There were two answers common to all of us: project management and English writing. We are all in management now, not practical engineering, and need words more than we need numbers and formulae. An English writing course should be required for all pure and applied science majors, in my opinion.
I represented computer science at an elementary-school tech fair a few months ago. Many of the students had been given papers they were supposed to fill out by asking us questions; one of the questions was, "How often do you use writing in your job?" And they were all surprised when I answered, "Every day". I need to discuss design, bugs, performance, releases, strategy, &c &c, and all over e-mail. Writing (and typing) is a core skill for me.
Note that the studies do not say multivitamins are worthless, nor does it address any other health areas except those three. That is just the headline sensationalism.
Did you miss the part where the TFA's title said "Stop wasting money on supplements"? The article itself is trying to make the argument that it's a waste for most people to take multivitamins. But the reason given is that it doesn't prevent death, heart attacks, cancer, or dementia.
Guess what? Hiring policemen don't prevent natural death, heart attacks, cancer or dementia either. Neither does wearing a seatbelt. Neither do all those safety regulations on cars and aircraft. Are they going to write an editorial next saying that we should "Stop wasting money on police, seatbelts, safety regulation", and cite studies showing that they don't prevent natural death, heart attacks, cancer, or dementia?
Vitamin deficiency causes all kinds of random problems that are often not quickly diagnosed. Do a cost-benefits analisys. It's a low probability that I'll have a vitamin deficiency, but if I do, vitamins will help a lot. Given how little they cost, it seems like a no-brainer.
What would be better is if the US patent office had to repay the royalties (or perhaps a percentage of them). Then there would actually be incentive for them to be careful about the patents they approved. As it is, they get money for any patent they approve, and no negative consequences for approving patents which are later overturned.
Of course, and that's the right thing to do -- until such time as you discover that your leg has actually been infected, and that you need antibiotics. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it can be incredibly dangerous. I don't know what the rate of bacterial infection is for falling out of a tree, but let's say it was 1 in 1,000. No antibiotics means that goes from "1 in 1000 children who scrape their knee hospitalized" to "1 in 1000 children who scrape their knee die", which is pretty bad.
According to the Times, the real financial problem facing the Post Office may have been created by Congress in the first place through the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. The law required the service to begin prefunding the healthcare benefits of future retirees 50 years in advance. The requirement costs about $5.6 billion a year, and it caused the Postal Service to lose $5.1 billion the first year after it was enacted.
So for the last 7 years, they've had a $5B handicap -- limiting what they can do wrt expanding into other markets, upgrading services, and so on. I'd say they're doing pretty amazing.
It would be akin (because of the vast separation in time) to our finding forty thousand versions of "Damn, Og just missed small deer.... No, wait, he return.... Damn, Og just missed small deer."
Your example contains "damn", which could help you track exposure to religion, attitudes towards swearing, and so on. The existence of "small deer" could help you track the change of population and determine exactly when a species became extinct / sacred / in high demand. Even when not mentioned, a historian might be able to deduce that Og was using a ranged weapon here rather than a close-combat one, to help study ancient technology, correlating it with other evidence to track the rise and fall of different tribes or races. That all sounds like a potential treasure-trove of information to me.
Most of our data are totally uninteresting pieces of garbage. Think of it, a future species recovers an archive of present tweets and facebook comments.
Said by someone who obviously has never done much looking at history. The fact that "uninteresting pieces of garbage", that either everyone knew and assumed or thought didn't need to be said, were *not* written down, makes it a lot harder to understand the context in which the things we *do* have were said. Having a handful of people's full FB / twitter records will be a treasure trove of information for 50th-century historians trying to figure out what life was actually like in the 20th century.
Let us never confuse creating value with capturing value; somehow we have to get them better aligned.
Do we? Because you know, I was under the impression that not everybody measured value and success by the fatness of one's wallet.
