Things are getting better as far as diversity goes...
Exactly why is diversity better? Is there something wrong with having a primarily Mormon state that needs to be "improved" upon? Or is it that white people are not allowed to have their own place with their own distinct culture?
Would you say that a place like Japan or India needs to be improved with diversity?
Actually, there was a day and time when you could make money, feed your family, etc. by just doing a good job day in and day out.
There was. And I'd say that that's a better life than this situation. If indeed we need to keep reinventing ourselves every few years just to stay employed, then I'd say that we've taken a huge leap backwards, wouldn't you? A big decrease in the quality of life. And few seem to have noticed, or care. Where will this lead?
I'd say that your quote is a great argument against this new, global economy. Exactly what is it giving us besides cheap gadgets and no job security? Why does everyone think this is better?
That's not always true. Small companies that don't have huge overhead, like (as is my understanding) ACD Systems here in Victoria, BC, Canada, don't need to outsource because they're making enough money even with the higher wages they're paying to employees here.
Additionally, a lot of corporations like HP will outsource their IT and helpdesk staff to save a few million while the CEOs and upper management are still lining their pockets with HUGE amounts of money that probably balances out what they save. Granted, they probably don't want to take any kind of a pay cut themselves, but if the times really are so tough that they can't afford to employ Americans, then by not making any sacrifices themselves, they're just selling out the American workers who got them where they are.
I doubt if very many American companies need to outsource, even to compete with other companies who do so anyway. Still, in general your point stands - companies will have a small competitive advantage by outsourcing, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve any blame for doing so, or retribution if it should ever come to that.
So what if it is? Not that I'm saying that it is, but what's the problem with nationalism? Doesn't it make sense that a country should take care of its own, putting them before others? After all, if you don't take care of your own, you'll be defeated and destroyed by those who do.
Bear in mind, though, that a hypersonic wind strong enough to rip the shuttle apart is enough air pressure to kill the astronauts - if not by itself, then by hurling them against pieces of the crew module.
Yeah, I can't figure out why they'd need permission to show a picture of a car at all. The only way it can make any sense would be if they wanted to show a picture from a Ford brochure or something like it because they didn't have any of their own.
In fact, thinking about it now, that's probably how they got the pictures of the rest of the cars. Maybe they were simply pictures of them that they took themselves or got from others who did, and thus there was no problem with copyright. Maybe there simply was no picture of a Bronco II available. Because there's no way the law could prevent them from taking a picture themselves and using it. And if there is, that is seriously fucked up.
Whoever decided to make the head block out of aluminum at Ford should be forced to drive one of those things.
Aluminum heads are really common these days, though. I think that most of the cars serviced at the car dealership where I used to work had aluminum heads, and most of those had iron blocks. Despite the differing rates of thermal expansion of aluminum and steel, gasket problems weren't abnormally common. Talking to the mechanics, they didn't seem to be much of a problem, even though making the head and block out of the same material is probably preferable.
Granted, the Ford Escort is a disposable car, but I doubt if it's because it uses aluminum heads.
Offtopic, but: I've never really understood why women with nice tits generally get hired more easily. It sounds like a strange question for me to ask, but think about it: does the man doing the hiring get to feel those tits? I'd guess that in most cases the answer is no. So why bother hiring them? Do men who hire women like to be teased? Or do they really think they can mack it with at least some of the hot women they hire?
one advantage of 64 bits is being able to memory map a large file and can result in better performance even with much less than 4 GB of memory...
I've heard this stated many times but not once have I seen any evidence backing it up. The concept doesn't even seem like it would be any faster. Think about it this way: you're mapping a file to memory to bypass all the relatively complex filesystem code - on something that is completely I/O-bound. Why bother?
In fact, (rant mode on), I've even heard people say that you could get rid of the filesystem completely this way. Just map the entire hard drive to memory! Brilliant! Except there's no way to implement things like journalled writes without file system code. Or maybe even a versioning filesystem. Why is this a good idea again? Why should we throw away an abstraction that provides us with things we use now?
