While it's true that there is a widely spread perception that programming is a lonely job, I've found in my career that communication is very important in programming. It's probably not true for all programming tasks, but gathering requirements, dividing the work into 1 person pieces, coordinating the work on those pieces, testing, and bug-fixing all require communication. A day doesn't go by that I don't sit down with someone together to do a little problem-solving.
So you may be right that a lot of smart young ladies base a decision not to go into programming on a belief that it's isolating, but if so then their concerns are misplaced.
Speaking as a woman in computer science, there is one thing that's lonely about programming though: not enough other women! I've definitely found that women and men communicate in different styles. I enjoy both styles, but find that something is missing in my life if I only get to take part in one of them. If other women see this like me, then we may be talking about a self-perpetuating cycle here.
Interesting response -- did you fail to notice me say that I am an American in Germany and that it was the Germans who started the discussion trashing Americans? (ie the hosts)
And as if manners had anything to do with it. Criticism can be constructive too -- if it is informed. And people who give criticism should be exactly the people who can recognize the value of receiving it.
In response to having to listen to yet another poorly informed rant against the American electoral college here in Germany over the weekend I started pointing out equal flaws in European forms of government. The lynching was about the same as what I'd expect in the US for pointing out flaws in the American system.
As far as I can tell everyone has a blind spot for their own country's system.
I don't know enough about Latin to discuss your more general point one way or another, but I can say your German example is incorrect.
The sentence should be "Er hat mich umgebracht" (something you couldn't actually say with truth anyways, since dead people can't talk;o). "umbringen" is a seperable prefix verb. "um" is a prefix in this case and not a preposition.
In German prepositions do influence the case (Nominative, Accussative, Dative, or Genetive) of the nouns in the sentence. Since the noun is declined to indicate it's role in the sentence with respect to the verbs and prepositions, word order can be more flexible than in English.
English needs word order to indicate what role a certain noun is playing in the sentence more often because the nouns are not changed for their new position. As a result, sometimes sentences really do become clearer when you don't let your preposition dangle.
This of course isn't a reason to follow the rule slavishly. Sometimes it's just silly, as Winston Churchill so clearly demonstrated.
You and the anonymous coward below both misunderstood the GP post. There are antibiotics that are designed to be taken only once. I don't know how many varieties there are of these antibiotics, but I do know at least that there is one for bladder infections.
GP is asking if the design of creating a lot of pills to be taken over a period of time is necessary in as many cases as it is used. (That's assuming I understood him correctly which is also not guaranteed.) If more antibiotics were designed to be taken only once, people would be less likely to make mistakes which lead to antibiotic resistance.
You know both of you may be right, but I tend to agree more with GP.
I just spent 3 hours last night trying to get a certain feature working under linux (soundcard talking to CD player). Result, 3 hours of frustration and no progress. On my Windows on the same machine it works without problem. This is not the first problem I've had with Linux. The worst was when Yast offered to repair my installation and kindly mismounted my harddrives, causing linux to fail to boot. At least I got that one fixed though.
I'd be willing to wager that I have considerably more patience than the average user. Most would have booted Linux, seen that it didn't work and stopped using Linux. It doesn't matter to 90% of your users who's fault it is. They just want something that works.
So maybe your long-term view will serve Linux well. But maybe, by the time all the quirks are out of ACPI, the next technology will be in.
I'd like to see Linux succeed, and I'm not convince that it will from what I've seen.
For the purposes of distribution of state funds, a religious school is any school in which a religion is taught as truth in the classroom. It is also any school with a religiously discriminatory admissions or hiring process. It is also any school which is run by a religious institution. That even means that state-funded scholarships awarded to an individual can't be used to pay for education at one of these institutions.
The state has no problem with sponsoring private schools. It won't sponsor religious private schools.
