Slashdot is not a blog. Slashdot is a "news selection/clipping service" or "news filter", depending on precisely what you get from it.
And the reason Slashdot had a discussion on Kryptonite locks and bic pens was because enough bloggers outed Kryptonite's insecure locks that a major news service wrote an article on it, which slashdot then added to it's news for that day (or the week after, depending on which/. editor was on duty...).
(I also posted this a few messages up, but it deserves repeating)
Why? 'Piece' is the correct homonym, not 'peace'. As in he's contributed his part of the conversation. The origins of the saying are archaic, which is why you may have made the mistake, but Taco had it right the first time.
I've never felt posessive about a lack of aggression, so I would never expect to have much to say about 'my peace'.
Regards, Ross
[For the grammar nazis: I don't like how S&W insist that surrounding punctuation be included inside any quotation marks, even when the passage is not a quotation! When I'm putting single quotes around words or phrases, they are being called out from the surrounding text, not declarations that they represent a person's speech.]
Why? 'Piece' is the correct homonym, not 'peace'. As in he's contributed his part of the conversation. The origins of the saying are archaic, which is why you may have made the mistake, but Taco had it right the first time.
I've never felt posessive about a lack of aggression, so I would never expect to have much to say about 'my peace'.
Regards, Ross
[For the grammar nazis: I don't like how S&W insist that surrounding punctuation be included inside any quotation marks, even when the passage is not a quotation! When I'm putting single quotes around words or phrases, they are being called out from the surrounding text, not declarations that they represent a person's speech.]
Only on slashdot could trash like the parent be modded +4 Insightful.
I agree with his argument and if I had mod points, I would have modded him +5 Insightful.
The problem you appear to be having is that his statement is accurate and unflattering. The religious wants to make (sinful == illegal) and they are pursuing that goal on many fronts, not only pornography and being anti-gay-rights. You can't really disagree with it because it's the often-stated goal of many politically active Christian groups.
Try working with 1600x1200 on that 15" monitor and see how sane you stay.
You seem to think that high resolution on a smaller screen would be a bad thing. My experience dramatically contradicts your statement. In my experience, the smaller the pixels, the better.
My current and previous laptops (Thinkpad R51P and A21P) have had a 15.4" display with 1600x1200 resolution and I absolutely love that display. My fiance has also switched over to the same model of laptop after borrowing mine for a little while. Subpixel antialiasing on larger pixels just looks out of focus. Subpixel antialiasing on that screen looks nearly perfect. The math seems obvious to me: a 1/4" high letter on my screen has a lot more pixels than a 1/4" high letter on a lower resolution display. More pixels == smoother curves and fewer jaggies.
These are the first screens that I can read documents (PDF's, web pages, etc.) without any eyestrain whatsoever. I used to print just about everything out that would take more than a few minutes to read. Now I only print out things that need to go places that the laptop can't.
Technical manuals? Recipes? Research papers? All comfortable to read on that screen. For the first time ever. The only thing that worries me is whether or not I'll be able to find another laptop with the same incredible resolution in two years when I need to replace this one...
Unfortunately the world's governments have colluded to issue money backed not by gold, silver, or something else humans across the world hold to be valuable, but rather by nothing more than a government promise.
Actually, the value of the US Dollar is backed by the stock market. Money appears and disappears from the stock market. This is true under a gold standard as well as under our current paper money system. The cash in circulation today is provided under a government promise whereas cash under a gold standard is based upon some sort of reserve. How the cash is ultimately valued (by the value of enterprises adding value to the economic system) is the same in both cases.
The downside of a gold standard is the number of parties that can manipulate the cash supply of the economy is dramatically increased. Many things can change the scarcity of gold, and that can make the cash more or less valuable than the dollars it represents. There were numerous cases in the late 19th and early 20th centuries where countries attempted to screw with other country's economies by moving large quantities of gold around the world.
Fiat money with a sane money manager is dramatically superior to the gold standard and people who think otherwise are simply uninformed. It's when crazy policies get enacted (like Argentina's fixing of the Argentine dollar to the US Dollar) that things get hugely out of whack and serious problems arise.
The assertion that we have "hardwired functions in brain" for "spoken discourse" is certainly rather bold
That language (and most of our higher brain functions) could have developed in the past two hundred thousand years is an assertion that has become rather mainstream. The only people that continue to deny it the "it's all nurture" people that prefer to view the brain as a "tabula rasa" with only cultural influences generating all of the behavioral complexity of a modern person. The fear of genetic determinism and the revival of eugenics seem to be preventing this type of person from accepting anything other than nurture as an explanation for anything like language... but what if the similarities between individuals of different races are much larger than the genetic differences between those same races?
The idea that kids are taught language by adults is laughable once you look at some of the data. Two and three year old children are so much better at learning language than adults it's scary (orders of magnitude better). Kids learn language from adults, but they learn it despite baby-talk and other things many western parents do, not because of it. In many other cultures, kids start to talk at exactly the same time as in the U.S. without any explicit assistance from their parents. The parents are talking around the kids all the time, and one day, the kid starts participating.