It wasn't until after I posted that that I realized that you were joking about the Slashdot summary. My apologies if I was rude. But still, it was offtopic and not really funny, as most of us understood what they meant right away.
At any rate, South Park? You've noticed my name... Yeah. Seemed like a fun name to use, way back when. I still like it.
Getting hydrogen from oil *also* consumes as much energy as it gives back, and then some.
Utterly ridiculous. In the article it mentions that by separating hydrogen from hydrocarbons and putting it in a fuel cell, they actually get MORE useful energy out of the fuel, not less. There's no net consumption of energy, as there would be by cracking water. There's a net release of energy. It's a more efficient system.
Did you not read the article, sir? Why would the Navy want to do this, and have the additional burden of protecting a new class of vulnerable ship, when they could just separate the hydrogen from the hydrocarbons inside the vehicles themselves?
How many times does this have to be said? Extract hydrogen from hydrocarbons and you no longer have the hydrocarbons for use as fuel, so cracking oil costs roughly as much energy as cracking water. The only difference is what you put in (expensive oil vs. cheap water) and what you throw away (carbon vs. oxygen).
Read the article. When you extract hydrogen from hydrocarbons, you can burn that hydrogen for energy, and you have a net output of energy. You can make the process self-perpetuate. Separating water into oxygen and hydrogen, on the other hand, takes away more energy than you can get back from burning the hydrogen.
By the way, there is a small contradiction between the above claim that Python is more understandable than Perl and the claim that it has an advantage over C++ or Java because it is not as verbose as those. Typically, in increasing amount of source code, you have Perl -> Python -> (C++,Java). If you think that Python is more understandable than Perl, then by that same logic, we could conclude that C++ or Java is more understandable than Python.
That is false logic, sir. No one said that Python is more understandable than Perl because it needs more source code to express a given idea. Those two simply happen to both be true in this case. (According to many.) It's possible to have a language that is really verbose and not any clearer than another language that's more compact. (Take Brainfuck, for instance.) And when you do, you'd call the more compact language a higher-level language than the more verbose one.
You kinda sound like one of those people who oppose nuclear power because other kooks have told them that it'll give everyone cancer, when the facts tell us that it's one of the safest, cleanest power sources we have. The supposed "fact" that powerlines are known to cause cancer means nothing: burned toast is known to cause cancer. Cosmic rays are known to cause cancer. Does that mean we should fear them?
The only thing that matters here is the relative risk compared to other things, which you don't seem to give a fuck about. There's no sense in flying off the handle over imagined risks without evaluating exactly what those risks are and making an informed decision.
How is that at all relevant to the fact that we need to service Hubble now? It's not like the costs of servicing it (which is supposed to be a regular thing) and the costs of launching a replacement are even comparable. NASA even admitted that they aren't refraining from servicing Hubble for cost reasons. We will lose Hubble if it isn't serviced, and then we would have nothing until 2010, assuming that the successor is even launched at all. In fact, at one point Nasa even stated that they want to bring it down in 2006.
Why is losing Hubble now and banking on an uncertain replacement better than just keeping it up there, doing useful work?
we see that Bush is reluctant to give Iraq back to the Iraqis. You may say they aren't mature enough to build their nation. I say it's none of our business. It's THEIR country.
It's a simple matter of pragmatism. Whether you support the war or not, the fact is that the US is in it now, and has to achieve their objectives or it was all for nothing.
If they give the country back to the Iraqis right now, it's likely (from what I've heard and read) that the Iraqis would just elect another man who would become dictator and then they would be no better off than before. They might even become a plausible threat to the US again in the future... (not that I'm saying they were beforehand, mind you.)
So if all the lives and money that were spent in the area are not to be a complete waste, then the job must be done right. The Iraqis must be set up with a stable government friendly to the West, and until that happens, they must be ruled by either the US or the UN.
With submarines, pretty much everything is designed to minimize the noise that they make. Submarines are stealth warships. More noise == easier for the enemy to detect == harder for the submarine to accomplish its mission. Supposedly they even tried developing a system called an MHD that would push water with no moving parts (and no noisy boiling), but as far as I know it never worked out.
