Iran is never easy to deal with. There is an even simpler option. Iran did it. Why? Because they saw what happened to Iraq. Disable their own tech till things quiet down and avoid loosing face at the same time while blaming their hated enemies. Bonus!
It all seems a little bit to convenient. And from this, it could have been build by outside forces, been detected AND allowed to run free to give Iran a way out.
What sends a red flag to me about it all is that Iran is so open about it all. They are never open about anything but they sure spilled their guts on this. Why?
Beginner: Doesn't know an IF statement IF (get it, if, for an if statement, Oh I kill myself... what do you mean "yes please") it hit him in the face.
Junior: Can code but needs a lot of hand holding on more complex problems and work needs to be checked for common errors such as SQL injection. Needs to be guided to avoid re-inventing the wheel or trying solutions that have been proven not to work.
Medior: Can code but cannot yet be trusted entirely on his own. Has some experience to avoid common pitfalls but has not yet encountered the one in a million bugs enough to know how to spot them and deal with them. Typical sign of a medior is: lets turn of logging to improve performance... gee I can't trace that error, if only we had logging available.
Senior: Has seen it all, fixes a bug before it ever appears. The engineer who knows a tap in the right place keeps the entire machine from collapsing. The master, the wizard, the legend. He however doesn't code. Not much. A line here, a single character, that is his magic. Churning out code is the work of juniors, you just change the tiniest bit and that is the difference between buggy code and non-buggy code.
You might have noted that at no point did I say anything about their skill at coding, the level of their code. The senior might well do top down programming and the junior use the latest OOP or whatever is the flavor of the day, but the juniors code is full of security holes and 1 in a million occurences cripling bugs and the seniors ain't.
Think of Terry Pratchett's, Cohen the Barbarian. It is not that they are better at fighting perse, they just got so much experience at not dying, they don't do it anymore.
Now the problem with all this is that age has NOTHING to do with it. You can be a senior straight out of school if you spend all your time coding and dealing with real time issues. Can, but it won't often be the case. This is why iPhone apps, being the latest in tech, still have the same old errors and flaws as apps from 20 years ago. The people who program them might know the latest tech but they lack the years of experience to avoid common flaws older people already encountered.
Trust me on this, I seen code well above what I could write but filled to the brim with fairly basic security and performance issues. Think of an old farmer watching a young farmer plow. The old farmer might not understand the tractor or know how to drive it, but he does know the plow blade is going to break soon because he knows the field is filled with unseen stones. Experience != skill. Both are valuable and the wise employer makes sure he has both available.
I have smelled a lot of smoke, but I never had the graving to smoke. I have drunk booze but never became an alcoholic. I have fallen hard to the ground but never broke a bone.
Ergo, there are no smoking addicts, no alcoholics and no broken bones in the world since they never happpened to me, they can't happen to anyone.
Anecdotes are NOT evidence.
What seems odd to me is that most gamers will readily admit mood music exists, certain music can put you into a certain mood. But a game with mood music playing on far more then just your sense of hearing cannot affect your mood. Why?
The most telling argument I find that gaming does have an influence is that so many gamers react with such outright hostility to any negative comments about gaming. Kinda like how it is hard to believe a drug user claiming drugs are non addictive when they risk going to jail for the 3rd time for a joint... eheh.
You sound a LOT like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and disease or alcohol producers claiming the effects on society are minimal.
Geez, people are already highly allergic to the hairs of some caterpillars. Tiny catterpillars that turn into flying animals that are hard to control. This is a big elephant. If it is a problem, we eat it. We did it before, we can do it again.
You mention the preference for when to have sex as an influence on your personality. But people ALWAYS want sex which can be proven that a power cut at ANY time of the year will ALWAYS result in a baby boom 9 months later.
Seasonal differences could make a chance except that modern man has managed to make seasonal differences go away. A mother carrying a child in winter no longer needs to fight bitter cold. And anyway, what about climates were the seasonal differences are minor? If being born in the winter makes you grumpy then wouldn't all northern people be really really grumpy full stop? Wouldn't all Africans have the same year round personality because of the year round sunshine?
And how do you account for different personalities in twins? For that matter, study animals and explain why a litter of half a dozen kittens can have half a dozen furry personalities?
Which is why OPEN, REALLY OPEN is so FUCKING important ALL THE TIME. Even the if the closed evil is shiny it is still utterly and totally evil and a small evil might be tolerated but evil wants to grow and big evils are not so nice.
The Mac itself already shows this, WHILE the device is open, test just for fun how many apps that are for free on Linux and Windows cost money for the Mac. No, not the same apps, equivelant apps. Everything from an FTP client to text editors. Just because it is a Mac developers think people are happy to "donate" a few bucks. Hell, you can afford a Mac, you can afford some cash for code right?
Makes sense BUT it shows that ultimately most people dream of having so much cash in their pocket they need to pay someone to hold their trousers up. Greed is ALWAYS lurking around the corner.
And then you get yourself locked in and all that evil and greed has you under control. Want an application on your iPhone? PAY. Even free applications cost money, see the VLC debate.
There is a reason there are so many payment providers, so many different methods of parting with your cash, because a single closed in method always turns out to be to expensive.
Want proof? The US government is considering setting a max on what banks can charge in the US for Debit transactions. Durbin Amendment. Banks are in an uproar and threathen to raise their service prices that 5% of people will be unable to afford to use banks. Small detail? In Europe the transaction costs are far less AND nobody has to go without banking services because they can't afford it AND it is faster. Oh and EVEN that ain't as good as it gets, PIN transctions are cheaper still and FREE! So Free that PIN transctions are used for 1 cent to verify accounts.
Ain't competition wonderfull? The free American market has succesfully competed until prices are the highest and service is the lowest.
Amazon has gotten so big that they not only can dictate what and what doesn't not happen but that the effort in going around it might become to great. Yes, you can buy a Nokia phone with a real OS on it and run anything you want but how long will people continue to develop for that when so few are using it?