State funds may not go towards the promotion of a religion in the US. Which means no broadcasts of religious material on publicly owned channels (I wake up every morning in Germany to a Lutheran or Catholic preacher on an otherwise excellent public channel -- that would be illegal in the US). It means no state funds to charitable organizations run by religions (something shrub is trying to change). It means no religious symbols on state property (hence the big stir about that Alabama judge who wants to put up the ten commandments in the court house and the occasional little stir about nativity scenes). It means that school children cannot be forced to recite the pledge of allegiance (which contains the words "In God We Trust"). It means that the state will never collect tithes for a church (The German and Spanish governments and Alsace-Moselle do, but only for 3 or 4 religions). The list goes on.
It also means that if you were to argue in the US that Turkey should not be part of the European Union because it's not Christian that most people won't understand why you think that has anything to do with anything. That argument seems to have some traction in Europe though.
Actually apart from a few symbols, like the "In God we Trust" you mentioned on our money and the self-serving public piousness of our president, separation of church and state is much stronger in the US than in Germany (where I currently live). I don't live in France but many of the things I hear give me the impression that there separation of church and state means something more like forcing the "secular" religion down people's throats. That "secular" religion hasn't entirely disentangled itself from its Christian roots. In fact it seems fairly blind to the ways in which it is influenced by them. And it seems incapable of recognizing the possibility of a Muslim secular movement.
By the way -- I'll take you at your word that you're not a secular fundamentalist, but in other cases people from religiously mixed families have been in my experience the most fundamentalist of secularists. They seem to have usually had a bad experience with religious intolerance and taken the wrong message away from that.
And a second by the way -- the wikipedia has a nice overview of religious freedom in various countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_ and_state
I'm sorry, but you're very wrong when you try to argue that France is good at separation of church and state.
In the US, state funding never goes to religious schools. That's illegal because it violates the principle of separation of church and state. As you point out, in France there are private religious schools. These schools receive state funding. The only religious schools receiving state funding are Christian (Protestant and Catholic). These schools either don't allow admission of non-Christians or they limit the percentage. They also have religious discriminatory hiring practices.
This has more practical problems than just violating the separation principal -- it causes non-christian immigrant minorities to be concentrated in one set of school systems where the mostly-French christians can flee them. It's a new apartheid.
Clothing (like the Muslim head-scarves) may have religious meaning for the people who wear them, but as long as it's not hurting anyone, the state should not be involved in determining that. A more balanced approach would be to prohibit proseletyzing and other behaviors which actually effect others, but allow people to otherwise observe the commandments of their religions. Making diversity visible has more positive effects than negative effects in a healthy society.
I find it interesting that high-range politicians in France actually get away with saying things like: "Muslim girls who wear headscarves do not want to be French". As if religion has anything at all to do with national identity. Except that in France it seems to.
I don't actually know but I'm guessing you were in New York? In any case, I can tell already that you probably weren't in Florida or Texas.
I'm an American living in Germany. My boyfriend and I went on vacation in Texas, Florida, and New York so I got a fast comparison of all three places. In Florida and Texas (more so in Florida), service was always with a smile. I hated New York, and especially New York City. It was worse than Paris for unfriendly service. It was stressful just to watch how people handled other people there.
The author of that article is involved in www.moveon.org. In case you didn't already know about it: maybe you're interested in signing up or volunteering?
I would add National Instrument's LabVIEW to your list of visual languages.
If you are trying to do detailed logic rather than just bring already written libraries together, a visual language may not be worse than something like Java. It may also not be better. I do think it makes a nice programming model for bringing together existing modules of code though. (as in LabVIEW Express)
Of course, as in any other kind of choice between programming languages, it all depends on the specific problem domain.
With respect to Germany I can speak from first hand experience: their whole system is hanging on by a thread. They're in the process of working on massive reductions in benefits on the same or possibly greater costs (and costs are 12-15% of my salary). Talk to any doctor and they are all being just as seriously abused by the system as the patients. They have a ration of procedures that they can perform and be paid for -- after that, they aren't paid for their work. For that reason, the next generation is not producing enough doctors which means they are looking at a future shortage. Of course under those circumstance, not only does the quantity and cost of care suffer, but also the quality. I feel infinitely more comfortable (ie safe and secure) in an American doctor's office or hospital than in a German one.
