> You know planes aren't held aloft by their engines, right?
Yeah? Shut the engines of your 747 off for a few minutes and see how well you stay aloft.
Planes are held aloft by a difference in pressure over the wing versus under it, but this only works while you're moving forward at a pretty good clip. Your momentum will buy you a little time to act, but time is not on your side. If you don't get at least one engine back on pretty soon, you've got a mandatory meeting scheduled with the surface.
> Granted, it's glowing/burning, so that should help, but how much? 10 fold?
Depends.
If it's really dark out (think: rural area at night), you can make out a standard incandescent handheld flashlight (not in detail, but you can see that there's a light there) from a couple of miles away.
The absolute brightness of the object definitely matters. Betelgeuse for instance appears MUCH brighter than Proxima Centauri, despite being some 160 times as far away.
I don't know exactly how much light a burning chunk of rock emits during atmospheric entry (probably depends somewhat on the composition of the rock), but I'm pretty sure it's a lot more than a handheld flashlight.
> absent the tobacco smoke, nicotine is relatively harmless and comparable to caffeine.
In a word, no.
Well, in terms of *addictiveness* it's comparable to caffeine (which is to say, the withdrawal symptoms make you so cranky, after a few hours your friends and family will either drive you out of the house or physically compel you to go back on the drug).
However, in terms of the medical risks of nicotine, lung issues are about the third or fourth thing down the list. The heart, the brain, the blood vessels, and a number of other minor systems are all damaged and/or at risk.
Caffeine (when taken in excess, as is extremely common in American society) is also not particularly good for you, granted; but it's not nearly as damaging as nicotine.
The other thing is, comparison to caffeine is kind of disingenuous anyway. I know it's socially accepted, for historical reasons, but that's a grandfather-clause effect. If caffeine were a new product, the company that came up with it wouldn't even have the nerve to *apply* for FDA approval. (Well, maybe for oncology, if it killed cancer cells. You can pretty much get FDA approval for chemotherapy use of a mixture of arsenic and heroine if you can show that it kills cancer cells.)
> So yeah, I used to think they're bogus. But now I dont. YMMV.
It's not so much that all chiropracty is inherently totally bogus in all circumstances. There *are* people who claim this, but it's not really a mainstream view.
The issue is more that there's not nearly enough consistency, from one chiropractor to another, in terms of how much training they have, whether they have any idea at all what they're doing, and, importantly, whether they limit themselves to performing legitimate and useful services or go totally off the deep end promoting bizarroid rituals with all manner of obviously unrealistic claims. There's a lot of bogus woo-woo chiropracty out there.
My advice about chiropractors is as follows. First, don't go on a whim just because you have a backache today. Take 500mg of acetaminophen and a hot bath. Most people never need to see a chiropractor, so it shouldn't be the first thing on your to-do list every time you have a muscle twitch.
Second, if you are considering going to a chiropractor, see a licensed medical doctor about your back at least once first, preferably one who specializes in backs. Sure, sometimes the doctor comes up blank and just prescribes some pain meds, which doesn't really solve anything. In that case, you'll probably go to a chiropractor next. But sometimes the doctor will discover that you have a real medical problem, such as a torn disc or whatnot, which needs to be treated. It would be a very rare chiropractor who could deal effectively with something like that, and it's even possible they could inadvertently exacerbate the problem. See a doctor first.
Third, and most important, never EVER go to a chiropractor you know nothing about. Always speak first to other people in the community who have been to chiropractors in the past, so you can get some idea which ones are any good. Be very wary of chiropractors whose fans go in on a regular basis. Try to find one whose patients say things like, "Oh, yeah, when I was having back problems a couple of years ago, I went to [name] a couple of times, and it really helped."
> And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big
The speed of light is only theoretically the speed limit, an absolute upper bound. In practice, nothing with enough mass and complexity to be alive, much less intelligent, can travel at anywhere near c and hope to survive. Interstellar travel is wildly impractical. It makes for interesting fiction, but unless our understanding of physics is TOTALLY messed up (*way* more flawed than we currently think pure Newtonian physics was), there's absolutely zero practical application, ever.
Even interstellar *communication* is wildly impractical. I mean, come on, latency measured in *years*? What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language? And if you don't, how are you going to learn it? Cultural immersion is NOT possible. Back-and-forth dialog isn't even really possible. With no pre-existing linguistic information to help you bridge the gap, *and* no interaction, how would you characterize an alien language? You could spend centuries analyzing a single hour's worth of message and get nowhere. It'd be like trying to read the Voynich manuscript, only much worse (because the Voynich manuscript was written by a *human*, and furthermore by a human who was obviously familiar with a number of popular human writing conventions that we understand; an alien message wouldn't be so comprehensible). You almost certainly wouldn't be able to figure out for sure if the signals you were getting were language and represented actual meaning or not.
