But consumers weren't quite convinced by the zebras.
Kudos for your choice of analogy. I was getting very tired of cars.;-)
But this all reminds me of an axiom I used to hear all the time back in the '80s when I was making a good living out of contracting on all sorts of non-mainstream big-iron machines:
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
I happen to know of a middle-manager at a then well-known Burroughs site in London who did indeed get fired for doing exactly that. But my point is that as a crushing monopoly, IBM's dominance expired, and there is no reason to assume that one day Microsoft's will not do likewise. I'm not saying Microsoft will go bust (neither did IBM), but there must inevitably come a time when MS will have to re-evaluate its position in its marketplace.
No, I haven't been out of the industry for 30 years: I have spent decades contracting in many countries and disciplines. There is no point in my going into a country-by-country analysis, but in practice you might be surprised to find that in most cases there is much left unchanged since the '50s and '60s. In any case, any such changes are codified, and are simple enough to accommodate in software. The point I was making is that this kind of system is not rocket science.
Pro tip: choose your payroll processor carefully, as they can skip with your tax deposits...
Yeah, that particular scam, and many others like it have been in circulation since (even!) before the period I was referring to. Just because they might not have made it to Wikipedia just yet doesn't mean we didn't know about them.
No, not quite. This was in Europe, and the situation was considerably less prehistoric than what you describe. And the whole point was to automate everything - otherwise why bother?
Often it is a politician showing that he or she is completely ignorant of technical issues
Payrolls are hardly technically challenging. By way of perspective, 30 years ago I worked at a computer bureau, which for those too young to remember such a thing, was a shop where businesses brought in their handwritten input data on paper forms, and our keypunch ops would encode it on to mag tape for us to process on our Burroughs B3700 computer.
We ran our in-house payroll package for everything from public services to market gardens, and there is no reason why it wouldn't work just as well today, other than that it was written in COBOL, which isn't so trendy any more.
The world will be a better place when all the managers retire who were raised without computers.
The managers who used our packages were ALL raised without computers. That did not make them incapable or stupid. The world will be a better place when kids stop belittling their elders for no factual reason.
I RTFA and fail to see what the pros/cons of each service is, and which one he recommends.
That's because he can't recommend any on the basis of the results or methodology of the testing.
SNPs can be a useful tool, but because (by definition) they are single nucleotides, you need a lot of them to be able to validate a pattern. From the submission, he mentions 3 labs using 5, 10 and 15 SNPs and claiming to be able to draw inferrences from these. My understanding (FWIW) is that a mere 5 polymorphisms are not really sufficient to draw useful conclusions in this way, and 15 might still be on the low side, given that there is little in the way of firm proof of association with known disease conditions.
If you want to pursue this kind of testing, one can only suggest that the more SNPs the lab tests for, the more credibility you can expect it to have. And the more you can expect it to cost.
Sounds like your mum has her feet on the ground. But on the other hand, show me someone who has her feet on the ground, and I'll show you someone who can't get her pants off...;-)
Yeah - first performed (I believe) in the year I was born. No matter how many times I see evidence of this, I always find it a bit scary to see how people are attracted to this kind of conformity.
Incidentally, I read that in Singapore and other Asian countries they are seeing a "spike" in the number of males born as a result of this passive selection for baby boys.
Obviously this is on one hand an incredibly stupid idea, but in a overcrowded world, it's one of the smartest things they could possibly have come up with, however unintentionally.
If you need IVF, then you are deficient and should NOT reproduce!
I won't argue that, since I sort of agree. I might add, though, that putting time and funding into counselling for would-be parents and/or smoothing the path to adoption, fostering or whatever might be a better use of resources than pursuing IVF.
I know all too many couples who have left off breeding until the female is in her 40s and therefore less likely to bring a sprog to term, in the interests of financial or lifestyle security, and who suddenly become devastated when their first attempts fail to bear fruit.
I call this the "I Want It All And I Want It Now Syndrome", and am becoming less and less sympathetic, even though one of these characters is in fact my younger sister. We are becoming all too conditioned to a belief that any inconvenience like disease or infertility can be "fixed" by medical intervention, without any consideration being given to other options.
