When I got stuck on travel most of last summer, I started blogging about how pissed off I was. Not even work-related stuff, just about how idiotic the airline staff was, or how run down some of the hotels were. That kept me sane.
We have one candidate that opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, and another that still insists it was a rousing success. This isn't even a contest.
You have a much better chance of competing against an evil corporation than you do against an evil government.
The problem arises when all of the corporations are evil, and pretty much everything runs through them.
A quick example: California just threw out No Compete clauses. These were provisions in employee's contracts that said, basically, you couldn't work for a former employer's competitor. One you took a job with Company A, you could never use your skills for Company B, C, or D. You were useless in your chosen field.
"That sucks," you say, "so don't work for Company A." The problem is, Company B, C, and D also have that same provision. The end result: you couldn't go to work without essentially selling yourself into slavery.
This is wrong, and needs to be restrained. In fact, I think one of the most important roles of Government today is to reign in the accumulation of power by corporations.
Anyhow, I digress. No mention of iPhone: Good. Not because I hate the iPhone (I loves it), but because I think the focus should be on the user, not on one specific device.
I certainly understand where you're coming from, but I also understand why the iPhone is so often mentioned in comparison to Android and similar products: the iPhone is the "reference build" of a smart phone.
Your phone has a touch screen? Cool; is it as responsive as the iPhone? Your phone has email? Nice; is it as well integrated as the iPhone? You have turn-by-turn navigation? Nice, is it... wait a minute, you don't have that on the iPhone? Wow...
iPhone is the product to meet and beat, so comparisons are inevitable, just like FireFox was always compared to IE, when it was first getting its footing. Now that FireFox is largely seen as "as good as" IE, and in many cases superior, the comparisons are less frequent.
The touchscreen looks solid, plus there's a full, slide-out keyboard. Beautiful.
It's an open architecture, so there's none of this "sorry, we'll let this guy sell his 'I'm An Idiot' app for $1,000, but if you try to port a web browser over, we'll murder your children" crap.
It runs Java, so there's none of this "you can program in any language you want, as long as your one of the ten people in the universe that uses Objective-C" crap.
Please, Google, *please* don't screw this up. Cool it with the "for your eyes only" SDK shenanigans. Get a decent build out the door, and start getting some handset makers in the game.
The smaller cameras get, the more common this is going to become.
Security guards and such get all bent out of shape if you try to take a picture inside of a mall. Cops get all bent out of shape when you record them being cops. But when the camera is so small that it can't be easily spotted...
Agreed. I bike 30 miles every other day and that was enough, along with a sensible diet, to get me from a peak of 180 pounds down to a more healthy 155. Now I'm steady at 155 but can still eat more than I normally could without the exercise. Plus it's good for the heart.
Maintaining weight is a matter of how many calories you consume and how many your burn. Weight training will build muscle but doesn't burn a lot of calories. Things like running, swimming, and biking are the kinds of things that burn calories.
True, running a mile may burn more calories than lifting weights immediately, but the immediate effect isn't the only thing to consider. In fact, it isn't even the most important.
The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even just sitting around browsing the web. So in the regard, weight training is vastly more important that steady-state cardio.
And when you do brief, intense exercise, it fires up your metabolism for the next 24-48 hours. So running five miles burns more calories than 15 minutes of interval sprints or a half hour of CrossFit while you're exercising, but two days later, the guy who did intervals or CrossFit will have burned more total calories.
I don't know about that. A lot of my books are like television is to other people: simple entertainment. There are times when I want to have my horizons expanded, or to learn something new and nifty. But there are other times when I just want to forget about everything that happened at the office today, and when I do, it's kind of amazing how often I pick up a book that involves a guy with a staff blowing things to smithereens. And if there's a tool that will point me to even more guys with staves blowing even more things to smithereens, I say bring it on. Sometimes, I just want something comfortable. And explosive.
Do I just not understand the market dynamics, or could this be a case of price fixing?
The cell phone providers are an oligopoly, which allows price fixing. On top of that, if you try to cancel your contract, they charge you $250, further stifling competition.
You know, I'm glad people are waking up and deciding that they need to do something about their health. Two problems, though:
1. If the government wants to mandate a healthy lifestyle, it can kindly go right to hell. I know, this is Japan, not the US, but I don't like big government no matter what continent its on.
