Sure, but how many of those breaks cease being "mini"?
Just avoid replying to discussions.
Gah! I'm doing it again!
There are other ways to do during mini break. For example those that don't require you to continue sitting in the chair and staring at the screen (you should get up, move a little and look at something else once in a while)
I know. And I will, as soon as I've finished reading this bit.
Many years ago I had a conversation with an author friend who mentioned that by the time she gets to writing chapter 11 in a book she begins to lose interest in completing it. Something along the lines of being far enough into the book to have put a good piece of work in and are bored with the prospect of what lies ahead and not far enough into it that the end is in sight. She mentioned that she just needs to power through those spots. Eventually you'll move through it and the work will become self fulfilling again.
If you "power through" it despite lack of inspiration, you risk writing a book that becomes boring and uninspired after chapter 11. Has she considered writingt books with 10 chapters instead? A lot of writers write books that are way too thick and get boring halfway through. Better write only the bits for which you have inspiration and skip the rest entirely, IMO. You don't need to tell everything that happens, just the bits that are fun to read.
Terry Pratchett (an author who doesn't use chapters at all) says there's no such thing as writer's block. There's only bad writers.
I'm afraid this advice doesn't translate well to programming projects, however. You can't skip bits of code and let the end user imagine them. Although you might skip over the boring bits of code and focus on the fun bits first, and later return to the boring bits when everything else is done, because otherwise it just won't work. Doing boring stuff that's essential to get the fun stuff working isn't nearly as bad as doing boring stuff that won't do anything meaningful until I've gotten around to the fun stuff later.
TPP "stole" one seat in euro parliament due to the knee-jerk populistic reaction to TPB trial.
They didn't steal anything. They got the votes fair and square, a sign that clearly a lot of Swedes care about this. I think they're going to get more out of this one seat than out of the other Swedish seats in the EP.
They don't have *any* political agenda besides filesharing issues.
Not entirely true. Their political issues are software patents, general copyright reform, and privacy. It's limited, but enough to fit into any left-libertarian faction.
In itself, this is normal. If I am a boss of a small company, I can keep in contact with each of my employees. I can go and ASK what kind of a refreshment they want AND probably have the capacity to supply it. Something intresting seems to happen, IF people in a small group are asked what they want, they limit themselves to ask for things that are reasonable with that group. Either that or magically every small company doesn't have someone with outlandish desires. But as the company gets bigger, the request for type of refreshments becomes wider. No longer just coffee, thee and water but perhaps cola as well. Then different varieties of tea. Soda. Decaf. Herbal teas. Fairtrade coffee. Snacks. Health food.
Are you saying that people in small companies don't drink cola, soda, fairtrade coffee or weird tea varieties? I work in a very small company (5 people), and my boss gets lunch for us every day with a variety of exotic foodstuffs depending on what the employees want. For drinks we have several varieties of coffee (we have some fancy espresso machine), choices of tea, cola light (no other sodas, but there's little demand for them), yoghurt drinks at lunch and fruit juice that nobody seems to drink. It's an easy way to keep employees (and the boss himself) happy.
When companies grow bigger, bosses distance themselves from regular employees and can have fancy drinks without employees noticing. In the mean time, food and drink for employees turns into an abstract number that can reach alarming proportions and turns out to be an easy candidate for budget cuts. (I think this line of reasoning fits in better with the rest of your post too.)
In the netherlands, the SOCIALIST tv broadcaster VARA pays some of its top talent HALF a million euros. Yeah, they are going to be real socialists, capable of keeping in touch with the common man.
Don't forget to mention that these broadcasting organisations are mostly funded with public money. Recently, the trend in Netherland is that nobody who's being paid with public money should be paid more than the prime minister (who gets somewhere around EUR 150,000 I think). I'm not sure that's a particularly good standard, because our PM isn't particularly competent either, and hardly more deserving of money than highly trained experts, but I do agree that public hospital directors or other bosses of semi-public institutions shouldn't be paid half a million from public money. Unless they really truly are that good, but most people who get that amount of money generally aren't.
Geert Wilders, Vlaams Blok, British Nationlists, Pirate Party are NOT rising to power because the masses like them. They are protest parties. People vote for them to get a message across and so far the message is being ignored. I think that at this moment, the message is incapable of being heard.
It's the bane of all democratic governments: people expecting you to do what the people want, rather than leaving you to make your own deals.
I agree with most of what you say (albeit rather verbose), and I'd mod you Insightful if I wasn't already replying to you. Sorry about that.
