This sounds very much like (looks very much like, as well) a project that some of my professors were working on a few years back at Ohio State University, called Resolve C++. I also recall that they were working with another university (can't remember which... maybe U Penn?) on Resolve Ada.
The basic idea was that they added a whole ton of syntactic sugar to C++ (not by structured comments, but by adding a bunch of key words that were #defined into nothing). I'm curious if this is related to that work at all. (At the time I was convinced that it was total crap, but several years of experience have shown me what they were trying to accomplish, if poorly.)
What kind of crack are you smoking? I filled out the applications. I got denied. Plain and simple. It's amazing how much damage that your highshcool principal can do to that application process if he chooses to. Mine did. Maybe I deserved it, maybe I didn't... but he set out to ruin my college prospects and largely did so. Life goes on, I did well at a state college, and now I have a bunch of Harvard graduates working with me and for me.
What the hell do you know about my life? Apparently nothing.
I'm not trying to get into a big fight here, but a blanket statement was made which simply isn't true. I know this because I am a living couter-example. You don't need to counter with ad hominem attacks.
If you got the 98th or 99th percentile on your SAT you could have gone to school for free. No, maybe not Harvard for free, but certainly a good state university (Penn State, Rutgers, one of the better SUNY schools, etc.), or even a decent (sub-Ivy) private school.
Bullshit to you. I did get 98th percentile SATs (97th percentile verbal and perfect math... and this was before the score inflation "re-centering" that occured in '95), and I barely got into college. I got $300 of scholarships, at a large state university. So take your "informed opinion" somewhere else. The "merit-based" system is bullshit. If your parents couldn't afford to send you to a private school, but they weren't poor enough to garner you "special consideration", either... then welcome to the screwed-over center, buddy.
Now, really... How hard was that? Was it worth building into the interpreter? Is it better than building it into the interpreter because the code is right there, and you can do something differently with it if you want?
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
Why should we consider it to be alive? Well, I suppose that's just because it meets any definition I've ever heard for "life" that wasn't specifically contrived for the purpose of trying to pretend that fetuses and embrios aren't alive.
Ask any biologist whether or not a single cell is alive. This is not actually that difficult. It's somewhat amazing to me how completely a cell dies once it dies. All of its functions... even functions which one might assume to be extremely passive functions cease to operate. For example, the cell wall ceases to be selectively permiable! Can you believe that? It's amazing. The cell stops doing everything that the cell does. It's not hard to tell whether or not a single cell is alive.
Nor is it difficult to make the distinction between the living and non-living state of, say, an entire organ. Someone performing a heart transplant, for example, knows damn well the difference between a dead heart and a living heart.
The point is, this is not some crazy semantic or philosophical debate. It is @#$%ing obvious that the fetus or embrio is alive. If you want to have a crazy philosophical debate, try asking me to argue that it is an independant life from the life of the mother. That is at least a more interesting question. Again, I'd draw the comparison back to that of, say, a bacteria or parasite. In pretty much any conceivable way, it fits the same definition of an independant life as befits that of, for example, a tapeworm.
Again, though, I'm only bothering to state the fact that it is alive for the purpose of calculating its perceived value to society, relative to the perceived value of the woman's right to choose the course of her life and what she does with her own body. Also, pay attention to the fact that NOT ALL human life need be considered of the same value. It is a perfectly reasonable statement of value to say that the value of this life is less important than the value of the woman's right to govern the course of her own life. My point, though, is that that is the argument to be having.
Arguing that the fetus is not alive is as ridiculous as arguing that all human life is infinitely valuable, or labeling abortion as murder.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
Did you even read what I said? It's like you got to the first line and stopped reading (even though it begged you to keep reading). Points 2 and 4 were all about the fact that you, the woman, would have to carry this baby to term (if you were to not have an abortion) and that society places a high value on your right to make choices regarding decisions of that nature.
As for point 1, itself, I'm sorry but you're wrong. A fetus or an embrio is alive and it is human. It is very underdeveloped, and we can negotiate the relative value placed on human life depending on all sorts of things, including potential contribution to society, age, health, chances for survival, etc., etc. However, the point is that it is alive and human.
As to being human... I mean, it's not a dog, is it? It may not be as smart as a dog, but it's human DNA in there. What the hell else are you gonna call it?
As far as being alive, of course it is. It can't survive on it's own, taken out of it's environment, but it's alive. Can you survive in outer space or at the bottom of the ocean? Can a tapeworm survive if removed from your body? Does the fact that it can't survive out of your body mean that it is not alive? What if it is a very young tapeworm? Does the fact that it is young mean that it is not alive? Or that it is not a tapeworm? Hell no.
