Dropping two atomic weapons on Japan brought the war to an abrupt end and probably saved countless lives.
That the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was the factor that brought the war to its end is debatable.
Stalin had an agreement with the US that the USSR would engage with Japan 3 months after the defeat of the Germans. V-E day to the Soviets was May 9, 1945. 3 months after that was August 9, and on that day the Soviets began their invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria. (It also happened to be the day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.) Japan was fighting a losing war against the US, and while I'm sure they didn't want any more atomic bombs dropped on them, they _certainly_ didn't want to fight both the US and the USSR. The USSR was as uncaring about casualties as the Japanese were, and they were holding a grudge from the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905 in the war in the Russian Far East. The Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945.
Seriously, the reason why there is no "IronPerl" is that no one with the capability to do the port of Perl 5 to.NET has had the motivation to do so. As was previously commented upon, the bar to do this kind of work is, unfortunately, higher with Perl than with other languages in its class (e.g. Ruby, Python) due to the evolutionary creation & implementation of the Perl 5 language. Python has a language spec off of which implementations can be built in a clean-room fashion. Perl has a language implementation which is its own spec. This leads to significant gnarly-ness when it comes to doing subsequent implementation, be they on.NET, the JVM or on a Lisp Machine. Still, it's not impossible. If someone made a reasonable effort at it then it could happen. (And Microsoft could well pick up the tab to someone who showed sufficient talent and initiative too. The IronRuby implementation is the product of one guy who started it as a personal project. And then Microsoft noticed and hired him to keep doing what he was doing.)
Perl 6 addresses this problem in that Perl 6 is a spec. (Well, it's getting really damn close to being a completed spec.) There are no completed implementations of it but several are in the works. Pugs is a Haskell implementation effort. Rakudo is one built on the Parrot VM. There's the SMOP implementation effort too. Larry Wall is working on one that will use the Perl 5 VM to implement Perl 6. I'm sure we'll have implementation teams working on JVM and.NET implementations soon enough too.
If all you want to do is Perl 5 on Windows there are a few ports -- see ActivePerl and IndigoPerl.
To quote me: "A segment of Java programmers seem to be embracing Ruby (and Rails) in particular. A new dynamic language, Groovy, is capitalizing on this trend by providing a dynamic language on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that incorporates elements of both Java and Ruby."
I admit it's not much, but you're the one who used the categorical.
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of insurance companies could make it difficult for a person with a genetic predisposition to disease to obtain health or life insurance.
What you're describing here is the concept of adverse selection. It's an endemic problem in the insurance industry, but more generally is a phenominon of economics in the realm of information asymmetries.
This kind of genome sequencing technology would bring it into the foreground so that the whole American population would suddenly talk about and understand the concept, and perhaps do something about it, in the same way that high interest rates in the early 1980s had everyone suddenly talking about "time value of money" and "cap rates", terms previously only used and understood by economists and MBAs. (Of course, people seem to have forgotten these things since.)
I mention this because America currently practices a kind of strategy against adverse selection in health care by linking health care provisioning to employment through employer-provided health insurance. I'm not sure if this is why the system was set up initially (probably not, as economists didn't have a good theory regarding adverse selection until the 1970s) but the idea here is that if you're healthy enough to be employable, then you're probably healthy enough to be worth insuring from the perspective of the insurance companies. By being employed, you help level the information assymetry that you hold in your advantage over the insurers.
Of course, if everyone (insurers and would-be subscribers to insurance) held perfect knowledge, the whole industry would collapse. Insurers wouldn't bother insuring people who needed it, and the people who were super-healthy wouldn't bother buying insurance.
Other countries (e.g. Canada) solve this problem by making health care universal. It's quite egalitarian, which some people would consider a good thing. It's also very efficient, because now you don't have to put all kinds of resources into a system to check to see if people are good candidates for insurance. (You also don't have to have billing departments or big beefy accounting departments.)
If there's any kind of sanity in the US, this kind of technology will (finally) provide the political impetus for a real, substantial universal health care system there, too. Whether or not such a system develops can be used as a proxy to determine the hidden (or at least unobservable) information regarding the presense of sanity in the US.
People in the mid-1990s spoke of "overnight obsolescence", that Perl 6 would replace everything in a few weeks, and that you had better learn a new programming language every month. Over 10 years later, perl 6 is still in beta mode.
The Perl 6 effort was instantiated by Larry in July 2000. So, 5.5 years.