Hm, there was the subway building company that caused buildings to collapse in Amsterdam (IIRC) and then caused for yet more buildings to collapse in Cologne (Germany) a few months later, including the historical archive. A dozend people lost their home and two their life. Oddly enough I haven't heard of any real consequences yet.
Because consequences would cost money and they're already way over budget.
I do like the idea of the new subway, but I don't understand why they always underestimate cost and risk so much.
The countries that have converted to SI are the countries that were late to the industrial revolution party.
Like all of Europe? No, it's countries that were somehow influenced by Napoleon that converted to SI. And eventually other countries that wanted to do business with Europe (or had business done to them by Europe) and realised that SI was way easier to work with.
Short of a massive cash investment (Many Trillions of Dollars), or all manufacturing leaving the US and UK for good, Imperial units will stay and be indifferent to the sighs of the "rest" of the world.
If I'm not mistaken, the US uses the "English" system rather than the Imperial system. They sound mostly the same but are subtly different in some places. I doubt this is going to cost many Mars landers, however, because the UK already mostly switched to SI (though still not completely, but that's only a matter of time).
The problem is that newspapers now have to choose who to focus on: People who get their daily news online, and people who don't.
That's not the problem, that's the solution. More focused news papers, more accurately tailored to the way their readers read news.
(hitting F5 on nu.nl has become an important part of Dutch work culture already)
Wait, doesn't nu.nl reload automatically every minute or so?
there will be less people that need cleaned-up press releases and there will be more that expect in-depth analysis on topics they saw online yesterday. But currently newspapers do have to cater to both groups.
NRC Next caters specifically to the internet people. They don't do headlines, have all the important "latest news" factoids crammed into the bottom half of page 3, and the rest is background. Quite often background to something that was big on internet the day before (like that Iranian girl).
Although in some ways, NRC Next is more a daily lifestyle paper than a real news paper, which is probably a sign of how futile it is to bring real news when you have to compete with internet.
The news papers will only report about this tomorrow.
Funny? Insighful! Every time I read a newspaper, I'm surprised I'm reading yesterday's news. I love reading from paper, but as a medium for reporting the latest news, it's obsolete. They should focus more on background and analysis for the factoids you've already read online. (Which is exactly the business model of my current newspaper, which is one of the few Dutch newspapers that's growing.)
To say someone is monarch says they are in charge, nigh autocracy, if they're not in charge they're not a monarch.
You're rather alone in that belief.
You're free to redefine words as you see fit, but it will make you look rather silly in a discussion. You're basically claiming that absolute monarchy is the only kind of monarchy, and that constitutional monarchy is not a monarchy at all.
If you were an American, that might be an easy mistake to forgive, but if I understand you correctly, you're living in the oldest constitutional monarchy in the world. Limitations to the power of the English crown go back to the Magna Carta. Even if Queen Elizabeth has more power than other European monarchs, the UK is hardly an autocracy, which would mean she's not a monarch according to your definition. I think quite a lot of people would disagree with your defintition.
If you truly have a constitution then you don't have a monarchy, unless the first line says "the Monarch is always right".
Next time, perhaps you'll want to consult wikipedia or google before you spout such crap. You're confusing constitutional monarchy with absolute monarchy.
I can't see how a monarchy can be democratic. The monarch has ultimate power and so the people do not.
Your medieval world view is tremendously out of date. There are dozens of democratic constitutional monarchies in the world. Much of Europe, for example.
A monarchy can be superficially democratic in order to avoid the monarchs subjects from getting pissed-off and establishing an alternate government but it's never truly a democracy if, when you've voted for something, the monarch can just say "nah, don't like that" and refuse to instigate it.
King Baudouin of Belgium could refuse to sign a law that parliament passed. In order to pass the law anyway, Belgium became a republic for a day. However, most kings don't have that right.
Ideally that list would extend to ecosystems and foreigners, but what can you do.
Huh? Seems to me that allowing outsiders a say in your government is a pretty bad idea, seeing as they don't hold a stake in things.
Of course foreigners have a stake in things. That's why there are so many international negotiations over tons of issues. And in the case of the US, that stake is bigger than with most countries.
Oh wait, I forgot. It's only other countries (like the US) that are supposed to let foreigners tell them what to do... your own country is fine and able to handle itself, thankyouverymuch. Silly me...
Get off your high horse. It's true for any country.
The camera isn't useless and on most newer phones taking the pictures off is as easy as buying a $10 Micro (or mini) SD card and adapter and just getting them off there.