Certainly you could see by the comparison to a tapeworm that you could consider the fetus to be a form of life very much akin to a parasite. Perhaps that is an offsetting factor in the value which we assign to its life. As I said before, the value that we place on human life is not absolute. Perhaps an important extension to that is that the value placed on different individuals lives is not the same. We obviously value the life of the current and former presidents and their families above the lives of Secret Service agents, for example. They would trade their lives for the lives of those they protect, because they place a higher value thereon. So maybe, just maybe, we can recognize that it is a human life, but one of less value to society than your own? Perhaps even a human life of less value to society than your right to make choices governing your body and the course of your life? That's what I'm saying.
As to your later comment that men should have no say in discussion over the moral implications of abortion... that's just lunacy. You trying to force a fetus on me is no better than me trying to force a fetus on you... and I never said any such thing in the above. All I said was:
-the fetus's life has value to society (even to men, sorry) -the mother's rights of choice has value to society (also even to men, damnit) -the discussion can only properly be framed as the relative weighting of those two values.
I, as a man, but more importantly as a citizen, place a great deal of value on your right, as a person, to make decisions about the course of your life, of which the choice to carry a baby to term is certainly a very great one. Even though I don't know you, personally, your right to make decisions about your life is important to me. Deal with it. I feel it is my responsibility to safeguard your rights, as I hope you feel the same about me and my rights. However, I feel this about your rights, EVEN IF you do not feel the same about mine.
I, also as a man and a citizen, place a great deal of value on the lives of people I have not and never will meet. I feel it is my responsibility to guard their lives, as I hope they feel the same about me and my life. However, I feel this about their lives, EVEN IF they do not feel the same about mine.
Once again, I will make no statement here about WHICH of these two rights I hold in higher importance in this context... but I defend both of those values, individually.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
OK, fine... I'll finally bite on this issue.
"murder is the unlawful killing of people. Abortion is legal, so legally its not murder."
Circular logic, circular logic. The logic flows in a circle, so logically it is circular.
Furthermore, the only defensible (at least as far as I can figure... please correct me if you think I'm wrong!) way of framing the issue is to enumerate a few things:
1. Abortion is the termination of a human life, albeit a perhaps not very developed one. Note: I didn't call it murder... whichever side of the issue you are on... keep reading before you decide that I'm an asshole.
2. Abortion is a surgical procedure (or, I suppose a drug treatment, what with RU486) performed on the mother, the woman, as well as on the embrio/fetus. Also, that carrying the child to term is a physically difficult and life-altering experience for the woman (as well as, certainly, for the embrio/fetus).
3. Our societal value placed on human life is very great, but NOT absolute. There are several examples of situations where we, as a society, place other values above the value of individual human lives. These include: the sad necessity of war, the defense of other human lives, and, at the radical extreme, even money. I know that no one wants to admit it, but would we as a nation (USA) be happy coughing up our entire GNP on the world's most expensive medical procedure for the purpose of extending the life of some anonymous octogenarian by 10 years? No, we would not. I know that's a ridiculous example, but it establishes that we, as a society, would put a dollar value on human life... it's just a ridiculously high value. It's a rhetorical statement.
4. We, as a society, place a great deal of value on individual rights. The rights, for example, to make choices concerning physically difficult and/or painful as well as life-altering events in our lives. This value is, too, NOT ABSOLUTE. My favorite quote on this issue is from (if I recall correctly) Oliver Wendel Holmes: "Your right to swing your fist ends with my nose." You have the right to excercise the aductor muscles for your index finger... but when you put that right in the context of a loaded pistol held in your hand and pointed at my head... I start to question your right.
Okay... so where does that leave us? Well, points 1 and 2 are just basic statements of seemingly obvious fact... one of which will tend to be glossed over by folks on one side of the issue, and vice versa. Points 3 and 4 are also, I think, hard to argue with AS ABSOLUTE STATEMENTS OF FACT. The problem with statements 3 and 4 is when they are combined with statements 1 and 2, along with relative value judgements. As a I said, 3 and 4 simply state these things that we value, but upon which we do not put ABSOLUTE value. That is, there are individual situations where we may value other things above both or either of those values.
So the discussion of abortion really boils down to the relative weighting of:
all evaluated in the context of a potential abortion. I put an asterisk next to the personal choice of the fetus/embrio, because we must presume that if, given the choice and able to understand the choice, it would choose to live.
Anyway, I just think that if we could frame the discussion in this manner, we could have much richer discussion on the issue. Also, note that I don't speak of freeing the discussion of emotion, because I think that emotion is actually a critical element... just so long as we are discussing the emotions in the context of the actual question.
-- P.S. please note that I tried as hard as possible to exclude any personal bias in the above. Ideally, individuals on both sides of the issue will think that I stand opposite them, respectively. I will note that my personal bias is very close to the center, and that it has shifted from one side to the other in my life... and I consider it conceivable, but unlikely, that it could flip back. Have fun guessing.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, another critical element of control that the Writes pioneered was dihedral (did I spell that right), that is: making the wings inherently stable against inadvertant roll by raising them at a slight angle to the horizontal.
Do you honestly believe that the significance of the Wright Brother's flight was the control system? Please.