Perl 6 is not in "beta mode". It's not even really in alpha. (Although the Pugs project could be thought of as a pre-alpha.) The language is still being designed.
And this posting is +5 informative? WTF. This posting doesn't have a single fact correct. However, I agree with the implication that one needed worry about overnight obsolescence. When Perl 6 is released it won't cause Perl 5 to disappear from the face of the earth. The code will still exist, and the skills will be just as valuable for years to come.
Cheers,
Richard
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
How do you write nested lists such as [[1,2],[3,4],5,[6,7,8]]?
If that's how you did it then you most certainly wouldn't have experienced the list flattening you encountered. You would have a reference to a list, containing 4 elements, the one with index 2 (3rd offset) being a scalar value and the others themselves being references to lists.
In Python, it's trivial (that's how you'd write it), but in perl, nobody I talked to could give me an answer.
That's how you'd write it in Perl, too. (Or perhaps you would have the outermost brackets being round () ones, depending on your needs.)
As for noone being able to give you an answer, you can hardly blame Perl for your friends not knowing Perl. Or for your lack of ability to research (as another poster pointed out).
I'm not entirely without sympathy, however. I remember list flattening taking me an hour or two to figure out, many moons ago. And I almost gave up Perl while attempting to write my first Perl program. In 15 minutes I had written 50 lines of Perl that accomplished it would have taken me 2 days and nearly 1000 LoC to write in C. But it wouldn't compile. After 45 minutes of sheer frustration I finally tweaked in that "elseif" in Perl is spelled "elsif".
I don't think that your story demonstrates that Python is superior to Perl, though, or that my reply demonstrates that Perl is superior to Python. (I've written a bit of Python; I think it's more or less Perl but with funny indentation, and without variable sigils.) I think what it shows is how crucial it is for a person to have a positive experience with a language quickly, lest they ditch it and try something else. (I.e. before they develop a "sunk cost" in their earlier learning.) I imagine you've encountered problems with Python since then that have required, oh, say 1/2 an hour of research to work through. Given that you already have a lot invested in the language, you're willing to do that 1/2 hour of research.
Was one of them YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto? I was the organizer, so if so I just wanted to say hi and thanks for coming.:-) It was the greatest pleasure being able to give people a fun conference to be at. Even if not, I know what you mean -- being a long-time YAPC conference goer was what made me want to be a conference organizer. It's a wonderful community with lots of accepting, helpful and nice people at all levels.
The same Canada that just voted their Congress out of office?
If it was merely the terminology that you got wrong here then it would be somewhat forgivable (i.e. calling 'parliament' 'congress', although in truth they aren't entirely isomorphic). But you're also completely off-base on the basic concepts.
And even if you weren't so obviously and entirely wrong, what does this have to do with health care systems, which is what the rest of your posting is about? Governments get turfed from office in all kinds of countries for all kinds of reasons all the time. It's not always about health care, and it's not like the hospitals have closed while we're waiting for the new election.
The same Canada that almost killed a friend of mine whose plane was grounded on 9/11, got a stomach flu and almost died in a Canadian hospital while he waited THREE DAYS for a doctor to see him?
This so doesn't track with any experience I've ever had or anyone else I know has ever had. For some reason, I'm more inclined to think that you're trolling than to give you the benefit of the doubt.
The same Canada where people are on waiting lists for years for a basic MRI that I can drive down the street here in the States and get in a mere hours?
There are some waiting lists for some things. My wife waited 10 months for some elective, non-crucial foot surgery. (Bunyon stuff.)
A few months ago my cousin, on the other hand, went into a hospital in a rural area on Saturday morning with a severe headache and blurred vision. That afternoon she was in a downtown Toronto hospital where she received 3 MRIs in quick succession. Her brain tumour removal surgery was done 4 days later. She's now just completing her first course of chemo and radiation therapy.
A few years ago my father had a heart attack. His double-bypass was done 4 days later, and would have been done sooner if it wasn't for that they initially put him on some blood thinners that they had to let get out of his system. After 3 days he had exploratory surgery so that they could find out what was wrong. That was done in the morning -- he was offered to have the bypass done that afternoon. (He decided to wait until the next day for unrelated reasons.)
There is more money in the US healthcare system. I think that per capita the US spends two times as much as Canada does, but it's not spent efficiently. (My wife recently did an inspection of a health complex in Atlanta, and she told me she was amazed at how much money was spent on the office space. All marble and art-work and indoor fountains.) Whatever waiting lists (and other issues) there are here could be completely dispelled if we went up to 2/3 the US level, IIRC.
