For your Excel problem, Window -> Freeze panes, with the active cell to the right and below the column / row you want to keep stationary. Intuitive as all get-out, I know.
Clearcutting is a sign of bad government management of resources.
Been reading too many ecofreak brochures again, have we? Statements like the above are simplistic generalizations at best, and outright lies at worst. Not all forests are alike. But don't listen to me, because you wouldn't believe me anyways. Listen to Patrick Moore, a PhD ecologist who also was a founder of Greenpeace. He has a few nice articles posted on clearcutting
and biodiversity in clearcuts.
Selective cutting preserves the ecostructure quite nicely.
Uh, yeah, whatever. And can also permit root rot in the remaining trees, interfere with stand dynamics, progression, etc. Do you know what happens when you harvest a tree species which needs lots of light as a young plant, while leaving a lot of mature trees to shade the understory? Hint - you've changed everything. Some species require major disturbance events (fire, blowdown, etc) to regenerate, and will not regenerate on sites where shade is present.
Objectives:
The twelfth flight of SpaceShipOne. Objectives included: pilot proficiency, reaction control system functionality check and stability and control and performance of the vehicle with the airframe thermal protection system installed. This was an unpowered glide test.
Results: Slashdot's editors are facists.
Launch conditions were 48,500 feet and 125 knots. All systems performed as expected and the vehicle landed successfully while demonstrating the maximum cross wind landing capability.
Parent comment is at +5 as I post this. Either some moderators were sleeping, or else they agree with the assertion.
Don't worry, it's just your mailing address, name, and your phone number.
Whew, thats a relief. And here I thought they were selling something that wasn't already in the white pages of the telephone directory.
As for your third point, ever heard of inflation? A minimum wage earner in 1985 had to work for 4-5 hours to buy a $20 CD. It is now down to 2 hours (typical CD price of $16 at A&B Sound or Future Shop). In constant (1985) dollars, the current price of $16 is likely pretty close to $7.
Plus CD burning software, zip software, PDF reader, Java, and so on. At least one long day by the time the machine is functional. Even longer if you have non-business machine (music-ripping software, games, etc).
I avoid firmware upgrades unless I really want the feature, or can add enough new functions to avoid buying more hardware. Last thing I want is turn a working digicam into a dead one. I wish manufacturers would follow a few simple rules, as I would be more willing to update firmware:
Always make the original firmware / bios available. Keep in in some form of ROM if possible.
Always permit a fallback to the original firmware / bios (because the original should be available, as noted above). You almost need a pin or switch to do it, similar to the dip switch on some motherboards which restored default settings. Ideally, it would be nice to see a firmware loader in ROM, which could then manage and select among different firmware versions on a device, accessed through some key sequence, available for a second or two on power-up.
No extra tools or hardware should be required. I don't even have a floppy drive hooked up anymore.
No special operating system should be required (Windows-only firmware upgrades, anyone?). For firmware upgrades to be robust enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy, all that should matter is getting the new firmware file into the device, over an industry-standard protocol, and you then automatically load the new firmware the next time you boot (including a check for corruption in the firmware upgrade file).
User data and settings should be maintained through the upgrades. If new settings are available / old options are removed, then it is the manufacturers job to avoid screwing things up, not the device owners job to reset / reload everything.
Well, given the abominable state of Canada's immgiration laws, he would likely become eligible to be a landed immigrant after serving a few years in Club Fed, or something like that.
why don't they set up schools to teach the current generation of kids there not to hate, and why terrorism is bad?
Yeah, that is a wonderful idea. I'm certain it will work just fine telling a bunch of kids that American is great, that the American people really really care deeply about them, and that Uncle Sam had only their best interests at heart when he dropped a few tonnes of explosives onto their grandparents village. In fact, I'm confident that it will work just as well as the anti-drug campaigns worked in US schools.
[looks at drug use stats] Nah, wrong comparison. Hmm, maybe some other state indoctrination example will work better. Hey, maybe it will work as well as the safe sex classes in schools.