ABSO-FRIGIN-LUTELY!!! The thing that set the Writes apart from all the other would-be aviators of the day was there understanding of aerodynamics, and how crucial that was to powered flight.
They invented the technique of using a wind tunnel to measure lift and drag.
They improved propeller efficiency from the standard at the time of 40% to 80%! Modern propellers have an efficiency of about 85%. Holy crap.
Their wing-warping (which many people criticize, even though it is on the come back... Heck, people criticized the flying wing until the B2) mechanism was critical. They learned from their extensive and analytical study that the only way to control a plane in flight was to vary the aerodynamics by varying the wing geometry. Granted, most methods for vairable wing geometry used since then have involved hinged, surfaces, but the critical idea was there.
While many people look at Otto Lilienthal's work as being the foundation of the Write brothers, this is really not true. The Writes tried to follow Lilienthal's work, but were not able to scale it up to a large enough plane to carry a motor. It was only once they reallized that Lilienthal's assumptions about wings were flawed, that they came up with truly modern and workable wings.
For what it's worth, that pretty much exactly mirrors my own experience.
The real problem with outsourcing is not any sort of nonsense about the general quality of workers in country X. It is the same problem that you would get in outsorcing to some company on the far side of the US: you just can't manage the individuals in the same way, you can't hire them (as) selectively, and it's a huge pain to fire them.
I'm currently working with a team of about 12 Indian developers. One of them is great. If he'd interviewed for a job here, I'd have hired him. Two of them are alright. They're the sort of guys who I'd hope to avoid hiring, but if they somehow interviewed far better than they actually were and got hired... they're not bad enough that I'd fire them. That leaves nine guys who are just dead wood. I'm guessing that's about the same ratio as I'd get in the US if I just didn't know dick about recruiting (or didn't care). Of course, if I'd hired nine guys who were dead wood, I'd fire them... whereas these guys don't work for me... they work for the vendor, so I can't can them. It was a bitch just getting the single worst guy off of our project team... and who knows what they'll replace him with.
Anyway, you roll that together with the fact that there are a lot of hidden costs that reduce the effective cost savings, and it really just stops being such a good idea. If only I could convince the execs of this...
It appears that the plow operators, despite having "reached a temporary comprimise" have actually organized some sort of "blue-flue"-esque walk-out/strike without "technically" going on a walk-out/strike. Let me explain:
1) The roads are not getting plowed for shit today. Trust me, I've been driving them.
2) The only plows I <i>have</i> seen today have been in long trains (6 or more plows) driving slowly head-to-tail, plowing only the <i>shoulders</i> of highways and not plowing city streets whatsoever.
3) I also passed several of these "plow-trains" just stopped on the side of the road. I've never seen so many plows out <b>not</b> plowing in my life.
Bastards. Lazy bastards. That's right. F*cking-A this pisses me off. Yeah, you can bet your ass that if they were having their positions tracked then the roads would be plowed today.
Now... whether it makes sense to talk about benchmarking it in this sense is another thing all together. Granted, it would make more sense to benchmark smbfs versus nfs or afs (where you carefully controlled other hidden variables in the comparison, like network speed and the underlying filesystem on the remote host) then to benchmark it versus ext3 or reiserfs... But it is still incorrect to say that samba is not a file system.
Is nfs not a filesystem? If so, they really chose a poor acronym.
Well, I said nothing about the intent of exempting the state health agencies from the regulations. I was just saying that it would be nice to see MassHealth step up and voluntarily implement the same standard that every other payor in the state is, let alone every other non-Medicaid payor in the nation.
In particular, it would be fitting with the notion of using open standards as a cost-cutting measure. I mean... you know who is primarily responsible for driving this stuff? Medicare... and they're doing it to cut their own costs.
Yeah, thanks to the dot-bomb bubble, which he encouraged... I mean, why not? It made him look good, only at the expense of the future economy (well, the present economy now) and whoever came along after him in office. Don't forget that the dot-bomb bubble had already burst, and the economy was already starting to tank before he left office. I mean, blaming the current economic situation on Bush is pretty damn silly, considering that his economic policy couldn't really take effect until after he had been office for several months, and the economy was already fscked up before he took office. Don't get me wrong, I think he really picked the wrong time for tax cuts... the Laffer Curve (spelling?) as made famous by Reagan-omics doesn't just go up infinitely... the idea is to achieve the local maximum. Anyway... straying off point.
We are the silicon valley of biotech...
Well, no. San Diego would be more accurately referred to as the silicon valley of biotech. Boston was, however, the silicon valley of the northeast. That played a big role in how much our economy has tanked in the past couple of years. There were an awful lot of dot-coms in downtown and on the Route-128 tech corridor that totally imploded. There's a pretty serious cascade effect through the service and luxury economies, as well, when you rip a giant chunk out of high end of the local economy.
On the subject of their state healthcare (which, by the way, means Medicaid, or MassHealth, as its called in Mass), what about this "open standards" business carrying over into MassHealth?
