle you would just launch a bombing raid under heavy air cover and the airfield would be no more. The Vietnamese air-force was almost entirely defensive, and they'd be easily wiped out if they were actually targetted.
The issue was politics. Bombs were a negotiating technique. The US was concerned about Russians on the ground, etc. The US limited itself to fighting a tactical war of attrition against an enemy whose strategic capability was left unchecked. The Germans weren't defeated in WWII by superior battlefield tactics - they were defeated because their factories were reduced to rubble (as were most of their cities).
The bottom line is don't start a war unless you're willing to finish the war.
I know a guy who was working in a law firm essentially as a paralegal (law student) who ran into this kind of problem with this boss - a new lawyer at the firm. His boss was really messing up and underperforming, and he blamed it on his staff - who were promptly put on "the list".
Unfortunately in many large companies there is a pecking order and the managers on high can't be bothered to investigate. If you're in a service org you can end up in trouble on the whim of an executive. Not much can be done about it...
Mod parent up. There is no excuse these days for somebody who can't bother to figure out how to work a computer. Sure, maybe in 1990 there was an excuse for the scientist who just stuck with their calculator. But not today. You can find somebody else to do the work fairly easily - at least to that level of competence. Maybe when they are faced with losing their job they'll take he initiative to figure things out.
Maybe it isn't their fault. Maybe it is. Doesn't really matter - it isn't somebody's fault when they lose their hands, but you won't find the local handyman. And computer classes are dirt cheap at most community colleges...
Uh, the whole point of the strategic reserve is for the US to be constantly ready to fight a major war. That hasn't really changed in 30 years. If the US didn't do this then middle-east dictators could threaten the US with interdiction of shipping and the US would pretty-much have to give in.
The US is hardly a theocracy. It wouldn't surprise me if Bush did launch an invasion of Iran at some point, but it isn't likely to be the result of any kind of religious motivation. Iran is clearly opposed to US interests in the region, and meddles quite a bit in Iraq. They posture quite a bit as well. If Bush thinks it is in the best interests of the nation to invade then he'll probably do it before leaving office. It really doesn't have anything to do with his religious beliefs - other conservative presidents have made similar moves, as well as more than a few liberal presidents.
Sure, you can debate moral equivalence all you want - "But the US is meddling in Iraq - so why is it bad that Iran does it?" That's nice and all but it doesn't really impact anything - the US isn't likely to change its invasion plans simply because it makes some slashdotters unhappy. And I think most people aren't terribly happy with Iran so the backlash isn't likely to be all that large.
In the end I'm not sure if the US is likely to invade, but the decision is probably going to be pragmatic in nature (or at least that will be the reasoning behind it). Sure, if they invade there will be all kinds of justifications made for it, but like most invasions it is really all pragmatism. That's why you don't see the US/UN/EU pushing for an invasion of Rwanda/etc.
The real beauty of this is that when the guy is denied jobs they won't tell him why. Ditto for just about any other use of this list.
Everybody has learned that the best way not to get sued about something is to not tell anybody what the decision-making process was. Ten people apply for a job and you want to hire the pretty one - just indicate that they seemed to be the most qualified. Want to fire all the (pick-a-race) people in your workplace - just make sure not to fire them all in a row and be sure to find performance issues in every case, and keep a token few on payroll for show.
People on these lists just won't get offered credit/jobs/etc. People who date them will just "lose interest." They won't even get a chance to defend themselves or challenge the list - it might be some time before they even realize they are on it...
Look up forfeiture some time. Sure, there is "due process" involved, but it consists of a trial to which you are not invited and at which there is no defence - just a prosecutor and judge.
The logic is that you as a person aren't charged with a crime, so your rights aren't at risk, but instead your possessions are accused of a crime, and there are no laws safeguarding the rights of possessions. Essentially it is a fine without a fair trial. But it is cheap and effective so they do it.
These days you can end up in prison for 10 years without a right to a jury trial. Just get accused of 25 counts of a crime with a 5 month maximum sentence. My feeling is that a jury trial should be legally required to assess a traffic fine. You'd see a big change in the number of nuiscence laws out there!
