'"The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish"'
Since the constitution gives them the power to enter into binding treaties and we entered that one I think international war tribunals would fit neatly in that requirement.
Where did you get that idea? Have you ever actually met people who were in those camps? I knew a woman who was. The stories and the scars she shared suggest otherwise.
We also tested eugenics programs on the prisoners. Just like the Nazis.
'Mind you, I'm completely opposed to torture but I draw the line at giving enemy combatants (whether accorded POW status or not) access to our civilian judicial system.'
'Enemy combatant' is just a made up term with no meaning. You have criminals, and soldiers, either they are one or the other. Lets not forget, there are plenty of people locked up with absolutely no evidence or even valid suspicion against them.
But Guantanamo isn't the only camp we should clear out, we have a network of prisons abroad where the local government is detaining and torturing people on our behalf. That network needs shut down as well.
'When Al Quada starts fighting in uniform under the command of officers while taking steps to minimize civilian casualties I'll start worrying about the fact that they aren't being accorded POW status.'
Would you feel the same way about our special forces units? It isn't as if we do more than pay lip service to avoiding civilian casualties.
In any case, we went to war with Iraq (that war is already over) not terrorists.
Your argument is circular, either they are POW's and should get rights under the geneva convention or they are criminals and should be recognized to have the same rights we believe every human being has innately. You can't have it both ways.
'When has the Constitution ever been held to apply to prisoners of war?'
The only example of prisoners of war you will find would be iraqi soldiers captured on the battlefield. Everyone else was captured for potential criminal acts.
Don't take the 'war on terror' lingo too seriously.
You are offering a hypothetical situation to a real world example.
Instead, how about just making a reliable test? Multiple servers with multiple OS's and multiple apps (all controlled) over a controlled connection.
The ONLY change should be the client OS's.
It's just basic science. ' The GP's point is that your 'basic science' only tests how the operating systems perform under ideal conditions. Reality is a far cry from the lab, just ask Vietnam vets and returning soldiers from Iraq about the difference between the performance of equipment in lab testing and the field.
The OS gets credit for those too. Indexing is part of the default configuration of windows and McAfee/Norton and their ilk are essential because of system security issues.
Really benchmarks between windows and *nix aren't fair comparisons if you aren't running an active resident shield spyware/anti-virus scanner on windows to attempt to bring it a little closer to the out of the box security level of any *nix distribution.
'That's the clean OS and Firefox running in 256M. Unless he is running a LOT of other crap in the background (IM client(s), spyware cleaner, anti virus, iTunes helper, a scheduler or two, etc) then 512M ought to be plenty and the machine shouldn't be RAM-bound.'
Windows swaps no matter how much ram you have. That is what makes this so ridiculous, at 2gb of ram with a fully optimized system winxp would still be swapping and introducing the overhead of doing so. And that performance problem is DEFINITELY an OS issue.
More similar sounds odd but certainly seems to be valid language to me. If item a and b have similarities they are similar, if item c has more similarities to a than b than it could be said be more similar to a while b is less similar to a.
'irregardless'
Nonsensical as it may seem irregardless is certainly a word now. Usage and adoption and not pedants define language.
'For anybody familiar of what killed the Commodore Amiga...'
Not producing enough units. A ridiculous pricetag. Or the brains of the operation cashing out and moving to the Bahamas. Which of those reasons are you referring to?
This is not a case of merely needing to 'type up papers'. Ubuntu and Dell are not at fault here. The school is. It has become standard practice among schools providing online courses to use materials that are firmly tied to MS Office.
All those features that nobody uses... the schools do. They use them routinely and stubbornly in course materials that students must use and interact with. For example, in one online class I had to turn in an assignment where a number of steps in a process were represented as colored and labeled objects in a word document. The objects were draggable and had to be placed into the appropriate blanks on an outline of a process then the document saved and turned in.
Knowing steps in a process and completing work demonstrating it is valid. But this is hardly the only way that 'fill in the blank' can be done. In fact, it represents a total waste of effort on the part of the school developing a pretty doc, ties students to office, and increases the costs of classes to pay for crap like this.
'Re-read the grandparent post. It says "...when your child is 13". '
Fair enough, his statement was really about the age so I thought you were disputing that.
' But when you consider that the average age of likely respondents on slashdot is not very much higher than 13, this is one of the more stupid slashdot discussions I've involved myself in. '
Speak for yourself youngling. Not that the age of the poster has any relevance. That's the beauty of the internet, people are (potentially) judged on the merit of what they have to say or contribute, not who they are. 13yr olds make at least as many valid points as their elders imho.
All that aside, a 3 yr old being zapped by an electrical socket is a tragedy. A 13 yr old getting zapped by a socket is everything that is right about natural selection.