For anyone not familiar with what is THE BIG THING going on in healthcare right now: it's called HIPAA. It's a whole TON of healthcare regulations, being rolled out. This spring a bunch of privacy stuff went into effect, and this fall, a bunch of regulations around data interchange formats. You see, healthcare involves a whole ton of data flying around... eligibility queries, eligibility responses, claims being filed, claims being paid and denied... and an awful lot of this happens electronically. The thing is that all of the different payors (insurance companies, government agencies) have historically had very different and disparate systems for handling this data, and required a bunch of different formats, and this has made it very difficult for healthcare providers (doctors, etc) to do their jobs and get paid.
Anyway, as of October 16th (I think... I might be off on the day by a tiny bit), all of the payors in the country have to start handling all of their data interchanges in a common format. All of the payors EXCEPT the various states' Medicares. For whatever reason, they totally get a by on all of this (which, to a certain degree, defeats the purpose). Anyway, the point behind this huge rant is just that it would be awfully nice if, as part of this initiative toward open standards, Massachusetts's state Medicare program voluntarily switched over to the same open standard that everybody else is being compelled to switch to.
As a Mass resident, I don't think the taxes are as bad as the state's reputation suggests.
Apart from that, there's a big hole in downtown Boston called the "Big Dig", that sucks in most of the tax revenue so that's why there's none left.:-)
Well... two things to say to that.
1. What!?!?! Mass has ridiculous taxes. On their face they may not seem that bad... I mean it's a flat 5.9% rate? Wow, a flat rate, that sounds so republican, what's the deal? Well, the deal is that everything... down to RENT is tax deductible (up to a limit). That makes it an incredibly progressive tax, as well, when all is said and done.
2. The big dig is mostly being paid for by tolls on the Mass Pike (I-90), as opposed to taxes. Even though the original levy that built it and its toll booths explicitly stated that the tolls would end when the project was paid for. However, through some wonderful P.R.T. (that's The People's Republic of Taxachusetts) democrats-only politics, they've decided that the big dig is part of the Mass Pike (which is total B.S.). The big dig is primarily on I-93, not I-90, and is entirely in downtown Boston, not the 150 or so miles west of Boston where the majority of these tolls are collected).
While I agree with you that trying to force MS to make Office For Linux is not the answer, the notion that the government cannot/should not do this sort of thing is kind of crap.
As to cannot -- well, they already do this sort of thing. Great example: the phone companies must supply phones to Podunk Montana, even though those individual subscribers are a financial loss to the phone companies. Who pays for that loss? The folks in the cities. And there is a good reason, called the network effect. Every phone in the whole country is made more valuable by the fact that very nearly every home has a phone in it. If only 80% of homes/businesses had phones in them, then _my_ phone would be made less useful. (Similar arguments can and, in my opinion should, be made about IP utilities... but that is strayiong off point).
As to should not -- well, I actually sort of addressed that inline above. Granted, the phone companies are just one example, but there are others, too, many of which have obvious supporting reasons. Other kinds of utilities, zoning codes, for example... public safety (which you mentioned)... sidewalks (you know that if you own property in many municipalities, you are compelled to maintain the sidewalk on your property).
The point is that whatever regulating bodies involved in this process make good, informed decisions.
Well, the really interesting thing is this: How many places claim to be hiring (and trying to attract) the 99th percentile (or 99.9th as in this case... perhaps a touch of hyperbole), and how many places actually do what it takes. I would guess that, regardless of the number of companies that claim to be attracting the 99th percentile, only about 1% of companies actually treat their programmers like you should be treating your most important, most profit-driving individual contributors.
Re:colour me unimpressed
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The Bionic Office
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think part of what's revolutionary about it is a manager making a rational economic argument for why it is worthwhile to spend this kind of money on giving developers a nice work area, and then putting their money where their mouth is (damn english, lacking proper indirect third-person singular pronoun).
It would be nice if my company could see things this way, instead of making lame-ass defeneses that "We can't treat the programmers specially, when there are non-programming paper-pushing staff right down the hall. If they get cubicles, we can't give you nice offices. While we agree that you *deserve* better, they'll get pissed off at the disparity." Hell, they probably tell those people "We really can't do better for you... I mean, we *already* treat you as well as the programmers!"
<aside> By the way, the word is "color", friend. KIDDING! </aside>
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This sounds very much like (looks very much like, as well) a project that some of my professors were working on a few years back at Ohio State University, called Resolve C++. I also recall that they were working with another university (can't remember which... maybe U Penn?) on Resolve Ada.
The basic idea was that they added a whole ton of syntactic sugar to C++ (not by structured comments, but by adding a bunch of key words that were #defined into nothing). I'm curious if this is related to that work at all. (At the time I was convinced that it was total crap, but several years of experience have shown me what they were trying to accomplish, if poorly.)
