Yup. Sure does! Of course, you might want to consider it a model rather than THE system. Another interesting thing: operates entirely through voluntary donations exclusively from members. There are no taxes in the sense of forced payment to the government. There are definitely prescribed systems for the donations, but they are _always_ left to the conscience of the individual members.
I haven't posted in a looooong time! Here goes:
This is a good idea, in that we need better government. The thing is, it doesn't need Soros or anyone else to invest. There is an existing, excellent example governmental system already at work in the world. Six million people are organizing themselves around the world using a system originally designed in the late 1800's. The Baha'i World Community has three levels of government, it is completely free of corruption, it is non-partisan, it is based on individual capabilities rather than party platforms, it is free from electioneering/campaigning, and it has been functioning effectively for over 40 years at a global scale (prior to that it was functioning for many more decades at a national scale in various countries around the world).
As a member of the Baha'i community myself, I have first-hand experience with the functioning of this system. It is amazing how incredibly different it is from the existing governmental systems you see running in nations.
There are other people who have commented here about how this system or the other system is excellent, it's just that (some excuse for why it's not working)... The Baha'i system _is_ working. There is no excuse to offer about how it's great in theory, because it's also great in practice.
The only challenge is that you have to actually buy into it... Oh, wait, that's a challenge for every other system too. Oh well.:-D
Actually, the real challenge is that it is not just a mechanical system. It uses spiritual principles in its operation. This is difficult for many people, but still, I encourage you to investigate it and the Baha'i community itself.
Mishkin.
1. Management asks the engineering group to come up with a proposal for solving a problem. 2. The engineering group comes up with a standard. 3. Management supports the standard and holds the engineering group to its commitment.
For any standard you can think of, this will work most effectively. The only problem is that I lied about it being three _easy_ steps. Each one is actually really hard to do and you just won't have any success with rolling out new standards until you get good at each of these things.
Until then, coaching, training, badgering and firing might get you part way.
I've been using SkypeOut for quite some time now. I first purchased SkypeOut credit in Oct. 2004. My main motivation has been that my brother lives in Beijing and I live in Toronto. But I also talk with other family and friends quite regularly using the feature. One thing I've noticed: my connection and audio quality tend to be better to when I'm talking to my Brother in Beijing than when I'm talking to my wife while I'm travelling in the US. Skype has gradually become more and more important in my suite of communication tools. I'd much rather Skype someone than email them. I used to use Yahoo! messenger and ICQ quite a bit. I've completely stopped. Maybe they've improved, but Skype's conference call/chat feature has been extremely helpful. I did an hour-long 3-way business call between Toronto, Baltimore and London in the UK for only a few dollars!
All that said, there's a problem too: I've been using it on my laptop and it means carrying around a headset with a microphone. The built-in mic is terrible. For anyone adopting Skype as a phone replacement (which it sill isn't for me), this is an important consideration. The big "discount" they are giving with free SkypeOut in North America will probably help adoption here a little, but I'm not convinced it will make a really big splash. I think they need to figure out a nice way to integrate with a cell-phone-like headset that still works through one's computer/laptop or on one's wireless LAN. This would be the item that would allow me to get rid of my home/office phones.
I hear lots of funny words and abbreviations and it sometimes seems like people are just throwing them around to sound impressive. Do I really have to learn all this funny language? Is this just something that I should expect as I become more technical?
Someone recently said to me:
My command of TLAs is growing exponentially, but my wetware doesn't have quite the SLA that my RAID NAS does. I'm hopeful that adding an MVC front-end to my recently deployed web-services layer (built to accomodate our LAMP,.NET and J2EE systems as well as our old green-screens) will allow me to do async updates to the distributed repository. I haven't yet figured out our HA failover system, but I'm thinking of an MQ sending stuff to a remote service provider.
This seems obvious: laptops! The low power consumption makes them perfect. I'd love a multi-processor ARM9 core laptop running... oh, say, OS/X:-) Just for the geekiness of it.
