By all means, don't sign up. Sailors on Christopher Columbus ships probably didn't make enough money to justify the added risks, crappy food and many month of boredom and backbreaking labor. Builders of great cathedrals probably made just a little more money than surfs. None of the actual cosmonauts/astronauts or even Barack Obama or Putin made as much money in their years in power as recent AIG executive bonuses.
For some people, living a meaningful life is priceless. For everyone else, there is a mastercard and our money-centered consumer culture. I don't think one group can really succeed in their goals without another. Just take a pick and don't ridicule others too quickly.
I always think my 20 month old daughter will ask for a jacket if she really feels cold. Now to convince her mom or well-meaning friends and relatives:-)
With BP, Arco and other companies at least acknowledging in TV ads that the current 100% reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable and other solutions, along with simply using less, are a must. Shell is an awfully wealthy company and investing 1% of the money they spend on locating new oil sources would finance an awful lot of school/university projects to come up with financially viable forms of alternative energy. This investment would have more than paid for itself just on PR value.
I have never been particularly loyal to any brand of gas, but I think I will start using the BP station 3 blocks down the road that I drive to get home anyway rather than Shell which is just at the highway exit.
Oh the irony. Windows.Forms is incomprehensible unless you were developing for MS products since Windows 3.1. A simple thing like a background thread setting enabled state of a button causes a deadlock.
Everyone seems to raise targetted advertising as a privacy concern - I really, really can't see how it could be harmful to me.
While I like using Gmail at work, I don't want all these oriental massage parlor ads to show up in an unrelated Google search done as part of a presentation to a Fortune 500 customer. While there are technical solutions to these problems 1) Nobody really uses them consistently 100% of the time 2) they are not always available to users of proprietary or someone elses' computers, software and services and 3) This doesn't excuse reputable companies, especially ones who claim to do no evil, being so obnoxious by default.
Atheism is merely a classification of religion that is on par with "N/A"
Actually classic Atheism goes much further than "N/A". It is an unquestionable belief that no intelligent powers were involved in our creation, our life has no higher purpose than whatever an individual (or at least a society) feels like doing and our consciousness disappears with death of our brain cells. Many atheists rely on Occam's razor principle to support their belief that anything not covered by today's science doesn't exist. In reality, although, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation of the facts is usually true, there are plenty of examples where the actual explanation is more complex than anyone could have imagined beforehand. One needs to look no further than the theory of relativity or quantum physics.
"N/A" would be more of a person who doesn't give much thought to religious questions. There are more non-religious people than atheists and most people who would identify themselves as Christians are actually non-religious and basically view church as a Sunday cultural event.
As for myself, I believe that, based on what we observe in the rest of the universe, it's extremely unlikely that we are NOT part of some kind of bigger picture - like electrons in an atom, a single cell in a human body or an individual animal in an ecosystem. However I also can not see how any particular person can claim to have the complete answer on what that big picture is.
Well, how about abandon-ware business applications?
I simply don't think VMWare and Parallels have thought this through. Most home MacOSX users who want windows emulation and are savvy enough to set it up have been using computers for at least a decade. Its highly likely that they have a favorite game or app that would influence them to choose the product that supports it. On the other hand, businesses are notorious for not upgrading even apps written when MS-DOS just came out.
It would be much easier to have a general purpose product that can be used with any OS of user's choice than to try to quantify every possible use case.
I (or Google) have a right to take a picture from my property, or any publicly accessible land and post it online. It might help terrorists, but this is the price of living in a free country. Obviously, if there are dozens of terrorist attacks per year, we might declare martial law and the country will not be free anymore, at least until the war is over. But I don't see any justification to live in fear and repression based on a single attack 7 years ago, and when we have successfully toppled the government that sponsored the terrorist plot in question.
Wow, I wasn't aware that the army handles civil matters in US. But as long as it does, I would say your private orifices are in even more danger than in PMITA. Just ask Abu Ghraib detainees.