What kind of crack are you smoking? I filled out the applications. I got denied. Plain and simple. It's amazing how much damage that your highshcool principal can do to that application process if he chooses to. Mine did. Maybe I deserved it, maybe I didn't... but he set out to ruin my college prospects and largely did so. Life goes on, I did well at a state college, and now I have a bunch of Harvard graduates working with me and for me.
What the hell do you know about my life? Apparently nothing.
I'm not trying to get into a big fight here, but a blanket statement was made which simply isn't true. I know this because I am a living couter-example. You don't need to counter with ad hominem attacks.
Bullshit to you. I did get 98th percentile SATs (97th percentile verbal and perfect math... and this was before the score inflation "re-centering" that occured in '95), and I barely got into college. I got $300 of scholarships, at a large state university. So take your "informed opinion" somewhere else. The "merit-based" system is bullshit. If your parents couldn't afford to send you to a private school, but they weren't poor enough to garner you "special consideration", either... then welcome to the screwed-over center, buddy.
Can I sit by a pond, instead? How about an inland sea?
That's a sort of lame argument... perl doesn't have an "interactive mode" because it doesn't need one. Look at this, ma, no hands:
.= <STDIN>) {
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
my $buffer = '';
print "[perl] ";
while ($buffer
# check if code compiles, else allow continuation of input, ala shell
my $code = eval "sub {no strict; $buffer}";
if ($code) {
print &$code;
$buffer = '';
print "\n[perl] ";
}
else {
print "> ";
}
}
Which gives you an interactive perl session like so:
[me@host]$ perl interact.pl
[perl] 1+
> 1
2
[perl] ++$x
1
[perl] ++$x
2
[perl] for (1..5) {
> print "sucka!\n";
> sleep 1;
> }
sucka!
sucka!
sucka!
sucka!
sucka!
[perl] exit
[me@host]$
Now, really... How hard was that? Was it worth building into the interpreter? Is it better than building it into the interpreter because the code is right there, and you can do something differently with it if you want?
Why should we consider it to be alive? Well, I suppose that's just because it meets any definition I've ever heard for "life" that wasn't specifically contrived for the purpose of trying to pretend that fetuses and embrios aren't alive.
Ask any biologist whether or not a single cell is alive. This is not actually that difficult. It's somewhat amazing to me how completely a cell dies once it dies. All of its functions... even functions which one might assume to be extremely passive functions cease to operate. For example, the cell wall ceases to be selectively permiable! Can you believe that? It's amazing. The cell stops doing everything that the cell does. It's not hard to tell whether or not a single cell is alive.
Nor is it difficult to make the distinction between the living and non-living state of, say, an entire organ. Someone performing a heart transplant, for example, knows damn well the difference between a dead heart and a living heart.
The point is, this is not some crazy semantic or philosophical debate. It is @#$%ing obvious that the fetus or embrio is alive. If you want to have a crazy philosophical debate, try asking me to argue that it is an independant life from the life of the mother. That is at least a more interesting question. Again, I'd draw the comparison back to that of, say, a bacteria or parasite. In pretty much any conceivable way, it fits the same definition of an independant life as befits that of, for example, a tapeworm.
Again, though, I'm only bothering to state the fact that it is alive for the purpose of calculating its perceived value to society, relative to the perceived value of the woman's right to choose the course of her life and what she does with her own body. Also, pay attention to the fact that NOT ALL human life need be considered of the same value. It is a perfectly reasonable statement of value to say that the value of this life is less important than the value of the woman's right to govern the course of her own life. My point, though, is that that is the argument to be having.
Arguing that the fetus is not alive is as ridiculous as arguing that all human life is infinitely valuable, or labeling abortion as murder.
Did you even read what I said? It's like you got to the first line and stopped reading (even though it begged you to keep reading). Points 2 and 4 were all about the fact that you, the woman, would have to carry this baby to term (if you were to not have an abortion) and that society places a high value on your right to make choices regarding decisions of that nature.
As for point 1, itself, I'm sorry but you're wrong. A fetus or an embrio is alive and it is human. It is very underdeveloped, and we can negotiate the relative value placed on human life depending on all sorts of things, including potential contribution to society, age, health, chances for survival, etc., etc. However, the point is that it is alive and human.
As to being human... I mean, it's not a dog, is it? It may not be as smart as a dog, but it's human DNA in there. What the hell else are you gonna call it?
As far as being alive, of course it is. It can't survive on it's own, taken out of it's environment, but it's alive. Can you survive in outer space or at the bottom of the ocean? Can a tapeworm survive if removed from your body? Does the fact that it can't survive out of your body mean that it is not alive? What if it is a very young tapeworm? Does the fact that it is young mean that it is not alive? Or that it is not a tapeworm? Hell no.