Imagine my chagrin when about 20 minutes later, lying in bed, I realized that not only am I not a cool geek, I'm stupid too! I can't believe I missed that. Must be the fact of being awake at 3:15am in my time zone and trying to write matematical poetry. Really it's the best time to do it, but it's also a pretty bad time to do it too:-)
I thought that integrating IE with Explorer was a great idea. I talked about it with other techie friends. We all agreed that it would be a "cool thing". Truth be told, it still is a cool thing. I'd love Mozilla to be my official interface to my hard drive as well as the web. Unfortunately, security in such a situation really is tough. In our networked world, there is too much malicious and flawed software/content out there. And so we go backwards feature-wise in order to secure ourselves. Unfortunately this is happening in a lot of places, not just in technology. I'm taking this way beyond the original context, but "The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established." We can't truly be secure anywhere until we can trust others. And we can't trust others until we have justice. And we can't have justice until we all recognize at a deep level that all human beings are equal. This recognition of the unity of humanity must acknowledge our diversity. Living in harmony is a goal, not a means. The means is the recognition of the unity of humanity.
Indeed! I still love playing Alpha Centauri, Max Payne II, Age of Empires, and even a bunch of older ones. I have a 1.7 Pentium M laptop as my primary computer including for gaming. It's got a great screen (1920x1200), but the graphics processor is getting a little dated (ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro). Hmm... I wonder if I can upgrade it?
I haven't yet played a MMORPG for a very simple reason: I have neither the time nor the money to dedicate to an ongoing game. I do still buy new games from time to time, particularly fantasy RPG or simulation (e.g. Civ IV). I am glad to hear someone mention that the single-player game market is being under-served. I for one find myself browsing through all the games and wishing that the MMORPGs had single-player versions that didn't require any sort of subscription. There may be some out there, but it certainly isn't obvious from the packaging!
Yeah, I'm actually interested in the same stuff. My wife and I are gradually converting over to a more ecologically friendly way of living. It's tough to do it quickly because of embodied energy concerns that we have.
I love technology. My family has several laptops, desktops and we run a few servers as well. We have gadgets. But the thing about it all that bothers me, is that it is all dependent on the precarious infrastructure for power and telecom. I would love to have solar and wind power backup. I'd love to have redundant methods of communication, even going back to low-tech/old-tech radio systems. I'd also like to have local caches of reference materials such as wikipedia, about.com, CIA world factbook, etc. I'm not a survivalist freak, but I do find it painful when the power goes out for a few days at a time! It'd be nice to have some basic backups!
Indeed, but just because two things share a type doesn't mean they have the same attributes. It is only if you can show that the attributes of each thing are caused by being part of the type that this works. Not only that, but the first part about history doesn't prove that those previous forms of media weren't evil. This is not a trivial point: there are plenty of people still worried about (for example) television. Just because something has become pervasive and culturally accepted doesn't mean it's "good". The connection between video games and other types of media, in the context of this discussion seems intuitive, but it is not logically supported, at least not how the connection was presented.
4. Publicize that history shows we never embrace new media. This is true for silent movies, radio, pulp magazines, comic books and every new music wave including Mozart. Videogames are not the devil incarnate, and not capable of half the deviltry our critics claim for them.
doesn't hold any water. In fact, it's not really evidence at all. The statement could be read like this:
History shows that we never embrace new foozles.
This is true for blue foozles, red foozles and green foozles.
Yellow foozles are not the devil incarnate, and not capable of half the deviltry our critics claim for them.
Hmm... the first two points don't mention anything about yellow foozles that in any way shows that they are not the devil incarnate.
Hate to tell you this, but it might be because you're getting old(er). Don't worry, I won't tell anyone.
Actually, I'm not terribly old yet: 34 yrs have passed me by. It's really only in the last year that I've started to lose my taste for cool new gadgets, etc. I thought about that when I was writing my original comment, but I don't think it's the reason for me at least.
In the mid-eighties to early nineties my brother and I would frequently pour over Sony catalogues and hang out at the Sony store. At the time, they were definintely the cool place for gadgets. I think about ten years ago I started to feel like they had lost the cool factor. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but after that, every time I went into a Sony store I got bored real quick. Recently, their attempts with the VAIO and related computer equipment have seemed like neat ideas looking for a problem. Visual design without any real innovation in the substance. The iPod was innovative due to its simplicity, its design and its quality. The combination was powerful and continues to be powerful. That tends to be Apple's strength. They don't worry too much about price. Sony doesn't either, but they also don't get all three factors right as consistently as Apple.
