On the upside, we do have unlimited unpaid days off,
Unfortunately, with many jobs you can't take advantage of a few of those days without taking them all off. I'd be just as happy with 20 days government-mandated unpaid leave as 20 days of paid leave (provided annual salary remained the same). Of course, if there were mandated unpaid leave days, most salary-paying employers would just give paid days anyway, since it makes it easier for payroll to keep track of.
Given Mr. Coleman's limited budget, to save save money, he only used a single campaign sign and posted it on the web. It's an interesting take on IP rights, given that the used another sign to create his.
Ummm... No. Windows 3.1 and older Macs (up to OS 8.0) used pretty much comparable cooperative multitasking models. Time-slicing generally can't happen under these models. It's the more modern preemptive schedulers that use time slices. They avoid the issues of giving time to idle threads by keeping track of the running status of processes, and only giving time to threads that are ready to do work, and ignoring those that are idle/waiting on the kernel/of lower priority.
Geocentrism (the belief) is a known false idea that you'd have to be an idiot to continue to believe in. Geocentrism (the model) is useful insofar as its predections match reality. Taking just the earth-moon-sun trio, I can accurately model eclipses, tides, lunar cycles, seasons, etc.. It's just a model - an abstraction (although not particularly useful).
Similarly, just because the earth is round, doesn't mean that a map of my city can't be projected onto a flat piece of paper and still be useful. Likewise, in a typical electrical circuit, I can model the "current" flowing from positive to negative, despite that fact that for the most part, it's negative electrons flowing in the reverse direction.
A "belief" in a scientific model is misplaced. Whether quantum mechanics works the way it does because our model represents reality, or because reality is different but behaves in an analogous fashion, or whether we're just bumping into the limits of the supercomputer that is simulating us is irrelevant. If it works, use it. When we hit the limitations of the model and devise a new one, we don't have to throw out the old model, we just need to realize its limitations.
What does it mean to believe in QM, though? I believe that it makes predictions that accurately describe what we can see and measure. Does that mean that the models it uses constitute a true understanding of how the universe behaves? These aren't things you can believe in or not believe in - either they work in a given situation or they don't. I don't "believe" in Newton's laws of motion. They fairly accurately predict what happens in certain real-life situations, but we know that they are only helpful models that simplify what is actually happening. A theory is only useful insofar as it makes predictions about reality. QM does a good job at that, but if something better comes along that is either simpler and makes the same predictions, or makes better predictions, then QM will join geocentrism in the list of useful, but outdated models.
It's not like geocentrism isn't a useful theory - you can come up with complicated fomulae to predict the motions of the planet and whatnot, if you're staying on earth. The geocentric model is much simpler if you just want to observe the orbit of the moon and the sun. It's just when you start looking at the other planets and trying to tie in things like gravity that things get much simpler to model if you switch to a heliocentric view. Is it really that different from switching between polar and cartesian coordinate systems?
No, it's the absolute determinism of the universe that is stopping from concluding that the universe is deterministic. Neither you, nor locality had any choice in the matter.
Concrete usually has a pH in the range of 12 - roughly that of drain cleaner. If you're safe gardening without protective gloves, your soil is less alkaline than concrete.
You're correct up to this point. Even with a mandatory hardware-based trusted computing platform, there will still be users out there being tricked into entering their banking details into a strange website (or even over the phone).
Once someone's pointing a gun at you, you're pretty much too late to do anything but talk your way out of it. Trying to go for your gun is the surest way to get yourself shot. If you're going to defend yourself with a gun, you've got to do it before they have theirs pointed at you.
Are there kinder gentler criminals in other countries?
Pretty much, yes. Random break and enters that result in rape and/or murder happen so rarely in Canada that they're basically a statistical anomaly. When such a thing does happen, it makes national news for a week. I can't speak for other countries, but I suspect the same can be said for most of northern Europe (or any other successful socialist country).
We do get random break-and-enters, but generally if someone's at home, it was due to bad planning on the criminal's part and they run away.
Um.. interesting quote, but I'm not sure why you're replying to my comment with it. Are you trying to say that Benjamin Franklin suffered from wanting to cancel all programs, except those that specifically benefited him? Or that he wanted to not pay taxes and yet have all the social programs he could imagine? Or are you saying that he falls into the "bombastic blogger" category and has chosen a side to represent, disregarding any sympathies he may have with the opposite side?
In any case, Benjamin Franklin, as smart as he was, died 220 years ago. We no longer think it's acceptable to leave those unable to care for themselves to die. There is a distinction between those unable to care for themselves, and those unwilling to care for themselves that is often ignored. Capitalists often talk as if all the poor are just lazy mooches, and socialists often talk as if all the poor are mentally-deficient cripples. Neither is true, and finding ways to take care of those who need it, while discouraging abuse is where the discussion needs to be. Not in all-or-nothing absolutes.