It's true that the tides can't dissipate momentum, as momentum can't disappear... but the Earth can transfer momentum to the moon through gravitational forces. When the moon and Earth are tidal locked (in billions, not millions of years) the moon will be farther away from the Earth, and the overall angular momentum will be the same.
As far as how this happens, this page has a pretty good explanation.
I liked the McDonald's example. The thought of someone reacting in shocked horror and disgust when someone else is contradicting the supposed fact that their food is "good" is quite funny. It's funny partly because no one (almost no one) would actually believe that the goodness of McDonald's food is an objective, provable fact. But that's kind of my point. It's not just that it so isn't an objective fact... it's that nothing is. We shouldn't hold all statements to this high standard, because none of them would stand up to it. There's always something that some nut can argue, even about mathematical proofs.
So when someone says that something is good, they don't mean that they think it's a fact. They mean either that they think it's good, or that most people do, but no one would actually mean that it's something provable. Goodness itself doesn't really exist except as a concept in our minds, after all, and it is not well-defined, so it is not provable. It's just an idea. It's still useful despite this.
Religious fundamentalism is indeed a better example: I think I see what you're getting at now. There is indeed a potential downside to believing things to be absolute truth when they are not. But there is a world of difference between killing others over unquestioned dogma and saying that something is true when it has a reasonable grounding in fact.
For instance: for all we can prove, the sun will stop shining tomorrow. In fact, for all we can prove, the force of gravity will reverse tonight and the Earth will explode from its own massive reversed weight, and everyone will be flung into the heavens. Now, someone such as myself say that that won't happen. I can't prove that it won't happen, and it isn't an objective fact that it won't happen. But since nothing is an objective fact, why does that matter? I can still say that the Earth won't explode tonight because it sure as hell won't. And it makes sense to say that. If we limit ourselves to making statements about things that we can prove, we would wind up making no statements at all.
The ability to say that something is true is too useful to give up just because we can't know the objective truth. And that's really my entire point. We will make mistakes... but that's what we humans do. We shouldn't seek to make no mistakes, but rather to make few of them.
Yet at the same time, these books do codify truths. It really is wrong to kill, for example. I don't know if I'd say that's an objective truth...
I agree. It is wrong to kill. But it isn't an objective truth. Indeed, it is sometimes even necessary to kill. "Wrong", like "good", doesn't really exist except as a concept in our minds, so it can't be one. It is a truth because we agree on it. Human lives have meaning because they have meaning to us.
It's how I rationalize living in a world where I believe we are ultimately alone. (I am an atheist, something I wouldn't wish on anyone else.) How can anything have meaning if we are just some cosmic accident? Well... things have meaning if they have meaning to us. Our lives have meaning, the things we do for our society and the people in it have meaning, the things we create have meaning... Meaning itself is a construct of our minds, so we can assign things meaning at will. One thing is certain: we will all die, so we must decide for ourselves what meaning our lives have, if any.
I hope you can understand my point of view, even if you don't agree with it.
I didn't take it so much as "how to get away with shoplifting", as "Avoiding harassment by store rent-a-cops".
Put that way, it does make more sense. You have some good examples of harassment. I find it surprising that it would be a frequent occurrence, though, given that you don't steal - I thought most places sent guards after you only if they've seen you take stuff on their video cameras. One would hope that would be the case, anyway.
As far as "dangerous knowledge" goes, this is pretty innocent...
True. And you should note that I'm not one of those people who thinks that dangerous knowledge should be suppressed, or even that it can. But sharing knowledge such as this can make it look like you are trying to help people who are up to no good. You are of course within your rights to tell someone how to break the law and get away with it, but that doesn't mean you should.
It would be easier to justify it like this poster did.
Obviously I'd prefer that no one apply this knowledge...
Slashdot Mirror
Would you say that a place like Japan or India needs to be improved with diversity?
I'd say that your quote is a great argument against this new, global economy. Exactly what is it giving us besides cheap gadgets and no job security? Why does everyone think this is better?