It depends a lot on what phone you have. On an iPhone and a Mac, it's even easier to get your photos from iPhone to Mac. Other phones are very inaccessible and require them to be sent by MMS.
My wife MMSed me a beautiful photo of our son because that's apparently the easiest way for her, but my iPhone doesn't support MMS. I'm not sure who to be angry at for this.
The criminal underground you mention is the biggest reason why it should be legalised. It's a big source of revenue for organised crime, and they can use that revenue to fund bigger projects. It's how the mafia got big during the Prohibition era. Make it legal, for sale in shops in a way similar to strong alcohol, and the criminals get competition from honest businessmen with much lower profit margins.
And if you're afraid of how people will function in society, weed is less incapacitating than alcohol. How do you deal with drunks in the office? Most people drink only in the weekends or maybe a bit in the evening. The same happens with pot.
... and a point is made. The United States is NOT a Democracy. We are a Republic.
You say that as if they're mutually explusive. They're not. Dictatorship and democracy are mutually explusive. Monarchy and republic are mutually exclusive. But all democracies are either a republic or a monarchy, and the US is not a monarchy. It's a democratic federal republic (although you could argue about how democratic it really is, considering how the system is organised to effectively only allow two parties to be represented in Congress, and a president can be elected on a minority vote).
Under a Democracy, the majority forces their opinions on the minority and it eventually turns into an Oligarchy.
Not necessarily, although it is what's hapened in the US. But that's more because of the lack of real democracy in the system.
In our Republic, laws are set forth through a strict set of procedures to ensure fairness to all parties involved, not just the most popular.
In which republic exactly? Definitely not in the US, where only the two biggest parties have any real chance of representation.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but how many of those breaks cease being "mini"?
Just avoid replying to discussions.
Gah! I'm doing it again!
There are other ways to do during mini break. For example those that don't require you to continue sitting in the chair and staring at the screen (you should get up, move a little and look at something else once in a while)
I know. And I will, as soon as I've finished reading this bit.
Many years ago I had a conversation with an author friend who mentioned that by the time she gets to writing chapter 11 in a book she begins to lose interest in completing it. Something along the lines of being far enough into the book to have put a good piece of work in and are bored with the prospect of what lies ahead and not far enough into it that the end is in sight. She mentioned that she just needs to power through those spots. Eventually you'll move through it and the work will become self fulfilling again.
If you "power through" it despite lack of inspiration, you risk writing a book that becomes boring and uninspired after chapter 11. Has she considered writingt books with 10 chapters instead? A lot of writers write books that are way too thick and get boring halfway through. Better write only the bits for which you have inspiration and skip the rest entirely, IMO. You don't need to tell everything that happens, just the bits that are fun to read.
Terry Pratchett (an author who doesn't use chapters at all) says there's no such thing as writer's block. There's only bad writers.
I'm afraid this advice doesn't translate well to programming projects, however. You can't skip bits of code and let the end user imagine them. Although you might skip over the boring bits of code and focus on the fun bits first, and later return to the boring bits when everything else is done, because otherwise it just won't work. Doing boring stuff that's essential to get the fun stuff working isn't nearly as bad as doing boring stuff that won't do anything meaningful until I've gotten around to the fun stuff later.
TPP "stole" one seat in euro parliament due to the knee-jerk populistic reaction to TPB trial.
They didn't steal anything. They got the votes fair and square, a sign that clearly a lot of Swedes care about this. I think they're going to get more out of this one seat than out of the other Swedish seats in the EP.
They don't have *any* political agenda besides filesharing issues.
Not entirely true. Their political issues are software patents, general copyright reform, and privacy. It's limited, but enough to fit into any left-libertarian faction.
In itself, this is normal. If I am a boss of a small company, I can keep in contact with each of my employees. I can go and ASK what kind of a refreshment they want AND probably have the capacity to supply it. Something intresting seems to happen, IF people in a small group are asked what they want, they limit themselves to ask for things that are reasonable with that group. Either that or magically every small company doesn't have someone with outlandish desires. But as the company gets bigger, the request for type of refreshments becomes wider. No longer just coffee, thee and water but perhaps cola as well. Then different varieties of tea. Soda. Decaf. Herbal teas. Fairtrade coffee. Snacks. Health food.
Are you saying that people in small companies don't drink cola, soda, fairtrade coffee or weird tea varieties? I work in a very small company (5 people), and my boss gets lunch for us every day with a variety of exotic foodstuffs depending on what the employees want. For drinks we have several varieties of coffee (we have some fancy espresso machine), choices of tea, cola light (no other sodas, but there's little demand for them), yoghurt drinks at lunch and fruit juice that nobody seems to drink. It's an easy way to keep employees (and the boss himself) happy.