'And on that note, I would never suggest using personality tests in small businesses - the correlation between personality test scores and job performance is just too low for it to be justifiable'
I wouldn't suggest using them at all. Along with drug tests, credit scores, and other meaningless metrics that are not related to the job. The one extraordinary employee you throw away could easily outweigh the benefits of increasing job performance on average.
It's simple really. They are weeding out the people who are too stupid to lie and play the game. Having a brain will only take you so far in any aspect of life.
It starts with your parents, you learn what they want to see and hear from their model child and how to manipulate them. Then school. Understanding the material is great and in an ideal world students would be judged strictly by how well they understand the material. All students who learn what they are supposed to be learning would get A's. Instead the difference between A and B (and sometimes even C) students is how well they play the game and tell the teachers what they want to hear (or are pretending they want to hear, they are playing the game too after all). In college where half your life is spent writing papers it is even worse, you have to learn to read the professors and tell them what they want to hear. You can tell from their personalities what 'insights' into the material they would love to hear from you. This is tougher, than is a general parent standard, a general high school and grade school personality you can rely on. Professors much be gauged individually. And finally there is work, fortunately, corporate whore is more or less one personality type that can be used to get hired.
'Except you have NO IDEA how a "good employee" would answer.'
No in my experience. Corporate go-getter company policy licking droid is pretty much a standard across all large companies I've encountered. This thing is produced by HR and executive level management after all. Don't confuse actual on the job work habits and needs with the corporate ideal invented by HR and public facing front of the company. It isn't like your actual manager is going to bother reading the thing.
'I see this along the same lines as the lookign down on not dressing up for an interview: an excellent early warning sign that the company and I are not going to be a good match for one another.'
In the tech world I've been annoyed when I encountered the opposite. Companies where they said the dress code was less formal than what I am wearing. It's a job interview for fuck sake. Everyone and their dog knows you dress up as a simple sign of courtesy and respect. Its one of those things that separates the stupid from those who can play the game. You have to play the game to do well in school, work, and life. It sucks but anyone with half a brain can mimic the desired behavior for these situations.
'an intelligent person would understand that different sectors, firms within sectors, and departments within firms place different values upon divergent priorities.'
False. The intelligent understands that low level managers that accomplish work within the company do all of the above. The intelligent understands that this test is developed by corporate and marketing type droids and thus they should answer in a manner the corporate/marketing droid would like. Read the employee handbook or watch an orientation video at any company and express the attitude expressed in said video. ATTENTION! Do not give the answers that would actually best fit to accomplish the goals and ideals stated in said video, give the answers the fit the ATTITUDE expressed in the video with the solutions they stated and state the goals they state. Even if those things conflict.
'Efficiency is composed of accuracy and speed. How is each of these weighted?'
You don't weight them, you are superman and work both accurately and fast. Whatever option gives the most of both is what you want. Companies never want you to SAY you are willing to sacrifice quality for speed. If there is an option that says you will exceed goals ahead of deadline, pick that one.
'Work dynamic is composed of the independence vs the subordination of workers to the chain of command. How are those weighted?'
If you are applying for management you are absolutely a free thinker and worker who rigidly adheres to every letter of company policy. If you are applying to anything else you are a self starting management teetsucker. Clear enough for you? Most importantly, as anything other than management you listen to other employees every concern, never get angry, upset, or emotional, make friends easily, and never have confrontations with other employees.
So fake it for your employer and the tests. That's what I do and I score well on them. It's really not hard, think employee manuals and orientation videos. All corporations want the same thing, and the tests are scored by the corporate 'ideal' for an employee, not what the manager likes.
Think of them as being a tool to weed out the people too stupid to lie to the test.
'As a teenager, I was always passed up because I couldn't "pass" the personality test on BestBuy.com'
Seriously, I have taken these tests. How could not be ABLE to pass one? Just think of any corporate orientation video you have ever seen, imagine one of the employees being portrayed in said video and answer accordingly.
You have no conflicts with other employees. You inform to management. You don't use drugs. You don't think any drug use is acceptable. You report all accident prone things and failure to follow safety procedures to the manager. You believe corporate policy should be followed 100% of the time no matter how ridiculous it would be to actually do that. Bam, simple, 90+% match on the personality test.
'Your last point: whining of the hungry had nothing to do with it. Food will cost the same regardless of the unit of measure.'
I think maybe you should reread what I said and think a little deeper about how spending tens of billions of dollars on converting to the metric system could affect food purchases... regardless of the price of food (which actually would go up, along with everything else since all levels of production would have to retool and retrain on the metric system and then pass those costs to the consumer).
Slashdot Mirror
'"The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish"'
Since the constitution gives them the power to enter into binding treaties and we entered that one I think international war tribunals would fit neatly in that requirement.
