Make your own diamond? Not going to happen. Make your own diamond ring? Design your own ring around a less-bothersome stone? Definitely. I wouldn't wait around for synthetic gem-quality diamonds, though. If you want to minimize your interaction with DeBeers, go to a jeweler who will buy an estate ring and then use the jem in the ring you want.
Or do something like what I did for my fiance. She got double lasik surgery (with wavefront) and a very moderately priced ring with small garnets and diamonds (our birthstones). There's no real
those responsible for managing and renumerating these employees know and plan for this unpaid overtime.
The biggest problem with overtime is that it doesn't yield the benefits that employers think it will. Creative employees simply can not work much more than forty hours per week and actually get more done. At least not more quality work. You can do a lot more than usual during a crunch, but you can't already be worn down, and afterwards, you have to recover your stamina with some actual rest.
A union is a response to a complete failure of management to maintain a productive relationship with their employees. The confrontational relationship of union-company discussion permanently harms both groups and it's almost impossible to restore whatever dialog might have been there before. A union may be the only control on management run amok, but it is an awfully big gun and should only be used once individual negotiation has completely failed.
Also, many employers believe that their developers are cogs who can be replaced fairly quickly. The strike to prove them wrong would be very costly and risky to the developers involved. Most developers don't have the kind of savings needed to weather a strike, and the unions wouldn't have any funds to support it either.
Color me skeptical. Programmer unions aren't going to happen any time soon. At least not among companies I want to work for. And that's the point, isn't it?
I've never liked that assumed reality about fights in space.
If I'm designing a human-ship interface for a fighting ship in space, I'm going to make sure that you can tell where other vessels all around you and what they're doing, (i.e. you'll know if it's moving, if it's coming closer and when it blows up, you'll hear that too).
Of course, I'll be synthesizing the noises, and an outside explosion won't shake the bridge or throw anyone out of their chair or anything like that. But you'll hear other ships if I had anything to say about the design of the controls.
Discipline means that someone forces you to do things you don't want to, instead of things that you do want to do.
I understand discipline, in this context, to be the ability to make myself do things that I find unpleasant (boring, difficult, etc.) in the short term in order to achieve a long-term goal (saving and investing in order to build a nest-egg, learning and practicing the piano in order to become proficient in the skill, etc.). You called this "self-discipline", but that's just being pedandic. When we teach children to be "disciplined" the prefix "self-" may clarify, but is not necessary.
Furthermore, you don't know when it's time to leave, so it's stupid to do the boring stuff now and the fun stuff tomorrow
It all comes down to finding a balance between short term and long term goals. There's too much individual variation to provide any hard and fast rules about how to find that balance, but fully discounting the value of either short or long term goals is likely to result in less happiness. Also, disciplined shouldn't mean "no play", but play in balance with other activities. Play is definitely important, for adults and children, but few people achieve circumstances where they can play all the time and still achieve other goals they've set for themselves.
An aphorism I like goes: Plan like you're going to live forever. Live like you're going to die tomorrow.
In fact, there is an old copy of "Brain Lock" on one of her bookshelves that has been read through several times (I have not yet read it myself). She has mentioned to me that she tried many alternative techniques, and at this point, she considers them ineffective for helping her. It took an enormous number of failed alternatives before she would consider taking drugs. Given the beliefs she has today about medication, I'm a little suprised that she ever made the decision to take Zoloft.
I think that she was that desperate (to accept information that she didn't want to believe), and we're both happy with where she is right now. Not that she's not stressed out with classes and work, not that she doesn't have times when she's frustrated with circumstances, not that life is perfect... But things are good. And that's as much as either of us can ask for.
My fiance takes Zoloft and an anti-anxiety drug called "Busparin" (sp?). These two drugs have changed her life pretty dramatically (she started taking them about six months before we started dating). She used to have trouble with obsessive thought patterns and felt that her life was in a rut.
Since taking the drugs, she has been able to control the obsessive thoughts, meet me (we met through an online dating site), start her PhD (just the dissertation to go), get engaged to me, buy a motorcycle, enjoy riding her motorcycle, and basically start enjoying her life.
So there's one positive testimonial. Though I do agree that antidepressants appear to be radically overprescribed, Zoloft has had a very positive effect on at least one person.
How many people that you really want flying an airplane would be able to handle the execution of dozens or (on large planes) hudreds of people? How many eight year old girls would it have to have their throats cut before you or anyone else opened the door?
This goes beyond unrealistic.
What are the other hundreds of passengers and flight attendants doing while the bad guys are threatening people?
If someone or some group started making threatening moves, I and the other passengers would do our best to beat them senseless and tie them back into their seats with belts and shoelaces. If a few people got hurt or killed in that process, it's clearly a better outcome than allowing hijackers to have control of the aircraft.
