> The "ignore and hope it goes away" mentality is why it has been > in development for 16 years and the progress is so slow.
Oh.
I thought that was because there are a grand total of eleven people in the whole world who have more than a passing interest in the project. (This figure is an estimate. It could be off by as much as 20%.)
The other seven billion of us (also an estimate) either like Windows well enough to want to use it, in which case we just use the version that comes pre-installed on every new computer, or else we don't like Windows well enough to want to use it, which sort of implies that we don't really want to use a third-party reimplementation of it either.
The problem is figuring out the syntax for the path to your new directory. It's been a while since I last worked on VMS, but IIRC paths looked something like FOO$BAR[BAZ.QUUX.NEENER]WIBBLE:WOBBLE.DIR;42
Really. Although a directory might not have had the semicolon and version number, since directories, as best I can remember, were not versioned. Even for files you didn't have to specify the version if you just wanted the most recent one, which was frequently the case, especially when editing a file -- not specifying the version would result in a new version being automatically created when you saved your changes (the one feature of VMS that I would really like to have on Linux).
> BeOS hasn't really progressed at all in the past...what? 8 years?
Twelve years, give or take a couple of months
Unless you count updated hardware drivers so that it can actually run on a recently manufactured computer as "progress", that is. Personally, I'd call that "treading water".
BeOS is very interesting, and there are definitely some things we can learn from it. I think anyone involved in OS or especially GUI design should make a point of being familiar with it. (The same is also true of VMS, although that has a somewhat higher learning curve.)
I cannot, however, imagine wanting to actually use it as my primary operating system on a day to day basis at this point. I do not see it as a practically useful system today. Haiku perhaps could have been, if it had gotten started much sooner, like, immediately after it became clear in 1996 that Apple was going to buy NeXT and not BeOS, at which point it was already well understood that Be had either failed to convince OEMs to ship BeOS, either as a dual-boot option or solo or that any OEMs they did convince had become unconvinced due to other pressures. Thus, any intelligent person by the end of 1996 could easily figure out that the company was going to go under. If the Haiku project had been started right then, and if the project had progressed much more rapidly once it got underway, if, for example, Haiku R1 had come out in 1998 and a multi-user-enabled R2 in 2000, Haiku might have carved out a significant niche for itself.
But in 1996, and still in 1998, and even still in 2000 for that matter, most BeOS users were in denial about the company's fate and the possibility that store shelves might soon feature computers with BeOS pre-installed, so Haiku didn't even get started at all until 2001 (around the time the company formally announced that it was selling off all its assets and giving up on any possibility of further development in order to salvage what stock-holder value it could). Even as late as 2005 many BeOS users (the ones who had not yet switched to Linux or Mac OS X) were still in denial about the fate of the BeOS R5 source code base and whether whatever company eventually ended up with those assets might either resurrect the OS or else release it under an open-source license. So it's fair to say that Haiku development was a little slow getting started -- a slowness it could ill afford, given how far behind BeOS development had been already. BeOS had some cool advantages compared to the operating systems of the day, such as Windows 95 or, heaven help us, Mac System 7; but there were also some rather notable things it was missing, even then, things that should have been fixed in a subsequent release -- and presumably would have been, if the company had found enough of a market to continue to pay its operating expenses. Haiku, when it was finally started half a decade later, was even further behind, due to the need to start from scratch and reimplement what had already been done -- and once they eventually finish with that, they will still need to design and implement the things that Be had not yet done when it went under.
As a result of those delays, Haiku is still in no position to be adopted as an operating system for regular day-to-day use any time in the forseeable future. Among other things, it has no provision at all for file ownership, user accounts, or (meaningful) permissions. That was one thing in 1996, but now, in an era when we take for granted that everything has to interact with a hostile internet, and so other systems are no longer limiting themselves to simple owner/group permissions but rather are by necessity moving toward adding more complex and discriminating security systems (ACLs, application-level permissions, non-executable memory, ASLR, etc.), the Haiku developers speak of plain old multi-user capability as a pie-in-the-sky "something everyone would like to have" eventually in the distant-future R2. Aside from the obvious implications in multi-user (e.g., business) environments
If CDE had been open-sourced in early or even mid 1997, then the history of the open-source desktop would indeed be different. In 1998? Maybe. Depending on *when* in 1998 it happened. By the end of 1998, it wouldn't have mattered at all, because both Gnome and KDE were mature, feature complete, clearly superior to CDE, and included in multiple distributions by that point.
