I mean really, if the most awesome candidate in the world came in with matted hair in a Lynard Skynard t-shirt in old shots and flip-flops, he's not getting the job, no matter how good he is.
Why not? Sure, a customer service or other "public face" -jobs might require a certain style, but development, maintenance etc. can be done just fine by someone wearing flip-flops.
Or is this simply the HR equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"?
Or it could say that you've had an an e-mail address for a very long time and continue to use it because it's the one everyone knows.
You wouldn't use that logic to keep having your physical mail addressed to the local homeless shelter...
In order to check your physical mail, you have to physically go there, which takes time and effort. On the other hand, contacting any host on the Internet, no matter their physical location, takes the same amount of time and effort. See the difference?
For me, the belief in the supernatural is a necessary component of religion.
Communism, in Soviet Russia, was for all intents and purposes a state religion, despite having no supernatural component. Free-market capitalism is quickly becoming one, at least for some people (unless you want to count the "invisible hand" as supernatural). Nationalism certainly qualifies, with the nation taking the place of a god.
That does rise a question: given that people are prone to religious behavior, are secular religions better or worse than supernatural ones?
Possibly because of American culture, I would probably also stipulate that the supernatural being(s) would have to be singular, as it seems to be in any religion with at least a million followers.
Since this would make, for example, Greek pantheon not qualify as religion, I'd suggest rethinking this requirement. Monotheistic religions are pretty new.
What nobody has satisfactorily explained is this: why are these two related? Why can't you increase inertia without increasing gravitation? What is the connection between the two? Why do gravitational mass and inertial mass always measure to be the exact same value?
Well, in General Relativity, it's because they're the same thing. Gravity is caused by spacetime getting curved (dunno why it does), which in turn means that what's actually a straight path seems to curve towards a massive object. Basically, if you're not in freefall, you're being accelerated (your path through spacetime is curved), and the weight of an object is actually it's inertial mass resisting that acceleration.
In other words, they're not two things but a single thing.
Since we're well into scientific nitpicks already, pi is a natural constant
To nitpick, pi is not a natural constant but a mathematical one, and even then only in euclidean geometry. The observed value of pi is actually variable, since it changes depending on curvature of spacetime.
Is our model of PI more accurate than our measurement of a circle in reality?
Does this mean our model of PI can not be more accurate than our measurements?
Or is there some other way to 'prove' that our model of PI is exact regardless of what our universe measures it as?
A mathematical construct, such as a circle, isn't modeling any physical object. It is a purely logical, non-physical entity. Measuring a non-physical entity is meaningless.
As it happens, the value of circumference to diameter (PI) on objects that resemble circles to some arbitrary degree is not constant within our universe. Gravity (ironically enough considering the subject of the article) is caused by warping of spacetime in General Relativity, which in turn changes this ratio (the stronger the gravity field, the smaller the ratio).
Anyway, all this means that a circle (and thus PI) is not a physical entity or process we're trying to model, it's a model which happens to resemble some physical entities enough to give acceptably accurate results when it's used to describe them. Our model of PI is exact by definition; it's the real objects that are inexact circles.
It's cool to think that one bigass equation could describe our entire universe, but I've never understood why people believe that it's actually the case. I can't help thinking of savages looking at a McLaren F1 and thinking "Under the bonnet there must be a complex structure made of Car Molecules. Anything else we find in there, if we divide it sufficiently, will turn out to be made of Car."
Well, if you divide the car sufficiently, you end up with protons, neutrons and electrons. And neutrons can further decay to protons and electrons. And a proton + electron is, of course, hydrogen. So in a way, the whole car is made from ionized hydrogen.
Given that the website refuses to show me their products unless I give my contact info first, I suspect that getting fucked is indeed going to result from doing business with them - and not in the good way.
Besides, we already have sex robots, they simply aren't human-shaped.
If somebody were willing to come up with a billion dollars in cash, they could buy the top 100 people in the PostgreSQL project, and that would cramp it severely for a couple of years.
If someone is willing to use a billion dollars in cash just to slow the development of a database program, they're unlikely to have a billion dollars to begin with.
So what you say is that I should move my online biz from.fr to.whateverelse?
He's saying that if you operate in some country and take advantage of its infrastructure, both physical and social, you should also pay the taxes you owe it, rather than argue that your company is based in $TAX_SHELTER_COUNTRY, despite having nothing more than a single-room office - if even that - there. In other words, you should play honestly.
Ok. Folks, pack the server, we're moving! DNS propagation should be done by the time we're done setting up the new servers in whateverelse.
Are the folks also moving? Are you moving? Or are you going to stay in France, enjoying the benefits of French society while refusing to pay the taxes to support it with accounting tricks?