Which is also the logic of the pilot. It is better to allow every single passenger on the plane to be killed than to lose control of the cockpit and possibly allow the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other people.
I specifically remember news items from years ago that instructed people in a plane that was being hijacked to cooperate with the hijackers and let the professional negotiatiors deal with the hijackers to secure your release. These "helpful hints" usually appeared around the same time as a hijacking was appearing on the evening news.
9/11 changed that equation forever. The new rule: do not cooperate with a potential hijacker, under any circumstances. If you're going to die in a hijacking, at least die fighting to deny the plane to the hijacker(s).
At this point, I think they could hand out guns to suspicious looking people on the jetway and it would still be impossible for them to take over an airplane. The other passengers simply wouldn't allow it. These increasingly intrusive security screenings do absolutely nothing to improve aircraft safety. It's just feel good inaction by an agency which doesn't have the power to accomplish it's goals (make air travel safe).
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -- Helen Keller
Echo's server round-trips are agonizing. We spent weeks trying various ways to reduce the number of fully synchronous server requests and page redisplays. We eventually gave up, and at this point, Echo is a four letter word in our organization and the inside joke for a completely unusable UI framework.
If Echo2 is AJAX, perhaps they can recover some credibility around here...
I agree that universities have a lot in common with corporations. They are both organizations of people, so there's no way to avoid broad similarities. But I would observe that most universities acknowledge that there are also substantial differences between the way educators and employees at traditional companies are governed.
While that acknowledgement is being made in public, however, I suspect that there is less and less respect for academic freedom in private. My father is a tenured professor at a public university and even with tenure, he gets enormous pressure to stick to making statements that are in the interests of the school and the school's sponsors.
This is a sad, sad development as the media long ago abandoned the pretense of being the conscience of government and corporations and there are very few institutions remaining that offer a venue to voice unpopular and socially heretical opinions.
This is a University setting, not a bank. Academic administrations don't get to tell speakers, lecturers, or professors what to talk about or what not to talk about.
At least that's how it's supposed to work in academic institutions.
I'm very sad that you perceive that there is no difference between a university and a company. Not because you're wrong, but because you might be right.
I don't understand why "strong" is better than "b" for bold, or "em" is better than "i" for italics. IMHO, less typing is better, even if most people now use some sort of graphical editor like Dreamweaver.
Part of the idea in those renamings is to increase the separation between content and presentation. In the two examples you give, changing the semantic behind the markup allows them to imply content information instead of presentation information. "b[old]" and "i[talics]" specify the appearance of a block of text. "strong" and "em" provide content hints similar to voice inflection and body language that can't be carried in simple text. The fact that they may be consistently mapped to bold or italic font styles during presentation is convenient, but doesn't mean they're the same thing.
It's part of the same philosophy of how to name "class" and "id" attributes when using CSS. The names should describe the kind or function or responsibility of the content (header, footer, subscript, etc.) instead of describing the intended appearance of the content (small, extraSmall, largeGrey, etc.).
As for "less typing" == "better", I'm of mixed feelings myself. I think that XML/HTML/XHTML/XSL is already an extremely verbose syntax, so I'm not too upset if some of the tags get a little bigger. In my experience, good tools and effective habits make more of a difference than anything else.
If Norm Matloff (or anybody else) has credible evidence that Intel, or anyone else, is paying their H1B employees less than their US counterparts, he should file a lawsuit - it will bring them the gratitude of current and future H1B employees around the country.
You're naive and you're further asserting that employers adhere to the spirit or the wording of the law. They only adhere to the extent that they won't get in trouble for not adhering.
At two previous employers, I was entitled to see the payroll data and the H1B visa holders earned 25-40% less than peer employees doing the same job (with worse reviews) who could quit at will. And according to the realities of the situation, those employers are completely safe in flaunting the laws for H1B pay.
The law says the employer has to pay comparable wages. But who is going to complain? Who will testify in court that their current pay is below the market rate? The visa holder? The guy who has to pack up and leave the country in 10 days if the company lets him go? You're smoking some pretty good weed if you think that person is going to rock the boat for a 25% raise. Even though they are entitled to every penny of that money under the law.
The fact of the matter is that H1B employers research pay grades in their region, classify H1B employees as the cheapest kind of employee arguably related to their job and then peg H1B hires at the bottom of the pay ranges for that worst case job description. It's deliberate and widespread, and you'll never convince any employer to admit that in a court of law.
The end result is that H1B's are substantially cheaper employees and also have much stronger disincentives to leave. They're essentially indentured servants and for you to assert otherwise sounds like ignorance of the facts to me.
But, people, if you are going to hunt, be responsible and learn to fcking shoot!. People willing to take a shot at an animal, but not willing to put in the time to be good enough to make a clean kill (or track down a wounded animal whatever it takes) makes me sick.