Linux users who have been around for more than a couple of years have all seen countless dozens of widget-set themes (for both Qt and GTK) specifically designed to mimic the appearance of CDE. And yes, they're kind of ugly, but sometimes people get nostalgic.
If you compare the CDE look to other GUIs *from the same time period*, it doesn't seem so horrible -- which puts it leagues ahead of Xaw, for example. Xaw was visually horrible by the standards of the day when it was first introduced. I once implemented, in a single weekend, a text-mode widget set in GW-BASIC that looked about a hundred times better than Xaw. (It didn't support using a mouse, though.)
If you're writing down so much that you can't jot it down quickly with pencil and paper and transcribe it (on your computer or whatever) after class in under five minutes, you're cheating yourself out of an education by focusing all your attention on taking notes. Stop that.
Leave your computer and phone and whatnot in the dorm. Pay attention in class. Listen to what the professor is saying. Watch him -- he might even use gestures occasionally. Try to understand the content of the course. Ask questions. Basically, behave as if you're in class to *learn*.
There will occasionally be things you need to take note of, but if you're doing it right your notes for an hour-long class period should fit on one side of a 3x5 card.
Every once in a while you may have a class that is an exception to this. Differential Equations, for instance, might require more note-taking. When this does occur, you'll know. It'll be obvious.
But for most classes, it's better to focus on following what's going on *during* class, rather trying to write it all down to try to sift through later.
Actually, it's the relative *abundance* of coal that makes coal-fired power plants more common than nuclear ones, because they are cheaper to run (especially when you factor in political costs, such as the considerable resources that go into convincing people to allow a nuclear plant to be built and then maintaining the public perception that it is safe, especially when it gets to be twenty years old and there's a harmless but quite visible crack on the exterior surface of the concrete water-cooling tower). If coal and oil were a lot less common, they would cost too much, and nuclear power would be cheaper. But coal and oil are abundant, so burning them is very affordable.
The real problem with solar power is that it's distributed wrong, both spatially and temporally. If you just calculate per-annum how much power is needed and how much we could easily collect with existing solar cells, it looks like a go: there's plenty of power. Problem is, it's in the wrong places at the wrong times.
We *theoretically* have the technology to collect solar energy in New Mexico all day on an August afternoon and use it in Cleveland on a cold February night when the sun hasn't been seen for more than two minutes at a stretch since mid October, but it's not practical in bulk. The batteries that would be needed to meet our entire country's power needs in this way would be the size of Saskatchewan and cost a hundred times the whole world's GDP to build.
It is batteries, at this point, that are the real hold-up for widespread deployment of solar power. The solar cells themselves were the hold-up in the past, but those have gotten a lot better. Now the problem is the batteries. It's not yet really practical to generate power in the daytime and use it after the sun goes down that same night, nevermind about what happens when the sky is overcast for nine months solid.
More efficient ways of transferring power over long distances could somewhat reduce the need for batteries. If we could generate the power in New Mexico and transfer it to Ohio and Michigan with only a 10% loss, for example, then we wouldn't need to worry much about the whole summer/winter thing. That still leaves the day/night issue, though, so we'd need enough batteries to store something like sixteen hours' worth of power at a time.
> don't believe to be women. They don't believe to be men either.
If they don't claim to be women, telling them they that they therefore can't compete in the women's athletic categories at the Olympics shouldn't be a real big problem. This is a category for women only. Are you a woman? No? Well, then, there's your answer.
The problem is finding a sufficiently precise rule to eliminate a few bozos who say they are women but clearly are not, phenotypically speaking. Some kind of hard-and-fast rule is necessary, if you're going to tell people which category they can't be in.
The only other option would be to get rid of the gender-specific categories and let women compete against the men, but a lot of people would scream bloody murder, partly out of a sense that this isn't "fair" to the women, many of whom would not be able to compete at an international level against men, particularly in certain events, and partly because there are some sports that people -- men in particular -- would much prefer to watch women compete in rather than men.
Neither of these objections is really important in the grand scheme of things. Fairness is a red herring: nothing in life is ever fair, and if life ever were truly fair it would either be so boring or so horrific beyond imagination that either way we'd all beg for death. Certainly for most Olympic sports there are going to be a great many people who are physically incapable of competing in any case. As for the other objection, that's not really what the Olympics is about anyhow.