2. Why do people insist on using meaningless standards like waist size or BMI, standards that can easily be shown to have no real bearing on health? Especially when there are perfectly good, and just as easy, methods that actually mean something, like hip-to-waist ratio.
Did it occur to you that the "recession" you mentioned--that is, a condition in which the supply of labor exceeds demand--means that you aren't worth as much as during times of tight supply?
It doesn't matter what the market conditions are, slavery is wrong, and that's basically what a non-compete is: slavery. To get a decent job today, you need to spend years of your life, and thousands of dollars, just to get in the door. And then, for the privileged of working for a company, you're supposed to sign a piece of paper that says, essentially, "if you aren't working for us, you aren't allowed to work at all"?
I honestly don't care about the market effect of no-competes. No-competes are inherently immoral. These kinds of studies are just tools to help get rid of them.
There is a saying here (paraphrased): "A 20 year old liberal will end up a 70 year old conservative and doesn't have to change a single of his views".
So I don't fear for the conservative parties of the world just yet.
You do realize that this quote means that public opinion tends to drift towards liberalism, right? It means that in 20 years, what is considered liberal now will be considered conservative, and what is considered liberal will be even further to the left.
The first line of this article could easily be reworded "alphadogg points us to a NetworkWorld story about the search by ISPs for new ways to stop rendering the service for which their customers pay."
For what it's worth, I'm a conservative, and I plan on voting for Obama, because he's more conservative than McCain. Traditionally conservative, that is, not "hey, let's start a bunch of wars and run up the deficit" conservative.
I was in the corner, bitching about the fact that it took almost a decade to get Java 6 on the Mac. From a third party. Then, I was bitching about the fact that Apple decided to release the "official" Java 6, but limited it to 64 bit processors.
Since when has writing code quickly ever been considered one of Java's strong points? Personally I'd take stdio over Java's alternative (file wrapped in a stream buffer wrapped in a buffered reader wrapped in an enigma) any day of the week. Yeah, Java's file I/O is kind of... verbose. A lot of things in Java are. But that's why pretty much everyone who codes in Java has some utility class with some version of writetoFile( byte[] data, File file ). Solve the problem once and forget about it. To me, that's less onerous than trying to figure out which of the thirteen thousand different implementations of a string class someone is using, but maybe that's just me.
Though this is one of the things that they should look into fixing in newer versions of Java. They really need to go ahead and make a version that is extensively similar to, but not necessarily backwards-compatible with, previous version, that is more internally consistent and less verbose. I've been coding Java for almost a decade, and I still have to stop and think about whether I need to call size or length.
It has killed our manufacturing base and is eating into programming and hands-on tech jobs, but also gives us lots of shinny cheap trinkets and fat cars. Along with a ballooning trade deficit, crushing debt, an economy based more on illusion than real, tangible goods...
Like I said before "eating nutritiously won't make you loose weight." And that's a fact. It's not as much of a fact as many believe.
A calorie is not just a calorie. The food we consume has direct and powerful effects on our metabolism, hormone profile, and other biological factors.
For example, eating carbs spikes insulin, which is the body's "storage" hormone, meaning you're more likely to store the calories you consume as fat. If you avoid that insulin spike, however, you aren't as likely to store those calories. I've been on a 4,000 calorie-per-day "diet" and losing weight, because I was eating less than 30 grams of carbs per day.
The body is also designed to survive in times of famine. Part of that design means the body is very stingy with things that it thinks to be scarce, and very lose with things it believes it has in abundance. This means a low-fat diet actually convinces your body that fat is a scarce item, which causes it to hoard fat. If you're eating a high-fat diet, the body thinks it has fat in abundance, and will begin to use fat as its preferred source of fuel.
Of course, that assumes that you're eating a healthy mix of fats: mono- poly- and saturated. The body doesn't actually know what to do with trans fats, so it just kind of shuffles them off the the abdomen. And then kills you out of confusion.
So, actually, eating right, almost regardless of amount, can have a dramatic effect on body composition.
He was arrested for nothing more than saying something like "Fuck George Bush" or "Hillary Clinton is a stupid cunt licker" or "Barack Obama can go fuck himself" or "John McCain is an asshole." (There, equal opportunity.:)
Tastelss? Perhaps. Illegal? Not where I live. More importantly: Wrong? No.