Me too. Having grown up in the shadow of the Cold War, on a planet where humans breed like flies on a dungheap, where any meanness or nastiness is regarded as OK if it enables you to pull the guy above you off the ladder and stomp on the hands of the next guy down, I have never felt that this is a world I would want to be responsible for bringing a child into.
Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north...
You don't even need it to freeze. Here in Western Australia, the surface of a road can get to as much as 70 deg. C on a summer day, but cool to 15 degrees overnight. Even in winter the temperatures can vary from 3 to 30 degrees C. I suspect it might be a tall order to expect a concrete road to put up with that kind of stress unless you put in a lot of expansion joints.
the stones that get caught between truck dual tires. They tend to get loose in perfect timing to crash your windshield.
I've come to believe (from anecdotal experience in rural Australia) that that might be something to do with the angle of your windscreen: seems to me that the closer your windscreen is to the vertical, the more likely it is to be cracked by stones from truck tyres. So normal sedan cars seem to be less vulnerable to this than vans or 4WDs.
But from my extensive experience, I would much rather drive on a dirt/gravel road than on a poorly maintained asphalt road. For one thing, they at least keep you awake. Modern cars, with the dumbing-down of their technology, make it all too damn easy to fall asleep at the wheel on long trips, and a rough surface forces you to pay attention.
No, the simplest solution is to adopt a policy I took up in the late '90s when it first occurred to be that my history might be sniffed:
Delete it.
That's right. It's perfectly possible to live a fulfilled life without browser history, or cookies for that matter. In fact, I still have my cookies file symlinked to/dev/null, though I am aware that current browsers offer an option to clear it...
...I used to keep an alt account active specifically so that I could mod down my opponents... ...Anyway the way to do it is to post AC, reload the page then mod up your own AC comment.
These comments illustrate exactly my pet peeve about Slashdot, and why I think AC posting should be stopped. Discussions are least worth reading when people like you insist on turning them into some adolescent type of adversarial point-scoring video-game.
the "no mod and comment" rule is perhaps one of the most ill-concieved rules I have seen.
Then perhaps you haven't understood the concept behind the rule. The idea is to prevent individuals having unrestrained ability to push an agenda of their own: hence mod or post, but not both.
Unlike some other long-standing rules on this forum, this is one that actually has very sound reasoning behind it.
Unfortunately, the legislators have left it a bit late for the (arguably) main contender, Firefox. It seems that in default configurations, Firefox now seems slower to load webpages than IE, so new Windows users may be justifiably tempted to stay with the MS offering.
I still prefer Firefox for my purposes, but it does take a bit of tinkering to make it run as snappily as I would like.
When Firefox (or Phoenix as it was then) split away from the old Mozilla, its main point was its bloat-free ethos. For a long time, I used to do my own builds of the old Mozilla without all the unnecessary stuff like mail clients, HTML editors and other cruft, and for some time it thrashed the pants off Firefox. Maybe it's time to examine the source of Firefox and start the evaluation again.
Would you kids please get your wanking done before you start posting on Slashdot? Panting and drooling every time you see a female is pretty boring for others...
enough sterilizing fluid to kill any rouge viruses
Rouge? I can't say I've heard of any red ones before, but that might be because they are small enough that the wavelength of light is such that colour has no meaning.
A curious artifact of nomenclature. Since when do we really call pigs "swine"? OK, I know they both mean the same thing, but why not just call it "pig flu"?
My initial reaction was "oh noes! Air graffiti!"...
...until I read how this works. Actually, the idea could be quite udeful for once. Seems to me it should be quite a small step to introduce some sort of OCR into the works to clean it up a bit...
Interesting that it took being forced into bankruptcy to kick them into thinking about viability in a non-petroleum-based world. Perhaps this could become a common business model for the future?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
But consumers weren't quite convinced by the zebras.
;-)
Kudos for your choice of analogy. I was getting very tired of cars.