*applause*
When my grandfather and I went hunting, he told me that before I took a shot at a deer, I must be prepared to follow that deer wherever it went and that I wasn't welcome back at home while there was a wounded animal still suffering because of my action.
As a result of that directive, stated in no uncertain terms, I tend to only take very high probability shots and I've only had to really walk one time so far (and I still get upset with myself for not ending that deer's suffering more quickly). Hunters who can't be bothered to follow wounded animals get me absolutely furious.
As it turns out I've read much of the information referenced from the Vegetarian Society and they are a perfect example of my complaint about vegetarian literature in general: they don't effectively provide control data for their statistics and conclusions.
Fundamentally: they're comparing causes of mortality of people who eat meat in the general population to vegetarians. There's no isolation for the effect of meat in the diet. Those who eat meat in the general population are largely unaware of their diet, eating the "SAD" or something roughly equivalent. The "Standard American Diet" can be described as:
too many calories (frequently eating to over-satiation).
erratic scheduling (typified by a minimal or completely missing breakfast).
dominated by refined food products, specifically refined sugar and refined flour.
lots of fried foods.
lots of saturated fats, hydrolized oils, and low density cholesterol from multiple sources.
lacking sufficient quantities of several necessary vitamins and minerals.
includes meat (sometimes in excessive quantity).
So how can they be sure it's just the meat that's at fault for those health problems? Of course the SAD diet is unhealthy. Any diet where you're aware of what you're eating will be healthier than that. If the meat's to blame, the studies I've seen (and I've seen a lot) have yet to make that case.
While I agree that a vegetarian diet can be healthier than the SAD, it's not the only diet that is. Just about any diet with moderate quantities of varied food eaten regularly throughout the day will probably do the trick. In my own cooking, I specifically include a wide variety of steamed vegetables, whole fruit (very little juice), whole grains and whole grain products, and moderate quantities of meat, usually fish or venison that I've personally harvested.
If they were to conduct a study of a stable varied diet including meat against a stable varied diet excluding meat, I suspect the health benefits of the vegetarian diet over a diet including meat would be very difficult to identify. This is not to say that a vegetarian diet is unhealthy: far from it. Only that moderate quantities of meat are not unhealthy and have eliminated the cravings I used to regularly feel during my own years as a vegetarian.
For several years, I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian (this actually happened shortly after my first hunt, where my emotions were so strong that I found it difficult to bear the sight of meat for quite some time). Since I live in California, I live near thousands of people who currently practice vegetarianism to varying degrees. I am also personally acquainted with several dozen of them and have had books, articles, studies and personal anecdotes sent my way for many years.
Anecdotally speaking, of course (since I don't know which studies you're referring to), not one of the assertions in the papers and books I've ready is substantiated by anything better than self-serving, anecdotal reports. You'd think that nobody doing vegetarian advocacy had heard of double blind testing. Most of this material (especially the books) don't even get that far, and are instead pure assertion and wishful thinking wrapped up with fake certifications, memberships, and mail-order degrees. And then, my friends who are the most consistent vegetarians are the least healthy people I know. Far too thin (emaciated was the word my fiance used), and constantly complaining about various problems (most seem to have joint problems).
As for the propaganda of the meat industry, I differentiate between advertising and propaganda (where one is hawking a product or service and the other is attempting to alter more fundamental meme patterns about a position or a subject). Not too many people are claiming that a diet of pure meat is even slightly healthy. Instead, the most credible evidence shows that a balanced diet, including moderate amounts of meat (about as much as a single Outback steak divided up over a week), results in the fewest risk factors for long life and overall quality of life.
Personally, I find that the most credible discussions have involved people who have practiced several forms of vegetarianism, have personally observed the changes in their own bodies and who currently have a healthy body image (as opposed to the distorted body image that many with eating disorders have). This site tries very hard to walk a sensitive line (while maintaining a sane position) and is maintained by several lapsed and moderate vegetarians.
And I agree completely that the bigger problem is the moral separation that people have from the cruelty done in their name when they buy packaged meat from the supermarket.
Lest you forget, the case at hand is internet hunting that, short of them FedEx'ing the carcass to you, isn't done for meat.
Oh, I agree with just about everyone here that the "hunting as video game" that was the original subject is utterly reprehensible, and for any number of reasons. It's the swipe at the end of the/. posting that's gotten all of the attention and discussion here.
So you kill a deer for no other reason that to make yourself feel better and less of a hypocrit? Somehow, I don't think the deer cares about your feelings.
Way to completely miss the point. He wasn't asking for the deer's approval, just like you don't ask the cow. He's merely taking personal responsibility for the killing, which you appear to object to.
There is a school of thought among hunters that personally using the resources provided by an animal you killed provides meaning to the death. Death is a part of life. If taking an animal's life helps to sustain my own and if the animal felt as little pain as possible during that death, I'm not going to feel the slightest bit guilty about my actions.