I wish somehow, we could pass laws in each state AND nationally, that there be a mortorium on any new tax being instated. For like 5 years minimum...NO NEW TAXES, and even with that...no new taxes without equivalent tax being recinded, or cut in govt. spending. I think we need a constitutional amendment that states no person shall be subjected to (local, state, and federal) taxes totaling more than x% of their income, where x is hopefully rather low. Instead of allowing the government to tell us how much we get to keep, we need to start telling the government how much they're allowed to take.
And I realize that as soon as this amendment passed, taxes would be set at x%. That's why x needs to be low. Graduate it based on income levels, if necessary (e.g., make it progressive), but for God's sake, put a cap on it.
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When I got stuck on travel most of last summer, I started blogging about how pissed off I was. Not even work-related stuff, just about how idiotic the airline staff was, or how run down some of the hotels were. That kept me sane.
We have one candidate that opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, and another that still insists it was a rousing success. This isn't even a contest.
You have a much better chance of competing against an evil corporation than you do against an evil government.
The problem arises when all of the corporations are evil, and pretty much everything runs through them.
A quick example: California just threw out No Compete clauses. These were provisions in employee's contracts that said, basically, you couldn't work for a former employer's competitor. One you took a job with Company A, you could never use your skills for Company B, C, or D. You were useless in your chosen field.
"That sucks," you say, "so don't work for Company A." The problem is, Company B, C, and D also have that same provision. The end result: you couldn't go to work without essentially selling yourself into slavery.
This is wrong, and needs to be restrained. In fact, I think one of the most important roles of Government today is to reign in the accumulation of power by corporations.
Bravo. That was the best explanation of the relationship between God, science, and religion I've read in ages.
Anyhow, I digress. No mention of iPhone: Good. Not because I hate the iPhone (I loves it), but because I think the focus should be on the user, not on one specific device.
I certainly understand where you're coming from, but I also understand why the iPhone is so often mentioned in comparison to Android and similar products: the iPhone is the "reference build" of a smart phone.
Your phone has a touch screen? Cool; is it as responsive as the iPhone? Your phone has email? Nice; is it as well integrated as the iPhone? You have turn-by-turn navigation? Nice, is it... wait a minute, you don't have that on the iPhone? Wow...
iPhone is the product to meet and beat, so comparisons are inevitable, just like FireFox was always compared to IE, when it was first getting its footing. Now that FireFox is largely seen as "as good as" IE, and in many cases superior, the comparisons are less frequent.
I want to make love to this handset.
The touchscreen looks solid, plus there's a full, slide-out keyboard. Beautiful.
It's an open architecture, so there's none of this "sorry, we'll let this guy sell his 'I'm An Idiot' app for $1,000, but if you try to port a web browser over, we'll murder your children" crap.
It runs Java, so there's none of this "you can program in any language you want, as long as your one of the ten people in the universe that uses Objective-C" crap.
Please, Google, *please* don't screw this up. Cool it with the "for your eyes only" SDK shenanigans. Get a decent build out the door, and start getting some handset makers in the game.
Give me something better than an iPhone.
The smaller cameras get, the more common this is going to become.
Security guards and such get all bent out of shape if you try to take a picture inside of a mall. Cops get all bent out of shape when you record them being cops. But when the camera is so small that it can't be easily spotted...
Also, for all your developers, do you have a designer? UI development = graphic design + industrial/interaction design.
Pretty much every web site I've ever been to that was created by a graphic designer was a beautiful, unusable piece of crap. Food for thought...
Agreed. I bike 30 miles every other day and that was enough, along with a sensible diet, to get me from a peak of 180 pounds down to a more healthy 155. Now I'm steady at 155 but can still eat more than I normally could without the exercise. Plus it's good for the heart.
Maintaining weight is a matter of how many calories you consume and how many your burn. Weight training will build muscle but doesn't burn a lot of calories. Things like running, swimming, and biking are the kinds of things that burn calories.
True, running a mile may burn more calories than lifting weights immediately, but the immediate effect isn't the only thing to consider. In fact, it isn't even the most important.
The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even just sitting around browsing the web. So in the regard, weight training is vastly more important that steady-state cardio.
And when you do brief, intense exercise, it fires up your metabolism for the next 24-48 hours. So running five miles burns more calories than 15 minutes of interval sprints or a half hour of CrossFit while you're exercising, but two days later, the guy who did intervals or CrossFit will have burned more total calories.