[looks at teenage pregnancy and gonorrhea rates] Still the wrong comparison. Better rethink that premise. Perhaps less despair, squalor, and hopelessness would help a bit. Along with getting the whackos out of the education system in those countries.
Read my second link. You weren't talking about single receiver consumer grade GPS - you specifically mentioned differential GPS in your initial post about GPS accuracy, and did not restrict your comments to only the instrument in question.
You may note that I also did not reference the instrument in the article - I was discussing GPS in general.
Maybe 10 years ago GPS wasn't good enough. However, it is good enough for land titles in British Columbia (not very many survey monuments to tie into for minesites in the middle of nowhere). I don't know if I would want to do building construction layout (millimetre accuracy) using GPS, but if GPS is fine for land titles, it should be OK for most purposes. The Geodetic Survey Division of Natural Resources Canada has some more info on the different GPS methods. Check out the final part on Carrier Positioning accuracy - sub centimetre (10mm) is acheivable.
Try myprivacy.ca. The site is hosted by easyDNS. You sign up for an email account, which will only forward email from registrars to your real account. Everyone else has to go through a challenge / response reply. Only a few registrars participate, but it works well for me. And as for my real world address and phone number, they can get that from the phone book anyways.
Yeah, that's life. I am friends with many nurses, am related to a few more, and also married one. I've heard enough stories to solidly cement my opinion. I also have several other data points based on my own personal experiences with misdiagnosis, etc. If it makes you feel any better, I believe that nursing, along with every other trade, craft, or profession, suffers from some percentage of incompetent practitioners. As for dollars to donuts on survival rates, would that be a Tim Hortons donut? Nurses are part of a team, and are not the ones making prescrptions or deciding treatment - they provide input to doctors based on their observations and experience (nurses usually get to spend a lot more time with any given patient than doctors), which good doctors will consider in their decision making process.
You should take doctors off that pedestal, and remember that just over a hundred years ago, they were still bleeding people to try and cure their ailments, prescribed arsenic as a medicine, and judged competence based on the amount of blood on their smocks. That is not very many generations ago. Basically, those quacks taught the people who taught the people who are still teaching in the med schools today. Even doctors today only put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.
B. You have no idea that she recovered because of the medication.
See your point C, in which you stated "ICU nurses have lots of knowledge". I heard it directly from the ICU nurse in question. First hand. Someone who was present at more deaths in a month than you or I will likely ever directly witness in our lifetimes. Thanks for your opinion, but I'll take her word for it.
Short story in semi-point form. No names, lest people I know lose jobs. Car accident, patient in intensive care unit. Young woman, has small children, I believe. ICU doctors want to pull the plug (think it was a neurologist, ie, brain surgeon). No brain scan completed, doctor makes recommendation to family to turn off ventilator, family approves.
Nurse mentions to doctor that patient appears to be responding, and the doctor should get a scan to measure brain activity. She is overridden by the doctor, who maintains that the patient is brain dead, a vegetable. Doctor orders that patient is to be removed from life support. Nurse decides to adminster medication to assist breathing based on a standing order (blanket prescription for the ICU),and then turns off life support as ordered bvy doctor. Only because of medication administered, patient continues to breath. Nurse nearly loses job over this.
A few days later, patient is awake. A few months later, patient is nearly fully recovered, possible loss of recent memories, but is up walking about, part of her family, leading a useful and productive life. As far as I'm concerned, the above doctor should not be practicing, and should be sued for everything he owns, but doctors protect their own.
I don't trust doctors anymore. Period. You should get to know some ICU nurses, and you might want to revise some of your opinions. Personally, I would cause severe physical harm to any doctor with a god complex, before I would let them touch anyone I care about. I would also ask an experienced third party nurse to do an assessment, review a brain scan, and provide a second opinion (insamuch as the law permits nurses to have an opinion), before I would pull the plug on anyone based on a doctors advice.
There is an order of magnitude difference in skill between a nurse, and a brain surgeon.
Yes, the typical nurse has patient assessment skills at least 10 times better than the average brain surgeon, and a bedside manner which is possibly 100 times better.
