Sure. All you need to do is reverse the polarity. That always has exactly the opposite effect of the unwanted, right-side up polarity. That's how I got my blender to unblend smoothies back into strawberries, bananas, and milk.
That's a weird quote. I think he might have misunderstood government control not as meaning government regulations or specific policies, but that the governments had no power over the internet development.
He's right. If any government in a country really, really wanted to, they could regulate all phone lines in and out of the country and seize all networking equipment. Although you might still have networked computers illegally, you don't have a country-sprawling internet.
However, the reason the internet grew the way it did was precisely because very few governments out there didn't want it there.
Strange, strange comment to come from the guy. Sounds like a man that can't separate his mindset from that of an authoritarian regime. Nothing happens that we (the government) didn't want to happen, even if it happened on its own, since we could have stopped it anytime.
Another problem with multi-threading is that nothing is a black box anymore (not like anything really is, anyway). Once you start worrying about sharing statics and globals, you need to consider all the accesses done by objects you bring in from other libraries, which means you need to check the source to see if, for example, it uses a static cache (with no locking). Then, you need to dig in, find out why you're getting seg faults or corrupted memory, track down where else you're using this class (could be, for example, inside another object entirely, which could again be from a different library), synchronize with that other thread that you thought was completely unrelated (i.e., used the same class, but had its own instance of it), rinse, and repeat.
If you are using third party or homegrown (but not yours) libraries inside your multithreaded program, pretty soon you'll realize that not only do you need to know what and how they are accessing, but you also need to keep close tabs on what changes are done in future releases (again, keeping track of implementation details in those release). Your quick and highly parallelized threading program just became a maintenance nightmare.
Wow, if the US really cares so much about UN resolutions that it will go to war for them, these countries are therefore, most definitely, next on the list. Who wants to remind them what happens to countries that violate UN resolutions when the US is still around?
Man, North Korea is a huge problem for another reason as well. What the hell do you do with all the people? They have known no other place than North Korea, have no concept of what the rest of the world is like, and have been trained they're whole life to worship the leader and to hate it's neighbors and the US. Even if you do invade, imagine the kind of insurgency you'd have to be fighting over there after the war!
How, also, do you replace a government's like Kim's? Saddam's was hard enough, and this one is much, much more oppressive. When you suddently take away the only system that those undernourished, unskilled, and worst of all, institutionalized people have known, people that have never learned to fend for themselves... Wow, it's a huge task. That kind of damage will take a lot more commitment to fix than Iraq. I definitely don't think Bush is up to it (he screwed up so many times, and so unnecessarily, in Iraq, that I've lost any faith in his nation-building capabilities).
What happens if they are reunited with the South? How different are those two people after 60 years apart? Look at how poorly East Germany was integrated with West Germany, and then imagine how much worse it will be for South Korea, a country poorer than West Germany, yet with a bigger economic/educational gap to fill.
In North Korea's case, though, they can be defensive, since the political, economic, and cultural capital of the South is but an artillery shell throw's away. Japan is also within North Korean missile range, as they proved with that launch that flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific. It's defensive like a bank robber taking a hostage and using them as a human shield kind of defensive.
So now that Kim Jong-Il feels protected, what will he do? What will he do with the army he spent 60% of the GDP of the country building? I mean, it's not exactly like that country has been just sitting around, doing nothing since the Korean War. It's been conducting raids in South Korea, there have been numerous territorial water violations (with shots fired and people dying), it's been abducting Japanese civilians to train spies, it's been selling nuclear know-how to other countries (Pakistan, for example), etc. Now that North Korea feels a lot more resilient to an attack, might it not also feel that the US would be much more reluctant to enter into a Korean conflict with the threat of nukes being fired?
I mean, in the North, it's one man's decision - Kim's. What is he thinking? Does he think the US will not risk that kind of war, especially when it's tied up in Iraq? Or do Kim's old survival instincts still tell him that a war is a sure way to lose power, and these nukes are just part of a larger way of getting aid flowing back into the country (with seems unlikely in the next four Bush years)? Either way, this isn't good news. The first option starts a war that will bring much death and broken bodies, the latter will prolong a regime that sends out movies to its citizens teaching them how to eat grass due to a shortage of food.