That's not always true. Small companies that don't have huge overhead, like (as is my understanding) ACD Systems here in Victoria, BC, Canada, don't need to outsource because they're making enough money even with the higher wages they're paying to employees here.
Additionally, a lot of corporations like HP will outsource their IT and helpdesk staff to save a few million while the CEOs and upper management are still lining their pockets with HUGE amounts of money that probably balances out what they save. Granted, they probably don't want to take any kind of a pay cut themselves, but if the times really are so tough that they can't afford to employ Americans, then by not making any sacrifices themselves, they're just selling out the American workers who got them where they are.
I doubt if very many American companies need to outsource, even to compete with other companies who do so anyway. Still, in general your point stands - companies will have a small competitive advantage by outsourcing, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve any blame for doing so, or retribution if it should ever come to that.
So what if it is? Not that I'm saying that it is, but what's the problem with nationalism? Doesn't it make sense that a country should take care of its own, putting them before others? After all, if you don't take care of your own, you'll be defeated and destroyed by those who do.
Bear in mind, though, that a hypersonic wind strong enough to rip the shuttle apart is enough air pressure to kill the astronauts - if not by itself, then by hurling them against pieces of the crew module.
Yeah, I can't figure out why they'd need permission to show a picture of a car at all. The only way it can make any sense would be if they wanted to show a picture from a Ford brochure or something like it because they didn't have any of their own.
In fact, thinking about it now, that's probably how they got the pictures of the rest of the cars. Maybe they were simply pictures of them that they took themselves or got from others who did, and thus there was no problem with copyright. Maybe there simply was no picture of a Bronco II available. Because there's no way the law could prevent them from taking a picture themselves and using it. And if there is, that is seriously fucked up.
Granted, the Ford Escort is a disposable car, but I doubt if it's because it uses aluminum heads.
Offtopic, but: I've never really understood why women with nice tits generally get hired more easily. It sounds like a strange question for me to ask, but think about it: does the man doing the hiring get to feel those tits? I'd guess that in most cases the answer is no. So why bother hiring them? Do men who hire women like to be teased? Or do they really think they can mack it with at least some of the hot women they hire?
Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks.
In fact, (rant mode on), I've even heard people say that you could get rid of the filesystem completely this way. Just map the entire hard drive to memory! Brilliant! Except there's no way to implement things like journalled writes without file system code. Or maybe even a versioning filesystem. Why is this a good idea again? Why should we throw away an abstraction that provides us with things we use now?
It wasn't until after I posted that that I realized that you were joking about the Slashdot summary. My apologies if I was rude. But still, it was offtopic and not really funny, as most of us understood what they meant right away.
At any rate, South Park? You've noticed my name... Yeah. Seemed like a fun name to use, way back when. I still like it.
Maybe you should stop being a pedantic asshole and realize that how the parent poster said it is how it is meant.
Did you not read the article, sir? Why would the Navy want to do this, and have the additional burden of protecting a new class of vulnerable ship, when they could just separate the hydrogen from the hydrocarbons inside the vehicles themselves?
So the two processes are not at all equivalent.
You kinda sound like one of those people who oppose nuclear power because other kooks have told them that it'll give everyone cancer, when the facts tell us that it's one of the safest, cleanest power sources we have. The supposed "fact" that powerlines are known to cause cancer means nothing: burned toast is known to cause cancer. Cosmic rays are known to cause cancer. Does that mean we should fear them?
The only thing that matters here is the relative risk compared to other things, which you don't seem to give a fuck about. There's no sense in flying off the handle over imagined risks without evaluating exactly what those risks are and making an informed decision.
How is that at all relevant to the fact that we need to service Hubble now? It's not like the costs of servicing it (which is supposed to be a regular thing) and the costs of launching a replacement are even comparable. NASA even admitted that they aren't refraining from servicing Hubble for cost reasons. We will lose Hubble if it isn't serviced, and then we would have nothing until 2010, assuming that the successor is even launched at all. In fact, at one point Nasa even stated that they want to bring it down in 2006.