I don't know about that. A lot of my books are like television is to other people: simple entertainment. There are times when I want to have my horizons expanded, or to learn something new and nifty. But there are other times when I just want to forget about everything that happened at the office today, and when I do, it's kind of amazing how often I pick up a book that involves a guy with a staff blowing things to smithereens. And if there's a tool that will point me to even more guys with staves blowing even more things to smithereens, I say bring it on. Sometimes, I just want something comfortable. And explosive.
Do I just not understand the market dynamics, or could this be a case of price fixing?
The cell phone providers are an oligopoly, which allows price fixing. On top of that, if you try to cancel your contract, they charge you $250, further stifling competition.
You should reply to this, and just quote yourself, so you can get another +5, because this needs to be repeated, loud and often.
You know, I'm glad people are waking up and deciding that they need to do something about their health. Two problems, though:
1. If the government wants to mandate a healthy lifestyle, it can kindly go right to hell. I know, this is Japan, not the US, but I don't like big government no matter what continent its on.
2. Why do people insist on using meaningless standards like waist size or BMI, standards that can easily be shown to have no real bearing on health? Especially when there are perfectly good, and just as easy, methods that actually mean something, like hip-to-waist ratio.
It doesn't matter what the market conditions are, slavery is wrong, and that's basically what a non-compete is: slavery. To get a decent job today, you need to spend years of your life, and thousands of dollars, just to get in the door. And then, for the privileged of working for a company, you're supposed to sign a piece of paper that says, essentially, "if you aren't working for us, you aren't allowed to work at all"?
I honestly don't care about the market effect of no-competes. No-competes are inherently immoral. These kinds of studies are just tools to help get rid of them.
So I don't fear for the conservative parties of the world just yet.
You do realize that this quote means that public opinion tends to drift towards liberalism, right? It means that in 20 years, what is considered liberal now will be considered conservative, and what is considered liberal will be even further to the left.The first line of this article could easily be reworded "alphadogg points us to a NetworkWorld story about the search by ISPs for new ways to stop rendering the service for which their customers pay."
For what it's worth, I'm a conservative, and I plan on voting for Obama, because he's more conservative than McCain. Traditionally conservative, that is, not "hey, let's start a bunch of wars and run up the deficit" conservative.
I was in the corner, bitching about the fact that it took almost a decade to get Java 6 on the Mac. From a third party. Then, I was bitching about the fact that Apple decided to release the "official" Java 6, but limited it to 64 bit processors.
Sweet. Maybe was can start getting Java VMs on the Mac less than a decade after they're released now.
Though this is one of the things that they should look into fixing in newer versions of Java. They really need to go ahead and make a version that is extensively similar to, but not necessarily backwards-compatible with, previous version, that is more internally consistent and less verbose. I've been coding Java for almost a decade, and I still have to stop and think about whether I need to call size or length.
A calorie is not just a calorie. The food we consume has direct and powerful effects on our metabolism, hormone profile, and other biological factors.
For example, eating carbs spikes insulin, which is the body's "storage" hormone, meaning you're more likely to store the calories you consume as fat. If you avoid that insulin spike, however, you aren't as likely to store those calories. I've been on a 4,000 calorie-per-day "diet" and losing weight, because I was eating less than 30 grams of carbs per day.
The body is also designed to survive in times of famine. Part of that design means the body is very stingy with things that it thinks to be scarce, and very lose with things it believes it has in abundance. This means a low-fat diet actually convinces your body that fat is a scarce item, which causes it to hoard fat. If you're eating a high-fat diet, the body thinks it has fat in abundance, and will begin to use fat as its preferred source of fuel.
Of course, that assumes that you're eating a healthy mix of fats: mono- poly- and saturated. The body doesn't actually know what to do with trans fats, so it just kind of shuffles them off the the abdomen. And then kills you out of confusion.
So, actually, eating right, almost regardless of amount, can have a dramatic effect on body composition.
India is a Democracy. China is not.
Getting to chose your oppressor isn't always the big happy it's made out to be.Tastelss? Perhaps. Illegal? Not where I live. More importantly: Wrong? No.
And I realize that as soon as this amendment passed, taxes would be set at x%. That's why x needs to be low. Graduate it based on income levels, if necessary (e.g., make it progressive), but for God's sake, put a cap on it.