Just out of morbid entertainment, I'll continue this thread.
My knowledge of the bible is more than sufficient. I was brought up in a fanatic household.
Plus, you seem to have completely missed my sarchasm. Thats understandible in such emotional discussions. That plus I mispelled "factitious", which means "made up".
But in other news, "Love thy neighbor" would be a great message. But it's got little to do with modern Christianity. The "message" actually was called "The word of God". And this word was perverted to become that "The Son of Man" or the son of God has come to free us of Gods punishment for original sin. "Love thy neighbor" you must be confusing with the speach Jesus gave to a bunch of Rich guys just before he told them they had to become poor to better honor God( a fact missed by most rich Americans, who pull out of their asses that God wants us to be rich and powerful - google Jabez which predates Jesus by some time). My favorite modern quote "Will Dick Cheny go to Heaven, or will a camel make it through that needle eye?" Anyway, that speech simply identified the 3 most important commandments. Hardly a new doctrine.
If all of Christianity was based on "Love thy neighbor", we wouldn't be killing Jews in the middle ages to get them to convert. Nor would we be burning witches, pagens. What would be the significance of confession, Easter, 'accepting Jesus as your personal savior'. These are rituals derived from a complex story. Not logical conclusions of 'Love'. In fact they were merely artifacts of Jewish cultural history. Jesus was nothing more than the embodiment of the reaction of the times. He was to Judaism as Karl Marx was to capitalism. Or Luther was to Catholicism.
Now you may be referring to modern new religeon, many of which were started by charletans who have invented facts to give themselves credibility, and thus a flock. David Koresh, Joseph Smith, etc. Thats fine, but Im hard pressed to call them Christians, just because Jesus was part of their teachings.
Dont be too quick to dismiss someone's understanding of a doctrine. You leave yourself vulnerable.
That plus Im not sure your responding to me, as I said nothing about badness. Merely the unrelatedness of the collection of books called the Christian bible.
The problem is that while you may not push your beliefs, other people exploit your fears at election time to side step real issues. So we non believers have resentment that global affairs and grants to wealthy industries are so easily controlled by topics such as gay marriage and stem cells and abortion.
Id further this by saying that the danger of the fearing of a godless society is very tell tale. A supressed child overcompensates when the controling authority goes away.
If the only reason someone does not "sin" is divine justice, then the nautural reaction to the concept of there not being such justice is to act in a most defiling way.
Its best to maintain a healthy societal perspective so that we dont come into chaos when historical evidence is eventually dug up contradicting long held faith in certain religeous institutions.
I'll show you where Jesus shunned fornication, and even where he condoned stoning people and witches to death (there's a difference) when you can show me where Christians can get divorced. My best guess is that the bible has to completely contradict itself on a given topic at least once per thousand year cycle.
My festitous point is that people cobble unrelated and inconsistent texts together, glaze over the special cases then claim that not only is the combined text completely true (since it was devinely edited), but that we can read in between the lines to derive further divine truth.
I think the gp had his own rant, but your question is very important. Belief in God is first and foremost a cultural phenomena. We typically designate the cultural superstitions / rituals into formal religeons which help insiders identity and outsiders to properly categorize. Even being agnostic (like myself), all elements of the quasi faith can be tied to your cultural upbringings and unresolved superstitions. I still have an irrational fear of taking the office of God in contempt. I call it respect, but its really just superstition. No different than people that get scared "Tempting fate" when someone says "nothing could possibly go wrong".
Thus, your quasi belief in God (I mean no disrespect) necessitates adoption of SOME pre-established notions/rituals/organizational structure. And part and parsel of those ideas are non-imperical/untestible cause and effects. You are in essence captive to the irrational fears (irrational because you have necessarily never directly experienced the wrath of Fate or the judging God). I say this arrogantly - pre-judgeing that you could not relay any personal experiences that I would qualify as being a divine consiquence. For that shortness I appologize, but could elaborate if need be.
To be "Scientific" implies that you embody the philosophy of Science. This is different than saying you occasionally support science in your thinking. Not terribly diferent than saying you are honest or reliable or productive. More specifically, to say you are Scientific in the context of a religeous discussion is a dichatomy. You can be a dad at home and a porn star at work, but those two roles don't belong together- their focuses are mutually exclusive.
Likewise, if your defining essence is empirical/logical discovery, then you should have a distaste for the event horizons of our culture. The super being complex (e.g. religeous/divine faith) should be something that you feel compelled to seek out or irradicate (prove/disprove).
To pasively accept that there is a fairy tale-like order to the world is like passively living next to an active volcano; Never second guessing that it would ever become a larger issue.
Now if we can get something like the Mac OS X type of GUI going with Linux on the desktop...
Thank you, but no.. I actually prefer the gnome user experience to XP / Mac. I would, however, like to see greater out-of-the-box installation / configuration / drivers so I don't have to trouble-shoot my parent's Linux boxes. Basic setup and support still suck.
Resistivity is the inverse of conductivity.. Conductivity is a function of: A) Number of possible free electron states (positions) - function of temperature B) Mean time to collision for given electron - function of temperature C) [free] Electron density - function of temperature
Note that higher temperatures mean: B) greater vibrational or translational properties of the material which obstruct the paths of free electrons.. So B is inversely proportional to temperature. C) greater number of electrons are excited and thus broken from their atomic bonds (or at least lower atomic orbitals) and thus a greater number of electrons are available to participate in conduction. So C is directly proportional to temperature
Any material that A) has free electrons (non-atomicly bound OR in covalent orbitals / orbitals shared between atoms) B) has a non-infinite potential barrier between geometric positions C) is above absolute zero
Naturally, the wider the path (radially), the greater the number of electrons and the greater the number of electron states, so the greater the conductivity.. It's 1 to 1 or linear growth.
As for length, the conductivity is an intrinsic measure, so length is somewhat irrelevant. However as a matter of practicality, on a large scale, the longer a path a given set of electrons have to travel, the more collisions will occur and thus the greater number of energy dispersals will occur and thus a greater amount of waste-heat. So you get an effectively greater measurement of resistance the longer the wire. This too is linear..
But length is usually a function of practical design (gotta connect two geographically distinct items).. Width, on the other hand is often a function of technology (how small can I make it) AND because width directly affects conductivity (gotta be wider to conduct more electrons), the intrinsic conductivity of the material dictates that for a given requirement of current and voltage, you must have a certain width for a given material.
However, not all geometries are created equally. The shape of the material, (which includes the curvature.. gentle curves v.s. right angles) affects the electro-static properties of the material. Indeed the mean-free-path to collision is different around the edges/boundries of a material, so obviously curved wire will have different properties than straight wire. Likewise the type of material adjacent to the conductor dramatically affects it's properties.
So to your original statement about water.
A) Water is a naturally polarized particle, so it can easily support attraction of free electrons.
Ionized water (e.g. salt-water) has even greater electron attraction B) Water is anamorphic (non structured, and constantly moving), so the mean-time-to-collision is pretty short.. This restricts conductivity significantly. C) Water is not naturally ionized - it doesn't give off a free electron in it's natural state at room-temperature, so there are very few actual electrons available to conduct. Salt, on the other hand DOES give off a free electron when ionized in water. Likewise acids are ionized giving off free electrons. Thus lead-acid batteries use water with lots of free electrons, and thus conduct electricity reasonably well. Note that it's the storage of electrons, not the conductivity of electrons that makes these batteries useful. In fact the collisions due to high current conduction heats up the water.. This is how car batteries can explode, and this is why you should never open up the battery ports immediately after a car has been running for a long time.
This is a seriously important debate.. But there is no one right answer.
On the one hand, you have the perl paragidm - keep absolutely everything in one file.. code, docs, API, meta-information.. In perl you had __DATA__ and __POD__ sections of the file for meta-data and documentation.. In Java you've almost always had javadocs, then xdoclets, and now annotations.
The advantage of this is the idea that code-changes almost always necessitates doc changes or meta-data changes.. The further away those items are from the code, the greater the probability that they'll get out of sync.
ALSO, new-commers that see the code for the first time won't have as far to go to get all the information about the code that is relevant.. If they are paging through a new project, they may not know where the associated meta-data XML files are.
Now, good annotation packages (like hibernate-annotations) allow you to override just about every possible annotation in use... And as a result, it makes the most sense to only annotate to the degree that generality necessitates.. Consider this object-oriented annotations (even though it's a hack-job on the back-end, because the code has to know to recursively check for annotations and XML in all the right places).