Nonetheless, a lot of people *do* seem to feel that there is real value in women's only competitions, including at the Olympics. In order to have them, it's going to be necessary to tell some people "Sorry, you can't compete in this division." Given that, I don't see what's wrong with telling people that they've got to have neither a Y chromosome nor any external genitalia in order to compete in the women's sports. Sure, it will rule out some people. Wasn't that rather the point?
Of course, you then have to let them compete in the men's division, but I doubt anybody in the developed world is going to seriously object to that at this point. Sixty years ago, yeah, but not now. That's assuming, of course, that they *can* compete in the men's division. There's more of a divide in some sports than others, but it's the very existence of this divide that leads to the popular "it's not fair" argument for maintaining a separate women's division in the first place.
(Perhaps we could also establish a division for people whose IQ is higher than the number of pounds they can lift. Nerd Olympics. Yes, I'm joking about that one. Mostly.)
> should be expanded far beyond patents. Allowing judges to force > the plaintiffs to pay for an unsuccessful suit against the defendants > in all cases would help limit spurious legal cases.
Not just the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs and, failing that (e.g., if the plaintiffs have no money), the lawyers who represented the plaintiffs in the frivolous suit should have to pony up.
95% of all pay-only-if-you-win medical malpractice legislation would cease overnight.
> In my high school, we teach all the way up to Calculus 2, and what > percentage of the population actually uses that kind of mathematics?
Pretty much only those who go on to take higher math in college. That's the *purpose* of Calculus: to get your brain ready for the really interesting (i.e., abstract) math.
Algebra, however, is necessary for pretty much everyone. You need basic algebra to manage your personal finances, design a doghouse for your pet, figure out how much to enlarge the one-inch tattoo design image you got from a book and are photocopying so that it fits in the space on your shoulder, or understand the extremely simple math you see every day e.g. in news stories. Basically, without algebra, you cannot function independently as an adult in our society. Someone would have to look after you all the time and do everything even slightly complicated on your behalf.
Yes, there are a few people who genuinely cannot learn algebra. There are also people who cannot learn to count past five or tie their own shoes or wipe their own noses or cross the street by themselves. Society makes provisions for these people, and these provisions mostly work, as long as such people are few in number.
But if we stop requiring students to take algebra, people who cannot function in adult society will NOT be few in number. They will be the majority, and society will revert to an early-twentieth-century standard wherein less than 20% of the population is capable of any white-collar work beyond answering the phone.
Most high schools don't require calculus, and I think that's okay. People really only need calculus if they're going to take additional math in college. Basic trigonometry is more arguable. Algebra is not arguable: it's just necessary.
Frankly, in this modern era when nobody's ever more than six inches from the nearest computational device, algebra is much MORE necessary than the ability to do multiplication and division with numbers larger than 100. We could chuck long division and four-digit multiplication and mostly not miss them, but we cannot afford to skimp on algebra.
Helpful, yeah, sure. OCR will _help_ you to be extremely motivated to develop a new backup strategy that does not involve paper. That'd be helpful. Also you might gain a much greater appreciation for the few remaining hairs you haven't pulled out of your head yet. Appreciating what you have is good, so that'd be helpful too.
> The sled you place the drive into makes a HUGE difference in recovery. > Avoid usb. I don't care if you insist on windows, install a firewire card.
Firewire? Why the heck would you...
Suppose I forget that and just plug the drive directly into the best drive controller (of the appropriate type for the drive) that I can lay my hands on. What am I missing?
> Accountants? Their backups are paper, and the backup > method is glaring suspiciously at the computer while they use it.
Actually, I know an accountant who glares suspiciously at the boxes of paper she's required by law to save and wonders why it can't just all be kept on the computer.
But yeah, accountants usually have paper backups. Although, recovering data that you need to actually work with from paper would be excruciating if there were very much of it.
However, in comparison to CEOs of multinational corporations, someone who makes a hundred grand a year is, although not technically lower class as such, close enough as makes no difference.
What the other poster said is an important idea to be aware of, particularly in American politics, because politicians (particularly ones from a certain political party I do not feel it necessary to name) love to increase their popularity and garner votes by publicly supporting higher income tax rates for the excruciatingly rich.
To understand how empty this is, you have to realize that people with that level of wealth will only ever pay income tax on the merest fraction of the money they make. People who make multiple millions of dollars a year can easily afford to drop fifty thousand of it on a clever accountant (who incidentally can manage their financial affairs in ten hours a week and collect similar fees from several other clients), at which point the tax code starts to look like it is made *entirely* out of loopholes.