When companies grow bigger, bosses distance themselves from regular employees and can have fancy drinks without employees noticing. In the mean time, food and drink for employees turns into an abstract number that can reach alarming proportions and turns out to be an easy candidate for budget cuts. (I think this line of reasoning fits in better with the rest of your post too.)
In the netherlands, the SOCIALIST tv broadcaster VARA pays some of its top talent HALF a million euros. Yeah, they are going to be real socialists, capable of keeping in touch with the common man.
Don't forget to mention that these broadcasting organisations are mostly funded with public money. Recently, the trend in Netherland is that nobody who's being paid with public money should be paid more than the prime minister (who gets somewhere around EUR 150,000 I think). I'm not sure that's a particularly good standard, because our PM isn't particularly competent either, and hardly more deserving of money than highly trained experts, but I do agree that public hospital directors or other bosses of semi-public institutions shouldn't be paid half a million from public money. Unless they really truly are that good, but most people who get that amount of money generally aren't.
Geert Wilders, Vlaams Blok, British Nationlists, Pirate Party are NOT rising to power because the masses like them. They are protest parties. People vote for them to get a message across and so far the message is being ignored. I think that at this moment, the message is incapable of being heard.
It's the bane of all democratic governments: people expecting you to do what the people want, rather than leaving you to make your own deals.
I agree with most of what you say (albeit rather verbose), and I'd mod you Insightful if I wasn't already replying to you. Sorry about that.
Where is my vo... Ooh! Legolas!
Hm, there was the subway building company that caused buildings to collapse in Amsterdam (IIRC) and then caused for yet more buildings to collapse in Cologne (Germany) a few months later, including the historical archive. A dozend people lost their home and two their life. Oddly enough I haven't heard of any real consequences yet.
Because consequences would cost money and they're already way over budget.
I do like the idea of the new subway, but I don't understand why they always underestimate cost and risk so much.
The countries that have converted to SI are the countries that were late to the industrial revolution party.
Like all of Europe? No, it's countries that were somehow influenced by Napoleon that converted to SI. And eventually other countries that wanted to do business with Europe (or had business done to them by Europe) and realised that SI was way easier to work with.
Short of a massive cash investment (Many Trillions of Dollars), or all manufacturing leaving the US and UK for good, Imperial units will stay and be indifferent to the sighs of the "rest" of the world.
If I'm not mistaken, the US uses the "English" system rather than the Imperial system. They sound mostly the same but are subtly different in some places. I doubt this is going to cost many Mars landers, however, because the UK already mostly switched to SI (though still not completely, but that's only a matter of time).
The problem is that newspapers now have to choose who to focus on: People who get their daily news online, and people who don't.
That's not the problem, that's the solution. More focused news papers, more accurately tailored to the way their readers read news.
(hitting F5 on nu.nl has become an important part of Dutch work culture already)
Wait, doesn't nu.nl reload automatically every minute or so?
there will be less people that need cleaned-up press releases and there will be more that expect in-depth analysis on topics they saw online yesterday. But currently newspapers do have to cater to both groups.
NRC Next caters specifically to the internet people. They don't do headlines, have all the important "latest news" factoids crammed into the bottom half of page 3, and the rest is background. Quite often background to something that was big on internet the day before (like that Iranian girl).
Although in some ways, NRC Next is more a daily lifestyle paper than a real news paper, which is probably a sign of how futile it is to bring real news when you have to compete with internet.
I don't consider Obama a geek, but he has many nerd qualities, so I would agree with this.
Considering he likes Star Trek, I'd say he also has geek qualities. His main nerd quality is that he's smart, but I'm not sure that's enough.
The news papers will only report about this tomorrow.
Funny? Insighful! Every time I read a newspaper, I'm surprised I'm reading yesterday's news. I love reading from paper, but as a medium for reporting the latest news, it's obsolete. They should focus more on background and analysis for the factoids you've already read online. (Which is exactly the business model of my current newspaper, which is one of the few Dutch newspapers that's growing.)
I'm afraid there's supposed to be some hyphens in that word according to the latest spelling misform.
koeienuier?
Gah! Stupid new spelling messing with perfectly funny words.
To say someone is monarch says they are in charge, nigh autocracy, if they're not in charge they're not a monarch.
You're rather alone in that belief.
You're free to redefine words as you see fit, but it will make you look rather silly in a discussion. You're basically claiming that absolute monarchy is the only kind of monarchy, and that constitutional monarchy is not a monarchy at all.