The other side of the story is important too... That if your code is dependent on annotations (say you're hack-job didn't facilitate XML overrides), then you reuse code in two different contexts, you're screwed, because you've historically coded to one annotation schema, but then in one or more use cases, those annotations are not correct.. This is most common in interfaced' API libraries (with little or no actual code). If say a @Transactional attribute is present in the API, but it's being deployed in a non-transactional environment (say a trivial front-end web-app that doesn't do any DB activity and thus doesn't have a registered transaction manager), then you might be in for a shock when you first deploy the code. That being said, things like @Transactional are encouraged to exist only in the class implementation code, not in the interfaces. But you might have a poor annotation package which doesn't handle this properly.
Another example is if you define schema attributes on the POJO, say @Length(max=32) String firstName;
Then you use this Person object everywhere... Well, not every place is going to want a column length of 32 chars (though this might be a good-thing).. Again, in Hibernate at least, you can always override in XML for a particular deployment... But it violates the use-case above of a 1'st time prorammer paging through the code.. Now they have a false expectation.
I'm sure there are other pros and cons. But Annotations are far better than xdoclet.. And xdoclet as a paradigm has exploded.. For trivial one-use-case code, xdoclet and annotations are a god-send. Consider EJB2 XML files and meta-interfaces which are a nightmare. All are handled elegantly via annotations. Less code/files == less chance for error.. Concice with little revocation of flexibility. Though in huffman-coded style, that old flexibility now requires twice as much conceptual complexity (knowing to look at XML for only special cases - and thus forgetting about it).
First, let me clarify that I'm not against electric anything. I concluded with an ideal of mine.. And yes, I'm very much aware of www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com. However, I'm 60% engineer / 40% economist, so my comments are about the practicalities of today.
I'll defer any further comments on efficiency metrics, as I don't have time to research them.
"That's because electricity is indirectly subsidized by your tax dollars. All government regulated monoplies are." Right, and Iraq and Halliburton and the Afghan pipeline are all about freedom
I don't think you understood my comment, as Halliburton doesn't make any sense as any sort of analogy. Big expense items are natural monopolies.. Things like telco wiring, cable wiring, electric wiring, distribution and generation, bridges, roads etc. These are things that the US has decided will never work if left exclusively to the private sector AND perfect competition.. They are called natural monopolies because it is felt by economists that if left purely to darwinian economics they would never get off the ground.. The start-up costs are too high and the marginal revenew (through competition) is too low.
So there are two problems.. 1) If we just grant a blanket monopoly, we have what later we found in the drug industry.. $1k / pill price-tags. Where the private entity over-spends to produce the good, then charges in only the most elastic region of the supply-demand curve (same with SUN servers, few people can afford them, but those that can are willing to pay anything). They have correctly determined that this is how they can maximize their total revenew (short of selling to different people at different prices which unfortunately the US says is illegal - free market my ass). 2) If we exclusively use government contracts (bridges, power companies, etc), then we have beaurocratic bla bla bla and it's a socialist regeme like England or Russia (with respect to public resources). Whether this is good or bad, the US citizen has said no.
So we'd like the self-interested upkeep and efficiency of profit-oriented private industry without the hang-over of a full blown monopoly.
The answer is a government SUBSIDIZED and regulated monopoly. A single company is awarded the monopoly, and guaranteed operating-costs with a low profit margin.. The government even applies a tax onto the goods which is directly fed back into that industry. Every aspect of their operation is scrutinzed (like Walmart does with it's suppliers). The government gives guidelines about compensation levels which are directly tied to cost + predetermined profit margin. Enron was all about pretending that their costs were higher SO THAT they could charge a higher marginal rate.
If you think that the electric companies are more efficient than the oil companies... Consider that the Enron price gouging would be NORMAL were it not for the government regulated and subsidized monopolies.
This is why people are starting to fight to make Big Oil the same sort of public utility. Prices would be cut to a 1/3rd at least. Now we'd have supply shortages since we can't control markets outside the US. So that's the trade-off. And even if we could control foreign oil prices, local companies would not have an interest in over-producing.. Same Enron tactic, produce artificial shortages so that marginal costs are high (even though average costs are low), and by the government formula, you can charge a higher rate for each barrel.
Today we have at least 1000x the performance for $500. Because a large percentage of the consumers were willing to purchase bleeding edge / top-edge products.. This drove the market to compete for this very expensive, high-risk market.. Also it was because there was a metric by which people measured performance.. We can't just measure MPH in a car, because we're capped by laws.. We COULD measure by MPG, but nobody seems to give a f*K. At least the MPG seems to have little correlation with people's buying patterns..
Show me the numbers. The reason we have diesel electric train is because you can get more torque out of an electric motor for arbitrary rpm's. If a train is moving at a constant 1mph (say uphill), it's pretty hard to properly gear high torque out of even a diesel engine.
But you can't tell me that the total energy wasted in transferring energy from a chemical source to mechanical source through at least 4 stages of transfer (heat-waste from the power plant, non-ideal mechanical-to-electric transfer, transmission-line-loss, many many stages of non-idea transformer loss, non-ideal car battery loss, and non-ideal battery-to-mechanical loss).
Yes, due to economies of scale you get more effeciency at each stage than you would in a small scale car, but the overall process is much more wasteful.
The reason the per-mile fuel costs are less is because they don't burn ultra-refined petrolium as the source chemical.
That being said.. Show me an electric car on the market today.. So the whole point is moot.
Electricity can come from non-polluting sources. And gas can come from recycled cooking oil. The key is that it won't in the US any time soon.
The cost of electricity hasn't risen 300% in six years. That's because electricity is indirectly subsidized by your tax dollars. All government regulated monoplies are.
Pollution from a few sources is more easily managed and disperses less than from millions of ground level sources. I'll grant you the ability to manage pollution distribution. But historically this isn't a rose garden as plant waste leaks into public drinking water, etc.
Electric cars are simpler mechanically, more reliable and easier to repair. Hahahaha.. Maintance for existing electric / hibrid cars are projected to be higher than traditional gas burners. I haven't directly looked at numbers, but every review I have seen factors maintanance in to make hybrids a more expensive car overall.. Basically people don't buy hibrids to save money. Will it get better? Possibly.. If technologies and personal choice allow for it. Perhaps it's just an economy of scale issue.. Fewer cars means lower production of parts, means higher cost of replacement parts. But I like how you phrased this in the present tense.
Electric cars accelerate faster and can use regenerative braking. I'd like to see an electric car beat a mustang. Currently the energy density of petrolium beats the pants off batteries. So you're not going to get as compact, light or even as inexpensive of a car with the same horse-power. While you could produce a high-enough current battery/delivery-system to provide arbitrarily large horse power (though I don't know the weight requirements of near 500HP @ 60mph motors), the problem is that you're doing this by dumping your charge. Consider it a short-circuit ; how efficient is the system under this load with current technologies. Yes, in the future we'll have energon-cubes with five-9's efficiency levels. But right now we've got lead-acid baby.
Feel free to provide numbers, as I'm interested in this topic.
Granted, regenerative breaking is nice, but we're not saving the world with it, as it merely reduces the effect of one type of innefficiency.
Existing range limitations can be overcome with improved battery chemistry. Incremental, so it's a long ways off. For the forseeable future, higher tech will likely mean greater expense per unit.
I'm still hoping for a centralized semi-rail system (and thus on-the-fly energy (or even power) delivery).. The key thing I'd like to reform is the idiocy of decentralized human trafic decision making.. Every damn day I hear about 5 major accidents on my way to work (thankfully it doesn't usually affect the HOV roads in DC). I mean EVERY day.. Screw terrorism, how many people die because of an over-loaded transport-system and self-interested drivers.
1) Of course they don't need an acre of land, they just need about 30m for the foundation, the surrounding land can be used as farmland just fine (you usually don't build them in residential areas).
I'm sorry, but I've been to Germany, and the landscape/real-estate there is totally different than in the US.. It's much sparser (except in the main cities). In the US, An airport can not expand to lay more runway (and who the hell wants to live near an airport). Every place that is trying to deploy wind mills has MASSIVE local retallitation, because there are significant negatives to putting a massive tower in your back yard (and wind mills are in EVERYONE's back yards within visibility). And every spot of land is SOMEONE's back yard.. Why would you want your land devalued by putting a massive power plant hundreds of feet above you? It doesn't matter if it's only psychological, it is a very real effect that affects their pocket-books when it comes time to sell (and we trade real estate every 7 years on average).
I'm not balking wind mills (I love them), I'm balking the idea that it only takes 30m of real estate.
For the same reason, we can't build new oil refineries or virtually any other non-clean factories in the US - at least not without buying out all the land at enormously over-priced rates.