What is *needed* is a start-up company to get capital venture funding and start a hardware store to compete with the likes of Dell... but to ONLY use Open-Source, and spend their captial funding on ADVERTISEMENT of the advantages of FOSS.
This was VA Linux's business model rather a long time ago. (They might have been VA Research at the time. I forget the relative time line.) They got stomped like narcs at a biker rally.
Seeing as how we do not behave exactly like every other animal, would there be a way that we could have come from Mars?
Perhaps Adam and Eve were real and the first couple to come.
We behave a lot more like the animals on Earth than we behave like all the animals we know of on Mars. (I.e. none)
Besides, what's with this "exactly" requirement anyhow? No two animals (or people, if you think we mustn't be counted as animals) behave exactly like each other either. Maybe we all come from different planets! There's a planet somewhere that's full of exact copies of me!
(And there's a world filled with nothing but shrimp. I grew tired of that world quickly.)
Or (like the other poster said), maybe we come from Pak. That's a hell of a lot more likely than that Adam and Eve came from Mars.
Relative to each other, I love chocolate:ice cream in the proportion 51:49
Does that mean I should only ever eat chocolate, because of the two it's the one I love more?
I think that the parent is suggesting you stay away from computers at home as a piece of advice -- use your home time to enjoy the thing you love in the.49 proportion.
I guess computers could be loved to the tune of 1, but that strikes me (and not a few others) as being pretty sad. Sure, everyone is allowed a few years of Larval Stage when they're younger, but hopefully by the time someone is in their late 20s they start to get an inkling that there's more to life than just X, no matter what X is.
I normally don't feed the trolls, but I'll make an exception this time.
The best thing that we can do is to convince that egomaniac, Larry Wall, to stop adding junk into Perl and bloating the language into something like PL/1.
You've obviously never met Larry Wall. You, sir, are no Larry Wall.
People love C and Perl 5.x for their simplicity.
People (well, some people) love C for its simplicity, and people (some people, maybe some overlap with the previous group, maybe not) love Perl 5... but I doubt for its simplicity. (Try to find an EBNF description of Perl 5. What's the construction count?)
Spector names a high figure; no one has ever yet written a check that big...They think it over. Then they say...What could you do with twice as much money?'"
In this situation, your natural feeling is to think that you're on top of the world and that everything is going to be hunkie-dorie from here on it. So you lead back in your chair, think about it, and 45 seconds later you give them an honest and reasonable answer. (After all, they're being reasonable, nice guys who just gave you a warm fuzzy, right?)
So then they give you 60% of the original amount of money discussed (after all, noone had ever cut a cheque that big before), and they hold you to delivering on the "2x as big a budget" pie-in-the-sky dreaming version. This, after all is how the state of the art is advanced -- stretch goals.
Yes, that's me. Do I know you / were you a classmate of mine? The 'main Lee' I remember from those days I mainly did appmath (computational simulations) courses with. I think he went to UW for his PhD.
As far as meetings go, well sure, meetings are to be abhorred by
any sensible person. That's also why in Universities (where you get
your fancy degrees) we teach people to break up in arbitrary small
groups and work on a project. The smart ones figure out pretty quick
that small group work sucks and determine to avoid such situations, or
make them as functional as possible.
Any kind of work can suck. Therefore, group project work can
suck. But it can also rock. While there are some random elements
nudging such work on the sucks/rocks continuum, I think the majority
of it is systematic. That is, it sucks or rocks in direct proportion
to your own actions within such groups.
Notice that I didn't say "in direct proportion to the actions of
all the people within such groups." You -- each and every individual
-- has the capability to turn pretty much any group into a functioning
group.
The fact of the matter is that most people are poor at interacting
in group work -- that is, maximizing their own potential within the
group, and maximizing the potential of the group.
Everyone pines to end up on the team in which, by luck, everyone
gets along well and works hard and competently and things just end up
going great. (I think this usually happens in the context of
self-selected groups with high barriers to entry; I'll give an example
of this that I've seen recently later.) These teams happen, but
rarely. You're a sucker to wait for such things to happen. Make the
team work.
To try to put this all in context, I'll provide a few examples
here that I've experienced in the realms of university, working life
and Open Source projects, and also tag on a few academic references at
the bottom.