And that doesn't only mean I'm comfortable buying meat at the supermarket that someone else killed for me. I also include hunting for meat myself, exactly like the poster you replied to.
Assuming evolution works, then the fact that our bodies don't make us good hunters should tell you something... like perhaps we shouldn't be hunting.
Ah, but our big brains and opposable thumbs make us very good hunters (us very good tool builders/users can use tools to overcome our lack of running speed, sharp claws and sharp teeth). The calorie density of meat is the only reason your distant (and your fairly recent) ancestors flourished and resulted in a population that included you.
Among primitive man, nobody who lived very long was a vegetarian, and nobody had the luxury of buying their meat already killed and cleanly presented in the supermarket. If they didn't kill the animal themselves, they knew who did.
If you're a strict vegetarian, congrats, I haven't got much criticism for you (though I do dislike a lot of the self-deceptive propaganda you read). If you're not a vegetarian and you buy meat from a supermarket, there's only one response you deserve:
Sit down and shut the fuck up.
Having someone else kill your meat for you doesn't put you in any better ethical position than a hunter who kills his own meat. If anything, the hunter has some control over how much pain the animal feels as it dies. You'll need to be keeping a close watch on the slaughterhouse that supplies your butcher to claim the same ability. As someone who had an informal tour of an operating slaughterhouse, I know I can do better with a rifle. And after taking that tour, which showed me just how horrible the process is that puts cleanly wrapped cuts of meat on the supermarket shelf, I took up hunting again.
Regards, Ross
Re:The future of databases is... no Database at al
on
The Future of Databases
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Oh my dear god. You've never actually used Prevayler have you? Prevayler isn't nearly as useful on actual data problems as Prevayler's worshippers would have you believe.
I know this because I tried to use it. If you'd ever tried to use it, you'd know how unbelievably poorly it performed when attempting to implement real world queries. You have to implement every query in Java, and Java is a particularly poor implementation choice for creating complex queries.
What if I said that this can be as fast as 8000 times faster than Oracle?
This "performance comparison" that the Prevayler group trots out is particularly funny as their test uses a single ArrayList of objects as in-memory "storage" and then "queries" it by index. Not exactly a realistic problem. Try a query across four classes with a few million instances of each class and you'll quickly discover what relational databases are good for.
Did they react the same way to every car that came through the checkpoint? If not, what circumstances were different?
After RTFM'ing, it appears that the soldiers were not manning a checkpoint, but a "Blocking Position", i.e. completely closing down the road and turning cars back with multiple barriers, signs, and military vehicles blocking the road. The signs and approach to a checkpoint would be substantially different than to a blocking position.
All previous cars (15-30 cars) turned around prior to reaching the "warning line" (designated as the distance where the blocking soldiers would fire). This car did not stop and continued to approach the blocking position. Which is fundamentall what was different about this car from the other cars that approached the blocking position, according to the US military.
The Italians assert a lot of things that are different from the report's findings. The Italians assert that they were on a main road, not heading towards a main road, but the US asserts that the soldiers were blocking access to the main road from an overpass. The Italians assert that the US was fully briefed on the extraction of the journalist while the US concludes that the only person in the US military who knew about the operation was ordered by an Italian general to say nothing. The Italians assert that there is evidence they were shot from behind and shot a great deal more than eleven times while the US military claims 11 penetrations of the car, all from the front-right.
If the Italians have any hard evidence of their claims, they need to speak up and directly contradict the fidings in this report. Assertions without evidence will, correctly, be ignored.
(BTW, I didn't vote for Bush, I'm still horrified about Abu-Grahib, and if the US military is lying about this incident, I hope they catch hell for it. But it looks like there's a substantial evidence chain to show that the Italian driver acted in a way that looked aggressive and threatening to soldiers doing their duty exactly as they were ordered.)
Actually, I think the two examples of Mac advocacy are pretty dramatically different. It's clear that Paul Graham's blog entry is his opinion. It seems equally clear that the trade journal article is Apple's PR company's opinion.
The difference is critically important to the ethics of both articles.
Basically, Paul Murphy is wrong about what SCO is suing IBM for and wrong in his misinformed conclusion that SCO's case has any merit. The rest of his position piece follows logically from those two initial errors.
As to why he's wrong: 1) Linux doesn't need knowledge from the AT&T SysV code base to become world-class. 2) IBM isn't trying to contribute knowledge or source from the AT&T SysV code base to Linux.
As an aside, reverse engineering was never necessary to understand or duplicate a unix kernel and is therefore his mention of it is a complete red herring.
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Make your own diamond? Not going to happen. Make your own diamond ring? Design your own ring around a less-bothersome stone? Definitely. I wouldn't wait around for synthetic gem-quality diamonds, though. If you want to minimize your interaction with DeBeers, go to a jeweler who will buy an estate ring and then use the jem in the ring you want.