Some reading on the subject (samebooks from Powell's). I'd like to reassure you, the books I reccommend are quite accessable, even if you are not into evolutionary psychology, cognitive development, or linguistics. Also pretty cheap if you buy used paperbacks...
I used to buy lottery tickets, too. Until it dawned on me that they just amount to extra tax on the mathemtically challenged.
If you're buying lottery tickets as an investment plan, well yeah, you're pretty much a complete retard. If you're buying lottery tickets as entertainment, the math comes out a little differently:
An evening out at the movies in many major U.S. cities will run you $20-$40 depending on the specific theater and if you buy popcorn and drinks. Spending $5 a week so you get to fantasize what you'll do with the money in the now non-zero likelihood that you win something and the excitement of the actual drawing? I can see how two months of that might be worth giving up one evening out to the movies...
When an RFID-school-pass, GPS-cell-phone, or junk-food-in-schools story appears, the thread are dominated by comments denouncing the Orwellian tools, calling for parents to butt-out. Yet, in threads like this one, when the shoe is on the other foot, the comments swing the other way, with almost no one blaming the violent games themselves, and instead demanding that the parents take responsibility and get more involved.
I'm on the "parents need to take more responsibility" side of every argument you provide. Parents need to spend less time on the rat race and more time raising their children. Period.
Orwellian tools: Better parenting doesn't mean fooling themselves into believing that remote monitoring tools will replace actual parenting, so don't bother with the threat to privacy and security until you've actually raised your kids. The few problem kids after actual parenting have failed can have their movements monitored at your favorite local juvenile detention facility (you think I'm joking, I'm not).
Video games: Parents need to 1) spend time with their children and provide them a sound ethical education (before they're 12. if they haven't got it by then, it's too late); 2) put in some effort to be aware of how their children are spending their time (TV: which shows? Video Games: which games? With Friends: which friends and doing what? etc.) and 3) please not purchase violent video games for their disaffected teens. How did this become so difficult again? You don't need the second SUV or the second largest house in your subdivision. Get your priorities straight and put your family ahead of your total adjusted earnings.
But if you were the story were to suggest a parent secretly search their kid's room for marijuana, suddenly the thread would be overwhelmed by posts demanding that the parents butt-out and "let kids be kids."
Marijuana: while they're in my house, they're subject to my rules. Those rules include "No illegal drugs inside the house." I'm not particularly upset by marijuana use per se, but I do get very antsy about federal property seizure guidelines which make my home forfeit at the discretion of the seizing officers. I'm not going to randomly toss bedrooms, but if I have reason to believe that there are drugs in my home, I will spend some time trying to find them.
9/11 was preventable. We got pwned by leaving the cockpit doors open even though it was "common" knowledge that the most effective way to thwart hijackings was to NEVER let the bad guys take control of the airplane. If they can manage to crash it, or kill every passenger, so be it. El Al figured this out in the 70's, yet the FAA was too fucking stupid to pay attention.
Though I agree with your points, it's important to realize that there are other contributing factors to both the hijacking and why cockpit doors weren't secure. On the cockpit door, another contributing factor was the the pilot's union objected to a secure cockpit door on the argument that it would slow down emergency egress from the cockpit.
IMHO, the other big factor on airplane security in general is that the general public had been told for decades that in the event of a hijacking, to not resist and let government/police negotiators secure their release. This type of passive response to violence is commonly advised by lots of uninvolved people for lots of situations (it's bad advice for pretty much each and every case), but the old advice on hijacking doesn't seem to get much airtime these days. The people on flight 56 figured out the real deal when they called home and the ability of hijackers to use a plane as a weapon ended within minutes.
Today, I think that airport security could hand out loaded pistols to the three most suspicious characters on the jetway and you'd still never see another 9/11-type takeover. The passengers simply wouldn't let it happen. I sure as hell wouldn't...
There's also a Phalanx gun, which can target and destroy an incoming projectile (like an RPG or missile) before it makes impact. I'm sure it could be modified to fit on a humvee in an automated supply convoy.
Phalanx guns are BIG, like several times the weight of a humvee even before you load the ammunition.
Besides, I wouldn't be too worried about guided missiles being aimed at a convoy. You should be more worried about antivehicular explosive charges (mines) and RPG's in convoy defense. Automated convoys also need to worry about EMP devices taking out unshielded equipment (basically, external sensors) and crackers getting into control systems to divert vehicles, to state two more sophisticated attacks that might be devised.
Loyalty, much like it's close cousin, trust, isn't an on-off switch. If you aren't 100% loyal (by keeping your resume up to date, for instance), that doesn't mean you're a traitor to the organization you currently work for.
Loyalty is earned and spent by both sides of a relationship, and undying loyalty only comes after a series of successful tests over a long period of time. To restate: Loyalty is built over time, by deliberate action on both sides of the relationship.
For organizations, it's more difficult than for people because their actions are judged by all of their members (employees) and it's almost impossible to keep everyone happy all of the time. People can make private mistakes, apologize for them, and their loyalty (as judged by the other party) can fully recover. Organizational mistakes usually mean that someone's getting fired, and when that's front line people, there's no apology possible, the damage is done. Organizations have to make a whole bunch of decisions for the long term to be perceived as loyal, and if they don't do that, if they slip into short term "this quarter" thinking: all attempts to build loyalty are nothing more than "promises" with a three month life span. Employees figure this out extremely quickly, and most everyone can see some of the indications of this type of behavior.
