The usual approach of writing a character significantly different from you is to draw on people you know in the relevant category. Chances are pretty good that you know some women pretty well (immediate family if nobody else), and can draw on their personalities for ideas about how. An example of this working out very well: F Scott Fitzgerald based the main female characters of The Great Gatsby on women who were living in Chicago at the time.
The real expert on men writing great female characters has to be Joss Whedon though. What I think makes his characters work so well is that he focuses their lives on something other than their femaleness. Which makes sense - as a white guy, I don't walk around constantly thinking"I'm a white guy, I'm a white guy, I'm a white guy...", and it would be dumb to expect a woman to do that. That's not to say he doesn't make them women: They're often attracted to men, they're likely to enjoy dressing up prettily, they usually wear their hair long, etc but they have many other motivations and personality traits that make his women as varied and interesting as his men.
This kind of thing already exists: 1. The Linux Standard Base (LSB) has the goal of creating a standard set of libraries that you can code against that will be available on almost any Linux box. 2. SDL, which works on a wide varieties of Linux, as well as Windows and MacOS.
You cannot reach energy independence and still burn oil at greater rates
Sure you can. Here's the plan, which, couched in nicer terms, is basically what the Project for a New American Century advocates: 1. Take over oil-rich areas via military force. 2. Install puppet governments to rule over those areas. 3. Demand that your puppet states sell you oil really cheaply, and charge a really high tariff to sell it to anyone else. If they refuse to comply, depose and replace the puppet. Repeat as many times as necessary until you get a compliant puppet. 4. Use the oil to improve your military forces even more, so you can take over another oil-rich area. Repeat until you have control over all the oil on the planet and have the rest of the world at your mercy.
Of course, that only works if the rest of the world hasn't either united to resist you or come up with some better way of extracting energy.
Why do you think Linux has been able to (mostly) avoid the fragmentation that plagued the competing Unixes of the 1980's? What would you say helps keep Linux a unified project rather than more forked system like BSD?
There are good reasons why Lord of the Rings failing the Bechdel test is hardly surprising: 1. Tolkien wrote it in the 1940's. Sexism was hardly unusual then. 2. Tolkien was actively imitating and drawing from older tales and epics, which regularly had very few important female characters. For instance, the only woman with any kind of significant role in Beowulf (a significant inspiration for Tolkein) is Grendel's mother, and she isn't even given a name. 3. One of the constant and enduring themes throughout the books is the deep bonds that form between men thrown together into really bad situations. Probably part of the point was to give folks an idea of what it was like to be at the front in WWI, where the only women in the area were nurses.
There was at least one fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had actually completely reversed the roles of men and women: The women were the tough fighters and leaders and in charge of everything, the men were expected to sit around looking pretty until the women wanted to sleep with them.
renewable energy in the form of wind, solar, tidal and geothermal generation cannot replace fossil fuels fast enough to keep Global Warming within reasonable limits
That completely ignores what should be near the top of the energy agenda, namely conservation. The US, for instance, uses about twice as much energy per capita as Germany, and yet there isn't a significant difference in quality of life.
And it's interesting that when somebody who knows what they're talking about proposes a cheap and effective measure, like painting rooftops white so they absorb less heat, they are mostly made fun of and/or ignored.
I'm going to have to disagree with that, having been in the shoes of both estimator and PM. There are several reasons:
1. Often, there aren't really a lot of unknowns. There are lots of times where the programming task is something along the lines of "Put together a UI that looks like this and behaves like that, takes data from these places over here, and if the user hits the 'save' button shove that data back over here to save it." That entire task is well-defined and quite straightforward, and there should be very little unknown about how to do it.
2. Estimates provide valuable information to those deciding what to do next. If a developer estimates project A (worth $3 million) at 20 days, that's likely to be a better return on investment than project B (worth $4 million) estimated at 40 days. Somebody just looking at revenue would be more likely to pick project B, somebody looking at the revenue plus the estimate would pick project A.
3. The procrastination argument is simply wrong. If a developer has estimated 20 business days to do something, he may scramble to get it done on days 18-25. If he's given no estimate, days 20-60 zoom right by and he still doesn't have it done, because he can just put it off until tomorrow.
With a hybrid you haven't, since you've been buying gas the whole time. Less gas for sure, but not $8K worth.
AC's $8K figure is completely reasonable. I'm going with numbers that are close to the real thing, and are reasonably easy to calculate: Non-hybrid sedan: 120000 miles / (25 miles / gallon) * $3.50 / gallon = 4800 gallons * $3.50 / gallon = $16800 annually for gasoline. Hybrid sedan: 120000 miles / 50 miles / gallon) * $3.50 / gallon = 2400 gallons * $3.50 / gallon = $8400 annually for gasoline. Difference: $8400
Higher gas prices or a greater mpg difference are favorable to the hybrid. Lower gas prices or a smaller difference between the hybrid and non-hybrid would make the difference less but still significant.