Both products fail miserably at running anything older than XP. VMWare still wins here, since at least it manages to install and run 98SE successfully, while Parallels install suffers from endless crashes. But even a trivial DX game like "Lose your marbles" results in a blank screen, while it works perfectly fine in VPC for Mac on 5 year old hardware. There are many older applications and games that do not run on XP. Just how hard would it be to emulate an S3 video card and SB16 so that we can run whatever we fill like in the VM?
But how will you know if a firm passed you over because of something you said online? It'd be impossible to enforce.
Well, it's be impossible until one of the employees involved with hiring process brags about that on Facebook, like the first poster just did on slashdot. If not, a modest monetary reward from my lawyers would probably motivate someone to leak an internal e-mail. Facebook/MySpace logs can be subpoenaed to check for access from the company's network block to my personal profile.
But most of all, who would want to risk time in federal penn or at very least the popularity of the octuplet mom? You could also google for photos and reject all the black guys, but why would you want to literally risk your ass for your company? Proving discrimination may be hard, but there will be hell to pay once its confirmed.
When I am getting an $600K mortgage from a bank, they have much more at stake than an average employer. And yet, I have never heard of either Google searches being used to screen applicants or information in official credit reports being deliberately falsified by businesses (as opposed to identity theft). This may have started as a requirement of various equal rights laws, but I doubt a single bank would want things to be any other way now. Why risk losing qualified customers on unsubstantiated chit-chat of their high school enemies or lending to a serial arsonist who is just not into Internet?
Go after businesses rather than anonymous posters coming from a proxy server in Romania. Not only you'll have a lot more luck finding violators but more importantly you will find that the targets of the law need it as much as you do.
I would just like to clarify that our judicial system does not believe in "preventive prison" and especially the following statement:
It's preferable to lock up one guy (Joe) for two nights than to let another (Bob) out that beats the wife to a lifeless pulp.
The idea is that it's preferable to prevent abuse of people by the government even if the cost is that unproven abuse of one private citizen by another sometimes can not be prevented.
None of this implies that Bob can not be arrested if there is good evidence to back up his wife's story.
Replace "female" with "white", "male" with "black" and "battering" with "mugging". Do you still think you will be able to have a constructive discussion with your customary assumptions?
If she made it to the shelter, she calls 911 (999/190), the police gets her kids wherever they are, and they go thru the system. For the night, they don't stay with the abuser. She does not call him. Her lawyer/public defendant/the DA gets the abuser arrested, and the judge will see if it is enough a court order for him to be out of the house.
Oh boy. Brasilian police abandons even the thinest pretense of due process and gender equality that we sometimes still get in US. A woman can just give herself a minor bruise, show up in the shelter and get her husband arrested and his children and house taken away from him by the police?
IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES should abuser and abused exchange words directly.
No right to confront one's accuser either? Niiice!
High accuracy is required for encoding music and video, though.
Oh really? You would wait 7 hours to compress your vacation movie from HD camcorder into a torrent to share with friends when you can do that in one hour with a bad pixel every minute or so? I would say every application which needs more CPU power than current technology can provide operates on huge amounts of input and output data and as such can live with a few isolated errors.
I bet you will sing a different tune when you can get 26 hours of charge from your video player in exchange for a bad pixel every minute or so. And, while I don't see banks suffering from expensive/power inefficient CPUs quite as much as from subprime mortgages, I think an extra cent deposited to your account every month would compensate you for any rounding errors quite nicely if they did need to save money in that area.
Do you focus on the very real needs of individual Americans, with the possible consequence of lengthening the economic troubles -- or do you try to strengthen American companies (possibly at the cost of American jobs in the short term) in order to get the economy back on track, at which point the employment market will improve for everyone?
This questions itself is biased.
Do we focus on deregulation of American companies so that, even though they will lay off millions of americans now and will probably replace most of these with cheaper labor oversees when the economy is back on track? Or do we make sure that, whatever jobs are still there to be done in a recession, americans get a realistic chance to bid on them?