My undergraduate degree was astronomy. (Undergraduate astronomy
is basically an amalgam of compsci, physics and applied maths.) Group
work was mandatory in that program simply because the problem sets
(with about 2 due a week) were far too big and difficult for any of us
to regularly be able to individually complete. So we did a lot of
group meetings to work out the problems. Sometimes they were
"sharing" meetings, where we'd each get a question or two on our own
and bring them all together in the end, hopefully with enough time
left over for each to present a mini-lecture on the thought processes
that led to the solution (without which you'd be pretty much toast
when the same kind of question appeared on an exam), but occasionally
a problem would be too difficult for any of us to solve individually
and we'd have to group-work a single problem together. (Or maybe get
it from the notes of someone a year or two ahead of us.:-) ) This
worked out pretty well, but this is probably an example of people who
are naturally hard working and intelligent self-selecting themselves
into the group. (You don't take undergrad astrononmy by accident,
after all.)
Fast forward 7 years... and now I'm in a top-tier MBA program.
The differences between the programs are enormous. There are 330
people in my year, not 8. People come from a wide variety of
backgrounds and there is a wide variety of skills, both kinds of skill
and amounts of skill. Group work is built into the program at a dozen
different levels rather than just being something that happens "by
accident." We don't have 4 years to get to know each other and learn
how to work with each other (and build up levels of trust and
game-theoretic dynamics): some groups are meant to last for several
months, others for several hours. And guess what -- they all worked
out great. Sure, there was an occasional slacker (be it for reasons
of disposition, or because they had a death in the family so they had
to run off for personal reasons, thus leaving the rest of us to pick
up their slack), but it didn't happen all that often and it was never
anything that the rest of us couldn't reasonably absorb. With pretty
much every group project my teams managed to find a way to make things
work ou
Don't feel badly. Women have had robotic replacements available to them for men for decades, and as far as I can tell, it's not like women date men less these days as a result. This only helps even things out.
Cheers,
Richard
(*sigh* I feel dirty for even participating in this thread/line-of-thought...)
I have a different association when I hear 'firecow'.
This is a story that my wife told me that I think is fairly funny. My wife's parents are from Hong Kong and she mostly speaks Cantonese Chinese with them when she's at home, though my wife was born and raised in Toronto and English is her first language.
One day, one of my wife's parents (I forget which) while speaking Cantonese asked her to go upstairs to get the firecow for the cell phone. My wife was completely baffled by this. So she talked it through with them and it turns out that the literal translation for "battery recharger" from Cantonese into English is -- firecow.
If we'd bombed Japan in the normal way there would have been many more casualties.
If? The United States "conventionally" bombed Japan mercilessly during WW2. Read up on the bio of Curtis LeMay to get a sense of what that was all about. (He was the Strategic Air Command General who ordered and executed the firebombing of Tokyo, which destroyed about half of Tokyo, a city the size of New York, in one night.)
Steve Mann gave a closing keynote on this topic ('souveillance') and a few related ones at a conference in Toronto last year. Check out what he has to say about it first-hand:
Thanks... between this explanation and another reply posting, I understand your point a lot better.
I'm still trying to figure out how this is a bad deal in terms of who pays what to whom. The people who watch 1 hour of commercials in return for 4 hours of programming at least find this to be an acceptable trade. The people who pay broadcasters $1.20 per viewer-hour find this acceptable too. Whatever the differential is, this is the profit of the broadcasters. And it's not like they exerted no effort / spent no money to occupy this middleman position. It seems like a pretty standard business arrangement to me.
This is not to suggest that I'm a fan of the great gratis spectrum giveaway and the legal apparatus that perpetuates it in an age when it no longer makes any sense to, from a public interest point of view.
Obviously we're now in an age where disintermediation of the broadcasting middleman is practical and sensical to perform. It should be done. Production facilities are likely to get a better deal, and viewers (who now rightfully would be the paying consumers of the production) will certainly get more of what they want and at better prices, too. And I won't loose any more sleep for the passing of the broadcasting industry than I would for those who depend on another business model that fails in the face of technological innovation.
While your posting has given me a lot of insight into the economics of TV advertising that I didn't have before, there is something you wrote I have to take to task:
In other words, you get $1.20 worth of programming for watching an hour of advertising. $1.20 per hour is an illegal wage by a long margin in most places these days, and a terrible deal. It's no wonder we want to reject it.
Another way of looking at this is that I get several millions of dollars' worth per hour of advertising I watched. After all, it cost that much to make those 4 hours of TV.