Reflection. I dissagree with your response.. Reflection is a hack and should never be used directly.. You should always employ a framework which may or may need to resort to reflection (say to read Java5 annotations).. The best way to dynamicly map strings is via Object Orientation.. Duh... interface IFoo {... } Map m = new Map(); m.put("string1", new Foo1()); m.put("string2", new Foo2()); The way web services work is that there is an XML file which gives string names of classes and associates them with the string names.. (URLs for example). So a base servlet, for example implements interface javax.servlet.Servlet which has the method void get(HttpRequest request, HttpRespnse response) You then write a lot of code that implements that interface, and you put into the J2EE web.xml file
Servlet1
com.company.project.ui.MyServlet
Servlet1/myproj/edit/*
Behind the scenes the J2EE servlet engine is doing: Map name2Servlet = new HashMap(); for config in configuration: name2Servlet.put(config.name, Class.forName(config.className).newInstance()); Map url2ServletName = new HashMap(); for config in configuration: url2ServletName.put(config.url, config.servletName); The key is the semi-reflective Class.forName which retrieves a reflective Class object that can be used to inspect all the methods and fields and annotations for that piece of code. But calling: Servlet myServlet = (Servlet)Class.forName(className).newInstance(); is identical in terms of performance to calling: Servlet myServlet = new MyServlet(); They both compile down to similar base byte-code. But you should almost never use the Class.forName(...) because you don't get compile-time safety. The preferred method of dealing with dynamicly loaded code is to leverage a framework (such as the servlet engine).. Or to use an IOC (inversion of control) mechanism like picocontainer, hivemind, jBoss or spring. In this IOC, you define interface fields and the IOC container mapps the names of the fields (often just string associations) to particular implementations.. So class Foo:
IBar bar;
void run() { bar.doSomething(); } interface IBar:
void doSomething(); class Bar1 implements IBar
void doSomething() {... } class Bar2 implements IBar
void doSomething() {... } So now the container has to recognize (somehow) that Foo.bar has to be set to either Bar1 or Bar2.. How this is done is up to the implementation details of the container.. BUT, the code doesn't give a crap.. It defines a contract saying I'm going to NullPointerException if the container doesn't properly configure me.. But the code doesn't have any reference to ANY container.. The knowledge of control in inverted.. Instead of code configuring itself, the container configures the runtime code. These associations can be in an XML file (most common), they can be defined by Java5 annotations.. e.g. class Foo
@SpringDependency(beanName="bar")
IBar bar;... @SpringBean(name = "bar") class Bar1 implements IBar {.. } @SpringBean(name = "bar") class Bar2 implements IBar {... } Then configuration becomes a matter of WHICH classes get deployed to the server. Alternatively, and most commonly is an XML file which maps classes to bean names, and dependencies to bean-names
So in this configuration we have 6 symbolic names: bar1,bar2,real-bar,test-bar,foo1,foo2 And the final mappings are bar1 bar2 foo1 -> bar1 foo2 -> bar2 The key is that we have full object orientation and absolutely zero need for function pointers or otherwise symbolic loading of classes... The fact that somebody somewhere is calling Class.forName(..) (and also reflectively lookup up field naems) is 100% hidden from us.. Th
The Bible even admonishes us about credit. In the book of Proverbs (NIV 22:7) we read: 'The Rich rule over the Poor, and the borrower is Servant to the Lender'. 'nuff said I think.
So does that mean you're living in mortal sin?
Look, you either buy in to capitalism and the free-market or you don't. Which is fine either way. But a free market economy's intrinsic nature is to compete through natural selection - adhereing to only those requirements that the environment requires. To corporate America, this increasingly means what the government regulates (as consumers more and more just buy what they're presented). And the government regulates via the will of the people (more or less). I just watched a show last night on the history channel about the history of plumbing. It was the will of the people that regulated hundred-page city-codes for construction that single-handidly brought the US into the 20'th century health-wise. Is it the case that the will of the people see's personal privacy to be an issue of public good will? If so, then it will eventually find it's way into being legislated.
I'm not personally convinced that it's a panacea of good will. I believe there are germs that can hide and fester in anonymity. But this topic is long over discussed for me.
I'd rather work for a suit at IBM, where my boss's boss has to report to someone, than a local software firm, where my boss's boss might fire me and give my job to his nephew.
Do you honestly think that a small firm can afford to put someone in a position for which they are not qualified?
In any case, more power to you. I've worked at Dupont and I've worked at several start-ups.. I much prefer the start ups (even though Dupont was a almost exclusively run by engineers).. Have I been laid off several times? Sure.. But I don't fear job security because my skill set is desireable.
Larger firms have certain economies of scale, but as my original post tried to state, at a certain point, you have a diseconomy of scale.. The management pyramid becomes so overwhelming that productivity actually falls.. Beuracracy is a key ingredient...
I've worked with several major companies (contract work from a small firm) and their matrix-management structure was embarrasing to us. Constant beuracracy to where we never knew if the project was going to stay alive or not (nothing to do with us). Management often is willing to shift gears even after spending millions of dollars on a project because they have the option do (don't continue to invest money into bad money).. A small firm can't afford to constantly shift around - they have to see a project through or it dramatically cripples the company. And I like the feel of a job that has gone through to completion. I can't tell you how many projects that never saw the end at larger firms that I've been affiliated with.
A Good Credit rating is not necessarily a measure of a persons integrity. Let's look at a couple cases in point.
Sorry, you're fabricating words.. Nobody in this whole post has said anything about integrity. They've talked exclusively about good personal management skills.. Time management, money management, and organizational skills. I'm sure that the people you've mentioned excelled at the above attributes, or they wouldn't have gotten to such high powers of responsibility..
Were the ultimately good for the company, no.. Don't confuse apples with oranges.
Hiring based on skills and talents rather than credit rating may improve the staff, build a better product, and improve the welfare of company and it's shareholders. While, at the same time, giving someone who has not had money to make payments on his debts the oppertunity to get a leg up in the world.
You speak about this as if the current norm is back-ground credit checks, and 'wouldn't a great idea be to base hiring on skills'. But the context is that companies ARE hiring based on skills as they are discovered.. But for many positions, the skillset is not apparent, and all you have is what awards you've gotten in high school or collage. Perhaps what positions you've held.. But when you're reviewing hundreds of applications, there will be a great many individuals that are comparable.. That ARE good looking on paper and in person. This whole discussion is about whether it is ethical to encorporate more personal metrics into the decision making process..
Is it any less ethical that pretty administrative assistants are hired (foremerly secretaries)? Is it any less ethical that a confident person is hired over a nervous person?... that a friend/associate is hired over a more qualified person?
1. 90% of America is not cometent enough to realize it's bad to spend willy nilly on credit, and most would be in a very place if they went without one or two paychecks. How much do owe? How much do you make? What's the minimum ballences on your credit cards? What cards do you have? Do you have morgage? What's your anual income? Common, if you can tell the companies your applying at, may as well tell us.
And why do you think that is? Because there are very few up-front consequences to over-spending on credit. You think.. 'We need this for the family', 'It's a long term investment'. You think, 'I know we can't afford this appartment, but we just can't live in our old neighborhood'. It's the idea that the immediate crisis is more important than the long term situation.. The situation that you won't be able to dig yourself out of. Then, of course, there's the occasional bad fortune: Medical / loss of job. When you're living razor thin, it's hard to say they should have put away more for a bad day.
Only people that want to buy a house (and occasionally a car) are concerned about their credit history.. Most everyone else is willing to make a payment two or three months late because that helps them out in the short-run. Instead, people that are genuinely concerned about their credit history.
2. If they are perpetually unemployed because they have bad credit, then how will they find jobs to correct the situation.
Again, you're assuming that skillset is not part of the hiring process. A person that works hard will eventually develop noticeable and valueable skill-sets. There is always a job low enough in stature that they can be hired and build from... Only pride prevents one from taking such a lower level of work (unless of course the economy is doing very poorly). In the mean time, you are forced to rely on family friends or strangers to reduce your monthly expenses. Spending every penny of credit available to you during a time of unemployment is no more responsible than buying a big screen TV when you earn minimum wage.
Busiensses have a responsiblity to be good corporate citizens.
Tell that to the Ford company. They were practically the founders of the American Middle class by virtue of over-paying their workers.
I'm not aware of what kind of quality control systems they had at the time, but today they are in a very tight market losing money on every car they make for the US. Is it their responsibility to double their highest expense (labor costs) for public welfare to help rebuild the middle class? The unions already are crying about pay cuts and wage freezes. Isn't Ford scrambling like a chicken with it's head cut off trying to find better operations, human-resources and over-all efficiencies (because everyone else already has)??
We're talking businesses that are in razor-thin profit margins.. Many start ups never see a penny of profit because they are squashed by competition, or worse, incompetent internal controls (bad budgeting, bad hiring, etc). Is it their responsibility to volunteer greater public welfare?