Using capital gains instead of salary is just the tip of the iceberg. With a little planning, *most* of the money that you spend does not count as income of any kind, salary or otherwise. Maybe it's a deductible business expense. (Want to take your woman to Paris for a week? Quick, schedule a couple of business lunches...) Maybe what looks to the untrained eye like a huge capital gain is legally a capital loss. (The movie studios have turned this particular trick into an art form. Frankly, they should make a movie about it -- it's much more interesting than most of their subject matter.) Maybe you didn't officially make any money personally because it's all held by a trust fund or holding corporation or some other entity that your accountant conjured up out of paperwork and bailing twine. There are dozens of these tricks, and if one of them is inapplicable for any reason the accountant just reaches for another.
Multimillionaires DO NOT PAY income tax at anything resembling the rates you would naively assume by looking at the tax tables. In the top income brackets, the numbers in the tax tables are unmitigated fiction. The illusion is maintained for political reasons, but raising the official tax rates for the very highest income brackets has basically no effect at all on anyone. You could raise the official tax rate for the over-fifty-million income bracket to nine thousand percent, and it wouldn't matter, because nobody would ever officially legally have enough taxable income to be in that bracket, even if they appear to the non-accountants among us to make over a billion dollars a year.
So the next time a politician talks about taxing the very rich, you can just laugh and ignore him. It's utterly meaningless.
> I think it's much more compelling for psychologists to use to understand large communities
Yeah, okay, sure, that could be useful, potentially, after fifty years of study.
But, on a personal note, I'd be much more immediately interested in the technology if I could easily find out what my own numbers are and how those compare to the collated stats (mean, median, standard deviation, etc).
I realize you may find this shocking, but it turns out the Wikipedia article on England is frequently edited by people from England, of all places. Weird, but true.
I know the official difference, but it's irrelevant. "England" is what practically *everybody* (well, everybody overseas from there) routinely calls the whole country. We've been doing so ever since we were officially part of England.
> Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also part of the UK
Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are part of England.
If we meant the province we'd say "England proper" to clarify, but unless you're actually *in* England there's almost never any reason to refer specifically to England proper. How often do people from England talk specifically about the (American) Midwest or the (American) South? It's like that. We don't very often need a word for just the southeastern portion of your country.
> so calling the UK "England" is like calling the USA "Florida"
It's a lot more like calling the USA "America" or the entire Russian Federation (or, during the cold war, the whole USSR) "Russia". Which everybody does. It's the normal single-word name for the nation and has been for hundreds of years.
> "England" is NOT a short name for "United Kingdom"
Maybe in England it's not, but I can count on my fingers the number of times in my whole life that I've ever heard an American call it "the United Kingdom". We almost always call it England. What *else* would we call it? We've been calling it England ever since way back when we were considered to be part of England ourselves. England is easier to spell than Britian (I made a spelling mistake there on purpose, for effect; then I realized that I'd inadvertently made a second one), and until the internet came along virtually nobody over here had even *heard* of the "United Kingdom".
> All handcuff keys for a certain brand are identical. That is to allow one > officer to handcuff a suspect and any other officer to remove the cuffs.
That's the official marketing copy -- as in, be careful, don't step in that official marketing copy, or your shoes will stink for a week.
In reality, if each set had a distinct key, the officer would simply need to hand the key over to the next guy, along with the prisoner, whenever custody changes. No big deal.
The real reason the keys are all the same is because that allows the keys to be mass produced and allows the locks to be simpler, which results in a significantly cheaper per-unit cost. It probably also allows the cuffs to be physically smaller -- a more complex re-key-able mechanism would take a bit more space.
Cuffs that have a unique key would be somewhat more secure. However, they'd also cost more, and it's arguable whether it would be worth it, given that the handcuff lock is often not the weakest part of the security system for prisoner transport.
For any given model, yes. And yes, that's a rather obvious and fairly serious design flaw, strictly from a security perspective. However, it also allows a pair of cuffs to be cheaper than would otherwise be the case. That's the tradeoff.
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> The "ignore and hope it goes away" mentality is why it has been
> in development for 16 years and the progress is so slow.
Oh.
I thought that was because there are a grand total of eleven people in the whole world who have more than a passing interest in the project. (This figure is an estimate. It could be off by as much as 20%.)