The iPhone and closed Android systems are a threath not out of themselves but because they upset the ecology. Anyone that thinks these are healthy probably looks at the map, sees countless seas of green farmland all with the same crop and nothing else and thinks "Well nature is doing all right, lots of plants, lots of growth".
Do we REALLY want the walmart effect to become part of every element of life?
I never understood people who try to get a new ergonomic mouse through the company. Why bother? The exact model you want is waiting in the shop and you can get it without signing forms. The money? Come on, a good mouse/keyboard lasts years. For pennies a day you get to use the tool you want. No hassle.
And I have been extending that. Want a quality screen to stare at all day with your precious eyeballs? Buy it yourself. Faster HD? Put in a SSD and no longer cause yourself headaches with slow searches etc.
In other industries it is perfectly normal. Any good cook will have his own knives. They are the ones he likes not what some manager squeezing pennies thinks is the best buy. Most carpenters and mechanics have their own tools, often in the form of their own carts completely kitted out with everything they want and need from tools to stereo and coffee machine. Knew one guy who really likes his esperesso, so his tool cart had one build in. Other liked his music and so it had huge speakers build in.
Why do most in IT insist on using the most craptastic HP/Dell crap that can be bought for LOW-LOW prices as our tools of the trade. Even if the company supplies the paint brushes, you can be sure they won't be the ones from the department store on the corner. The right tool for the job, is it such a hard concept?
I have been interviewing for jobs and only ONE company had hardware on the desks that I considered "Nice". Everything else is the same old standard crap. That screen the boss stares at for 1 minute a day is something I will be looking at 8+ hours a day. Why should I have my home machine that I sit only 2+ hours at be significantly better then the office machine? That makes no sense.
Does a professional photographer use an instant camera at work and a Hasselblad for holiday snapshots? No? Then why do you use a IPS screen at home and a LCD at work?
Let me bring my own. It will be faster, more robuust and more productive. Of course, I do expect to be paid for it.
This situation is not unusual. But what bosses forget is to enable their employees to WORK more hours rather then just ordering them to do so.
We single geeks waste a lot of time. Do you make breakfast? You COULD be working already having skipped the rush hour making your commute faster IF your boss served breakfast at the office.
Same with doing the shopping. Hire a teen to do it for your employees and they don't need to rush to the shops at the last minute.
Expensive? Not at all, sure it costs a bit of money but the hours saved not just in time but in frustration your employees will vent during the day is huge. THINK of it. How many hours a day are wasted with people complaining about their commute? Enable them to escape it, by leaving earlier/later, and the complaint time is gone and you get a happier employee.
Same with other trivial stuff. Arrange for someone who can do the waiting in line bits. You know, like a secretary. Who does call the energy company to handle the bosses complaint about his personal bill because that time could be better spend on more productive work.
Want more out of your workers? Reduce their non-work load. A person has 100% energy, anything not spend on work is a waste. How many of you have taken a few hours off to take the car to the garage? Have the office flunky do it and gain some productive hours.
Same with the office itself. If a programmer has to load paper into the printer he ain't coding, not thinking about how to solve a valuable problem. So have people to do that.
It really ain't complicated. Get your development team a secretary. Watch productivity soar.
You are a fucking liar or a delusional douche bag republican. Leaks happen all the time? Oh really then WHY is the US government only going apeshit NOW and not all the time? Oh small leaks happen it is practically how governments do their business but that is information someone WANTS to leak who is part of the system. This information the system did NOT want to be leaked. It is one thing to leak some figures that make the other party look bad, it is quite another to leak something that makes your entire country look bad.
That Wikileaks is more then just a site that Assange is more then just whistleblower is shown by the reaction to the actions. If this was just another leak the US wouldn't be throwing a bi-partisan hissy fit of epic proportions.
The pentagon papers was the most recent similar case, do you call every 40 years regular?
Go back to sleep tea-bagger, the state says all if well so be happy.
Godwin be damned but the nazi's were bitten by commies, racists, anti-semites and biggots. Yes Americans, one of them is you or do you care to explain the moral difference between "Geine Juden" and "Whites Only"? The russians is obvious and the British racial crimes are so many that god has reserved a special place in hell for them, it is called england and it is a bleak and desperate place indeed to be damned to live in.
Real heroes ain't supermen, they are people who decided to standup when most bent over and they don't always standup for purely noble reasons. Many a soldier fought for freedom but joined for the excitement. The fireman who rescues you from a burning house still cashes a paycheck and doesn't life on the adoration alone.
So you don't have a problem with fake results appearing in your google results then complain about fake results in your google results?
Your second paragraph is EXACTLY what people are complaining about. Instead of searching for reviews and finding reviews you get countless filler sites that have zero content but get rated higher.
But to be honest, this has always been an issue and we are just getting more demanding. Most tech improves perceptibly over time but search engines are still stuck in the dark ages of 2000. Personally I have long believed there is a room for an engine that allows people to easily filter their searches and share their filters.
The point is that some people just can't accept that a successfull site can be run without ads. So they use every single event to push their idea EVEN if the event disproves it. See climate change denialist. Hottest year, coldest winter but everything is just fine...
I don't think you need to worry. Gosh, aren't those famous last words? People think this is a race of Palin vs Obama in NORMAL circumstances. But what if in the week before the election something happens. Say a terrorist attack? A scandal? A mosque is build somewhere in the USA?
The likes of Palin always go up and down, and every thinks they can never recover from their downs. But the populist vote is always unpredictable and if the reason for their popularity isn't addressed (a fundemental distrust of the way the world is run) then anything can make their popularity rise again.
We got our own Palin in Holland. Geert Wilders. He wasn't a real threath as well. But he controls the government right now and despite that so far it has been a complete shambles and dropping results the REASON he was so popular hasn't been removed. And everytime an article happens like "5 youths attack young woman in train with hammer to steal phone" he gets another voter. Especially when the REAL story is that the youths had light tans (read Muslim immigrants) and this was part of a police description put out at the same time as the press release. Editing this out doesn't help at all, it just reinforces the believe that the "left" media is lying and that EVERY story about crime where race is not mentioned is done by Muslim immigrants.