Bloggers get an audience by vehemently choosing one side or the other and pouring on the vitriol to make for an entertaining read. Most people, including those same bombastic bloggers, feel that there is something of value in both sides. In the best case scenario, this leads to a healthy discussion of what level of healthcare should be funded and/or regulated by the government. In the rather-more-common case it leads to people violently supporting both at the same time. Hence, the railing against socialist programs while applying for medicare. Or cheating on taxes, and at the same time complaining that the government isn't spending enough money on policing. Or, for a concrete example, Craig T. Nelson of "Coach" complaining that he never received any help when he was out of a job:
"What happened to society? I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No. They gave me hope, they gave me encouragement, and they gave me a vision."
Yeah, but it's one out of one! Every earth-like planet we've been able to analyze closely has support intelligent life (and humanoid intelligent life, at that). If journalistic statistics have taught me anything, it's that there's no reason to pay heed to selection bias, so I'm pretty sure every star has a planet with nearly the exact same conditions as earth.
But again, you're missing out externalities. The amount any given person is willing to pay is one thing, but it doesn't factor in how much the nation as a whole benefits from reduced car traffic, in the form of lower road maintenance, reduced pollution, and less dependence on foreign oil. In the ideal rational world, where we could directly measure these external benefits, the subsidies could be correspondingly adjusted, and we could get an accurate view of the company's worth.
That not liberal vs. conservative, that's socialist vs. capitalist.
The liberal/conservative scale in this case article refers to the degree of acceptance of change and differences in others. In this case, the most liberal act would be assume that people are homeless because they enjoy it, and revere them for challenging the status-quo. Next moving toward conservatism, you would acknowledge that everyone gets hungry and help them get food (either via private charity or government programs), but still not making the assumption that they have the desire to get off the streets. Next you would assume that homeless people really want to live a "normal" life, but are somehow prevented from doing so. In this case you give them opportunities to get jobs/housing so they can get back into society, or treat whatever addictions/illnesses they have. Next you assume that the majority of homeless people are there due to laziness. They had the same opportunities you had, but just couldn't or wouldn't cut it, or had some hippie aversion to joining "the machine". You (or the government) give them some food out of common decency, but aren't really wanting to do much for them unless they show some sign of wanting to reform. The most conservative view is to either ignore homeless people (or jail them so they're easier to ignore). Obviously anyone on the street is messed up in some way (likely of their own fault), and they are less human than the rest of us.
Certainly socialism as practiced by the USSR fell quite far to the conservative side. The government controlled the economy, but had no time for people who fell outside of the norm. The US with its capitalism officially falls quite far to the liberal side, with ADA, protection of minorities, religion, sexual orientation, etc... but has some vocal extremes on both sides.
If by "slow adoption", you mean the "fastest selling OS ever", and if by "niche product", you mean "sold more units than all versions of the iPhone and currently #2 in console sales", then yes, I'd have to agree with your first statement.
The rest of your comment I can agree with at face value. Microsoft needs to stick with a few things and do them WELL. All these half starts with their phones, and tablets, and etc... are killing any new buzz they try and generate. One of their biggest selling values in the corporate world is their backwards compatibility and long term support for their OSs. I can still pop in my Wordstar floppy from the 80s and open my grade-school assignments on my i7 running 64-bit windows 7, 25 years later - nearly complete binary level compatibility. (I do have to run it in XP compatibility mode, since 16 bit support has been dropped.) And yet here they are dropping support for Windows Mobile after just a couple years - not even unix-style recompile-for-a-new-platform compatibility.
Given the stuff that is being approved, I think this is it exactly. It's sad that it's easier to get these gimmicks approved than something that's actually useful.
First, I think you're giving Mrs. Wilder less credit than she deserves, given that she lived well into the 1950s, I don't think a highway interchange would have phased her much. That being said, I recently applied the reverse of the proposed "Laura Ingalls test" and brought my 5 years old to a replica 1880s town featuring a 1 room prairie school house. We had a very difficult time convincing him that it was a school. In his opinion, a school needs to have books, tables and not desks, whiteboards and not chalkboards, electric lights, and of course, a sand table, lego, toy cars, easals and painting supplies, and computers. He couldn't wrap his head around why you'd need inkwells or slates.
Slashdot Mirror
On the upside, we do have unlimited unpaid days off,
Unfortunately, with many jobs you can't take advantage of a few of those days without taking them all off. I'd be just as happy with 20 days government-mandated unpaid leave as 20 days of paid leave (provided annual salary remained the same). Of course, if there were mandated unpaid leave days, most salary-paying employers would just give paid days anyway, since it makes it easier for payroll to keep track of.