Perhaps instead you are considering corporate america.. The fortune-500 companies as those to whom public welfare should reside. These are companies with multi-million dollar salaries for the upper eschelon - to which unions constantly balk. While this may be a reasonable concern, I don't tend to like the employer / employee mentality that exists in such corporate environments, so I'm not terribly interested in that discussion. Decentralized franchises or small-to-medium-scale companies are more attrictive for me as the basis of the middle class worker.
First, I'm not advocating credit checks. I'm saying that the arguments against it are not convincing.
Why allow a criminal back ground? Why allow a drug test?
They are allowed because they've historically been able to get away with it, and it's a valueable tool.. The business wants to have more information in it's decision making process, whereas the general citizen wants more privacy. So to say that you 'just' want your privacy isn't a valid argument... People talking about you at the water cooler would imply that they are not keeping such background checks in privacy, and I would promote suing their asses back into the stone age. Same with medical records (which ARE already given up to join certain types of medical insurance plans promoted by a company).
It's supply and demand.. If the company can get away with it without a law suite, then they will.. Companies that profit better by doing so will beat out companies that don't.
The only way you're going to have successful law suites against such practices is if you can show that it does you harm.
If there are 50 applicants for a job, and you have a very low credit score and you didn't get the job - it's going to be hard to prove that you were the best person for that job and it was only your score that kept you out of the position. If you were argueably a better applicant than someone else with a higher credit score, then that might fly.. Except we already promote things like affirmative action (which I support), so the best skilled for a job is not always what is most desired for a job.
Again, I'm not saying this is moral, or it should be universally accepted.. I'm trying to put this into perspective.
That is, unless "growing up with a silver spoon and parents who bail you out of every financial misstep" is a critical element in hiring.
I'm sorry, but my parents didn't have a silver spoon.. In fact, they survive on $20,000 / year. Yet, I have a near perfect credit score. And I did that on an average annual salary of 20,000 for 10 years.
Why? Well, I can't say with certainty.. But my guess would be that I didn't let myself get overwhelmed.. During collage I would get as far as $15,000 of rolling credit card debt.. But I did this through the use of 0% offers.. Getting something like a dozen cards, but ALWAY making high/high payments on exactly one card with non-zero interest.
I did this knowing that eventually I would have a higher paying job (and the banks knew this).. Unfortunately trying to balance work and school (and a social life), I took twice as long as my original plan.. So my debt continued to grow and the 0% interest cards ran out... So I consolidated onto a single medium-rate high-credit card, and continued to make high payments on it (by this time, I had enough credit history that a single card would have enough credit to do this).
And finally I graduated and got a decent job.. Paid down the cards, and in less than a year, bought a house in this over-bloated market, because my credit score was so f*ing high.
I managed my expenditures and liabilities. I didn't purchase beyond my means.. I had student loans and car loans out the ass, but these are things a bank assumes are going to be there. What they don't assume will be there is a finite amount of credit at high interest, a lower-than-sustainable steady-state job situation and a worsening purchasing power. If this is your situation.. Get rid of the car and take public transportation (saves thousands / year). Get rid of HBO and develop more community ties so you can have communal parties (perhaps with friends that do have HBO). Stop going out to eat. Stop buying junk food at top dollar, and instead eat oat meal, pasta and wait for meat sales at the local market. I lived this way off-and-on for 20 years (because I was under my parents' wing through collage).
The point is that, no matter what your station in life is, there IS a way of surviving responsibly. The problem is that most people don't accept their station in life and try to live beyond their means.. This ALWAYS catches up with them.. And the credit history is a metric of this.
As an employer, aren't you very much interested in your employee's ability to manage their own life so that they can function properly in your organization?
This isn't to say that there aren't heart-throbbing stories of tragedy.. But here I'm refuting the silver-spoon statement which I find offensive.
We don't need credit checks for jack squat. We need criminal state & FBI background checks and that's it.
I find your argument dismissive and biased. While I can't definitively promote credit-check based employee selection, your argument provides almost no argument against the option.
Consider the job of a successful interviewer. You first wish to weed out criminals, illegals, and if you can, drug addicts who are likely to go into rehab, or become less effective of an employee. While you can not discriminate, it is your fault if the company goes under because it's run by a large enough percentage of dead-beats. You have to determine if an otherwise apparent dead-beat is honestly making recovery strides and thus is worth the risk. Just like a bank has to determine if you will likely default when they give you a car loan. The difference is that a bank can charge a higher interest rate to mitagate the risk.. An interviewer does not have continuous flexibility in what position they can put you in (especially if the interview is for a specific job).
There is adverse selection when it comes to the interviewing process.. The prospective employee is at their best at the interview.. They are the best dressed, the best attention-span, the best attitude.. There is a sense of fear in most subjects. The resume is potentially padded with semi-truths.. The references may not be who they are declared to be (a super-visor may actually be a co-worker). Former employers are not allowed (by law) to hurt the former employee's opportunities for new work, so they can't just say that the employee was a dead-beat, never showed up to work, had a bad attitude, was disruptive of other worker's productivity, was slow to train and incompentent. So as an interviewer you have to expect a certain degree of superficial gloss.
So the CV, the references, the criminal back-ground check are the current tools. But there is a science that works against the interviewer (much like the political process which convolutes the voters decision making). It often comes down to presence and personality.. Did the interviewer like you. Which I think is a bull shit reason to get hired (unless that's part of the job description).
As an interviewer, knowing that the particular position I'm looking to fill has a high degree of gloss and few differentiating metrics, I would be starved to find new methologies. MicroSoft and other's utilized a type of IQ test. But do you really need high IQ people flipping burgers? But we don't chide at the IQ test because of our self sense of vanity - sure we'd like everybody to be smarter.
Yet somehow your credit history - something you DID have a chance to affect is somehow detestable?
Perhaps I could see anger over your medical history being a deciding factor (ops, you're going to cost us a lot in heart related problems, so we won't hire you). Mainly because you had no way of affecting this (except perhaps diet and excercize).
So lets say that your credit history became a deciding factor between you and one other person (anything less is too indeterministic to claim discrimination against). If you knew that your credit history was a determining factor (and you would have to give permission to do such a thing), then you would know the major obsticles in your past, and you could outline them in the interview process.
If there was a bankruptsy because your bitch ex wife emptied your bank account, ran your credit cards to full, and took you for half of what was left, then say so in the interview. If the report can show this as a singularity, then you should be fine.
But most likely, you were careless more than a few times and didn't make a payment on time. Perhaps you're an obstinant dick-head and decided that the most appropriate way to contest a credit charge was to never pay that credit card again. While you may feel justified, banks don't.. And as an interviewer, would I feel that you'd be likely to "dick us over" as well? I regularly see a
Most SMP code is tested on CPUs of equal clock speeds
You're kidding right? I can't imagine any software which depends on the timing of coperative CPUs.. MPI and general divide-and-qonquer work-clusters could care less about the performance level of peer threads/co-processes. Hell process interrupts due to pre-emptive multi-tasking is enough to guarantee lack of symmetry.
Now perhaps you're referring to scheduling problems in the kernel.. I'm sure that AMD would be generous enough to provide kernel patches as are necessary.
I disagree.. I survived almost my entire college career without the need for power point (graduated last year). In fact, I was always lothe to see the occasional business student who gave a "flashy" presentation in an economics class or whatever that wasted the audiences time on freak animation gone awrye.
The best presentations I've ever seen in the lecture halls were verbal with maybe an occasional graphic (NO text). The point of a presentation is to present with your person, not with a story-board. If the presentation could sell your point, then why bother showing up?
But if that's the case, then how is powerpoint better than 20 years ago with white cardboard with picture cut-outs? If you're in a lecture hall with 200 people, then powerpoint projects better onto a larger screen.. But I'm not aware of many classes of 200 people that had class-presentation day.
The biggest fallacy of powerpoint presentations is that people take the 3x5 cards and show them to people... They then read off of the powerpoint screen to make their verbal case.. But the audience is then distracted from the speaker because they are forced to read the exact notes that the presenter is about to elaborate on.
And to echo other posters' comments.. When you're browsing the web, are you excited or dismayed when a web site exclusively publishes a power-point presentation (assuming you even have a windows plugin that can read the link). In other words, is powerpoint more or less expressive than other media? And thus is it a boone or bane to your business skills? (hint, the fact that lay CEOs and vice presidents use them isn't a formal proof).
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of morbid entertainment, I'll continue this thread.
My knowledge of the bible is more than sufficient. I was brought up in a fanatic household.
Plus, you seem to have completely missed my sarchasm. Thats understandible in such emotional discussions. That plus I mispelled "factitious", which means "made up".