A quip I recently heard from a guy who's been trying to organize grassroots political action (not for a major candidate or party, but around some ballot issues): "The button to use on a smartphone to truly change in the world is the one labelled 'OFF'"
The key problems with the X-ray machines were: 1. They were invasive searches without anything remotely similar to probable cause. 2. They don't actually stop people from carrying bombs onto aircraft (as has been tested several times).
If you have a better plan for long-term control of carbon emissions than cutting our dependency on the internal combustion (and diesel) engine, I'd love to hear it.
1. The first target should be coal-fired power plants. Replace those with wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear (which has problems but not as much of a CO2 problem). 2. The second target should be replacing long-distance trucking with rail, which is far more efficient. 3. The third target should be cars, SUVs, etc. Current hybrid tech gets you about halfway there, full electric (if it works well and is reasonably convenient) would get you the other half, because now you've gotten rid of the worst power plants. 4. Then go after the oil-fired power plants, replacing those with renewables.
One nice thing about this proposal is that it doesn't require technology that doesn't currently exist. One of the approaches to the problem that I find no good at all is funding research and expecting a perpetual cheap energy machine to pop out of nowhere a la The Saint. Of course, it does require seriously large investments, so it won't happen until the costs of global warming outweigh the cost of doing something about it.
The good ones get way better than a 25% boost. For instance, I'm now driving an 8-year-old Prius that gets approximately 49 mpg, compared to your average sedan getting somewhere around 27 mpg.
And in case someone is interested in accusing me of being an enviroweenie, let me just point out that the reason I bought that car (used) was because I could, for an extra $500 at purchase time compared to similar vehicles on the market, save $700 a year in gas money. The model also has a good repair history. So hard-nosed economics worked very much in its favor.
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The "paint your roof white" suggestion was meant more for office parks, skyscrapers, and other taller flat-roofed buildings where there is no attic.
Distros are different, but we don't have the situation where stuff written on, say, Ubuntu, can't easily be repackaged for Red Hat.
"I knew I shouldn't have had that burrito right before the big jump!"
The usual approach of writing a character significantly different from you is to draw on people you know in the relevant category. Chances are pretty good that you know some women pretty well (immediate family if nobody else), and can draw on their personalities for ideas about how. An example of this working out very well: F Scott Fitzgerald based the main female characters of The Great Gatsby on women who were living in Chicago at the time.
The real expert on men writing great female characters has to be Joss Whedon though. What I think makes his characters work so well is that he focuses their lives on something other than their femaleness. Which makes sense - as a white guy, I don't walk around constantly thinking"I'm a white guy, I'm a white guy, I'm a white guy ...", and it would be dumb to expect a woman to do that. That's not to say he doesn't make them women: They're often attracted to men, they're likely to enjoy dressing up prettily, they usually wear their hair long, etc but they have many other motivations and personality traits that make his women as varied and interesting as his men.
This kind of thing already exists:
1. The Linux Standard Base (LSB) has the goal of creating a standard set of libraries that you can code against that will be available on almost any Linux box.
2. SDL, which works on a wide varieties of Linux, as well as Windows and MacOS.
I doubt Detroit wants to get rid of the Obama administration, seeing as how it recently bailed them out.
You cannot reach energy independence and still burn oil at greater rates
Sure you can. Here's the plan, which, couched in nicer terms, is basically what the Project for a New American Century advocates:
1. Take over oil-rich areas via military force.
2. Install puppet governments to rule over those areas.
3. Demand that your puppet states sell you oil really cheaply, and charge a really high tariff to sell it to anyone else. If they refuse to comply, depose and replace the puppet. Repeat as many times as necessary until you get a compliant puppet.
4. Use the oil to improve your military forces even more, so you can take over another oil-rich area. Repeat until you have control over all the oil on the planet and have the rest of the world at your mercy.
Of course, that only works if the rest of the world hasn't either united to resist you or come up with some better way of extracting energy.
Why do you think Linux has been able to (mostly) avoid the fragmentation that plagued the competing Unixes of the 1980's? What would you say helps keep Linux a unified project rather than more forked system like BSD?
There are good reasons why Lord of the Rings failing the Bechdel test is hardly surprising:
1. Tolkien wrote it in the 1940's. Sexism was hardly unusual then.
2. Tolkien was actively imitating and drawing from older tales and epics, which regularly had very few important female characters. For instance, the only woman with any kind of significant role in Beowulf (a significant inspiration for Tolkein) is Grendel's mother, and she isn't even given a name.
3. One of the constant and enduring themes throughout the books is the deep bonds that form between men thrown together into really bad situations. Probably part of the point was to give folks an idea of what it was like to be at the front in WWI, where the only women in the area were nurses.
There was at least one fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had actually completely reversed the roles of men and women: The women were the tough fighters and leaders and in charge of everything, the men were expected to sit around looking pretty until the women wanted to sleep with them.
