Heart disease is a great one...Number one killer, across the board. Men worry about it, women...not so much.
My "favorite" statistic is the murder/assault rates for strangers vs acquaintances...There is this..."We're all going to be raped/killed in our beds" thing that people are just obsessed with. Violence is going to sneak up on them from some evil stranger...And it's almost always someone they know and trust.
People grab onto these big scary fears which hardly ever occur, and they ignore all the things that are familiar. People obsessing over terrorism when they're far far far more likely to be killed in a car wreck.
Just human nature to be distracted by shiny things. It's part of what we are.
The problem is always the same: It's design by committee, by a bunch of people whose jobs are on the line.
Look at all the great applications, that just blew up out of nowhere. They're all started by people who are so amazingly fucking stoked about this idea! It's the coolest thing ever! It's going to change the world! I used to work with a guy who had that vibe, and it's like fricking crack, those people are just so into it, and amazed by it, and they want to use it, they want it to be like their dreams, and they think about it constantly.
Contrast that with a group of people whose sole goal is to try to take apart this successful thing, and pick out its success, and put that into their own thing so it'll be successful. It's like taking a famous piece of art and trying to pull the art out of it...They're looking for an ephemeral thing. They don't know why it's cool. They don't know what it is about it that makes it great.
The thing is, YouTube is hardly unique. The idea is a simple idea. There are a lot of other sites out there that allow you to host your videos for other people to see. But it has that thing...That ephemeral thing...Hell in this case, it could just be that it built a great user base out of daily show clips, and now those people are putting great stuff on YouTube, so it has great content...And it's by no means certain that another venture, no matter how well funded, will be able to tap that secret sauce. They may though. Never underestimate the power of a sufficiently large integer with a "$" in front of it.
I'm a paranoid bastard. I got there the hard way, and its served me well a time or two. I can walk down a street, and spend the whole time thinking about bad things that can happen, and I'm inventive. I hunch involuntarily when I hear target shooting in the distance, even though I know I can't possibly be hit if I hear the shot.
I am a worst case scenario kinda guy, and I tend to avoid a lot of crap that comes down the pipe because of it, though admittedly it's not a fun way to live. I also tend to take a lot of crap about it, from men, women, coworkers, friends.
For every person who is rightly cautious, there are a dozen who never consider danger for a second...This is personal experience with people looking at me like I'm a lunatic for ever imagining a bad thing might happen in X situation.
Sure, a lot of females get sexually assaulted, but you should look up the actual crime statistics...The vast majority (70%) of sexual assaults come from family members, and acquaintances, not from random strangers. In the case of murder, only 14% of murders came from strangers who had no relation to the victim (as far as is known) (BJS).
Fearmongering about random strangers is a fricking joke. The calls are coming from inside the building, and the person on the other end of the line has a key. Rolling up your window ain't gonna help, because the trouble is probably in the car with you.
You know what you can do about it? Nothing. You can live your life like me, a fricking paranoiac who's creeped out to eat food prepared by other people, and is probably still gonna die in some stupid violent way...Or you can realize that that odds of anything bad happening are pretty damn low...50 to 1 against per year for all violent crime (BJS again), and while that doesn't mean never, not even close, it's pretty fricking slim to let it run your whole life.
Man, where have you been...The only person I can even imagine making a death threat to someone who writes java books is a programmer. You've never worked on a "team" with a programmer who would lose his fricking mind if anyone criticized his code?
Anyway, tech weenies are some of the most verbally nasty bastards on the internet...It's like they save up all the aggression from every time someone pisses them off, and then they spew it out all over the place when someone pisses 'em off online...It's specifically because they're not going to doing anything about it other than talk, that their talk is so nasty.
It's just a reality on the internet that people will make outrageous threats toward people they don't agree with. And internet or any other medium, if you piss off certain people they'll resort to physical threats...I sold off the last of my guns when I was 20, and bought the first of a new set after I someone my journalist wife pissed off started harassing us...The truth can be a weapon, and some people will treat it as such.
It's the way of the world, and it's unfortunate, but it's a fact of life. If you're afraid of death threats, possible harassment, and (unlikely) serious danger, don't do that sort of job. It's well and good to say that "This sort of thing should never happen" but it always has, and I'll bet it always will.