Retained sponges are also very costly from a medical-legal standpoint, where our broken tort system routinely hands out awards in the lower 6 figures for such events, even when there are no long term consequences for the patient, and much much more when there is true patient injury.
and
Unfortunately, the consequences of leaving a sponge in can be fatal, so all accrediting bodies have taken the stance that there is no acceptable level of such mistakes.
Perhaps the reason juries hammer doctors who forget sponges is because they can end up being fatal? They're also COMPLETELY preventable accidents (unlike many other forms of malpractice - which often involve a lot of second-guessing). The damanges are intended to be punitive in nature - so that hospitals aren't looking at bar-code scanners as a cost center, but rather a real savings.
Actually, a good system shouldn't depend on people being able to count. Especially after multiple-hour surgeries in high-stress environments (there is a LOT of care in surgery I'd imagine).
I think I read that conscientious individuals transcribing values from one medium to another mess up about one out of 25 times or so. That's why you need double-checking. NOBODY can be careful for hours on end - it just isn't how the human brain is wired. The Navy knows all about this - sailors on watch for hours on end could start at the titanic sailing by and not report it, so duties are adjusted accordingly to prevent this from happening.
I think the problem here is that the nurses doing the second counts are the same who did the first, so they probably have a preconceived notion as to the correct answer. If a different set of nurses did both counts and had to report their answer without knowledge of both the initial count and the other count in the second round, then there would be less chance of coming up with the "right" answer (which ends up being wrong).
Yup - when the owners are "the people" nobody really thinks about them when making business decisions. Just a few kickbacks to the right people and there is no oversight, since the right people are the oversight.
When the owners are a bunch of shareholders with a board of directors there is a lot of concern about making every share of stock worth the most it can be worth. Sometimes that leads to short-sightedness, but you generally don't see publicly traded companies being sold for a song without competitive bidding.
I think the reason that government-owned business works so poorly so often is that there is nobody enforcing the laws. With private business there is a government that can at least keep things in line - with government-owned business the business is its own police.
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In my observations, it all comes down to what you're willing to pay for. If your insurance costs $500/yr you won't get the same level of care as somebody who pays $10k/yr for their insurance. Sure, the same company might write both policies, but they don't treat both customers in the same way.
It isn't like health care is a charity - in any country. Lots of people need to get paid to make it work. In some countries the sick are expected to pay, or at least the healthy are expected to pay in case they get sick (or they go without when they do). In some countries the pay comes in taxes (and if you want to know how humanitarian these governments are try to avoid paying those taxes). Neither way is ideal, and both ways have pros and cons. I tend to think that a hybrid approach is best, but who am I?
People who think that there is any panacea for healthcare are listening too much to their politicians ("just elect me and everybody will be happy!"). There is a legitimate debate on the topic, and people need to get a grip with reality and deal with the fact that at least presently not everybody can live to the age of 105 - not even in Europe...
In the US they're required to treat any acute medical condition that you have. So if you're bleeding they'll stop the bleeding. If your heart has stopped they'll get it pumping again (using any means available).
However, if you're able to walk out the door without dropping dead, then they pretty-much don't need to do anything regardless of how likely you are to drop dead in a week.
I'm not convinced that a completely-socialized approach to medicine will improve things overall, but I'm not opposed to measures to at least help out with folks who can't afford any care and who can be treated reasonably inexpensively. Ultimately, however, everybody dies - and you can't do much to change that. Spending loads of money to make somebody live a few months longer and do nothing else productive with their lives is probably not wise from a societal standpoint. Sure, lots of people might care about that person, but they're free to arrange treatment if those few months matter to them - why force others to pay for it?
It depends on your plan. If you opted for the cheapest plan money can buy, then you get treated exactly as you suggest. If you opt for a more expensive plan you tend to get much better care - because the insurer wants to promote the plan to people willing to pay more.
Note that it matters what PLAN you get - not what INSURER you get. They all have cheap plans and expensive plans, and they're all willing to deny all treatment or approve all kinds of stuff depending on what plan you're on.
If you shop for price you get a good price - if you shop for quality you get good quality. It is like anything. As long as some people care about their health there will be plans willing to cater to them - but don't expect them to be the cheapest ones out there. The difficulty is that most people get the plan their employer picks - and employers may or may not consider a good health plan a necessary perk to provide...