This is why businessmen are nowadays just as universally hated as politicians: most of them are slimy little toads who are trying to enrich themselves at other people's expense using whatever loopholes they can find, rather than building factories or providing services. Frankly, it's even worse than it was during the era of Robber Barons, who at least ran actual businesses.
But hey, do run crying to whatever tax shelter you wish; just remember that everyone else coming there is exactly like you, so life might not be so pleasant there after all.
That sort of setup would do nothing to influence the statistics quoted -- there would be one open and one not-open AP added to the count.
Which would move the statistic towards 50% open/50% closed. When x approaches infinity, (o+x)/(o+x+c+x) approaches 0.5 (where 0 is the number of open access points, c is the number of closed access points, x is the number of access points that can be counted as both, and the result is the proportion of access points that appear open to access points).
The extra tax isn't there to 'allow' you to pirate whatever. It's there because it's known it happens, and it's there to subsidize some of the value back. It is not a "you are allowed to pirate" tax.
The tax is there because some businessman realized that they could get a subsidy by bribing a lawmaker to listen to them, and then proceeded to do so.
Like with everything, you can blame the group that does bad things for your increased costs.
That group would be the copyright holders. Or at least I think that bribing lawmakers to pervert society and technological progress for the sake of your profits and the detriment of all is pretty bad.
Do you think it is the store that loses money if someone steals from them? No, the lost value will be taken from other customers in increased prices.
The shopkeeper already sets the price to whatever he thinks will bring him the most income. So do all the other businesses. I don't know why people keep parroting this rubbish when it's clearly just that.
Ahhh religion, where changing flesh into bread and blood into wine isnt considered "witchcraft". Yet all other "magics" was at one time punishable. Hypocrisy, it loves religion.
Transubstantation was considered a miracle (that is, powered by God) in Catholicism. Witchcraft and other magic was considered to be powered by Satan. It followed that the first was a holy affair, while the latter was extremely dangerous if not the sole domain of people who had sold their souls.
But hey, actually researching the rationale behind religious practices would force you to acknowledge that there was, indeed, a rationale, which in turn would imply that the people practicing them weren't doing so out of stupidity or malice. It's much easier to stay ignorant and make snide remarks to karma whore at any given opportunity, now isn't it?
It's ironic how Slashdot atheists are just another version of Jack Chick.
Nice attitude by that contractor. No wonder IT jobs are being shipped overseas to people that are willing to work twice as hard for 1/5th the pay.
Yeah. They had real work ethic in the early days of Industrial Revolution: 16-hour work days and the rest of the time spent on-call in case of fire or something, none of this "safety regulation" stuff, the manager could ask you to bend over (literally) anytime to get himself a little extra morality boost perk, and the children also worked rather than waste time in school or playing! And when you got injured or crippled by those machines with no profit-eating safety devices, you didn't suck on public teat by expecting to be fed, no: you starved to death so your betters didn't need to pay taxes. Then Marx went and invented communism, and suddenly everyone is afraid workers rather than treating them as the subhuman wage slaves they are, and giving them things like rises and social security!
Good thing we can outsource to India, China and Africa to help return us to those glory days when hads were gods and had-nots were nothing.
Too long a story to tell here (you can google it) but their originally-stated goal was laudable: a lassaiz-faire (sp?) world with basic physics, to see how people would operate, including a truly free-for all zone called Jesse.
So basically, just like every other time laissez-faire system have been set up, people acted true to their dickhead nature, and the system fell down in flames. Now if only the people running the economy would learn from this, and stop pushing the destructive right-wing no-regulation policies...
This escalated to a full scale war which, when the peacniks (who'd been joined by socialists and other fellow travelers) begged the Lindens to intervene, and they did. Their actions to enforce 'peace' in some Left-Coast sort of utopian view directly contravened their own stated rules of non-intervention, and showed them for the hypocrites they are.
I guess the hawks don't like being in the receiving end of shock and awe. BWAAAA!!!
Antibiotics upset the balance of biological flora in the enviroment and in the human gut potentially allowing resitent pathogens to do better at the expense of non resistant types of their own and other species. It doesn't take much to tip the balance in nature where a small edge can make all the difference.
You are making the assumption that resistance to a particular antibiotic comes with no strings attached. However, both dublicating the gene itself and the proteins it encodes take resources that could be better used to reproduce, or perhaps defend against some other threat. Consequently, at some small - but still greater than zero - level on concentration being resistant to antibiotics is actually a hindrance rather than edge.
So what? So did the oil making up the plastics in that computer you're typing on.
If we could put a man on the Moon, why can't we get rid of non-sequiters?