I'll bet they've added some more fricking metadata...They spent all that work trying to come up with a database filesystem...You know they didn't just toss all of that code. Also, they have all that "search your hard drive" functionality built in to compete with spotlight, so it has to index and categorize files, etc, etc, so your searches seem quick and responsive.
Just a bunch of bloat. Move the bits first, then go back and do the rest of that stuff during system slack time, but Windows does everything on the fly...Or on the crawl, as it were.
Even XP takes a lot longer to copy files than Linux, for example...It's just an artifact of the file system. I use a Linux server to back up my Windows machines, and I've seen it a hundred times...Ten minutes to copy up, a hour to copy down.
I don't necessarily think it's Microsoft out to screw people, it's just that they store a frickton of file information...I mean, it's undelete information, and fragmentation information, and system restore information...That's just the way Windows works, and it's the way it's always worked, and comparing it to something like Linux or OS X where the file system doesn't contain all that overhead, it's an apples to oranges comparison.
I think what he's getting at is that, for Windows, all of it's libraries have to be in place for it to be a functional system, whereas for linux, many libraries can be removed from the system without compromising functionality.
In the old days, they used to say, "Never install compilers, because if someone cracks your system, then they can use them to generate rootkits, etc." I still here people spouting that line, but the truth is, if they crack your system, they can bring those things in themselves, without much effort...Broadband has made that simple. Same is true with missing libraries...Lot of viruses work by replacing existing libraries with their own hacked versions, so having that library missing in the first place isn't going to make 'em even blink.
I think that trying to make your system less functional in order to limit your exposure when it gets cracked, isn't really the way to go. It's one thing to have one major application per system, and another to try and cut out libraries in the hopes that someone might need them while they're hacking you. One is compartmentalization, the other is pooping where you live.
If your security won't stand up to public scrutiny, then it isn't really secure...You're gambling on everyone being dumber than you, and they're probably not.
I did that once, and had problems, and then opened the machine up to find that they'd just squeezed a dime-sized glob of paste on the cpu, and then mashed the heat sink down on top of it...There was a visible gap between the CPU and the heatsink.
I "noticed" it almost immediately because of the massive increase in fan noise...the fan was supposed to be replaced with an identical fan, so I thought they'd just screwed me, but the fan was correct, so I checked the cpu, and voila, craptacularity.
The easiest way to apply thermal paste is to seat the processor, and then dump a glob of paste on it, and spread it as thin as you possibly can with a credit card or some other plastic scraping tool...Don't be afraid to scrape off the excess! That's what you're supposed to be doing! Then mash the heat sink down on it, and see if any squeezes out the sides...If it does, you've got too much. Scrape some more off. You should definitely be able to see the top of the CPU through the paste.
Easy as pie. The only time I ever saw anyone have problems was with one of those old Socket A AMD processors, where you had to have a fricking screwdriver to force the metal clamps on the heatsink into place...Lot of people put holes in their motherboards while installing one of those chips.
Chris Tolkien annoys the crap out of me, though, admittedly, more for "original" tripe like The Treason of Isengard than for compilations like the Silmarillion...He's definitely out to make a buck on his father's work.
What a guy question. Your testicles are inside of your body but are they technically part of your body? There is a hell of a lot less connecting them to your body than there is connecting the placenta and all it contains to a woman's body, not to mention the fact that its a hell of a lot farther inside.
A fertilized egg is a potential human being. This is a valuable thing. But it is not something with rights, or independent legal standing. It is not something that can survive without a huge commitment from a willing female. And if said female is not willing, then that egg should be discarded.
Technically it's not advertising. There are very strict rules about advertising on not-for-profit radio. You can't include a "call to action" (e.g. "Go out and buy X") or anything similar, and I'm pretty sure you can't mention specific commercial products.
Basically all you can say is, "The preceding programming was brought to you by the fine folks at X, who make many fine products that I can't tell you about."
I missed the Halon era in the datacenters, but I got caught in a Co2 fire suppression system not too long ago, so I can imagine the situation. With us, it was a faulty sensor that tripped the fire suppression, so everything is normal, then the fire alarm goes off and the fricking Co2 starts roaring out, and everyone starts running like hell...It was a full bore high pressure suppression system, like you'd see on industrial machinery, so the time to get out was pretty low.