Personally, who cares how expensive it is.
The person paying for it. In the US that would probably be an insurance carrier (those who pay a higher premium might get access to it). In most of the rest of the world it would be your government (if you are lucky you might get access to it).
I have only sympathy with what you went though - I've had someone close to me go through life-threatening medical problems as well. I'm all for improving the level of technology available. However, economics always comes into play - it just isn't politically-correct to admit it.
No nation on earth fully meets their medical needs financially - everybody rations care at some level. Every nation also faces questions like "is it better to spend $500M on one machine in one hospital that will cure 10 extra people per year, or $500M on something else that might save more lives?". The cost of one of those machines would also pay for a lot of doctors and nurses as well - you might save more lives just by giving patients more time with caregivers.
The problem in medicine is that nobody is allowed to discuss the hard questions like this without being branded as insensitive or inhuman. The problem is that the hard decisions get made one way or another, and without genuine debate the decisions are probably made in a less-than-ideal way. Money spent on particle accelerators saves lives - but so does money for food/education/sanitation/law-enforcement/doctors/clean-air/etc. There is only so much money to go around - and economics are all about spending it where it will do the most good...
Uh, the New Testament wasn't authored in Hebrew - it was originally written in Greek, which was the common language of the day (owing to Alexandar the Great's March across most of Western Europe/Asia).
/.): The US Supreme Court issues a ruling in English based upon some treaty written in French. It turns out that the supreme court choose to use a less-common translation of a French phrase in the treaty as part of its ruling, and quotes it in English. In the USA the only binding law would be the Supreme Court's ruling, based on the alternate translation from French. The Supreme Court's ruling isn't really a translation-error per se since it is also an original creative work, and the Supreme Court's intention wasn't to just translate the treaty, but it chose to quote a part of it in English to further some larger purpose. You couldn't look at the ruling 100 years later and say that the Supreme Court didn't mean what they said because the translation of a line of French was debatable - the Supreme Court clearly meant what they said in the bulk of their ruling, and the translation was in support of the larger work. Now, you could choose to disagree with the Supreme Court, and that is neither here nor there.
What you are probably getting confused over is the fact that Matthew quotes from Isaiah - which was written in Hebrew originally. Matthew translated it when he quoted it (since he was writing in Greek - not that he was the first to translate the Hebrew bible to Greek).
The word used in Isaiah is probably best translated as young maiden. In using it to refer to the virgin birth Matthew translates it to Greek as virgin to go along with the rest of his account. It is obviously a more recent phenomenon than Isaiah, but it dates back to the first century - it isn't like this was a mistranslation from the middle ages. Matthew's intention of communicating that Mary was a virgin is very clear from the lengthy account of the whole story.
Now, if you think Matthew was full of it I suppose that is something else, but this isn't some invention of modern translators or anything like that.
How about an analogy (since this is
So, while Isaiah is likely to have meant "young maiden" it doesn't really change the fact that Matthew was trying to communicate "virgin". And if you really are just interested in historicity then you'd probably tend to put more stock in a document written after Jesus's birth than 600 years before it when trying to figure out what happened.
FYI - if your main concern is apps consuming all your ram, just use ulimit. You can limit virtual or real memory use to however much you care to. I've found that java tends to require a load of virtual memory though - must be how it allocates addresses (it doesn't actually consume that much real memory).
Or we could just develop these technologies on the ground, and use robots for the actual flights. What exactly do we need to do with people in space anyway, that can't be done with a probe?
Sure, in the very long term colonizing other planets sounds like a good idea. However, there is no reason you have to have people in space to develop the technology to make this possible - go ahead and build a moon base - just don't put any people in it until there is a real reason for them to actually be there. You can develop lots of technology for a tenth of the cost and without any risk to life.
And there is no reason that much of this technology can't be tested out on earth first - put a proposed moon base design in the middle of a desert and have people live in it for 5 years. You can work out the bugs without any serious risk to life.
That is the whole problem with the manned space program - it doesn't actually accomplish anything other than putting people in space. Sure, there are technology spinoffs and all that, but you could have just funded blue sky R&D without putting anybody in space and gotten the same results...
