In short you really have to retain a sense of humor for the people you interview and ultimately work for. Because nearly all of them are shitheads.
Who else here is familiar with the seasonal joy and merriment associated with putting lights on the Christmas tree? Chains of lights used to be almost exclusively wired in series, so if one bulb was bad the whole chain would go out. To find the bad bulb, you take another bulb and works down the entire chain, swapping the new bulb for each old one and hoping that the chain lights.
On occasion, you will go down the entire chain, testing the bulb for a good fit and light in each and every socket, and each time get a negative result. You discover that the problem isn't just the chain of lights--sometimes the test bulb is defective, too.
If nearly everyone you've ever interviewed and worked for is a shithead, one explanation is that you're extremely unlucky....
had a great job at the end of 2003, but ended up getting fired because I had an attitude that signaled I wanted a better company to work for. I didn't like the directions they were taking, etc. I had publicly talked about quitting and finding a better job, and after a heated argument with an incompetent boss, I was terminated.
Well, yes. It's much harder to get a new job if your references suck. Potential future employers are not going to look fondly on an applicant who feels no qualms about badmouthing his job, his boss, and his company, can't control his temper, and talks regularly about leaving for another job at a "better" company.
The point is this : you won't know if it was a stupid move for 6 months. If you find some kick ass company to work for, then it was a smart move. If you're borrowing money from family and friends to pay for a bankruptcy attorney, then you were a fool.
The stupid move wasn't leaving the old job. The stupid move was getting fired.
What's to prevent one counter from blocking/approving ballots according to personal preference. The arguement that the other counters stop him is not valid, because he could be "the other" counter who stops legitimate votes for a canidate he opposes.
I can't speak for how a manual counting system would work in the United States, but the Canadian system seems relatively resistant to the type of manipulation you describe.
Each polling station is operated by two people: one from each of the two parties who drew the most votes in the last election in that electoral district. These two participate in the counting of votes.
Any candidate in the election may send observers (called scrutineers) to any of (or all) the polling stations. These observers may monitor both voting and counting.
Contested ballots are set aside but kept for a recount if the outcome is close. Someone will notice and comment if a particular polling station has more than one or two spoiled ballots.
Any candidate may request a judicially-supervised recount providing they're willing to submit a nominal fee and attest that they believe errors were made in the count.
A recount is mandatory if the margin of victory is smaller than a certain threshold (0.1% if I remember correctly.)
To fudge the count you need to corrupt a lot of individuals up the chain.
Even methamphetamines help the pharmaceutical companies. Who do you think makes methadone?
Strictly speaking, methadone and methamphetamines aren't usually related. Methadone is used in the treatment of heroin addiction. If you're looking for a (at least tenuous) link between big pharma and crystal meth, methamphetamines are tradiationally made from over-the-counter cold medications containing (pseudo)ephedrine hydrochloride.
And if the german authorities cannot stop the contents because it is located in other contries, this kind of censorship is no better than the censorship done by countries like Iran and China.
On the other hand, just about every nation has specified content that it is illegal to view. Different countries draw the line in different places, and on different issues.
In Germany, it would seem that some effort is being expended to block objectionable material before it reaches consumers. The United States' preference is to charge the person who downloads and views the objectionable content.
Which arrangment is "better"?
The question of whether Germany should allow the distribution of Nazi-related material is separate from the question of how that type of ban should be enforced.
You cannot do this while charging a battery. The voltage MUST be kept below the voltage of the battery or you will start doing funky things with the battery.
You could connect and charge the batteries in series. Heck, that's what your 12 volt lead-acid battery is: six 2 volt lead-acid cells connected in series. They just happen to all be in the same box.
Do some clever stuff with relays to join your battery banks in series during charging, and drop them back to parallel when you're done. I would expect that you'd also probably have some smart little regulators across each cell to monitor the charging process, since Li-ion batteries tend to be somewhat finicky beasts.
All that said, I would expect a ton of heating/cooling problems during charging if you tried to scale these batteries up to electric car sizes. Even if you could deliver sufficient energy, I suspect you'd melt anything in the middle of such a structure....
To post a picture of empty space and say it's full of dark matter is just stupid. I think the only dark matter this article shows is in the astronomers head.