The public commons for ideas and artistic works is better off the more populated with diversity it is. This connects closely with the idea of Memes (related to the idea of the selfish gene by Richard Dawkins). For my own part, I do copyright some things, but I am starting to use Creative Commons licenses for more and more of my writing and music (not that I make a big contribution, but hey... every little bit helps:-).
And I have been avoiding buying one until I could get a decent sized 1080p monitor (40'+) at a decent price. That is starting to become possible. On the other hand, I have been collecting DVDs (I have about 350-400) and watching them on my various limited size computer monitors. As a family (with three kids) we are a little tired of the small monitors. I would love to switch over to one of the new DVD formats. But of course I was waiting for the format war to resolve itself since as you might be able to tell I am a very conservative purchaser when it comes to entertainment systems. I don't rip and share music or movies except in the very limited fair use sense of close friends and family who might be interested in a single thing and who are likely to go out and purchase. As others have said, this requirement will punish me. I don't like that, but at this point it may not prevent me from purchasing... I'll just have to wait a little until the De-HDMI workaround is available... Jon?
The qualities of an ideal test is a framework similar to ACID for databases and INVEST for user stories. It describes six verifiable qualities that a test should have. On a related note, this article doesn't make me really that excited. I've been using test driven development with JUnit and NUnit to deliver tens of thousands of lines of code into production with similar defect rates (about two defects found over the course of several years of code being in production). I maintained good productivity rates, delivered code into QA with no defects found, into pre-production with no defects found and finally into production where defects were found only after a great deal of time in operation. The code was not simple either: it was asynchronous, guaranteed delivery, multi-threaded messaging code for enterprise systems. Developers who don't do TDD should be paid about 1/4 as much as developers who do, IMNSHO.
I read the first half of the article...
on
Rounding Algorithms
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...where it discusses the various rounding methods. I had actually thought of/used most of them. The one that was new to me was the round-half-even (banker's rounding). Very cool idea, and I had no idea it was commonly used.
This is a great reference article! If you are programmer working with numerical algorithms, keep this article handy.
Any chance of getting this law to go in a more benign direction? If there's going to be all these cameras anyway, might as well see if the data they pick up can be made public so that abuse of the data is reduced. Gaak. Crazy times we live in!
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Sure does! Of course, you might want to consider it a model rather than THE system. Another interesting thing: operates entirely through voluntary donations exclusively from members. There are no taxes in the sense of forced payment to the government. There are definitely prescribed systems for the donations, but they are _always_ left to the conscience of the individual members.
Mishkin.
I haven't posted in a looooong time! Here goes: This is a good idea, in that we need better government. The thing is, it doesn't need Soros or anyone else to invest. There is an existing, excellent example governmental system already at work in the world. Six million people are organizing themselves around the world using a system originally designed in the late 1800's. The Baha'i World Community has three levels of government, it is completely free of corruption, it is non-partisan, it is based on individual capabilities rather than party platforms, it is free from electioneering/campaigning, and it has been functioning effectively for over 40 years at a global scale (prior to that it was functioning for many more decades at a national scale in various countries around the world).
:-D
There is an excellent wikipedia article about the Baha'i system.
As a member of the Baha'i community myself, I have first-hand experience with the functioning of this system. It is amazing how incredibly different it is from the existing governmental systems you see running in nations.
There are other people who have commented here about how this system or the other system is excellent, it's just that (some excuse for why it's not working)... The Baha'i system _is_ working. There is no excuse to offer about how it's great in theory, because it's also great in practice.
The only challenge is that you have to actually buy into it... Oh, wait, that's a challenge for every other system too. Oh well.
Actually, the real challenge is that it is not just a mechanical system. It uses spiritual principles in its operation. This is difficult for many people, but still, I encourage you to investigate it and the Baha'i community itself. Mishkin.