But in other news, "Love thy neighbor" would be a great message. But it's got little to do with modern Christianity. The "message" actually was called "The word of God". And this word was perverted to become that "The Son of Man" or the son of God has come to free us of Gods punishment for original sin. "Love thy neighbor" you must be confusing with the speach Jesus gave to a bunch of Rich guys just before he told them they had to become poor to better honor God( a fact missed by most rich Americans, who pull out of their asses that God wants us to be rich and powerful - google Jabez which predates Jesus by some time). My favorite modern quote "Will Dick Cheny go to Heaven, or will a camel make it through that needle eye?" Anyway, that speech simply identified the 3 most important commandments. Hardly a new doctrine.
If all of Christianity was based on "Love thy neighbor", we wouldn't be killing Jews in the middle ages to get them to convert. Nor would we be burning witches, pagens. What would be the significance of confession, Easter, 'accepting Jesus as your personal savior'. These are rituals derived from a complex story. Not logical conclusions of 'Love'. In fact they were merely artifacts of Jewish cultural history. Jesus was nothing more than the embodiment of the reaction of the times. He was to Judaism as Karl Marx was to capitalism. Or Luther was to Catholicism.
Now you may be referring to modern new religeon, many of which were started by charletans who have invented facts to give themselves credibility, and thus a flock. David Koresh, Joseph Smith, etc. Thats fine, but Im hard pressed to call them Christians, just because Jesus was part of their teachings.
Dont be too quick to dismiss someone's understanding of a doctrine. You leave yourself vulnerable.
That plus Im not sure your responding to me, as I said nothing about badness. Merely the unrelatedness of the collection of books called the Christian bible.
The problem is that while you may not push your beliefs, other people exploit your fears at election time to side step real issues. So we non believers have resentment that global affairs and grants to wealthy industries are so easily controlled by topics such as gay marriage and stem cells and abortion.
We quickly tire of such blind faith.
Id further this by saying that the danger of the fearing of a godless society is very tell tale. A supressed child overcompensates when the controling authority goes away.
If the only reason someone does not "sin" is divine justice, then the nautural reaction to the concept of there not being such justice is to act in a most defiling way.
Its best to maintain a healthy societal perspective so that we dont come into chaos when historical evidence is eventually dug up contradicting long held faith in certain religeous institutions.
I'll show you where Jesus shunned fornication, and even where he condoned stoning people and witches to death (there's a difference) when you can show me where Christians can get divorced. My best guess is that the bible has to completely contradict itself on a given topic at least once per thousand year cycle.
My festitous point is that people cobble unrelated and inconsistent texts together, glaze over the special cases then claim that not only is the combined text completely true (since it was devinely edited), but that we can read in between the lines to derive further divine truth.
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lying for fun and profit
I think the gp had his own rant, but your question is very important. Belief in God is first and foremost a cultural phenomena. We typically designate the cultural superstitions / rituals into formal religeons which help insiders identity and outsiders to properly categorize. Even being agnostic (like myself), all elements of the quasi faith can be tied to your cultural upbringings and unresolved superstitions. I still have an irrational fear of taking the office of God in contempt. I call it respect, but its really just superstition. No different than people that get scared "Tempting fate" when someone says "nothing could possibly go wrong".
Thus, your quasi belief in God (I mean no disrespect) necessitates adoption of SOME pre-established notions/rituals/organizational structure. And part and parsel of those ideas are non-imperical/untestible cause and effects. You are in essence captive to the irrational fears (irrational because you have necessarily never directly experienced the wrath of Fate or the judging God). I say this arrogantly - pre-judgeing that you could not relay any personal experiences that I would qualify as being a divine consiquence. For that shortness I appologize, but could elaborate if need be.
To be "Scientific" implies that you embody the philosophy of Science. This is different than saying you occasionally support science in your thinking. Not terribly diferent than saying you are honest or reliable or productive. More specifically, to say you are Scientific in the context of a religeous discussion is a dichatomy. You can be a dad at home and a porn star at work, but those two roles don't belong together- their focuses are mutually exclusive.
Likewise, if your defining essence is empirical/logical discovery, then you should have a distaste for the event horizons of our culture. The super being complex (e.g. religeous/divine faith) should be something that you feel compelled to seek out or irradicate (prove/disprove).
To pasively accept that there is a fairy tale-like order to the world is like passively living next to an active volcano; Never second guessing that it would ever become a larger issue.
Now if we can get something like the Mac OS X type of GUI going with Linux on the desktop...
Thank you, but no.. I actually prefer the gnome user experience to XP / Mac. I would, however, like to see greater out-of-the-box installation / configuration / drivers so I don't have to trouble-shoot my parent's Linux boxes. Basic setup and support still suck.
Resistivity is the inverse of conductivity..
Conductivity is a function of:
A) Number of possible free electron states (positions) - function of temperature
B) Mean time to collision for given electron - function of temperature
C) [free] Electron density - function of temperature
Note that higher temperatures mean:
B) greater vibrational or translational properties of the material which obstruct the paths of free electrons.. So B is inversely proportional to temperature.
C) greater number of electrons are excited and thus broken from their atomic bonds (or at least lower atomic orbitals) and thus a greater number of electrons are available to participate in conduction. So C is directly proportional to temperature
Any material that
A) has free electrons (non-atomicly bound OR in covalent orbitals / orbitals shared between atoms)
B) has a non-infinite potential barrier between geometric positions
C) is above absolute zero
Naturally, the wider the path (radially), the greater the number of electrons and the greater the number of electron states, so the greater the conductivity.. It's 1 to 1 or linear growth.
As for length, the conductivity is an intrinsic measure, so length is somewhat irrelevant. However as a matter of practicality, on a large scale, the longer a path a given set of electrons have to travel, the more collisions will occur and thus the greater number of energy dispersals will occur and thus a greater amount of waste-heat. So you get an effectively greater measurement of resistance the longer the wire. This too is linear..
But length is usually a function of practical design (gotta connect two geographically distinct items).. Width, on the other hand is often a function of technology (how small can I make it) AND because width directly affects conductivity (gotta be wider to conduct more electrons), the intrinsic conductivity of the material dictates that for a given requirement of current and voltage, you must have a certain width for a given material.
However, not all geometries are created equally. The shape of the material, (which includes the curvature.. gentle curves v.s. right angles) affects the electro-static properties of the material. Indeed the mean-free-path to collision is different around the edges/boundries of a material, so obviously curved wire will have different properties than straight wire. Likewise the type of material adjacent to the conductor dramatically affects it's properties.
So to your original statement about water.
A) Water is a naturally polarized particle, so it can easily support attraction of free electrons.
Ionized water (e.g. salt-water) has even greater electron attraction
B) Water is anamorphic (non structured, and constantly moving), so the mean-time-to-collision is pretty short.. This restricts conductivity significantly.
C) Water is not naturally ionized - it doesn't give off a free electron in it's natural state at room-temperature, so there are very few actual electrons available to conduct. Salt, on the other hand DOES give off a free electron when ionized in water. Likewise acids are ionized giving off free electrons. Thus lead-acid batteries use water with lots of free electrons, and thus conduct electricity reasonably well. Note that it's the storage of electrons, not the conductivity of electrons that makes these batteries useful. In fact the collisions due to high current conduction heats up the water.. This is how car batteries can explode, and this is why you should never open up the battery ports immediately after a car has been running for a long time.
Care to back up your claims of bunk so that you're not also labeled as bunk?
This is a seriously important debate.. But there is no one right answer.
On the one hand, you have the perl paragidm - keep absolutely everything in one file.. code, docs, API, meta-information.. In perl you had __DATA__ and __POD__ sections of the file for meta-data and documentation.. In Java you've almost always had javadocs, then xdoclets, and now annotations.
The advantage of this is the idea that code-changes almost always necessitates doc changes or meta-data changes.. The further away those items are from the code, the greater the probability that they'll get out of sync.
ALSO, new-commers that see the code for the first time won't have as far to go to get all the information about the code that is relevant.. If they are paging through a new project, they may not know where the associated meta-data XML files are.
Now, good annotation packages (like hibernate-annotations) allow you to override just about every possible annotation in use... And as a result, it makes the most sense to only annotate to the degree that generality necessitates.. Consider this object-oriented annotations (even though it's a hack-job on the back-end, because the code has to know to recursively check for annotations and XML in all the right places).