Loyalty starts with a culture of loyalty as a part of an organizational culture of long-term thinking, driven by top management. Until that exists, loyal employees will be abberations; hopeful people who haven't been burned that badly yet. It's possible to create an organization worthy of loyalty: I've been in one and I enjoyed working there. However, most modern U.S. companies put the short term interests of shareholders above all else, which means there is zero loyalty to employees. Kinda tough to expect any employee loyalty coming back in that kind of environment.
What you're describing is structurally similar to the kind of stuff we did with Calavista at my previous employer. We had a build step and a test step running on different machines (and neither one was the cvs machine) in order to get the commit performance we needed (our tests could take as little as 5 minutes to run with a local database server, but could take 20 minutes or more if the database machine was separate and didn't have a great network connection).
You get to run a shell script per step (build, test, etc.). We modified some existing Calavista scripts to run the build, deploy, and test on remote machines, then wait for the results to come back. Doesn't seem like it would be that tough to kick off multiple builds and tests on different platforms and then wait for all of the results to come back...
I'd say give them a call as it sounds like your problem is right up their alley. Tell them Ross sent you:)
- it's when some £$^$%^^%%$ checks in broken code, or forgets to check something in, that you want to go and wring their bloody neck, because you're pissing your sunday away trying to fix the weekly rollup build.
This is why I love products that protect the source tip with pre-commit testing. If it doesn't pass the regression suite, it's their problem and not your problem. You can do it with commit hooks in some CM tools (Subversion gives you some ability to do this, as an example), and there are a few commercial tools that give you a LOT of control over the commit test.
Disclaimer: In addition to being a very satisfied customer of Calavista, I help them out on occasional contract work, so I have some interest in their success.
Perhaps it isn't as obvious as you think. My clothes washing approach is pretty different from yours.
Whites, blue jeans, towels and bedclothes: hot water, normal cycle. Delicates: cold water, gentle cycle. Everything else: warm water, normal cycle. Group dark colors, bright colors, light colors into separate loads.
Dryer: hottest setting unless the garmet tag says otherwise (usually not).
I buy extra-large T-shirts, which fit me after a few washes. Nothing else seems to shink all that much. Most of my casual clothes last between 5 to 10 years. Nicer clothes tend to get retired after a few years by tears/rips or stains that even the professional cleaners can't get out.
But when has Microsoft ever provided innovation on a technical level that lead to a successful product? I can't think of any such case. Everything is either a copy of something else, or purchased from someone else.
I think of Excel as sufficiently superior to Lotus 1-2-3 and superior in enough different ways as to be an innovative success story. Excel started out as a copy, but quickly became Microsoft's own system, where eventually the only similarity was that they were both spreadsheets. The rest was Microsoft.
If you want a second innovative product... well... that's about all I've got.
innovating a new business model is hardly what real geeks would consider important innovation, right?
I think that most geeks give Netflix full credit for their original business model.
I'd like to think that geeks are a little better at ignoring the marketdroid and a little more likely to be interested in what's going on behind the curtain. Most "new business practices" don't stand up to that kind of scrutiny very well, but those that do seem to get the respect they deserve...
When volcanoes spew more greenhouse gases in a day than mankind has done in 10,000 years... Gimme a break.
Actually, the Mt. Saint Helens eruption added about 4% to the US greenhouse gas emissions for 1980 (one part in twenty five!). On average, volcanos put about 110 million tons of CO2 into the air per year. Human activity puts about 10 billion tons of CO2 into the air per year (about 90 times as much as volcanos). Volcanos also tend to pump out more SO2 than anything else, and SO2 is a reverse greenhouse gas (causing global cooling).
The largest eruption in recent history (and probably the largest in the last twelve thousand years) was Tambora in 1815. That eruption is believed to have produced 300 million tons of SO2 and 80 million tons of CO2. But the output of the biggest volcano in recorded history is just a drop in the bucket compared to modern human activity.
In both cases, there is nothing to prevent you from bringing your own supplies and making your own coffee or ice. In fact, this type of self-driven event preparation is highly encouraged.
When it comes to ice, however, the hardware to produce it in any quantity would get expensive rather quickly. Which is the pretty much the point of them charging for it (can't clean up the desert after the party if you're broke).
I do think that the burning man planners would like nothing less than to eliminate these two monetary transactions as well...
Public ownership means the corporate executives have a duty to the shareholders to maximize their value (i.e. keep the stock price high).
That's simplistic, and if you understood the real, more complex answer, you'd realize how deeply you misunderstand what companies must do.
There are plenty of companies who put other interests above the stockholder's interests. As long as these other interests are clearly described to potential shareholders (usually in the corporate charter, the corporate bylaws and mentioned/described in financial statements), the investors (owners) can pound sand.
Even if they're making money, are they making enough money? Are they making the right strategic decisions? The shareholders invested a ton of capital in Novell, are the executives making the best use of it?