1. Management asks the engineering group to come up with a proposal for solving a problem.
2. The engineering group comes up with a standard.
3. Management supports the standard and holds the engineering group to its commitment.
For any standard you can think of, this will work most effectively. The only problem is that I lied about it being three _easy_ steps. Each one is actually really hard to do and you just won't have any success with rolling out new standards until you get good at each of these things.
Until then, coaching, training, badgering and firing might get you part way.
I've been using SkypeOut for quite some time now. I first purchased SkypeOut credit in Oct. 2004. My main motivation has been that my brother lives in Beijing and I live in Toronto. But I also talk with other family and friends quite regularly using the feature. One thing I've noticed: my connection and audio quality tend to be better to when I'm talking to my Brother in Beijing than when I'm talking to my wife while I'm travelling in the US. Skype has gradually become more and more important in my suite of communication tools. I'd much rather Skype someone than email them. I used to use Yahoo! messenger and ICQ quite a bit. I've completely stopped. Maybe they've improved, but Skype's conference call/chat feature has been extremely helpful. I did an hour-long 3-way business call between Toronto, Baltimore and London in the UK for only a few dollars!
All that said, there's a problem too: I've been using it on my laptop and it means carrying around a headset with a microphone. The built-in mic is terrible. For anyone adopting Skype as a phone replacement (which it sill isn't for me), this is an important consideration. The big "discount" they are giving with free SkypeOut in North America will probably help adoption here a little, but I'm not convinced it will make a really big splash. I think they need to figure out a nice way to integrate with a cell-phone-like headset that still works through one's computer/laptop or on one's wireless LAN. This would be the item that would allow me to get rid of my home/office phones.
I hear lots of funny words and abbreviations and it sometimes seems like people are just throwing them around to sound impressive. Do I really have to learn all this funny language? Is this just something that I should expect as I become more technical?
Someone recently said to me:
Do I really have to learn all those terms?
This seems obvious: laptops! The low power consumption makes them perfect. I'd love a multi-processor ARM9 core laptop running... oh, say, OS/X :-) Just for the geekiness of it.
Imagine my chagrin when about 20 minutes later, lying in bed, I realized that not only am I not a cool geek, I'm stupid too! I can't believe I missed that. Must be the fact of being awake at 3:15am in my time zone and trying to write matematical poetry. Really it's the best time to do it, but it's also a pretty bad time to do it too :-)
I thought that integrating IE with Explorer was a great idea. I talked about it with other techie friends. We all agreed that it would be a "cool thing". Truth be told, it still is a cool thing. I'd love Mozilla to be my official interface to my hard drive as well as the web. Unfortunately, security in such a situation really is tough. In our networked world, there is too much malicious and flawed software/content out there. And so we go backwards feature-wise in order to secure ourselves. Unfortunately this is happening in a lot of places, not just in technology. I'm taking this way beyond the original context, but "The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established." We can't truly be secure anywhere until we can trust others. And we can't trust others until we have justice. And we can't have justice until we all recognize at a deep level that all human beings are equal. This recognition of the unity of humanity must acknowledge our diversity. Living in harmony is a goal, not a means. The means is the recognition of the unity of humanity.
Indeed! I still love playing Alpha Centauri, Max Payne II, Age of Empires, and even a bunch of older ones. I have a 1.7 Pentium M laptop as my primary computer including for gaming. It's got a great screen (1920x1200), but the graphics processor is getting a little dated (ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro). Hmm... I wonder if I can upgrade it?
I haven't yet played a MMORPG for a very simple reason: I have neither the time nor the money to dedicate to an ongoing game. I do still buy new games from time to time, particularly fantasy RPG or simulation (e.g. Civ IV). I am glad to hear someone mention that the single-player game market is being under-served. I for one find myself browsing through all the games and wishing that the MMORPGs had single-player versions that didn't require any sort of subscription. There may be some out there, but it certainly isn't obvious from the packaging!
This seems like a really expensive way to address over-fishing!
Yeah, I'm actually interested in the same stuff. My wife and I are gradually converting over to a more ecologically friendly way of living. It's tough to do it quickly because of embodied energy concerns that we have.