Seems like, all things being equal, it'd be a lot safer to have a Co2 suppression system ready than to maintain a constant low-oxygen environment. They have low pressure systems, that fill the room slowly enough to not be a danger to employees (especially slow moving ones which covers a lot of IT personnel).
It's not sad. Jesus, they were still measuring things in "War and Peace"'s a few years ago! At least now they're measuring it in an actual digital object, and moreover, it makes sense to a lot of people because a lot of people have gotten to the point where they actually appreciate that those files on their computer have an actual "size" at all!
It seems lame to us...Hell I remember when hard drives measured in tens of megabytes, and space was a real issue, all the time. Geeks deal in so many different types of digital files, so many different formats...Tell a geek its "45 hours of mp3 music" and they'll say, "At what bitrate?"
But for a layman to actually be able to measure space in terms of things that you can't physically touch? That's a pretty big accomplishment.
Where I learned it has to do with what, exactly? Philo=Friend Sophos=Wisdom. Anyway, you're wrong. I was a Cognitive Science major, so, in order to get my "philosophy" degree, I had a high requirement for physics, comp sci, and anatomy, as well as pure philosophy courses.
Argue all you want about the fluffy sciences, and I won't blink, but philosophy covers way too much ground to be so easily pigeonholed.
Easiest way to explain lift to a layman is using Bernoulli's principles dealing with differential pressure...in the case of an airplane, the shape of a wing creates an area of lower pressure above the wing resulting in an upward force perpendicular to the flow of air.
Drag is the measure of the friction on an object as it moves through a fluid. Basically, it's the force that acts perpendicular to the force of lift, so where lift is generated perpendicular to the line of travel of an object through a fluid, drag is generated in parallel with the movement of the same object.
That's what you get when you ask a philosophy student (B.A Philosophy, '97) to describe lift and drag...Might help if you remember that Newton was a philosopher. Putting us in the same category as Sociologists is like confusing "Astrologer" and "Astronomer".
Eh, I'm still glad to see a company put that out there. It's good work, pure science, and the results aren't "owned" by anyone.
Definitely makes me think more kindly of Sony...It's obviously a PR scam, but I really don't care...They could have done a lot of different things for PR, and this one will actually do some good.
How about the isolated mad cow cows from a few years back, where they traced it back to individual cows?
Every cow has a number. Every number has records about shots and illnesses, etc...I don't need a study to know that, I just need to know that they have to have a method to keep from double dosing animals. You're probably right; that info isn't passed along to the slaughterhouse, but I guarantee it's collected, and it easily could be passed along.
How about imported fruits? One of the things I find amusing is that fruit from countries with lax pesticide laws is freely available here, despite the laws we make to protect consumers from known harmful pesticides. It should be labeled, so that people can make an informed decision.
As for public panic, I frankly don't care. If they worry that people will stop eating their produce because of what they put in it, maybe they should think twice about what they put in it.
Oh come on, like they don't do meat inspections, and like they don't track what they give to each cow in terms of drugs. Like they don't know what wheat variant grew in what field, and where that wheat ended up...I think I recall a batch of e coli-contaminated spinach that they traced down to one field.
So don't spout the industry line at me, that any requirement for them to share data which they damn well collect will cause all prices to go through the roof and end food production as we know it...Hell they said that when the inspections to make sure that meat was freshly killed and relatively free of human fingers were instituted (a hundred and one years ago), and it doesn't seem to have destroyed the industry, despite what the industry maintained at the time.
You may be happy to have people feed you whatever they want to, but I'd at least like to know.
I think it's deeper than that. Come right down to it, we're pack creatures...We live in social groups. When a member of our social group starts acting in a way that's bad for the pack as a whole we shun them...if it gets worse, we punish them, and if it gets unbearable, we remove them.
Call it morality if you like, but it's really more of a refined social instinct.
Well Greenpeace is not a reliable source in this instance, so it's hardly surprising that they're announcing very strong findings on disputable data.
That being said, I'd prefer that aggressively GM'd crops had to be labeled as such, so I could do my own damn research. Likewise meat products treated with x, y, or z hormone/antibiotic/preservative. If I bought a damn pop tart, I'd know more about what was in it than in a steak which costs 10 times as much.
Slashdot Mirror
Heart disease is a great one...Number one killer, across the board. Men worry about it, women...not so much.