True - but in most languages compilers can't optimize for parallelism too well - so you end up doing that part manually. But the appropriate parallel approach can be sensitive to how threads need to share data - so if you change the requirements your approach can become sub-optimal.
If you could make a high-level language that was more suitable for parallelism then the compiler would do more of the work.
I'd see maintainability being a big advantage of functional programming as well. By defining at a high level what needs to be done, and not how to do it, you can change the former with less impact on redoing the latter.
Imagine creating an elegant and efficient parallel solution to some problem. Somebody comes along and changes the requirements. Suddenly your whole algorithm breaks down and needs a major rewrite because the new requiremets have different cross-thread synchronization profiles. If you had a high-level functional solution to the problem then you just change the code and the compiler does the rest.
In most cases writing correct and maintainable code is more important than squeezing out every bit of performance. And this is VERY hard to do with locks/semaphores/etc. A high-level language that can scale to a cluster has a lot of usefulness.
Good calc - aside from the questionable linearity of heat vs clock speed. However, I have to nitpick one statement you made:
Total energy output of the Sun: "386 billion billion megawatts" (per second)
The power output is in megawatts - period. Not megawatts per second. The energy output would be 386 billion billion megajoules per second, though. Energy is not equal to power.
But you used the figure for power correctly.
Ok, devil's advocate - why not?
Is there any reason that absolutely ANY trivial fact can't be included in wikipedia?
Just have a ratings system to put less-noteworthy material someplace where people won't have to browse through it. Companies like google can specialize in finding data in these kinds of articles.
Disk space is getting to the point where an encyclopedia could be built capable of containing the continuous typing of every human on earth for the rest of time. So why not let them type?
You're probably right.
Add to that list just about every single piece of industry-specific software out there. From a software-for-the-masses standpoint it really isn't up to the polish of even Openoffice.
However, these kinds of programs are EVERYWHERE. That's because the wonderful devs that develop beautiful open-source media players don't know anything about load distribution on airframes, or fluid flow in sewer lines, or hydrodynamics in a chemical reactor, or small-molecule binding to proteins, or how to manage the workflow of 4000 tax accountants, or how to track every package being delivered in a 8000-employee highrise.
Welcome to the world of industry-specific apps. EVERY industry has them, and you don't learn about them in your computer science program. They're unpolished, and some still even run on green-screens. And if they stop working the guy who made them stop working is fired, blacklisted, and possibly hunted down by a hitman. Companies pay $2000/seat for licenses and they look like they were written for Windows 3.11.
These apps are precisely the reason that nobody in the industrial world is using Vista. Some guy in the desktop engineering ivory tower says "why do you use that lousy software?" - and then some guy in an IT service org on the factory floor points to the 500 robots putting cars together and asks when Microsoft Robot is being released. They might not be pretty, but these apps are essential to any industry - large or small.
You were wise not to stay though. I agree - the time for retention bonuses and concessions is BEFORE somebody turns in their resignation. If they can't treat you well before you quit, then they won't treat you well for long afterwards. It also leads to a strained relationship.
Employers would be well-served to consider just how important key staff are. Not everybody is essential to retain, but a LOT of people are. More than just your well-paid managers.
There was a time when jobs offered benefits, job security, and respect for their employees.
As others have pointed out, this was more of an anamoly than anything else. It really comes down to supply and demand, and also global markets.
There was once a time when people bought stuff from the store down the street - because they didn't know that the one 40 miles away had the same item on sale for ten cents less. Today you run a search on froogle for anything of any value at all, and you pick the vendor that offers the best quality for the lowest price. And that selection can be ruthless - if you find an item listed by two vendors that you consider completely trustworthy and the item is literally 5 cents cheaper at one of them, you'll probably buy it there.
As a result EVERYBODY is at an intense level of competition. That translates all the way to the workforce. if paying your employees more can lead to better sales then it may happen - but those employees might be expected to work long hours or otherwise earn their keep.
There will always be market segments that can compete on something other than just price or hours-worked - but they still have to compete on something. If you're extremely innovative or creative or intelligent you might be able to get by without constant pager abuse or whatever. But if you're fairly typical then you'll be treated in a fairly typical way - and if you don't play ball somebody else will get picked for the team.