If you were an American, that might be an easy mistake to forgive, but if I understand you correctly, you're living in the oldest constitutional monarchy in the world. Limitations to the power of the English crown go back to the Magna Carta. Even if Queen Elizabeth has more power than other European monarchs, the UK is hardly an autocracy, which would mean she's not a monarch according to your definition. I think quite a lot of people would disagree with your defintition.
Is there some joke going on in this thread I'm not aware of?
No, it's just a futile attempt to inform people who prefer to remain misinformed.
Really, it's not a difficult concept to grasp, but I get the impression some people just don't want to understand it.
If you truly have a constitution then you don't have a monarchy, unless the first line says "the Monarch is always right".
Next time, perhaps you'll want to consult wikipedia or google before you spout such crap. You're confusing constitutional monarchy with absolute monarchy.
What? What? Am I the only one who can see this? A monarchy is a form of democracy?
Don't think so one-dimensional. Monarchy-republic is orthogonal to democracy-dictatorship.
I can't see how a monarchy can be democratic. The monarch has ultimate power and so the people do not.
Your medieval world view is tremendously out of date. There are dozens of democratic constitutional monarchies in the world. Much of Europe, for example.
A monarchy can be superficially democratic in order to avoid the monarchs subjects from getting pissed-off and establishing an alternate government but it's never truly a democracy if, when you've voted for something, the monarch can just say "nah, don't like that" and refuse to instigate it.
King Baudouin of Belgium could refuse to sign a law that parliament passed. In order to pass the law anyway, Belgium became a republic for a day. However, most kings don't have that right.
Ideally that list would extend to ecosystems and foreigners, but what can you do.
Huh? Seems to me that allowing outsiders a say in your government is a pretty bad idea, seeing as they don't hold a stake in things.
Of course foreigners have a stake in things. That's why there are so many international negotiations over tons of issues. And in the case of the US, that stake is bigger than with most countries.
Oh wait, I forgot. It's only other countries (like the US) that are supposed to let foreigners tell them what to do... your own country is fine and able to handle itself, thankyouverymuch. Silly me...
Get off your high horse. It's true for any country.
The camera isn't useless and on most newer phones taking the pictures off is as easy as buying a $10 Micro (or mini) SD card and adapter and just getting them off there.
It depends a lot on what phone you have. On an iPhone and a Mac, it's even easier to get your photos from iPhone to Mac. Other phones are very inaccessible and require them to be sent by MMS.
My wife MMSed me a beautiful photo of our son because that's apparently the easiest way for her, but my iPhone doesn't support MMS. I'm not sure who to be angry at for this.
For the ASCAP, they can take cup of Botulinum toxin and ...
... look really pretty when they die.
Maybe they should do it as a HUD system, prjecting on the windscreen of the car.
And then, when they feel the need to warn you, your entire windscreen goes opaque with a giant warning message.
Freedom? You have more people incarcerated in your borders than any nation in history. Why? It's good for business.
It's true. A privatised prison system is really scary.
The criminal underground you mention is the biggest reason why it should be legalised. It's a big source of revenue for organised crime, and they can use that revenue to fund bigger projects. It's how the mafia got big during the Prohibition era. Make it legal, for sale in shops in a way similar to strong alcohol, and the criminals get competition from honest businessmen with much lower profit margins.
And if you're afraid of how people will function in society, weed is less incapacitating than alcohol. How do you deal with drunks in the office? Most people drink only in the weekends or maybe a bit in the evening. The same happens with pot.
... and a point is made. The United States is NOT a Democracy. We are a Republic.
You say that as if they're mutually explusive. They're not. Dictatorship and democracy are mutually explusive. Monarchy and republic are mutually exclusive. But all democracies are either a republic or a monarchy, and the US is not a monarchy. It's a democratic federal republic (although you could argue about how democratic it really is, considering how the system is organised to effectively only allow two parties to be represented in Congress, and a president can be elected on a minority vote).
Under a Democracy, the majority forces their opinions on the minority and it eventually turns into an Oligarchy.
Not necessarily, although it is what's hapened in the US. But that's more because of the lack of real democracy in the system.
In our Republic, laws are set forth through a strict set of procedures to ensure fairness to all parties involved, not just the most popular.
In which republic exactly? Definitely not in the US, where only the two biggest parties have any real chance of representation.
Hopefully, these bastards will kill themselves without killing others, making the road safer for everyone else.
Would be nice, but what if they're driving SUVs? Then they kill others with little harm to themselves.