I'm definitely a night coder. The phone's not ringing, there's no temptation to go outside and play in the sun. My wife's asleep, and that problem I've been thinking about all day is just shouting an answer at me. If I start coding at midnight, I can start checking off milestones at 4am, and then they start dropping off at 4am.
I can't wait until I can start doing that again, but with the recent birth of my son, I sleep any time I possibly can. If I plan to code from midnight to 4am, he'll definitely be needing my attention from 8pm to midnight, and 4am to 6am, when I have to start getting ready to head into the office.
Though I have to say I'm proud of having completed a pet project--moving my AAACounters.com web site from a LAMP-based system to Google's Python/BigTable-based AppEngine--in the occasional quiet hours in the first few days after his birth, when I did not need to go into the office. Feed him, migrate the image database, change him, translate the counter mechanism from Perl to Python, swaddle him, debug-debug-debug, put him to sleep, migrate the counter value database and move the domain. It was pretty sweet.
Actually, the GP poster has a point. It's not pretty, but there are a lot of people out there who see compromise as weakness. If you look at recent history of the Basque separatist movement, for example, as soon as there was some level of conciliation, the level of violence skyrocketed.
Part of it may also be that people who have lived for so long fighting a particular cause end up being more attached to the fight than the cause itself, and as soon as it looks like their way of life is threatened, they try to do things which encourage the fight to continue.
In this case, however, I feel it's a much baser motivation. Like a shark smelling blood, this guy decided he could have a little PR feeding frenzy to fuel his gubernatorial run. Silly AG, don't you know that a well-educated populace would never fall for such a thing?
I think you have it backwards, don't you? Common carriers, IIRC, need not and in fact can not monitor communications. If they were to, they'd lose their CC status.
...and potentially, in some states, "Internet stalking".
I agree there's a problem on Yahoo's side here, but I'm not sure of the best solution. That being said, if she had the right resources (money, a good lawyer who didn't need a deep-pockets defendant to take the case), she could have laid the smack-down on her ex, who--if he knew what was good for him--would have taken down the post immediately. In the end, she can probably take him for everything he's got, but because that probably isn't much, her lawyer is going to focus on Yahoo, for better or worse.
The other thing to consider, as well, is the question of where that 65% number comes from. Perhaps if there were fewer white people who were racists--as well as people of other backgrounds--maybe the margin of victory would have been even greater, perhaps even similar to what it was among AfAm voters.
I think (note: opinion alert!) it's probably fair to assume that the percentage of non-AfAm voters who voted for McCain SOLELY because of his racial background is roughly equal to the percentage of AfAm voters who voted for Obama SOLELY because of his.
Absolutely correct. And let's not forget the huge number of African-Americans who supported Hillary. The nomination controversy (remember Michigan and Florida?) caused this to be of not-insubstantial concern to the Obama campaign.
On the FB "Five People I'd Like to Punch in the Face" quiz, I listed GWB, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rice. If I get waterboarded because of that, my only regret will be that it didn't allow six so I could put in Rove.
Your post makes me wonder why Google hasn't gotten some sort of bulk reseller license for Lexis Nexis. It seems like if you could purchase one-off batch requests (i.e. execute them overnight when the cost is lower) using Google Check-Out, it could be a boon for Google and L/N.
I disagree. They're grabbing little enough data that it will--theoretically--allow people only to go to the sites that will really be helpful for them. Removing wasted time from the equation will be a positive net gain for users and webmasters alike. In an extreme example, if this separates out spammers with no-content-all-ads sites from sites that really provide a useful service, then it's good for everyone.
It may indeed hurt the people who run sites that are not in the top few sites in a crowded niche, but overall, I think a core snippet will help the best-run sites, not hurt them, in most cases.
I don't know why they force you to agree to it. Unless there's some sort of union agreement or tenure issue, most people are at-will employees, at least in the US, and can be fired at any time for any reason.
Maybe the issue is firing for cause, which allows companies to get out of their obligation to pay unemployment, as I understand it, but if it's just a matter of separating the wheat and the chaff, they don't need an agreement to do this.
It goes like this: "Hey, look, this employee clearly isn't happy, and instead of dealing with their manager or colleagues, they're airing their dirty laundry to the world. This isn't the kind of person we want to trust with our trade secrets. G'bye!"
A better company would have identified the problems sooner by using good performance management methodologies which would encourage open and honest communication among the ranks, but many companies can't be bothered. There's a growing sector of the talent management software market that deals with this because some companies do realize that they can save a lot of cutter by keeping their good employees happy and not resorting to these sorts of punitive measures.
I don't know what the big deal is with these adblock/noscript systems. Sites that offer a service for free, it seems to me, should be allowed to show ads, and if I'm using those services, I should allow them to display on my screen. Occasionally--very rarely--I'm intrigued enough to click.
If I don't want ads, I should be given an option to pay for the service and get an ad-free version.
If I go to a site and it's just plastered in ads, I typically just don't go back there.
I'm certainly not holier than anyone, but I figure a site like/. provides a pretty worthwhile service--even if it's only entertainment--and while I don't really feel the urge to be a paying subscriber, I don't feel such great vitriol towards the ads that I need to block them.