If there were any *intelligent* aliens, they would eventually figure this out and give up on the idea.
> Writing is an art and a skill that has to be developed for clarity
So is speaking, and while nearly everyone takes at least a couple of years of writing classes in school, many people get through high school and sometimes even college without a single hour of training for speaking. And it shows. You ask someone to face-to-face to explain an issue to you, and out of their mouth pours stuff like "So okay, so you know like the thing I was saying like the other day, right? Okay, so umm here's the thing. Okay. You know how we were umm thinking about moving in like a new direction with that, right? Okay, so umm what I was thinking was, okay, what we could do is, umm, take that and go with it. Okay, so, like, what do you think?"
And yes, there *are* also people who do that in writing. Some of them are on Slashdot even. But they are in the minority. Face-to-face, speaking, at least half the population talks like that. People do it so much, you don't even notice it most of the time, because your brain has learned to filter it out. Nonetheless, it *does* make communicating anything take longer. And while the speaker is figuring out what he actually wants to say, the listener is sitting there nodding politely, instead of working on something else.
> Also, IM is different from email in that it is much easier > to have a back-and-forth like in a spoken conversation.
That's only because most people these days use absolutely wretched email software.
The thing about email is, you *can* let it sit and wait until you get around to checking it, but you don't *have* to do things that way all the time. If you happen to be on at the same time as someone else, you certainly can (with decent software) have a back-and-forth that's faster than any IM service I've ever seen. When I was in college we used to have email conversations back-and-forth sometimes even when we were in the same computer lab together, because it created a record, let both people talk at once, and didn't disturb the other people in the room.
> As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed.
Oh, absolutely. Where I work, we once went five months between meetings (the boss was busy...), and it was clearly FAR too long. When we finally had a meeting again, it went on for over two and a half hours, because of all the things we needed to cover, and we still didn't cover everything. We had another long meeting the next month, just trying to catch up.
These days we try to have a meeting every month if possible, or at least not miss two months in a row.
So if your meetings are running long because you have too many things to cover, it's a sign you could maybe do with having meetings a little more often.
> workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have > at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if > it's just a weekly status meeting.
Umm, if you have no communication with your boss except at meetings, your boss clearly isn't doing his job right. That's all I have to say about that.
> 30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive
I should say so. How on earth would you ever get any work done?
> but 2 hours is, in most cases (especially for management), too little.
I suppose it depends on what you're doing, but if we had to sit through two hours of meetings every week where I work, it would be a complete waste of time *and* would drive us all out of our minds.
> The key is balance and making sure the meetings you > schedule are effective and serve a definite purpose.
Agreed. If you find that more than about a third of the time in your meetings is basically unproductive for most of the people in the room, you're having too many of the darned things.
> invitee lists for individual meetings should only include essential personnel.
Depends on the purpose of the meeting. Sometimes you need to get everyone in your group together. We have monthly meetings for everyone on staff, but admittedly we're small. We fit around a single table and can all see one another's faces. I guess in a larger organization this would be a department meeting or a team meeting or something, depending on how you're organized.
> if you schedule it people tend to try to fill that time, > even when they don't have anything of real substance to add.
If you find this happening, you're having too many meetings.
> You know all those websites created in Flash, with Flash menus > and Flash fonts, etc? You know, the ones with something called > ActionScript going on deep down where you interact with the website.
No, actually, I don't know them. It's been years since I saw a use of Flash that wasn't either Yet Another YouTube Clone, or a chintzy game along the lines of Farmville or Zuma.
People who play Farmville and so forth are, as a rule, either several decades too old to be part of the target market for the iPad, or several years too young to have their own computing device (other than a phone; even preschool kids are running around with their own phones). Young people who are old enough to have their own computing device mostly use installed games that don't require Flash, or consoles, or else they don't play computer games because they're too busy updating their MySpace relationship status.
As far as the iPad is concerned, that leaves YouTube and things like it.
(Not that I think RipCode is particularly relevant. If it's not installed out of the box, people are going to year that "YouTube doesn't work on the iPad", and either they'll care about that or they won't. If YouTube is a big deal to them, they won't buy the device, and if it's not, then they won't need RipCode.)
Actually, we solved that back in the nineties when we secretly rewrote about a quarter of the world's software in Perl and never told anyone. So now everybody's been using software for years that requires Perl, and they never even realized. Think of it as security through surreptitious ubiquity.