The other side of the story is important too... That if your code is dependent on annotations (say you're hack-job didn't facilitate XML overrides), then you reuse code in two different contexts, you're screwed, because you've historically coded to one annotation schema, but then in one or more use cases, those annotations are not correct.. This is most common in interfaced' API libraries (with little or no actual code). If say a @Transactional attribute is present in the API, but it's being deployed in a non-transactional environment (say a trivial front-end web-app that doesn't do any DB activity and thus doesn't have a registered transaction manager), then you might be in for a shock when you first deploy the code. That being said, things like @Transactional are encouraged to exist only in the class implementation code, not in the interfaces. But you might have a poor annotation package which doesn't handle this properly.
Another example is if you define schema attributes on the POJO, say
@Length(max=32) String firstName;
Then you use this Person object everywhere... Well, not every place is going to want a column length of 32 chars (though this might be a good-thing).. Again, in Hibernate at least, you can always override in XML for a particular deployment... But it violates the use-case above of a 1'st time prorammer paging through the code.. Now they have a false expectation.
I'm sure there are other pros and cons. But Annotations are far better than xdoclet.. And xdoclet as a paradigm has exploded.. For trivial one-use-case code, xdoclet and annotations are a god-send. Consider EJB2 XML files and meta-interfaces which are a nightmare. All are handled elegantly via annotations. Less code/files == less chance for error.. Concice with little revocation of flexibility. Though in huffman-coded style, that old flexibility now requires twice as much conceptual complexity (knowing to look at XML for only special cases - and thus forgetting about it).
First, let me clarify that I'm not against electric anything. I concluded with an ideal of mine.. And yes, I'm very much aware of www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com. However, I'm 60% engineer / 40% economist, so my comments are about the practicalities of today.
I'll defer any further comments on efficiency metrics, as I don't have time to research them.
"That's because electricity is indirectly subsidized by your tax dollars. All government regulated monoplies are." Right, and Iraq and Halliburton and the Afghan pipeline are all about freedom
I don't think you understood my comment, as Halliburton doesn't make any sense as any sort of analogy. Big expense items are natural monopolies.. Things like telco wiring, cable wiring, electric wiring, distribution and generation, bridges, roads etc. These are things that the US has decided will never work if left exclusively to the private sector AND perfect competition.. They are called natural monopolies because it is felt by economists that if left purely to darwinian economics they would never get off the ground.. The start-up costs are too high and the marginal revenew (through competition) is too low.
So there are two problems..
1) If we just grant a blanket monopoly, we have what later we found in the drug industry.. $1k / pill price-tags. Where the private entity over-spends to produce the good, then charges in only the most elastic region of the supply-demand curve (same with SUN servers, few people can afford them, but those that can are willing to pay anything). They have correctly determined that this is how they can maximize their total revenew (short of selling to different people at different prices which unfortunately the US says is illegal - free market my ass).
2) If we exclusively use government contracts (bridges, power companies, etc), then we have beaurocratic bla bla bla and it's a socialist regeme like England or Russia (with respect to public resources). Whether this is good or bad, the US citizen has said no.
So we'd like the self-interested upkeep and efficiency of profit-oriented private industry without the hang-over of a full blown monopoly.
The answer is a government SUBSIDIZED and regulated monopoly. A single company is awarded the monopoly, and guaranteed operating-costs with a low profit margin.. The government even applies a tax onto the goods which is directly fed back into that industry. Every aspect of their operation is scrutinzed (like Walmart does with it's suppliers). The government gives guidelines about compensation levels which are directly tied to cost + predetermined profit margin. Enron was all about pretending that their costs were higher SO THAT they could charge a higher marginal rate.
If you think that the electric companies are more efficient than the oil companies... Consider that the Enron price gouging would be NORMAL were it not for the government regulated and subsidized monopolies.
This is why people are starting to fight to make Big Oil the same sort of public utility. Prices would be cut to a 1/3rd at least. Now we'd have supply shortages since we can't control markets outside the US. So that's the trade-off. And even if we could control foreign oil prices, local companies would not have an interest in over-producing.. Same Enron tactic, produce artificial shortages so that marginal costs are high (even though average costs are low), and by the government formula, you can charge a higher rate for each barrel.
Today we have at least 1000x the performance for $500.
Because a large percentage of the consumers were willing to purchase bleeding edge / top-edge products.. This drove the market to compete for this very expensive, high-risk market.. Also it was because there was a metric by which people measured performance.. We can't just measure MPH in a car, because we're capped by laws.. We COULD measure by MPG, but nobody seems to give a f*K. At least the MPG seems to have little correlation with people's buying patterns..
Electric motors are much more efficient.
Show me the numbers. The reason we have diesel electric train is because you can get more torque out of an electric motor for arbitrary rpm's. If a train is moving at a constant 1mph (say uphill), it's pretty hard to properly gear high torque out of even a diesel engine.
But you can't tell me that the total energy wasted in transferring energy from a chemical source to mechanical source through at least 4 stages of transfer (heat-waste from the power plant, non-ideal mechanical-to-electric transfer, transmission-line-loss, many many stages of non-idea transformer loss, non-ideal car battery loss, and non-ideal battery-to-mechanical loss).
Yes, due to economies of scale you get more effeciency at each stage than you would in a small scale car, but the overall process is much more wasteful.
The reason the per-mile fuel costs are less is because they don't burn ultra-refined petrolium as the source chemical.
That being said.. Show me an electric car on the market today.. So the whole point is moot.
Electricity can come from non-polluting sources.
And gas can come from recycled cooking oil. The key is that it won't in the US any time soon.
The cost of electricity hasn't risen 300% in six years.
That's because electricity is indirectly subsidized by your tax dollars. All government regulated monoplies are.
Pollution from a few sources is more easily managed and disperses less than from millions of ground level sources.
I'll grant you the ability to manage pollution distribution. But historically this isn't a rose garden as plant waste leaks into public drinking water, etc.
Electric cars are simpler mechanically, more reliable and easier to repair.
Hahahaha.. Maintance for existing electric / hibrid cars are projected to be higher than traditional gas burners. I haven't directly looked at numbers, but every review I have seen factors maintanance in to make hybrids a more expensive car overall.. Basically people don't buy hibrids to save money. Will it get better? Possibly.. If technologies and personal choice allow for it. Perhaps it's just an economy of scale issue.. Fewer cars means lower production of parts, means higher cost of replacement parts. But I like how you phrased this in the present tense.
Electric cars accelerate faster and can use regenerative braking.
I'd like to see an electric car beat a mustang. Currently the energy density of petrolium beats the pants off batteries. So you're not going to get as compact, light or even as inexpensive of a car with the same horse-power. While you could produce a high-enough current battery/delivery-system to provide arbitrarily large horse power (though I don't know the weight requirements of near 500HP @ 60mph motors), the problem is that you're doing this by dumping your charge. Consider it a short-circuit ; how efficient is the system under this load with current technologies. Yes, in the future we'll have energon-cubes with five-9's efficiency levels. But right now we've got lead-acid baby.
Feel free to provide numbers, as I'm interested in this topic.
Granted, regenerative breaking is nice, but we're not saving the world with it, as it merely reduces the effect of one type of innefficiency.
Existing range limitations can be overcome with improved battery chemistry.
Incremental, so it's a long ways off. For the forseeable future, higher tech will likely mean greater expense per unit.
I'm still hoping for a centralized semi-rail system (and thus on-the-fly energy (or even power) delivery).. The key thing I'd like to reform is the idiocy of decentralized human trafic decision making.. Every damn day I hear about 5 major accidents on my way to work (thankfully it doesn't usually affect the HOV roads in DC). I mean EVERY day.. Screw terrorism, how many people die because of an over-loaded transport-system and self-interested drivers.
Central
1) Of course they don't need an acre of land, they just need about 30m for the foundation, the surrounding land can be used as farmland just fine (you usually don't build them in residential areas).
I'm sorry, but I've been to Germany, and the landscape/real-estate there is totally different than in the US.. It's much sparser (except in the main cities). In the US, An airport can not expand to lay more runway (and who the hell wants to live near an airport). Every place that is trying to deploy wind mills has MASSIVE local retallitation, because there are significant negatives to putting a massive tower in your back yard (and wind mills are in EVERYONE's back yards within visibility). And every spot of land is SOMEONE's back yard.. Why would you want your land devalued by putting a massive power plant hundreds of feet above you? It doesn't matter if it's only psychological, it is a very real effect that affects their pocket-books when it comes time to sell (and we trade real estate every 7 years on average).
I'm not balking wind mills (I love them), I'm balking the idea that it only takes 30m of real estate.
For the same reason, we can't build new oil refineries or virtually any other non-clean factories in the US - at least not without buying out all the land at enormously over-priced rates.
Moreover, to what end? Unclaimed real-estate? Maybe it could be the next middle east. The real promised land?