BTW, longer life expectancy can be attributed to a number of factors and the medical system is only one of them. Just look at the recent public policy discussions about obesity in America, for example.
Still I think that American's need to do more to cover the very poor. I just haven't yet seen a forced-participation scenario on which the negatives don't outweight the positives yet. When people have to do things for themselves, they often do them better than when they have to do them for other people.
Maybe simply expanding Medicare to cover the working poor would be a better solution.
Rolling back Bush'es tax-breaks for the rich ought to provide enough to do that. If not, raising taxes wouldn't be out of the question in my opinion. Americans still pay huge amounts less than I pay in Germany. Other possibilities for raising the money could be: putting Iraq under a UN mandate so that we can get financial assistance from other countries to help deal with that herculean endeavor, finally getting rid of farm subsidies so that 3rd world countries can compete in trade on an even playing field, doubling gasoline taxes to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, and so on...
I had a related problem with Yahoo a couple of years ago.
My aunt sent me and several other people an inflammatory forward which, among other things, compared Sept 11th to the Holocaust, claimed the Afghanistan wedding party which was bombed was to blame for their own demise, and criticized the Palestinians for their widely broadcast and falsified celebration of Sept 11th. I replied that three thousand sudden unexpected deaths can't be compared to six million deaths through torture and medical experiments, and that it was disrespectful of the holocaust victims to do so. I also pointed out that the Palestinian celebrations were a hoax. (I later learned I was wrong on this point. Fake footage: Palestinians dancing in the street) I was upset enough about the e-mail that I sent my answer to all the recipients of the original forward.
Somebody wasn't amused at my response (or maybe an automated spam filter detected the words "hoax" and "holocaust" in the same mail?) and decided to report it as spam to yahoo. Yahoo immediately blocked my account without warning or recourse. This was very upsetting for me because I had a number of old e-mails and address information stored in that account which I didn't have anywhere else and which would have been impossible to replace. It took me several hours of research spread out over a couple of days to find the telephone number for paying customers to call and get the problem corrected.
Lessons learned: Don't keep important information in a free account. Some things are worth paying for. Don't use Yahoo.
People talk to other people to learn something. The genetic "feel good" of socializing is just positive reinforcement. So if a social network is content-free or too content general, what's the point? Existing internet applications (static web-pages, chatting, etc...) are just as good if not better.
Maybe the major advantage these things bring is in having data model rigorous enough to make them searchable which contains typical fields useful for social networking (friends, enemies, interests, skills, birthday, whatever). But if that's the case, all you'd need to do is define an RDF Schema for this sort of information and add some XML to existing datasets (ie html pages, slashdot profiles, etc.) You don't really need these proprietary solutions.
I'm a linux newb and I started with Suse 9.0 about a month ago.
I'm still trying, 'cause I'd rather not use Windows for various philosophical and technical reasons. I'm disappointed, though.
Specifically YAST broke my network configuration multiple times by adding a network card when I configured something in a seperate unrelated part of the tool. Try to find that error as a linux newb. The apps Suse comes with have multiple minor, but irritating bugs. Mozilla's scroll bars disappear, the address manager refused to save my filters for a while and then suddenly fixed itself, some of the screen savers crash the computer entirely, and etc.
So yeah, I'm still trying, and since I am a programmer, I may just go in and fix the bugs rather than living with them. Because YAST is going GPL, I have a chance to be able to help out there. But with all the hype I'd been reading here on Slashdot about GPL'ed projects and specifically Linux, I was expecting better. Oh well...
I'm a Linux newb and I've started with SuSE. One thing I noticed though was the similarities between YAST and HP's SAM. Both can run in terminal mode and in GUI mode. HP managed that by creating a language called ObAM (I worked on it a little in an internship there years ago). ObAM could be interpreted to a useable interface in both modes.