Actually, I hate to break it to you, but Data dies in the last Star Trek movie. Gets blown up with the Reman warbird. He'd transferred his memories to B4 before it happened, though, so theoretically something of him can be salvaged.
> lest a consumer figures that they're paying 10% for the movies and 90% for the drive
Wait, the whole thing is $100, right? How can only 10% be for the movies? Where are you getting these hard drives that cost ninety bucks a pop? Where I come from, they're more like sixty. I'd have figured Paramount was trying to value their lame movie collection at 40% of the price, which it's not worth, and I'd buy a different hard drive and tell them where to stick their movies. We already have all the Star Trek movies we care about (everything up through Nemesis; reboots categorically don't interest me, as I consider them non-canon) on VHS.
Then why is it Germany that requires phones to be registered, and the US that does not require this? Do you think it's because there's nobody in the US government that would kind of like to be able to track people, or that it hasn't occurred to any of them that phones could be used?
I'm telling you, anybody proposing a law like that here would have his political career buried under a metric trainload of opposition, largely to the effect of "Ack! 1984! Commies! Nazis! They're going to make us all wear 666 on our hands and foreheads!" That's what happened to the idiots who suggested national ID cards (and I call them idiots because, being from here, they should have *known* what the reaction would be).
Do you realize how long it took the US to accept social security numbers that uniquely identify us for tax purposes? The program got underway in 1936, and having a SSN wasn't mandatory for adults until 1986. (It's still only mandatory for children if you want to claim them as dependents to reduce the tax you pay.) That's fifty years, for a number that basically just lets the IRS keep straight which John Miller is which, and it was VERY controversial, and there are still people who are exempt from it entirely.
If you think it would be easy to pass "all phones must be registered" legislation in the US, you don't understand American culture.
It seemed obvious, even to someone who was previously unaware of that particular German law. It just sounds like the kind of thing Germany would do, and its citizens would put up with.
It's also the kind of legislation that would never fly here, first because voting for something like that could terminate a lawmaker's career, fast; second because the phone companies and privacy groups would both lobby against it, but nobody with those kinds of resources would lobby in favor; third, because the courts would never let such a law stand even if it were passed in the legislature; and fourth because law enforcement in most jurisdictions would generally ignore it, for the simple reason that they have other things to do with their time (like give out speeding tickets). Tracking down people who are using unregistered phones? Not high on the priority list. The phone companies would NEVER agree to shut down the unregistered phones while they still constituted such a high percentage (26% in Mexico; the percentage would surely be higher than that here), because a double-digit-percentage drop in usage would be far more costly to them than any fine the government could possibly levy against them and make stick.
Technically, blue cheese isn't rotten as such. It's moldy. Limburger is rotten.
However, the distinction between "rotten" and "moldy" is lost on most Americans. And frankly, although I understand the distinction, I'm not sure I can say which is more distasteful. Neither is appetizing.
I like a fair variety of cheeses. Off the top of my head I like cheddar (either mild or sharp), colby, longhorn, provolone, monterrey jack (including pepperjack), brick, motzarella, grated parmesan or romano, muenster, white American, and even some yellow American (but NOT the processed kind that comes in individually wrapped slices; that stuff just tastes fake, I'm sorry). I can even put up with a little Velveeta if it's baked into something that also has other cheeses in it (like cheddar for instance).
But for all the variety, these cheeses that I like all have something in common: the culture is run to the point where the cheese is finished, and then it's halted (usually by heating), and any further steps are taken that are needed (such as pressing or draining) to complete the process. Only after this is the finished cheese shipped to the store, where you buy it, and it's NOT actively going bad. You don't find yourself saying things like, "Get the cheese to sickbay. The doctor should examine it immediately."
Ah, well. People from some cultures (e.g., Korea) have been known to opine that all cheese is spoiled and nasty and that nobody in their right mind would want to eat it on purpose. So I guess that makes my position on cheese a moderate, centrist position, eh?
In the first place it wouldn't be economic in the developed world to pay someone to manually pick all the meat off the bones piece by piece.
Additionally, many Americans these days would also consider it unsanitary because oh, no, someone might have *touched* the meat, and it might have been up to five minutes since their last mandated use of hand sanitizer, and ewwww, gross, food isn't supposed to be *touched*. (This attitude is especially prevalent among people who mostly eat processed foods. People who eat a lot of home-cooked food are much less squeamish about such things, but those people aren't the main market for chicken nuggets.) If word got out that the meat were picked off the bones by hand, there could be a negative impact on sales. It's not worth the risk, especially when mechanical reclamation is so much cheaper anyway.