My "favorite" statistic is the murder/assault rates for strangers vs acquaintances...There is this..."We're all going to be raped/killed in our beds" thing that people are just obsessed with. Violence is going to sneak up on them from some evil stranger...And it's almost always someone they know and trust.
People grab onto these big scary fears which hardly ever occur, and they ignore all the things that are familiar. People obsessing over terrorism when they're far far far more likely to be killed in a car wreck.
Just human nature to be distracted by shiny things. It's part of what we are.
The problem is always the same: It's design by committee, by a bunch of people whose jobs are on the line.
Look at all the great applications, that just blew up out of nowhere. They're all started by people who are so amazingly fucking stoked about this idea! It's the coolest thing ever! It's going to change the world! I used to work with a guy who had that vibe, and it's like fricking crack, those people are just so into it, and amazed by it, and they want to use it, they want it to be like their dreams, and they think about it constantly.
Contrast that with a group of people whose sole goal is to try to take apart this successful thing, and pick out its success, and put that into their own thing so it'll be successful. It's like taking a famous piece of art and trying to pull the art out of it...They're looking for an ephemeral thing. They don't know why it's cool. They don't know what it is about it that makes it great.
The thing is, YouTube is hardly unique. The idea is a simple idea. There are a lot of other sites out there that allow you to host your videos for other people to see. But it has that thing...That ephemeral thing...Hell in this case, it could just be that it built a great user base out of daily show clips, and now those people are putting great stuff on YouTube, so it has great content...And it's by no means certain that another venture, no matter how well funded, will be able to tap that secret sauce. They may though. Never underestimate the power of a sufficiently large integer with a "$" in front of it.
I'm a paranoid bastard. I got there the hard way, and its served me well a time or two. I can walk down a street, and spend the whole time thinking about bad things that can happen, and I'm inventive. I hunch involuntarily when I hear target shooting in the distance, even though I know I can't possibly be hit if I hear the shot.
I am a worst case scenario kinda guy, and I tend to avoid a lot of crap that comes down the pipe because of it, though admittedly it's not a fun way to live. I also tend to take a lot of crap about it, from men, women, coworkers, friends.
For every person who is rightly cautious, there are a dozen who never consider danger for a second...This is personal experience with people looking at me like I'm a lunatic for ever imagining a bad thing might happen in X situation.
Sure, a lot of females get sexually assaulted, but you should look up the actual crime statistics...The vast majority (70%) of sexual assaults come from family members, and acquaintances, not from random strangers. In the case of murder, only 14% of murders came from strangers who had no relation to the victim (as far as is known) (BJS).
Fearmongering about random strangers is a fricking joke. The calls are coming from inside the building, and the person on the other end of the line has a key. Rolling up your window ain't gonna help, because the trouble is probably in the car with you.
You know what you can do about it? Nothing. You can live your life like me, a fricking paranoiac who's creeped out to eat food prepared by other people, and is probably still gonna die in some stupid violent way...Or you can realize that that odds of anything bad happening are pretty damn low...50 to 1 against per year for all violent crime (BJS again), and while that doesn't mean never, not even close, it's pretty fricking slim to let it run your whole life.
Man, where have you been...The only person I can even imagine making a death threat to someone who writes java books is a programmer. You've never worked on a "team" with a programmer who would lose his fricking mind if anyone criticized his code?
Anyway, tech weenies are some of the most verbally nasty bastards on the internet...It's like they save up all the aggression from every time someone pisses them off, and then they spew it out all over the place when someone pisses 'em off online...It's specifically because they're not going to doing anything about it other than talk, that their talk is so nasty.
It's just a reality on the internet that people will make outrageous threats toward people they don't agree with. And internet or any other medium, if you piss off certain people they'll resort to physical threats...I sold off the last of my guns when I was 20, and bought the first of a new set after I someone my journalist wife pissed off started harassing us...The truth can be a weapon, and some people will treat it as such.
It's the way of the world, and it's unfortunate, but it's a fact of life. If you're afraid of death threats, possible harassment, and (unlikely) serious danger, don't do that sort of job. It's well and good to say that "This sort of thing should never happen" but it always has, and I'll bet it always will.
I'll bet they've added some more fricking metadata...They spent all that work trying to come up with a database filesystem...You know they didn't just toss all of that code. Also, they have all that "search your hard drive" functionality built in to compete with spotlight, so it has to index and categorize files, etc, etc, so your searches seem quick and responsive.