As an aside, I'm waiting anxiously to see what is reported on North Korea's official news agency tomorrow (they're always a day behind). Most of the news items on this website are ridiculous (i.e., president of Congo celebrates Kim's birthday, Kim gets fruit basket from Palenstinians, Japan declared wicked trickster, etc.), but I wonder if they will mention this announcement.
vague fears about Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
That's not the reason people object to this kind of research. The main question in this whole argument is the one that neither side can agree on: at what point do we start being a living human being, and the killing of that human being becomes murder? At conception or some arbitrary point later (e.g., brain is fully formed, a neuron grows, all fingers are there, etc.)? Every other point in this discussion stems from that one question, for which there seems to be no objective answer, because we don't have a clear, unanimous idea of what it actually means to be human.
Not only that, but in a brilliant design move (don't ask me how they do it), they let me save things in my monitor! And I know it's there, too, cuz I can see everything I've saved throughout the years right on the screen! I'm never going to run out of harddrive! Game wants me to install it to my harddrive Program Files? No, thank you, space hog! I'm not made of money, you are going straight into the monitor! BTW, us tech savvy people call it the Desktop.
Disclaimer: INAE (I'm not an economist, but I do work for a trading firm).
Actually, the fed has been raising interest rates (as a matter of fact, another rise today to 2.5).
In pure GDP terms, the US is still the king of the world. But there are several underlying problems with the economy (not a recession, but foundation problems) that are showing up in part in the currency value.
Americans, for example, seem to be allergic to saving. 2/3 of the economy is consumer spending, the current accounts deficit is huge, and a huge part of that consumption is being bankrolled by foreign capital. This is, obviously, unsustainable, particularly with the weakening dollar. And with that kind of comsumption, the US will be hard pressed to get a trading surplus, even with the weaker currency.
Another problem caused by the falling dollar is that it's starting rumbles about it being dropped as the world's reserve currency. The yuan isn't exactly the problem, either, because although China buys butt loads of treasuries to keep the yuan low, the fact of the matter is that it probably wouldn't rise by that much even if unpegged. China only makes about 15% of value added profit on its exports, because it also needs to import a huge amount of capital and raw materials in order to produce the goods it ships. What this purchasing of treasuries is actually doing is keeping the prices of the bonds elevated, so it's easier for the US to issue more debt, and with the current decline of the dollar, that debt becomes cheaper and cheaper to pay, which also stimulates more bond issuance. God, the jump in the number treasury auctions last year was enormous!
The US isn't in a recession, not by a long shot. Again, in pure GDP growth, it's still the prize cow of the world economy. But if the US keeps spending itself like it is, it's only a matter of time before it loses its leadership position. For now, the saving grace of the American economy is that the country is still the best place in the world for investing, due mostly to the huge amounts of money flowing through the country, the very flexible financial markets, and the ease of doing business here. But with the weakening dollar and the deficit, that's becoming less and less so, and the US risks losing that edge at some point. The current situation is an unstable equilibrium that will be settled eventually, one way or another, IMHO.
You forgot:
If that money isn't in the hands of competent, patriotic American companies, it goes to the terrorists. So ask yourself: How much do I love America?
Protect our schools from the terrorist threat. Buy our new hardware.
Similar thing happened to me. Ever since I was a kid, I've been using a story I wrote a long time ago about a time when some friends dared me to shoot a bird with a handgun one of them found in this dad's closet. The whole thing started as a very silly little blurb I wrote up at the last minute for a class, and got a C on.
Anyway, I've used the damned story so many times for so many different things that I don't evern remember right which parts are true and which aren't. I even won a journalism award in highschool for it once, even though I handed it for a fictional writing assignment! (actually, I guess that fits)
Well, I take a free-form writing class in college, and, of course, I hand in yet another version of this story as an assignment. Again, I quickly type it out the night before while waiting for the loading screens on the game on my nintendo to finish.
The professor liked it so much, that he had me stand up in front of the class and read it to everybody the following day. The man kept stopping me every sentence or so and explaining to the class what I meant when I described the "shards of glass on top of the wall that surrounded our community, and how I was trying to convey the idea of an isolated world where you live or die by acceptance in it", or some other amazing insight into my work.
Oh, man, I was very nervous when I started reading, but there's nothing like noticing that the prof is a complete jackass to set your stomach at ease.
Would you set up explosives by the roadside, then, to blow up passing military vehicles? Attack military convoys? Fire mortars at military bases? Ambush patrols?