The other seven billion of us (also an estimate) either like Windows well enough to want to use it, in which case we just use the version that comes pre-installed on every new computer, or else we don't like Windows well enough to want to use it, which sort of implies that we don't really want to use a third-party reimplementation of it either.
Believe me, that's not the problem.
The problem is figuring out the syntax for the path to your new directory. It's been a while since I last worked on VMS, but IIRC paths looked something like FOO$BAR[BAZ.QUUX.NEENER]WIBBLE:WOBBLE.DIR;42
Really. Although a directory might not have had the semicolon and version number, since directories, as best I can remember, were not versioned. Even for files you didn't have to specify the version if you just wanted the most recent one, which was frequently the case, especially when editing a file -- not specifying the version would result in a new version being automatically created when you saved your changes (the one feature of VMS that I would really like to have on Linux).
Just don't ask about navigating the directory hierarchy.
> BeOS hasn't really progressed at all in the past...what? 8 years?
Twelve years, give or take a couple of months
Unless you count updated hardware drivers so that it can actually run on a recently manufactured computer as "progress", that is. Personally, I'd call that "treading water".
BeOS is very interesting, and there are definitely some things we can learn from it. I think anyone involved in OS or especially GUI design should make a point of being familiar with it. (The same is also true of VMS, although that has a somewhat higher learning curve.)
I cannot, however, imagine wanting to actually use it as my primary operating system on a day to day basis at this point. I do not see it as a practically useful system today. Haiku perhaps could have been, if it had gotten started much sooner, like, immediately after it became clear in 1996 that Apple was going to buy NeXT and not BeOS, at which point it was already well understood that Be had either failed to convince OEMs to ship BeOS, either as a dual-boot option or solo or that any OEMs they did convince had become unconvinced due to other pressures. Thus, any intelligent person by the end of 1996 could easily figure out that the company was going to go under. If the Haiku project had been started right then, and if the project had progressed much more rapidly once it got underway, if, for example, Haiku R1 had come out in 1998 and a multi-user-enabled R2 in 2000, Haiku might have carved out a significant niche for itself.
But in 1996, and still in 1998, and even still in 2000 for that matter, most BeOS users were in denial about the company's fate and the possibility that store shelves might soon feature computers with BeOS pre-installed, so Haiku didn't even get started at all until 2001 (around the time the company formally announced that it was selling off all its assets and giving up on any possibility of further development in order to salvage what stock-holder value it could). Even as late as 2005 many BeOS users (the ones who had not yet switched to Linux or Mac OS X) were still in denial about the fate of the BeOS R5 source code base and whether whatever company eventually ended up with those assets might either resurrect the OS or else release it under an open-source license. So it's fair to say that Haiku development was a little slow getting started -- a slowness it could ill afford, given how far behind BeOS development had been already. BeOS had some cool advantages compared to the operating systems of the day, such as Windows 95 or, heaven help us, Mac System 7; but there were also some rather notable things it was missing, even then, things that should have been fixed in a subsequent release -- and presumably would have been, if the company had found enough of a market to continue to pay its operating expenses. Haiku, when it was finally started half a decade later, was even further behind, due to the need to start from scratch and reimplement what had already been done -- and once they eventually finish with that, they will still need to design and implement the things that Be had not yet done when it went under.
As a result of those delays, Haiku is still in no position to be adopted as an operating system for regular day-to-day use any time in the forseeable future. Among other things, it has no provision at all for file ownership, user accounts, or (meaningful) permissions. That was one thing in 1996, but now, in an era when we take for granted that everything has to interact with a hostile internet, and so other systems are no longer limiting themselves to simple owner/group permissions but rather are by necessity moving toward adding more complex and discriminating security systems (ACLs, application-level permissions, non-executable memory, ASLR, etc.), the Haiku developers speak of plain old multi-user capability as a pie-in-the-sky "something everyone would like to have" eventually in the distant-future R2. Aside from the obvious implications in multi-user (e.g., business) environments
> The ugliest desktop I have ever used or laid my eyes on.'
Apparently you have not seen Xaw. Compared to that, CDE is drop-dead gorgeous.
> Would have possibly made a difference in 1998
If CDE had been open-sourced in early or even mid 1997, then the history of the open-source desktop would indeed be different. In 1998? Maybe. Depending on *when* in 1998 it happened. By the end of 1998, it wouldn't have mattered at all, because both Gnome and KDE were mature, feature complete, clearly superior to CDE, and included in multiple distributions by that point.
