In fact, there isn't a single argument that isn't equally valid for drunk drivers as it is for older drivers.
This highlights the severity of the problem - my mother in law is 70, and I'll bet you a whole lot of money I could drive more safely after drinking a 12-pack than she does sober.
Not that I *would* drive drunk - but that's the point. I know I don't have any business on the road in that condition; neither does she. And she's not the worst elderly driver I've seen by a long shot.
This is just a dodge to A) make money, and B) court the AARP vote.
Yup. This is off-topic, but I've often wondered if this country would be less fucked if we moved voting from Tuesday to the weekend. That way, people who aren't chronically unemployed or retired could vote a little more easily. As it is, the vote is practically ruled by deadbeats and geezers.
Avast, Apple! Ye scurvy dogs may have forgotten that we be havin' this provision in our rules statin' that something ye patent must not already be bein' made by someone else.
Arrr! Ye be drinkin' too much from the barrel o' rum if ye think the USPTO reads the parchment yonder patent application is writ on.
Ay, matey, thar be the hole in yer hull. Too many patents, not enough eyepatch-covered eyes to be readin' 'em.
Then again, we should think whether the hydrogen is. Don't want to sound like an asshole, but that water vapor those hydrogen-fueled cars produce is not going to vanish either.
Since that hydrogen was probably produced by electrolysis of water, it's pretty much a zero-sum game. But water isn't to be worried about, since rain is a pretty good way of regulating the water vapor in the atmosphere.
I haven't really been able to figure out how to do anything significant in Haskell. But I suspect that one day a language more like haskell and less like C will end up being the most popular. Monads and all that kind of confuses me.I think it helps if you have a strong math background and are comfortable with Lambda calculus.
Monads, lambda, calculs...arrr, matey, now I know why Haskell's such a bloody mess - Neal Stephenson wrote it! That be why it seems good at first and falls apart at the end.
I know its getting harder and harder, especially considering these things are only a handful of atoms across, but why can't they ever skip a generation? Why work on three generations of chips simultaneously? Why not just skip one?
Because it takes too long to do the R&D, it would leave them with too much time between releases. Also, it's the nature of how products are developed. Once the early R&D folks come up with something and hand it off to the people who work on small-scale fab, it's not like the R&D people are going to sit on their hands until the stuff they just worked on hits the market. No, they work on something new, that will hopefully become a product after the thing they just did.
That doesn't mean that some things don't get acccelerated or other things don't become dead-ends, but in industries that have long time to market you can't wait until your last product is done to start working on your next one.
Since this is slashdot and all posts must contain car analogies - think about it this way, GM doesn't wait until they release the 2008 models to start designing the 2009s. They can't.
Ah! See, whereas I was stupid enough to take general chemistry as somebody who has no intention of getting an advanced degree in the sciences, but who is just interested in them. I was naïve enough to expect a class that taught concepts. Instead, I got a rigorous boot camp consisting of pages and pages of rote math problems based on nebulous ideas with no practical application
That sucks. I assure you, general chem does not *have* to be that way, but it too often is. When I was a TA, I did my best to teach things at a very conceptual level, bringing the math in when the students understood what was going on.
The entire purpose of the class seemed to be to "shake out the whiny, grade-grubbing pre-[whatever]".
Unfortunately, too often, it is. And basically all of the Freshman/Sophomore chem classes are used that way. But by your own assertion, you weren't whiny or grade-grubbing. You say you wanted to learn the fundamentals of a subject, and if it were done my way, that's exactly what I'd do. Ironically, it would still weed out the whiny grade grubbers, because they usually prefer rote memorization to actual learning.
This was the same teacher who announced to the class at Thanksgiving time: "I know a lot of you like to leave town to be with your families during the holidays, but you need to understand, when you're studying chemistry that's really not possible." Seriously. (Hint: I'm 35. My mother's pushing 70. Fuck you.)
Yeah, that's pretty shitty. I can say with certainty this jackass doesn't speak for all chemistry professors.
Result? I have no intention of ever setting foot in the chemistry department again. (I tried o. chem but dropped the class -- it was even worse.)
Sorry a few assholes spoiled an interesting subject for you, but I can't fault you.
One less science student in America. Happy now?
I assume you're referring to the profs, because my entire point is that chemistry *shouldn't* be treated as a weed-out course to get rid of people - at least, people who want to learn. I was happy when my classes were no longer weed-outs, which started junior year.
I'm surprised that you thought that P-chem was "lite" compared to Organic. Many of the people I knew who took both would disagree. I got A's in both btw.