In order to confiscate someone's geek card for a Friends reference, you'd have to first recognize it *as* a Friends reference, and say so. That's all well and good if they used the word "Friends" in their post, but otherwise it puts you in danger of losing your own card.
> they're not fond of Root Beer. They say it tastes > "like the dentists office" whatever that means
I bet I can guess.
Flouride, in the kinds of concentrations that are needed to make an effective twice-a-year fluoride treatment, such as the one a dentist might give you as a child, has a fairly strong taste, which is widely considered unpleasant. In an attempt to make it more palatable, it is often "covered up" with strong food-treat flavors. The most popular flavor for this is a flavor called "bubble gum", but root beer is another one that sometimes gets used, and there are a couple of others as well. I think "grape" (like a cheap purple popsicle, not the flavor of actual grapes) might be another.
Note that the bubble-gum fluoride treatments don't taste all that much like bubble gum, and the root beer ones don't taste all that much like root beer, and so on. The fluoride taste is unmistakably still present in all of them. But there *is* some resemblance to the nominal flavor, perhaps enough that, if you'd had the fluoride treatments repeatedly and learned to hate them before encountering bubble gum or root beer for the first time, you might have a negative reaction.
American kids, of course, have all had bubble gum and root beer many times before they ever have the fluoride treatments, so they don't make the backwards association.
> And I really don't want to know what parts of > the chicken go into delicious chicken nuggets.
It's probably not as bad as you might think.
It's not the breast meat, obviously, because there's too much market for that as chicken breasts. That's the most commercially valuable portion (probably mostly because of the way it's one great big piece with no bones and usually not too much fat). About 70% of the chicken meat that's sold as whole pieces, at least around here, is breast meat, even though it's about 20% of the meat on the chicken. The remainder of many of those chickens is left over, so it goes into processed chicken.
Most of the rest of the chicken meat that's sold separately as whole pieces is drumsticks, sometimes with thighs attached, sometimes not. And lately restaurants have been selling a lot of Buffalo wings.
But the other edible meat parts are not so prized for sale as separate pieces, so they mostly end up in processed chicken, including nuggets. So you're looking at the back, as much of the neck meat as they can easily get off the bones, a few of the thighs and legs,... basically, it's meat. Not the highly-prized breast meat, but still meat.
The worse thing about processed chicken is the fact that it's usually breaded and deep fried.
> But hey, we eat haggis, lutefisk, scrapple, prarie oyster, > head cheese, rotting cheese. We're up there.
Who is "we", exactly? I take it you're from Scotland (haggis), Scandinavia (lutefisk), *and* France (rotting cheese)? And where on earth do a significant percentage of the population eat head cheese or scrapple, to say nothing of "prairie oysters"? Nowhere, to my knowledge.
Speaking as a Midwesterner, the weirdest thing "we" eat (and it should be noted that I personally don't) is probably ranch dressing (a condiment made from thickened seasoned buttermilk, commonly eaten on lettuce-based salads; about a quarter of the population will voluntarily eat the stuff).
People from other parts of the country actually make fun of us for how tame our cuisine is. The standard joke is, in Ohio there are only three spices: salt, cinnamon, and ketchup. (This is an exaggeration, of course. We also put tiny amounts of ground cloves, nutmeg, or ginger in certain kinds of baked goods, and a few people even put black pepper on their food.)
> i swear that culutre would eat anything, they make fish ice cream
Yeah? Less than two days ago my sister was talking about how she wanted to try the chocolate-covered bacon recipe she saw in a Taste of Home magazine. Chocolate-covered bacon, no fooling. My dad said hey, if you're going to do that, why not take the idea to its logical conclusion and make bacon s'mores?
Every country has some weird cuisine.
Not that I'm volunteering to eat sushi. I like my fish cooked, thank you very much.
> I don't own a Toyota but if I did I wouldn't be afraid to drive it.
You should be. Driving a car on the public roads is dangerous business.
Yeah, I know you really meant "more afraid to drive it than any other vehicle". But I think it's important to remember how dangerous cars are. They're so convenient, people drive them all the time, and then they get complacent about the hazard and start doing dumb stuff, like fiddling with a phone and bopping in time to the music on the radio and looking at the billboards, instead of paying attention to what's going on on the road. Would you do that stuff while cleaning out a six-hundred-degree pizza oven? No? Cars are much more dangerous.
Why not just officially label them "developing planets" and have done? Then people who don't care about being politically correct can go right on calling them "third world planets".
Slashdot Mirror
> You know planes aren't held aloft by their engines, right?
Yeah? Shut the engines of your 747 off for a few minutes and see how well you stay aloft.
