Well, as Stephen Colbert has observed on numerous occasions, your gut is smarter than your brain. Therefor, using gut bacteria here is just attempting to replicate the wonderful thought process of your gut.
This is the path to darkness, death, destruction and marital law.
As the son of a lawyer who handled a lot of divorce work, I have to say that was one of the funniest typos I've encountered in a long time.
You're mostly right about the rest of your post though. The thing I want to point out, though, is that many of the civilian population are justifiably afraid that if they do something about what's going on, they'll lose any chance of working, which means they'll (soon, once the 2012 election is done) lose their ability to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their kids. Or they just might get beaten by the cops, arrested and tried for assaulting the cops' knee with their groin, and thrown into prison where they get repeatedly raped and beaten. Or they might get taken in for questioning as a material witness and thrown into the equivalent of Gitmo for a decade. Or they might be put on president Obama's hit list and taken out with cruise missiles. And if it came down to a full-scale military conflict between the US government and its citizens, the government wins hands down, because at this point you're talking about a situation where international stigma doesn't matter so they'll be quite happy to use their WMDs.
For my own part, I don't believe the case for anthropogenic global warming is an open and shut case. I realize there are others who think I'm a lunatic for not being able to come to that conclusion. But the essence of science is thoroughly vetting theories... anthropogenic global warming is a theory whose final chapter is yet to be written.
So here's my question: How certain does a scientific theory have to be before you will act upon it? Consider a payoff matrix that looks something like this: A) You act assuming AGW is true. If you're right, you lose $1 trillion per year. If you're wrong you lose $1 trillion per year. B) You act assuming AGW is false. If you're right, you lose nothing. If you're wrong, you lose $10 trillion per year.
It's kind of like health insurance for the planet: If you don't have a problem, it's a bad deal, but if you do have a problem and don't have the insurance, you're in big trouble. And unless you have another Earth that you can easily get to, it's not like we can run a controlled experiment, so you have to make a decision based on probabilities.
Of course, we know that the vast majority of governments and businesses are betting on B, but that has more to do with it being cheaper in the short term than it being right.
Actually, the sad thing is that it's not uncommon to find people who have put in serious effort to create their ambient slop.
By comparison, some of the experimental musicians of the 1970's (who were on all sorts of interesting drugs at the time, of course) created some really relaxing music with very little effort: For instance, a piece called "Humming" that effectively gets a chorus of people doing exactly what the title says, which creates much the same effect as the most carefully planned ambient music.
What if the ISP says 'not without a warrant' on this too?
Why would they do that? Seriously, what motivation do that have to do that? All it could possibly do is create headaches for the legal department. And if the ISP says 'not without a warrant' and wins, rest assured that somebody in law enforcement would start investigating them for something-or-other. While there's probably a market for an ISP that protects its customers legally, I doubt that the market is large enough to sustain a company that has a real chance of competing with the AT&Ts of the world.
Baseline happiness can arguably be negatively correlated to competitiveness, drive and success.
Or not, because people who are depressed feel like it doesn't matter what they do, life's going to suck anyways. They may also respond to their constant unhappiness by looking for artificial mood boosters, which can lead to alcoholism or drug use. They frequently also fail to recognize the value of their accomplishments. By contrast, a happier person is more likely to trigger their brain's reward mechanisms when they do something productive, so they're likely to repeat the behavior.
And it's also worth noting that it's unclear to what degree "drive" and "competitiveness" has to do with "success": The best predictor of a person's level of educational attainment is their parents' educational attainment. The best predictor of athletic success is genetic advantages like height, eyesight, and weight. Artistic success has a fair amount to do with whether a kid's artistic efforts were encouraged or discouraged early on. Most of the really wealthy people in the US inherited a significant amount (Paul Allen is the exception on this front, not the rule).
A possible factor here is that if they recruited test subjects from the student population (not uncommon for university studies), the black subjects would be more likely to be exceptionally motivated and happy people just to get into the school in the first place.
Well, typically once in office, "Change you can believe in" quickly becomes "Dollars you can believe in". The other way of looking at it is that those in Washington DC are just following the Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
One of the saddest sights I've had in my travels was being in Berlin, with its wide variety of world-class restaurants, and watching what looked and sounded like American tourists going straight for McDonalds.
I'm surprised you didn't add killing and torturing (under the rules put forward by the UN Human Rights Council and Amnesty International) citizens without charges.
But hey, at least nobody's tried to quarter troops in my home yet.