This isn't about Linus. I'm sure that Linus is at least as happy, if not far happier, than Ballmer, Elop, or Fiorina. It's about us as society. Money is power, after all -- it's people with money that decide what buildings are built, what movies get made, what devices are produced, and so on. Giving that power to Ballmer and Elop, who are good at "capturing value" while destroying it, is bad for society.
Where are they "badmouthing" Linux? All they said was that Linux is over-kill for running a single application within a VM. Linux and OSv are different tools for different purposes.
Especially since Linux was the first hypervisor they ported to, and has the best support at the moment.
Additionally unfounded. Given that BSD sources can be downloaded, modified, and their changes never see the light of day the loss of information is virtually guaranteed. Not to say it doesn't happen with the GPL, but it's actually a legal risk to allow it to happen.
In practice, the vast majority of the time GPL and BSD are functionally equivalent. The reason is this: if a company takes a GPL project, makes changes, but doesn't do the work to upsteam them, and then just publishes their changes as patches on their own website, there is a very low probability that those patches will ever make it either upstream, or into a competitor's product. Publishing the patches on your website is not considered "contributing to the community"; actually doing the work of upstreaming is. A company that doesn't upstream anything but only publishes patches on their website is considered a "taker" by the community. The major things driving contributions to upstream are the pain of having to rebase local modifications in order to pull new code from upstream, and the benefits of being seen to "give back" to the community. These both would work the same for a BSD project.
However, just like any time you're working with other people, "what happens in the worst case" is important, and has a material impact on how you relate when there are disadgreements. If the situation becomes tense with your wife, you'll act differently if you know that in the event of a divorce she'll get half of your considerable property than if you know she can't touch a dime. Similarly, the fact that I could take those published patches and upstream them myself is important to me. And although companies like BSD when they're the only one contributing to a project, it seems to me that GPL provides a much better "worst case scenario" for you if you're working with a competitor.
If you don't want to be demeaned, don't work in a job where your role includes cleaning up human excrement and vomit from trains.
Or, we as society could stop demeaning people for doing good work and making the world a better place. Do you want to be able to take a subway without the place reeking of shit and puke? Then be thankful for the people cleaning it up; give them respect, good working conditions, and a living wage. Anyone who is creating value for society deserves that much, whether they're designing the next iPhone or washing the piss smell of a public lavatory. And if you don't give them any of that, don't be surprised if they don't deliver very much value to you.
Besides, the demeaning argument could be applied to any kind of time keeping system. So you use your finger to clock on instead of a card. So what?
If the card is exactly the same, then why go through the expense of the fancy new equipment?
If the fingerprint system really is cheaper / more robust / maintainable / whatever, then it may make sense to upgrade. If, as I suspect, it is is more expensive, and they're doing it not to reduce costs and increase efficiency of processing but to have more control over people. Either that's not necessary, in which case it's demeaning, or it is necessary, in which case (it seems to me) they're doing something else really wrong.
well the reason they don't want the scanners is that then they can't as easily sell their job when they move on - or have their cousin cover for them on a sick day.
Possibly, but another very good reason they don't want scanners is that it's demeaning and insulting.
Unless there are significant problems (and not just "significant bending of the rules", but "significant extra expense or reduction in quality"), there is no reason to treat people like criminals.
And if there are significant problems, there's a better solution: Hire people you trust, and then trust the people you hire; and don't judge them by stupid metrics like "has been physically present exactly N hours?", but by metrics like, "Is the area they were responsible for clean?" If it would take an average person working at a reasonable rate 8 hours to clean a certain area, and because of me the area is now clean, then pay me for 8 hours worth of work, whether it took me 8 hours or three hours.
That's a post from August 13, about the ruling going into this trial -- not about the actual trial or the verdict itself, which is what this article was about.
You are crazy. If you look at deaths per yer per 100K vehicles [wikipedia.org], the rate ranges from 14,050 (Togo) down to 4.6 (Malta). Other samples: UK (5.1), US (15), Russia (55), Bangladesh (6,300).