Planes are held aloft by a difference in pressure over the wing versus under it, but this only works while you're moving forward at a pretty good clip. Your momentum will buy you a little time to act, but time is not on your side. If you don't get at least one engine back on pretty soon, you've got a mandatory meeting scheduled with the surface.
> Granted, it's glowing/burning, so that should help, but how much? 10 fold?
Depends.
If it's really dark out (think: rural area at night), you can make out a standard incandescent handheld flashlight (not in detail, but you can see that there's a light there) from a couple of miles away.
The absolute brightness of the object definitely matters. Betelgeuse for instance appears MUCH brighter than Proxima Centauri, despite being some 160 times as far away.
I don't know exactly how much light a burning chunk of rock emits during atmospheric entry (probably depends somewhat on the composition of the rock), but I'm pretty sure it's a lot more than a handheld flashlight.
> absent the tobacco smoke, nicotine is relatively harmless and comparable to caffeine.
In a word, no.
Well, in terms of *addictiveness* it's comparable to caffeine (which is to say, the withdrawal symptoms make you so cranky, after a few hours your friends and family will either drive you out of the house or physically compel you to go back on the drug).
However, in terms of the medical risks of nicotine, lung issues are about the third or fourth thing down the list. The heart, the brain, the blood vessels, and a number of other minor systems are all damaged and/or at risk.
Caffeine (when taken in excess, as is extremely common in American society) is also not particularly good for you, granted; but it's not nearly as damaging as nicotine.
The other thing is, comparison to caffeine is kind of disingenuous anyway. I know it's socially accepted, for historical reasons, but that's a grandfather-clause effect. If caffeine were a new product, the company that came up with it wouldn't even have the nerve to *apply* for FDA approval. (Well, maybe for oncology, if it killed cancer cells. You can pretty much get FDA approval for chemotherapy use of a mixture of arsenic and heroine if you can show that it kills cancer cells.)
> So yeah, I used to think they're bogus. But now I dont. YMMV.
It's not so much that all chiropracty is inherently totally bogus in all circumstances. There *are* people who claim this, but it's not really a mainstream view.
The issue is more that there's not nearly enough consistency, from one chiropractor to another, in terms of how much training they have, whether they have any idea at all what they're doing, and, importantly, whether they limit themselves to performing legitimate and useful services or go totally off the deep end promoting bizarroid rituals with all manner of obviously unrealistic claims. There's a lot of bogus woo-woo chiropracty out there.
My advice about chiropractors is as follows. First, don't go on a whim just because you have a backache today. Take 500mg of acetaminophen and a hot bath. Most people never need to see a chiropractor, so it shouldn't be the first thing on your to-do list every time you have a muscle twitch.
Second, if you are considering going to a chiropractor, see a licensed medical doctor about your back at least once first, preferably one who specializes in backs. Sure, sometimes the doctor comes up blank and just prescribes some pain meds, which doesn't really solve anything. In that case, you'll probably go to a chiropractor next. But sometimes the doctor will discover that you have a real medical problem, such as a torn disc or whatnot, which needs to be treated. It would be a very rare chiropractor who could deal effectively with something like that, and it's even possible they could inadvertently exacerbate the problem. See a doctor first.
Third, and most important, never EVER go to a chiropractor you know nothing about. Always speak first to other people in the community who have been to chiropractors in the past, so you can get some idea which ones are any good. Be very wary of chiropractors whose fans go in on a regular basis. Try to find one whose patients say things like, "Oh, yeah, when I was having back problems a couple of years ago, I went to [name] a couple of times, and it really helped."
> Except YouTube does work on the iPad
Oh. The (RipCode) article summary implied otherwise.
If YouTube already works, what's RipCode for? What problem is it solving? I'm missing something.
> And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big
The speed of light is only theoretically the speed limit, an absolute upper bound. In practice, nothing with enough mass and complexity to be alive, much less intelligent, can travel at anywhere near c and hope to survive. Interstellar travel is wildly impractical. It makes for interesting fiction, but unless our understanding of physics is TOTALLY messed up (*way* more flawed than we currently think pure Newtonian physics was), there's absolutely zero practical application, ever.
Even interstellar *communication* is wildly impractical. I mean, come on, latency measured in *years*? What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language? And if you don't, how are you going to learn it? Cultural immersion is NOT possible. Back-and-forth dialog isn't even really possible. With no pre-existing linguistic information to help you bridge the gap, *and* no interaction, how would you characterize an alien language? You could spend centuries analyzing a single hour's worth of message and get nowhere. It'd be like trying to read the Voynich manuscript, only much worse (because the Voynich manuscript was written by a *human*, and furthermore by a human who was obviously familiar with a number of popular human writing conventions that we understand; an alien message wouldn't be so comprehensible). You almost certainly wouldn't be able to figure out for sure if the signals you were getting were language and represented actual meaning or not.