Perhaps I'm thinking about this differently, based on 2 assumptions that I'm not sure you're making: 1. I'm not going to date Mary while I'm dating Susan or vice versa. Maybe that makes me naive, but that seems to me to lead to a lot fewer complications if one or both relationships is successful. 2. I'm not going to trust the rumor mill regarding what Mary and Susan will or won't do on which date. Among other things, people change: Maybe Mary has a reputation for being a prude but discovered a new side of her personality, while Susan may have found Jesus and decided she wanted to remain celibate from now until she gets married.
Hence, the only way I'm really going to know what a relationship with either of these women is really going to work out is to try it. If I've dated Mary for a while, and she doesn't put out on the third date, that's not so essential to me that I'll end an otherwise positive relationship over that. If I prefer Susan's company over Mary's, I'm going to ask her out first, so I'll never know what Mary's views are on the issue (unless Susan and I break up).
You're making two assumptions which are questionable at best: 1. The only way a man can get sex is to go on some requisite number of dates with his desired partner. This is demonstrably untrue - if nothing else, he can probably hire a prostitute fairly easily. 2. The man in a long-term relationship is trading his commitment for her sex. This doesn't seem to be true - studies and polls on this topic suggest that a lot of men really value the intellectual, emotional, and social relationship as much as the physical one.
If I'm looking for a long-term relationship, I expect Mary to put out by the third date or so, and if she doesn't, I'll find my long-term relationship with Susan, who *will* put out.
Or, you know, I might realize that in any successful long-term relationship, there's a lot of factors that matter more than how quickly I can get my partner into bed. For instance, do I enjoy spending time with Mary? Do we have some common interests? Do we have good and meaningful conversations? Can we figure out a way of working when work needs to get done? If this relationship really does well, and we end up hitched for the rest of our lives, we're going to spend far more time dealing with that stuff than whether Mary put out on the third date.
Germany, Japan, Bulgaria, and Italy where US forces stand ready to bravely defend against the USSR and the Axis Powers? Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, where we have troops ready to keep out the forces of Saddam Hussein?
When you look at significant military threats to nearby allied nations, all you have are: 1. North Korea, mostly targeting South Korea but sometimes Japan. 2. Pakistan, who's primary target is the more-or-less equally armed India. 3. Iran, possibly targeting Iraq but conceivably Afghanistan. 4. Serbia, targeting to some degree Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzogovnia.
NASA budget: $19 billion US military budget: $685 billion (including $79 billion for R&D alone)
If you do a pie chart of the federal budget, NASA barely even gets a sliver.
That's one of the oddities I've seen among those who generally oppose government spending: They tend to have a wildly distorted view of where most of the federal spending actually goes. The big items that account for almost all of it are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on previously accumulated debt, so if you're really trying to reduce the size of government, you have to do something about those.
But really, the important lesson from this is that you shouldn't share passwords between different sites. Use a variety of auth manager and a lot of the risk goes away.
The good news is you can probably start doing some of this stuff on your own. For instance, you can probably set up git on your dev box and just use it for your own change management. You can definitely write unit tests for your code, although you may have to keep that fact hidden from your boss. Just start doing it.
If someone is running around in a panic of "I lost the version of the file from 3 days ago and we need to get it live right now!", use your version control and pull up the version from 3 days ago. When asked "How did you do that?" tell them all you can about the repo, so now you have 2 devs sharing code using a DVCS, and then he tells his buddy and so on, so that by the time management has to make a decision about whether to officially use DVCS the devs can say "We've been doing this for months and it's helped us work faster and recover from screw-ups quickly."
This all assumes that the organization is this bad because it doesn't know any better, not because it's actually being impeded by a manager who would be featured over on Daily WTF.
For comparison, right now investors take home 85% of capital gains. So for a $1000 gain, instead of getting $850 you'll get $800. Sure, that's less return, but not enough to make investing a bad move.
Slashdot Mirror
Many major corporations are in favor of ACTA, and no major corporations oppose it, so clearly, signing it is a no-brainer.
I'd have been more surprised if any of the countries in question had had the cajones to stand up to Disney, News Corp, GE, or Time Warner.
Well, as Stephen Colbert has observed on numerous occasions, your gut is smarter than your brain. Therefor, using gut bacteria here is just attempting to replicate the wonderful thought process of your gut.
Either that or a labor action by the Screen Actor's Guild. That's the kind of thing your union is for, right? And she is in SAG, right?