In any case, H1Bs are neutral, if not positive in their effect on the job market. Government mandates prevailing wages are many times what an average american makes. On the other hand, a new immigrant will need to spend more money locally than a long-resident american would - rent/mortgage, new car and furniture, eating out rather than cooking, etc. So even though there will be more competition for programming jobs, there will be many additional chef, car dealer, landlord, etc jobs that would not be there without influx of H1B workers. It's a good bet that some of these businesses will buy american-made software or need IT support, so it is not a given that it would be more difficult to get a tech job after all.
The picture is much bleaker for outsourcing since there is no guarantee that any of the new jobs will be available in US.
Maybe because Americans are still making babies unlike most of the world that uses 220+V? Reducing the voltage by half, having 3 prong outlets with an extra ground and standardizing on outlets with thin slits instead of holes nicely sized for little fingers does wonders for keeping a curious toddler alive. In fact, I see a medium-term future with most home outlets being 12v DC for digital electronics and LED lights. You can lick those with your tongue and just get sour taste (although, as I understand, some extremely unlucky people can get electrocuted even in these cases, so it's a matter of statistical safety rather than actually encouraging people to do that).
The gas it produces still contains all the C-atoms of the original waste
How do you know that? Maybe part of carbon is left in compact solid residue that can be buried, while the produced gas has higher content of hydrogen than the original waste.
Have you ever seen a medical device - a thermometer, a blood sugar meter or a blood pressure monitor - than always returns consistent results. I have seen a diabetic prick her finger twice and get 240 the first time and 110 the second. What makes you trust a single measurement from a device with complicated, unpublished source code that literally analyzes vapors? I think if a policemen collects a breath test, an urine test and a blood test and all show excessive BAC, no judge will demand the source code from all 3 equipment manufacturers.
How about people whose families have trouble paying for health care because their investment tanked? Most people now need money for essentials, not luxuries. So you shouldn't automatically judge them for caring about stock prices. At least Steve Jobs is getting good healthcare, when he chooses to use it instead of trying to cure cancer by drinking herbal tee. The same can not be always said about someone's grandpa with heart disease.
Slashdot Mirror
By all means, don't sign up. Sailors on Christopher Columbus ships probably didn't make enough money to justify the added risks, crappy food and many month of boredom and backbreaking labor. Builders of great cathedrals probably made just a little more money than surfs. None of the actual cosmonauts/astronauts or even Barack Obama or Putin made as much money in their years in power as recent AIG executive bonuses.
For some people, living a meaningful life is priceless. For everyone else, there is a mastercard and our money-centered consumer culture. I don't think one group can really succeed in their goals without another. Just take a pick and don't ridicule others too quickly.
I always think my 20 month old daughter will ask for a jacket if she really feels cold. Now to convince her mom or well-meaning friends and relatives :-)
With BP, Arco and other companies at least acknowledging in TV ads that the current 100% reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable and other solutions, along with simply using less, are a must. Shell is an awfully wealthy company and investing 1% of the money they spend on locating new oil sources would finance an awful lot of school/university projects to come up with financially viable forms of alternative energy. This investment would have more than paid for itself just on PR value.
I have never been particularly loyal to any brand of gas, but I think I will start using the BP station 3 blocks down the road that I drive to get home anyway rather than Shell which is just at the highway exit.
It does not have .NETs simplicity and ease of use.
Oh the irony. Windows.Forms is incomprehensible unless you were developing for MS products since Windows 3.1. A simple thing like a background thread setting enabled state of a button causes a deadlock.
I don't know of any existing products with this functionality.
You must have never tried /usr/games/adventure. Collosial caves were typically closed until 5 pm or so.
How exactly are you planning to receive GPS signals inside a building?
Everyone seems to raise targetted advertising as a privacy concern - I really, really can't see how it could be harmful to me.
While I like using Gmail at work, I don't want all these oriental massage parlor ads to show up in an unrelated Google search done as part of a presentation to a Fortune 500 customer. While there are technical solutions to these problems 1) Nobody really uses them consistently 100% of the time 2) they are not always available to users of proprietary or someone elses' computers, software and services and 3) This doesn't excuse reputable companies, especially ones who claim to do no evil, being so obnoxious by default.