If there were any *intelligent* aliens, they would eventually figure this out and give up on the idea.
> Writing is an art and a skill that has to be developed for clarity
So is speaking, and while nearly everyone takes at least a couple of years of writing classes in school, many people get through high school and sometimes even college without a single hour of training for speaking. And it shows. You ask someone to face-to-face to explain an issue to you, and out of their mouth pours stuff like "So okay, so you know like the thing I was saying like the other day, right? Okay, so umm here's the thing. Okay. You know how we were umm thinking about moving in like a new direction with that, right? Okay, so umm what I was thinking was, okay, what we could do is, umm, take that and go with it. Okay, so, like, what do you think?"
And yes, there *are* also people who do that in writing. Some of them are on Slashdot even. But they are in the minority. Face-to-face, speaking, at least half the population talks like that. People do it so much, you don't even notice it most of the time, because your brain has learned to filter it out. Nonetheless, it *does* make communicating anything take longer. And while the speaker is figuring out what he actually wants to say, the listener is sitting there nodding politely, instead of working on something else.
> Also, IM is different from email in that it is much easier
> to have a back-and-forth like in a spoken conversation.
That's only because most people these days use absolutely wretched email software.
The thing about email is, you *can* let it sit and wait until you get around to checking it, but you don't *have* to do things that way all the time. If you happen to be on at the same time as someone else, you certainly can (with decent software) have a back-and-forth that's faster than any IM service I've ever seen. When I was in college we used to have email conversations back-and-forth sometimes even when we were in the same computer lab together, because it created a record, let both people talk at once, and didn't disturb the other people in the room.
> As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed.
Oh, absolutely. Where I work, we once went five months between meetings (the boss was busy...), and it was clearly FAR too long. When we finally had a meeting again, it went on for over two and a half hours, because of all the things we needed to cover, and we still didn't cover everything. We had another long meeting the next month, just trying to catch up.
These days we try to have a meeting every month if possible, or at least not miss two months in a row.
So if your meetings are running long because you have too many things to cover, it's a sign you could maybe do with having meetings a little more often.
> workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have
> at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if
> it's just a weekly status meeting.
Umm, if you have no communication with your boss except at meetings, your boss clearly isn't doing his job right. That's all I have to say about that.
> 30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive
I should say so. How on earth would you ever get any work done?
> but 2 hours is, in most cases (especially for management), too little.
I suppose it depends on what you're doing, but if we had to sit through two hours of meetings every week where I work, it would be a complete waste of time *and* would drive us all out of our minds.
> The key is balance and making sure the meetings you
> schedule are effective and serve a definite purpose.
Agreed. If you find that more than about a third of the time in your meetings is basically unproductive for most of the people in the room, you're having too many of the darned things.
> invitee lists for individual meetings should only include essential personnel.
Depends on the purpose of the meeting. Sometimes you need to get everyone in your group together. We have monthly meetings for everyone on staff, but admittedly we're small. We fit around a single table and can all see one another's faces. I guess in a larger organization this would be a department meeting or a team meeting or something, depending on how you're organized.
> if you schedule it people tend to try to fill that time,
> even when they don't have anything of real substance to add.
If you find this happening, you're having too many meetings.
> You know all those websites created in Flash, with Flash menus
> and Flash fonts, etc? You know, the ones with something called
> ActionScript going on deep down where you interact with the website.
No, actually, I don't know them. It's been years since I saw a use of Flash that wasn't either Yet Another YouTube Clone, or a chintzy game along the lines of Farmville or Zuma.
People who play Farmville and so forth are, as a rule, either several decades too old to be part of the target market for the iPad, or several years too young to have their own computing device (other than a phone; even preschool kids are running around with their own phones). Young people who are old enough to have their own computing device mostly use installed games that don't require Flash, or consoles, or else they don't play computer games because they're too busy updating their MySpace relationship status.
As far as the iPad is concerned, that leaves YouTube and things like it.
(Not that I think RipCode is particularly relevant. If it's not installed out of the box, people are going to year that "YouTube doesn't work on the iPad", and either they'll care about that or they won't. If YouTube is a big deal to them, they won't buy the device, and if it's not, then they won't need RipCode.)
> since Greek and Latin aren't valid Perl
Well, there is Lingua::Romana::Perligata. Predictably, we have Damian to blame for that.
Actually, we solved that back in the nineties when we secretly rewrote about a quarter of the world's software in Perl and never told anyone. So now everybody's been using software for years that requires Perl, and they never even realized. Think of it as security through surreptitious ubiquity.