Just a bunch of bloat. Move the bits first, then go back and do the rest of that stuff during system slack time, but Windows does everything on the fly...Or on the crawl, as it were.
Even XP takes a lot longer to copy files than Linux, for example...It's just an artifact of the file system. I use a Linux server to back up my Windows machines, and I've seen it a hundred times...Ten minutes to copy up, a hour to copy down.
I don't necessarily think it's Microsoft out to screw people, it's just that they store a frickton of file information...I mean, it's undelete information, and fragmentation information, and system restore information...That's just the way Windows works, and it's the way it's always worked, and comparing it to something like Linux or OS X where the file system doesn't contain all that overhead, it's an apples to oranges comparison.
it's = its
here = hear
puppy = tired
I think what he's getting at is that, for Windows, all of it's libraries have to be in place for it to be a functional system, whereas for linux, many libraries can be removed from the system without compromising functionality.
In the old days, they used to say, "Never install compilers, because if someone cracks your system, then they can use them to generate rootkits, etc." I still here people spouting that line, but the truth is, if they crack your system, they can bring those things in themselves, without much effort...Broadband has made that simple. Same is true with missing libraries...Lot of viruses work by replacing existing libraries with their own hacked versions, so having that library missing in the first place isn't going to make 'em even blink.
I think that trying to make your system less functional in order to limit your exposure when it gets cracked, isn't really the way to go. It's one thing to have one major application per system, and another to try and cut out libraries in the hopes that someone might need them while they're hacking you. One is compartmentalization, the other is pooping where you live.
If your security won't stand up to public scrutiny, then it isn't really secure...You're gambling on everyone being dumber than you, and they're probably not.
I did that once, and had problems, and then opened the machine up to find that they'd just squeezed a dime-sized glob of paste on the cpu, and then mashed the heat sink down on top of it...There was a visible gap between the CPU and the heatsink.
I "noticed" it almost immediately because of the massive increase in fan noise...the fan was supposed to be replaced with an identical fan, so I thought they'd just screwed me, but the fan was correct, so I checked the cpu, and voila, craptacularity.
The easiest way to apply thermal paste is to seat the processor, and then dump a glob of paste on it, and spread it as thin as you possibly can with a credit card or some other plastic scraping tool...Don't be afraid to scrape off the excess! That's what you're supposed to be doing! Then mash the heat sink down on it, and see if any squeezes out the sides...If it does, you've got too much. Scrape some more off. You should definitely be able to see the top of the CPU through the paste.
Easy as pie. The only time I ever saw anyone have problems was with one of those old Socket A AMD processors, where you had to have a fricking screwdriver to force the metal clamps on the heatsink into place...Lot of people put holes in their motherboards while installing one of those chips.
It's his notes. There is a huge difference.
Chris Tolkien annoys the crap out of me, though, admittedly, more for "original" tripe like The Treason of Isengard than for compilations like the Silmarillion...He's definitely out to make a buck on his father's work.
What a guy question. Your testicles are inside of your body but are they technically part of your body? There is a hell of a lot less connecting them to your body than there is connecting the placenta and all it contains to a woman's body, not to mention the fact that its a hell of a lot farther inside.
A fertilized egg is a potential human being. This is a valuable thing. But it is not something with rights, or independent legal standing. It is not something that can survive without a huge commitment from a willing female. And if said female is not willing, then that egg should be discarded.
Technically it's not advertising. There are very strict rules about advertising on not-for-profit radio. You can't include a "call to action" (e.g. "Go out and buy X") or anything similar, and I'm pretty sure you can't mention specific commercial products.
Basically all you can say is, "The preceding programming was brought to you by the fine folks at X, who make many fine products that I can't tell you about."
I missed the Halon era in the datacenters, but I got caught in a Co2 fire suppression system not too long ago, so I can imagine the situation. With us, it was a faulty sensor that tripped the fire suppression, so everything is normal, then the fire alarm goes off and the fricking Co2 starts roaring out, and everyone starts running like hell...It was a full bore high pressure suppression system, like you'd see on industrial machinery, so the time to get out was pretty low.