I get tired of hearing programmers on/. boast about how unique and special they consider their work to be. Thanks for taking the wind out of the sails of the grandparent post.
That's funny, as I studied organic chem way back in university, and decent writing skills were a basic prerequisite. With your attitude, you will be in for a world of hurt once you have to get a real job, assuming that your resumes don't go directly to the circular file (garbage can). Your lack of grammar and spelling skills is truly painful to behold - "helped paid" is atrocious, "winner to" is equally pathetic, and you appear to randomly choose your verb tenses throughout.
hydrofluoric. A former chem prof of mine threatened to fail assignments which contained that particular typo. Dissolved. Also, insoluble is the correct spelling. But hey, you spelled silver correctly.
Anyways, semiconductor process chemicals are treated (at least in Europe / North America, and they're getting better than they used to be in India, Taiwan, etc). HF is easily neutralized. Look at the environmental permitting at Intel's fab 12 in Arizona - waste discharge is a huge issue; they don't just dump HF out a pipe. Once neutralized, fluoride salts are about as toxic as toothpaste (toothpaste is approx 0.243% NaF, which is nasty stuff).
But cost is the big picture. You're talking about something similar to lifecycle costs, which are, admittedly, the best way to evaluate pricing. At the end of the day, the cost of a policy should be compared to the benefits. The policy proposed in the study is insanely expensive, especially when you examine the benefits.
I work for an engineering consultant firm. It is more cost effective for a client to pay my employer than it is to learn and replicate what we do, even though we cost much more on an hourly basis than an employee. I say this to reinforce an earlier comment in the thread about hiring a mechanic to fix your car.
The class you described would not fly for most high schoolers. Even the 50% in your grade 10 compsci class were an atypical selection of high-schoolers, and were hardly representative of the general student population. I recall that few, if any of my classmates were interested in advanced math, or even in problem solving. North american high school was glorified babysitting after grade 10 for most students - you know, the ones who went on to such fabulous careers as gas jockeys or drug dealers. I do not believe that a mandatory class at the level you describe would be possible - the average kid is not motivated enough to tackle simple problem solving, let alone abstract problem solving. Plus, it is simply not necessary.
They article authors need to get out of their ivory tower and look at the world of real work. My job requires a degree and several years of experience, and 99% of what I do is repetitive (writing reports, reviewing data, etc), and is well-suited to using generic tools such as spreadsheets or word processors. In the event that a custom tool is required, we either purchase off the shelf specialized software, or use our in-house programmer to develop a solution to a common problem, which is then used by everyone in the firm to ensure consistency in our results.
Every engineer I know who took classes such as differential equations in university hasn't touched that stuff in years or decades. Look at what people do on a day-to-day basis. A century from now, secretaries will still be acting as a gatekeeper to senior staff and taking care of administrivia, just like today. They may not be answering telephones, but whatever they do will be similar in that it will be 100% routine. The less routine your work is, the more skills you require, forming a continuuum from assembly line worker (I've done that during school) to spacecraft designer (I haven't done that).
The more interesting jobs (to me) will always require more education than the norm. But for most jobs, the norm is too much. I laugh every time I see some job advertisement for what is basically for a labourer or clerk position, which require Grade 12, or some post-secondary education. There was one last week which wanted a university degree for a "management trainee" for a car rental agency. I nearly pissed myself over that one. Perhaps they wanted a degree as evidence that candidates can read and write, which is a sad testament to the quality of public education. But in reality, high school education is overkill for that type of job, and the equivalent job a century ago (horse and buggy rentals?) was done by a someone who only reached grade 8 or grade 10, if that.
The older I get, the more I realize that all that matters in the workplace is the ability to build relationships, communicate with others, and solve problems. I think that a successful businessman of a century ago would do quite well today. Similarly, the socially inept with poor communication skills limit themselves no matter their technical abilities. They will be toolmakers, not tool users or managers, and will never have decision making powers.
A society only needs so many toolmakers. Not everyone needs to become a toolmaker, and few jobs require custom tools built from scratch each day.
Perhaps I am myopic, but I don't see that ever changing.