Atheism is merely a classification of religion that is on par with "N/A"
Actually classic Atheism goes much further than "N/A". It is an unquestionable belief that no intelligent powers were involved in our creation, our life has no higher purpose than whatever an individual (or at least a society) feels like doing and our consciousness disappears with death of our brain cells. Many atheists rely on Occam's razor principle to support their belief that anything not covered by today's science doesn't exist. In reality, although, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation of the facts is usually true, there are plenty of examples where the actual explanation is more complex than anyone could have imagined beforehand. One needs to look no further than the theory of relativity or quantum physics.
"N/A" would be more of a person who doesn't give much thought to religious questions. There are more non-religious people than atheists and most people who would identify themselves as Christians are actually non-religious and basically view church as a Sunday cultural event.
As for myself, I believe that, based on what we observe in the rest of the universe, it's extremely unlikely that we are NOT part of some kind of bigger picture - like electrons in an atom, a single cell in a human body or an individual animal in an ecosystem. However I also can not see how any particular person can claim to have the complete answer on what that big picture is.
Well, how about abandon-ware business applications?
I simply don't think VMWare and Parallels have thought this through. Most home MacOSX users who want windows emulation and are savvy enough to set it up have been using computers for at least a decade. Its highly likely that they have a favorite game or app that would influence them to choose the product that supports it. On the other hand, businesses are notorious for not upgrading even apps written when MS-DOS just came out.
It would be much easier to have a general purpose product that can be used with any OS of user's choice than to try to quantify every possible use case.
I (or Google) have a right to take a picture from my property, or any publicly accessible land and post it online. It might help terrorists, but this is the price of living in a free country. Obviously, if there are dozens of terrorist attacks per year, we might declare martial law and the country will not be free anymore, at least until the war is over. But I don't see any justification to live in fear and repression based on a single attack 7 years ago, and when we have successfully toppled the government that sponsored the terrorist plot in question.
Wow, I wasn't aware that the army handles civil matters in US. But as long as it does, I would say your private orifices are in even more danger than in PMITA. Just ask Abu Ghraib detainees.
Both products fail miserably at running anything older than XP. VMWare still wins here, since at least it manages to install and run 98SE successfully, while Parallels install suffers from endless crashes. But even a trivial DX game like "Lose your marbles" results in a blank screen, while it works perfectly fine in VPC for Mac on 5 year old hardware. There are many older applications and games that do not run on XP. Just how hard would it be to emulate an S3 video card and SB16 so that we can run whatever we fill like in the VM?
But how will you know if a firm passed you over because of something you said online? It'd be impossible to enforce.
Well, it's be impossible until one of the employees involved with hiring process brags about that on Facebook, like the first poster just did on slashdot. If not, a modest monetary reward from my lawyers would probably motivate someone to leak an internal e-mail. Facebook/MySpace logs can be subpoenaed to check for access from the company's network block to my personal profile.
But most of all, who would want to risk time in federal penn or at very least the popularity of the octuplet mom? You could also google for photos and reject all the black guys, but why would you want to literally risk your ass for your company? Proving discrimination may be hard, but there will be hell to pay once its confirmed.
Simply has to be taken with a grain of salt!
When I am getting an $600K mortgage from a bank, they have much more at stake than an average employer. And yet, I have never heard of either Google searches being used to screen applicants or information in official credit reports being deliberately falsified by businesses (as opposed to identity theft). This may have started as a requirement of various equal rights laws, but I doubt a single bank would want things to be any other way now. Why risk losing qualified customers on unsubstantiated chit-chat of their high school enemies or lending to a serial arsonist who is just not into Internet?
Go after businesses rather than anonymous posters coming from a proxy server in Romania. Not only you'll have a lot more luck finding violators but more importantly you will find that the targets of the law need it as much as you do.
I would just like to clarify that our judicial system does not believe in "preventive prison" and especially the following statement:
It's preferable to lock up one guy (Joe) for two nights than to let another (Bob) out that beats the wife to a lifeless pulp.
The idea is that it's preferable to prevent abuse of people by the government even if the cost is that unproven abuse of one private citizen by another sometimes can not be prevented.