That doesn't mean theres anything natural about any of the antibiotics being used now than have been artificially designed.
Penicillin itself is still in use.
And your point is moot, anyway; if bacteria didn't become resistant to penicillin until it was used in massive quantities, why would they become resistant to these "artificial" (oohh, scary!) antibiotics any faster?
Well, if you had a rioting mob in your street when something is posted which they don't like then you too would be more careful not to incite violence.
Actually, I'd be asking for more funding for the police and the army, as well as forming a neighbourhood militia.
It's very easy to defend free speech from your comfortable home in a stable society, but if you live in a less fortunate country then you have to take a different route to prevent people dying unnecessarily.
My society is stable because violent extremists are put down with as much force as needed and publicly condemned, not accomodated. If they get their way by violence, they'll simply resort to it again and again and again, and so will every other bunch of lunatics, since they'll note that it works.
If you let people get their way by threatening violence, it will never end.
The big benefit of free trade isn't increased freedoms around the world, but the lessening of armed conflict. Nations which trade with each other tend to do better than isolationist nations, but they also become dependent on each other. Nation which depend on each other are much less likely to wage war on each other. Whether they both grant the same freedoms to their citizens is largely irrelevant.
I disagree with the last part. If two nations have free trade between themselves, and one has higher wages and better labour protection laws than the other, then the people in the first will actually be worse off with free trade than without it, since the companies will outsource the production to the second (exactly as has happened lately). The people in the second may be better off or they might actually be worse off too, if their government realizes that it can encourage foreign investment by keeping its citizens down.
In the long run, free trade might well benefit us all, but currently it's creating a rush to the bottom: we're standardizing on US copyright law, Chinese political freedoms, and Indian wages. All that's missing is African rule of law and EU's level of bureaucracy.
Of course, generally speaking, increased wealth (average income) does tend to lead to increased education and an increase in freedom.
Median income is a better single-number wealth indicator, as it guarantees that at least half of the population is getting that mcuh.
The libertarian geek can look a lot like a cultural imperialist - hell-bent on imposing his own beliefs and values on everyone.
So, "imposing his own beliefs and values on everyone" is Newspeak for "not shutting someone up when the local government tells you to"?
Freedom of speech is not about imposing our believes on others, it's about letting them know about their options. This is opposed by those who want to force others to take a certain option by hiding all others. At best, these people see themselves as shepherds and the rest of their population as sheeps; people who can't be given freedom to choose because they might choose wrong. At worst they're outright villains who want to lord it over others. In both cases they have a serious case of hubris.
These accusations of "cultural imperialism" are simply a particularly stupid attempt to justify denying other people the choice of how they want to live. They are false: giving someone knowledge doesn't in any way force him to adapt your culture. It simply gives him the option of doing that, if he so desires. And frankly, if your culture can't survive when people have a chance to choose between that and another culture... then good riddance.
I was doing a temp job at a company where company policy was actually that nobody was allowed to shake hands, because of H1N1.
Hmm... A company policy that actually helps prevent the problem it's meant to prevent, does this without disrupting productivity, and doesn't harm - and in fact helps - the rest of the society. How surreal.
Once resistance appears in humans, having a bit of antibiotic in the food supply provides the selection advantage needed to make the resistant strain common.
No it doesn't. Other selection pressures completely overwhelm it. It's a bit like why humans don't grow bone armors despite this making them more resistant to bear attacks: bear attacks are too rare to cause a selection pressure strong enough to overcome the downsides.
Think of an antibiotic as a secret that humanity must hide from the ecosystem.
Antibiotics originated from the ecosystem. Penicillin was named after the mold that produces it, a common enough mold that some got into a petri dish accidentally.
Hmmm... seems to me that we are still fighting the Moors...
No, we aren't. A bunch of lunatics got lucky with their terrorist strike, prompting a few opportunistic politicians to declare "war on terror" to act as a veil for a power grap. Equating this "war" to the actual threat of being overrun Europe faced during the Dark Ages is ludicrous.
and science and technology is now obsessed with taking back all of the goodies that it gave us, so, like, where's the progress?
Really? What goodies, exactly speaking, has science "taken back"? I seem to have lost none, and in fact am in the process of getting some new rather advanced electronic computing components to faciliate my use of the worldwide communication network I'm sending this message through. For that matter, my shelves are barely able to hold the weight of printing press oriented works on them, and my coat hangers have various artificial fabrics hanging from them.
Here is the conclusion: H-1B engineers were never necessary to the American economy.
H-1B engineers are necessary to suppress wages, which is necessary to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. That's commonly known as "right-wing" politics, which have been practiced at least since Reagan's time, for the detriment of almost all.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not? Sure, a customer service or other "public face" -jobs might require a certain style, but development, maintenance etc. can be done just fine by someone wearing flip-flops.