Actually, I hate to break it to you, but Data dies in the last Star Trek movie. Gets blown up with the Reman warbird. He'd transferred his memories to B4 before it happened, though, so theoretically something of him can be salvaged.
> lest a consumer figures that they're paying 10% for the movies and 90% for the drive
Wait, the whole thing is $100, right? How can only 10% be for the movies? Where are you getting these hard drives that cost ninety bucks a pop? Where I come from, they're more like sixty. I'd have figured Paramount was trying to value their lame movie collection at 40% of the price, which it's not worth, and I'd buy a different hard drive and tell them where to stick their movies. We already have all the Star Trek movies we care about (everything up through Nemesis; reboots categorically don't interest me, as I consider them non-canon) on VHS.
Then why is it Germany that requires phones to be registered, and the US that does not require this? Do you think it's because there's nobody in the US government that would kind of like to be able to track people, or that it hasn't occurred to any of them that phones could be used?
I'm telling you, anybody proposing a law like that here would have his political career buried under a metric trainload of opposition, largely to the effect of "Ack! 1984! Commies! Nazis! They're going to make us all wear 666 on our hands and foreheads!" That's what happened to the idiots who suggested national ID cards (and I call them idiots because, being from here, they should have *known* what the reaction would be).
Do you realize how long it took the US to accept social security numbers that uniquely identify us for tax purposes? The program got underway in 1936, and having a SSN wasn't mandatory for adults until 1986. (It's still only mandatory for children if you want to claim them as dependents to reduce the tax you pay.) That's fifty years, for a number that basically just lets the IRS keep straight which John Miller is which, and it was VERY controversial, and there are still people who are exempt from it entirely.
If you think it would be easy to pass "all phones must be registered" legislation in the US, you don't understand American culture.
> You are right in localizing me.
It seemed obvious, even to someone who was previously unaware of that particular German law. It just sounds like the kind of thing Germany would do, and its citizens would put up with.
It's also the kind of legislation that would never fly here, first because voting for something like that could terminate a lawmaker's career, fast; second because the phone companies and privacy groups would both lobby against it, but nobody with those kinds of resources would lobby in favor; third, because the courts would never let such a law stand even if it were passed in the legislature; and fourth because law enforcement in most jurisdictions would generally ignore it, for the simple reason that they have other things to do with their time (like give out speeding tickets). Tracking down people who are using unregistered phones? Not high on the priority list. The phone companies would NEVER agree to shut down the unregistered phones while they still constituted such a high percentage (26% in Mexico; the percentage would surely be higher than that here), because a double-digit-percentage drop in usage would be far more costly to them than any fine the government could possibly levy against them and make stick.
> What exactly is "rotten" about blue cheese?
Technically, blue cheese isn't rotten as such. It's moldy. Limburger is rotten.
However, the distinction between "rotten" and "moldy" is lost on most Americans. And frankly, although I understand the distinction, I'm not sure I can say which is more distasteful. Neither is appetizing.
I like a fair variety of cheeses. Off the top of my head I like cheddar (either mild or sharp), colby, longhorn, provolone, monterrey jack (including pepperjack), brick, motzarella, grated parmesan or romano, muenster, white American, and even some yellow American (but NOT the processed kind that comes in individually wrapped slices; that stuff just tastes fake, I'm sorry). I can even put up with a little Velveeta if it's baked into something that also has other cheeses in it (like cheddar for instance).
But for all the variety, these cheeses that I like all have something in common: the culture is run to the point where the cheese is finished, and then it's halted (usually by heating), and any further steps are taken that are needed (such as pressing or draining) to complete the process. Only after this is the finished cheese shipped to the store, where you buy it, and it's NOT actively going bad. You don't find yourself saying things like, "Get the cheese to sickbay. The doctor should examine it immediately."
Ah, well. People from some cultures (e.g., Korea) have been known to opine that all cheese is spoiled and nasty and that nobody in their right mind would want to eat it on purpose. So I guess that makes my position on cheese a moderate, centrist position, eh?
> It's usually mechanically-reclaimed meat
Well, yes, obviously.
In the first place it wouldn't be economic in the developed world to pay someone to manually pick all the meat off the bones piece by piece.
Additionally, many Americans these days would also consider it unsanitary because oh, no, someone might have *touched* the meat, and it might have been up to five minutes since their last mandated use of hand sanitizer, and ewwww, gross, food isn't supposed to be *touched*. (This attitude is especially prevalent among people who mostly eat processed foods. People who eat a lot of home-cooked food are much less squeamish about such things, but those people aren't the main market for chicken nuggets.) If word got out that the meat were picked off the bones by hand, there could be a negative impact on sales. It's not worth the risk, especially when mechanical reclamation is so much cheaper anyway.