You're right. Obviously the astronomers involved made all this stuff up. They haven't got a preprint of a their report to Astrophysics Journal posted on the web, or anything like that. And popular science journalists would never try to get cute with the pictures they choose to go with their articles. I mean that just doesn't happen.
Though the BBC is a reputable source and usually gets their facts straight, they're not to be mistaken for a peer-reviewed journal. A two-hundred-word article isn't going to have a full complement of figures and supporting data--and it shouldn't be expected to.
Mods--the parent post is funny at best; not insightful. I have this amusing mental image of a bunch of drunk astronomers drawing random circles on star charts and saying, "Okay, this week we'll tell them there's dark matter here. Suckers."
It's not very hard to take an ink, purify it, dissolve it in Methylene Chloride, toss it into a powerful NMR... and come up with a structure.
You've never tried this with a pigment that's a mixture of lots of compounds, have you?
You're going to have to start with some sort of separation step--probably liquid chromatography for this stuff--followed up by an analytical technique for whatever comes out of the column (I would start with mass spec myself, but if you're getting really clean peaks out of the HPLC then you might feed some to an NMR and see what comes out. Figuring out structures is much easier with MS and NMR data.)
I wouldn't be surprised if you had to do it a few times with different solvents to resolve all the constitutent components. And even then you're only getting a very first approximation.
...and you've got an ink with no upfront costs.
Except for the HPLC-MS, the NMR, the time of the chemists and technicians, the months or years it will take to do the reverse engineering, the reagents and equipment to do pilot projects to manufacture and test the copycat ink, the patent attorney to keep you from getting sued for ripping off the other guy's formulation....
Why is the big mantra on slashdot "this guy is stupid!", as if this is the ultimate sin? I guess "stupid" people don't deserve anything but contempt.
You're right. On the face of the matter, it isn't fair. Some people are less intelligent than others, through unfortunate circumstances of upbringing or genetics.
On the other hand, this guy is a pre-med student. By the classic standards of our society he isn't (or shouldn't be) stupid. He should be very, very, smart. What he's done here doesn't look too bright, and it stems from a lack of common sense as well as loose ethical principles.
The only way The Woz would have made a pile of money off the Apple without Jobs, is if he was lucky enough to have another Jobs-type stumble across him.
The only way Jobs would have made a pile of money off Apple without The Woz, is if he was lucky enough to stumble across another Woz-type.
...And around we go again....
There are a lot of people in business and marketing who are good at their jobs, but not making millions (or billions) of dollars. Similarly, there are a lot of technical people who are good at their jobs, but not designing future household-name products from their garages. Wozniak and Jobs both seem to stand at the very small apices of very broad pyramids. Having the best of both categories come together is a rare thing indeed.
Do you think we'd have DVDs if people hadn't found many easy ways to copy VHS tapes? Nope. Same with CDs. They exist because they're cheaper to produce than tapes, yet can be sold for more because of the "higher quality" and because they were, at the time of their release, damn difficult to copy.
...because it took years before somebody noticed you could connect the video out from a DVD player to the video in of a VHS deck. Similarly, I'm sure it took forever for someone to notice that the audio out from a CD player could be connected to a regular tape deck. Damn those pirates and their crazy technology. Sure the duplicates (on VHS or audio tape) weren't as good as the original DVD or CD, but such copies are pretty close to as good as the VHS or audio tapes that they replaced.
If people didn't find the new format more convenient and higher in quality, then they wouldn't have bought the damn things. There was a significant period of time where both formats were sold side by side in stores, and people chose to pay the premium for the 'better' technology. Remember that some new formats have passed into obscurity--Laserdisc, for instance.
If you want to argue a conspiracy, then suggest that the manufacturers wanted to force you to rebuy your entire music collection in the new format. The last part of your argument at least is spot on--manufacturers do indeed like the new formats because they're cheaper to manufacture. That doesn't make them evil, just economically sound.
There has yet to be a reputable study that has concluded that second hand smoke causes cancer. You can google for further discussion on this.