Linux users who have been around for more than a couple of years have all seen countless dozens of widget-set themes (for both Qt and GTK) specifically designed to mimic the appearance of CDE. And yes, they're kind of ugly, but sometimes people get nostalgic.
If you compare the CDE look to other GUIs *from the same time period*, it doesn't seem so horrible -- which puts it leagues ahead of Xaw, for example. Xaw was visually horrible by the standards of the day when it was first introduced. I once implemented, in a single weekend, a text-mode widget set in GW-BASIC that looked about a hundred times better than Xaw. (It didn't support using a mouse, though.)
If you're writing down so much that you can't jot it down quickly with pencil and paper and transcribe it (on your computer or whatever) after class in under five minutes, you're cheating yourself out of an education by focusing all your attention on taking notes. Stop that.
Leave your computer and phone and whatnot in the dorm. Pay attention in class. Listen to what the professor is saying. Watch him -- he might even use gestures occasionally. Try to understand the content of the course. Ask questions. Basically, behave as if you're in class to *learn*.
There will occasionally be things you need to take note of, but if you're doing it right your notes for an hour-long class period should fit on one side of a 3x5 card.
Every once in a while you may have a class that is an exception to this. Differential Equations, for instance, might require more note-taking. When this does occur, you'll know. It'll be obvious.
But for most classes, it's better to focus on following what's going on *during* class, rather trying to write it all down to try to sift through later.
Actually, it's the relative *abundance* of coal that makes coal-fired power plants more common than nuclear ones, because they are cheaper to run (especially when you factor in political costs, such as the considerable resources that go into convincing people to allow a nuclear plant to be built and then maintaining the public perception that it is safe, especially when it gets to be twenty years old and there's a harmless but quite visible crack on the exterior surface of the concrete water-cooling tower). If coal and oil were a lot less common, they would cost too much, and nuclear power would be cheaper. But coal and oil are abundant, so burning them is very affordable.
The real problem with solar power is that it's distributed wrong, both spatially and temporally. If you just calculate per-annum how much power is needed and how much we could easily collect with existing solar cells, it looks like a go: there's plenty of power. Problem is, it's in the wrong places at the wrong times.
We *theoretically* have the technology to collect solar energy in New Mexico all day on an August afternoon and use it in Cleveland on a cold February night when the sun hasn't been seen for more than two minutes at a stretch since mid October, but it's not practical in bulk. The batteries that would be needed to meet our entire country's power needs in this way would be the size of Saskatchewan and cost a hundred times the whole world's GDP to build.
It is batteries, at this point, that are the real hold-up for widespread deployment of solar power. The solar cells themselves were the hold-up in the past, but those have gotten a lot better. Now the problem is the batteries. It's not yet really practical to generate power in the daytime and use it after the sun goes down that same night, nevermind about what happens when the sky is overcast for nine months solid.
More efficient ways of transferring power over long distances could somewhat reduce the need for batteries. If we could generate the power in New Mexico and transfer it to Ohio and Michigan with only a 10% loss, for example, then we wouldn't need to worry much about the whole summer/winter thing. That still leaves the day/night issue, though, so we'd need enough batteries to store something like sixteen hours' worth of power at a time.
> It's about information being exchangeable for energy.
Yes, but if you *know* that the particles are entangled, that in itself is information.
> don't believe to be women. They don't believe to be men either.
If they don't claim to be women, telling them they that they therefore can't compete in the women's athletic categories at the Olympics shouldn't be a real big problem. This is a category for women only. Are you a woman? No? Well, then, there's your answer.
The problem is finding a sufficiently precise rule to eliminate a few bozos who say they are women but clearly are not, phenotypically speaking. Some kind of hard-and-fast rule is necessary, if you're going to tell people which category they can't be in.
The only other option would be to get rid of the gender-specific categories and let women compete against the men, but a lot of people would scream bloody murder, partly out of a sense that this isn't "fair" to the women, many of whom would not be able to compete at an international level against men, particularly in certain events, and partly because there are some sports that people -- men in particular -- would much prefer to watch women compete in rather than men.
Neither of these objections is really important in the grand scheme of things. Fairness is a red herring: nothing in life is ever fair, and if life ever were truly fair it would either be so boring or so horrific beyond imagination that either way we'd all beg for death. Certainly for most Olympic sports there are going to be a great many people who are physically incapable of competing in any case. As for the other objection, that's not really what the Olympics is about anyhow.