The precision of your measurement will change your end result significantly. That's because coastlines are fractal. For more explanation of this principle check out this explanation of fractal coastlines.
Just a little side note: I'm indifferent to the internet or the people on the internet
People who bother to say something to other people are trying to reach out to other people. Obviously you wanted people on the internet to read what you wrote otherwise you wouldn't have written it and submitted it to./.
Thus the very making of this comment makes it incorrect.
You are aware that the "public health insurance" companies are really private companies right? When the government decided to essentially raise insurance rates by 10 Euros each quarter it was a giveaway to these companies. And that's what I mean. They only managed to hide it by debating about it so long that people lost sight of the goal which was to find a fair way to keep the public health insurance companies solvant. The end result was neither fair (ie it's a regressive tax* for all but the very poor), nor effective (ie it won't actually reduce unnecessary doctor's visits).
Since the insurance companies are the only ones that got anything out of this, that would be easier to explain as bending over for these companies, than it would be as bending over for the voter.
As far as the government handling things I can say directly through personal experience that that's not the case. I've given a police report on a stolen article and the police officer basically told me I was wasting my time. I had a problem with a German health insurance company and called the Bundesgesundheitsministerium. Before I started describing the actual problem, the woman there told me that without having actually heard the problem, she would assume that the insurance company was right. I was cheated by a landlord who refused to fix the mold and later mushrooms on the wall in my kitchen caused by leaky shower tiles. He still got to keep my last two months rent when I decided that the apartment was unliveable. If you want justice there, you have to pay your dues to a Deutsche Mieterschutz Verein (hint: not a government agency), as I found out later. I had to pay about 400 Euros to get my driver's license transfered just because my license was from Texas. Had it been from Colorado, I would only have had to pay about 100. Most of that 400 went to a driver's ed teacher, which you have to hire in order to go through the beaurocratic process. Part of it went for the translation of my driver's license which should have been totally unnecessary. The way the laws are shaped there is basically a giveaway to those businesses, but since it only effects foreigners, it's not going to get changed.
That's 4 stories. That's not all of it, and that's just in 3.5 years of living in Germany.
Here's a couple of bonus stories: a friend of mine tried to report a stolen bike in Belgium, and they flippantly told him that he should go out and steal a replacement. He's half Turkish, so his theory is that they just didn't like the way he looked. I was sitting on a train, and in walk a couple of police officers. They walk right past every passenger in the car all the way to the other end and asked two black men for their identification. Why would they pick precisely those two out if not for their skin color?
You may think the government does the work for you, but that's probably only because you've never actually really needed it. I've needed it and it's failed me time and time again. What the government does do for me is make sure I've got all my stamps right on my papers. Yippee.
Again, I'm not saying the US is better. Many of these specific problems wouldn't have occured in the US, but I'm sure other problems would have. On that, I think we're actually in agreement.
*In case you don't know what regressive means: a regressive tax is one that is a larger percentage of a smaller income, and a smaller percentage of a larger income. This is widely acknowledged as socially injust.
Speaking as an american in Germany I would agree that there are some important advantages to having more than two parties.
On the down side, the necessity of making compromise may not reduce partisanship. Often times, the other major party is against a new law no matter what it is, just to try and distinguish themselves. Then compromise time comes, and the law is made so complex that no one understands it just so that it *looks* like everyone won. Sometimes, that compromising makes the law in question so ineffective or even damaging that it should never be passed.
For an example, check out the recent "Praxisgebuhr" law in Germany. Before this law, Germans didn't have to pay even a token payment for going to the doctor. As a result, unnecessary costs arose when people went to the doctor for runny noses, hypochondria, and loneliness. Everyone knew it was time for people to bear some token economic consequence for choosing to go to the doctor. Thus was born the "doctor's visit fee". But then it was watered down. Chronically ill don't have to pay the co-pay, and poor people don't have to pay the co-pay. That's fair, you say. But it keeps going until the decision is made that people don't have to pay the co-pay more than once every 4 months. What? Excuse me but unless the purpose is to create a regressive raise in the insurance fees, de-coupling the co-pay from the number of doctor's visits doesn't fulfill the purpose of the law. The law was passed anyways.