I'm not sure if that is true. One of the sibling posts to this one provides a link to a full-on prospective study which confirms environmental tobacco smoke is a risk factor for lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. It's a January 2005 publication, so I don't blame you for not seeing it before.
I would also argue that elements of tobacco smoke are known carcinogens. To take one example, a lot of recent work has demonstrated that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) like benzo[a]pyrene causes specific mutations to the p53 gene which are identical to mutations found in cancers of the lung and other organs (abstract). It's very difficult to tease out all the different factors at work in an epidemiological study, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest:
PAHs are present in tobacco smoke;
p53 is mutated in ~60% of human lung cancers;
p53 mutations mostly occur at a few 'hotspots';
PAHs bind to and disrupt the p53 gene at the same sites as mutations are observed;
PAHs cause cancer in rats;
Therefore it is likely that cigarette smoke can cause oncogenic (cancer-inducing) mutations.
Yes, there are questions about the relative effect of these compounds compared to other environmental carcinogens. Based on the evidence available, it would seem that the burden is on the tobacco industry to demonstrate that these known mutagenic compounds don't cause cancer in this particular case.
I would put global warming due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide in roughly the same category. The reasoning seems sound, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, and we should probably act on a preemptive strategy of harm reduction.
Cutting energy production is always tough on the economy. The US went through this in the late 70's, and most people remember how miserable that was.
Um, that wasn't a voluntary thing. To grossly oversimplify, fossil fuel prices skyrocketed because the OPEC nations decided to close the taps (in 1973; in 1979 it was the destabilization of Iran during the Iranian Revolution).
Aside from the threat of invasion, there's nothing to prevent the same thing from happening today. It's a question of whether the United States (and other developed nations--don't forget that Canada, the U.K., Australia, and others have also signed on) reduce their dependence on foreign oil voluntarily now, or whether it happens...
a) on the whim of OPEC,
b) when the next war in the Middle East wipes out oil production/refining/transportation infrastructure, or
c) when oil production in the Middle East falls significantly due to depleted supply.
Maybe it makes sense to wean overly dependent nations off their excessive fossil fuel usage. Do it in a measured, controlled, planned manner over the course of several years, rather than having OPEC decide to do it for us in a week. Incidentally, it might be good for the U.S. economy in the long run--right now, it keeps posting record trade deficits.
Why is it that the courts are more worried about enforcing the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law? Wasn't that the whole point of English Common law to begin with? To make the law accessible to the people?
I rather thought that common law arose as a system of precedents established to deal with situations where formally codified law did not exist. (Of course in jurisdictions with a common law tradition, statutes are often written to enshrine specific interpretations of existing common law principles.)
In all cases, the letter of the law does trump the spirit of the law.
Moreover, don't contracts/agreements hinge upon the idea of benefiting both parties in some way? What possible benefit are people gaining from being restricted by rules they neither know nor understand?
My understaning is that in this case, people are agreeing to these terms of service in exchange for accounts on Orbitz. The terms don't seem deceptive, just stupid.
Of course, the question of whether or not this condition would hold up in court is interesting--it seems very click-through-ish, and also the notion of restricting linking on the public internet seems kind of dubious.
I also don't believe that posession of a nuclear weapon is a deterrent to any U.S. military action, either, since these states seldom have the means to produce more than a handful of low-yield weapons and lack the ability to deliver them outside their own theater.
Really? The U.S. would be okay with nuclear weapons being detonated in Seoul or Tokyo? Or, for that matter, delivered by container ship to San Francisco harbor? Delivering a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon against a nonmilitary target is pretty straightforward--it's only slightly more difficult than calling FedEx, in most cases.
I did not expect them to program their computer to grab the money from my other bank accounts, and worse, not notify me that they had raided another account. I never remember signing anything that authorized the bank to make unauthorized withdrawals from my other accounts in the event that there were insufficient funds to cover a check.
What you're describing is the bank's right of set-off, which I understand most financial institutions claim--it's buried somewhere in the fine print of your account agreement. (Actually, I'm not as familiar with U.S. banking law; is set-off just assumed?) This has been around for a long time; it didn't show up with the invention of computers. (See for example the 1913 case American National Bank of Nashville v. Miller, which refers to this right). They can, at their option, draw upon your other accounts to fulfill unsatisfied debts.