No, I mean that our college had a "lite" version of P-chem for the whiny pre-meds that was a separate, condensed class - whereas those of us who were actual majors took the full-year version. The pre-meds had to take the full-year main-track O-chem to get into med school, though, so we couldn't get rid of them at that stage.
As for the comparison, I don't know which was "easier" to me. I hate memorizing, and for a lot of O-chem (primarily O-Chem II) that's how it was taught, so I didn't much like it. On the other hand, P-chem was far more interesting and fundamental as I saw it, so I enjoyed it a lot more. I also got A's in both, so it wasn't a matter of that.
Nothing is funnier than the truth. During my undergraduate career I worked for the Chemistry department and it was my job to watch some of these hopeless pre-med students suffer through o-chem lab. Needless to say, I feel a lot better knowing that a good share of the more inept ones got filtered out so early on in the game.
See, I think these people are asking the wrong question. The question isn't whether pre-meds should suffer through orgo - the question is whether chemistry majors should have to suffer the whiny, grade-grubbing pre-meds who slow the class down and turn it into a brainless, memorization-based weed-out class.
My degree's in chemistry, and the classes got a lot more fun and interesting once the pre-meds got shunted off into the "lite" track of classes like P-chem. We could have actual discussions about concepts for a change.
As usual, even if the RIAA loses (or eventually drops the case), they "win" in the sense that they send the message that they are willing to make life hell for anyone who opposes them (including other lawyers).
Problem with that is he's already decided that his mission in life is taking on the RIAA. Indeed, in defending himself, he has every right to publically make the case that what he's saying on his site is true, which would get him off the hook for what they're suing. Worse, the RIAA is giving the guy a forum to say these things! In that way, the trial is really about the RIAA - they say it's illegal to say mean things about them (why it would be, I have no idea), he gets to prove that the things he says are totally legit, and he also has the opportunity to try to expose the flaws in their litigation. He'll certainly claim that, ironically, the very suit against him proves his case.
I'd agree with you on the "send a message" aspect if they went after someone who didn't want a piece of them, but since they're taking on a guy who's been hitting away already, all they're doing is handing him the club that he'll use to beat them.
Note I'm not a lawyer, and I have only the best of feelings toward the RIAA...
No, if I have a single employee who has a skill that I don't, the problem is my boss's hiring me. He should have hired somebody more qualified to lead my team. If that ever happens, I have some people to recommend.
There's a difference between leading a team and micromanaging what each member does. It must be a seriously monolithic workgroup where any member, even the leader, can do what each member does. Consider building a house - I guarantee the GC isn't expert in each trade, but he still leads them.
Having people that can do things you can't is a strength. If you don't, again, it's a weak team that's no better than one single member
I'm an IT project manager. If one of my peeps bailed and I couldn't step right in and fill their spot and train their replacement myself I would consider myself a failure.
If you don't have a single employee who has a skill that you don't, then your real failure is in hiring.
By default I put my snail mail in envelopes (keep my correspondence private), by default I put on clothes (keep my privates... private), and by default I expect the police are not searching my house or tapping my phone (4th Amendment privacy). Why isn't my browser private by defa.... oh wait, it's not my browser, it belongs to MS Google Mozilla, nevermind.
The privacy is relative to people who can access your computer. I'm assuming you don't normally expect strict secrecy from your wife regarding your correspondence, your house, your phone, and your...privates. If you do expect that, you'll probably have to engage in non-default behavior. Just like here.
Employees'(or prospective employees') personal lives should be strictly off limits unless the employee voluntarily discloses the information as per professional interview guidelines(such as listing interests on a resume' or answering an interviewer's questions).
Welcome to real life. Particularly with onerous labor laws in a lot of states that make it damn near impossible to fire someone, employers need every resource available to them to separate the losers from potential employees. Thing is, people who are losers in their free time tend to be losers on the job, which gives your employer a vested interest in finding out.
Which is why it's a good idea for you to *not* have photographic evidence of you doing stupid stuff. Nobody will decline to hire you because they see a glass of beer in your hand. But if somebody pulls out a camera when you're doing more substantially illegal things, punch them. And don't hang out with the sort of dipshits that post pictures online of themselves and their friends acting like idiots.
Let's say for the sake of argument that some advanced alien space travelling race created life on earth and guided its advancement over time through genetic engineering. There's no reason in principle why this fact, if it was a fact, could not be subjected to scientific investigation.
OK. Define the experiment that will test that. I'm interested to see how you pull it off.