...if a game gives you that then it must be pretty immersive.
Not really - Descent from 1995 was notorious for giving people motion sickness, and looking at a blocky 640x480 14" screen can hardly be called immersive.
Given Mr. Coleman's limited budget, to save save money, he only used a single campaign sign and posted it on the web. It's an interesting take on IP rights, given that the used another sign to create his.
Windows 3.1 used to use time slicing
Ummm... No. Windows 3.1 and older Macs (up to OS 8.0) used pretty much comparable cooperative multitasking models. Time-slicing generally can't happen under these models. It's the more modern preemptive schedulers that use time slices. They avoid the issues of giving time to idle threads by keeping track of the running status of processes, and only giving time to threads that are ready to do work, and ignoring those that are idle/waiting on the kernel/of lower priority.
Geocentrism (the belief) is a known false idea that you'd have to be an idiot to continue to believe in. Geocentrism (the model) is useful insofar as its predections match reality. Taking just the earth-moon-sun trio, I can accurately model eclipses, tides, lunar cycles, seasons, etc.. It's just a model - an abstraction (although not particularly useful).
Similarly, just because the earth is round, doesn't mean that a map of my city can't be projected onto a flat piece of paper and still be useful. Likewise, in a typical electrical circuit, I can model the "current" flowing from positive to negative, despite that fact that for the most part, it's negative electrons flowing in the reverse direction.
A "belief" in a scientific model is misplaced. Whether quantum mechanics works the way it does because our model represents reality, or because reality is different but behaves in an analogous fashion, or whether we're just bumping into the limits of the supercomputer that is simulating us is irrelevant. If it works, use it. When we hit the limitations of the model and devise a new one, we don't have to throw out the old model, we just need to realize its limitations.
What does it mean to believe in QM, though? I believe that it makes predictions that accurately describe what we can see and measure. Does that mean that the models it uses constitute a true understanding of how the universe behaves? These aren't things you can believe in or not believe in - either they work in a given situation or they don't. I don't "believe" in Newton's laws of motion. They fairly accurately predict what happens in certain real-life situations, but we know that they are only helpful models that simplify what is actually happening. A theory is only useful insofar as it makes predictions about reality. QM does a good job at that, but if something better comes along that is either simpler and makes the same predictions, or makes better predictions, then QM will join geocentrism in the list of useful, but outdated models.
It's not like geocentrism isn't a useful theory - you can come up with complicated fomulae to predict the motions of the planet and whatnot, if you're staying on earth. The geocentric model is much simpler if you just want to observe the orbit of the moon and the sun. It's just when you start looking at the other planets and trying to tie in things like gravity that things get much simpler to model if you switch to a heliocentric view. Is it really that different from switching between polar and cartesian coordinate systems?
No, it's the absolute determinism of the universe that is stopping from concluding that the universe is deterministic. Neither you, nor locality had any choice in the matter.
Concrete usually has a pH in the range of 12 - roughly that of drain cleaner. If you're safe gardening without protective gloves, your soil is less alkaline than concrete.
Someone will always be able to fool the users.
You're correct up to this point. Even with a mandatory hardware-based trusted computing platform, there will still be users out there being tricked into entering their banking details into a strange website (or even over the phone).
Once someone's pointing a gun at you, you're pretty much too late to do anything but talk your way out of it. Trying to go for your gun is the surest way to get yourself shot. If you're going to defend yourself with a gun, you've got to do it before they have theirs pointed at you.
Are there kinder gentler criminals in other countries?
Pretty much, yes. Random break and enters that result in rape and/or murder happen so rarely in Canada that they're basically a statistical anomaly. When such a thing does happen, it makes national news for a week. I can't speak for other countries, but I suspect the same can be said for most of northern Europe (or any other successful socialist country).
We do get random break-and-enters, but generally if someone's at home, it was due to bad planning on the criminal's part and they run away.
It's very sad for superheros in Canada. We just can't compete with the kind of crime they get down in the US.
Um.. interesting quote, but I'm not sure why you're replying to my comment with it. Are you trying to say that Benjamin Franklin suffered from wanting to cancel all programs, except those that specifically benefited him? Or that he wanted to not pay taxes and yet have all the social programs he could imagine? Or are you saying that he falls into the "bombastic blogger" category and has chosen a side to represent, disregarding any sympathies he may have with the opposite side?
In any case, Benjamin Franklin, as smart as he was, died 220 years ago. We no longer think it's acceptable to leave those unable to care for themselves to die. There is a distinction between those unable to care for themselves, and those unwilling to care for themselves that is often ignored. Capitalists often talk as if all the poor are just lazy mooches, and socialists often talk as if all the poor are mentally-deficient cripples. Neither is true, and finding ways to take care of those who need it, while discouraging abuse is where the discussion needs to be. Not in all-or-nothing absolutes.