Wait, 14% of the population dies every year in Togo due to automobile accidents? That's just not possible. There must be a mistake somewhere.
Games have nothing to do with it. It seems rather self-evident that doing that involves learning something reasonably challenging for an hour a day for two months would boost cognitive flexibility.
Click through and read the paper -- it's not paywalled, is relatively short, and I think the big picture is pretty understandable.
If you do, you'll find that 1) cognitive flexibility is a technical term for a specific class of mental abilities 2) StarCraft was shown to increase cognitive flexibility, but (as expected) not some other mental abilities 3) in addition to the control group, he had two SC groups: one which had only one base to control, and one which had 2 bases to control. The ones with two bases to control showed more improvement in cognitive flexibility than those with only one base.
So it does have to do with StarCraft in particular. My question is, in what real-life situations is this "cognitive flexibility" actually useful? He keeps saying there is a "benefit", but it's not clear to me what benefit there is other than being able to do better on some artificial lab tests. (And of course being able to play SC better, which is of course a benefit in itself.)
And as the brief actually points out, a person's beliefs about whether what he did was illegal or not are completely irrelevant to whether or not a crime was actually committed. If what you did was illegal, you are punished even if you believe it to be legal; but the converse holds true as well -- if what you did was legal, you should not be punished, even if you believed that it was illegal.
But the Fifth Amendment guarantees that no one may be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” not an unqualified “right to remain silent.” In any event, it is settled that forfeiture of the privilege against self-incrimination need not be knowing.
And:
...Although “no ritualistic formula is necessary in order to invoke the privilege,” Quinn v. United States , 349 U. S. 155, 164 (1955), a witness does not do so by simply standing mute. Because petitioner was required to assert the privilege in order to benefit from it, the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejecting petitioner’s Fifth Amendment claim is affirmed.
I agree with the 4 dissenting judges:
Far better, in my view, to pose the relevant question directly: Can one fairly infer from an individual’s silence and surrounding circumstances an exercise of the Fifth Amendment’s privilege? The need for simplicity, the constitutional importance of applying the Fifth Amendment to those who seek its protection, and this Court’s case law all suggest that this is the right question to ask here. And the answer to that question in the circumstances of today’s case is clearly: yes.
But that's the law of the land right now; so make sure everyone you know knows this.
Apple is definitely having an idea shortage. Nothing comparable to Google Glass (which may or may not be a success, but at least is an advance in some direction). Nothing comparable to Microsoft's new-generation Kinect (which is a significant technical development, even if it needs an off switch). Not even a ruggedized iPhone (something several competing vendors now offer).
But doing something completely new has never been Apple's modus operandi. Instead, they let other people try things that are completely new, see how they fail, then come in and "do it right":
There were lots of mp3 players before the iPod. But they never gained mass market appeal; Apple changed that.
I had a smartphone before the iPhone came out. I had even purchased apps and installed them; but overall, the experience was very unsatisfying, and I had basically determined that there wasn't much point in having a tiny computer in your pocket. The iPhone changed that.
Microsoft and others had been trying to get tablets to take off for years; Apple brought out the iPad and kick-started a whole new movement towards tablets.
If things follow historical trends (which is a big if), then Google (and maybe some others) will come out with Google Glass, it will be a big flop, people will realize how useless having a HUD is and just about decide it's not worth it anymore -- and then Apple will come out with iSpec and redefine the market.
Why not - they wouldn't have found all those witches in 1692 without crowdsourcing.
Actually, the worst of the Salem witch trials was that they weren't crowd-sourced, but were an epic failure of the actual legal system at the time. Every person killed was tried and sentenced by a panel of 7 professional judges with years of experience, most of whom carried on with their professional careers afterwards. Reading it is like a textbook example of why we have these basic rights, like "presumption of innocence", "trial by jury", "right to an attourney", &c -- and should be a warning to anyone who thinks that we need to "get tough on crime" by taking away protections like these.