I expected them to bounce the check, or have a human examine it and recognize that the written amount of the check was a tenth of the amount indicated by the MICR.
They may well have believed they were doing you a favour. Rather than bouncing your check and embarrassing you in front of your creditors, they let it through because of your generally good credit behaviour. As for hand rechecking the amounts, someone already saw the physical check once and goofed. It was a human being that misread the amount of your check, not a computer. The electronic bits--the MICR routing to your account and so forth--worked properly. Even if your bank instead waited for all checks to arrive at the local branch for processing, you can still have the clerk who makes a typo/calculating error/other mistake, and you get the added bonus of waiting two weeks for checks to clear.
Banks made numerical errors long before electronic computers. The boardgame Monopoly was first sold in 1935, and it has a "Bank error in your favor" card for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Who else here is familiar with the seasonal joy and merriment associated with putting lights on the Christmas tree? Chains of lights used to be almost exclusively wired in series, so if one bulb was bad the whole chain would go out. To find the bad bulb, you take another bulb and works down the entire chain, swapping the new bulb for each old one and hoping that the chain lights.
On occasion, you will go down the entire chain, testing the bulb for a good fit and light in each and every socket, and each time get a negative result. You discover that the problem isn't just the chain of lights--sometimes the test bulb is defective, too.
If nearly everyone you've ever interviewed and worked for is a shithead, one explanation is that you're extremely unlucky....
Well, yes. It's much harder to get a new job if your references suck. Potential future employers are not going to look fondly on an applicant who feels no qualms about badmouthing his job, his boss, and his company, can't control his temper, and talks regularly about leaving for another job at a "better" company.
The point is this : you won't know if it was a stupid move for 6 months. If you find some kick ass company to work for, then it was a smart move. If you're borrowing money from family and friends to pay for a bankruptcy attorney, then you were a fool.
The stupid move wasn't leaving the old job. The stupid move was getting fired.
I can't speak for how a manual counting system would work in the United States, but the Canadian system seems relatively resistant to the type of manipulation you describe.
Each polling station is operated by two people: one from each of the two parties who drew the most votes in the last election in that electoral district. These two participate in the counting of votes.
Any candidate in the election may send observers (called scrutineers) to any of (or all) the polling stations. These observers may monitor both voting and counting.
Contested ballots are set aside but kept for a recount if the outcome is close. Someone will notice and comment if a particular polling station has more than one or two spoiled ballots.
Any candidate may request a judicially-supervised recount providing they're willing to submit a nominal fee and attest that they believe errors were made in the count.
A recount is mandatory if the margin of victory is smaller than a certain threshold (0.1% if I remember correctly.)
To fudge the count you need to corrupt a lot of individuals up the chain.
Strictly speaking, methadone and methamphetamines aren't usually related. Methadone is used in the treatment of heroin addiction. If you're looking for a (at least tenuous) link between big pharma and crystal meth, methamphetamines are tradiationally made from over-the-counter cold medications containing (pseudo)ephedrine hydrochloride.
On the other hand, just about every nation has specified content that it is illegal to view. Different countries draw the line in different places, and on different issues.
In Germany, it would seem that some effort is being expended to block objectionable material before it reaches consumers. The United States' preference is to charge the person who downloads and views the objectionable content.
Which arrangment is "better"?
The question of whether Germany should allow the distribution of Nazi-related material is separate from the question of how that type of ban should be enforced.
You could connect and charge the batteries in series. Heck, that's what your 12 volt lead-acid battery is: six 2 volt lead-acid cells connected in series. They just happen to all be in the same box.
Do some clever stuff with relays to join your battery banks in series during charging, and drop them back to parallel when you're done. I would expect that you'd also probably have some smart little regulators across each cell to monitor the charging process, since Li-ion batteries tend to be somewhat finicky beasts.
All that said, I would expect a ton of heating/cooling problems during charging if you tried to scale these batteries up to electric car sizes. Even if you could deliver sufficient energy, I suspect you'd melt anything in the middle of such a structure....
