Lot of fiction labelled fact and a lot of fact labelled fiction up there. I'm a Nader guy, so I don't know why I bother, but an impartial discussion of the "gore lies" thing can be found at this urban legends site.
If the third party vote is large enough to swing the election one way or the other, than the parties will damn-well have to pay attention to the people who voted for that third party in the next election cycle.
Otherwise, they can just safely ignore them as too insignificant to matter.
One of the reasons (along with the good economy) that we finally managed to get the deficit under control is because a third party candidate wouldn't shut up about it, and got a lot of votes. He didn't win (thank God!) but the important thing he was talking about finally got noticed.
Nader's talking about the way corporations have bought the political system. If you want to get that issue noticed next time out, you have to give him enough votes to get the attention of the major parties. Otherwise they'll just ignore the issue as ramblings of unimportant voters.
To me, a real wasted vote is a vote for someone who will likely ignore 90% of what the voter stands for. Given the stands I've seen both candidates take on the issues that continually crop on/., I'd say that that is the majority here.
Yes, 50% of all children in this country are below average, and using a statistical analysis of the all of the years that make up the history of the Earth it is easy to prove that the chance the human race will exist next year is around 1 in 100,000.
Yes, we're all just a great big game of SimEarth 3590 and it is vitally important that we keep this place interesting. If the forteen year old kid who is running this thing gets bored and decides to run UltraMegaQuake ]})|({[, we're toast. So for the Earth's sake, everybody go out and do something interesting. The fate of the Planet is in the balance.
Lots of very, very smart people, with nice shiny nobel prizes and such, are currently arguing about whether or not the human brain is non-deterministic.
Since they haven't figured it out yet, I wouldn't put to much stock in anything a poster here says on the subject.
Be aware that the people putting those "Hot Pre-IPO startup!" titles in there are usually the headhunters trying to fill the job, not anyone actually working for the company.
Well, one advantage is that even if your company goes bust, you probably don't end up in the poorhouse yourself. If you start a company, make a decent amount of money while it is around, and then it goes bust, it is, in my mind, a risk that was worth taking.
The Economist pointed out a few issues back that even with the "End of the Internet Gold Rush", dotcom startups actually fail at a significantly lower rate than other sorts of businesses.
They called the fact dotcoms have started to fail at a faster rate good news as it shows that investors are starting to get more cluefull and that the wheat is starting to be separated from the chaff.
I think the difference today, as opposed to a year ago, are that investors are starting to want to see a little more concrete evidence of potential. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given the huge number of startups that seem to have no business plan whatsoever.
To me, the best question to ask yourself is not "How much money will I make if I work there?", but "How much will I enjoy working there?". In my mind, put away enough savings so some out-of-work downtine won't kill you and then take the job you are least likely to dread going to day in, day out. Especially if long hours are a possibility. I've worked at shitty jobs where I punched in my eight hours every day and got a good check in the end, and let me tell you, give me a long hours at an interesting job every time!
When looking at an employer, questions like "Is their technology cool? Is the guy I'd report to a jerk, or a nice guy?" are far more important to your quality of life than cash or, heaven forbid, stock options.
And never, ever, ever delude yourself into thinking that stock options are real money. They are basically just free lottery tickets. Make sure that you can live on the salary they offer you. I'm personally on my fifth set of stock options. Grand income from them all: ~$3000. Worry about them during negotiations, but be very, very careful about giving up too much salary to get them. Never assume that you'll be able to make up the savings, whatever later, once you cash them in. And they are something to put entirely out of your mind the minute you take the job. Pretend they don't exist. Pretend you didn't get any.
In the end, if you like your job and earn enough to live ok, that's all you really need. Everything else is just gravy. And in these techie negative employment days, I don't know that even job stability is all that important, assuming you've been smart, and stuck a couple month's salary in the bank.
Not entirely true. Dogs have a lot of genetic variability, so inbreeding for mutts is not an issue. However, some of the more obscure breeds are suffering from a lack of genetic variability and show effects of inbreeding.
Apparently, human beings went through some near-extinction event around 200,000 years or so ago. (If I remember correctly. I could be off by a factor of ten.) I recall reading that there is evidence that the entire human population is based on a small group of 10,000 individuals.