With some broad caveats, it's not their call. The shareholder's decision is to invest or to withdraw investment with rare "confidence/no confidence" votes decided by an actual majority of outstanding share (not the 5% piping up here). Most shareholder lawsuits are about fraud or are part of larger power plays. Very few have to do with the quality of management and even fewer of those end up winning.
A lot of people think that because shareholders are owners that all decisions must be made in accordance with shareholder desires. Management has been hired to fulfill one or more promises to various groups, those promises being spelled out in the corporate charter. If short-term shareholder gain is in the charter, then managment had better step up. The long-term interests of shareholders is much more common and much tougher to nail down to a few decisions in the here and now.
Novell management will be able to argue quite convincingly that the proposals being mentioned here are not in the long term interest of Novell shareholders, but only in the interest of a few shareholders who wish to sell their stake. Acting in the interest of owners wishing to sell against the long term interest of all owners is the kind of behavior that will get you in very deep trouble very quickly.
Stuff like not being able to take *any* leave for the first six months of employment, sick or not, only giving 10 days off per year total to junior employees, and so on.
Yeah, that's control-freak horseshit and it is my deliberate goal to minimize those kinds of policies. The plan is for employees to accumulate PTO at the rate of 6 2/3 hours per bi-monthly pay period. After that, there's only the request to respect each other when scheduling time off.
If your business plan doesn't require people to stick around long, the no-benefit-for-seniority plan can be OK. If you do want to retain people, you'll have to provide motivation somehow, and leave is a standard and valuable way to do so.
I'm hoping that the company culture is one that people enjoy being a part of and that it's something worth staying with. Eventually, people will grow and their positions and responsibilities will change. If those professional changes match up with their personal goals, why would they want to leave? Maybe I'm idealistic, but that's the kind of thing I've wanted, and I tend to project my own desires a bit...
So you say that for anyone to have a discussion of evolution they must use your conventions of naming? I say bullshit.
If you decide to make up your own definition for a word and then claim that scientists must also using your definition when they use the same word... I can think of a better place to put your "bullshit" label.
Theory already has a specific meaning when used by scientists. In this case, the various theories of evolution provide our current best explanations for the many-times-over observed fact of evolution (the fact that the frequency of alleles in a population changes over time).
You will learn more about evolution in the Bible than any PH.D. granting institution can teach you. And you will live a better life.
The first statement is patently false. Charitably, the Bible discusses the who and why of creation, but is woefully lacking any substantive discussion of how or when (which is what the theories and facts of evolution are all about). The second statement is irrelevant, since most graduate institutions don't explicitly attempt to improve how people live their lives (there is hope that by improving the quality/quantity of what people know, lives will improve, but it's implicit).
You should read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Edwards.
Not a month ago, another Christian was yelling at me for saying that Christianity still use fear-based arguments to spread the word (and Christian morality). He said that I was ignorant and that those type of people were just a part of the ugly history of Christianity. Where were you to defend my assertion then?
I always get a chuckle when I think that according to the worldview of people like you, all us godless heathens must be just wallowing in sin and misery because we don't have a man in the sky to tell us what's right and what's wrong. A really useful ethics will be a lot more useful than any "list of rules" morality like you're going to find in your books. Some Christians will understand and agree with what I'm saying, but I don't expect it to make any sense to you (you may also say they weren't really Christians anyway:)
How do you explain miricles?
Which miracles?
How do you explain the works of Mother Theresa?
As the personal effort of a well-intentioned but poorly informed woman. (perhaps not so poorly informed, since she came to the West for her own medical treatments rather than be treated in the hospitals that she created... hmmm...).
How do you explain it when modern medicine says a person will die, that there is nothing else that can be done, but a priest comes and the person wakes up?
In the real world, we should often discuss probabilities instead of certainties, but if, based on a doctor's experience, a patient has a vanishingly small chance of survival, he'll conclude the patient is a goner and move on to the next guy. But vanishingly small probabilities are still non-zero and some people will pull through by sheer force of will (a.k.a. placebo effect, which is not a brush-off, but a really important set of biophysical effects that your body can do to itself).
I stand in awe. Absolutely amazing. Judd truly grasps the zen of the flame.
After reading this, I realize that I am but a humble student of the artist. I used to occasionally dive into talk.politics.guns and join in the flamewars there. Thought I was pretty good at the game, but I had no idea.
Two remarks. First, Brazill seems too feeble-minded to have done something as cool as "That 70's Show" (either that or my love of redheaded chicks is getting in the way of my better judgement). Second, Judd seems like a cat torturing a mouse. A joke about getting into an intellectual battle with an unarmed opponent comes to mind. At some point, it's clear just how intellectually outmatched Brazill was and I started to feel pity for him.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is not a blog. Slashdot is a "news selection/clipping service" or "news filter", depending on precisely what you get from it.
/. editor was on duty...).
And the reason Slashdot had a discussion on Kryptonite locks and bic pens was because enough bloggers outed Kryptonite's insecure locks that a major news service wrote an article on it, which slashdot then added to it's news for that day (or the week after, depending on which
Regards,
Ross
(I also posted this a few messages up, but it deserves repeating)
Why? 'Piece' is the correct homonym, not 'peace'. As in he's contributed his part of the conversation. The origins of the saying are archaic, which is why you may have made the mistake, but Taco had it right the first time.