For people who use these plug-ins, do you ever whitelist ads for sites you use a lot for free, or do you block everything? If the latter, can you give me the dime tour of your justification for doing so? I'm not trying to start a flame-war; I'm really trying to understand the motivation.
The purpose of these stories is to warn people to stay away from Apple, because Apple does not have your best interests in mind, only its bottom line.
Or another way to put it might be that they are not trying to be everything to everyone, and while we do not necessarily know all the reasons for all of their decisions, anyone who is going to make a significant purchase ($200+ dollars plus ongoing fees) should have this information in order to make an informed decision.
If you're going to "warn people" to stay away from Apple because they're interested in their bottom line, you're going to have to warn people to stay away from pretty much all corporations. Of course, that means not having any sort of computing device...
The officers you're tailing might not be too impressed if they notice you following. But people do indeed do that; you ever hear of Copwatch?
You do make a good point, although I think the logic is dubious, as using a GPS system makes it very easy to track a lot more people simultaneously than it is to physically tail them. And it's the wholesale warrantless surveillance that's difficult for most people to accept.
Me, I think that anything that would be considered stalking if a non-cop does it should be regulated by fourth amendment rules.
Failures? Because *you* don't have an account? Google Voice is awesome; I use it every day! Considering the fact that it works as advertised, I wouldn't call it a failure just because they haven't rolled out to everyone in the world.
Don't confuse your disappointment and/or frustration with someone else's failure.
Burger King doesn't get into block wars with McDonald's just because they opened up a new restaurant right across the street.
Funny you should bring up that example. They may not get into block wars, but there have been legal battles. My understanding is that McDonald's spends millions of dollars evaluating neighborhoods--what other businesses are there, what's traffic and parking like--and have made a real science of finding new locations. BK has a similar strategy: they wait until McD's opens up a restaurant and open up one of theirs a block or so away.
McD's has apparently tried to stop this coat-tail strategy, but unfortunately for them, there's nothing they can do about it, short of not doing the research and/or not opening up any new locations.
I think your method of calculating real cost makes more sense than the GP post. I'm still more for just counting that monthly payment as money spent, but if you must depreciate value over the life of the car rather than over life of the payment, your way is better than a blanket "$5000/year".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm definitely a night coder. The phone's not ringing, there's no temptation to go outside and play in the sun. My wife's asleep, and that problem I've been thinking about all day is just shouting an answer at me. If I start coding at midnight, I can start checking off milestones at 4am, and then they start dropping off at 4am.
I can't wait until I can start doing that again, but with the recent birth of my son, I sleep any time I possibly can. If I plan to code from midnight to 4am, he'll definitely be needing my attention from 8pm to midnight, and 4am to 6am, when I have to start getting ready to head into the office.
Though I have to say I'm proud of having completed a pet project--moving my AAACounters.com web site from a LAMP-based system to Google's Python/BigTable-based AppEngine--in the occasional quiet hours in the first few days after his birth, when I did not need to go into the office. Feed him, migrate the image database, change him, translate the counter mechanism from Perl to Python, swaddle him, debug-debug-debug, put him to sleep, migrate the counter value database and move the domain. It was pretty sweet.
Actually, the GP poster has a point. It's not pretty, but there are a lot of people out there who see compromise as weakness. If you look at recent history of the Basque separatist movement, for example, as soon as there was some level of conciliation, the level of violence skyrocketed.
Part of it may also be that people who have lived for so long fighting a particular cause end up being more attached to the fight than the cause itself, and as soon as it looks like their way of life is threatened, they try to do things which encourage the fight to continue.
In this case, however, I feel it's a much baser motivation. Like a shark smelling blood, this guy decided he could have a little PR feeding frenzy to fuel his gubernatorial run. Silly AG, don't you know that a well-educated populace would never fall for such a thing?
Governor's Manson? Is that any relation to Charle's Manson?
I think you have it backwards, don't you? Common carriers, IIRC, need not and in fact can not monitor communications. If they were to, they'd lose their CC status.
RI/MPAA
I think the clearest way to abbreviate this combination would be [RI|MP]AA, although one could argue for ??AA or **AA as well.
...and potentially, in some states, "Internet stalking".
I agree there's a problem on Yahoo's side here, but I'm not sure of the best solution. That being said, if she had the right resources (money, a good lawyer who didn't need a deep-pockets defendant to take the case), she could have laid the smack-down on her ex, who--if he knew what was good for him--would have taken down the post immediately. In the end, she can probably take him for everything he's got, but because that probably isn't much, her lawyer is going to focus on Yahoo, for better or worse.
The other thing to consider, as well, is the question of where that 65% number comes from. Perhaps if there were fewer white people who were racists--as well as people of other backgrounds--maybe the margin of victory would have been even greater, perhaps even similar to what it was among AfAm voters.
I think (note: opinion alert!) it's probably fair to assume that the percentage of non-AfAm voters who voted for McCain SOLELY because of his racial background is roughly equal to the percentage of AfAm voters who voted for Obama SOLELY because of his.