You're right. Obviously the astronomers involved made all this stuff up. They haven't got a preprint of a their report to Astrophysics Journal posted on the web, or anything like that. And popular science journalists would never try to get cute with the pictures they choose to go with their articles. I mean that just doesn't happen.
Though the BBC is a reputable source and usually gets their facts straight, they're not to be mistaken for a peer-reviewed journal. A two-hundred-word article isn't going to have a full complement of figures and supporting data--and it shouldn't be expected to.
Mods--the parent post is funny at best; not insightful. I have this amusing mental image of a bunch of drunk astronomers drawing random circles on star charts and saying, "Okay, this week we'll tell them there's dark matter here. Suckers."
You've never tried this with a pigment that's a mixture of lots of compounds, have you?
You're going to have to start with some sort of separation step--probably liquid chromatography for this stuff--followed up by an analytical technique for whatever comes out of the column (I would start with mass spec myself, but if you're getting really clean peaks out of the HPLC then you might feed some to an NMR and see what comes out. Figuring out structures is much easier with MS and NMR data.)
I wouldn't be surprised if you had to do it a few times with different solvents to resolve all the constitutent components. And even then you're only getting a very first approximation.
Except for the HPLC-MS, the NMR, the time of the chemists and technicians, the months or years it will take to do the reverse engineering, the reagents and equipment to do pilot projects to manufacture and test the copycat ink, the patent attorney to keep you from getting sued for ripping off the other guy's formulation....
You're right. On the face of the matter, it isn't fair. Some people are less intelligent than others, through unfortunate circumstances of upbringing or genetics.
On the other hand, this guy is a pre-med student. By the classic standards of our society he isn't (or shouldn't be) stupid. He should be very, very, smart. What he's done here doesn't look too bright, and it stems from a lack of common sense as well as loose ethical principles.
So he should be correctly described as a dumbass.
Glad we could clear that up.
The only way Jobs would have made a pile of money off Apple without The Woz, is if he was lucky enough to stumble across another Woz-type.
There are a lot of people in business and marketing who are good at their jobs, but not making millions (or billions) of dollars. Similarly, there are a lot of technical people who are good at their jobs, but not designing future household-name products from their garages. Wozniak and Jobs both seem to stand at the very small apices of very broad pyramids. Having the best of both categories come together is a rare thing indeed.
Hang some grub in front of the dish and crank 'er up to 7200 watts
The rhythmic thumping noise you hear is an FCC compliance officer banging his head on his desk.
That whooshing noise you hear is the point of the grandparent post going right over your head.
I'm running Opera 7.54, with Block Unwanted Popups set. (Hit F12 and it's the third entry on the quick preferences menu.) No popup here. :)
You misspelled "c311".
If people didn't find the new format more convenient and higher in quality, then they wouldn't have bought the damn things. There was a significant period of time where both formats were sold side by side in stores, and people chose to pay the premium for the 'better' technology. Remember that some new formats have passed into obscurity--Laserdisc, for instance.
If you want to argue a conspiracy, then suggest that the manufacturers wanted to force you to rebuy your entire music collection in the new format. The last part of your argument at least is spot on--manufacturers do indeed like the new formats because they're cheaper to manufacture. That doesn't make them evil, just economically sound.
I'm not sure if that is true. One of the sibling posts to this one provides a link to a full-on prospective study which confirms environmental tobacco smoke is a risk factor for lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. It's a January 2005 publication, so I don't blame you for not seeing it before.
I would also argue that elements of tobacco smoke are known carcinogens. To take one example, a lot of recent work has demonstrated that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) like benzo[a]pyrene causes specific mutations to the p53 gene which are identical to mutations found in cancers of the lung and other organs (abstract). It's very difficult to tease out all the different factors at work in an epidemiological study, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest:
PAHs are present in tobacco smoke;
p53 is mutated in ~60% of human lung cancers;
p53 mutations mostly occur at a few 'hotspots';
PAHs bind to and disrupt the p53 gene at the same sites as mutations are observed;
PAHs cause cancer in rats;
Therefore it is likely that cigarette smoke can cause oncogenic (cancer-inducing) mutations.
Yes, there are questions about the relative effect of these compounds compared to other environmental carcinogens. Based on the evidence available, it would seem that the burden is on the tobacco industry to demonstrate that these known mutagenic compounds don't cause cancer in this particular case.