TV productions, once made, are non-rivalrous. That is, your having a zero-marginal-cost copy of it doesn't diminish the value of my copy of it. If it cost $10 million to make, and you and I each get a copy, then we only have to spend $5 million apiece to get $10 million worth of TV. What it sounds like in your advertising model is that we've got 8 million people sharing the cost, each paying about $1.20 for $10 million worth of production. That's a pretty good deal. (A similar economics is in play with cars: the marginal cost of a car is $20,000, but in buying it you receive the benefits of $100,000,000s worth of R&D effort. Economies of scale make the world go 'round.)
Last autumn, I wanted to give Ubuntu a try. So I bought myself an external USB hard drive on which to install it. (No sense in messing up a known working current install on my internal hard drive.)
The install wasn't difficult... until the time came to write the grub record. It asked me if I wanted to write a grub record, and I said yes. Being one of those "easy installer", it didn't bother asking me any more questions after that. It simply over-wrote my existing grub record on my internal hard drive. Umm... thanks, guys.
I haven't given Ubuntu another try since then. I don't have time to risk on this kind of funny business.
Slashdot Mirror
That the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was the factor that brought the war to its end is debatable.
Stalin had an agreement with the US that the USSR would engage with Japan 3 months after the defeat of the Germans. V-E day to the Soviets was May 9, 1945. 3 months after that was August 9, and on that day the Soviets began their invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria. (It also happened to be the day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.) Japan was fighting a losing war against the US, and while I'm sure they didn't want any more atomic bombs dropped on them, they _certainly_ didn't want to fight both the US and the USSR. The USSR was as uncaring about casualties as the Japanese were, and they were holding a grudge from the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905 in the war in the Russian Far East. The Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945.
Cheers,
- Richard
I resemble that comment!
Seriously, the reason why there is no "IronPerl" is that no one with the capability to do the port of Perl 5 to .NET has had the motivation to do so. As was previously commented upon, the bar to do this kind of work is, unfortunately, higher with Perl than with other languages in its class (e.g. Ruby, Python) due to the evolutionary creation & implementation of the Perl 5 language. Python has a language spec off of which implementations can be built in a clean-room fashion. Perl has a language implementation which is its own spec. This leads to significant gnarly-ness when it comes to doing subsequent implementation, be they on .NET, the JVM or on a Lisp Machine. Still, it's not impossible. If someone made a reasonable effort at it then it could happen. (And Microsoft could well pick up the tab to someone who showed sufficient talent and initiative too. The IronRuby implementation is the product of one guy who started it as a personal project. And then Microsoft noticed and hired him to keep doing what he was doing.)
Perl 6 addresses this problem in that Perl 6 is a spec. (Well, it's getting really damn close to being a completed spec.) There are no completed implementations of it but several are in the works. Pugs is a Haskell implementation effort. Rakudo is one built on the Parrot VM. There's the SMOP implementation effort too. Larry Wall is working on one that will use the Perl 5 VM to implement Perl 6. I'm sure we'll have implementation teams working on JVM and .NET implementations soon enough too.
If all you want to do is Perl 5 on Windows there are a few ports -- see ActivePerl and IndigoPerl.
Cheers,
- Richard
Didn't appear _anywhere_ in the article?
To quote me: "A segment of Java programmers seem to be embracing Ruby (and Rails) in particular. A new dynamic language, Groovy, is capitalizing on this trend by providing a dynamic language on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that incorporates elements of both Java and Ruby."
I admit it's not much, but you're the one who used the categorical.
Cheers,
- Richard
Exactly how obvious should that be to the 95.4% of the people in the world who aren't American?
This kind of genome sequencing technology would bring it into the foreground so that the whole American population would suddenly talk about and understand the concept, and perhaps do something about it, in the same way that high interest rates in the early 1980s had everyone suddenly talking about "time value of money" and "cap rates", terms previously only used and understood by economists and MBAs. (Of course, people seem to have forgotten these things since.)
I mention this because America currently practices a kind of strategy against adverse selection in health care by linking health care provisioning to employment through employer-provided health insurance. I'm not sure if this is why the system was set up initially (probably not, as economists didn't have a good theory regarding adverse selection until the 1970s) but the idea here is that if you're healthy enough to be employable, then you're probably healthy enough to be worth insuring from the perspective of the insurance companies. By being employed, you help level the information assymetry that you hold in your advantage over the insurers.
Of course, if everyone (insurers and would-be subscribers to insurance) held perfect knowledge, the whole industry would collapse. Insurers wouldn't bother insuring people who needed it, and the people who were super-healthy wouldn't bother buying insurance.