Or do something like what I did for my fiance. She got double lasik surgery (with wavefront) and a very moderately priced ring with small garnets and diamonds (our birthstones). There's no real
Regards,
Ross
those responsible for managing and renumerating these employees know and plan for this unpaid overtime.
The biggest problem with overtime is that it doesn't yield the benefits that employers think it will. Creative employees simply can not work much more than forty hours per week and actually get more done. At least not more quality work. You can do a lot more than usual during a crunch, but you can't already be worn down, and afterwards, you have to recover your stamina with some actual rest.
A union is a response to a complete failure of management to maintain a productive relationship with their employees. The confrontational relationship of union-company discussion permanently harms both groups and it's almost impossible to restore whatever dialog might have been there before. A union may be the only control on management run amok, but it is an awfully big gun and should only be used once individual negotiation has completely failed.
Also, many employers believe that their developers are cogs who can be replaced fairly quickly. The strike to prove them wrong would be very costly and risky to the developers involved. Most developers don't have the kind of savings needed to weather a strike, and the unions wouldn't have any funds to support it either.
Color me skeptical. Programmer unions aren't going to happen any time soon. At least not among companies I want to work for. And that's the point, isn't it?
Regards,
Ross
I've never liked that assumed reality about fights in space.
If I'm designing a human-ship interface for a fighting ship in space, I'm going to make sure that you can tell where other vessels all around you and what they're doing, (i.e. you'll know if it's moving, if it's coming closer and when it blows up, you'll hear that too).
Of course, I'll be synthesizing the noises, and an outside explosion won't shake the bridge or throw anyone out of their chair or anything like that. But you'll hear other ships if I had anything to say about the design of the controls.
Regards,
Ross
Discipline means that someone forces you to do things you don't want to, instead of things that you do want to do.
I understand discipline, in this context, to be the ability to make myself do things that I find unpleasant (boring, difficult, etc.) in the short term in order to achieve a long-term goal (saving and investing in order to build a nest-egg, learning and practicing the piano in order to become proficient in the skill, etc.). You called this "self-discipline", but that's just being pedandic. When we teach children to be "disciplined" the prefix "self-" may clarify, but is not necessary.
Furthermore, you don't know when it's time to leave, so it's stupid to do the boring stuff now and the fun stuff tomorrow
It all comes down to finding a balance between short term and long term goals. There's too much individual variation to provide any hard and fast rules about how to find that balance, but fully discounting the value of either short or long term goals is likely to result in less happiness. Also, disciplined shouldn't mean "no play", but play in balance with other activities. Play is definitely important, for adults and children, but few people achieve circumstances where they can play all the time and still achieve other goals they've set for themselves.
An aphorism I like goes: Plan like you're going to live forever. Live like you're going to die tomorrow.
Regards,
Ross
In fact, there is an old copy of "Brain Lock" on one of her bookshelves that has been read through several times (I have not yet read it myself). She has mentioned to me that she tried many alternative techniques, and at this point, she considers them ineffective for helping her. It took an enormous number of failed alternatives before she would consider taking drugs. Given the beliefs she has today about medication, I'm a little suprised that she ever made the decision to take Zoloft.
I think that she was that desperate (to accept information that she didn't want to believe), and we're both happy with where she is right now. Not that she's not stressed out with classes and work, not that she doesn't have times when she's frustrated with circumstances, not that life is perfect... But things are good. And that's as much as either of us can ask for.
Regards,
Ross
My fiance takes Zoloft and an anti-anxiety drug called "Busparin" (sp?). These two drugs have changed her life pretty dramatically (she started taking them about six months before we started dating). She used to have trouble with obsessive thought patterns and felt that her life was in a rut.
Since taking the drugs, she has been able to control the obsessive thoughts, meet me (we met through an online dating site), start her PhD (just the dissertation to go), get engaged to me, buy a motorcycle, enjoy riding her motorcycle, and basically start enjoying her life.
So there's one positive testimonial. Though I do agree that antidepressants appear to be radically overprescribed, Zoloft has had a very positive effect on at least one person.
Regards,
Ross
How many people that you really want flying an airplane would be able to handle the execution of dozens or (on large planes) hudreds of people? How many eight year old girls would it have to have their throats cut before you or anyone else opened the door?
This goes beyond unrealistic.
What are the other hundreds of passengers and flight attendants doing while the bad guys are threatening people?
If someone or some group started making threatening moves, I and the other passengers would do our best to beat them senseless and tie them back into their seats with belts and shoelaces. If a few people got hurt or killed in that process, it's clearly a better outcome than allowing hijackers to have control of the aircraft.
Which is also the logic of the pilot. It is better to allow every single passenger on the plane to be killed than to lose control of the cockpit and possibly allow the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other people.