But this all reminds me of an axiom I used to hear all the time back in the '80s when I was making a good living out of contracting on all sorts of non-mainstream big-iron machines:
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
I happen to know of a middle-manager at a then well-known Burroughs site in London who did indeed get fired for doing exactly that. But my point is that as a crushing monopoly, IBM's dominance expired, and there is no reason to assume that one day Microsoft's will not do likewise. I'm not saying Microsoft will go bust (neither did IBM), but there must inevitably come a time when MS will have to re-evaluate its position in its marketplace.
No, I haven't been out of the industry for 30 years: I have spent decades contracting in many countries and disciplines. There is no point in my going into a country-by-country analysis, but in practice you might be surprised to find that in most cases there is much left unchanged since the '50s and '60s. In any case, any such changes are codified, and are simple enough to accommodate in software. The point I was making is that this kind of system is not rocket science.
Pro tip: choose your payroll processor carefully, as they can skip with your tax deposits...
Yeah, that particular scam, and many others like it have been in circulation since (even!) before the period I was referring to. Just because they might not have made it to Wikipedia just yet doesn't mean we didn't know about them.
No, not quite. This was in Europe, and the situation was considerably less prehistoric than what you describe. And the whole point was to automate everything - otherwise why bother?
Often it is a politician showing that he or she is completely ignorant of technical issues
Payrolls are hardly technically challenging. By way of perspective, 30 years ago I worked at a computer bureau, which for those too young to remember such a thing, was a shop where businesses brought in their handwritten input data on paper forms, and our keypunch ops would encode it on to mag tape for us to process on our Burroughs B3700 computer.
We ran our in-house payroll package for everything from public services to market gardens, and there is no reason why it wouldn't work just as well today, other than that it was written in COBOL, which isn't so trendy any more.
The world will be a better place when all the managers retire who were raised without computers.
The managers who used our packages were ALL raised without computers. That did not make them incapable or stupid. The world will be a better place when kids stop belittling their elders for no factual reason.
I RTFA and fail to see what the pros/cons of each service is, and which one he recommends.
That's because he can't recommend any on the basis of the results or methodology of the testing.
SNPs can be a useful tool, but because (by definition) they are single nucleotides, you need a lot of them to be able to validate a pattern. From the submission, he mentions 3 labs using 5, 10 and 15 SNPs and claiming to be able to draw inferrences from these. My understanding (FWIW) is that a mere 5 polymorphisms are not really sufficient to draw useful conclusions in this way, and 15 might still be on the low side, given that there is little in the way of firm proof of association with known disease conditions.
If you want to pursue this kind of testing, one can only suggest that the more SNPs the lab tests for, the more credibility you can expect it to have. And the more you can expect it to cost.
Sounds like your mum has her feet on the ground. But on the other hand, show me someone who has her feet on the ground, and I'll show you someone who can't get her pants off... ;-)
Yeah - first performed (I believe) in the year I was born. No matter how many times I see evidence of this, I always find it a bit scary to see how people are attracted to this kind of conformity.
Incidentally, I read that in Singapore and other Asian countries they are seeing a "spike" in the number of males born as a result of this passive selection for baby boys.
Obviously this is on one hand an incredibly stupid idea, but in a overcrowded world, it's one of the smartest things they could possibly have come up with, however unintentionally.
...that doesn't seem to point to anything fundamentally wrong with eugenics if done properly.
The trouble is with different people's interpretation of the last three words.
If you need IVF, then you are deficient and should NOT reproduce!
I won't argue that, since I sort of agree. I might add, though, that putting time and funding into counselling for would-be parents and/or smoothing the path to adoption, fostering or whatever might be a better use of resources than pursuing IVF.
I know all too many couples who have left off breeding until the female is in her 40s and therefore less likely to bring a sprog to term, in the interests of financial or lifestyle security, and who suddenly become devastated when their first attempts fail to bear fruit.
I call this the "I Want It All And I Want It Now Syndrome", and am becoming less and less sympathetic, even though one of these characters is in fact my younger sister. We are becoming all too conditioned to a belief that any inconvenience like disease or infertility can be "fixed" by medical intervention, without any consideration being given to other options.
not everyone wants children, including myself.