Nonetheless, a lot of people *do* seem to feel that there is real value in women's only competitions, including at the Olympics. In order to have them, it's going to be necessary to tell some people "Sorry, you can't compete in this division." Given that, I don't see what's wrong with telling people that they've got to have neither a Y chromosome nor any external genitalia in order to compete in the women's sports. Sure, it will rule out some people. Wasn't that rather the point?
Of course, you then have to let them compete in the men's division, but I doubt anybody in the developed world is going to seriously object to that at this point. Sixty years ago, yeah, but not now. That's assuming, of course, that they *can* compete in the men's division. There's more of a divide in some sports than others, but it's the very existence of this divide that leads to the popular "it's not fair" argument for maintaining a separate women's division in the first place.
(Perhaps we could also establish a division for people whose IQ is higher than the number of pounds they can lift. Nerd Olympics. Yes, I'm joking about that one. Mostly.)
> should be expanded far beyond patents. Allowing judges to force
> the plaintiffs to pay for an unsuccessful suit against the defendants
> in all cases would help limit spurious legal cases.
Not just the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs and, failing that (e.g., if the plaintiffs have no money), the lawyers who represented the plaintiffs in the frivolous suit should have to pony up.
95% of all pay-only-if-you-win medical malpractice legislation would cease overnight.
> In my high school, we teach all the way up to Calculus 2, and what
> percentage of the population actually uses that kind of mathematics?
Pretty much only those who go on to take higher math in college. That's the *purpose* of Calculus: to get your brain ready for the really interesting (i.e., abstract) math.
Algebra, however, is necessary for pretty much everyone. You need basic algebra to manage your personal finances, design a doghouse for your pet, figure out how much to enlarge the one-inch tattoo design image you got from a book and are photocopying so that it fits in the space on your shoulder, or understand the extremely simple math you see every day e.g. in news stories. Basically, without algebra, you cannot function independently as an adult in our society. Someone would have to look after you all the time and do everything even slightly complicated on your behalf.
Yes, there are a few people who genuinely cannot learn algebra. There are also people who cannot learn to count past five or tie their own shoes or wipe their own noses or cross the street by themselves. Society makes provisions for these people, and these provisions mostly work, as long as such people are few in number.
But if we stop requiring students to take algebra, people who cannot function in adult society will NOT be few in number. They will be the majority, and society will revert to an early-twentieth-century standard wherein less than 20% of the population is capable of any white-collar work beyond answering the phone.
Most high schools don't require calculus, and I think that's okay. People really only need calculus if they're going to take additional math in college. Basic trigonometry is more arguable. Algebra is not arguable: it's just necessary.
Frankly, in this modern era when nobody's ever more than six inches from the nearest computational device, algebra is much MORE necessary than the ability to do multiplication and division with numbers larger than 100. We could chuck long division and four-digit multiplication and mostly not miss them, but we cannot afford to skimp on algebra.
Helpful, yeah, sure. OCR will _help_ you to be extremely motivated to develop a new backup strategy that does not involve paper. That'd be helpful. Also you might gain a much greater appreciation for the few remaining hairs you haven't pulled out of your head yet. Appreciating what you have is good, so that'd be helpful too.
> You missed a group:
> 4) The [people who] buy-in at the IPO price [and] really want
> the first-day "pop", because it means they can off-load
How is that different from the other poster's group 2? It sounds like exactly the same group to me.
> The sled you place the drive into makes a HUGE difference in recovery.
> Avoid usb. I don't care if you insist on windows, install a firewire card.
Firewire? Why the heck would you...
Suppose I forget that and just plug the drive directly into the best drive controller (of the appropriate type for the drive) that I can lay my hands on. What am I missing?
The rest of your post made pretty good sense.
> Accountants? Their backups are paper, and the backup
> method is glaring suspiciously at the computer while they use it.
Actually, I know an accountant who glares suspiciously at the boxes of paper she's required by law to save and wonders why it can't just all be kept on the computer.
But yeah, accountants usually have paper backups. Although, recovering data that you need to actually work with from paper would be excruciating if there were very much of it.
However, in comparison to CEOs of multinational corporations, someone who makes a hundred grand a year is, although not technically lower class as such, close enough as makes no difference.
What the other poster said is an important idea to be aware of, particularly in American politics, because politicians (particularly ones from a certain political party I do not feel it necessary to name) love to increase their popularity and garner votes by publicly supporting higher income tax rates for the excruciatingly rich.