I've never felt posessive about a lack of aggression, so I would never expect to have much to say about 'my peace'.
Regards,
Ross
[For the grammar nazis: I don't like how S&W insist that surrounding punctuation be included inside any quotation marks, even when the passage is not a quotation! When I'm putting single quotes around words or phrases, they are being called out from the surrounding text, not declarations that they represent a person's speech.]
Why? 'Piece' is the correct homonym, not 'peace'. As in he's contributed his part of the conversation. The origins of the saying are archaic, which is why you may have made the mistake, but Taco had it right the first time.
I've never felt posessive about a lack of aggression, so I would never expect to have much to say about 'my peace'.
Regards,
Ross
[For the grammar nazis: I don't like how S&W insist that surrounding punctuation be included inside any quotation marks, even when the passage is not a quotation! When I'm putting single quotes around words or phrases, they are being called out from the surrounding text, not declarations that they represent a person's speech.]
Only on slashdot could trash like the parent be modded +4 Insightful.
I agree with his argument and if I had mod points, I would have modded him +5 Insightful.
The problem you appear to be having is that his statement is accurate and unflattering. The religious wants to make (sinful == illegal) and they are pursuing that goal on many fronts, not only pornography and being anti-gay-rights. You can't really disagree with it because it's the often-stated goal of many politically active Christian groups.
Regards,
Ross
Try working with 1600x1200 on that 15" monitor and see how sane you stay.
You seem to think that high resolution on a smaller screen would be a bad thing. My experience dramatically contradicts your statement. In my experience, the smaller the pixels, the better.
My current and previous laptops (Thinkpad R51P and A21P) have had a 15.4" display with 1600x1200 resolution and I absolutely love that display. My fiance has also switched over to the same model of laptop after borrowing mine for a little while. Subpixel antialiasing on larger pixels just looks out of focus. Subpixel antialiasing on that screen looks nearly perfect. The math seems obvious to me: a 1/4" high letter on my screen has a lot more pixels than a 1/4" high letter on a lower resolution display. More pixels == smoother curves and fewer jaggies.
These are the first screens that I can read documents (PDF's, web pages, etc.) without any eyestrain whatsoever. I used to print just about everything out that would take more than a few minutes to read. Now I only print out things that need to go places that the laptop can't.
Technical manuals? Recipes? Research papers? All comfortable to read on that screen. For the first time ever. The only thing that worries me is whether or not I'll be able to find another laptop with the same incredible resolution in two years when I need to replace this one...
Regards,
Ross
Unfortunately the world's governments have colluded to issue money backed not by gold, silver, or something else humans across the world hold to be valuable, but rather by nothing more than a government promise.
Actually, the value of the US Dollar is backed by the stock market. Money appears and disappears from the stock market. This is true under a gold standard as well as under our current paper money system. The cash in circulation today is provided under a government promise whereas cash under a gold standard is based upon some sort of reserve. How the cash is ultimately valued (by the value of enterprises adding value to the economic system) is the same in both cases.
The downside of a gold standard is the number of parties that can manipulate the cash supply of the economy is dramatically increased. Many things can change the scarcity of gold, and that can make the cash more or less valuable than the dollars it represents. There were numerous cases in the late 19th and early 20th centuries where countries attempted to screw with other country's economies by moving large quantities of gold around the world.
Fiat money with a sane money manager is dramatically superior to the gold standard and people who think otherwise are simply uninformed. It's when crazy policies get enacted (like Argentina's fixing of the Argentine dollar to the US Dollar) that things get hugely out of whack and serious problems arise.
Regards,
Ross
The assertion that we have "hardwired functions in brain" for "spoken discourse" is certainly rather bold
That language (and most of our higher brain functions) could have developed in the past two hundred thousand years is an assertion that has become rather mainstream. The only people that continue to deny it the "it's all nurture" people that prefer to view the brain as a "tabula rasa" with only cultural influences generating all of the behavioral complexity of a modern person. The fear of genetic determinism and the revival of eugenics seem to be preventing this type of person from accepting anything other than nurture as an explanation for anything like language... but what if the similarities between individuals of different races are much larger than the genetic differences between those same races?
The idea that kids are taught language by adults is laughable once you look at some of the data. Two and three year old children are so much better at learning language than adults it's scary (orders of magnitude better). Kids learn language from adults, but they learn it despite baby-talk and other things many western parents do, not because of it. In many other cultures, kids start to talk at exactly the same time as in the U.S. without any explicit assistance from their parents. The parents are talking around the kids all the time, and one day, the kid starts participating.
Some reading on the subject (same books from Powell's). I'd like to reassure you, the books I reccommend are quite accessable, even if you are not into evolutionary psychology, cognitive development, or linguistics. Also pretty cheap if you buy used paperbacks...
Regards,
Ross
I used to buy lottery tickets, too. Until it dawned on me that they just amount to extra tax on the mathemtically challenged.