Palin voters are not all right wingers in the way of anarchy style free market, they just see the houses in their street being foreclosed and nothing being done about it. They want SOMEONE to do SOMETHING. Palin's answer is that she is going to do something. Obama's answer is... well... what is it? Palin's answer is wrong BUT that is not what these people are hearing. They are seeing someone who can talk to them vs someone who can't. Obama has fallen into the trap that he has become part of the system. Might be the best way to at least get something done BUT the voter sees just another fat cat politician playing the game while the voters American Dream is falling to pieces.
Don't count Palin out yet. The source of her success is only growing. And even if she is gone, who is going to take her place.
A lot has been written in regards to Geert Wilders and 1932-1939 (Hitlers reign before WW2) but that in unfair. Geert is no Hitler BUT he MIGHT be one of the unknowns who lead the european countries leading UP to the election of Hitler. Hitler didn't create the nazi party and the national socialist agenda wasn't always the one that become best known for the holocaust. Palin/Wilders of the 1920's laid the foundation on which Hitler rose up. BUT ALSO the Obama's/Cohen's (dutch political figure who is blamed for the coddling of immigrants) they too helped, or failed to stop, the sentiment that lead to the growth of the extreme parties.
Read up on the pre-history of the nazi party and OPEN your eyes to see that it takes TWO sides to give an extreme party power. Bacteria can only grow on a nutritious surface. Do you blame rapid growith of bacteria on your kitchen counter on the bacteria or on the person who didn't clean the counter properly to stop the growth of bacteria and parasites?
Palin is not the disease, it is the symptom. You are fighting the fever, not the virus. I wouldn't celebrate when the fever goes down, the death of the patient might also be causing it.
Ah, the eternal excuse of the true right winger
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Amazon Censorship Expands
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· Score: 5, Insightful
No, it isn't banned. We the state don't ban anything. You just won't be doing business in this town.
I much rather have state censorship. The state can be voted out. Amazon can not.
So, you are free to publish a book that upsets the powers that be, you just won't be finding a publisher or bookstore to sell it. But freedom is ensured as long as you don't try to exercise it.
This guy would also defend "No jews allowed" or "Whites only" on private businesses. The dream he chases? I want none of it.
They have cunnincly replicated the drive-thru setup but when the little window opens a French man shoots you through the head, scoops out your liver and turns it into pate. It was widely protested in the EU as inhumane until it was pointed out only the Touristus Americanus falls into this trap. The American ambassador was asked for comments but he replied he couldn't answer the phone now because he was in the line at a drive-thru and hasn't been heard from since.
Slashdot wishes it to be known that is does not condone the wholesale slaughter of Americans for their livers or other organs and that anyone who puts this idea into practice must do so without express approval from the world wide community of food lovers.
Really, show me ONE SUV that actually uses its space for the work commute. Oh okay, so you found one in ALL of France, big whoop. But I think that Americans just can't grasp the problem. Europe is SMALLER en the cities are just not designed with big cars in mind. For that matter most Europeans just don't get the American road system. The two areas work at a totally different scale. For instance, my own commute takes about 45 minutes... by bicycle, car OR train. Really. The travel time is NOT in the distance but in the waiting. The car gets stuck in all kinds of traffic jams, the train suffers delays on one of the most crowded rail networks in the world and of course you got to get to and from the train station by a bus service that doesn't connect and the bicycle... actually that one is pretty good a very straight line with just one big pothole with no lights around it.
And SUV's are not just another car. Forget for a moment the type of driver inside of them who tend to be major assholes, two SUV's passing each other in a narrow street, and old european cities are nothing but narrow streets, and the cars typically slow down to pass each other. They take just that bit more space say a meter in a bumper to bumper traffic jams. 4 SUV's and you could have fitted a whole extra car in the extra space taken by a SUV. Parking is the same. The drivers feel safer so take more risks, not only does this make the risk similar again but the death toll on pedestrians and cyclist increases thanks to the SUV driver.
London had the congestion charging and despite that fact that it was universally hated (or so the popular press tell us) it worked. The difference is staggering. But it wasn't popular. ANY law will have opponents. If you try to find a way to get anything done that won't upset anyone, you will never get anything done and THAT will REALLY upset people.
You just want an excuse, because ONE SUV was once found to actually have a full load for a work commute, ALL SUV's should be allowed to drive with one person in congested city centers totally unfit for such large cars. NIMBY must be your middle name.
Oh and a congestion tax would also hit low pollution vehicles. So if I drive a small electric car filled with passengers I get to pay the same as a SUV with just the driver. SMART!
An old engineer retires after decades working in a factory. But some years after the factory machine breaks down and all the young engineers are baffled. Finally someone recalls the old engineer and asks him to come in, for a fee to see if he can fix it.
The engineer comes out of retirement and takes a look at the machine, walks to a part of it and hits it and the machine works again.
Everyone is happy, until the engineer sends his bill. $50.010.
The boss calls him, demanding to explain the charge for just one tap.
It is simple the engineer says: $10 for the tap. $50.000 for knowing WHERE to tap.
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The point is that there are workers and engineers. The workers should be judged on quantity, the engineers on quality. I myself have fixed small things that gave a tenfold increase in performance or dropped all errors from a system. What does that matter over building the original code? Well, 1/10th the server cost. A huge reduction in upset customers meaning less staff needed for support a huge recurring cost.
Who is worth more? The team that builds the car OR the one person who spots and fixed the fatal flaw with a gas pedal? Ask Toyota.
I just hate those pushy bankers. Why can't they just keep their place in line behind lawyers for who is going to get it when the revolution comes? Are they afraid we are going to run out of bullets or something?
Okay, so the line is lawyers, bankers, politicians, republicans. NO pushing ahead. We probably run out of bullets before we got to republicans but we can just have them watch Fox showing a video of a gun firing and they will drop dead from fright.
So what would happen in your non-regulated market all using the same grid if one company decides that 110 volt is for sissies and go the manly 220 volt of civilized countries?