I can't imagine a case where you would say that it's necessary to understand that
long polymer chains have a lot of easily releasable energy in order to drive a car. The only people who need to know that are the people who make the fuel. Because we have reached a degree of reliability with autos that allows us to implicitly trust that a gas station will carry fuel that will propel our car down the road, we no longer need to know that.
Gasoline is neither a polymer, nor a particularly long hydrocarbon chain. It is a mixture of many different short hydrocarbon molecules, typically only containing 5-11 carbon atoms per molecule. Gasoline even includes cyclic (ring-shaped) hydrocarbons such as benzene, toluene, and xylenes, which are not really chains at all.
While you definitely proved your own point that you don't need to understand gasoline to drive a car, perhaps you should pick an illustration which wich you are actually more familiar next time.
Other than that, I agree with you, especially about the costs of specialization. I imagine an economist would be able to shred the original article to pieces based on the economic costs of such a vision coming true. Given the amount of time he spent discussing the productivity benefits of specialization and mass production in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith would be horrified by their suggestions.
Marbles - yeah, that sure sounds like a remote root exploit waiting to happen. And freesweep (curses-based minesweeper clone) - sounds like another dangerous vulnerability to the unpatched machine. kdebase is a local vulnerability, and as for ipmasq, webfs, openssl and tomcat - I don't recall these even being installed on a typical debian workstation, let alone being started up at boot time. The only vulnerabilities in your list that might matter are the ssh ones.
Co-generation is quite common in industry. It involves the reuse of waste materials to generate heat, steam, or electricity, and can also be used to describe use of heat from one process to drive another. Many pulp mills and sawmills run cogen plants, most refineries and chemical producers also do this to some extent, and it is also called CHP, or combined heat and power. While it is good to turn a waste stream or unused resource into revenue, it is nothing new. I'm sitting within about 1km of a large woodwaste cogen plant at a nearby sawmill.
Slashdot Mirror
For your Excel problem, Window -> Freeze panes, with the active cell to the right and below the column / row you want to keep stationary. Intuitive as all get-out, I know.
As for your third point, ever heard of inflation? A minimum wage earner in 1985 had to work for 4-5 hours to buy a $20 CD. It is now down to 2 hours (typical CD price of $16 at A&B Sound or Future Shop). In constant (1985) dollars, the current price of $16 is likely pretty close to $7.
Plus CD burning software, zip software, PDF reader, Java, and so on. At least one long day by the time the machine is functional. Even longer if you have non-business machine (music-ripping software, games, etc).
Should have done that. It wouldn't have bothered you by morning.
- Always make the original firmware / bios available. Keep in in some form of ROM if possible.
- Always permit a fallback to the original firmware / bios (because the original should be available, as noted above). You almost need a pin or switch to do it, similar to the dip switch on some motherboards which restored default settings. Ideally, it would be nice to see a firmware loader in ROM, which could then manage and select among different firmware versions on a device, accessed through some key sequence, available for a second or two on power-up.
- No extra tools or hardware should be required. I don't even have a floppy drive hooked up anymore.
- No special operating system should be required (Windows-only firmware upgrades, anyone?). For firmware upgrades to be robust enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy, all that should matter is getting the new firmware file into the device, over an industry-standard protocol, and you then automatically load the new firmware the next time you boot (including a check for corruption in the firmware upgrade file).
- User data and settings should be maintained through the upgrades. If new settings are available / old options are removed, then it is the manufacturers job to avoid screwing things up, not the device owners job to reset / reload everything.
Oughta cover it. In a perfect world.Well, given the abominable state of Canada's immgiration laws, he would likely become eligible to be a landed immigrant after serving a few years in Club Fed, or something like that.
[looks at drug use stats] Nah, wrong comparison. Hmm, maybe some other state indoctrination example will work better. Hey, maybe it will work as well as the safe sex classes in schools.
[looks at teenage pregnancy and gonorrhea rates] Still the wrong comparison. Better rethink that premise. Perhaps less despair, squalor, and hopelessness would help a bit. Along with getting the whackos out of the education system in those countries.