Other countries (e.g. Canada) solve this problem by making health care universal. It's quite egalitarian, which some people would consider a good thing. It's also very efficient, because now you don't have to put all kinds of resources into a system to check to see if people are good candidates for insurance. (You also don't have to have billing departments or big beefy accounting departments.)
If there's any kind of sanity in the US, this kind of technology will (finally) provide the political impetus for a real, substantial universal health care system there, too. Whether or not such a system develops can be used as a proxy to determine the hidden (or at least unobservable) information regarding the presense of sanity in the US.
Cheers,
Richard
The Perl 6 effort was instantiated by Larry in July 2000. So, 5.5 years.
Perl 6 is not in "beta mode". It's not even really in alpha. (Although the Pugs project could be thought of as a pre-alpha.) The language is still being designed.
And this posting is +5 informative? WTF. This posting doesn't have a single fact correct. However, I agree with the implication that one needed worry about overnight obsolescence. When Perl 6 is released it won't cause Perl 5 to disappear from the face of the earth. The code will still exist, and the skills will be just as valuable for years to come.
Cheers,
Richard
If that's how you did it then you most certainly wouldn't have experienced the list flattening you encountered. You would have a reference to a list, containing 4 elements, the one with index 2 (3rd offset) being a scalar value and the others themselves being references to lists.
That's how you'd write it in Perl, too. (Or perhaps you would have the outermost brackets being round () ones, depending on your needs.)
As for noone being able to give you an answer, you can hardly blame Perl for your friends not knowing Perl. Or for your lack of ability to research (as another poster pointed out).
I'm not entirely without sympathy, however. I remember list flattening taking me an hour or two to figure out, many moons ago. And I almost gave up Perl while attempting to write my first Perl program. In 15 minutes I had written 50 lines of Perl that accomplished it would have taken me 2 days and nearly 1000 LoC to write in C. But it wouldn't compile. After 45 minutes of sheer frustration I finally tweaked in that "elseif" in Perl is spelled "elsif".
I don't think that your story demonstrates that Python is superior to Perl, though, or that my reply demonstrates that Perl is superior to Python. (I've written a bit of Python; I think it's more or less Perl but with funny indentation, and without variable sigils.) I think what it shows is how crucial it is for a person to have a positive experience with a language quickly, lest they ditch it and try something else. (I.e. before they develop a "sunk cost" in their earlier learning.) I imagine you've encountered problems with Python since then that have required, oh, say 1/2 an hour of research to work through. Given that you already have a lot invested in the language, you're willing to do that 1/2 hour of research.
Cheers,
Richard
Was one of them YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto? I was the organizer, so if so I just wanted to say hi and thanks for coming. :-) It was the greatest pleasure being able to give people a fun conference to be at. Even if not, I know what you mean -- being a long-time YAPC conference goer was what made me want to be a conference organizer. It's a wonderful community with lots of accepting, helpful and nice people at all levels.
Cheers,
Richard
If it was merely the terminology that you got wrong here then it would be somewhat forgivable (i.e. calling 'parliament' 'congress', although in truth they aren't entirely isomorphic). But you're also completely off-base on the basic concepts.
And even if you weren't so obviously and entirely wrong, what does this have to do with health care systems, which is what the rest of your posting is about? Governments get turfed from office in all kinds of countries for all kinds of reasons all the time. It's not always about health care, and it's not like the hospitals have closed while we're waiting for the new election.
This so doesn't track with any experience I've ever had or anyone else I know has ever had. For some reason, I'm more inclined to think that you're trolling than to give you the benefit of the doubt.
There are some waiting lists for some things. My wife waited 10 months for some elective, non-crucial foot surgery. (Bunyon stuff.)
A few months ago my cousin, on the other hand, went into a hospital in a rural area on Saturday morning with a severe headache and blurred vision. That afternoon she was in a downtown Toronto hospital where she received 3 MRIs in quick succession. Her brain tumour removal surgery was done 4 days later. She's now just completing her first course of chemo and radiation therapy.
A few years ago my father had a heart attack. His double-bypass was done 4 days later, and would have been done sooner if it wasn't for that they initially put him on some blood thinners that they had to let get out of his system. After 3 days he had exploratory surgery so that they could find out what was wrong. That was done in the morning -- he was offered to have the bypass done that afternoon. (He decided to wait until the next day for unrelated reasons.)