I specifically remember news items from years ago that instructed people in a plane that was being hijacked to cooperate with the hijackers and let the professional negotiatiors deal with the hijackers to secure your release. These "helpful hints" usually appeared around the same time as a hijacking was appearing on the evening news.
9/11 changed that equation forever. The new rule: do not cooperate with a potential hijacker, under any circumstances. If you're going to die in a hijacking, at least die fighting to deny the plane to the hijacker(s).
At this point, I think they could hand out guns to suspicious looking people on the jetway and it would still be impossible for them to take over an airplane. The other passengers simply wouldn't allow it. These increasingly intrusive security screenings do absolutely nothing to improve aircraft safety. It's just feel good inaction by an agency which doesn't have the power to accomplish it's goals (make air travel safe).
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -- Helen Keller
Regards,
Ross
Echo's server round-trips are agonizing. We spent weeks trying various ways to reduce the number of fully synchronous server requests and page redisplays. We eventually gave up, and at this point, Echo is a four letter word in our organization and the inside joke for a completely unusable UI framework.
If Echo2 is AJAX, perhaps they can recover some credibility around here...
Regards,
Ross
I agree that universities have a lot in common with corporations. They are both organizations of people, so there's no way to avoid broad similarities. But I would observe that most universities acknowledge that there are also substantial differences between the way educators and employees at traditional companies are governed.
While that acknowledgement is being made in public, however, I suspect that there is less and less respect for academic freedom in private. My father is a tenured professor at a public university and even with tenure, he gets enormous pressure to stick to making statements that are in the interests of the school and the school's sponsors.
This is a sad, sad development as the media long ago abandoned the pretense of being the conscience of government and corporations and there are very few institutions remaining that offer a venue to voice unpopular and socially heretical opinions.
Regards,
Ross
This is a University setting, not a bank. Academic administrations don't get to tell speakers, lecturers, or professors what to talk about or what not to talk about.
At least that's how it's supposed to work in academic institutions.
I'm very sad that you perceive that there is no difference between a university and a company. Not because you're wrong, but because you might be right.
Regards,
Ross
I don't understand why "strong" is better than "b" for bold, or "em" is better than "i" for italics. IMHO, less typing is better, even if most people now use some sort of graphical editor like Dreamweaver.
Part of the idea in those renamings is to increase the separation between content and presentation. In the two examples you give, changing the semantic behind the markup allows them to imply content information instead of presentation information. "b[old]" and "i[talics]" specify the appearance of a block of text. "strong" and "em" provide content hints similar to voice inflection and body language that can't be carried in simple text. The fact that they may be consistently mapped to bold or italic font styles during presentation is convenient, but doesn't mean they're the same thing.
It's part of the same philosophy of how to name "class" and "id" attributes when using CSS. The names should describe the kind or function or responsibility of the content (header, footer, subscript, etc.) instead of describing the intended appearance of the content (small, extraSmall, largeGrey, etc.).
As for "less typing" == "better", I'm of mixed feelings myself. I think that XML/HTML/XHTML/XSL is already an extremely verbose syntax, so I'm not too upset if some of the tags get a little bigger. In my experience, good tools and effective habits make more of a difference than anything else.
Regards,
Ross
7200rpm notebook drive
Regards,
Ross
If Norm Matloff (or anybody else) has credible evidence that Intel, or anyone else, is paying their H1B employees less than their US counterparts, he should file a lawsuit - it will bring them the gratitude of current and future H1B employees around the country.
You're naive and you're further asserting that employers adhere to the spirit or the wording of the law. They only adhere to the extent that they won't get in trouble for not adhering.
At two previous employers, I was entitled to see the payroll data and the H1B visa holders earned 25-40% less than peer employees doing the same job (with worse reviews) who could quit at will. And according to the realities of the situation, those employers are completely safe in flaunting the laws for H1B pay.
The law says the employer has to pay comparable wages. But who is going to complain? Who will testify in court that their current pay is below the market rate? The visa holder? The guy who has to pack up and leave the country in 10 days if the company lets him go? You're smoking some pretty good weed if you think that person is going to rock the boat for a 25% raise. Even though they are entitled to every penny of that money under the law.
The fact of the matter is that H1B employers research pay grades in their region, classify H1B employees as the cheapest kind of employee arguably related to their job and then peg H1B hires at the bottom of the pay ranges for that worst case job description. It's deliberate and widespread, and you'll never convince any employer to admit that in a court of law.
The end result is that H1B's are substantially cheaper employees and also have much stronger disincentives to leave. They're essentially indentured servants and for you to assert otherwise sounds like ignorance of the facts to me.
Regards,
Ross
But, people, if you are going to hunt, be responsible and learn to fcking shoot!.
People willing to take a shot at an animal, but not willing to put in the time to be good enough to make a clean kill (or track down a wounded animal whatever it takes) makes me sick.