You may note that I also did not reference the instrument in the article - I was discussing GPS in general.
Maybe 10 years ago GPS wasn't good enough. However, it is good enough for land titles in British Columbia (not very many survey monuments to tie into for minesites in the middle of nowhere). I don't know if I would want to do building construction layout (millimetre accuracy) using GPS, but if GPS is fine for land titles, it should be OK for most purposes. The Geodetic Survey Division of Natural Resources Canada has some more info on the different GPS methods. Check out the final part on Carrier Positioning accuracy - sub centimetre (10mm) is acheivable.
Try myprivacy.ca. The site is hosted by easyDNS. You sign up for an email account, which will only forward email from registrars to your real account. Everyone else has to go through a challenge / response reply. Only a few registrars participate, but it works well for me. And as for my real world address and phone number, they can get that from the phone book anyways.
Bah. Replying to my own post. Link to BBC history of Victorian medicine. Supports use of word "quack" in parent post.
You should take doctors off that pedestal, and remember that just over a hundred years ago, they were still bleeding people to try and cure their ailments, prescribed arsenic as a medicine, and judged competence based on the amount of blood on their smocks. That is not very many generations ago. Basically, those quacks taught the people who taught the people who are still teaching in the med schools today. Even doctors today only put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.
See your point C, in which you stated "ICU nurses have lots of knowledge". I heard it directly from the ICU nurse in question. First hand. Someone who was present at more deaths in a month than you or I will likely ever directly witness in our lifetimes. Thanks for your opinion, but I'll take her word for it.Short story in semi-point form. No names, lest people I know lose jobs. Car accident, patient in intensive care unit. Young woman, has small children, I believe. ICU doctors want to pull the plug (think it was a neurologist, ie, brain surgeon). No brain scan completed, doctor makes recommendation to family to turn off ventilator, family approves.
Nurse mentions to doctor that patient appears to be responding, and the doctor should get a scan to measure brain activity. She is overridden by the doctor, who maintains that the patient is brain dead, a vegetable. Doctor orders that patient is to be removed from life support. Nurse decides to adminster medication to assist breathing based on a standing order (blanket prescription for the ICU),and then turns off life support as ordered bvy doctor. Only because of medication administered, patient continues to breath. Nurse nearly loses job over this.
A few days later, patient is awake. A few months later, patient is nearly fully recovered, possible loss of recent memories, but is up walking about, part of her family, leading a useful and productive life. As far as I'm concerned, the above doctor should not be practicing, and should be sued for everything he owns, but doctors protect their own.
I don't trust doctors anymore. Period. You should get to know some ICU nurses, and you might want to revise some of your opinions. Personally, I would cause severe physical harm to any doctor with a god complex, before I would let them touch anyone I care about. I would also ask an experienced third party nurse to do an assessment, review a brain scan, and provide a second opinion (insamuch as the law permits nurses to have an opinion), before I would pull the plug on anyone based on a doctors advice.
You compared apples and oranges with that one.
I get tired of hearing programmers on /. boast about how unique and special they consider their work to be. Thanks for taking the wind out of the sails of the grandparent post.
- tell me how hot your girlfriend is;
- mention the size of your penis; or
- (shudder) post a link to a picture of either of the above.
Not that I'd accuse you of being insecure or anything.....That's funny, as I studied organic chem way back in university, and decent writing skills were a basic prerequisite. With your attitude, you will be in for a world of hurt once you have to get a real job, assuming that your resumes don't go directly to the circular file (garbage can). Your lack of grammar and spelling skills is truly painful to behold - "helped paid" is atrocious, "winner to" is equally pathetic, and you appear to randomly choose your verb tenses throughout.
Anyways, semiconductor process chemicals are treated (at least in Europe / North America, and they're getting better than they used to be in India, Taiwan, etc). HF is easily neutralized. Look at the environmental permitting at Intel's fab 12 in Arizona - waste discharge is a huge issue; they don't just dump HF out a pipe. Once neutralized, fluoride salts are about as toxic as toothpaste (toothpaste is approx 0.243% NaF, which is nasty stuff).