I would put global warming due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide in roughly the same category. The reasoning seems sound, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, and we should probably act on a preemptive strategy of harm reduction.
What they don't mention is the assumption that geologists will discover in 2055 that Lancastershire County is made entirely of gold.
I keed....
Um, that wasn't a voluntary thing. To grossly oversimplify, fossil fuel prices skyrocketed because the OPEC nations decided to close the taps (in 1973; in 1979 it was the destabilization of Iran during the Iranian Revolution).
Aside from the threat of invasion, there's nothing to prevent the same thing from happening today. It's a question of whether the United States (and other developed nations--don't forget that Canada, the U.K., Australia, and others have also signed on) reduce their dependence on foreign oil voluntarily now, or whether it happens...
a) on the whim of OPEC,
b) when the next war in the Middle East wipes out oil production/refining/transportation infrastructure, or
c) when oil production in the Middle East falls significantly due to depleted supply.
Maybe it makes sense to wean overly dependent nations off their excessive fossil fuel usage. Do it in a measured, controlled, planned manner over the course of several years, rather than having OPEC decide to do it for us in a week. Incidentally, it might be good for the U.S. economy in the long run--right now, it keeps posting record trade deficits.
I rather thought that common law arose as a system of precedents established to deal with situations where formally codified law did not exist. (Of course in jurisdictions with a common law tradition, statutes are often written to enshrine specific interpretations of existing common law principles.)
In all cases, the letter of the law does trump the spirit of the law.
Moreover, don't contracts/agreements hinge upon the idea of benefiting both parties in some way? What possible benefit are people gaining from being restricted by rules they neither know nor understand?
My understaning is that in this case, people are agreeing to these terms of service in exchange for accounts on Orbitz. The terms don't seem deceptive, just stupid.
Of course, the question of whether or not this condition would hold up in court is interesting--it seems very click-through-ish, and also the notion of restricting linking on the public internet seems kind of dubious.
It's okay--just make a really short video and loop it. You'll save a ton on bandwidth, and nobody here will know the difference. :D
Might work great for their intranet search appliances, though....
Why is it that you can almost never fly a full mile on one Frequent Flyer Mile? They're usually good for distances closer to a hundred yards or so....
In the interest of truth in advertising, Virgin Galactic invites you to collect Frequent Flyer Light Microseconds.
Really? The U.S. would be okay with nuclear weapons being detonated in Seoul or Tokyo? Or, for that matter, delivered by container ship to San Francisco harbor? Delivering a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon against a nonmilitary target is pretty straightforward--it's only slightly more difficult than calling FedEx, in most cases.
Indeed. Just in case North Korea was unaware that the United States had that capability....
Our words are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
What is this, Civ II?
I never remember signing anything that authorized the bank to make unauthorized withdrawals from my other accounts in the event that there were insufficient funds to cover a check.
What you're describing is the bank's right of set-off, which I understand most financial institutions claim--it's buried somewhere in the fine print of your account agreement. (Actually, I'm not as familiar with U.S. banking law; is set-off just assumed?) This has been around for a long time; it didn't show up with the invention of computers. (See for example the 1913 case American National Bank of Nashville v. Miller, which refers to this right). They can, at their option, draw upon your other accounts to fulfill unsatisfied debts.
I expected them to bounce the check, or have a human examine it and recognize that the written amount of the check was a tenth of the amount indicated by the MICR.
They may well have believed they were doing you a favour. Rather than bouncing your check and embarrassing you in front of your creditors, they let it through because of your generally good credit behaviour. As for hand rechecking the amounts, someone already saw the physical check once and goofed. It was a human being that misread the amount of your check, not a computer. The electronic bits--the MICR routing to your account and so forth--worked properly. Even if your bank instead waited for all checks to arrive at the local branch for processing, you can still have the clerk who makes a typo/calculating error/other mistake, and you get the added bonus of waiting two weeks for checks to clear.
Banks made numerical errors long before electronic computers. The boardgame Monopoly was first sold in 1935, and it has a "Bank error in your favor" card for a reason.