Fair enough. Then I'd just say that your experience with normal people's blogs varies significantly from mine.
Bloggers get an audience by vehemently choosing one side or the other and pouring on the vitriol to make for an entertaining read. Most people, including those same bombastic bloggers, feel that there is something of value in both sides. In the best case scenario, this leads to a healthy discussion of what level of healthcare should be funded and/or regulated by the government. In the rather-more-common case it leads to people violently supporting both at the same time. Hence, the railing against socialist programs while applying for medicare. Or cheating on taxes, and at the same time complaining that the government isn't spending enough money on policing. Or, for a concrete example, Craig T. Nelson of "Coach" complaining that he never received any help when he was out of a job:
"What happened to society? I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No. They gave me hope, they gave me encouragement, and they gave me a vision."
Yeah, but it's one out of one! Every earth-like planet we've been able to analyze closely has support intelligent life (and humanoid intelligent life, at that). If journalistic statistics have taught me anything, it's that there's no reason to pay heed to selection bias, so I'm pretty sure every star has a planet with nearly the exact same conditions as earth.
But again, you're missing out externalities. The amount any given person is willing to pay is one thing, but it doesn't factor in how much the nation as a whole benefits from reduced car traffic, in the form of lower road maintenance, reduced pollution, and less dependence on foreign oil. In the ideal rational world, where we could directly measure these external benefits, the subsidies could be correspondingly adjusted, and we could get an accurate view of the company's worth.
That not liberal vs. conservative, that's socialist vs. capitalist.
The liberal/conservative scale in this case article refers to the degree of acceptance of change and differences in others. In this case, the most liberal act would be assume that people are homeless because they enjoy it, and revere them for challenging the status-quo. Next moving toward conservatism, you would acknowledge that everyone gets hungry and help them get food (either via private charity or government programs), but still not making the assumption that they have the desire to get off the streets. Next you would assume that homeless people really want to live a "normal" life, but are somehow prevented from doing so. In this case you give them opportunities to get jobs/housing so they can get back into society, or treat whatever addictions/illnesses they have. Next you assume that the majority of homeless people are there due to laziness. They had the same opportunities you had, but just couldn't or wouldn't cut it, or had some hippie aversion to joining "the machine". You (or the government) give them some food out of common decency, but aren't really wanting to do much for them unless they show some sign of wanting to reform. The most conservative view is to either ignore homeless people (or jail them so they're easier to ignore). Obviously anyone on the street is messed up in some way (likely of their own fault), and they are less human than the rest of us.
Certainly socialism as practiced by the USSR fell quite far to the conservative side. The government controlled the economy, but had no time for people who fell outside of the norm. The US with its capitalism officially falls quite far to the liberal side, with ADA, protection of minorities, religion, sexual orientation, etc... but has some vocal extremes on both sides.
The rest of your comment I can agree with at face value. Microsoft needs to stick with a few things and do them WELL. All these half starts with their phones, and tablets, and etc... are killing any new buzz they try and generate. One of their biggest selling values in the corporate world is their backwards compatibility and long term support for their OSs. I can still pop in my Wordstar floppy from the 80s and open my grade-school assignments on my i7 running 64-bit windows 7, 25 years later - nearly complete binary level compatibility. (I do have to run it in XP compatibility mode, since 16 bit support has been dropped.) And yet here they are dropping support for Windows Mobile after just a couple years - not even unix-style recompile-for-a-new-platform compatibility.
Given the stuff that is being approved, I think this is it exactly. It's sad that it's easier to get these gimmicks approved than something that's actually useful.
That's why Buckley's works so well. There's enough bitter in that to knock a person down. But it works..
You'd have have a bigger reduction of BPA intake by making sure you wash your hand every time you handle a thermal printed receipt.
New process: Start -> "notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" (without quotes) -> ctrl-shift-enter -> Allow escalation, then continue as above
First, I think you're giving Mrs. Wilder less credit than she deserves, given that she lived well into the 1950s, I don't think a highway interchange would have phased her much. That being said, I recently applied the reverse of the proposed "Laura Ingalls test" and brought my 5 years old to a replica 1880s town featuring a 1 room prairie school house. We had a very difficult time convincing him that it was a school. In his opinion, a school needs to have books, tables and not desks, whiteboards and not chalkboards, electric lights, and of course, a sand table, lego, toy cars, easals and painting supplies, and computers. He couldn't wrap his head around why you'd need inkwells or slates.
Using Powershell. Windows 2008 Server Core barely even has a GUI - it's all command line and remote management.