None of this implies that Bob can not be arrested if there is good evidence to back up his wife's story.
Replace "female" with "white", "male" with "black" and "battering" with "mugging". Do you still think you will be able to have a constructive discussion with your customary assumptions?
If she made it to the shelter, she calls 911 (999/190), the police gets her kids wherever they are, and they go thru the system. For the night, they don't stay with the abuser. She does not call him. Her lawyer/public defendant/the DA gets the abuser arrested, and the judge will see if it is enough a court order for him to be out of the house.
Oh boy. Brasilian police abandons even the thinest pretense of due process and gender equality that we sometimes still get in US. A woman can just give herself a minor bruise, show up in the shelter and get her husband arrested and his children and house taken away from him by the police?
IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES should abuser and abused exchange words directly.
No right to confront one's accuser either? Niiice!
High accuracy is required for encoding music and video, though.
Oh really? You would wait 7 hours to compress your vacation movie from HD camcorder into a torrent to share with friends when you can do that in one hour with a bad pixel every minute or so? I would say every application which needs more CPU power than current technology can provide operates on huge amounts of input and output data and as such can live with a few isolated errors.
I bet you will sing a different tune when you can get 26 hours of charge from your video player in exchange for a bad pixel every minute or so. And, while I don't see banks suffering from expensive/power inefficient CPUs quite as much as from subprime mortgages, I think an extra cent deposited to your account every month would compensate you for any rounding errors quite nicely if they did need to save money in that area.
Do you focus on the very real needs of individual Americans, with the possible consequence of lengthening the economic troubles -- or do you try to strengthen American companies (possibly at the cost of American jobs in the short term) in order to get the economy back on track, at which point the employment market will improve for everyone?
This questions itself is biased.
Do we focus on deregulation of American companies so that, even though they will lay off millions of americans now and will probably replace most of these with cheaper labor oversees when the economy is back on track? Or do we make sure that, whatever jobs are still there to be done in a recession, americans get a realistic chance to bid on them?
In any case, H1Bs are neutral, if not positive in their effect on the job market. Government mandates prevailing wages are many times what an average american makes. On the other hand, a new immigrant will need to spend more money locally than a long-resident american would - rent/mortgage, new car and furniture, eating out rather than cooking, etc. So even though there will be more competition for programming jobs, there will be many additional chef, car dealer, landlord, etc jobs that would not be there without influx of H1B workers. It's a good bet that some of these businesses will buy american-made software or need IT support, so it is not a given that it would be more difficult to get a tech job after all.
The picture is much bleaker for outsourcing since there is no guarantee that any of the new jobs will be available in US.
Maybe because Americans are still making babies unlike most of the world that uses 220+V? Reducing the voltage by half, having 3 prong outlets with an extra ground and standardizing on outlets with thin slits instead of holes nicely sized for little fingers does wonders for keeping a curious toddler alive. In fact, I see a medium-term future with most home outlets being 12v DC for digital electronics and LED lights. You can lick those with your tongue and just get sour taste (although, as I understand, some extremely unlucky people can get electrocuted even in these cases, so it's a matter of statistical safety rather than actually encouraging people to do that).
The gas it produces still contains all the C-atoms of the original waste
How do you know that? Maybe part of carbon is left in compact solid residue that can be buried, while the produced gas has higher content of hydrogen than the original waste.
Have you ever seen a medical device - a thermometer, a blood sugar meter or a blood pressure monitor - than always returns consistent results. I have seen a diabetic prick her finger twice and get 240 the first time and 110 the second. What makes you trust a single measurement from a device with complicated, unpublished source code that literally analyzes vapors? I think if a policemen collects a breath test, an urine test and a blood test and all show excessive BAC, no judge will demand the source code from all 3 equipment manufacturers.
How about people whose families have trouble paying for health care because their investment tanked? Most people now need money for essentials, not luxuries. So you shouldn't automatically judge them for caring about stock prices. At least Steve Jobs is getting good healthcare, when he chooses to use it instead of trying to cure cancer by drinking herbal tee. The same can not be always said about someone's grandpa with heart disease.