Reflection. ... }
/myproj/edit/*
... } ... } ... .. } ... }
I dissagree with your response.. Reflection is a hack and should never be used directly.. You should always employ a framework which may or may need to resort to reflection (say to read Java5 annotations)..
The best way to dynamicly map strings is via Object Orientation.. Duh...
interface IFoo {
Map m = new Map();
m.put("string1", new Foo1());
m.put("string2", new Foo2());
The way web services work is that there is an XML file which gives string names of classes and associates them with the string names.. (URLs for example).
So a base servlet, for example implements interface javax.servlet.Servlet which has the method
void get(HttpRequest request, HttpRespnse response)
You then write a lot of code that implements that interface, and you put into the J2EE web.xml file
Servlet1
com.company.project.ui.MyServlet
Servlet1
Behind the scenes the J2EE servlet engine is doing:
Map name2Servlet = new HashMap();
for config in configuration: name2Servlet.put(config.name, Class.forName(config.className).newInstance());
Map url2ServletName = new HashMap();
for config in configuration: url2ServletName.put(config.url, config.servletName);
The key is the semi-reflective Class.forName which retrieves a reflective Class object that can be used to inspect all the methods and fields and annotations for that piece of code. But calling:
Servlet myServlet = (Servlet)Class.forName(className).newInstance();
is identical in terms of performance to calling:
Servlet myServlet = new MyServlet();
They both compile down to similar base byte-code.
But you should almost never use the Class.forName(...) because you don't get compile-time safety.
The preferred method of dealing with dynamicly loaded code is to leverage a framework (such as the servlet engine).. Or to use an IOC (inversion of control) mechanism like picocontainer, hivemind, jBoss or spring.
In this IOC, you define interface fields and the IOC container mapps the names of the fields (often just string associations) to particular implementations.. So
class Foo:
IBar bar;
void run() { bar.doSomething(); }
interface IBar:
void doSomething();
class Bar1 implements IBar
void doSomething() {
class Bar2 implements IBar
void doSomething() {
So now the container has to recognize (somehow) that Foo.bar has to be set to either Bar1 or Bar2.. How this is done is up to the implementation details of the container.. BUT, the code doesn't give a crap.. It defines a contract saying I'm going to NullPointerException if the container doesn't properly configure me.. But the code doesn't have any reference to ANY container.. The knowledge of control in inverted.. Instead of code configuring itself, the container configures the runtime code.
These associations can be in an XML file (most common), they can be defined by Java5 annotations.. e.g.
class Foo
@SpringDependency(beanName="bar")
IBar bar;
@SpringBean(name = "bar")
class Bar1 implements IBar {
@SpringBean(name = "bar")
class Bar2 implements IBar {
Then configuration becomes a matter of WHICH classes get deployed to the server.
Alternatively, and most commonly is an XML file which maps classes to bean names, and dependencies to bean-names
So in this configuration we have 6 symbolic names: bar1,bar2,real-bar,test-bar,foo1,foo2
And the final mappings are
bar1
bar2
foo1 -> bar1
foo2 -> bar2
The key is that we have full object orientation and absolutely zero need for function pointers or otherwise symbolic loading of classes... The fact that somebody somewhere is calling Class.forName(..) (and also reflectively lookup up field naems) is 100% hidden from us.. Th
The Bible even admonishes us about credit. In the book of Proverbs (NIV 22:7) we read: 'The Rich rule over the Poor, and the borrower is Servant to the Lender'. 'nuff said I think.
So does that mean you're living in mortal sin?
Look, you either buy in to capitalism and the free-market or you don't. Which is fine either way. But a free market economy's intrinsic nature is to compete through natural selection - adhereing to only those requirements that the environment requires. To corporate America, this increasingly means what the government regulates (as consumers more and more just buy what they're presented). And the government regulates via the will of the people (more or less). I just watched a show last night on the history channel about the history of plumbing. It was the will of the people that regulated hundred-page city-codes for construction that single-handidly brought the US into the 20'th century health-wise. Is it the case that the will of the people see's personal privacy to be an issue of public good will? If so, then it will eventually find it's way into being legislated.
I'm not personally convinced that it's a panacea of good will. I believe there are germs that can hide and fester in anonymity. But this topic is long over discussed for me.
I'd rather work for a suit at IBM, where my boss's boss has to report to someone, than a local software firm, where my boss's boss might fire me and give my job to his nephew.
Do you honestly think that a small firm can afford to put someone in a position for which they are not qualified?
In any case, more power to you. I've worked at Dupont and I've worked at several start-ups.. I much prefer the start ups (even though Dupont was a almost exclusively run by engineers).. Have I been laid off several times? Sure.. But I don't fear job security because my skill set is desireable.
Larger firms have certain economies of scale, but as my original post tried to state, at a certain point, you have a diseconomy of scale.. The management pyramid becomes so overwhelming that productivity actually falls.. Beuracracy is a key ingredient...
I've worked with several major companies (contract work from a small firm) and their matrix-management structure was embarrasing to us. Constant beuracracy to where we never knew if the project was going to stay alive or not (nothing to do with us). Management often is willing to shift gears even after spending millions of dollars on a project because they have the option do (don't continue to invest money into bad money).. A small firm can't afford to constantly shift around - they have to see a project through or it dramatically cripples the company. And I like the feel of a job that has gone through to completion. I can't tell you how many projects that never saw the end at larger firms that I've been affiliated with.
But, to each his own.
A Good Credit rating is not necessarily a measure of a persons integrity. Let's look at a couple cases in point.
Sorry, you're fabricating words.. Nobody in this whole post has said anything about integrity. They've talked exclusively about good personal management skills.. Time management, money management, and organizational skills. I'm sure that the people you've mentioned excelled at the above attributes, or they wouldn't have gotten to such high powers of responsibility..
Were the ultimately good for the company, no.. Don't confuse apples with oranges.
Hiring based on skills and talents rather than credit rating may improve the staff, build a better product, and improve the welfare of company and it's shareholders. While, at the same time, giving someone who has not had money to make payments on his debts the oppertunity to get a leg up in the world.
... that a friend/associate is hired over a more qualified person?
You speak about this as if the current norm is back-ground credit checks, and 'wouldn't a great idea be to base hiring on skills'. But the context is that companies ARE hiring based on skills as they are discovered.. But for many positions, the skillset is not apparent, and all you have is what awards you've gotten in high school or collage. Perhaps what positions you've held.. But when you're reviewing hundreds of applications, there will be a great many individuals that are comparable.. That ARE good looking on paper and in person. This whole discussion is about whether it is ethical to encorporate more personal metrics into the decision making process..
Is it any less ethical that pretty administrative assistants are hired (foremerly secretaries)?
Is it any less ethical that a confident person is hired over a nervous person?
1. 90% of America is not cometent enough to realize it's bad to spend willy nilly on credit, and most would be in a very place if they went without one or two paychecks. How much do owe? How much do you make? What's the minimum ballences on your credit cards? What cards do you have? Do you have morgage? What's your anual income? Common, if you can tell the companies your applying at, may as well tell us.
And why do you think that is? Because there are very few up-front consequences to over-spending on credit. You think.. 'We need this for the family', 'It's a long term investment'. You think, 'I know we can't afford this appartment, but we just can't live in our old neighborhood'. It's the idea that the immediate crisis is more important than the long term situation.. The situation that you won't be able to dig yourself out of. Then, of course, there's the occasional bad fortune: Medical / loss of job. When you're living razor thin, it's hard to say they should have put away more for a bad day.
Only people that want to buy a house (and occasionally a car) are concerned about their credit history.. Most everyone else is willing to make a payment two or three months late because that helps them out in the short-run. Instead, people that are genuinely concerned about their credit history.
2. If they are perpetually unemployed because they have bad credit, then how will they find jobs to correct the situation.
Again, you're assuming that skillset is not part of the hiring process. A person that works hard will eventually develop noticeable and valueable skill-sets. There is always a job low enough in stature that they can be hired and build from... Only pride prevents one from taking such a lower level of work (unless of course the economy is doing very poorly). In the mean time, you are forced to rely on family friends or strangers to reduce your monthly expenses. Spending every penny of credit available to you during a time of unemployment is no more responsible than buying a big screen TV when you earn minimum wage.
Busiensses have a responsiblity to be good corporate citizens.
Tell that to the Ford company. They were practically the founders of the American Middle class by virtue of over-paying their workers.
I'm not aware of what kind of quality control systems they had at the time, but today they are in a very tight market losing money on every car they make for the US. Is it their responsibility to double their highest expense (labor costs) for public welfare to help rebuild the middle class? The unions already are crying about pay cuts and wage freezes. Isn't Ford scrambling like a chicken with it's head cut off trying to find better operations, human-resources and over-all efficiencies (because everyone else already has)??