But in this case, any extinct animal is almost by definition going to suffer from inbreeding.
Definitely correct. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to go to the local "Computerland" (the first retail computer chain) to laugh at the idiotic salesmen. That was in 1982.
I can see it now...Hopfield and his grad student are going to die in a horrible car accident and scientists are going to spend the next three hundred years trying to figure out what he meant. An obscure professor will finally produce the answer in 2391 in a 1300 page paper that uses quantum theory, the psychology of preadolescent children and a statistical analysis performed by a 300 Exohertz computer, but only five people will actually be able to understand it.
Clue: Some of us are ripping things we paid for and burning it because it is more convenient to carry 7 hours of mp3s on a CD than 45 minutes on a prerecorded one.
Some of us rip because, perhaps, we don't like every song on a CD and it would prefer to create our own "greatest hits" CD.
Franklin studied electricity mostly as a scientist, not as an inventor. To my knowledge, he created no useful inventions with electricity. (He did some of the first pioneering work on it, and is the person responsible for the electron being "negative". He theorized that electricity was caused by a flow between a surplus of something and a shortage of something. He then assigned '-' to one and '+' to another, noting that he had a 50-50 shot of being right. Unfortunately, the dice didn't go his way.)
I also don't think Franklin ever patented anything, even his real inventions. (The Franklin stove, bifocals, etc.)
That is probably true, though it isn't necessarily "the weakest" that die off. It is the "least fit" for the current environment. I'd argue that there is a change in breeding and death patterns brought about by technology, and that as such, evolution still happens.
I'd also point out that one very important part of evolutionary theory is sexual selection, which is controlled not by how people die, but how people choose mates. That is obviously still going strong.
Slashdot Mirror
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My God, that's the funniest thing I've heard in months!
Having been screwed by both PHB's and visionaries in my career, I'll go with neither.
Lot of fiction labelled fact and a lot of fact labelled fiction up there. I'm a Nader guy, so I don't know why I bother, but an impartial discussion of the "gore lies" thing can be found at this urban legends site.
If the third party vote is large enough to swing the election one way or the other, than the parties will damn-well have to pay attention to the people who voted for that third party in the next election cycle.
/., I'd say that that is the majority here.
Otherwise, they can just safely ignore them as too insignificant to matter.
One of the reasons (along with the good economy) that we finally managed to get the deficit under control is because a third party candidate wouldn't shut up about it, and got a lot of votes. He didn't win (thank God!) but the important thing he was talking about finally got noticed.
Nader's talking about the way corporations have bought the political system. If you want to get that issue noticed next time out, you have to give him enough votes to get the attention of the major parties. Otherwise they'll just ignore the issue as ramblings of unimportant voters.
To me, a real wasted vote is a vote for someone who will likely ignore 90% of what the voter stands for. Given the stands I've seen both candidates take on the issues that continually crop on
This is Proof!!!
I think you mean 10 to 20 billion miles from the sun.
It is something like 10,000 years or more until it gets close enough to another star for that to be an issue.
No, I said "do something interesting", not mod this post interesting.
Shit, I'm sure that forteen year old boy found the post boring, so for God's sakes, don't encourage me!
Yes, 50% of all children in this country are below average, and using a statistical analysis of the all of the years that make up the history of the Earth it is easy to prove that the chance the human race will exist next year is around 1 in 100,000.
Yes, we're all just a great big game of SimEarth 3590 and it is vitally important that we keep this place interesting. If the forteen year old kid who is running this thing gets bored and decides to run UltraMegaQuake ]})|({[, we're toast. So for the Earth's sake, everybody go out and do something interesting. The fate of the Planet is in the balance.
Naah...
Remember:
1) Micheal Jackson
2) MC Hammer
3) Tiffany
4) Ronald Reagan
We survived that, we'll get through this!
Go, Nader!
Uh...I think that was meant to be parsed as "members of the programming community suspicious of the SDMI"
Lots of very, very smart people, with nice shiny nobel prizes and such, are currently arguing about whether or not the human brain is non-deterministic.
Since they haven't figured it out yet, I wouldn't put to much stock in anything a poster here says on the subject.