Tax law is similar and that creates very real social injustices as only someone above a certain income level can hire someone who actually understands the tax law. This means that poor people pay more taxes than required under the law because the law is to complex to be understood.
There are numerous other problems with the European systems, which seriously weaken their claim to democracy uninfluenced by corporations(party discipline, disproportionate representation at the European level, no class action law suits, etc...).
That's of course not to say that the American system is better. It's not. Both continents have a lot to learn from each other. They both need to STOP being so arrogant and START listening to each other.
Living in Germany, I think I have a feel for how pissed our allies are. It goes well beyond Iraq -- there are rumors being spread by respectable sources that the Bush administration played a role in scutteling the European constitution by bribing the Poles.
I hope we get a new president in the next election, otherwise the rest of the world will stop ascribing our behavior to one nut, and decide that America is full of egotistical pigs who've switched to handling Europe like they handle South America. Europe won't be nearly as easy to push around, and that perception will severely damage US economic and military interests.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, you've got me interested. How do I display a marker line at column N?
So you may be right that a lot of smart young ladies base a decision not to go into programming on a belief that it's isolating, but if so then their concerns are misplaced.
Speaking as a woman in computer science, there is one thing that's lonely about programming though: not enough other women! I've definitely found that women and men communicate in different styles. I enjoy both styles, but find that something is missing in my life if I only get to take part in one of them. If other women see this like me, then we may be talking about a self-perpetuating cycle here.
And as if manners had anything to do with it. Criticism can be constructive too -- if it is informed. And people who give criticism should be exactly the people who can recognize the value of receiving it.
In response to having to listen to yet another poorly informed rant against the American electoral college here in Germany over the weekend I started pointing out equal flaws in European forms of government. The lynching was about the same as what I'd expect in the US for pointing out flaws in the American system.
As far as I can tell everyone has a blind spot for their own country's system.
The sentence should be "Er hat mich umgebracht" (something you couldn't actually say with truth anyways, since dead people can't talk;o). "umbringen" is a seperable prefix verb. "um" is a prefix in this case and not a preposition.
In German prepositions do influence the case (Nominative, Accussative, Dative, or Genetive) of the nouns in the sentence. Since the noun is declined to indicate it's role in the sentence with respect to the verbs and prepositions, word order can be more flexible than in English.
English needs word order to indicate what role a certain noun is playing in the sentence more often because the nouns are not changed for their new position. As a result, sometimes sentences really do become clearer when you don't let your preposition dangle.
This of course isn't a reason to follow the rule slavishly. Sometimes it's just silly, as Winston Churchill so clearly demonstrated.
GP is asking if the design of creating a lot of pills to be taken over a period of time is necessary in as many cases as it is used. (That's assuming I understood him correctly which is also not guaranteed.) If more antibiotics were designed to be taken only once, people would be less likely to make mistakes which lead to antibiotic resistance.
Same id but at yahoo.
I just spent 3 hours last night trying to get a certain feature working under linux (soundcard talking to CD player). Result, 3 hours of frustration and no progress. On my Windows on the same machine it works without problem. This is not the first problem I've had with Linux. The worst was when Yast offered to repair my installation and kindly mismounted my harddrives, causing linux to fail to boot. At least I got that one fixed though.
I'd be willing to wager that I have considerably more patience than the average user. Most would have booted Linux, seen that it didn't work and stopped using Linux. It doesn't matter to 90% of your users who's fault it is. They just want something that works.
So maybe your long-term view will serve Linux well. But maybe, by the time all the quirks are out of ACPI, the next technology will be in.
I'd like to see Linux succeed, and I'm not convince that it will from what I've seen.
The state has no problem with sponsoring private schools. It won't sponsor religious private schools.