This is the path to darkness, death, destruction and marital law.
As the son of a lawyer who handled a lot of divorce work, I have to say that was one of the funniest typos I've encountered in a long time.
You're mostly right about the rest of your post though. The thing I want to point out, though, is that many of the civilian population are justifiably afraid that if they do something about what's going on, they'll lose any chance of working, which means they'll (soon, once the 2012 election is done) lose their ability to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their kids. Or they just might get beaten by the cops, arrested and tried for assaulting the cops' knee with their groin, and thrown into prison where they get repeatedly raped and beaten. Or they might get taken in for questioning as a material witness and thrown into the equivalent of Gitmo for a decade. Or they might be put on president Obama's hit list and taken out with cruise missiles. And if it came down to a full-scale military conflict between the US government and its citizens, the government wins hands down, because at this point you're talking about a situation where international stigma doesn't matter so they'll be quite happy to use their WMDs.
For my own part, I don't believe the case for anthropogenic global warming is an open and shut case. I realize there are others who think I'm a lunatic for not being able to come to that conclusion. But the essence of science is thoroughly vetting theories... anthropogenic global warming is a theory whose final chapter is yet to be written.
So here's my question: How certain does a scientific theory have to be before you will act upon it? Consider a payoff matrix that looks something like this:
A) You act assuming AGW is true. If you're right, you lose $1 trillion per year. If you're wrong you lose $1 trillion per year.
B) You act assuming AGW is false. If you're right, you lose nothing. If you're wrong, you lose $10 trillion per year.
It's kind of like health insurance for the planet: If you don't have a problem, it's a bad deal, but if you do have a problem and don't have the insurance, you're in big trouble. And unless you have another Earth that you can easily get to, it's not like we can run a controlled experiment, so you have to make a decision based on probabilities.
Of course, we know that the vast majority of governments and businesses are betting on B, but that has more to do with it being cheaper in the short term than it being right.
No, but it does explain why the best captains are left-handed.
Actually, the sad thing is that it's not uncommon to find people who have put in serious effort to create their ambient slop.
By comparison, some of the experimental musicians of the 1970's (who were on all sorts of interesting drugs at the time, of course) created some really relaxing music with very little effort: For instance, a piece called "Humming" that effectively gets a chorus of people doing exactly what the title says, which creates much the same effect as the most carefully planned ambient music.
What if the ISP says 'not without a warrant' on this too?
Why would they do that? Seriously, what motivation do that have to do that? All it could possibly do is create headaches for the legal department. And if the ISP says 'not without a warrant' and wins, rest assured that somebody in law enforcement would start investigating them for something-or-other. While there's probably a market for an ISP that protects its customers legally, I doubt that the market is large enough to sustain a company that has a real chance of competing with the AT&Ts of the world.
Baseline happiness can arguably be negatively correlated to competitiveness, drive and success.
Or not, because people who are depressed feel like it doesn't matter what they do, life's going to suck anyways. They may also respond to their constant unhappiness by looking for artificial mood boosters, which can lead to alcoholism or drug use. They frequently also fail to recognize the value of their accomplishments. By contrast, a happier person is more likely to trigger their brain's reward mechanisms when they do something productive, so they're likely to repeat the behavior.
And it's also worth noting that it's unclear to what degree "drive" and "competitiveness" has to do with "success": The best predictor of a person's level of educational attainment is their parents' educational attainment. The best predictor of athletic success is genetic advantages like height, eyesight, and weight. Artistic success has a fair amount to do with whether a kid's artistic efforts were encouraged or discouraged early on. Most of the really wealthy people in the US inherited a significant amount (Paul Allen is the exception on this front, not the rule).
A possible factor here is that if they recruited test subjects from the student population (not uncommon for university studies), the black subjects would be more likely to be exceptionally motivated and happy people just to get into the school in the first place.
Hey, many of the witches I know would be quite offended if you started comparing them to astrologers!
I mean, who thought you could seriously learn about psychopathic killers from a bunch of talking heads?
Well, typically once in office, "Change you can believe in" quickly becomes "Dollars you can believe in". The other way of looking at it is that those in Washington DC are just following the Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Please repeat, 1984 is NOT an instruction manual.
Wrong dystopia. If you want to really see what a consumerism-oriented society looks like, try Farenheit 451, or Brave New World, or even Wall-E.
One of the saddest sights I've had in my travels was being in Berlin, with its wide variety of world-class restaurants, and watching what looked and sounded like American tourists going straight for McDonalds.