Because you drive on roads, it's ok to tax you for a million dollars a year right?
If society as a whole has given me the privlege of earning 4 million dollars this year, then sure, it's reasonable for society to expect me to give a million dollars back.
We have a public service, we have a tax. The thing you're missing in your argument is that the cost of your use of that service is far less than the tax I made up. That's what the rich have to put up with.
Do you have numbers to back that up?
And I haven't even considered whether the tax is going to the right government! If NYC is paying for the road, but the feds are taking the tax, then that's a bad allocation of taxes.
The question at hand is whether it is fair to expect people who have benefitted incredibly from the System to give back into the System; and my argument is, yes it is. I agree with you, that the current method of having the federal government suck all the money out and then dole it back out to the states at their whim is not effiecient, and also reduces the diversity of solutions attempted.
What you're saying seems to have only marginal relationship to what I actually wrote; I suspect that you are arguing with an imaginary opponent in your head, rather than with me.
- A lot of the very rich people don't use roads and bridges very much. [snip]
- They absolutely don't use the public school system. Their kids are likely to attend exclusive and expensive boarding schools.
- They may be in the same hospital building, but they get very different treatment from what you or I get. [snip]
Do their employees also take a helicopter to work? Do businessmen have to train their employees from scratch in basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills? Does each company have to have its own set of on-staff doctors to avoid having the entire company out sick with the Plague?
Even if the owners don't personally use the services, they benefit immensely from having them available to the general public, who ultimately become their employees and customers.
It's not the ratio - it's the fact that it's based on only 10 events. Just think - if one more non-branded package had gone through, the ratio would have halved. When would that next parcel have been lost? Would it have been on the 90th send, or the 180th? We don't know. If you were trying for statistical rigour, you'd want to repeat the experiment until you were satisfied that a few extra events on either side wouldn't have a significant event. Consider, if they'd had 90 branded lost, and 10 non-branded lost, the ratio would have made exactly the same as presented, but an extra event on either side would have had a far lower impact on the actual ratio.
No, I understand that. I certainly don't think that we can say with a high statistical certainty that the ratio of missing packages is 9:1 -- as you say, a single additional missed non-labelled package could make it 4:1. What I am saying is, whatever the actual ratio, it seems fairly unlikely to be 1:1 -- and that's a problem, even if it's only in fact 11:10.
Slashdot Mirror
I represented computer science at an elementary-school tech fair a few months ago. Many of the students had been given papers they were supposed to fill out by asking us questions; one of the questions was, "How often do you use writing in your job?" And they were all surprised when I answered, "Every day". I need to discuss design, bugs, performance, releases, strategy, &c &c, and all over e-mail. Writing (and typing) is a core skill for me.
Did you miss the part where the TFA's title said "Stop wasting money on supplements"? The article itself is trying to make the argument that it's a waste for most people to take multivitamins. But the reason given is that it doesn't prevent death, heart attacks, cancer, or dementia.
Guess what? Hiring policemen don't prevent natural death, heart attacks, cancer or dementia either. Neither does wearing a seatbelt. Neither do all those safety regulations on cars and aircraft. Are they going to write an editorial next saying that we should "Stop wasting money on police, seatbelts, safety regulation", and cite studies showing that they don't prevent natural death, heart attacks, cancer, or dementia?
Vitamin deficiency causes all kinds of random problems that are often not quickly diagnosed. Do a cost-benefits analisys. It's a low probability that I'll have a vitamin deficiency, but if I do, vitamins will help a lot. Given how little they cost, it seems like a no-brainer.
What would be better is if the US patent office had to repay the royalties (or perhaps a percentage of them). Then there would actually be incentive for them to be careful about the patents they approved. As it is, they get money for any patent they approve, and no negative consequences for approving patents which are later overturned.