State funds may not go towards the promotion of a religion in the US. Which means no broadcasts of religious material on publicly owned channels (I wake up every morning in Germany to a Lutheran or Catholic preacher on an otherwise excellent public channel -- that would be illegal in the US). It means no state funds to charitable organizations run by religions (something shrub is trying to change). It means no religious symbols on state property (hence the big stir about that Alabama judge who wants to put up the ten commandments in the court house and the occasional little stir about nativity scenes). It means that school children cannot be forced to recite the pledge of allegiance (which contains the words "In God We Trust"). It means that the state will never collect tithes for a church (The German and Spanish governments and Alsace-Moselle do, but only for 3 or 4 religions). The list goes on.
It also means that if you were to argue in the US that Turkey should not be part of the European Union because it's not Christian that most people won't understand why you think that has anything to do with anything. That argument seems to have some traction in Europe though.
Actually apart from a few symbols, like the "In God we Trust" you mentioned on our money and the self-serving public piousness of our president, separation of church and state is much stronger in the US than in Germany (where I currently live). I don't live in France but many of the things I hear give me the impression that there separation of church and state means something more like forcing the "secular" religion down people's throats. That "secular" religion hasn't entirely disentangled itself from its Christian roots. In fact it seems fairly blind to the ways in which it is influenced by them. And it seems incapable of recognizing the possibility of a Muslim secular movement.
By the way -- I'll take you at your word that you're not a secular fundamentalist, but in other cases people from religiously mixed families have been in my experience the most fundamentalist of secularists. They seem to have usually had a bad experience with religious intolerance and taken the wrong message away from that.
And a second by the way -- the wikipedia has a nice overview of religious freedom in various countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_ and_state
In the US, state funding never goes to religious schools. That's illegal because it violates the principle of separation of church and state. As you point out, in France there are private religious schools. These schools receive state funding. The only religious schools receiving state funding are Christian (Protestant and Catholic). These schools either don't allow admission of non-Christians or they limit the percentage. They also have religious discriminatory hiring practices.
This has more practical problems than just violating the separation principal -- it causes non-christian immigrant minorities to be concentrated in one set of school systems where the mostly-French christians can flee them. It's a new apartheid.
Clothing (like the Muslim head-scarves) may have religious meaning for the people who wear them, but as long as it's not hurting anyone, the state should not be involved in determining that. A more balanced approach would be to prohibit proseletyzing and other behaviors which actually effect others, but allow people to otherwise observe the commandments of their religions. Making diversity visible has more positive effects than negative effects in a healthy society.
I find it interesting that high-range politicians in France actually get away with saying things like: "Muslim girls who wear headscarves do not want to be French". As if religion has anything at all to do with national identity. Except that in France it seems to.
I'm an American living in Germany. My boyfriend and I went on vacation in Texas, Florida, and New York so I got a fast comparison of all three places. In Florida and Texas (more so in Florida), service was always with a smile. I hated New York, and especially New York City. It was worse than Paris for unfriendly service. It was stressful just to watch how people handled other people there.
The author of that article is involved in www.moveon.org. In case you didn't already know about it: maybe you're interested in signing up or volunteering?
If you are trying to do detailed logic rather than just bring already written libraries together, a visual language may not be worse than something like Java. It may also not be better. I do think it makes a nice programming model for bringing together existing modules of code though. (as in LabVIEW Express)
Of course, as in any other kind of choice between programming languages, it all depends on the specific problem domain.
I'm going to have to stop using my Elmer Fudd international google. It doesn't have the full new look (for example, no Froogle.)
BTW, longer life expectancy can be attributed to a number of factors and the medical system is only one of them. Just look at the recent public policy discussions about obesity in America, for example.
Still I think that American's need to do more to cover the very poor. I just haven't yet seen a forced-participation scenario on which the negatives don't outweight the positives yet. When people have to do things for themselves, they often do them better than when they have to do them for other people.
Maybe simply expanding Medicare to cover the working poor would be a better solution.