Those acts get labelled as terrorist when they happen to american troops in Iraq, but they seem like legitimate resistance to me.
Don't think Zarqawi's group represents the resistance in Iraq. They are opportunistic interveners in Iraq, nothing more. Hell, they are trying very hard to get the Sunni's and Shia's to beat each other to a bloody pulp! Those guys are the terrorists.
There are many "insurgencies" in Iraq, not just one, not just terrorists. But they all get treated the same way by both the military (understandable, of course, they are the ones doing most of the dying on the American side) but, more importantly, by the public.
I think it's a little naive to think that the motiviation behind this war was the UN resolutions or the WMDs. Resolutions are ignored all the time (Israel has several against it that are never brought up), and WMD's? I'm sure Al Qaeda can find friendlier countries than Hussein to obtain them, especially when intelligence can't seem to be finding them. Plus, with the broad definition of WMD's, the fact that production facilities can have civilian uses as well, and how the manufacturing know-how is so widespread, I'm sure there are many, many more countries that have them available and would also be willing to sell them to whoever wants them.
My opinion on the war? Nice idea, abysmal execution.
Who wouldn't want to change the political landscape in the Middle East? Everyone does, yes, even Europe, though they (mostly France) try to promote change by educating the youth. They've been trying this approach in Syria for a while now, for example. It's the kind of approach that takes longer, and may not work, but has merit (hell, Brazil managed to shake off a military dictatorship and become a democracy without shedding any blood, so why not?).
But the Bush administration seemed to have a very disturbing lack of foresight and planning. The post-Iraq world is a dangerous, divided place, with the divide between the West and the Middle East bigger than ever. Seems a step back to me, at least until (if) Bush is vindicated and Iraq does become a shining beacon of democracy and freedom for the Mid East.
I think it was a stupid, impulsive move. 9/11 was still relatively fresh on people's minds, the war in Afghanistan was so quick and painless, so the timing might have seemed ideal in that sense. But nation building a country as divided as Iraq? Takes more than a summer to work out.
No matter what you think of the reasons for the war or whether it was right or not. The execution was so clumsy and irresponsible, that should be an in issue onto itself.
Something that I have found to be very, very useful is describing the problem to somebody else. Just having to reorder your thoughts about the issue in order to get the message across puts everything in a different light. Plus, you consider things that your brain usually just skips over without a second thought. I can't count how many times I've been telling a coworker about a problem and halfway through the explanation it hits me ("Well, then when we're iterating through the list the code... Oh, crap, found it.").
Who reads the buttons anymore anyway? They're usually big enough so you can hit them with the mouse without focusing your eyes on them, so you can keep you vision focused on the dialog text instead (which means you can't read the text in the buttons, of course).
Keeping the same left: positive, right:negative helps immensely with that, since that standard can be easily programmed in you brain and it becomes automatic.
As a matter of fact, Gnome's got me reading the dialog box buttons again, because I can never be sure which button order's been thrown at me. Before, I could just click on one of the two buttons I can see clearly out of the edge of my eye and forget about it.
Usability studies be damned. I don't care which order they're in, as long as they're consistent accross all apps. This is something that bugs me about open source. If you want to make a change like that, why not try very, very hard to get everyone to move with you? Why keep expecting that people will run gnome and only gnome apps, and not realize that this will become an issue with the huge bag of apps most linux users have on their desktop?
Actually, he probably means that so many people are shorting the stock already, it's impossible to find someone that will lend you the stock so you can short it too.
Google is an excellent metric for browser usage, in my opinion. It's a very simplistic site that works on every browser, so there's no bias on the user's side in that case, and you get less of the useragent spoofing crowd. It's also where most (as evidenced by their success) of the peopel go as a starting point in their web browsing, so you get a very diverse segment of the population. And finally, it's universally appealing. People of different economic and social statuses all use it.
It's not like pointing to the top five business and deducing how all other businesses are from that small group. You're looking at the customers, not the businesses.
It's more like having, for example, a supermarket chain that appeals to all parts of society and becomes the standard supermarket everyone goes to and analyzing what kind of car people drive to get there.
They're hardy, breed easily and eats almost anything
Hmmm. Then it sounds like whatever eats roaches will have no trouble inventing "agriculture", the precursor to civlization. Assuming they have at least one thumb, of course.
But that's only one part of the crowd. And you provide a great example for that.