Rules, regulation would forbid that? Ah!
You could of course create dozens of grids all next to each other. Copper after all costs NOTHING!
De-regulation has been done in MOST of the world for the majority of history and it SUCKS. Try a de-regulated bus service in Pakistan. Anyone with a truck can start one. Just have to guess were you end up at. And if you want to go somewhere it isn't economic to go? Then screw you!
People calling for a free market are delusional if not outright insane or lying. Most know perfectly well it can never work but hope to profit from the chaos. Why not deregulate the roads? Drive any side at any speed. Free market will sort it out (he who buys the biggest truck has the right of way).
The free market "works" in areas where setup costs and restrictions are minimal. And even with mobile phone stores there is regulation because towns rightly think that the entire highstreet turned into a mobile phone store is NOT the way to create a vibrant inner city. The amount of rules and regulation we have shows clearly that the free market cannot work in our modern civilized world, it never has.
You only have to look at regulation like opening times, advertising, environmental rules (and this can be as simple as not allowing big lorries to supply a shop at night), minimum wages, child labor laws, labor laws, health and safety standards, food standards that a free market is a pipe dream or a lie. The idiots think it is a dream, the powerful use it as a lie to keep the idiots under control. "No no, your power bill hasn't gone up by 100%, that is the choice of a free market! It will go down REAL soon any day now. Keep paying happy little consumer".
Allow a filter for kiddie porn and it won't be long before someone suggests since you can filter X you can also filter Y. Why do you think every sensible person who mattered was behind Larry Flynt and his smut? Because either you defend the smut you find disgusting or get censored yourself. It is only a matter of time before someone finds you in poor taste.
Yes, this does mean you must defend the possibility of having kiddie porn on the net. If you are not willing to tolerate toddler porn being transmitted then you are saying "censor anything you want on the internet". A very difficult position to take. Either you have freedom and people abusing it or you don't. And oddly enough even if you limit your own freedom, it don't stop the abusers. Take away "legal" kiddie porn and only child rapist will have kiddie porn... eh what? But the proof is clear, having sex with children is illegal in many ways in the Catholic church, doesn't seem to stop them does it? Child porn is already highly illegal in most countries and yet children keep being abused. The filters, they do NOTHING!
Except function as the introduction of filters for anything else the elite object to.
Though choice. Either surrender your freedom or be a child rape defender. Because ANYONE suggesting that the internet should not be censored and controlled wants to share child porn, just as everyone who defended Larry Flint wanted smut.
It is getting very hard to not be either a pedo or a terrorist these days. Think I will just surrender my freedom. So much easier and I can also get back to watching Idols.
Remember, any red-blooded American lusts after guns, not girls. You shoot women in the face with a magnum, not cum. And fondling boobies is something only pinko's and commies do. That is why there are so many of them. They just keep having sex! Degenerates. But the US will hold strong with a rigid fear of sex and the highest teenage pregnancy rate of any developed/civilized country... oh my god, did I just call Americans civilized? I feel so dirty.
I think the media is VERY aware. The media has an agenda, what that agenda is not the same for all media but you can see it clearly by how a story plays OR doesn't play. Girl in train is assaulted by 5 people, beaten with a hammer, 6th helps them escape by knocking out a window. The police description released to help find them says they got tinted skins, meaning in Holland and considering the area muslims. Now can you guys how few media happened to report this story at all and even if they did write down the police description?
But is the agenda left-leaning? Maybe BUT the non-reporting of skin tone of crimes leads those who think immigrants are to blame for everything to assume any crime reported without mention of race are immigrants. Not all crimes are done by immigrants but now people think they are because they assume the media is hiding it.
So what is the real motive of the media in hiding facts?
Could it be that the press reports on non-stories to bury stories they don't want to pay attention to? Far easier to publish a non-story like this then to deal with the backlash of reporting on crimes with racial data. Fill the newspapers with fluff, nobody bombs your offices for fluff.
Any mechanic who works for a roadside service company can tell you that peoples cars "break down" for the oddest reasons. Not enough petrol, wrong fuel, forgot to put in oil. All sorts of stuff that simply has to be maintained and replaced and doesn't leading to failure. Running out of petrol with your car is embarrising, running out of fuel in your airplane makes you a lawn dart or worse. I don't particularly care if some soccer-mom with the IQ of a weasel (sorry weasels) gets herself killed along with her kids. But if she crashes into my house, I would get upset.
What about the weather? Snow is bringing down europe but a car caught in a snow storm just becomes stuck. An aircraft? Has to divert. How far? Small airplane, small fuel tank. Can you imagine 100 soccer mom's lining up for an icy runway when they can barely park a car in summer on an empty lot? Or for that matter the business exec who thinks his beamer is a snow mobile and plows into a lamp post? Now that lamp post will be your apartment building.
As for controlling so many aircraft, LA airport is already uncontrollable and happily parked an airliner on a small jet years ago and things haven't got much better. Can you imagine a 100 or more increase in traffic figures? And if trained pilots from other countries already cause dangerous situations because they don't speak English, what will happen if hillbillies take to the air?
Just walk the street someday and notice for fun just how many cars stall for some reason or another. Oh it is not 1 per minute, but 1 per week would already cause a number of light aircraft accidents to severly burden the coffin industry. Would you step into a one-engined airliner?
No, someday we may have the tech AND the discipline but right now, the idea of the average road user in the air would have me make my next house a bunker, a deep one. SUV's in the sky... somethings just shouldn't be.
Oddly enough, if a book is good, I only read one at a time. Why would I need 4500 in my pocket. That would be like carrying 2 condoms... hopelessly optimistic.
Can you snif your new book, break it open? Scribe notes on it? Have it signed? Pass it on to your children? Hold the book your mother read to you and now you read to your kids?
And it would have to be a very small library for it to have just a couple thousand books. Does your ebook come with a kids corner? A librarian who does know that title of the book with that blue cover and it had this guy who met this girl you read 20 years ago? Does it have books you would never read but pick up because well you are there?