Certainly you could see by the comparison to a tapeworm that you could consider the fetus to be a form of life very much akin to a parasite. Perhaps that is an offsetting factor in the value which we assign to its life. As I said before, the value that we place on human life is not absolute. Perhaps an important extension to that is that the value placed on different individuals lives is not the same. We obviously value the life of the current and former presidents and their families above the lives of Secret Service agents, for example. They would trade their lives for the lives of those they protect, because they place a higher value thereon. So maybe, just maybe, we can recognize that it is a human life, but one of less value to society than your own? Perhaps even a human life of less value to society than your right to make choices governing your body and the course of your life? That's what I'm saying.
As to your later comment that men should have no say in discussion over the moral implications of abortion... that's just lunacy. You trying to force a fetus on me is no better than me trying to force a fetus on you... and I never said any such thing in the above. All I said was:
-the fetus's life has value to society (even to men, sorry)
-the mother's rights of choice has value to society (also even to men, damnit)
-the discussion can only properly be framed as the relative weighting of those two values.
I, as a man, but more importantly as a citizen, place a great deal of value on your right, as a person, to make decisions about the course of your life, of which the choice to carry a baby to term is certainly a very great one. Even though I don't know you, personally, your right to make decisions about your life is important to me. Deal with it. I feel it is my responsibility to safeguard your rights, as I hope you feel the same about me and my rights. However, I feel this about your rights, EVEN IF you do not feel the same about mine.
I, also as a man and a citizen, place a great deal of value on the lives of people I have not and never will meet. I feel it is my responsibility to guard their lives, as I hope they feel the same about me and my life. However, I feel this about their lives, EVEN IF they do not feel the same about mine.
Once again, I will make no statement here about WHICH of these two rights I hold in higher importance in this context... but I defend both of those values, individually.
OK, fine... I'll finally bite on this issue.
"murder is the unlawful killing of people. Abortion is legal, so legally its not murder."
Circular logic, circular logic. The logic flows in a circle, so logically it is circular.
Furthermore, the only defensible (at least as far as I can figure... please correct me if you think I'm wrong!) way of framing the issue is to enumerate a few things:
1. Abortion is the termination of a human life, albeit a perhaps not very developed one. Note: I didn't call it murder... whichever side of the issue you are on... keep reading before you decide that I'm an asshole.
2. Abortion is a surgical procedure (or, I suppose a drug treatment, what with RU486) performed on the mother, the woman, as well as on the embrio/fetus. Also, that carrying the child to term is a physically difficult and life-altering experience for the woman (as well as, certainly, for the embrio/fetus).
3. Our societal value placed on human life is very great, but NOT absolute. There are several examples of situations where we, as a society, place other values above the value of individual human lives. These include: the sad necessity of war, the defense of other human lives, and, at the radical extreme, even money. I know that no one wants to admit it, but would we as a nation (USA) be happy coughing up our entire GNP on the world's most expensive medical procedure for the purpose of extending the life of some anonymous octogenarian by 10 years? No, we would not. I know that's a ridiculous example, but it establishes that we, as a society, would put a dollar value on human life... it's just a ridiculously high value. It's a rhetorical statement.
4. We, as a society, place a great deal of value on individual rights. The rights, for example, to make choices concerning physically difficult and/or painful as well as life-altering events in our lives. This value is, too, NOT ABSOLUTE. My favorite quote on this issue is from (if I recall correctly) Oliver Wendel Holmes: "Your right to swing your fist ends with my nose." You have the right to excercise the aductor muscles for your index finger... but when you put that right in the context of a loaded pistol held in your hand and pointed at my head... I start to question your right.
Okay... so where does that leave us? Well, points 1 and 2 are just basic statements of seemingly obvious fact... one of which will tend to be glossed over by folks on one side of the issue, and vice versa. Points 3 and 4 are also, I think, hard to argue with AS ABSOLUTE STATEMENTS OF FACT. The problem with statements 3 and 4 is when they are combined with statements 1 and 2, along with relative value judgements. As a I said, 3 and 4 simply state these things that we value, but upon which we do not put ABSOLUTE value. That is, there are individual situations where we may value other things above both or either of those values.
So the discussion of abortion really boils down to the relative weighting of:
-value(personal choice, pregnant woman)
-value(personal choice, fetus/embrio)*
-and value(life, society)
all evaluated in the context of a potential abortion. I put an asterisk next to the personal choice of the fetus/embrio, because we must presume that if, given the choice and able to understand the choice, it would choose to live.
Anyway, I just think that if we could frame the discussion in this manner, we could have much richer discussion on the issue. Also, note that I don't speak of freeing the discussion of emotion, because I think that emotion is actually a critical element... just so long as we are discussing the emotions in the context of the actual question.
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P.S. please note that I tried as hard as possible to exclude any personal bias in the above. Ideally, individuals on both sides of the issue will think that I stand opposite them, respectively. I will note that my personal bias is very close to the center, and that it has shifted from one side to the other in my life... and I consider it conceivable, but unlikely, that it could flip back. Have fun guessing.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, another critical element of control that the Writes pioneered was dihedral (did I spell that right), that is: making the wings inherently stable against inadvertant roll by raising them at a slight angle to the horizontal.