Rolling back Bush'es tax-breaks for the rich ought to provide enough to do that. If not, raising taxes wouldn't be out of the question in my opinion. Americans still pay huge amounts less than I pay in Germany. Other possibilities for raising the money could be: putting Iraq under a UN mandate so that we can get financial assistance from other countries to help deal with that herculean endeavor, finally getting rid of farm subsidies so that 3rd world countries can compete in trade on an even playing field, doubling gasoline taxes to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, and so on...
My aunt sent me and several other people an inflammatory forward which, among other things, compared Sept 11th to the Holocaust, claimed the Afghanistan wedding party which was bombed was to blame for their own demise, and criticized the Palestinians for their widely broadcast and falsified celebration of Sept 11th. I replied that three thousand sudden unexpected deaths can't be compared to six million deaths through torture and medical experiments, and that it was disrespectful of the holocaust victims to do so. I also pointed out that the Palestinian celebrations were a hoax. (I later learned I was wrong on this point. Fake footage: Palestinians dancing in the street) I was upset enough about the e-mail that I sent my answer to all the recipients of the original forward.
Somebody wasn't amused at my response (or maybe an automated spam filter detected the words "hoax" and "holocaust" in the same mail?) and decided to report it as spam to yahoo. Yahoo immediately blocked my account without warning or recourse. This was very upsetting for me because I had a number of old e-mails and address information stored in that account which I didn't have anywhere else and which would have been impossible to replace. It took me several hours of research spread out over a couple of days to find the telephone number for paying customers to call and get the problem corrected.
Lessons learned: Don't keep important information in a free account. Some things are worth paying for. Don't use Yahoo.
People talk to other people to learn something. The genetic "feel good" of socializing is just positive reinforcement. So if a social network is content-free or too content general, what's the point? Existing internet applications (static web-pages, chatting, etc...) are just as good if not better.
Maybe the major advantage these things bring is in having data model rigorous enough to make them searchable which contains typical fields useful for social networking (friends, enemies, interests, skills, birthday, whatever). But if that's the case, all you'd need to do is define an RDF Schema for this sort of information and add some XML to existing datasets (ie html pages, slashdot profiles, etc.) You don't really need these proprietary solutions.
Just a thought...
I'm still trying, 'cause I'd rather not use Windows for various philosophical and technical reasons. I'm disappointed, though.
Specifically YAST broke my network configuration multiple times by adding a network card when I configured something in a seperate unrelated part of the tool. Try to find that error as a linux newb. The apps Suse comes with have multiple minor, but irritating bugs. Mozilla's scroll bars disappear, the address manager refused to save my filters for a while and then suddenly fixed itself, some of the screen savers crash the computer entirely, and etc.
So yeah, I'm still trying, and since I am a programmer, I may just go in and fix the bugs rather than living with them. Because YAST is going GPL, I have a chance to be able to help out there. But with all the hype I'd been reading here on Slashdot about GPL'ed projects and specifically Linux, I was expecting better. Oh well...
I'm a Linux newb and I've started with SuSE. One thing I noticed though was the similarities between YAST and HP's SAM. Both can run in terminal mode and in GUI mode. HP managed that by creating a language called ObAM (I worked on it a little in an internship there years ago). ObAM could be interpreted to a useable interface in both modes.
Does YAST do something similar?
Just curious...
The precision of your measurement will change your end result significantly. That's because coastlines are fractal. For more explanation of this principle check out this explanation of fractal coastlines.
I'm indifferent to the internet or the people on the internet
People who bother to say something to other people are trying to reach out to other people. Obviously you wanted people on the internet to read what you wrote otherwise you wouldn't have written it and submitted it to ./.
Thus the very making of this comment makes it incorrect.
BananaWare: Software which ripens after purchase.
Since the insurance companies are the only ones that got anything out of this, that would be easier to explain as bending over for these companies, than it would be as bending over for the voter.