If you're buying lottery tickets as an investment plan, well yeah, you're pretty much a complete retard. If you're buying lottery tickets as entertainment, the math comes out a little differently:
An evening out at the movies in many major U.S. cities will run you $20-$40 depending on the specific theater and if you buy popcorn and drinks. Spending $5 a week so you get to fantasize what you'll do with the money in the now non-zero likelihood that you win something and the excitement of the actual drawing? I can see how two months of that might be worth giving up one evening out to the movies...
Regards,
Ross
Does that mean that someone's going to be able to make the Kessel Run in less than 37 pieces of ALON?
(12 parsecs * 3.26 ly/parsec * 1 piece of ALON/ly)
Something about that isn't quite right. No, wait... it'll come to me...
Regards,
Ross
When an RFID-school-pass, GPS-cell-phone, or junk-food-in-schools story appears, the thread are dominated by comments denouncing the Orwellian tools, calling for parents to butt-out. Yet, in threads like this one, when the shoe is on the other foot, the comments swing the other way, with almost no one blaming the violent games themselves, and instead demanding that the parents take responsibility and get more involved.
I'm on the "parents need to take more responsibility" side of every argument you provide. Parents need to spend less time on the rat race and more time raising their children. Period.
Orwellian tools: Better parenting doesn't mean fooling themselves into believing that remote monitoring tools will replace actual parenting, so don't bother with the threat to privacy and security until you've actually raised your kids. The few problem kids after actual parenting have failed can have their movements monitored at your favorite local juvenile detention facility (you think I'm joking, I'm not).
Video games: Parents need to 1) spend time with their children and provide them a sound ethical education (before they're 12. if they haven't got it by then, it's too late); 2) put in some effort to be aware of how their children are spending their time (TV: which shows? Video Games: which games? With Friends: which friends and doing what? etc.) and 3) please not purchase violent video games for their disaffected teens. How did this become so difficult again? You don't need the second SUV or the second largest house in your subdivision. Get your priorities straight and put your family ahead of your total adjusted earnings.
But if you were the story were to suggest a parent secretly search their kid's room for marijuana, suddenly the thread would be overwhelmed by posts demanding that the parents butt-out and "let kids be kids."
Marijuana: while they're in my house, they're subject to my rules. Those rules include "No illegal drugs inside the house." I'm not particularly upset by marijuana use per se, but I do get very antsy about federal property seizure guidelines which make my home forfeit at the discretion of the seizing officers. I'm not going to randomly toss bedrooms, but if I have reason to believe that there are drugs in my home, I will spend some time trying to find them.
Regards,
Ross
9/11 was preventable. We got pwned by leaving the cockpit doors open even though it was "common" knowledge that the most effective way to thwart hijackings was to NEVER let the bad guys take control of the airplane. If they can manage to crash it, or kill every passenger, so be it. El Al figured this out in the 70's, yet the FAA was too fucking stupid to pay attention.
Though I agree with your points, it's important to realize that there are other contributing factors to both the hijacking and why cockpit doors weren't secure. On the cockpit door, another contributing factor was the the pilot's union objected to a secure cockpit door on the argument that it would slow down emergency egress from the cockpit.
IMHO, the other big factor on airplane security in general is that the general public had been told for decades that in the event of a hijacking, to not resist and let government/police negotiators secure their release. This type of passive response to violence is commonly advised by lots of uninvolved people for lots of situations (it's bad advice for pretty much each and every case), but the old advice on hijacking doesn't seem to get much airtime these days. The people on flight 56 figured out the real deal when they called home and the ability of hijackers to use a plane as a weapon ended within minutes.
Today, I think that airport security could hand out loaded pistols to the three most suspicious characters on the jetway and you'd still never see another 9/11-type takeover. The passengers simply wouldn't let it happen. I sure as hell wouldn't...
Regards,
Ross
There's also a Phalanx gun, which can target and destroy an incoming projectile (like an RPG or missile) before it makes impact. I'm sure it could be modified to fit on a humvee in an automated supply convoy.
Phalanx guns are BIG, like several times the weight of a humvee even before you load the ammunition.
Besides, I wouldn't be too worried about guided missiles being aimed at a convoy. You should be more worried about antivehicular explosive charges (mines) and RPG's in convoy defense. Automated convoys also need to worry about EMP devices taking out unshielded equipment (basically, external sensors) and crackers getting into control systems to divert vehicles, to state two more sophisticated attacks that might be devised.
Regards,
Ross
Loyalty, much like it's close cousin, trust, isn't an on-off switch. If you aren't 100% loyal (by keeping your resume up to date, for instance), that doesn't mean you're a traitor to the organization you currently work for.
Loyalty is earned and spent by both sides of a relationship, and undying loyalty only comes after a series of successful tests over a long period of time. To restate: Loyalty is built over time, by deliberate action on both sides of the relationship.
For organizations, it's more difficult than for people because their actions are judged by all of their members (employees) and it's almost impossible to keep everyone happy all of the time. People can make private mistakes, apologize for them, and their loyalty (as judged by the other party) can fully recover. Organizational mistakes usually mean that someone's getting fired, and when that's front line people, there's no apology possible, the damage is done. Organizations have to make a whole bunch of decisions for the long term to be perceived as loyal, and if they don't do that, if they slip into short term "this quarter" thinking: all attempts to build loyalty are nothing more than "promises" with a three month life span. Employees figure this out extremely quickly, and most everyone can see some of the indications of this type of behavior.