In order to confiscate someone's geek card for a Friends reference, you'd have to first recognize it *as* a Friends reference, and say so. That's all well and good if they used the word "Friends" in their post, but otherwise it puts you in danger of losing your own card.
> they're not fond of Root Beer. They say it tastes
> "like the dentists office" whatever that means
I bet I can guess.
Flouride, in the kinds of concentrations that are needed to make an effective twice-a-year fluoride treatment, such as the one a dentist might give you as a child, has a fairly strong taste, which is widely considered unpleasant. In an attempt to make it more palatable, it is often "covered up" with strong food-treat flavors. The most popular flavor for this is a flavor called "bubble gum", but root beer is another one that sometimes gets used, and there are a couple of others as well. I think "grape" (like a cheap purple popsicle, not the flavor of actual grapes) might be another.
Note that the bubble-gum fluoride treatments don't taste all that much like bubble gum, and the root beer ones don't taste all that much like root beer, and so on. The fluoride taste is unmistakably still present in all of them. But there *is* some resemblance to the nominal flavor, perhaps enough that, if you'd had the fluoride treatments repeatedly and learned to hate them before encountering bubble gum or root beer for the first time, you might have a negative reaction.
American kids, of course, have all had bubble gum and root beer many times before they ever have the fluoride treatments, so they don't make the backwards association.
> And I really don't want to know what parts of
... basically, it's meat. Not the highly-prized breast meat, but still meat.
> the chicken go into delicious chicken nuggets.
It's probably not as bad as you might think.
It's not the breast meat, obviously, because there's too much market for that as chicken breasts. That's the most commercially valuable portion (probably mostly because of the way it's one great big piece with no bones and usually not too much fat). About 70% of the chicken meat that's sold as whole pieces, at least around here, is breast meat, even though it's about 20% of the meat on the chicken. The remainder of many of those chickens is left over, so it goes into processed chicken.
Most of the rest of the chicken meat that's sold separately as whole pieces is drumsticks, sometimes with thighs attached, sometimes not. And lately restaurants have been selling a lot of Buffalo wings.
But the other edible meat parts are not so prized for sale as separate pieces, so they mostly end up in processed chicken, including nuggets. So you're looking at the back, as much of the neck meat as they can easily get off the bones, a few of the thighs and legs,
The worse thing about processed chicken is the fact that it's usually breaded and deep fried.
> But hey, we eat haggis, lutefisk, scrapple, prarie oyster,
> head cheese, rotting cheese. We're up there.
Who is "we", exactly? I take it you're from Scotland (haggis), Scandinavia (lutefisk), *and* France (rotting cheese)? And where on earth do a significant percentage of the population eat head cheese or scrapple, to say nothing of "prairie oysters"? Nowhere, to my knowledge.
Speaking as a Midwesterner, the weirdest thing "we" eat (and it should be noted that I personally don't) is probably ranch dressing (a condiment made from thickened seasoned buttermilk, commonly eaten on lettuce-based salads; about a quarter of the population will voluntarily eat the stuff).
People from other parts of the country actually make fun of us for how tame our cuisine is. The standard joke is, in Ohio there are only three spices: salt, cinnamon, and ketchup. (This is an exaggeration, of course. We also put tiny amounts of ground cloves, nutmeg, or ginger in certain kinds of baked goods, and a few people even put black pepper on their food.)
> i swear that culutre would eat anything, they make fish ice cream
Yeah? Less than two days ago my sister was talking about how she wanted to try the chocolate-covered bacon recipe she saw in a Taste of Home magazine. Chocolate-covered bacon, no fooling. My dad said hey, if you're going to do that, why not take the idea to its logical conclusion and make bacon s'mores?
Every country has some weird cuisine.
Not that I'm volunteering to eat sushi. I like my fish cooked, thank you very much.
> I don't own a Toyota but if I did I wouldn't be afraid to drive it.
You should be. Driving a car on the public roads is dangerous business.
Yeah, I know you really meant "more afraid to drive it than any other vehicle". But I think it's important to remember how dangerous cars are. They're so convenient, people drive them all the time, and then they get complacent about the hazard and start doing dumb stuff, like fiddling with a phone and bopping in time to the music on the radio and looking at the billboards, instead of paying attention to what's going on on the road. Would you do that stuff while cleaning out a six-hundred-degree pizza oven? No? Cars are much more dangerous.
Why not just officially label them "developing planets" and have done? Then people who don't care about being politically correct can go right on calling them "third world planets".