You are comparing a loving wife to a cow milking machine. Both might get you off, but geez, I can tell you the experience is just not the same.
There are lot of paid tests, but you pay a fixed fee for a standard test for YOUR equipment. No company can pay KEMA (I presume the dutch equivelant of LU) to test a competitors equipment and KEMA will never ever come out with a comparitive report. Your product either passes its test or not and that is all.
This is a bought report that tests a BETA of the paying company against 2 versions outdated production release of a competitor. If you can't see the bias right there, well... I think it is amazing that medical science has advanced so far that people born without a brain can survive!
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Iran is never easy to deal with. There is an even simpler option. Iran did it. Why? Because they saw what happened to Iraq. Disable their own tech till things quiet down and avoid loosing face at the same time while blaming their hated enemies. Bonus!
It all seems a little bit to convenient. And from this, it could have been build by outside forces, been detected AND allowed to run free to give Iran a way out.
What sends a red flag to me about it all is that Iran is so open about it all. They are never open about anything but they sure spilled their guts on this. Why?
I use the following classification:
You might have noted that at no point did I say anything about their skill at coding, the level of their code. The senior might well do top down programming and the junior use the latest OOP or whatever is the flavor of the day, but the juniors code is full of security holes and 1 in a million occurences cripling bugs and the seniors ain't.
Think of Terry Pratchett's, Cohen the Barbarian. It is not that they are better at fighting perse, they just got so much experience at not dying, they don't do it anymore.
Now the problem with all this is that age has NOTHING to do with it. You can be a senior straight out of school if you spend all your time coding and dealing with real time issues. Can, but it won't often be the case. This is why iPhone apps, being the latest in tech, still have the same old errors and flaws as apps from 20 years ago. The people who program them might know the latest tech but they lack the years of experience to avoid common flaws older people already encountered.
Trust me on this, I seen code well above what I could write but filled to the brim with fairly basic security and performance issues. Think of an old farmer watching a young farmer plow. The old farmer might not understand the tractor or know how to drive it, but he does know the plow blade is going to break soon because he knows the field is filled with unseen stones. Experience != skill. Both are valuable and the wise employer makes sure he has both available.
I have smelled a lot of smoke, but I never had the graving to smoke. I have drunk booze but never became an alcoholic. I have fallen hard to the ground but never broke a bone.
Ergo, there are no smoking addicts, no alcoholics and no broken bones in the world since they never happpened to me, they can't happen to anyone.
Anecdotes are NOT evidence.
What seems odd to me is that most gamers will readily admit mood music exists, certain music can put you into a certain mood. But a game with mood music playing on far more then just your sense of hearing cannot affect your mood. Why?
The most telling argument I find that gaming does have an influence is that so many gamers react with such outright hostility to any negative comments about gaming. Kinda like how it is hard to believe a drug user claiming drugs are non addictive when they risk going to jail for the 3rd time for a joint... eheh.
You sound a LOT like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and disease or alcohol producers claiming the effects on society are minimal.
Geez, people are already highly allergic to the hairs of some caterpillars. Tiny catterpillars that turn into flying animals that are hard to control. This is a big elephant. If it is a problem, we eat it. We did it before, we can do it again.
You mention the preference for when to have sex as an influence on your personality. But people ALWAYS want sex which can be proven that a power cut at ANY time of the year will ALWAYS result in a baby boom 9 months later.
Seasonal differences could make a chance except that modern man has managed to make seasonal differences go away. A mother carrying a child in winter no longer needs to fight bitter cold. And anyway, what about climates were the seasonal differences are minor? If being born in the winter makes you grumpy then wouldn't all northern people be really really grumpy full stop? Wouldn't all Africans have the same year round personality because of the year round sunshine?
And how do you account for different personalities in twins? For that matter, study animals and explain why a litter of half a dozen kittens can have half a dozen furry personalities?
Which is why OPEN, REALLY OPEN is so FUCKING important ALL THE TIME. Even the if the closed evil is shiny it is still utterly and totally evil and a small evil might be tolerated but evil wants to grow and big evils are not so nice.
The Mac itself already shows this, WHILE the device is open, test just for fun how many apps that are for free on Linux and Windows cost money for the Mac. No, not the same apps, equivelant apps. Everything from an FTP client to text editors. Just because it is a Mac developers think people are happy to "donate" a few bucks. Hell, you can afford a Mac, you can afford some cash for code right?
Makes sense BUT it shows that ultimately most people dream of having so much cash in their pocket they need to pay someone to hold their trousers up. Greed is ALWAYS lurking around the corner.
And then you get yourself locked in and all that evil and greed has you under control. Want an application on your iPhone? PAY. Even free applications cost money, see the VLC debate.
There is a reason there are so many payment providers, so many different methods of parting with your cash, because a single closed in method always turns out to be to expensive.
Want proof? The US government is considering setting a max on what banks can charge in the US for Debit transactions. Durbin Amendment. Banks are in an uproar and threathen to raise their service prices that 5% of people will be unable to afford to use banks. Small detail? In Europe the transaction costs are far less AND nobody has to go without banking services because they can't afford it AND it is faster. Oh and EVEN that ain't as good as it gets, PIN transctions are cheaper still and FREE! So Free that PIN transctions are used for 1 cent to verify accounts.
Ain't competition wonderfull? The free American market has succesfully competed until prices are the highest and service is the lowest.
Amazon has gotten so big that they not only can dictate what and what doesn't not happen but that the effort in going around it might become to great. Yes, you can buy a Nokia phone with a real OS on it and run anything you want but how long will people continue to develop for that when so few are using it?
The iPhone and closed Android systems are a threath not out of themselves but because they upset the ecology. Anyone that thinks these are healthy probably looks at the map, sees countless seas of green farmland all with the same crop and nothing else and thinks "Well nature is doing all right, lots of plants, lots of growth".
Do we REALLY want the walmart effect to become part of every element of life?
Seems a lot of people do.
I never understood people who try to get a new ergonomic mouse through the company. Why bother? The exact model you want is waiting in the shop and you can get it without signing forms. The money? Come on, a good mouse/keyboard lasts years. For pennies a day you get to use the tool you want. No hassle.