I work for an engineering consultant firm. It is more cost effective for a client to pay my employer than it is to learn and replicate what we do, even though we cost much more on an hourly basis than an employee. I say this to reinforce an earlier comment in the thread about hiring a mechanic to fix your car.
The class you described would not fly for most high schoolers. Even the 50% in your grade 10 compsci class were an atypical selection of high-schoolers, and were hardly representative of the general student population. I recall that few, if any of my classmates were interested in advanced math, or even in problem solving. North american high school was glorified babysitting after grade 10 for most students - you know, the ones who went on to such fabulous careers as gas jockeys or drug dealers. I do not believe that a mandatory class at the level you describe would be possible - the average kid is not motivated enough to tackle simple problem solving, let alone abstract problem solving. Plus, it is simply not necessary.
They article authors need to get out of their ivory tower and look at the world of real work. My job requires a degree and several years of experience, and 99% of what I do is repetitive (writing reports, reviewing data, etc), and is well-suited to using generic tools such as spreadsheets or word processors. In the event that a custom tool is required, we either purchase off the shelf specialized software, or use our in-house programmer to develop a solution to a common problem, which is then used by everyone in the firm to ensure consistency in our results.
Every engineer I know who took classes such as differential equations in university hasn't touched that stuff in years or decades. Look at what people do on a day-to-day basis. A century from now, secretaries will still be acting as a gatekeeper to senior staff and taking care of administrivia, just like today. They may not be answering telephones, but whatever they do will be similar in that it will be 100% routine. The less routine your work is, the more skills you require, forming a continuuum from assembly line worker (I've done that during school) to spacecraft designer (I haven't done that).
The more interesting jobs (to me) will always require more education than the norm. But for most jobs, the norm is too much. I laugh every time I see some job advertisement for what is basically for a labourer or clerk position, which require Grade 12, or some post-secondary education. There was one last week which wanted a university degree for a "management trainee" for a car rental agency. I nearly pissed myself over that one. Perhaps they wanted a degree as evidence that candidates can read and write, which is a sad testament to the quality of public education. But in reality, high school education is overkill for that type of job, and the equivalent job a century ago (horse and buggy rentals?) was done by a someone who only reached grade 8 or grade 10, if that.
The older I get, the more I realize that all that matters in the workplace is the ability to build relationships, communicate with others, and solve problems. I think that a successful businessman of a century ago would do quite well today. Similarly, the socially inept with poor communication skills limit themselves no matter their technical abilities. They will be toolmakers, not tool users or managers, and will never have decision making powers.
A society only needs so many toolmakers. Not everyone needs to become a toolmaker, and few jobs require custom tools built from scratch each day. Perhaps I am myopic, but I don't see that ever changing.
Other than that, I agree with you, especially about the costs of specialization. I imagine an economist would be able to shred the original article to pieces based on the economic costs of such a vision coming true. Given the amount of time he spent discussing the productivity benefits of specialization and mass production in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith would be horrified by their suggestions.
Marbles - yeah, that sure sounds like a remote root exploit waiting to happen. And freesweep (curses-based minesweeper clone) - sounds like another dangerous vulnerability to the unpatched machine. kdebase is a local vulnerability, and as for ipmasq, webfs, openssl and tomcat - I don't recall these even being installed on a typical debian workstation, let alone being started up at boot time. The only vulnerabilities in your list that might matter are the ssh ones.
Co-generation is quite common in industry. It involves the reuse of waste materials to generate heat, steam, or electricity, and can also be used to describe use of heat from one process to drive another. Many pulp mills and sawmills run cogen plants, most refineries and chemical producers also do this to some extent, and it is also called CHP, or combined heat and power. While it is good to turn a waste stream or unused resource into revenue, it is nothing new. I'm sitting within about 1km of a large woodwaste cogen plant at a nearby sawmill.
- MIT does it
- Cogen Europe
- EC / ASEAN Cogen site
Tons more links on Google - try looking for cogen, cogeneration, biomass, chp.