Obviously neither of you ever used a 300 baud modem. If you're using a cradle modem, kids on the lawn are a good thing. Kids trying to use the phone or playing inside and knocking it off the cradle is the danger!
I was a little younger - the risk for me was Mom picking up the other extension. No Carrier?!? Dammit!
Considering I have seen a 0% increase in the bandwidth available to me in the last 10 years, I don't see this happening EVER.
Yep, that's right, I'm one of those ancient modem technology users.
OTOH, I had a 300 baud modem back in the 80's, so I guess I've seen a 100x increase in the last 20 years.
Now get off my lawn!
Shit, man, I can *whistle* 300 baud.
I can't match you on the ancient modem, my first machine came with a 2400 baud. Puts me in the 'old' camp as opposed to 'completely decrepit' like yourself.
If you find a good way of keeping these damned kids off your lawn, let me know.
Really? Five years sounds like an eternity in the development of net technologies.
Seems like it's leveling off to me. Things really jumped from the mid 90s to early 00s, but not as much since. I'm not seeing a 10x increase in average connection speeds in the next 5 years.
Because I hold the copyright on the copyrighting of copyright laws.
No such thing. But you gave me an idea, so I just *patented* the copyrighting of copyright laws. To defeat the inherent recursive paradox, I was also forced to invent a time machine. That was also handy in allowing me to patent it before California started doing it, establishing prior art, and allowing *me* to sue *them*.
Maybe they wronged the open source community in the past, maybe they didn't (I personally don't know). Let's show them that we are forgiving of past mistakes and fully welcome them and their donated code into the FOSS world. They made things right, let's not dwell on the past.
I'm not familiar with VIA, but one also needs to consider the strong possibility that the people involved with copying GPL code years ago probably aren't the ones making the current decision. Companies usually evolve through attrition.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW: the town is inbread.
White or wheat?
september is finaly over...
Bring on the Eternal May!
In fact, there isn't a single argument that isn't equally valid for drunk drivers as it is for older drivers.
This highlights the severity of the problem - my mother in law is 70, and I'll bet you a whole lot of money I could drive more safely after drinking a 12-pack than she does sober.
Not that I *would* drive drunk - but that's the point. I know I don't have any business on the road in that condition; neither does she. And she's not the worst elderly driver I've seen by a long shot.
This is just a dodge to A) make money, and B) court the AARP vote.
Yup. This is off-topic, but I've often wondered if this country would be less fucked if we moved voting from Tuesday to the weekend. That way, people who aren't chronically unemployed or retired could vote a little more easily. As it is, the vote is practically ruled by deadbeats and geezers.
Maybe in the future in a hydrogen economy. At the moment, though, electrolysis does not account for very much of the nation's hydrogen supply.
I should have said 'in the best case' - you're right, most of it now probably comes from fossil fuels.
Avast, Apple! Ye scurvy dogs may have forgotten that we be havin' this provision in our rules statin' that something ye patent must not already be bein' made by someone else.
Arrr! Ye be drinkin' too much from the barrel o' rum if ye think the USPTO reads the parchment yonder patent application is writ on.
Ay, matey, thar be the hole in yer hull. Too many patents, not enough eyepatch-covered eyes to be readin' 'em.
Then again, we should think whether the hydrogen is. Don't want to sound like an asshole, but that water vapor those hydrogen-fueled cars produce is not going to vanish either.
Since that hydrogen was probably produced by electrolysis of water, it's pretty much a zero-sum game. But water isn't to be worried about, since rain is a pretty good way of regulating the water vapor in the atmosphere.
I haven't really been able to figure out how to do anything significant in Haskell. But I suspect that one day a language more like haskell and less like C will end up being the most popular. Monads and all that kind of confuses me.I think it helps if you have a strong math background and are comfortable with Lambda calculus.
Monads, lambda, calculs...arrr, matey, now I know why Haskell's such a bloody mess - Neal Stephenson wrote it! That be why it seems good at first and falls apart at the end.
I know its getting harder and harder, especially considering these things are only a handful of atoms across, but why can't they ever skip a generation? Why work on three generations of chips simultaneously? Why not just skip one?
Because it takes too long to do the R&D, it would leave them with too much time between releases. Also, it's the nature of how products are developed. Once the early R&D folks come up with something and hand it off to the people who work on small-scale fab, it's not like the R&D people are going to sit on their hands until the stuff they just worked on hits the market. No, they work on something new, that will hopefully become a product after the thing they just did.