There is more money in the US healthcare system. I think that per capita the US spends two times as much as Canada does, but it's not spent efficiently. (My wife recently did an inspection of a health complex in Atlanta, and she told me she was amazed at how much money was spent on the office space. All marble and art-work and indoor fountains.) Whatever waiting lists (and other issues) there are here could be completely dispelled if we went up to 2/3 the US level, IIRC.
Cheers,
Richard
This was VA Linux's business model rather a long time ago. (They might have been VA Research at the time. I forget the relative time line.) They got stomped like narcs at a biker rally.
Cheers,
Richard
We behave a lot more like the animals on Earth than we behave like all the animals we know of on Mars. (I.e. none)
Besides, what's with this "exactly" requirement anyhow? No two animals (or people, if you think we mustn't be counted as animals) behave exactly like each other either. Maybe we all come from different planets! There's a planet somewhere that's full of exact copies of me!
(And there's a world filled with nothing but shrimp. I grew tired of that world quickly.)
Or (like the other poster said), maybe we come from Pak. That's a hell of a lot more likely than that Adam and Eve came from Mars.
I love chocolate.
.49 proportion.
I love ice cream.
Relative to each other, I love chocolate:ice cream in the proportion 51:49
Does that mean I should only ever eat chocolate, because of the two it's the one I love more?
I think that the parent is suggesting you stay away from computers at home as a piece of advice -- use your home time to enjoy the thing you love in the
I guess computers could be loved to the tune of 1, but that strikes me (and not a few others) as being pretty sad. Sure, everyone is allowed a few years of Larval Stage when they're younger, but hopefully by the time someone is in their late 20s they start to get an inkling that there's more to life than just X, no matter what X is.
Cheers,
Richard
You've obviously never met Larry Wall. You, sir, are no Larry Wall.
People (well, some people) love C for its simplicity, and people (some people, maybe some overlap with the previous group, maybe not) love Perl 5... but I doubt for its simplicity. (Try to find an EBNF description of Perl 5. What's the construction count?)- Richard
So then they give you 60% of the original amount of money discussed (after all, noone had ever cut a cheque that big before), and they hold you to delivering on the "2x as big a budget" pie-in-the-sky dreaming version. This, after all is how the state of the art is advanced -- stretch goals.
Cheers,
Richard
Hi, Lee.
Yes, that's me. Do I know you / were you a classmate of mine? The 'main Lee' I remember from those days I mainly did appmath (computational simulations) courses with. I think he went to UW for his PhD.
If you're interested in more of the 'YAPC story', I did an interview with Perl.com here: http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/05/12/rdice.html
Cheers,
Richard
Any kind of work can suck. Therefore, group project work can suck. But it can also rock. While there are some random elements nudging such work on the sucks/rocks continuum, I think the majority of it is systematic. That is, it sucks or rocks in direct proportion to your own actions within such groups.
Notice that I didn't say "in direct proportion to the actions of all the people within such groups." You -- each and every individual -- has the capability to turn pretty much any group into a functioning group.
The fact of the matter is that most people are poor at interacting in group work -- that is, maximizing their own potential within the group, and maximizing the potential of the group.
Everyone pines to end up on the team in which, by luck, everyone gets along well and works hard and competently and things just end up going great. (I think this usually happens in the context of self-selected groups with high barriers to entry; I'll give an example of this that I've seen recently later.) These teams happen, but rarely. You're a sucker to wait for such things to happen. Make the team work.
To try to put this all in context, I'll provide a few examples here that I've experienced in the realms of university, working life and Open Source projects, and also tag on a few academic references at the bottom.
My undergraduate degree was astronomy. (Undergraduate astronomy is basically an amalgam of compsci, physics and applied maths.) Group work was mandatory in that program simply because the problem sets (with about 2 due a week) were far too big and difficult for any of us to regularly be able to individually complete. So we did a lot of group meetings to work out the problems. Sometimes they were "sharing" meetings, where we'd each get a question or two on our own and bring them all together in the end, hopefully with enough time left over for each to present a mini-lecture on the thought processes that led to the solution (without which you'd be pretty much toast when the same kind of question appeared on an exam), but occasionally a problem would be too difficult for any of us to solve individually and we'd have to group-work a single problem together. (Or maybe get it from the notes of someone a year or two ahead of us. :-) ) This
worked out pretty well, but this is probably an example of people who
are naturally hard working and intelligent self-selecting themselves
into the group. (You don't take undergrad astrononmy by accident,
after all.)