I love technology. My family has several laptops, desktops and we run a few servers as well. We have gadgets. But the thing about it all that bothers me, is that it is all dependent on the precarious infrastructure for power and telecom. I would love to have solar and wind power backup. I'd love to have redundant methods of communication, even going back to low-tech/old-tech radio systems. I'd also like to have local caches of reference materials such as wikipedia, about.com, CIA world factbook, etc. I'm not a survivalist freak, but I do find it painful when the power goes out for a few days at a time! It'd be nice to have some basic backups!
Indeed, but just because two things share a type doesn't mean they have the same attributes. It is only if you can show that the attributes of each thing are caused by being part of the type that this works. Not only that, but the first part about history doesn't prove that those previous forms of media weren't evil. This is not a trivial point: there are plenty of people still worried about (for example) television. Just because something has become pervasive and culturally accepted doesn't mean it's "good". The connection between video games and other types of media, in the context of this discussion seems intuitive, but it is not logically supported, at least not how the connection was presented.
The quoted argument:
doesn't hold any water. In fact, it's not really evidence at all. The statement could be read like this:Hmm... the first two points don't mention anything about yellow foozles that in any way shows that they are not the devil incarnate.
In the mid-eighties to early nineties my brother and I would frequently pour over Sony catalogues and hang out at the Sony store. At the time, they were definintely the cool place for gadgets. I think about ten years ago I started to feel like they had lost the cool factor. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but after that, every time I went into a Sony store I got bored real quick. Recently, their attempts with the VAIO and related computer equipment have seemed like neat ideas looking for a problem. Visual design without any real innovation in the substance. The iPod was innovative due to its simplicity, its design and its quality. The combination was powerful and continues to be powerful. That tends to be Apple's strength. They don't worry too much about price. Sony doesn't either, but they also don't get all three factors right as consistently as Apple.
That should be 40" obviously :-)
The public commons for ideas and artistic works is better off the more populated with diversity it is. This connects closely with the idea of Memes (related to the idea of the selfish gene by Richard Dawkins). For my own part, I do copyright some things, but I am starting to use Creative Commons licenses for more and more of my writing and music (not that I make a big contribution, but hey... every little bit helps :-).
Oops, forgot a tidbit: only started buying DVDs a few years ago.
And I have been avoiding buying one until I could get a decent sized 1080p monitor (40'+) at a decent price. That is starting to become possible. On the other hand, I have been collecting DVDs (I have about 350-400) and watching them on my various limited size computer monitors. As a family (with three kids) we are a little tired of the small monitors. I would love to switch over to one of the new DVD formats. But of course I was waiting for the format war to resolve itself since as you might be able to tell I am a very conservative purchaser when it comes to entertainment systems. I don't rip and share music or movies except in the very limited fair use sense of close friends and family who might be interested in a single thing and who are likely to go out and purchase. As others have said, this requirement will punish me. I don't like that, but at this point it may not prevent me from purchasing... I'll just have to wait a little until the De-HDMI workaround is available... Jon?
The qualities of an ideal test is a framework similar to ACID for databases and INVEST for user stories. It describes six verifiable qualities that a test should have. On a related note, this article doesn't make me really that excited. I've been using test driven development with JUnit and NUnit to deliver tens of thousands of lines of code into production with similar defect rates (about two defects found over the course of several years of code being in production). I maintained good productivity rates, delivered code into QA with no defects found, into pre-production with no defects found and finally into production where defects were found only after a great deal of time in operation. The code was not simple either: it was asynchronous, guaranteed delivery, multi-threaded messaging code for enterprise systems. Developers who don't do TDD should be paid about 1/4 as much as developers who do, IMNSHO.
...where it discusses the various rounding methods. I had actually thought of/used most of them. The one that was new to me was the round-half-even (banker's rounding). Very cool idea, and I had no idea it was commonly used.
This is a great reference article! If you are programmer working with numerical algorithms, keep this article handy.
Any chance of getting this law to go in a more benign direction? If there's going to be all these cameras anyway, might as well see if the data they pick up can be made public so that abuse of the data is reduced. Gaak. Crazy times we live in!