And I have been extending that. Want a quality screen to stare at all day with your precious eyeballs? Buy it yourself. Faster HD? Put in a SSD and no longer cause yourself headaches with slow searches etc.
In other industries it is perfectly normal. Any good cook will have his own knives. They are the ones he likes not what some manager squeezing pennies thinks is the best buy. Most carpenters and mechanics have their own tools, often in the form of their own carts completely kitted out with everything they want and need from tools to stereo and coffee machine. Knew one guy who really likes his esperesso, so his tool cart had one build in. Other liked his music and so it had huge speakers build in.
Why do most in IT insist on using the most craptastic HP/Dell crap that can be bought for LOW-LOW prices as our tools of the trade. Even if the company supplies the paint brushes, you can be sure they won't be the ones from the department store on the corner. The right tool for the job, is it such a hard concept?
I have been interviewing for jobs and only ONE company had hardware on the desks that I considered "Nice". Everything else is the same old standard crap. That screen the boss stares at for 1 minute a day is something I will be looking at 8+ hours a day. Why should I have my home machine that I sit only 2+ hours at be significantly better then the office machine? That makes no sense.
Does a professional photographer use an instant camera at work and a Hasselblad for holiday snapshots? No? Then why do you use a IPS screen at home and a LCD at work?
Let me bring my own. It will be faster, more robuust and more productive. Of course, I do expect to be paid for it.
This situation is not unusual. But what bosses forget is to enable their employees to WORK more hours rather then just ordering them to do so.
We single geeks waste a lot of time. Do you make breakfast? You COULD be working already having skipped the rush hour making your commute faster IF your boss served breakfast at the office.
Same with doing the shopping. Hire a teen to do it for your employees and they don't need to rush to the shops at the last minute.
Expensive? Not at all, sure it costs a bit of money but the hours saved not just in time but in frustration your employees will vent during the day is huge. THINK of it. How many hours a day are wasted with people complaining about their commute? Enable them to escape it, by leaving earlier/later, and the complaint time is gone and you get a happier employee.
Same with other trivial stuff. Arrange for someone who can do the waiting in line bits. You know, like a secretary. Who does call the energy company to handle the bosses complaint about his personal bill because that time could be better spend on more productive work.
Want more out of your workers? Reduce their non-work load. A person has 100% energy, anything not spend on work is a waste. How many of you have taken a few hours off to take the car to the garage? Have the office flunky do it and gain some productive hours.
Same with the office itself. If a programmer has to load paper into the printer he ain't coding, not thinking about how to solve a valuable problem. So have people to do that.
It really ain't complicated. Get your development team a secretary. Watch productivity soar.
You are a fucking liar or a delusional douche bag republican. Leaks happen all the time? Oh really then WHY is the US government only going apeshit NOW and not all the time? Oh small leaks happen it is practically how governments do their business but that is information someone WANTS to leak who is part of the system. This information the system did NOT want to be leaked. It is one thing to leak some figures that make the other party look bad, it is quite another to leak something that makes your entire country look bad.
That Wikileaks is more then just a site that Assange is more then just whistleblower is shown by the reaction to the actions. If this was just another leak the US wouldn't be throwing a bi-partisan hissy fit of epic proportions.
The pentagon papers was the most recent similar case, do you call every 40 years regular?
Go back to sleep tea-bagger, the state says all if well so be happy.
Godwin be damned but the nazi's were bitten by commies, racists, anti-semites and biggots. Yes Americans, one of them is you or do you care to explain the moral difference between "Geine Juden" and "Whites Only"? The russians is obvious and the British racial crimes are so many that god has reserved a special place in hell for them, it is called england and it is a bleak and desperate place indeed to be damned to live in.
Real heroes ain't supermen, they are people who decided to standup when most bent over and they don't always standup for purely noble reasons. Many a soldier fought for freedom but joined for the excitement. The fireman who rescues you from a burning house still cashes a paycheck and doesn't life on the adoration alone.
So you don't have a problem with fake results appearing in your google results then complain about fake results in your google results?
Your second paragraph is EXACTLY what people are complaining about. Instead of searching for reviews and finding reviews you get countless filler sites that have zero content but get rated higher.
But to be honest, this has always been an issue and we are just getting more demanding. Most tech improves perceptibly over time but search engines are still stuck in the dark ages of 2000. Personally I have long believed there is a room for an engine that allows people to easily filter their searches and share their filters.
The point is that some people just can't accept that a successfull site can be run without ads. So they use every single event to push their idea EVEN if the event disproves it. See climate change denialist. Hottest year, coldest winter but everything is just fine...
I don't think you need to worry. Gosh, aren't those famous last words? People think this is a race of Palin vs Obama in NORMAL circumstances. But what if in the week before the election something happens. Say a terrorist attack? A scandal? A mosque is build somewhere in the USA?
The likes of Palin always go up and down, and every thinks they can never recover from their downs. But the populist vote is always unpredictable and if the reason for their popularity isn't addressed (a fundemental distrust of the way the world is run) then anything can make their popularity rise again.
We got our own Palin in Holland. Geert Wilders. He wasn't a real threath as well. But he controls the government right now and despite that so far it has been a complete shambles and dropping results the REASON he was so popular hasn't been removed. And everytime an article happens like "5 youths attack young woman in train with hammer to steal phone" he gets another voter. Especially when the REAL story is that the youths had light tans (read Muslim immigrants) and this was part of a police description put out at the same time as the press release. Editing this out doesn't help at all, it just reinforces the believe that the "left" media is lying and that EVERY story about crime where race is not mentioned is done by Muslim immigrants.
Palin voters are not all right wingers in the way of anarchy style free market, they just see the houses in their street being foreclosed and nothing being done about it. They want SOMEONE to do SOMETHING. Palin's answer is that she is going to do something. Obama's answer is... well... what is it? Palin's answer is wrong BUT that is not what these people are hearing. They are seeing someone who can talk to them vs someone who can't. Obama has fallen into the trap that he has become part of the system. Might be the best way to at least get something done BUT the voter sees just another fat cat politician playing the game while the voters American Dream is falling to pieces.