Of course, and that's the right thing to do -- until such time as you discover that your leg has actually been infected, and that you need antibiotics. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it can be incredibly dangerous. I don't know what the rate of bacterial infection is for falling out of a tree, but let's say it was 1 in 1,000. No antibiotics means that goes from "1 in 1000 children who scrape their knee hospitalized" to "1 in 1000 children who scrape their knee die", which is pretty bad.
And of course, there's the insane requirement enacted in 2006 that the USPS pre-pay healthcare benefits 50 years in advance
So for the last 7 years, they've had a $5B handicap -- limiting what they can do wrt expanding into other markets, upgrading services, and so on. I'd say they're doing pretty amazing.
Your example contains "damn", which could help you track exposure to religion, attitudes towards swearing, and so on. The existence of "small deer" could help you track the change of population and determine exactly when a species became extinct / sacred / in high demand. Even when not mentioned, a historian might be able to deduce that Og was using a ranged weapon here rather than a close-combat one, to help study ancient technology, correlating it with other evidence to track the rise and fall of different tribes or races. That all sounds like a potential treasure-trove of information to me.
Said by someone who obviously has never done much looking at history. The fact that "uninteresting pieces of garbage", that either everyone knew and assumed or thought didn't need to be said, were *not* written down, makes it a lot harder to understand the context in which the things we *do* have were said. Having a handful of people's full FB / twitter records will be a treasure trove of information for 50th-century historians trying to figure out what life was actually like in the 20th century.
This isn't about Linus. I'm sure that Linus is at least as happy, if not far happier, than Ballmer, Elop, or Fiorina. It's about us as society. Money is power, after all -- it's people with money that decide what buildings are built, what movies get made, what devices are produced, and so on. Giving that power to Ballmer and Elop, who are good at "capturing value" while destroying it, is bad for society.
Especially since Linux was the first hypervisor they ported to, and has the best support at the moment.
In practice, the vast majority of the time GPL and BSD are functionally equivalent. The reason is this: if a company takes a GPL project, makes changes, but doesn't do the work to upsteam them, and then just publishes their changes as patches on their own website, there is a very low probability that those patches will ever make it either upstream, or into a competitor's product. Publishing the patches on your website is not considered "contributing to the community"; actually doing the work of upstreaming is. A company that doesn't upstream anything but only publishes patches on their website is considered a "taker" by the community. The major things driving contributions to upstream are the pain of having to rebase local modifications in order to pull new code from upstream, and the benefits of being seen to "give back" to the community. These both would work the same for a BSD project.
However, just like any time you're working with other people, "what happens in the worst case" is important, and has a material impact on how you relate when there are disadgreements. If the situation becomes tense with your wife, you'll act differently if you know that in the event of a divorce she'll get half of your considerable property than if you know she can't touch a dime. Similarly, the fact that I could take those published patches and upstream them myself is important to me. And although companies like BSD when they're the only one contributing to a project, it seems to me that GPL provides a much better "worst case scenario" for you if you're working with a competitor.
Or, we as society could stop demeaning people for doing good work and making the world a better place. Do you want to be able to take a subway without the place reeking of shit and puke? Then be thankful for the people cleaning it up; give them respect, good working conditions, and a living wage. Anyone who is creating value for society deserves that much, whether they're designing the next iPhone or washing the piss smell of a public lavatory. And if you don't give them any of that, don't be surprised if they don't deliver very much value to you.
If the card is exactly the same, then why go through the expense of the fancy new equipment?
If the fingerprint system really is cheaper / more robust / maintainable / whatever, then it may make sense to upgrade. If, as I suspect, it is is more expensive, and they're doing it not to reduce costs and increase efficiency of processing but to have more control over people. Either that's not necessary, in which case it's demeaning, or it is necessary, in which case (it seems to me) they're doing something else really wrong.
Possibly, but another very good reason they don't want scanners is that it's demeaning and insulting.
Unless there are significant problems (and not just "significant bending of the rules", but "significant extra expense or reduction in quality"), there is no reason to treat people like criminals.