To understand how empty this is, you have to realize that people with that level of wealth will only ever pay income tax on the merest fraction of the money they make. People who make multiple millions of dollars a year can easily afford to drop fifty thousand of it on a clever accountant (who incidentally can manage their financial affairs in ten hours a week and collect similar fees from several other clients), at which point the tax code starts to look like it is made *entirely* out of loopholes.
Using capital gains instead of salary is just the tip of the iceberg. With a little planning, *most* of the money that you spend does not count as income of any kind, salary or otherwise. Maybe it's a deductible business expense. (Want to take your woman to Paris for a week? Quick, schedule a couple of business lunches...) Maybe what looks to the untrained eye like a huge capital gain is legally a capital loss. (The movie studios have turned this particular trick into an art form. Frankly, they should make a movie about it -- it's much more interesting than most of their subject matter.) Maybe you didn't officially make any money personally because it's all held by a trust fund or holding corporation or some other entity that your accountant conjured up out of paperwork and bailing twine. There are dozens of these tricks, and if one of them is inapplicable for any reason the accountant just reaches for another.
Multimillionaires DO NOT PAY income tax at anything resembling the rates you would naively assume by looking at the tax tables. In the top income brackets, the numbers in the tax tables are unmitigated fiction. The illusion is maintained for political reasons, but raising the official tax rates for the very highest income brackets has basically no effect at all on anyone. You could raise the official tax rate for the over-fifty-million income bracket to nine thousand percent, and it wouldn't matter, because nobody would ever officially legally have enough taxable income to be in that bracket, even if they appear to the non-accountants among us to make over a billion dollars a year.
So the next time a politician talks about taxing the very rich, you can just laugh and ignore him. It's utterly meaningless.
> I think it's much more compelling for psychologists to use to understand large communities
Yeah, okay, sure, that could be useful, potentially, after fifty years of study.
But, on a personal note, I'd be much more immediately interested in the technology if I could easily find out what my own numbers are and how those compare to the collated stats (mean, median, standard deviation, etc).
I realize you may find this shocking, but it turns out the Wikipedia article on England is frequently edited by people from England, of all places. Weird, but true.
I know the official difference, but it's irrelevant. "England" is what practically *everybody* (well, everybody overseas from there) routinely calls the whole country. We've been doing so ever since we were officially part of England.
> Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also part of the UK
Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are part of England.
If we meant the province we'd say "England proper" to clarify, but unless you're actually *in* England there's almost never any reason to refer specifically to England proper. How often do people from England talk specifically about the (American) Midwest or the (American) South? It's like that. We don't very often need a word for just the southeastern portion of your country.
> so calling the UK "England" is like calling the USA "Florida"
It's a lot more like calling the USA "America" or the entire Russian Federation (or, during the cold war, the whole USSR) "Russia". Which everybody does. It's the normal single-word name for the nation and has been for hundreds of years.
> "England" is NOT a short name for "United Kingdom"
Maybe in England it's not, but I can count on my fingers the number of times in my whole life that I've ever heard an American call it "the United Kingdom". We almost always call it England. What *else* would we call it? We've been calling it England ever since way back when we were considered to be part of England ourselves. England is easier to spell than Britian (I made a spelling mistake there on purpose, for effect; then I realized that I'd inadvertently made a second one), and until the internet came along virtually nobody over here had even *heard* of the "United Kingdom".
> All handcuff keys for a certain brand are identical. That is to allow one
> officer to handcuff a suspect and any other officer to remove the cuffs.
That's the official marketing copy -- as in, be careful, don't step in that official marketing copy, or your shoes will stink for a week.
In reality, if each set had a distinct key, the officer would simply need to hand the key over to the next guy, along with the prisoner, whenever custody changes. No big deal.
The real reason the keys are all the same is because that allows the keys to be mass produced and allows the locks to be simpler, which results in a significantly cheaper per-unit cost. It probably also allows the cuffs to be physically smaller -- a more complex re-key-able mechanism would take a bit more space.
Cuffs that have a unique key would be somewhat more secure. However, they'd also cost more, and it's arguable whether it would be worth it, given that the handcuff lock is often not the weakest part of the security system for prisoner transport.
> are all of their keys identical?
For any given model, yes. And yes, that's a rather obvious and fairly serious design flaw, strictly from a security perspective. However, it also allows a pair of cuffs to be cheaper than would otherwise be the case. That's the tradeoff.