*applause*
When my grandfather and I went hunting, he told me that before I took a shot at a deer, I must be prepared to follow that deer wherever it went and that I wasn't welcome back at home while there was a wounded animal still suffering because of my action.
As a result of that directive, stated in no uncertain terms, I tend to only take very high probability shots and I've only had to really walk one time so far (and I still get upset with myself for not ending that deer's suffering more quickly). Hunters who can't be bothered to follow wounded animals get me absolutely furious.
Regards,
Ross
As it turns out I've read much of the information referenced from the Vegetarian Society and they are a perfect example of my complaint about vegetarian literature in general: they don't effectively provide control data for their statistics and conclusions.
Fundamentally: they're comparing causes of mortality of people who eat meat in the general population to vegetarians. There's no isolation for the effect of meat in the diet. Those who eat meat in the general population are largely unaware of their diet, eating the "SAD" or something roughly equivalent. The "Standard American Diet" can be described as:
So how can they be sure it's just the meat that's at fault for those health problems? Of course the SAD diet is unhealthy. Any diet where you're aware of what you're eating will be healthier than that. If the meat's to blame, the studies I've seen (and I've seen a lot) have yet to make that case.
While I agree that a vegetarian diet can be healthier than the SAD, it's not the only diet that is. Just about any diet with moderate quantities of varied food eaten regularly throughout the day will probably do the trick. In my own cooking, I specifically include a wide variety of steamed vegetables, whole fruit (very little juice), whole grains and whole grain products, and moderate quantities of meat, usually fish or venison that I've personally harvested.
If they were to conduct a study of a stable varied diet including meat against a stable varied diet excluding meat, I suspect the health benefits of the vegetarian diet over a diet including meat would be very difficult to identify. This is not to say that a vegetarian diet is unhealthy: far from it. Only that moderate quantities of meat are not unhealthy and have eliminated the cravings I used to regularly feel during my own years as a vegetarian.
Regards,
Ross
For several years, I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian (this actually happened shortly after my first hunt, where my emotions were so strong that I found it difficult to bear the sight of meat for quite some time). Since I live in California, I live near thousands of people who currently practice vegetarianism to varying degrees. I am also personally acquainted with several dozen of them and have had books, articles, studies and personal anecdotes sent my way for many years.
Anecdotally speaking, of course (since I don't know which studies you're referring to), not one of the assertions in the papers and books I've ready is substantiated by anything better than self-serving, anecdotal reports. You'd think that nobody doing vegetarian advocacy had heard of double blind testing. Most of this material (especially the books) don't even get that far, and are instead pure assertion and wishful thinking wrapped up with fake certifications, memberships, and mail-order degrees. And then, my friends who are the most consistent vegetarians are the least healthy people I know. Far too thin (emaciated was the word my fiance used), and constantly complaining about various problems (most seem to have joint problems).
As for the propaganda of the meat industry, I differentiate between advertising and propaganda (where one is hawking a product or service and the other is attempting to alter more fundamental meme patterns about a position or a subject). Not too many people are claiming that a diet of pure meat is even slightly healthy. Instead, the most credible evidence shows that a balanced diet, including moderate amounts of meat (about as much as a single Outback steak divided up over a week), results in the fewest risk factors for long life and overall quality of life.
Personally, I find that the most credible discussions have involved people who have practiced several forms of vegetarianism, have personally observed the changes in their own bodies and who currently have a healthy body image (as opposed to the distorted body image that many with eating disorders have). This site tries very hard to walk a sensitive line (while maintaining a sane position) and is maintained by several lapsed and moderate vegetarians.
And I agree completely that the bigger problem is the moral separation that people have from the cruelty done in their name when they buy packaged meat from the supermarket.
Regards,
Ross
Lest you forget, the case at hand is internet hunting that, short of them FedEx'ing the carcass to you, isn't done for meat.
/. posting that's gotten all of the attention and discussion here.
Oh, I agree with just about everyone here that the "hunting as video game" that was the original subject is utterly reprehensible, and for any number of reasons. It's the swipe at the end of the
Regards,
Ross
So you kill a deer for no other reason that to make yourself feel better and less of a hypocrit? Somehow, I don't think the deer cares about your feelings.
Way to completely miss the point. He wasn't asking for the deer's approval, just like you don't ask the cow. He's merely taking personal responsibility for the killing, which you appear to object to.
There is a school of thought among hunters that personally using the resources provided by an animal you killed provides meaning to the death. Death is a part of life. If taking an animal's life helps to sustain my own and if the animal felt as little pain as possible during that death, I'm not going to feel the slightest bit guilty about my actions.
And that doesn't only mean I'm comfortable buying meat at the supermarket that someone else killed for me. I also include hunting for meat myself, exactly like the poster you replied to.
Regards,
Ross
Assuming evolution works, then the fact that our bodies don't make us good hunters should tell you something... like perhaps we shouldn't be hunting.