I'm surprised you didn't add killing and torturing (under the rules put forward by the UN Human Rights Council and Amnesty International) citizens without charges.
But hey, at least nobody's tried to quarter troops in my home yet.
Perhaps I'm thinking about this differently, based on 2 assumptions that I'm not sure you're making:
1. I'm not going to date Mary while I'm dating Susan or vice versa. Maybe that makes me naive, but that seems to me to lead to a lot fewer complications if one or both relationships is successful.
2. I'm not going to trust the rumor mill regarding what Mary and Susan will or won't do on which date. Among other things, people change: Maybe Mary has a reputation for being a prude but discovered a new side of her personality, while Susan may have found Jesus and decided she wanted to remain celibate from now until she gets married.
Hence, the only way I'm really going to know what a relationship with either of these women is really going to work out is to try it. If I've dated Mary for a while, and she doesn't put out on the third date, that's not so essential to me that I'll end an otherwise positive relationship over that. If I prefer Susan's company over Mary's, I'm going to ask her out first, so I'll never know what Mary's views are on the issue (unless Susan and I break up).
You're making two assumptions which are questionable at best:
1. The only way a man can get sex is to go on some requisite number of dates with his desired partner. This is demonstrably untrue - if nothing else, he can probably hire a prostitute fairly easily.
2. The man in a long-term relationship is trading his commitment for her sex. This doesn't seem to be true - studies and polls on this topic suggest that a lot of men really value the intellectual, emotional, and social relationship as much as the physical one.
If I'm looking for a long-term relationship, I expect Mary to put out by the third date or so, and if she doesn't, I'll find my long-term relationship with Susan, who *will* put out.
Or, you know, I might realize that in any successful long-term relationship, there's a lot of factors that matter more than how quickly I can get my partner into bed. For instance, do I enjoy spending time with Mary? Do we have some common interests? Do we have good and meaningful conversations? Can we figure out a way of working when work needs to get done? If this relationship really does well, and we end up hitched for the rest of our lives, we're going to spend far more time dealing with that stuff than whether Mary put out on the third date.
Which countries are you thinking of?
Germany, Japan, Bulgaria, and Italy where US forces stand ready to bravely defend against the USSR and the Axis Powers? Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, where we have troops ready to keep out the forces of Saddam Hussein?
When you look at significant military threats to nearby allied nations, all you have are:
1. North Korea, mostly targeting South Korea but sometimes Japan.
2. Pakistan, who's primary target is the more-or-less equally armed India.
3. Iran, possibly targeting Iraq but conceivably Afghanistan.
4. Serbia, targeting to some degree Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzogovnia.
NASA uses a lot of tax money
NASA budget: $19 billion
US military budget: $685 billion (including $79 billion for R&D alone)
If you do a pie chart of the federal budget, NASA barely even gets a sliver.
That's one of the oddities I've seen among those who generally oppose government spending: They tend to have a wildly distorted view of where most of the federal spending actually goes. The big items that account for almost all of it are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on previously accumulated debt, so if you're really trying to reduce the size of government, you have to do something about those.
But really, the important lesson from this is that you shouldn't share passwords between different sites. Use a variety of auth manager and a lot of the risk goes away.
Sorry, obviously the link is incorrect. The correct link: The Daily WTF.
The good news is you can probably start doing some of this stuff on your own. For instance, you can probably set up git on your dev box and just use it for your own change management. You can definitely write unit tests for your code, although you may have to keep that fact hidden from your boss. Just start doing it.
If someone is running around in a panic of "I lost the version of the file from 3 days ago and we need to get it live right now!", use your version control and pull up the version from 3 days ago. When asked "How did you do that?" tell them all you can about the repo, so now you have 2 devs sharing code using a DVCS, and then he tells his buddy and so on, so that by the time management has to make a decision about whether to officially use DVCS the devs can say "We've been doing this for months and it's helped us work faster and recover from screw-ups quickly."
This all assumes that the organization is this bad because it doesn't know any better, not because it's actually being impeded by a manager who would be featured over on Daily WTF.
For comparison, right now investors take home 85% of capital gains. So for a $1000 gain, instead of getting $850 you'll get $800. Sure, that's less return, but not enough to make investing a bad move.
Heaven: Where the chefs are French, the police British, the carmakers German, and the lovers Italian, all organized by the Swiss.
Hell: Where the chefs are British, the police German, the carmakers French, the lovers Swiss, all organized by the Italians.