'Nobody tortured the Japanese Americans'
Where did you get that idea? Have you ever actually met people who were in those camps? I knew a woman who was. The stories and the scars she shared suggest otherwise.
We also tested eugenics programs on the prisoners. Just like the Nazis.
'Mind you, I'm completely opposed to torture but I draw the line at giving enemy combatants (whether accorded POW status or not) access to our civilian judicial system.'
'Enemy combatant' is just a made up term with no meaning. You have criminals, and soldiers, either they are one or the other. Lets not forget, there are plenty of people locked up with absolutely no evidence or even valid suspicion against them.
But Guantanamo isn't the only camp we should clear out, we have a network of prisons abroad where the local government is detaining and torturing people on our behalf. That network needs shut down as well.
'When Al Quada starts fighting in uniform under the command of officers while taking steps to minimize civilian casualties I'll start worrying about the fact that they aren't being accorded POW status.'
Would you feel the same way about our special forces units? It isn't as if we do more than pay lip service to avoiding civilian casualties.
In any case, we went to war with Iraq (that war is already over) not terrorists.
Your argument is circular, either they are POW's and should get rights under the geneva convention or they are criminals and should be recognized to have the same rights we believe every human being has innately. You can't have it both ways.
'When has the Constitution ever been held to apply to prisoners of war?'
The only example of prisoners of war you will find would be iraqi soldiers captured on the battlefield. Everyone else was captured for potential criminal acts.
Don't take the 'war on terror' lingo too seriously.
It's XP, it swaps regardless of how much ram you have.
'
You are offering a hypothetical situation to a real world example.
Instead, how about just making a reliable test? Multiple servers with multiple OS's and multiple apps (all controlled) over a controlled connection.
The ONLY change should be the client OS's.
It's just basic science.
'
The GP's point is that your 'basic science' only tests how the operating systems perform under ideal conditions. Reality is a far cry from the lab, just ask Vietnam vets and returning soldiers from Iraq about the difference between the performance of equipment in lab testing and the field.
The OS gets credit for those too. Indexing is part of the default configuration of windows and McAfee/Norton and their ilk are essential because of system security issues.
Really benchmarks between windows and *nix aren't fair comparisons if you aren't running an active resident shield spyware/anti-virus scanner on windows to attempt to bring it a little closer to the out of the box security level of any *nix distribution.
'That's the clean OS and Firefox running in 256M. Unless he is running a LOT of other crap in the background (IM client(s), spyware cleaner, anti virus, iTunes helper, a scheduler or two, etc) then 512M ought to be plenty and the machine shouldn't be RAM-bound.'
Windows swaps no matter how much ram you have. That is what makes this so ridiculous, at 2gb of ram with a fully optimized system winxp would still be swapping and introducing the overhead of doing so. And that performance problem is DEFINITELY an OS issue.
surefire recipe for a crash and burn
More similar sounds odd but certainly seems to be valid language to me. If item a and b have similarities they are similar, if item c has more similarities to a than b than it could be said be more similar to a while b is less similar to a.
'irregardless'
Nonsensical as it may seem irregardless is certainly a word now. Usage and adoption and not pedants define language.
'For anybody familiar of what killed the Commodore Amiga...'
Not producing enough units. A ridiculous pricetag. Or the brains of the operation cashing out and moving to the Bahamas. Which of those reasons are you referring to?
This is not a case of merely needing to 'type up papers'. Ubuntu and Dell are not at fault here. The school is. It has become standard practice among schools providing online courses to use materials that are firmly tied to MS Office.
All those features that nobody uses... the schools do. They use them routinely and stubbornly in course materials that students must use and interact with. For example, in one online class I had to turn in an assignment where a number of steps in a process were represented as colored and labeled objects in a word document. The objects were draggable and had to be placed into the appropriate blanks on an outline of a process then the document saved and turned in.
Knowing steps in a process and completing work demonstrating it is valid. But this is hardly the only way that 'fill in the blank' can be done. In fact, it represents a total waste of effort on the part of the school developing a pretty doc, ties students to office, and increases the costs of classes to pay for crap like this.
'Re-read the grandparent post. It says "...when your child is 13". '
Fair enough, his statement was really about the age so I thought you were disputing that.
' But when you consider that the average age of likely respondents on slashdot is not very much higher than 13, this is one of the more stupid slashdot discussions I've involved myself in. '
Speak for yourself youngling. Not that the age of the poster has any relevance. That's the beauty of the internet, people are (potentially) judged on the merit of what they have to say or contribute, not who they are. 13yr olds make at least as many valid points as their elders imho.
All that aside, a 3 yr old being zapped by an electrical socket is a tragedy. A 13 yr old getting zapped by a socket is everything that is right about natural selection.
'3 year old grandchild '
He said sensible at 3, not sensible at 13. Your example was consistent with his point.
its called natural selection, you weren't supposed to make the cut.