And if there are significant problems, there's a better solution: Hire people you trust, and then trust the people you hire; and don't judge them by stupid metrics like "has been physically present exactly N hours?", but by metrics like, "Is the area they were responsible for clean?" If it would take an average person working at a reasonable rate 8 hours to clean a certain area, and because of me the area is now clean, then pay me for 8 hours worth of work, whether it took me 8 hours or three hours.
That's a post from August 13, about the ruling going into this trial -- not about the actual trial or the verdict itself, which is what this article was about.
I really miss Groklaw's coverage and analysis of this whole thing.
Giving people's choices dignity and meaning by allowing them (and others around them) to experience consequences for those choices.
Wait, 14% of the population dies every year in Togo due to automobile accidents? That's just not possible. There must be a mistake somewhere.
Click through and read the paper -- it's not paywalled, is relatively short, and I think the big picture is pretty understandable.
If you do, you'll find that 1) cognitive flexibility is a technical term for a specific class of mental abilities 2) StarCraft was shown to increase cognitive flexibility, but (as expected) not some other mental abilities 3) in addition to the control group, he had two SC groups: one which had only one base to control, and one which had 2 bases to control. The ones with two bases to control showed more improvement in cognitive flexibility than those with only one base.
So it does have to do with StarCraft in particular. My question is, in what real-life situations is this "cognitive flexibility" actually useful? He keeps saying there is a "benefit", but it's not clear to me what benefit there is other than being able to do better on some artificial lab tests. (And of course being able to play SC better, which is of course a benefit in itself.)
And as the brief actually points out, a person's beliefs about whether what he did was illegal or not are completely irrelevant to whether or not a crime was actually committed. If what you did was illegal, you are punished even if you believe it to be legal; but the converse holds true as well -- if what you did was legal, you should not be punished, even if you believed that it was illegal.
From the actual ruling (majority opinion):
And:
I agree with the 4 dissenting judges:
But that's the law of the land right now; so make sure everyone you know knows this.
But doing something completely new has never been Apple's modus operandi. Instead, they let other people try things that are completely new, see how they fail, then come in and "do it right":
If things follow historical trends (which is a big if), then Google (and maybe some others) will come out with Google Glass, it will be a big flop, people will realize how useless having a HUD is and just about decide it's not worth it anymore -- and then Apple will come out with iSpec and redefine the market.
Actually, the worst of the Salem witch trials was that they weren't crowd-sourced, but were an epic failure of the actual legal system at the time. Every person killed was tried and sentenced by a panel of 7 professional judges with years of experience, most of whom carried on with their professional careers afterwards. Reading it is like a textbook example of why we have these basic rights, like "presumption of innocence", "trial by jury", "right to an attourney", &c -- and should be a warning to anyone who thinks that we need to "get tough on crime" by taking away protections like these.
If society as a whole has given me the privlege of earning 4 million dollars this year, then sure, it's reasonable for society to expect me to give a million dollars back.
Do you have numbers to back that up?
The question at hand is whether it is fair to expect people who have benefitted incredibly from the System to give back into the System; and my argument is, yes it is. I agree with you, that the current method of having the federal government suck all the money out and then dole it back out to the states at their whim is not effiecient, and also reduces the diversity of solutions attempted.
What you're saying seems to have only marginal relationship to what I actually wrote; I suspect that you are arguing with an imaginary opponent in your head, rather than with me.
Do their employees also take a helicopter to work? Do businessmen have to train their employees from scratch in basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills? Does each company have to have its own set of on-staff doctors to avoid having the entire company out sick with the Plague?
Even if the owners don't personally use the services, they benefit immensely from having them available to the general public, who ultimately become their employees and customers.
No, I understand that. I certainly don't think that we can say with a high statistical certainty that the ratio of missing packages is 9:1 -- as you say, a single additional missed non-labelled package could make it 4:1. What I am saying is, whatever the actual ratio, it seems fairly unlikely to be 1:1 -- and that's a problem, even if it's only in fact 11:10.