As far as the government handling things I can say directly through personal experience that that's not the case. I've given a police report on a stolen article and the police officer basically told me I was wasting my time. I had a problem with a German health insurance company and called the Bundesgesundheitsministerium. Before I started describing the actual problem, the woman there told me that without having actually heard the problem, she would assume that the insurance company was right. I was cheated by a landlord who refused to fix the mold and later mushrooms on the wall in my kitchen caused by leaky shower tiles. He still got to keep my last two months rent when I decided that the apartment was unliveable. If you want justice there, you have to pay your dues to a Deutsche Mieterschutz Verein (hint: not a government agency), as I found out later. I had to pay about 400 Euros to get my driver's license transfered just because my license was from Texas. Had it been from Colorado, I would only have had to pay about 100. Most of that 400 went to a driver's ed teacher, which you have to hire in order to go through the beaurocratic process. Part of it went for the translation of my driver's license which should have been totally unnecessary. The way the laws are shaped there is basically a giveaway to those businesses, but since it only effects foreigners, it's not going to get changed.
That's 4 stories. That's not all of it, and that's just in 3.5 years of living in Germany.
Here's a couple of bonus stories: a friend of mine tried to report a stolen bike in Belgium, and they flippantly told him that he should go out and steal a replacement. He's half Turkish, so his theory is that they just didn't like the way he looked. I was sitting on a train, and in walk a couple of police officers. They walk right past every passenger in the car all the way to the other end and asked two black men for their identification. Why would they pick precisely those two out if not for their skin color?
You may think the government does the work for you, but that's probably only because you've never actually really needed it. I've needed it and it's failed me time and time again. What the government does do for me is make sure I've got all my stamps right on my papers. Yippee.
Again, I'm not saying the US is better. Many of these specific problems wouldn't have occured in the US, but I'm sure other problems would have. On that, I think we're actually in agreement.
*In case you don't know what regressive means: a regressive tax is one that is a larger percentage of a smaller income, and a smaller percentage of a larger income. This is widely acknowledged as socially injust.
On the down side, the necessity of making compromise may not reduce partisanship. Often times, the other major party is against a new law no matter what it is, just to try and distinguish themselves. Then compromise time comes, and the law is made so complex that no one understands it just so that it *looks* like everyone won. Sometimes, that compromising makes the law in question so ineffective or even damaging that it should never be passed.
For an example, check out the recent "Praxisgebuhr" law in Germany. Before this law, Germans didn't have to pay even a token payment for going to the doctor. As a result, unnecessary costs arose when people went to the doctor for runny noses, hypochondria, and loneliness. Everyone knew it was time for people to bear some token economic consequence for choosing to go to the doctor. Thus was born the "doctor's visit fee". But then it was watered down. Chronically ill don't have to pay the co-pay, and poor people don't have to pay the co-pay. That's fair, you say. But it keeps going until the decision is made that people don't have to pay the co-pay more than once every 4 months. What? Excuse me but unless the purpose is to create a regressive raise in the insurance fees, de-coupling the co-pay from the number of doctor's visits doesn't fulfill the purpose of the law. The law was passed anyways.
Tax law is similar and that creates very real social injustices as only someone above a certain income level can hire someone who actually understands the tax law. This means that poor people pay more taxes than required under the law because the law is to complex to be understood.
There are numerous other problems with the European systems, which seriously weaken their claim to democracy uninfluenced by corporations(party discipline, disproportionate representation at the European level, no class action law suits, etc...).
That's of course not to say that the American system is better. It's not. Both continents have a lot to learn from each other. They both need to STOP being so arrogant and START listening to each other.
Living in Germany, I think I have a feel for how pissed our allies are. It goes well beyond Iraq -- there are rumors being spread by respectable sources that the Bush administration played a role in scutteling the European constitution by bribing the Poles.
I hope we get a new president in the next election, otherwise the rest of the world will stop ascribing our behavior to one nut, and decide that America is full of egotistical pigs who've switched to handling Europe like they handle South America. Europe won't be nearly as easy to push around, and that perception will severely damage US economic and military interests.