That doesn't mean that some things don't get acccelerated or other things don't become dead-ends, but in industries that have long time to market you can't wait until your last product is done to start working on your next one.
Since this is slashdot and all posts must contain car analogies - think about it this way, GM doesn't wait until they release the 2008 models to start designing the 2009s. They can't.
Ah! See, whereas I was stupid enough to take general chemistry as somebody who has no intention of getting an advanced degree in the sciences, but who is just interested in them. I was naïve enough to expect a class that taught concepts. Instead, I got a rigorous boot camp consisting of pages and pages of rote math problems based on nebulous ideas with no practical application
That sucks. I assure you, general chem does not *have* to be that way, but it too often is. When I was a TA, I did my best to teach things at a very conceptual level, bringing the math in when the students understood what was going on.
The entire purpose of the class seemed to be to "shake out the whiny, grade-grubbing pre-[whatever]".
Unfortunately, too often, it is. And basically all of the Freshman/Sophomore chem classes are used that way. But by your own assertion, you weren't whiny or grade-grubbing. You say you wanted to learn the fundamentals of a subject, and if it were done my way, that's exactly what I'd do. Ironically, it would still weed out the whiny grade grubbers, because they usually prefer rote memorization to actual learning.
This was the same teacher who announced to the class at Thanksgiving time: "I know a lot of you like to leave town to be with your families during the holidays, but you need to understand, when you're studying chemistry that's really not possible." Seriously. (Hint: I'm 35. My mother's pushing 70. Fuck you.)
Yeah, that's pretty shitty. I can say with certainty this jackass doesn't speak for all chemistry professors.
Result? I have no intention of ever setting foot in the chemistry department again. (I tried o. chem but dropped the class -- it was even worse.)
Sorry a few assholes spoiled an interesting subject for you, but I can't fault you.
One less science student in America. Happy now?
I assume you're referring to the profs, because my entire point is that chemistry *shouldn't* be treated as a weed-out course to get rid of people - at least, people who want to learn. I was happy when my classes were no longer weed-outs, which started junior year.
I'm surprised that you thought that P-chem was "lite" compared to Organic. Many of the people I knew who took both would disagree. I got A's in both btw.
No, I mean that our college had a "lite" version of P-chem for the whiny pre-meds that was a separate, condensed class - whereas those of us who were actual majors took the full-year version. The pre-meds had to take the full-year main-track O-chem to get into med school, though, so we couldn't get rid of them at that stage.
As for the comparison, I don't know which was "easier" to me. I hate memorizing, and for a lot of O-chem (primarily O-Chem II) that's how it was taught, so I didn't much like it. On the other hand, P-chem was far more interesting and fundamental as I saw it, so I enjoyed it a lot more. I also got A's in both, so it wasn't a matter of that.
Nothing is funnier than the truth. During my undergraduate career I worked for the Chemistry department and it was my job to watch some of these hopeless pre-med students suffer through o-chem lab. Needless to say, I feel a lot better knowing that a good share of the more inept ones got filtered out so early on in the game.
See, I think these people are asking the wrong question. The question isn't whether pre-meds should suffer through orgo - the question is whether chemistry majors should have to suffer the whiny, grade-grubbing pre-meds who slow the class down and turn it into a brainless, memorization-based weed-out class.
My degree's in chemistry, and the classes got a lot more fun and interesting once the pre-meds got shunted off into the "lite" track of classes like P-chem. We could have actual discussions about concepts for a change.
As usual, even if the RIAA loses (or eventually drops the case), they "win" in the sense that they send the message that they are willing to make life hell for anyone who opposes them (including other lawyers).
Problem with that is he's already decided that his mission in life is taking on the RIAA. Indeed, in defending himself, he has every right to publically make the case that what he's saying on his site is true, which would get him off the hook for what they're suing. Worse, the RIAA is giving the guy a forum to say these things! In that way, the trial is really about the RIAA - they say it's illegal to say mean things about them (why it would be, I have no idea), he gets to prove that the things he says are totally legit, and he also has the opportunity to try to expose the flaws in their litigation. He'll certainly claim that, ironically, the very suit against him proves his case.
I'd agree with you on the "send a message" aspect if they went after someone who didn't want a piece of them, but since they're taking on a guy who's been hitting away already, all they're doing is handing him the club that he'll use to beat them.
Note I'm not a lawyer, and I have only the best of feelings toward the RIAA...
Guess somebody should have actually showed up for American History classes instead of smoking dope in the bathroom.