Sure, it doesn't sound nice on one level, although it does lead to a far more efficient society. Whether or not the perfect society ought to be perfectly efficient is open to debate. However, this isn't a matter of greedy employers - it is a matter of greedy EVERYBODY. If you buy stock in companies with the highest returns, or always buy the better product for the cheapest price, or expect a competitive wage then you're just part of the big everybody-looks-out-for-number-one system.
Asking an employer to work an employee for 40 hours per week when 90% of his competition is willing to work for 50 hours is like asking a consumer to buy a 12" TV for $500 when the store down the street sells the same model for $60. If you don't tolerate paying more than your have to how can you expect your boss to do otherwise?
And for the record I'm fine with moderate workplace regulations to keep things safe and to reasonably regulate things like this. As long as the regs are fair and don't cause the entire economy to tank - the US (or wherever you live) is in competition as well. I don't consider a perfectly efficient society an ideal one, but we have to be realistic about drawing the lines otherwise in 50 years we'll find ourself invaded by somebody who can build tanks for half the price that we can...
And to think that once upon a time graphics programmers were excited by the prospect of a PC with bitblt capability (which was standard on other archs long before)...
Well, I can think of a military aircraft as well - the Valkyrie.
Granted, it never went into full production, but it was a Mach 3 cruise bomber. It would probably still be the fastest military cruise speed in the world if it went active. Granted, for maximum range it would have spent most of its time subsonic, but it could have sprinted for the better part of an hour over enemy airspace.
If only SAMs didn't obsolete it before it could be fully developed...
The lessons had been learnt so well that in Vietnam the US spent a fortune bombing the jungle - then in Cambodia.
The issue with Vietnam is that there was nothing else to bomb. The US was fighting a limited war, which was doomed from the start. The US no longer does that kind of stuff - it has never worked historically to my knowledge, unless you are fighting an isolated enemy who has no other access to supplies and you have absolutely overwhelming force and want to play really nice.
The problem was that rather than bombing the factory making the guns/missles/etc, the US would try to bomb the trucks carrying this stuff through the jungle. The factory is an easy concentrated target that doesn't move - the trucks would have been hard to hit back then even if they were in an open field.
Same with anti-air activities. Instead of taking out enemy airfields the US would try to engage planes in the sky - which was obviously a lot harder and more dangerous. In a modern battle you would just launch a bombing raid under heavy air cover and the airfield would be no more. The Vietnamese air-force was almost entirely defensive, and they'd be easily wiped out if they were actually targetted.
The issue was politics. Bombs were a negotiating technique. The US was concerned about Russians on the ground, etc. The US limited itself to fighting a tactical war of attrition against an enemy whose strategic capability was left unchecked. The Germans weren't defeated in WWII by superior battlefield tactics - they were defeated because their factories were reduced to rubble (as were most of their cities).
The bottom line is don't start a war unless you're willing to finish the war.
I know a guy who was working in a law firm essentially as a paralegal (law student) who ran into this kind of problem with this boss - a new lawyer at the firm. His boss was really messing up and underperforming, and he blamed it on his staff - who were promptly put on "the list".
Unfortunately in many large companies there is a pecking order and the managers on high can't be bothered to investigate. If you're in a service org you can end up in trouble on the whim of an executive. Not much can be done about it...
Mod parent up. There is no excuse these days for somebody who can't bother to figure out how to work a computer. Sure, maybe in 1990 there was an excuse for the scientist who just stuck with their calculator. But not today. You can find somebody else to do the work fairly easily - at least to that level of competence. Maybe when they are faced with losing their job they'll take he initiative to figure things out.
Maybe it isn't their fault. Maybe it is. Doesn't really matter - it isn't somebody's fault when they lose their hands, but you won't find the local handyman. And computer classes are dirt cheap at most community colleges...
Uh, the whole point of the strategic reserve is for the US to be constantly ready to fight a major war. That hasn't really changed in 30 years. If the US didn't do this then middle-east dictators could threaten the US with interdiction of shipping and the US would pretty-much have to give in.