A lot of other people evidently agreed with you because linux today has a plethora of journaling filesystems, each, of course, with their benefits and drawbacks. You were unlucky enough to get the immature, "I want to be different than everyone else" crowd that gives open source a bad name. Meanwhile, more industrious and valuable people in the community put in a lot of effort to solve your problem (which was, of course, their problem as well), and did a pretty good job of it as well.
Do you know what Sunnis and Shi'ites are fighting over? Whether Mohammed's heirs should have been his sons or his disciples. They've been killing each other over this for 1300 years.
I have to disagree with that. That's what makes them different from each other, separates them, and therefore makes conflicts over other matters (e.g., power, like in Iraq) much more likely.
It's what allows one member of a group point at another one, yell "Sunni!", and kill him because the Sunni is then part of that amorphous blob of people he has labeled as "enemy" and to which he attributes so many bad qualities. Prejudice, if you will, since you're prejudging whether the man is friend or foe by that one label, without knowing a thing about the person you're killing.
In order for that to work, you would have to keep out foreign competitors that can take advantage of the cheaper labor available elsewhere (or they will have a huge cost, and hence price, advantage over local firms), or legislation would have to pass that makes them hire Americans if they want to do business here. Both of these would probably keep most competitors out of the US, or at least a hefy amount. This would reduce competition, which leads to higher prices and lower innovation.
It's been tried before. Many times. It's very tempting to the population to have the government shielf them from those damned foreigners. But protectionism doesn't work. Companies here will stagnate due to lower competition, prices will get much higher as a result (and because of increased labor costs). With higher prices, they will become less competitive internationally, their demand will go down, and they will produce less. With higher prices, not only these firms will lay off people, but everyone downstream from them in the production chain will too. The steel tariffs being a good example of this.
I would really like to see how protectionist rules that artifically restrain companies' hiring choices wouldn't result in this. I do believe that the idiotic incentives companies get for outsourcing (which are really there to motivate companies to export more) should be removed. But how do you "protect" these jobs without sending the whole economy into an upheavel?
Slashdot Mirror
isn't it time you ask yourself, "How badly DO I want to play Doom 3?"?
Sure. All you need to do is reverse the polarity. That always has exactly the opposite effect of the unwanted, right-side up polarity. That's how I got my blender to unblend smoothies back into strawberries, bananas, and milk.
That's a weird quote. I think he might have misunderstood government control not as meaning government regulations or specific policies, but that the governments had no power over the internet development.
He's right. If any government in a country really, really wanted to, they could regulate all phone lines in and out of the country and seize all networking equipment. Although you might still have networked computers illegally, you don't have a country-sprawling internet.
However, the reason the internet grew the way it did was precisely because very few governments out there didn't want it there.
Strange, strange comment to come from the guy. Sounds like a man that can't separate his mindset from that of an authoritarian regime. Nothing happens that we (the government) didn't want to happen, even if it happened on its own, since we could have stopped it anytime.
Another problem with multi-threading is that nothing is a black box anymore (not like anything really is, anyway). Once you start worrying about sharing statics and globals, you need to consider all the accesses done by objects you bring in from other libraries, which means you need to check the source to see if, for example, it uses a static cache (with no locking). Then, you need to dig in, find out why you're getting seg faults or corrupted memory, track down where else you're using this class (could be, for example, inside another object entirely, which could again be from a different library), synchronize with that other thread that you thought was completely unrelated (i.e., used the same class, but had its own instance of it), rinse, and repeat.
If you are using third party or homegrown (but not yours) libraries inside your multithreaded program, pretty soon you'll realize that not only do you need to know what and how they are accessing, but you also need to keep close tabs on what changes are done in future releases (again, keeping track of implementation details in those release). Your quick and highly parallelized threading program just became a maintenance nightmare.
Probably the same way SCO got their grubby little hands on IBM's AIX code: by making a fuss while having no case.
Wow, if the US really cares so much about UN resolutions that it will go to war for them, these countries are therefore, most definitely, next on the list. Who wants to remind them what happens to countries that violate UN resolutions when the US is still around?
Man, North Korea is a huge problem for another reason as well. What the hell do you do with all the people? They have known no other place than North Korea, have no concept of what the rest of the world is like, and have been trained they're whole life to worship the leader and to hate it's neighbors and the US. Even if you do invade, imagine the kind of insurgency you'd have to be fighting over there after the war!