Fast forward 7 years... and now I'm in a top-tier MBA program. The differences between the programs are enormous. There are 330 people in my year, not 8. People come from a wide variety of backgrounds and there is a wide variety of skills, both kinds of skill and amounts of skill. Group work is built into the program at a dozen different levels rather than just being something that happens "by accident." We don't have 4 years to get to know each other and learn how to work with each other (and build up levels of trust and game-theoretic dynamics): some groups are meant to last for several months, others for several hours. And guess what -- they all worked out great. Sure, there was an occasional slacker (be it for reasons of disposition, or because they had a death in the family so they had to run off for personal reasons, thus leaving the rest of us to pick up their slack), but it didn't happen all that often and it was never anything that the rest of us couldn't reasonably absorb. With pretty much every group project my teams managed to find a way to make things work ou
Cheers,
Richard
(*sigh* I feel dirty for even participating in this thread/line-of-thought...)
Groovy.
This is a story that my wife told me that I think is fairly funny. My wife's parents are from Hong Kong and she mostly speaks Cantonese Chinese with them when she's at home, though my wife was born and raised in Toronto and English is her first language.
One day, one of my wife's parents (I forget which) while speaking Cantonese asked her to go upstairs to get the firecow for the cell phone. My wife was completely baffled by this. So she talked it through with them and it turns out that the literal translation for "battery recharger" from Cantonese into English is -- firecow.
You can't make this stuff up.
Cheers,
Richard
If? The United States "conventionally" bombed Japan mercilessly during WW2. Read up on the bio of Curtis LeMay to get a sense of what that was all about. (He was the Strategic Air Command General who ordered and executed the firebombing of Tokyo, which destroyed about half of Tokyo, a city the size of New York, in one night.)
Cheers,
Richard
http://epresence.tv/mediaContent/website_archived. aspx?dir=Open~Source~and~Free~Software:~Concepts,~ Controversies~and~Solutions~(May~9-11,~2004)
Scroll to the bottom of the page to find his talk in the list.
Cheers,
Richard
Thanks... between this explanation and another reply posting, I understand your point a lot better.
I'm still trying to figure out how this is a bad deal in terms of who pays what to whom. The people who watch 1 hour of commercials in return for 4 hours of programming at least find this to be an acceptable trade. The people who pay broadcasters $1.20 per viewer-hour find this acceptable too. Whatever the differential is, this is the profit of the broadcasters. And it's not like they exerted no effort / spent no money to occupy this middleman position. It seems like a pretty standard business arrangement to me.
This is not to suggest that I'm a fan of the great gratis spectrum giveaway and the legal apparatus that perpetuates it in an age when it no longer makes any sense to, from a public interest point of view.
Obviously we're now in an age where disintermediation of the broadcasting middleman is practical and sensical to perform. It should be done. Production facilities are likely to get a better deal, and viewers (who now rightfully would be the paying consumers of the production) will certainly get more of what they want and at better prices, too. And I won't loose any more sleep for the passing of the broadcasting industry than I would for those who depend on another business model that fails in the face of technological innovation.
Cheers,
Richard
Another way of looking at this is that I get several millions of dollars' worth per hour of advertising I watched. After all, it cost that much to make those 4 hours of TV.
TV productions, once made, are non-rivalrous. That is, your having a zero-marginal-cost copy of it doesn't diminish the value of my copy of it. If it cost $10 million to make, and you and I each get a copy, then we only have to spend $5 million apiece to get $10 million worth of TV. What it sounds like in your advertising model is that we've got 8 million people sharing the cost, each paying about $1.20 for $10 million worth of production. That's a pretty good deal. (A similar economics is in play with cars: the marginal cost of a car is $20,000, but in buying it you receive the benefits of $100,000,000s worth of R&D effort. Economies of scale make the world go 'round.)
Cheers,
Richard
Here's to hoping.
Last autumn, I wanted to give Ubuntu a try. So I bought myself an external USB hard drive on which to install it. (No sense in messing up a known working current install on my internal hard drive.)
The install wasn't difficult... until the time came to write the grub record. It asked me if I wanted to write a grub record, and I said yes. Being one of those "easy installer", it didn't bother asking me any more questions after that. It simply over-wrote my existing grub record on my internal hard drive. Umm... thanks, guys.
I haven't given Ubuntu another try since then. I don't have time to risk on this kind of funny business.
Cheers,
Richard
I hate to say it, but I have heard ass that sounds better than this. *sigh*
Cheers,
Richard