The US is hardly a theocracy. It wouldn't surprise me if Bush did launch an invasion of Iran at some point, but it isn't likely to be the result of any kind of religious motivation. Iran is clearly opposed to US interests in the region, and meddles quite a bit in Iraq. They posture quite a bit as well. If Bush thinks it is in the best interests of the nation to invade then he'll probably do it before leaving office. It really doesn't have anything to do with his religious beliefs - other conservative presidents have made similar moves, as well as more than a few liberal presidents.
Sure, you can debate moral equivalence all you want - "But the US is meddling in Iraq - so why is it bad that Iran does it?" That's nice and all but it doesn't really impact anything - the US isn't likely to change its invasion plans simply because it makes some slashdotters unhappy. And I think most people aren't terribly happy with Iran so the backlash isn't likely to be all that large.
In the end I'm not sure if the US is likely to invade, but the decision is probably going to be pragmatic in nature (or at least that will be the reasoning behind it). Sure, if they invade there will be all kinds of justifications made for it, but like most invasions it is really all pragmatism. That's why you don't see the US/UN/EU pushing for an invasion of Rwanda/etc.
The real beauty of this is that when the guy is denied jobs they won't tell him why. Ditto for just about any other use of this list.
Everybody has learned that the best way not to get sued about something is to not tell anybody what the decision-making process was. Ten people apply for a job and you want to hire the pretty one - just indicate that they seemed to be the most qualified. Want to fire all the (pick-a-race) people in your workplace - just make sure not to fire them all in a row and be sure to find performance issues in every case, and keep a token few on payroll for show.
People on these lists just won't get offered credit/jobs/etc. People who date them will just "lose interest." They won't even get a chance to defend themselves or challenge the list - it might be some time before they even realize they are on it...
Look up forfeiture some time. Sure, there is "due process" involved, but it consists of a trial to which you are not invited and at which there is no defence - just a prosecutor and judge.
The logic is that you as a person aren't charged with a crime, so your rights aren't at risk, but instead your possessions are accused of a crime, and there are no laws safeguarding the rights of possessions. Essentially it is a fine without a fair trial. But it is cheap and effective so they do it.
These days you can end up in prison for 10 years without a right to a jury trial. Just get accused of 25 counts of a crime with a 5 month maximum sentence. My feeling is that a jury trial should be legally required to assess a traffic fine. You'd see a big change in the number of nuiscence laws out there!
You said:
Retained sponges are also very costly from a medical-legal standpoint, where our broken tort system routinely hands out awards in the lower 6 figures for such events, even when there are no long term consequences for the patient, and much much more when there is true patient injury.
and
Unfortunately, the consequences of leaving a sponge in can be fatal, so all accrediting bodies have taken the stance that there is no acceptable level of such mistakes.
Perhaps the reason juries hammer doctors who forget sponges is because they can end up being fatal? They're also COMPLETELY preventable accidents (unlike many other forms of malpractice - which often involve a lot of second-guessing). The damanges are intended to be punitive in nature - so that hospitals aren't looking at bar-code scanners as a cost center, but rather a real savings.
Actually, a good system shouldn't depend on people being able to count. Especially after multiple-hour surgeries in high-stress environments (there is a LOT of care in surgery I'd imagine).
I think I read that conscientious individuals transcribing values from one medium to another mess up about one out of 25 times or so. That's why you need double-checking. NOBODY can be careful for hours on end - it just isn't how the human brain is wired. The Navy knows all about this - sailors on watch for hours on end could start at the titanic sailing by and not report it, so duties are adjusted accordingly to prevent this from happening.
I think the problem here is that the nurses doing the second counts are the same who did the first, so they probably have a preconceived notion as to the correct answer. If a different set of nurses did both counts and had to report their answer without knowledge of both the initial count and the other count in the second round, then there would be less chance of coming up with the "right" answer (which ends up being wrong).
Yup - when the owners are "the people" nobody really thinks about them when making business decisions. Just a few kickbacks to the right people and there is no oversight, since the right people are the oversight.
When the owners are a bunch of shareholders with a board of directors there is a lot of concern about making every share of stock worth the most it can be worth. Sometimes that leads to short-sightedness, but you generally don't see publicly traded companies being sold for a song without competitive bidding.
I think the reason that government-owned business works so poorly so often is that there is nobody enforcing the laws. With private business there is a government that can at least keep things in line - with government-owned business the business is its own police.