Loyalty starts with a culture of loyalty as a part of an organizational culture of long-term thinking, driven by top management. Until that exists, loyal employees will be abberations; hopeful people who haven't been burned that badly yet. It's possible to create an organization worthy of loyalty: I've been in one and I enjoyed working there. However, most modern U.S. companies put the short term interests of shareholders above all else, which means there is zero loyalty to employees. Kinda tough to expect any employee loyalty coming back in that kind of environment.
Regards,
Ross
Not sure why you weren't a friend before.
In any case, the error has been corrected.
Regards,
Ross
What you're describing is structurally similar to the kind of stuff we did with Calavista at my previous employer. We had a build step and a test step running on different machines (and neither one was the cvs machine) in order to get the commit performance we needed (our tests could take as little as 5 minutes to run with a local database server, but could take 20 minutes or more if the database machine was separate and didn't have a great network connection).
:)
You get to run a shell script per step (build, test, etc.). We modified some existing Calavista scripts to run the build, deploy, and test on remote machines, then wait for the results to come back. Doesn't seem like it would be that tough to kick off multiple builds and tests on different platforms and then wait for all of the results to come back...
I'd say give them a call as it sounds like your problem is right up their alley. Tell them Ross sent you
Regards,
Ross
- it's when some £$^$%^^%%$ checks in broken code, or forgets to check something in, that you want to go and wring their bloody neck, because you're pissing your sunday away trying to fix the weekly rollup build.
This is why I love products that protect the source tip with pre-commit testing. If it doesn't pass the regression suite, it's their problem and not your problem. You can do it with commit hooks in some CM tools (Subversion gives you some ability to do this, as an example), and there are a few commercial tools that give you a LOT of control over the commit test.
Disclaimer: In addition to being a very satisfied customer of Calavista, I help them out on occasional contract work, so I have some interest in their success.
Regards,
Ross
Perhaps it isn't as obvious as you think. My clothes washing approach is pretty different from yours.
Whites, blue jeans, towels and bedclothes: hot water, normal cycle.
Delicates: cold water, gentle cycle.
Everything else: warm water, normal cycle. Group dark colors, bright colors, light colors into separate loads.
Dryer: hottest setting unless the garmet tag says otherwise (usually not).
I buy extra-large T-shirts, which fit me after a few washes. Nothing else seems to shink all that much. Most of my casual clothes last between 5 to 10 years. Nicer clothes tend to get retired after a few years by tears/rips or stains that even the professional cleaners can't get out.
Regards,
Ross
But when has Microsoft ever provided innovation on a technical level that lead to a successful product? I can't think of any such case. Everything is either a copy of something else, or purchased from someone else.
I think of Excel as sufficiently superior to Lotus 1-2-3 and superior in enough different ways as to be an innovative success story. Excel started out as a copy, but quickly became Microsoft's own system, where eventually the only similarity was that they were both spreadsheets. The rest was Microsoft.
If you want a second innovative product... well... that's about all I've got.
Regards,
Ross
innovating a new business model is hardly what real geeks would consider important innovation, right?
I think that most geeks give Netflix full credit for their original business model.
I'd like to think that geeks are a little better at ignoring the marketdroid and a little more likely to be interested in what's going on behind the curtain. Most "new business practices" don't stand up to that kind of scrutiny very well, but those that do seem to get the respect they deserve...
In my experience anyway.
Regards,
Ross
When volcanoes spew more greenhouse gases in a day than mankind has done in 10,000 years... Gimme a break.
Actually, the Mt. Saint Helens eruption added about 4% to the US greenhouse gas emissions for 1980 (one part in twenty five!). On average, volcanos put about 110 million tons of CO2 into the air per year. Human activity puts about 10 billion tons of CO2 into the air per year (about 90 times as much as volcanos). Volcanos also tend to pump out more SO2 than anything else, and SO2 is a reverse greenhouse gas (causing global cooling).
The largest eruption in recent history (and probably the largest in the last twelve thousand years) was Tambora in 1815. That eruption is believed to have produced 300 million tons of SO2 and 80 million tons of CO2. But the output of the biggest volcano in recorded history is just a drop in the bucket compared to modern human activity.
Regards,
Ross
In both cases, there is nothing to prevent you from bringing your own supplies and making your own coffee or ice. In fact, this type of self-driven event preparation is highly encouraged.
When it comes to ice, however, the hardware to produce it in any quantity would get expensive rather quickly. Which is the pretty much the point of them charging for it (can't clean up the desert after the party if you're broke).
I do think that the burning man planners would like nothing less than to eliminate these two monetary transactions as well...
Regards,
Ross
Public ownership means the corporate executives have a duty to the shareholders to maximize their value (i.e. keep the stock price high).
That's simplistic, and if you understood the real, more complex answer, you'd realize how deeply you misunderstand what companies must do.
There are plenty of companies who put other interests above the stockholder's interests. As long as these other interests are clearly described to potential shareholders (usually in the corporate charter, the corporate bylaws and mentioned/described in financial statements), the investors (owners) can pound sand.