Why is losing Hubble now and banking on an uncertain replacement better than just keeping it up there, doing useful work?
It's a simple matter of pragmatism. Whether you support the war or not, the fact is that the US is in it now, and has to achieve their objectives or it was all for nothing.
If they give the country back to the Iraqis right now, it's likely (from what I've heard and read) that the Iraqis would just elect another man who would become dictator and then they would be no better off than before. They might even become a plausible threat to the US again in the future... (not that I'm saying they were beforehand, mind you.)
So if all the lives and money that were spent in the area are not to be a complete waste, then the job must be done right. The Iraqis must be set up with a stable government friendly to the West, and until that happens, they must be ruled by either the US or the UN.
Thanks a bunch for the link... the info there makes me want to do my own experiments on the matter.
Noise.
With submarines, pretty much everything is designed to minimize the noise that they make. Submarines are stealth warships. More noise == easier for the enemy to detect == harder for the submarine to accomplish its mission. Supposedly they even tried developing a system called an MHD that would push water with no moving parts (and no noisy boiling), but as far as I know it never worked out.
It's true that the tides can't dissipate momentum, as momentum can't disappear... but the Earth can transfer momentum to the moon through gravitational forces. When the moon and Earth are tidal locked (in billions, not millions of years) the moon will be farther away from the Earth, and the overall angular momentum will be the same.
As far as how this happens, this page has a pretty good explanation.
I liked the McDonald's example. The thought of someone reacting in shocked horror and disgust when someone else is contradicting the supposed fact that their food is "good" is quite funny. It's funny partly because no one (almost no one) would actually believe that the goodness of McDonald's food is an objective, provable fact. But that's kind of my point. It's not just that it so isn't an objective fact... it's that nothing is. We shouldn't hold all statements to this high standard, because none of them would stand up to it. There's always something that some nut can argue, even about mathematical proofs.
So when someone says that something is good, they don't mean that they think it's a fact. They mean either that they think it's good, or that most people do, but no one would actually mean that it's something provable. Goodness itself doesn't really exist except as a concept in our minds, after all, and it is not well-defined, so it is not provable. It's just an idea. It's still useful despite this.
Religious fundamentalism is indeed a better example: I think I see what you're getting at now. There is indeed a potential downside to believing things to be absolute truth when they are not. But there is a world of difference between killing others over unquestioned dogma and saying that something is true when it has a reasonable grounding in fact.
For instance: for all we can prove, the sun will stop shining tomorrow. In fact, for all we can prove, the force of gravity will reverse tonight and the Earth will explode from its own massive reversed weight, and everyone will be flung into the heavens. Now, someone such as myself say that that won't happen. I can't prove that it won't happen, and it isn't an objective fact that it won't happen. But since nothing is an objective fact, why does that matter? I can still say that the Earth won't explode tonight because it sure as hell won't. And it makes sense to say that. If we limit ourselves to making statements about things that we can prove, we would wind up making no statements at all.
The ability to say that something is true is too useful to give up just because we can't know the objective truth. And that's really my entire point. We will make mistakes... but that's what we humans do. We shouldn't seek to make no mistakes, but rather to make few of them.
I agree. It is wrong to kill. But it isn't an objective truth. Indeed, it is sometimes even necessary to kill. "Wrong", like "good", doesn't really exist except as a concept in our minds, so it can't be one. It is a truth because we agree on it. Human lives have meaning because they have meaning to us.
It's how I rationalize living in a world where I believe we are ultimately alone. (I am an atheist, something I wouldn't wish on anyone else.) How can anything have meaning if we are just some cosmic accident? Well... things have meaning if they have meaning to us. Our lives have meaning, the things we do for our society and the people in it have meaning, the things we create have meaning... Meaning itself is a construct of our minds, so we can assign things meaning at will. One thing is certain: we will all die, so we must decide for ourselves what meaning our lives have, if any.
I hope you can understand my point of view, even if you don't agree with it.
It would be easier to justify it like this poster did.
Good. That's all I wanted to know.