Ah, but our big brains and opposable thumbs make us very good hunters (us very good tool builders/users can use tools to overcome our lack of running speed, sharp claws and sharp teeth). The calorie density of meat is the only reason your distant (and your fairly recent) ancestors flourished and resulted in a population that included you.
Among primitive man, nobody who lived very long was a vegetarian, and nobody had the luxury of buying their meat already killed and cleanly presented in the supermarket. If they didn't kill the animal themselves, they knew who did.
If you're a strict vegetarian, congrats, I haven't got much criticism for you (though I do dislike a lot of the self-deceptive propaganda you read). If you're not a vegetarian and you buy meat from a supermarket, there's only one response you deserve:
Sit down and shut the fuck up.
Having someone else kill your meat for you doesn't put you in any better ethical position than a hunter who kills his own meat. If anything, the hunter has some control over how much pain the animal feels as it dies. You'll need to be keeping a close watch on the slaughterhouse that supplies your butcher to claim the same ability. As someone who had an informal tour of an operating slaughterhouse, I know I can do better with a rifle. And after taking that tour, which showed me just how horrible the process is that puts cleanly wrapped cuts of meat on the supermarket shelf, I took up hunting again.
Regards,
Ross
[misc drivel] Read more at:
http://www.prevayler.org/
Oh my dear god. You've never actually used Prevayler have you? Prevayler isn't nearly as useful on actual data problems as Prevayler's worshippers would have you believe.
I know this because I tried to use it. If you'd ever tried to use it, you'd know how unbelievably poorly it performed when attempting to implement real world queries. You have to implement every query in Java, and Java is a particularly poor implementation choice for creating complex queries.
What if I said that this can be as fast as 8000 times faster than Oracle?
This "performance comparison" that the Prevayler group trots out is particularly funny as their test uses a single ArrayList of objects as in-memory "storage" and then "queries" it by index. Not exactly a realistic problem. Try a query across four classes with a few million instances of each class and you'll quickly discover what relational databases are good for.
Regards,
Ross
Did they react the same way to every car that came through the checkpoint? If not, what circumstances were different?
After RTFM'ing, it appears that the soldiers were not manning a checkpoint, but a "Blocking Position", i.e. completely closing down the road and turning cars back with multiple barriers, signs, and military vehicles blocking the road. The signs and approach to a checkpoint would be substantially different than to a blocking position.
All previous cars (15-30 cars) turned around prior to reaching the "warning line" (designated as the distance where the blocking soldiers would fire). This car did not stop and continued to approach the blocking position. Which is fundamentall what was different about this car from the other cars that approached the blocking position, according to the US military.
The Italians assert a lot of things that are different from the report's findings. The Italians assert that they were on a main road, not heading towards a main road, but the US asserts that the soldiers were blocking access to the main road from an overpass. The Italians assert that the US was fully briefed on the extraction of the journalist while the US concludes that the only person in the US military who knew about the operation was ordered by an Italian general to say nothing. The Italians assert that there is evidence they were shot from behind and shot a great deal more than eleven times while the US military claims 11 penetrations of the car, all from the front-right.
If the Italians have any hard evidence of their claims, they need to speak up and directly contradict the fidings in this report. Assertions without evidence will, correctly, be ignored.
(BTW, I didn't vote for Bush, I'm still horrified about Abu-Grahib, and if the US military is lying about this incident, I hope they catch hell for it. But it looks like there's a substantial evidence chain to show that the Italian driver acted in a way that looked aggressive and threatening to soldiers doing their duty exactly as they were ordered.)
Regards,
Ross
He may be many things, but I'm pretty sure he's not a shill.
Correct. Please follow the links.
I'm using Paul Graham's essay about shills to point out why Paul Murphy is a shill.
Clear?
Regards,
Ross
Actually, I think the two examples of Mac advocacy are pretty dramatically different. It's clear that Paul Graham's blog entry is his opinion. It seems equally clear that the trade journal article is Apple's PR company's opinion.
The difference is critically important to the ethics of both articles.
Regards,
Ross
Paul Murphy, I'd like you to meet Paul Graham. What we have here is an Apple press release being printed up as a trade journal article.
Good for Apple's PR firm. I guess.
Not that I have anything against Macs or PowerPC hardware, I just don't like disengenuous authors (or their articles).
Regards,
Ross
Basically, Paul Murphy is wrong about what SCO is suing IBM for and wrong in his misinformed conclusion that SCO's case has any merit. The rest of his position piece follows logically from those two initial errors.
As to why he's wrong: 1) Linux doesn't need knowledge from the AT&T SysV code base to become world-class. 2) IBM isn't trying to contribute knowledge or source from the AT&T SysV code base to Linux.
As an aside, reverse engineering was never necessary to understand or duplicate a unix kernel and is therefore his mention of it is a complete red herring.
Regards,
Ross