Absolutely correct. And let's not forget the huge number of African-Americans who supported Hillary. The nomination controversy (remember Michigan and Florida?) caused this to be of not-insubstantial concern to the Obama campaign.
I could gopher that!
On the FB "Five People I'd Like to Punch in the Face" quiz, I listed GWB, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rice. If I get waterboarded because of that, my only regret will be that it didn't allow six so I could put in Rove.
I always knew Clippy was out-of-this-world!
Your post makes me wonder why Google hasn't gotten some sort of bulk reseller license for Lexis Nexis. It seems like if you could purchase one-off batch requests (i.e. execute them overnight when the cost is lower) using Google Check-Out, it could be a boon for Google and L/N.
I disagree. They're grabbing little enough data that it will--theoretically--allow people only to go to the sites that will really be helpful for them. Removing wasted time from the equation will be a positive net gain for users and webmasters alike. In an extreme example, if this separates out spammers with no-content-all-ads sites from sites that really provide a useful service, then it's good for everyone.
It may indeed hurt the people who run sites that are not in the top few sites in a crowded niche, but overall, I think a core snippet will help the best-run sites, not hurt them, in most cases.
I don't know why they force you to agree to it. Unless there's some sort of union agreement or tenure issue, most people are at-will employees, at least in the US, and can be fired at any time for any reason.
Maybe the issue is firing for cause, which allows companies to get out of their obligation to pay unemployment, as I understand it, but if it's just a matter of separating the wheat and the chaff, they don't need an agreement to do this.
It goes like this: "Hey, look, this employee clearly isn't happy, and instead of dealing with their manager or colleagues, they're airing their dirty laundry to the world. This isn't the kind of person we want to trust with our trade secrets. G'bye!"
A better company would have identified the problems sooner by using good performance management methodologies which would encourage open and honest communication among the ranks, but many companies can't be bothered. There's a growing sector of the talent management software market that deals with this because some companies do realize that they can save a lot of cutter by keeping their good employees happy and not resorting to these sorts of punitive measures.
This reminds me of this 4/1 joke about the Guardian converting its 188-year-old archive of news articles to a Twitter feed.
I don't know what the big deal is with these adblock/noscript systems. Sites that offer a service for free, it seems to me, should be allowed to show ads, and if I'm using those services, I should allow them to display on my screen. Occasionally--very rarely--I'm intrigued enough to click.
/. provides a pretty worthwhile service--even if it's only entertainment--and while I don't really feel the urge to be a paying subscriber, I don't feel such great vitriol towards the ads that I need to block them.
If I don't want ads, I should be given an option to pay for the service and get an ad-free version.
If I go to a site and it's just plastered in ads, I typically just don't go back there.
I'm certainly not holier than anyone, but I figure a site like
For people who use these plug-ins, do you ever whitelist ads for sites you use a lot for free, or do you block everything? If the latter, can you give me the dime tour of your justification for doing so? I'm not trying to start a flame-war; I'm really trying to understand the motivation.
The purpose of these stories is to warn people to stay away from Apple, because Apple does not have your best interests in mind, only its bottom line.
Or another way to put it might be that they are not trying to be everything to everyone, and while we do not necessarily know all the reasons for all of their decisions, anyone who is going to make a significant purchase ($200+ dollars plus ongoing fees) should have this information in order to make an informed decision.
If you're going to "warn people" to stay away from Apple because they're interested in their bottom line, you're going to have to warn people to stay away from pretty much all corporations. Of course, that means not having any sort of computing device...
The officers you're tailing might not be too impressed if they notice you following. But people do indeed do that; you ever hear of Copwatch?
You do make a good point, although I think the logic is dubious, as using a GPS system makes it very easy to track a lot more people simultaneously than it is to physically tail them. And it's the wholesale warrantless surveillance that's difficult for most people to accept.
Me, I think that anything that would be considered stalking if a non-cop does it should be regulated by fourth amendment rules.
Failures? Because *you* don't have an account? Google Voice is awesome; I use it every day! Considering the fact that it works as advertised, I wouldn't call it a failure just because they haven't rolled out to everyone in the world.
Don't confuse your disappointment and/or frustration with someone else's failure.
I love that Simpsons reference. Thanks for making me laugh.
Burger King doesn't get into block wars with McDonald's just because they opened up a new restaurant right across the street.
Funny you should bring up that example. They may not get into block wars, but there have been legal battles. My understanding is that McDonald's spends millions of dollars evaluating neighborhoods--what other businesses are there, what's traffic and parking like--and have made a real science of finding new locations. BK has a similar strategy: they wait until McD's opens up a restaurant and open up one of theirs a block or so away.
McD's has apparently tried to stop this coat-tail strategy, but unfortunately for them, there's nothing they can do about it, short of not doing the research and/or not opening up any new locations.
Darn you, posting your reply while I was writing mine! GMTA!
Don't forget the amount you're saving by not having to buy a gym membership.
I think your method of calculating real cost makes more sense than the GP post. I'm still more for just counting that monthly payment as money spent, but if you must depreciate value over the life of the car rather than over life of the payment, your way is better than a blanket "$5000/year".