Be aware that the people putting those "Hot Pre-IPO startup!" titles in there are usually the headhunters trying to fill the job, not anyone actually working for the company.
Well, one advantage is that even if your company goes bust, you probably don't end up in the poorhouse yourself. If you start a company, make a decent amount of money while it is around, and then it goes bust, it is, in my mind, a risk that was worth taking.
The Economist pointed out a few issues back that even with the "End of the Internet Gold Rush", dotcom startups actually fail at a significantly lower rate than other sorts of businesses.
They called the fact dotcoms have started to fail at a faster rate good news as it shows that investors are starting to get more cluefull and that the wheat is starting to be separated from the chaff.
I think the difference today, as opposed to a year ago, are that investors are starting to want to see a little more concrete evidence of potential. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given the huge number of startups that seem to have no business plan whatsoever.
To me, the best question to ask yourself is not "How much money will I make if I work there?", but "How much will I enjoy working there?". In my mind, put away enough savings so some out-of-work downtine won't kill you and then take the job you are least likely to dread going to day in, day out. Especially if long hours are a possibility. I've worked at shitty jobs where I punched in my eight hours every day and got a good check in the end, and let me tell you, give me a long hours at an interesting job every time!
When looking at an employer, questions like "Is their technology cool? Is the guy I'd report to a jerk, or a nice guy?" are far more important to your quality of life than cash or, heaven forbid, stock options.
And never, ever, ever delude yourself into thinking that stock options are real money. They are basically just free lottery tickets. Make sure that you can live on the salary they offer you. I'm personally on my fifth set of stock options. Grand income from them all: ~$3000. Worry about them during negotiations, but be very, very careful about giving up too much salary to get them. Never assume that you'll be able to make up the savings, whatever later, once you cash them in. And they are something to put entirely out of your mind the minute you take the job. Pretend they don't exist. Pretend you didn't get any.
In the end, if you like your job and earn enough to live ok, that's all you really need. Everything else is just gravy. And in these techie negative employment days, I don't know that even job stability is all that important, assuming you've been smart, and stuck a couple month's salary in the bank.
Not entirely true. Dogs have a lot of genetic variability, so inbreeding for mutts is not an issue. However, some of the more obscure breeds are suffering from a lack of genetic variability and show effects of inbreeding.
Apparently, human beings went through some near-extinction event around 200,000 years or so ago. (If I remember correctly. I could be off by a factor of ten.) I recall reading that there is evidence that the entire human population is based on a small group of 10,000 individuals.
But in this case, any extinct animal is almost by definition going to suffer from inbreeding.
Definitely correct. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to go to the local "Computerland" (the first retail computer chain) to laugh at the idiotic salesmen. That was in 1982.
Do you agree with Ben Franklin, that those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither?
I can see it now...Hopfield and his grad student are going to die in a horrible car accident and scientists are going to spend the next three hundred years trying to figure out what he meant. An obscure professor will finally produce the answer in 2391 in a 1300 page paper that uses quantum theory, the psychology of preadolescent children and a statistical analysis performed by a 300 Exohertz computer, but only five people will actually be able to understand it.
Clue: Some of us are ripping things we paid for and burning it because it is more convenient to carry 7 hours of mp3s on a CD than 45 minutes on a prerecorded one.
Some of us rip because, perhaps, we don't like every song on a CD and it would prefer to create our own "greatest hits" CD.
Franklin studied electricity mostly as a scientist, not as an inventor. To my knowledge, he created no useful inventions with electricity. (He did some of the first pioneering work on it, and is the person responsible for the electron being "negative". He theorized that electricity was caused by a flow between a surplus of something and a shortage of something. He then assigned '-' to one and '+' to another, noting that he had a 50-50 shot of being right. Unfortunately, the dice didn't go his way.)
I also don't think Franklin ever patented anything, even his real inventions. (The Franklin stove, bifocals, etc.)
That is probably true, though it isn't necessarily "the weakest" that die off. It is the "least fit" for the current environment. I'd argue that there is a change in breeding and death patterns brought about by technology, and that as such, evolution still happens.
I'd also point out that one very important part of evolutionary theory is sexual selection, which is controlled not by how people die, but how people choose mates. That is obviously still going strong.