No, if I have a single employee who has a skill that I don't, the problem is my boss's hiring me. He should have hired somebody more qualified to lead my team. If that ever happens, I have some people to recommend.
There's a difference between leading a team and micromanaging what each member does. It must be a seriously monolithic workgroup where any member, even the leader, can do what each member does. Consider building a house - I guarantee the GC isn't expert in each trade, but he still leads them.
Having people that can do things you can't is a strength. If you don't, again, it's a weak team that's no better than one single member
I'm an IT project manager. If one of my peeps bailed and I couldn't step right in and fill their spot and train their replacement myself I would consider myself a failure.
If you don't have a single employee who has a skill that you don't, then your real failure is in hiring.
By default I put my snail mail in envelopes (keep my correspondence private), by default I put on clothes (keep my privates... private), and by default I expect the police are not searching my house or tapping my phone (4th Amendment privacy). Why isn't my browser private by defa.... oh wait, it's not my browser, it belongs to MS Google Mozilla, nevermind.
The privacy is relative to people who can access your computer. I'm assuming you don't normally expect strict secrecy from your wife regarding your correspondence, your house, your phone, and your...privates. If you do expect that, you'll probably have to engage in non-default behavior. Just like here.
Employees'(or prospective employees') personal lives should be strictly off limits unless the employee voluntarily discloses the information as per professional interview guidelines(such as listing interests on a resume' or answering an interviewer's questions).
Welcome to real life. Particularly with onerous labor laws in a lot of states that make it damn near impossible to fire someone, employers need every resource available to them to separate the losers from potential employees. Thing is, people who are losers in their free time tend to be losers on the job, which gives your employer a vested interest in finding out.
Which is why it's a good idea for you to *not* have photographic evidence of you doing stupid stuff. Nobody will decline to hire you because they see a glass of beer in your hand. But if somebody pulls out a camera when you're doing more substantially illegal things, punch them. And don't hang out with the sort of dipshits that post pictures online of themselves and their friends acting like idiots.
Let's say for the sake of argument that some advanced alien space travelling race created life on earth and guided its advancement over time through genetic engineering. There's no reason in principle why this fact, if it was a fact, could not be subjected to scientific investigation.
OK. Define the experiment that will test that. I'm interested to see how you pull it off.
Obviously neither of you ever used a 300 baud modem. If you're using a cradle modem, kids on the lawn are a good thing. Kids trying to use the phone or playing inside and knocking it off the cradle is the danger!
I was a little younger - the risk for me was Mom picking up the other extension. No Carrier?!? Dammit!
Considering I have seen a 0% increase in the bandwidth available to me in the last 10 years, I don't see this happening EVER. Yep, that's right, I'm one of those ancient modem technology users. OTOH, I had a 300 baud modem back in the 80's, so I guess I've seen a 100x increase in the last 20 years. Now get off my lawn!
Shit, man, I can *whistle* 300 baud.
I can't match you on the ancient modem, my first machine came with a 2400 baud. Puts me in the 'old' camp as opposed to 'completely decrepit' like yourself.
If you find a good way of keeping these damned kids off your lawn, let me know.
Really? Five years sounds like an eternity in the development of net technologies.
Seems like it's leveling off to me. Things really jumped from the mid 90s to early 00s, but not as much since. I'm not seeing a 10x increase in average connection speeds in the next 5 years.
Because I hold the copyright on the copyrighting of copyright laws.
No such thing. But you gave me an idea, so I just *patented* the copyrighting of copyright laws. To defeat the inherent recursive paradox, I was also forced to invent a time machine. That was also handy in allowing me to patent it before California started doing it, establishing prior art, and allowing *me* to sue *them*.
or else invalidate the stupid 'copyright' claim because they don't try to protect it.
That doesn't apply to copyright. You're thinking of trademark.
The thing that will prod them into suing him is loss of revenue from sale of copies of the laws in question, like building codes and whatnot.
It is difficult to determine who are more annoying fanbois. Apple's or Opera's?
They both have a while to go before they defeat Gentoo circa 2004.
"y'know, if you compiled that from source like Gentoo does, it would be a lot faster..."
Maybe they wronged the open source community in the past, maybe they didn't (I personally don't know). Let's show them that we are forgiving of past mistakes and fully welcome them and their donated code into the FOSS world. They made things right, let's not dwell on the past.
I'm not familiar with VIA, but one also needs to consider the strong possibility that the people involved with copying GPL code years ago probably aren't the ones making the current decision. Companies usually evolve through attrition.