Do you honestly believe that the significance of the Wright Brother's flight was the control system? Please.
ABSO-FRIGIN-LUTELY!!! The thing that set the Writes apart from all the other would-be aviators of the day was there understanding of aerodynamics, and how crucial that was to powered flight.
They invented the technique of using a wind tunnel to measure lift and drag.
They improved propeller efficiency from the standard at the time of 40% to 80%! Modern propellers have an efficiency of about 85%. Holy crap.
Their wing-warping (which many people criticize, even though it is on the come back... Heck, people criticized the flying wing until the B2) mechanism was critical. They learned from their extensive and analytical study that the only way to control a plane in flight was to vary the aerodynamics by varying the wing geometry. Granted, most methods for vairable wing geometry used since then have involved hinged, surfaces, but the critical idea was there.
While many people look at Otto Lilienthal's work as being the foundation of the Write brothers, this is really not true. The Writes tried to follow Lilienthal's work, but were not able to scale it up to a large enough plane to carry a motor. It was only once they reallized that Lilienthal's assumptions about wings were flawed, that they came up with truly modern and workable wings.
For what it's worth, that pretty much exactly mirrors my own experience.
The real problem with outsourcing is not any sort of nonsense about the general quality of workers in country X. It is the same problem that you would get in outsorcing to some company on the far side of the US: you just can't manage the individuals in the same way, you can't hire them (as) selectively, and it's a huge pain to fire them.
I'm currently working with a team of about 12 Indian developers. One of them is great. If he'd interviewed for a job here, I'd have hired him. Two of them are alright. They're the sort of guys who I'd hope to avoid hiring, but if they somehow interviewed far better than they actually were and got hired... they're not bad enough that I'd fire them. That leaves nine guys who are just dead wood. I'm guessing that's about the same ratio as I'd get in the US if I just didn't know dick about recruiting (or didn't care). Of course, if I'd hired nine guys who were dead wood, I'd fire them... whereas these guys don't work for me... they work for the vendor, so I can't can them. It was a bitch just getting the single worst guy off of our project team... and who knows what they'll replace him with.
Anyway, you roll that together with the fact that there are a lot of hidden costs that reduce the effective cost savings, and it really just stops being such a good idea. If only I could convince the execs of this...
It appears that the plow operators, despite having "reached a temporary comprimise" have actually organized some sort of "blue-flue"-esque walk-out/strike without "technically" going on a walk-out/strike. Let me explain:
1) The roads are not getting plowed for shit today. Trust me, I've been driving them.
2) The only plows I <i>have</i> seen today have been in long trains (6 or more plows) driving slowly head-to-tail, plowing only the <i>shoulders</i> of highways and not plowing city streets whatsoever.
3) I also passed several of these "plow-trains" just stopped on the side of the road. I've never seen so many plows out <b>not</b> plowing in my life.
Bastards. Lazy bastards. That's right. F*cking-A this pisses me off. Yeah, you can bet your ass that if they were having their positions tracked then the roads would be plowed today.
Man this has me pissed off. I should stop now.
or how about:
Now... whether it makes sense to talk about benchmarking it in this sense is another thing all together. Granted, it would make more sense to benchmark smbfs versus nfs or afs (where you carefully controlled other hidden variables in the comparison, like network speed and the underlying filesystem on the remote host) then to benchmark it versus ext3 or reiserfs... But it is still incorrect to say that samba is not a file system.
Is nfs not a filesystem? If so, they really chose a poor acronym.
Well, I'm in that set... and the obviousness of the Duke Nukem / Ash derivation was not lost on me.
Dude... we are all using vi. ...well... vim.
Well, I said nothing about the intent of exempting the state health agencies from the regulations. I was just saying that it would be nice to see MassHealth step up and voluntarily implement the same standard that every other payor in the state is, let alone every other non-Medicaid payor in the nation.
In particular, it would be fitting with the notion of using open standards as a cost-cutting measure. I mean... you know who is primarily responsible for driving this stuff? Medicare... and they're doing it to cut their own costs.
Heh... I've always been partial to "The People's Republic of Massachusetts".
Come on...
Are we wealthy? We were under Clinton...
Yeah, thanks to the dot-bomb bubble, which he encouraged... I mean, why not? It made him look good, only at the expense of the future economy (well, the present economy now) and whoever came along after him in office. Don't forget that the dot-bomb bubble had already burst, and the economy was already starting to tank before he left office. I mean, blaming the current economic situation on Bush is pretty damn silly, considering that his economic policy couldn't really take effect until after he had been office for several months, and the economy was already fscked up before he took office. Don't get me wrong, I think he really picked the wrong time for tax cuts... the Laffer Curve (spelling?) as made famous by Reagan-omics doesn't just go up infinitely... the idea is to achieve the local maximum. Anyway... straying off point.
We are the silicon valley of biotech...