We're talking businesses that are in razor-thin profit margins.. Many start ups never see a penny of profit because they are squashed by competition, or worse, incompetent internal controls (bad budgeting, bad hiring, etc). Is it their responsibility to volunteer greater public welfare?
Perhaps instead you are considering corporate america.. The fortune-500 companies as those to whom public welfare should reside. These are companies with multi-million dollar salaries for the upper eschelon - to which unions constantly balk. While this may be a reasonable concern, I don't tend to like the employer / employee mentality that exists in such corporate environments, so I'm not terribly interested in that discussion. Decentralized franchises or small-to-medium-scale companies are more attrictive for me as the basis of the middle class worker.
First, I'm not advocating credit checks. I'm saying that the arguments against it are not convincing.
Why allow a criminal back ground? Why allow a drug test?
They are allowed because they've historically been able to get away with it, and it's a valueable tool.. The business wants to have more information in it's decision making process, whereas the general citizen wants more privacy. So to say that you 'just' want your privacy isn't a valid argument... People talking about you at the water cooler would imply that they are not keeping such background checks in privacy, and I would promote suing their asses back into the stone age. Same with medical records (which ARE already given up to join certain types of medical insurance plans promoted by a company).
It's supply and demand.. If the company can get away with it without a law suite, then they will.. Companies that profit better by doing so will beat out companies that don't.
The only way you're going to have successful law suites against such practices is if you can show that it does you harm.
If there are 50 applicants for a job, and you have a very low credit score and you didn't get the job - it's going to be hard to prove that you were the best person for that job and it was only your score that kept you out of the position. If you were argueably a better applicant than someone else with a higher credit score, then that might fly.. Except we already promote things like affirmative action (which I support), so the best skilled for a job is not always what is most desired for a job.
Again, I'm not saying this is moral, or it should be universally accepted.. I'm trying to put this into perspective.
That is, unless "growing up with a silver spoon and parents who bail you out of every financial misstep" is a critical element in hiring.
I'm sorry, but my parents didn't have a silver spoon.. In fact, they survive on $20,000 / year. Yet, I have a near perfect credit score. And I did that on an average annual salary of 20,000 for 10 years.
Why? Well, I can't say with certainty.. But my guess would be that I didn't let myself get overwhelmed.. During collage I would get as far as $15,000 of rolling credit card debt.. But I did this through the use of 0% offers.. Getting something like a dozen cards, but ALWAY making high/high payments on exactly one card with non-zero interest.
I did this knowing that eventually I would have a higher paying job (and the banks knew this).. Unfortunately trying to balance work and school (and a social life), I took twice as long as my original plan.. So my debt continued to grow and the 0% interest cards ran out... So I consolidated onto a single medium-rate high-credit card, and continued to make high payments on it (by this time, I had enough credit history that a single card would have enough credit to do this).
And finally I graduated and got a decent job.. Paid down the cards, and in less than a year, bought a house in this over-bloated market, because my credit score was so f*ing high.
I managed my expenditures and liabilities. I didn't purchase beyond my means.. I had student loans and car loans out the ass, but these are things a bank assumes are going to be there. What they don't assume will be there is a finite amount of credit at high interest, a lower-than-sustainable steady-state job situation and a worsening purchasing power. If this is your situation.. Get rid of the car and take public transportation (saves thousands / year). Get rid of HBO and develop more community ties so you can have communal parties (perhaps with friends that do have HBO). Stop going out to eat. Stop buying junk food at top dollar, and instead eat oat meal, pasta and wait for meat sales at the local market. I lived this way off-and-on for 20 years (because I was under my parents' wing through collage).
The point is that, no matter what your station in life is, there IS a way of surviving responsibly. The problem is that most people don't accept their station in life and try to live beyond their means.. This ALWAYS catches up with them.. And the credit history is a metric of this.
As an employer, aren't you very much interested in your employee's ability to manage their own life so that they can function properly in your organization?
This isn't to say that there aren't heart-throbbing stories of tragedy.. But here I'm refuting the silver-spoon statement which I find offensive.
We don't need credit checks for jack squat. We need criminal state & FBI background checks and that's it.
I find your argument dismissive and biased. While I can't definitively promote credit-check based employee selection, your argument provides almost no argument against the option.
Consider the job of a successful interviewer. You first wish to weed out criminals, illegals, and if you can, drug addicts who are likely to go into rehab, or become less effective of an employee. While you can not discriminate, it is your fault if the company goes under because it's run by a large enough percentage of dead-beats. You have to determine if an otherwise apparent dead-beat is honestly making recovery strides and thus is worth the risk. Just like a bank has to determine if you will likely default when they give you a car loan. The difference is that a bank can charge a higher interest rate to mitagate the risk.. An interviewer does not have continuous flexibility in what position they can put you in (especially if the interview is for a specific job).
There is adverse selection when it comes to the interviewing process.. The prospective employee is at their best at the interview.. They are the best dressed, the best attention-span, the best attitude.. There is a sense of fear in most subjects. The resume is potentially padded with semi-truths.. The references may not be who they are declared to be (a super-visor may actually be a co-worker). Former employers are not allowed (by law) to hurt the former employee's opportunities for new work, so they can't just say that the employee was a dead-beat, never showed up to work, had a bad attitude, was disruptive of other worker's productivity, was slow to train and incompentent. So as an interviewer you have to expect a certain degree of superficial gloss.
So the CV, the references, the criminal back-ground check are the current tools. But there is a science that works against the interviewer (much like the political process which convolutes the voters decision making). It often comes down to presence and personality.. Did the interviewer like you. Which I think is a bull shit reason to get hired (unless that's part of the job description).
As an interviewer, knowing that the particular position I'm looking to fill has a high degree of gloss and few differentiating metrics, I would be starved to find new methologies. MicroSoft and other's utilized a type of IQ test. But do you really need high IQ people flipping burgers? But we don't chide at the IQ test because of our self sense of vanity - sure we'd like everybody to be smarter.
Yet somehow your credit history - something you DID have a chance to affect is somehow detestable?
Perhaps I could see anger over your medical history being a deciding factor (ops, you're going to cost us a lot in heart related problems, so we won't hire you). Mainly because you had no way of affecting this (except perhaps diet and excercize).
So lets say that your credit history became a deciding factor between you and one other person (anything less is too indeterministic to claim discrimination against). If you knew that your credit history was a determining factor (and you would have to give permission to do such a thing), then you would know the major obsticles in your past, and you could outline them in the interview process.
If there was a bankruptsy because your bitch ex wife emptied your bank account, ran your credit cards to full, and took you for half of what was left, then say so in the interview. If the report can show this as a singularity, then you should be fine.
But most likely, you were careless more than a few times and didn't make a payment on time. Perhaps you're an obstinant dick-head and decided that the most appropriate way to contest a credit charge was to never pay that credit card again. While you may feel justified, banks don't.. And as an interviewer, would I feel that you'd be likely to "dick us over" as well? I regularly see a
Most SMP code is tested on CPUs of equal clock speeds
You're kidding right? I can't imagine any software which depends on the timing of coperative CPUs.. MPI and general divide-and-qonquer work-clusters could care less about the performance level of peer threads/co-processes. Hell process interrupts due to pre-emptive multi-tasking is enough to guarantee lack of symmetry.
Now perhaps you're referring to scheduling problems in the kernel.. I'm sure that AMD would be generous enough to provide kernel patches as are necessary.
I disagree.. I survived almost my entire college career without the need for power point (graduated last year). In fact, I was always lothe to see the occasional business student who gave a "flashy" presentation in an economics class or whatever that wasted the audiences time on freak animation gone awrye.
The best presentations I've ever seen in the lecture halls were verbal with maybe an occasional graphic (NO text). The point of a presentation is to present with your person, not with a story-board. If the presentation could sell your point, then why bother showing up?
But if that's the case, then how is powerpoint better than 20 years ago with white cardboard with picture cut-outs? If you're in a lecture hall with 200 people, then powerpoint projects better onto a larger screen.. But I'm not aware of many classes of 200 people that had class-presentation day.
The biggest fallacy of powerpoint presentations is that people take the 3x5 cards and show them to people... They then read off of the powerpoint screen to make their verbal case.. But the audience is then distracted from the speaker because they are forced to read the exact notes that the presenter is about to elaborate on.
And to echo other posters' comments.. When you're browsing the web, are you excited or dismayed when a web site exclusively publishes a power-point presentation (assuming you even have a windows plugin that can read the link). In other words, is powerpoint more or less expressive than other media? And thus is it a boone or bane to your business skills? (hint, the fact that lay CEOs and vice presidents use them isn't a formal proof).