Ah well. Look at the bright side, you could be stuck working for the geek squad!
'And on that note, I would never suggest using personality tests in small businesses - the correlation between personality test scores and job performance is just too low for it to be justifiable'
I wouldn't suggest using them at all. Along with drug tests, credit scores, and other meaningless metrics that are not related to the job. The one extraordinary employee you throw away could easily outweigh the benefits of increasing job performance on average.
It's simple really. They are weeding out the people who are too stupid to lie and play the game. Having a brain will only take you so far in any aspect of life.
It starts with your parents, you learn what they want to see and hear from their model child and how to manipulate them. Then school. Understanding the material is great and in an ideal world students would be judged strictly by how well they understand the material. All students who learn what they are supposed to be learning would get A's. Instead the difference between A and B (and sometimes even C) students is how well they play the game and tell the teachers what they want to hear (or are pretending they want to hear, they are playing the game too after all). In college where half your life is spent writing papers it is even worse, you have to learn to read the professors and tell them what they want to hear. You can tell from their personalities what 'insights' into the material they would love to hear from you. This is tougher, than is a general parent standard, a general high school and grade school personality you can rely on. Professors much be gauged individually. And finally there is work, fortunately, corporate whore is more or less one personality type that can be used to get hired.
'Except you have NO IDEA how a "good employee" would answer.'
No in my experience. Corporate go-getter company policy licking droid is pretty much a standard across all large companies I've encountered. This thing is produced by HR and executive level management after all. Don't confuse actual on the job work habits and needs with the corporate ideal invented by HR and public facing front of the company. It isn't like your actual manager is going to bother reading the thing.
'I see this along the same lines as the lookign down on not dressing up for an interview: an excellent early warning sign that the company and I are not going to be a good match for one another.'
In the tech world I've been annoyed when I encountered the opposite. Companies where they said the dress code was less formal than what I am wearing. It's a job interview for fuck sake. Everyone and their dog knows you dress up as a simple sign of courtesy and respect. Its one of those things that separates the stupid from those who can play the game. You have to play the game to do well in school, work, and life. It sucks but anyone with half a brain can mimic the desired behavior for these situations.
'an intelligent person would understand that different sectors, firms within sectors, and departments within firms place different values upon divergent priorities.'
False. The intelligent understands that low level managers that accomplish work within the company do all of the above. The intelligent understands that this test is developed by corporate and marketing type droids and thus they should answer in a manner the corporate/marketing droid would like. Read the employee handbook or watch an orientation video at any company and express the attitude expressed in said video. ATTENTION! Do not give the answers that would actually best fit to accomplish the goals and ideals stated in said video, give the answers the fit the ATTITUDE expressed in the video with the solutions they stated and state the goals they state. Even if those things conflict.
'Efficiency is composed of accuracy and speed. How is each of these weighted?'
You don't weight them, you are superman and work both accurately and fast. Whatever option gives the most of both is what you want. Companies never want you to SAY you are willing to sacrifice quality for speed. If there is an option that says you will exceed goals ahead of deadline, pick that one.
'Work dynamic is composed of the independence vs the subordination of workers to the chain of command. How are those weighted?'
If you are applying for management you are absolutely a free thinker and worker who rigidly adheres to every letter of company policy. If you are applying to anything else you are a self starting management teetsucker. Clear enough for you? Most importantly, as anything other than management you listen to other employees every concern, never get angry, upset, or emotional, make friends easily, and never have confrontations with other employees.
'It's quite possible to "fake it".'
So fake it for your employer and the tests. That's what I do and I score well on them. It's really not hard, think employee manuals and orientation videos. All corporations want the same thing, and the tests are scored by the corporate 'ideal' for an employee, not what the manager likes.
Think of them as being a tool to weed out the people too stupid to lie to the test.
'As a teenager, I was always passed up because I couldn't "pass" the personality test on BestBuy.com'
Seriously, I have taken these tests. How could not be ABLE to pass one? Just think of any corporate orientation video you have ever seen, imagine one of the employees being portrayed in said video and answer accordingly.
You have no conflicts with other employees. You inform to management. You don't use drugs. You don't think any drug use is acceptable. You report all accident prone things and failure to follow safety procedures to the manager. You believe corporate policy should be followed 100% of the time no matter how ridiculous it would be to actually do that. Bam, simple, 90+% match on the personality test.
In other words, all you have to do is lie.
'Your last point: whining of the hungry had nothing to do with it. Food will cost the same regardless of the unit of measure.'
I think maybe you should reread what I said and think a little deeper about how spending tens of billions of dollars on converting to the metric system could affect food purchases... regardless of the price of food (which actually would go up, along with everything else since all levels of production would have to retool and retrain on the metric system and then pass those costs to the consumer).