Me too. Having grown up in the shadow of the Cold War, on a planet where humans breed like flies on a dungheap, where any meanness or nastiness is regarded as OK if it enables you to pull the guy above you off the ladder and stomp on the hands of the next guy down, I have never felt that this is a world I would want to be responsible for bringing a child into.
Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north...
You don't even need it to freeze. Here in Western Australia, the surface of a road can get to as much as 70 deg. C on a summer day, but cool to 15 degrees overnight. Even in winter the temperatures can vary from 3 to 30 degrees C. I suspect it might be a tall order to expect a concrete road to put up with that kind of stress unless you put in a lot of expansion joints.
the stones that get caught between truck dual tires. They tend to get loose in perfect timing to crash your windshield.
I've come to believe (from anecdotal experience in rural Australia) that that might be something to do with the angle of your windscreen: seems to me that the closer your windscreen is to the vertical, the more likely it is to be cracked by stones from truck tyres. So normal sedan cars seem to be less vulnerable to this than vans or 4WDs.
But from my extensive experience, I would much rather drive on a dirt/gravel road than on a poorly maintained asphalt road. For one thing, they at least keep you awake. Modern cars, with the dumbing-down of their technology, make it all too damn easy to fall asleep at the wheel on long trips, and a rough surface forces you to pay attention.
No, the simplest solution is to adopt a policy I took up in the late '90s when it first occurred to be that my history might be sniffed:
/dev/null, though I am aware that current browsers offer an option to clear it...
Delete it.
That's right. It's perfectly possible to live a fulfilled life without browser history, or cookies for that matter. In fact, I still have my cookies file symlinked to
...I used to keep an alt account active specifically so that I could mod down my opponents...
...Anyway the way to do it is to post AC, reload the page then mod up your own AC comment.
These comments illustrate exactly my pet peeve about Slashdot, and why I think AC posting should be stopped. Discussions are least worth reading when people like you insist on turning them into some adolescent type of adversarial point-scoring video-game.
the "no mod and comment" rule is perhaps one of the most ill-concieved rules I have seen.
Then perhaps you haven't understood the concept behind the rule. The idea is to prevent individuals having unrestrained ability to push an agenda of their own: hence mod or post, but not both.
Unlike some other long-standing rules on this forum, this is one that actually has very sound reasoning behind it.
Unfortunately, the legislators have left it a bit late for the (arguably) main contender, Firefox. It seems that in default configurations, Firefox now seems slower to load webpages than IE, so new Windows users may be justifiably tempted to stay with the MS offering.
I still prefer Firefox for my purposes, but it does take a bit of tinkering to make it run as snappily as I would like.
When Firefox (or Phoenix as it was then) split away from the old Mozilla, its main point was its bloat-free ethos. For a long time, I used to do my own builds of the old Mozilla without all the unnecessary stuff like mail clients, HTML editors and other cruft, and for some time it thrashed the pants off Firefox. Maybe it's time to examine the source of Firefox and start the evaluation again.
Would you kids please get your wanking done before you start posting on Slashdot? Panting and drooling every time you see a female is pretty boring for others...
Two, it was very tasty.
Actually, documentary evidence suggests the reverse. But the birds grew so big (~30kg) they ate them anyway.
I wonder if they call it the Belgian Flu in Mexico?
enough sterilizing fluid to kill any rouge viruses
Rouge? I can't say I've heard of any red ones before, but that might be because they are small enough that the wavelength of light is such that colour has no meaning.
A curious artifact of nomenclature. Since when do we really call pigs "swine"? OK, I know they both mean the same thing, but why not just call it "pig flu"?
Is there really any useful purpose to be served by dredging this up? Don't these guys have anything better to do?
My initial reaction was "oh noes! Air graffiti!"...
...until I read how this works. Actually, the idea could be quite udeful for once. Seems to me it should be quite a small step to introduce some sort of OCR into the works to clean it up a bit...
Interesting that it took being forced into bankruptcy to kick them into thinking about viability in a non-petroleum-based world. Perhaps this could become a common business model for the future? ;-)