How, also, do you replace a government's like Kim's? Saddam's was hard enough, and this one is much, much more oppressive. When you suddently take away the only system that those undernourished, unskilled, and worst of all, institutionalized people have known, people that have never learned to fend for themselves... Wow, it's a huge task. That kind of damage will take a lot more commitment to fix than Iraq. I definitely don't think Bush is up to it (he screwed up so many times, and so unnecessarily, in Iraq, that I've lost any faith in his nation-building capabilities).
What happens if they are reunited with the South? How different are those two people after 60 years apart? Look at how poorly East Germany was integrated with West Germany, and then imagine how much worse it will be for South Korea, a country poorer than West Germany, yet with a bigger economic/educational gap to fill.
In North Korea's case, though, they can be defensive, since the political, economic, and cultural capital of the South is but an artillery shell throw's away. Japan is also within North Korean missile range, as they proved with that launch that flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific. It's defensive like a bank robber taking a hostage and using them as a human shield kind of defensive.
So now that Kim Jong-Il feels protected, what will he do? What will he do with the army he spent 60% of the GDP of the country building? I mean, it's not exactly like that country has been just sitting around, doing nothing since the Korean War. It's been conducting raids in South Korea, there have been numerous territorial water violations (with shots fired and people dying), it's been abducting Japanese civilians to train spies, it's been selling nuclear know-how to other countries (Pakistan, for example), etc. Now that North Korea feels a lot more resilient to an attack, might it not also feel that the US would be much more reluctant to enter into a Korean conflict with the threat of nukes being fired?
I mean, in the North, it's one man's decision - Kim's. What is he thinking? Does he think the US will not risk that kind of war, especially when it's tied up in Iraq? Or do Kim's old survival instincts still tell him that a war is a sure way to lose power, and these nukes are just part of a larger way of getting aid flowing back into the country (with seems unlikely in the next four Bush years)? Either way, this isn't good news. The first option starts a war that will bring much death and broken bodies, the latter will prolong a regime that sends out movies to its citizens teaching them how to eat grass due to a shortage of food.
As an aside, I'm waiting anxiously to see what is reported on North Korea's official news agency tomorrow (they're always a day behind). Most of the news items on this website are ridiculous (i.e., president of Congo celebrates Kim's birthday, Kim gets fruit basket from Palenstinians, Japan declared wicked trickster, etc.), but I wonder if they will mention this announcement.
vague fears about Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
That's not the reason people object to this kind of research. The main question in this whole argument is the one that neither side can agree on: at what point do we start being a living human being, and the killing of that human being becomes murder? At conception or some arbitrary point later (e.g., brain is fully formed, a neuron grows, all fingers are there, etc.)? Every other point in this discussion stems from that one question, for which there seems to be no objective answer, because we don't have a clear, unanimous idea of what it actually means to be human.
Not only that, but in a brilliant design move (don't ask me how they do it), they let me save things in my monitor! And I know it's there, too, cuz I can see everything I've saved throughout the years right on the screen! I'm never going to run out of harddrive! Game wants me to install it to my harddrive Program Files? No, thank you, space hog! I'm not made of money, you are going straight into the monitor! BTW, us tech savvy people call it the Desktop.
Disclaimer: INAE (I'm not an economist, but I do work for a trading firm).
Actually, the fed has been raising interest rates (as a matter of fact, another rise today to 2.5).
In pure GDP terms, the US is still the king of the world. But there are several underlying problems with the economy (not a recession, but foundation problems) that are showing up in part in the currency value.
Americans, for example, seem to be allergic to saving. 2/3 of the economy is consumer spending, the current accounts deficit is huge, and a huge part of that consumption is being bankrolled by foreign capital. This is, obviously, unsustainable, particularly with the weakening dollar. And with that kind of comsumption, the US will be hard pressed to get a trading surplus, even with the weaker currency.
Another problem caused by the falling dollar is that it's starting rumbles about it being dropped as the world's reserve currency. The yuan isn't exactly the problem, either, because although China buys butt loads of treasuries to keep the yuan low, the fact of the matter is that it probably wouldn't rise by that much even if unpegged. China only makes about 15% of value added profit on its exports, because it also needs to import a huge amount of capital and raw materials in order to produce the goods it ships. What this purchasing of treasuries is actually doing is keeping the prices of the bonds elevated, so it's easier for the US to issue more debt, and with the current decline of the dollar, that debt becomes cheaper and cheaper to pay, which also stimulates more bond issuance. God, the jump in the number treasury auctions last year was enormous!