Seems like, all things being equal, it'd be a lot safer to have a Co2 suppression system ready than to maintain a constant low-oxygen environment. They have low pressure systems, that fill the room slowly enough to not be a danger to employees (especially slow moving ones which covers a lot of IT personnel).
It's not sad. Jesus, they were still measuring things in "War and Peace"'s a few years ago! At least now they're measuring it in an actual digital object, and moreover, it makes sense to a lot of people because a lot of people have gotten to the point where they actually appreciate that those files on their computer have an actual "size" at all!
It seems lame to us...Hell I remember when hard drives measured in tens of megabytes, and space was a real issue, all the time. Geeks deal in so many different types of digital files, so many different formats...Tell a geek its "45 hours of mp3 music" and they'll say, "At what bitrate?"
But for a layman to actually be able to measure space in terms of things that you can't physically touch? That's a pretty big accomplishment.
What, like logic?
Not all philosophy is continental philosophy.
Where I learned it has to do with what, exactly? Philo=Friend Sophos=Wisdom. Anyway, you're wrong. I was a Cognitive Science major, so, in order to get my "philosophy" degree, I had a high requirement for physics, comp sci, and anatomy, as well as pure philosophy courses.
Argue all you want about the fluffy sciences, and I won't blink, but philosophy covers way too much ground to be so easily pigeonholed.
Easiest way to explain lift to a layman is using Bernoulli's principles dealing with differential pressure...in the case of an airplane, the shape of a wing creates an area of lower pressure above the wing resulting in an upward force perpendicular to the flow of air.
Drag is the measure of the friction on an object as it moves through a fluid. Basically, it's the force that acts perpendicular to the force of lift, so where lift is generated perpendicular to the line of travel of an object through a fluid, drag is generated in parallel with the movement of the same object.
That's what you get when you ask a philosophy student (B.A Philosophy, '97) to describe lift and drag...Might help if you remember that Newton was a philosopher. Putting us in the same category as Sociologists is like confusing "Astrologer" and "Astronomer".
Because, compared to bringing in water from other planets in the solar system, that water purification thing is EXPENSIVE!
Eh, I'm still glad to see a company put that out there. It's good work, pure science, and the results aren't "owned" by anyone.
Definitely makes me think more kindly of Sony...It's obviously a PR scam, but I really don't care...They could have done a lot of different things for PR, and this one will actually do some good.
How about the isolated mad cow cows from a few years back, where they traced it back to individual cows?
Every cow has a number. Every number has records about shots and illnesses, etc...I don't need a study to know that, I just need to know that they have to have a method to keep from double dosing animals. You're probably right; that info isn't passed along to the slaughterhouse, but I guarantee it's collected, and it easily could be passed along.
How about imported fruits? One of the things I find amusing is that fruit from countries with lax pesticide laws is freely available here, despite the laws we make to protect consumers from known harmful pesticides. It should be labeled, so that people can make an informed decision.
As for public panic, I frankly don't care. If they worry that people will stop eating their produce because of what they put in it, maybe they should think twice about what they put in it.
Oh come on, like they don't do meat inspections, and like they don't track what they give to each cow in terms of drugs. Like they don't know what wheat variant grew in what field, and where that wheat ended up...I think I recall a batch of e coli-contaminated spinach that they traced down to one field.
So don't spout the industry line at me, that any requirement for them to share data which they damn well collect will cause all prices to go through the roof and end food production as we know it...Hell they said that when the inspections to make sure that meat was freshly killed and relatively free of human fingers were instituted (a hundred and one years ago), and it doesn't seem to have destroyed the industry, despite what the industry maintained at the time.
You may be happy to have people feed you whatever they want to, but I'd at least like to know.
I think it's deeper than that. Come right down to it, we're pack creatures...We live in social groups. When a member of our social group starts acting in a way that's bad for the pack as a whole we shun them...if it gets worse, we punish them, and if it gets unbearable, we remove them.
Call it morality if you like, but it's really more of a refined social instinct.
Well Greenpeace is not a reliable source in this instance, so it's hardly surprising that they're announcing very strong findings on disputable data.
That being said, I'd prefer that aggressively GM'd crops had to be labeled as such, so I could do my own damn research. Likewise meat products treated with x, y, or z hormone/antibiotic/preservative. If I bought a damn pop tart, I'd know more about what was in it than in a steak which costs 10 times as much.