Don't count Palin out yet. The source of her success is only growing. And even if she is gone, who is going to take her place.
A lot has been written in regards to Geert Wilders and 1932-1939 (Hitlers reign before WW2) but that in unfair. Geert is no Hitler BUT he MIGHT be one of the unknowns who lead the european countries leading UP to the election of Hitler. Hitler didn't create the nazi party and the national socialist agenda wasn't always the one that become best known for the holocaust. Palin/Wilders of the 1920's laid the foundation on which Hitler rose up. BUT ALSO the Obama's/Cohen's (dutch political figure who is blamed for the coddling of immigrants) they too helped, or failed to stop, the sentiment that lead to the growth of the extreme parties.
Read up on the pre-history of the nazi party and OPEN your eyes to see that it takes TWO sides to give an extreme party power. Bacteria can only grow on a nutritious surface. Do you blame rapid growith of bacteria on your kitchen counter on the bacteria or on the person who didn't clean the counter properly to stop the growth of bacteria and parasites?
Palin is not the disease, it is the symptom. You are fighting the fever, not the virus. I wouldn't celebrate when the fever goes down, the death of the patient might also be causing it.
No, it isn't banned. We the state don't ban anything. You just won't be doing business in this town.
I much rather have state censorship. The state can be voted out. Amazon can not.
So, you are free to publish a book that upsets the powers that be, you just won't be finding a publisher or bookstore to sell it. But freedom is ensured as long as you don't try to exercise it.
This guy would also defend "No jews allowed" or "Whites only" on private businesses. The dream he chases? I want none of it.
They have cunnincly replicated the drive-thru setup but when the little window opens a French man shoots you through the head, scoops out your liver and turns it into pate. It was widely protested in the EU as inhumane until it was pointed out only the Touristus Americanus falls into this trap. The American ambassador was asked for comments but he replied he couldn't answer the phone now because he was in the line at a drive-thru and hasn't been heard from since.
Slashdot wishes it to be known that is does not condone the wholesale slaughter of Americans for their livers or other organs and that anyone who puts this idea into practice must do so without express approval from the world wide community of food lovers.
Really, show me ONE SUV that actually uses its space for the work commute. Oh okay, so you found one in ALL of France, big whoop. But I think that Americans just can't grasp the problem. Europe is SMALLER en the cities are just not designed with big cars in mind. For that matter most Europeans just don't get the American road system. The two areas work at a totally different scale. For instance, my own commute takes about 45 minutes... by bicycle, car OR train. Really. The travel time is NOT in the distance but in the waiting. The car gets stuck in all kinds of traffic jams, the train suffers delays on one of the most crowded rail networks in the world and of course you got to get to and from the train station by a bus service that doesn't connect and the bicycle... actually that one is pretty good a very straight line with just one big pothole with no lights around it.
And SUV's are not just another car. Forget for a moment the type of driver inside of them who tend to be major assholes, two SUV's passing each other in a narrow street, and old european cities are nothing but narrow streets, and the cars typically slow down to pass each other. They take just that bit more space say a meter in a bumper to bumper traffic jams. 4 SUV's and you could have fitted a whole extra car in the extra space taken by a SUV. Parking is the same. The drivers feel safer so take more risks, not only does this make the risk similar again but the death toll on pedestrians and cyclist increases thanks to the SUV driver.
London had the congestion charging and despite that fact that it was universally hated (or so the popular press tell us) it worked. The difference is staggering. But it wasn't popular. ANY law will have opponents. If you try to find a way to get anything done that won't upset anyone, you will never get anything done and THAT will REALLY upset people.
You just want an excuse, because ONE SUV was once found to actually have a full load for a work commute, ALL SUV's should be allowed to drive with one person in congested city centers totally unfit for such large cars. NIMBY must be your middle name.
Oh and a congestion tax would also hit low pollution vehicles. So if I drive a small electric car filled with passengers I get to pay the same as a SUV with just the driver. SMART!
An old engineer retires after decades working in a factory. But some years after the factory machine breaks down and all the young engineers are baffled. Finally someone recalls the old engineer and asks him to come in, for a fee to see if he can fix it.
The engineer comes out of retirement and takes a look at the machine, walks to a part of it and hits it and the machine works again.
Everyone is happy, until the engineer sends his bill. $50.010.
The boss calls him, demanding to explain the charge for just one tap.
It is simple the engineer says: $10 for the tap. $50.000 for knowing WHERE to tap.
-----
The point is that there are workers and engineers. The workers should be judged on quantity, the engineers on quality. I myself have fixed small things that gave a tenfold increase in performance or dropped all errors from a system. What does that matter over building the original code? Well, 1/10th the server cost. A huge reduction in upset customers meaning less staff needed for support a huge recurring cost.
Who is worth more? The team that builds the car OR the one person who spots and fixed the fatal flaw with a gas pedal? Ask Toyota.
I just hate those pushy bankers. Why can't they just keep their place in line behind lawyers for who is going to get it when the revolution comes? Are they afraid we are going to run out of bullets or something?
Okay, so the line is lawyers, bankers, politicians, republicans. NO pushing ahead. We probably run out of bullets before we got to republicans but we can just have them watch Fox showing a video of a gun firing and they will drop dead from fright.
So what would happen in your non-regulated market all using the same grid if one company decides that 110 volt is for sissies and go the manly 220 volt of civilized countries?
Rules, regulation would forbid that? Ah!
You could of course create dozens of grids all next to each other. Copper after all costs NOTHING!
De-regulation has been done in MOST of the world for the majority of history and it SUCKS. Try a de-regulated bus service in Pakistan. Anyone with a truck can start one. Just have to guess were you end up at. And if you want to go somewhere it isn't economic to go? Then screw you!
People calling for a free market are delusional if not outright insane or lying. Most know perfectly well it can never work but hope to profit from the chaos. Why not deregulate the roads? Drive any side at any speed. Free market will sort it out (he who buys the biggest truck has the right of way).