Even if they're making money, are they making enough money? Are they making the right strategic decisions? The shareholders invested a ton of capital in Novell, are the executives making the best use of it?
With some broad caveats, it's not their call. The shareholder's decision is to invest or to withdraw investment with rare "confidence/no confidence" votes decided by an actual majority of outstanding share (not the 5% piping up here). Most shareholder lawsuits are about fraud or are part of larger power plays. Very few have to do with the quality of management and even fewer of those end up winning.
A lot of people think that because shareholders are owners that all decisions must be made in accordance with shareholder desires. Management has been hired to fulfill one or more promises to various groups, those promises being spelled out in the corporate charter. If short-term shareholder gain is in the charter, then managment had better step up. The long-term interests of shareholders is much more common and much tougher to nail down to a few decisions in the here and now.
Novell management will be able to argue quite convincingly that the proposals being mentioned here are not in the long term interest of Novell shareholders, but only in the interest of a few shareholders who wish to sell their stake. Acting in the interest of owners wishing to sell against the long term interest of all owners is the kind of behavior that will get you in very deep trouble very quickly.
Regards,
Ross
Stuff like not being able to take *any* leave for the first six months of employment, sick or not, only giving 10 days off per year total to junior employees, and so on.
Yeah, that's control-freak horseshit and it is my deliberate goal to minimize those kinds of policies. The plan is for employees to accumulate PTO at the rate of 6 2/3 hours per bi-monthly pay period. After that, there's only the request to respect each other when scheduling time off.
If your business plan doesn't require people to stick around long, the no-benefit-for-seniority plan can be OK. If you do want to retain people, you'll have to provide motivation somehow, and leave is a standard and valuable way to do so.
I'm hoping that the company culture is one that people enjoy being a part of and that it's something worth staying with. Eventually, people will grow and their positions and responsibilities will change. If those professional changes match up with their personal goals, why would they want to leave? Maybe I'm idealistic, but that's the kind of thing I've wanted, and I tend to project my own desires a bit...
Regards,
Ross
So you say that for anyone to have a discussion of evolution they must use your conventions of naming? I say bullshit.
:)
If you decide to make up your own definition for a word and then claim that scientists must also using your definition when they use the same word... I can think of a better place to put your "bullshit" label.
Theory already has a specific meaning when used by scientists. In this case, the various theories of evolution provide our current best explanations for the many-times-over observed fact of evolution (the fact that the frequency of alleles in a population changes over time).
You will learn more about evolution in the Bible than any PH.D. granting institution can teach you. And you will live a better life.
The first statement is patently false. Charitably, the Bible discusses the who and why of creation, but is woefully lacking any substantive discussion of how or when (which is what the theories and facts of evolution are all about). The second statement is irrelevant, since most graduate institutions don't explicitly attempt to improve how people live their lives (there is hope that by improving the quality/quantity of what people know, lives will improve, but it's implicit).
You should read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Edwards.
Not a month ago, another Christian was yelling at me for saying that Christianity still use fear-based arguments to spread the word (and Christian morality). He said that I was ignorant and that those type of people were just a part of the ugly history of Christianity. Where were you to defend my assertion then?
I always get a chuckle when I think that according to the worldview of people like you, all us godless heathens must be just wallowing in sin and misery because we don't have a man in the sky to tell us what's right and what's wrong. A really useful ethics will be a lot more useful than any "list of rules" morality like you're going to find in your books. Some Christians will understand and agree with what I'm saying, but I don't expect it to make any sense to you (you may also say they weren't really Christians anyway
How do you explain miricles?
Which miracles?
How do you explain the works of Mother Theresa?
As the personal effort of a well-intentioned but poorly informed woman. (perhaps not so poorly informed, since she came to the West for her own medical treatments rather than be treated in the hospitals that she created... hmmm...).
How do you explain it when modern medicine says a person will die, that there is nothing else that can be done, but a priest comes and the person wakes up?
In the real world, we should often discuss probabilities instead of certainties, but if, based on a doctor's experience, a patient has a vanishingly small chance of survival, he'll conclude the patient is a goner and move on to the next guy. But vanishingly small probabilities are still non-zero and some people will pull through by sheer force of will (a.k.a. placebo effect, which is not a brush-off, but a really important set of biophysical effects that your body can do to itself).
Have a great day!
Ross
Probably the best e-mail exchange ever:
http://www.harpers.org/DontHaveACowMan.html
I stand in awe. Absolutely amazing. Judd truly grasps the zen of the flame.
After reading this, I realize that I am but a humble student of the artist. I used to occasionally dive into talk.politics.guns and join in the flamewars there. Thought I was pretty good at the game, but I had no idea.
Two remarks. First, Brazill seems too feeble-minded to have done something as cool as "That 70's Show" (either that or my love of redheaded chicks is getting in the way of my better judgement). Second, Judd seems like a cat torturing a mouse. A joke about getting into an intellectual battle with an unarmed opponent comes to mind. At some point, it's clear just how intellectually outmatched Brazill was and I started to feel pity for him.
Wow,
Ross