What he really means, in a nutshell: "Programmers are paid too much."
renewable energy in the form of wind, solar, tidal and geothermal generation cannot replace fossil fuels fast enough to keep Global Warming within reasonable limits
That completely ignores what should be near the top of the energy agenda, namely conservation. The US, for instance, uses about twice as much energy per capita as Germany, and yet there isn't a significant difference in quality of life.
And it's interesting that when somebody who knows what they're talking about proposes a cheap and effective measure, like painting rooftops white so they absorb less heat, they are mostly made fun of and/or ignored.
by 'United States' you mean 'Motorola'.
No, they probably mean 'AT&T', which just happens to be the 3rd largest campaign contributor in the country:
They might complain, but frequently they'll put up with it, because the alternative is unemployment.
It's actually a serious problem in this country, a big enough deal that it has a name: wage theft.
If there are 2 people working 60 hours a week, it could also be 3 people working 40 and most likely more efficient as they won't be burned out.
And by that logic, 9 women + 1 man can have a baby in 1 month. Often it doesn't work that way.
I'm going to have to disagree with that, having been in the shoes of both estimator and PM. There are several reasons:
1. Often, there aren't really a lot of unknowns. There are lots of times where the programming task is something along the lines of "Put together a UI that looks like this and behaves like that, takes data from these places over here, and if the user hits the 'save' button shove that data back over here to save it." That entire task is well-defined and quite straightforward, and there should be very little unknown about how to do it.
2. Estimates provide valuable information to those deciding what to do next. If a developer estimates project A (worth $3 million) at 20 days, that's likely to be a better return on investment than project B (worth $4 million) estimated at 40 days. Somebody just looking at revenue would be more likely to pick project B, somebody looking at the revenue plus the estimate would pick project A.
3. The procrastination argument is simply wrong. If a developer has estimated 20 business days to do something, he may scramble to get it done on days 18-25. If he's given no estimate, days 20-60 zoom right by and he still doesn't have it done, because he can just put it off until tomorrow.
With a hybrid you haven't, since you've been buying gas the whole time. Less gas for sure, but not $8K worth.
AC's $8K figure is completely reasonable. I'm going with numbers that are close to the real thing, and are reasonably easy to calculate:
Non-hybrid sedan: 120000 miles / (25 miles / gallon) * $3.50 / gallon = 4800 gallons * $3.50 / gallon = $16800 annually for gasoline.
Hybrid sedan: 120000 miles / 50 miles / gallon) * $3.50 / gallon = 2400 gallons * $3.50 / gallon = $8400 annually for gasoline.
Difference: $8400
Higher gas prices or a greater mpg difference are favorable to the hybrid. Lower gas prices or a smaller difference between the hybrid and non-hybrid would make the difference less but still significant.
Yup, you're right. Never, ever, trust a president of anything.
A quip I recently heard from a guy who's been trying to organize grassroots political action (not for a major candidate or party, but around some ballot issues):
"The button to use on a smartphone to truly change in the world is the one labelled 'OFF'"
Waddaya mean, no benefit? I'm sure the shareholders of Rapiscan are benefiting greatly!
Oh, you meant benefit to the public. Nah, the TSA isn't interested in that.
The key problems with the X-ray machines were:
1. They were invasive searches without anything remotely similar to probable cause.
2. They don't actually stop people from carrying bombs onto aircraft (as has been tested several times).
If you have a better plan for long-term control of carbon emissions than cutting our dependency on the internal combustion (and diesel) engine, I'd love to hear it.
1. The first target should be coal-fired power plants. Replace those with wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear (which has problems but not as much of a CO2 problem).
2. The second target should be replacing long-distance trucking with rail, which is far more efficient.
3. The third target should be cars, SUVs, etc. Current hybrid tech gets you about halfway there, full electric (if it works well and is reasonably convenient) would get you the other half, because now you've gotten rid of the worst power plants.
4. Then go after the oil-fired power plants, replacing those with renewables.
One nice thing about this proposal is that it doesn't require technology that doesn't currently exist. One of the approaches to the problem that I find no good at all is funding research and expecting a perpetual cheap energy machine to pop out of nowhere a la The Saint. Of course, it does require seriously large investments, so it won't happen until the costs of global warming outweigh the cost of doing something about it.
The good ones get way better than a 25% boost. For instance, I'm now driving an 8-year-old Prius that gets approximately 49 mpg, compared to your average sedan getting somewhere around 27 mpg.
And in case someone is interested in accusing me of being an enviroweenie, let me just point out that the reason I bought that car (used) was because I could, for an extra $500 at purchase time compared to similar vehicles on the market, save $700 a year in gas money. The model also has a good repair history. So hard-nosed economics worked very much in its favor.
So what's the point of this article then?
pageviews and ad revenue, I presume.
Yo momma's so fat that she stole 600 gallons of syrup just to get through breakfast!
Nah, it's against its programming to impersonate a deity.