The US isn't in a recession, not by a long shot. Again, in pure GDP growth, it's still the prize cow of the world economy. But if the US keeps spending itself like it is, it's only a matter of time before it loses its leadership position. For now, the saving grace of the American economy is that the country is still the best place in the world for investing, due mostly to the huge amounts of money flowing through the country, the very flexible financial markets, and the ease of doing business here. But with the weakening dollar and the deficit, that's becoming less and less so, and the US risks losing that edge at some point. The current situation is an unstable equilibrium that will be settled eventually, one way or another, IMHO.
You forgot: If that money isn't in the hands of competent, patriotic American companies, it goes to the terrorists. So ask yourself: How much do I love America?
Protect our schools from the terrorist threat. Buy our new hardware.
Do it for the children.
Similar thing happened to me. Ever since I was a kid, I've been using a story I wrote a long time ago about a time when some friends dared me to shoot a bird with a handgun one of them found in this dad's closet. The whole thing started as a very silly little blurb I wrote up at the last minute for a class, and got a C on.
Anyway, I've used the damned story so many times for so many different things that I don't evern remember right which parts are true and which aren't. I even won a journalism award in highschool for it once, even though I handed it for a fictional writing assignment! (actually, I guess that fits)
Well, I take a free-form writing class in college, and, of course, I hand in yet another version of this story as an assignment. Again, I quickly type it out the night before while waiting for the loading screens on the game on my nintendo to finish.
The professor liked it so much, that he had me stand up in front of the class and read it to everybody the following day. The man kept stopping me every sentence or so and explaining to the class what I meant when I described the "shards of glass on top of the wall that surrounded our community, and how I was trying to convey the idea of an isolated world where you live or die by acceptance in it", or some other amazing insight into my work.
Oh, man, I was very nervous when I started reading, but there's nothing like noticing that the prof is a complete jackass to set your stomach at ease.
Would you set up explosives by the roadside, then, to blow up passing military vehicles? Attack military convoys? Fire mortars at military bases? Ambush patrols?
Those acts get labelled as terrorist when they happen to american troops in Iraq, but they seem like legitimate resistance to me.
Don't think Zarqawi's group represents the resistance in Iraq. They are opportunistic interveners in Iraq, nothing more. Hell, they are trying very hard to get the Sunni's and Shia's to beat each other to a bloody pulp! Those guys are the terrorists.
There are many "insurgencies" in Iraq, not just one, not just terrorists. But they all get treated the same way by both the military (understandable, of course, they are the ones doing most of the dying on the American side) but, more importantly, by the public.
I think it's a little naive to think that the motiviation behind this war was the UN resolutions or the WMDs. Resolutions are ignored all the time (Israel has several against it that are never brought up), and WMD's? I'm sure Al Qaeda can find friendlier countries than Hussein to obtain them, especially when intelligence can't seem to be finding them. Plus, with the broad definition of WMD's, the fact that production facilities can have civilian uses as well, and how the manufacturing know-how is so widespread, I'm sure there are many, many more countries that have them available and would also be willing to sell them to whoever wants them.
My opinion on the war? Nice idea, abysmal execution.
Who wouldn't want to change the political landscape in the Middle East? Everyone does, yes, even Europe, though they (mostly France) try to promote change by educating the youth. They've been trying this approach in Syria for a while now, for example. It's the kind of approach that takes longer, and may not work, but has merit (hell, Brazil managed to shake off a military dictatorship and become a democracy without shedding any blood, so why not?).
But the Bush administration seemed to have a very disturbing lack of foresight and planning. The post-Iraq world is a dangerous, divided place, with the divide between the West and the Middle East bigger than ever. Seems a step back to me, at least until (if) Bush is vindicated and Iraq does become a shining beacon of democracy and freedom for the Mid East.
I think it was a stupid, impulsive move. 9/11 was still relatively fresh on people's minds, the war in Afghanistan was so quick and painless, so the timing might have seemed ideal in that sense. But nation building a country as divided as Iraq? Takes more than a summer to work out.
No matter what you think of the reasons for the war or whether it was right or not. The execution was so clumsy and irresponsible, that should be an in issue onto itself.