Well, no. San Diego would be more accurately referred to as the silicon valley of biotech. Boston was, however, the silicon valley of the northeast. That played a big role in how much our economy has tanked in the past couple of years. There were an awful lot of dot-coms in downtown and on the Route-128 tech corridor that totally imploded. There's a pretty serious cascade effect through the service and luxury economies, as well, when you rip a giant chunk out of high end of the local economy.
On the subject of their state healthcare (which, by the way, means Medicaid, or MassHealth, as its called in Mass), what about this "open standards" business carrying over into MassHealth?
For anyone not familiar with what is THE BIG THING going on in healthcare right now: it's called HIPAA. It's a whole TON of healthcare regulations, being rolled out. This spring a bunch of privacy stuff went into effect, and this fall, a bunch of regulations around data interchange formats. You see, healthcare involves a whole ton of data flying around... eligibility queries, eligibility responses, claims being filed, claims being paid and denied... and an awful lot of this happens electronically. The thing is that all of the different payors (insurance companies, government agencies) have historically had very different and disparate systems for handling this data, and required a bunch of different formats, and this has made it very difficult for healthcare providers (doctors, etc) to do their jobs and get paid.
Anyway, as of October 16th (I think... I might be off on the day by a tiny bit), all of the payors in the country have to start handling all of their data interchanges in a common format. All of the payors EXCEPT the various states' Medicares. For whatever reason, they totally get a by on all of this (which, to a certain degree, defeats the purpose). Anyway, the point behind this huge rant is just that it would be awfully nice if, as part of this initiative toward open standards, Massachusetts's state Medicare program voluntarily switched over to the same open standard that everybody else is being compelled to switch to.
As a Mass resident, I don't think the taxes are as bad as the state's reputation suggests.
:-)
Apart from that, there's a big hole in downtown Boston called the "Big Dig", that sucks in most of the tax revenue so that's why there's none left.
Well... two things to say to that.
1. What!?!?! Mass has ridiculous taxes. On their face they may not seem that bad... I mean it's a flat 5.9% rate? Wow, a flat rate, that sounds so republican, what's the deal? Well, the deal is that everything... down to RENT is tax deductible (up to a limit). That makes it an incredibly progressive tax, as well, when all is said and done.
2. The big dig is mostly being paid for by tolls on the Mass Pike (I-90), as opposed to taxes. Even though the original levy that built it and its toll booths explicitly stated that the tolls would end when the project was paid for. However, through some wonderful P.R.T. (that's The People's Republic of Taxachusetts) democrats-only politics, they've decided that the big dig is part of the Mass Pike (which is total B.S.). The big dig is primarily on I-93, not I-90, and is entirely in downtown Boston, not the 150 or so miles west of Boston where the majority of these tolls are collected).
While I agree with you that trying to force MS to make Office For Linux is not the answer, the notion that the government cannot/should not do this sort of thing is kind of crap.
As to cannot -- well, they already do this sort of thing. Great example: the phone companies must supply phones to Podunk Montana, even though those individual subscribers are a financial loss to the phone companies. Who pays for that loss? The folks in the cities. And there is a good reason, called the network effect. Every phone in the whole country is made more valuable by the fact that very nearly every home has a phone in it. If only 80% of homes/businesses had phones in them, then _my_ phone would be made less useful. (Similar arguments can and, in my opinion should, be made about IP utilities... but that is strayiong off point).
As to should not -- well, I actually sort of addressed that inline above. Granted, the phone companies are just one example, but there are others, too, many of which have obvious supporting reasons. Other kinds of utilities, zoning codes, for example... public safety (which you mentioned)... sidewalks (you know that if you own property in many municipalities, you are compelled to maintain the sidewalk on your property).
The point is that whatever regulating bodies involved in this process make good, informed decisions.
Vacation: 6 weeks
Salary: A fistful of yen
Direct Reports: Hung Lo, Long Lang, and Enormous Genitals
Well, the really interesting thing is this: How many places claim to be hiring (and trying to attract) the 99th percentile (or 99.9th as in this case... perhaps a touch of hyperbole), and how many places actually do what it takes. I would guess that, regardless of the number of companies that claim to be attracting the 99th percentile, only about 1% of companies actually treat their programmers like you should be treating your most important, most profit-driving individual contributors.
I think part of what's revolutionary about it is a manager making a rational economic argument for why it is worthwhile to spend this kind of money on giving developers a nice work area, and then putting their money where their mouth is (damn english, lacking proper indirect third-person singular pronoun).
It would be nice if my company could see things this way, instead of making lame-ass defeneses that "We can't treat the programmers specially, when there are non-programming paper-pushing staff right down the hall. If they get cubicles, we can't give you nice offices. While we agree that you *deserve* better, they'll get pissed off at the disparity." Hell, they probably tell those people "We really can't do better for you... I mean, we *already* treat you as well as the programmers!"
<aside>
By the way, the word is "color", friend. KIDDING!
</aside>
Well, it says there is a kitchenette in the common area... I'd have to imagine there is a coffee machine.