The free market "works" in areas where setup costs and restrictions are minimal. And even with mobile phone stores there is regulation because towns rightly think that the entire highstreet turned into a mobile phone store is NOT the way to create a vibrant inner city. The amount of rules and regulation we have shows clearly that the free market cannot work in our modern civilized world, it never has.
You only have to look at regulation like opening times, advertising, environmental rules (and this can be as simple as not allowing big lorries to supply a shop at night), minimum wages, child labor laws, labor laws, health and safety standards, food standards that a free market is a pipe dream or a lie. The idiots think it is a dream, the powerful use it as a lie to keep the idiots under control. "No no, your power bill hasn't gone up by 100%, that is the choice of a free market! It will go down REAL soon any day now. Keep paying happy little consumer".
Allow a filter for kiddie porn and it won't be long before someone suggests since you can filter X you can also filter Y. Why do you think every sensible person who mattered was behind Larry Flynt and his smut? Because either you defend the smut you find disgusting or get censored yourself. It is only a matter of time before someone finds you in poor taste.
Yes, this does mean you must defend the possibility of having kiddie porn on the net. If you are not willing to tolerate toddler porn being transmitted then you are saying "censor anything you want on the internet". A very difficult position to take. Either you have freedom and people abusing it or you don't. And oddly enough even if you limit your own freedom, it don't stop the abusers. Take away "legal" kiddie porn and only child rapist will have kiddie porn... eh what? But the proof is clear, having sex with children is illegal in many ways in the Catholic church, doesn't seem to stop them does it? Child porn is already highly illegal in most countries and yet children keep being abused. The filters, they do NOTHING!
Except function as the introduction of filters for anything else the elite object to.
Though choice. Either surrender your freedom or be a child rape defender. Because ANYONE suggesting that the internet should not be censored and controlled wants to share child porn, just as everyone who defended Larry Flint wanted smut.
It is getting very hard to not be either a pedo or a terrorist these days. Think I will just surrender my freedom. So much easier and I can also get back to watching Idols.
Remember, any red-blooded American lusts after guns, not girls. You shoot women in the face with a magnum, not cum. And fondling boobies is something only pinko's and commies do. That is why there are so many of them. They just keep having sex! Degenerates. But the US will hold strong with a rigid fear of sex and the highest teenage pregnancy rate of any developed/civilized country... oh my god, did I just call Americans civilized? I feel so dirty.
I think the media is VERY aware. The media has an agenda, what that agenda is not the same for all media but you can see it clearly by how a story plays OR doesn't play. Girl in train is assaulted by 5 people, beaten with a hammer, 6th helps them escape by knocking out a window. The police description released to help find them says they got tinted skins, meaning in Holland and considering the area muslims. Now can you guys how few media happened to report this story at all and even if they did write down the police description?
But is the agenda left-leaning? Maybe BUT the non-reporting of skin tone of crimes leads those who think immigrants are to blame for everything to assume any crime reported without mention of race are immigrants. Not all crimes are done by immigrants but now people think they are because they assume the media is hiding it.
So what is the real motive of the media in hiding facts?
Could it be that the press reports on non-stories to bury stories they don't want to pay attention to? Far easier to publish a non-story like this then to deal with the backlash of reporting on crimes with racial data. Fill the newspapers with fluff, nobody bombs your offices for fluff.
Any mechanic who works for a roadside service company can tell you that peoples cars "break down" for the oddest reasons. Not enough petrol, wrong fuel, forgot to put in oil. All sorts of stuff that simply has to be maintained and replaced and doesn't leading to failure. Running out of petrol with your car is embarrising, running out of fuel in your airplane makes you a lawn dart or worse. I don't particularly care if some soccer-mom with the IQ of a weasel (sorry weasels) gets herself killed along with her kids. But if she crashes into my house, I would get upset.
What about the weather? Snow is bringing down europe but a car caught in a snow storm just becomes stuck. An aircraft? Has to divert. How far? Small airplane, small fuel tank. Can you imagine 100 soccer mom's lining up for an icy runway when they can barely park a car in summer on an empty lot? Or for that matter the business exec who thinks his beamer is a snow mobile and plows into a lamp post? Now that lamp post will be your apartment building.
As for controlling so many aircraft, LA airport is already uncontrollable and happily parked an airliner on a small jet years ago and things haven't got much better. Can you imagine a 100 or more increase in traffic figures? And if trained pilots from other countries already cause dangerous situations because they don't speak English, what will happen if hillbillies take to the air?
Just walk the street someday and notice for fun just how many cars stall for some reason or another. Oh it is not 1 per minute, but 1 per week would already cause a number of light aircraft accidents to severly burden the coffin industry. Would you step into a one-engined airliner?
No, someday we may have the tech AND the discipline but right now, the idea of the average road user in the air would have me make my next house a bunker, a deep one. SUV's in the sky... somethings just shouldn't be.
Oddly enough, if a book is good, I only read one at a time. Why would I need 4500 in my pocket. That would be like carrying 2 condoms... hopelessly optimistic.
Can you snif your new book, break it open? Scribe notes on it? Have it signed? Pass it on to your children? Hold the book your mother read to you and now you read to your kids?
And it would have to be a very small library for it to have just a couple thousand books. Does your ebook come with a kids corner? A librarian who does know that title of the book with that blue cover and it had this guy who met this girl you read 20 years ago? Does it have books you would never read but pick up because well you are there?
You are comparing a loving wife to a cow milking machine. Both might get you off, but geez, I can tell you the experience is just not the same.
There are lot of paid tests, but you pay a fixed fee for a standard test for YOUR equipment. No company can pay KEMA (I presume the dutch equivelant of LU) to test a competitors equipment and KEMA will never ever come out with a comparitive report. Your product either passes its test or not and that is all.
This is a bought report that tests a BETA of the paying company against 2 versions outdated production release of a competitor. If you can't see the bias right there, well... I think it is amazing that medical science has advanced so far that people born without a brain can survive!