Something that I have found to be very, very useful is describing the problem to somebody else. Just having to reorder your thoughts about the issue in order to get the message across puts everything in a different light. Plus, you consider things that your brain usually just skips over without a second thought. I can't count how many times I've been telling a coworker about a problem and halfway through the explanation it hits me ("Well, then when we're iterating through the list the code... Oh, crap, found it.").
Who reads the buttons anymore anyway? They're usually big enough so you can hit them with the mouse without focusing your eyes on them, so you can keep you vision focused on the dialog text instead (which means you can't read the text in the buttons, of course).
Keeping the same left: positive, right:negative helps immensely with that, since that standard can be easily programmed in you brain and it becomes automatic.
As a matter of fact, Gnome's got me reading the dialog box buttons again, because I can never be sure which button order's been thrown at me. Before, I could just click on one of the two buttons I can see clearly out of the edge of my eye and forget about it.
Usability studies be damned. I don't care which order they're in, as long as they're consistent accross all apps. This is something that bugs me about open source. If you want to make a change like that, why not try very, very hard to get everyone to move with you? Why keep expecting that people will run gnome and only gnome apps, and not realize that this will become an issue with the huge bag of apps most linux users have on their desktop?
Actually, he probably means that so many people are shorting the stock already, it's impossible to find someone that will lend you the stock so you can short it too.
Damn! I laughed so hard at that one I fell out of my chair. You win again, gravity!
Google is an excellent metric for browser usage, in my opinion. It's a very simplistic site that works on every browser, so there's no bias on the user's side in that case, and you get less of the useragent spoofing crowd. It's also where most (as evidenced by their success) of the peopel go as a starting point in their web browsing, so you get a very diverse segment of the population. And finally, it's universally appealing. People of different economic and social statuses all use it.
It's not like pointing to the top five business and deducing how all other businesses are from that small group. You're looking at the customers, not the businesses.
It's more like having, for example, a supermarket chain that appeals to all parts of society and becomes the standard supermarket everyone goes to and analyzing what kind of car people drive to get there.
They're hardy, breed easily and eats almost anything
Hmmm. Then it sounds like whatever eats roaches will have no trouble inventing "agriculture", the precursor to civlization. Assuming they have at least one thumb, of course.
But that's only one part of the crowd. And you provide a great example for that.
A lot of other people evidently agreed with you because linux today has a plethora of journaling filesystems, each, of course, with their benefits and drawbacks. You were unlucky enough to get the immature, "I want to be different than everyone else" crowd that gives open source a bad name. Meanwhile, more industrious and valuable people in the community put in a lot of effort to solve your problem (which was, of course, their problem as well), and did a pretty good job of it as well.
Do you know what Sunnis and Shi'ites are fighting over? Whether Mohammed's heirs should have been his sons or his disciples. They've been killing each other over this for 1300 years.
I have to disagree with that. That's what makes them different from each other, separates them, and therefore makes conflicts over other matters (e.g., power, like in Iraq) much more likely.
It's what allows one member of a group point at another one, yell "Sunni!", and kill him because the Sunni is then part of that amorphous blob of people he has labeled as "enemy" and to which he attributes so many bad qualities. Prejudice, if you will, since you're prejudging whether the man is friend or foe by that one label, without knowing a thing about the person you're killing.
In order for that to work, you would have to keep out foreign competitors that can take advantage of the cheaper labor available elsewhere (or they will have a huge cost, and hence price, advantage over local firms), or legislation would have to pass that makes them hire Americans if they want to do business here. Both of these would probably keep most competitors out of the US, or at least a hefy amount. This would reduce competition, which leads to higher prices and lower innovation.
It's been tried before. Many times. It's very tempting to the population to have the government shielf them from those damned foreigners. But protectionism doesn't work. Companies here will stagnate due to lower competition, prices will get much higher as a result (and because of increased labor costs). With higher prices, they will become less competitive internationally, their demand will go down, and they will produce less. With higher prices, not only these firms will lay off people, but everyone downstream from them in the production chain will too. The steel tariffs being a good example of this.
I would really like to see how protectionist rules that artifically restrain companies' hiring choices wouldn't result in this. I do believe that the idiotic incentives companies get for outsourcing (which are really there to motivate companies to export more) should be removed. But how do you "protect" these jobs without sending the whole economy into an upheavel?