Or is this simply the HR equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"?
In order to check your physical mail, you have to physically go there, which takes time and effort. On the other hand, contacting any host on the Internet, no matter their physical location, takes the same amount of time and effort. See the difference?
Gmail is $0 a year and can be accessed through Web or POP3. It also doesn't require me to waste my time or money maintaining a mail server.
I'm not sure I'd want to work for someone who's obsessive-compulsive enough to care about my e-mail address.
Communism, in Soviet Russia, was for all intents and purposes a state religion, despite having no supernatural component. Free-market capitalism is quickly becoming one, at least for some people (unless you want to count the "invisible hand" as supernatural). Nationalism certainly qualifies, with the nation taking the place of a god.
That does rise a question: given that people are prone to religious behavior, are secular religions better or worse than supernatural ones?
Since this would make, for example, Greek pantheon not qualify as religion, I'd suggest rethinking this requirement. Monotheistic religions are pretty new.
Well, in General Relativity, it's because they're the same thing. Gravity is caused by spacetime getting curved (dunno why it does), which in turn means that what's actually a straight path seems to curve towards a massive object. Basically, if you're not in freefall, you're being accelerated (your path through spacetime is curved), and the weight of an object is actually it's inertial mass resisting that acceleration.
In other words, they're not two things but a single thing.
To nitpick, pi is not a natural constant but a mathematical one, and even then only in euclidean geometry. The observed value of pi is actually variable, since it changes depending on curvature of spacetime.
A mathematical construct, such as a circle, isn't modeling any physical object. It is a purely logical, non-physical entity. Measuring a non-physical entity is meaningless.
As it happens, the value of circumference to diameter (PI) on objects that resemble circles to some arbitrary degree is not constant within our universe. Gravity (ironically enough considering the subject of the article) is caused by warping of spacetime in General Relativity, which in turn changes this ratio (the stronger the gravity field, the smaller the ratio).
Anyway, all this means that a circle (and thus PI) is not a physical entity or process we're trying to model, it's a model which happens to resemble some physical entities enough to give acceptably accurate results when it's used to describe them. Our model of PI is exact by definition; it's the real objects that are inexact circles.
Well, if you divide the car sufficiently, you end up with protons, neutrons and electrons. And neutrons can further decay to protons and electrons. And a proton + electron is, of course, hydrogen. So in a way, the whole car is made from ionized hydrogen.
Given that the website refuses to show me their products unless I give my contact info first, I suspect that getting fucked is indeed going to result from doing business with them - and not in the good way.
Besides, we already have sex robots, they simply aren't human-shaped.
If someone is willing to use a billion dollars in cash just to slow the development of a database program, they're unlikely to have a billion dollars to begin with.
He's saying that if you operate in some country and take advantage of its infrastructure, both physical and social, you should also pay the taxes you owe it, rather than argue that your company is based in $TAX_SHELTER_COUNTRY, despite having nothing more than a single-room office - if even that - there. In other words, you should play honestly.
Are the folks also moving? Are you moving? Or are you going to stay in France, enjoying the benefits of French society while refusing to pay the taxes to support it with accounting tricks?
This is why businessmen are nowadays just as universally hated as politicians: most of them are slimy little toads who are trying to enrich themselves at other people's expense using whatever loopholes they can find, rather than building factories or providing services. Frankly, it's even worse than it was during the era of Robber Barons, who at least ran actual businesses.
But hey, do run crying to whatever tax shelter you wish; just remember that everyone else coming there is exactly like you, so life might not be so pleasant there after all.
Which would move the statistic towards 50% open/50% closed. When x approaches infinity, (o+x)/(o+x+c+x) approaches 0.5 (where 0 is the number of open access points, c is the number of closed access points, x is the number of access points that can be counted as both, and the result is the proportion of access points that appear open to access points).
Getting a dual-band guest-zone enabled wireless router: >$20. Setting the SSID to "password: password": priceless ;).
The tax is there because some businessman realized that they could get a subsidy by bribing a lawmaker to listen to them, and then proceeded to do so.
That group would be the copyright holders. Or at least I think that bribing lawmakers to pervert society and technological progress for the sake of your profits and the detriment of all is pretty bad.
The shopkeeper already sets the price to whatever he thinks will bring him the most income. So do all the other businesses. I don't know why people keep parroting this rubbish when it's clearly just that.
Transubstantation was considered a miracle (that is, powered by God) in Catholicism. Witchcraft and other magic was considered to be powered by Satan. It followed that the first was a holy affair, while the latter was extremely dangerous if not the sole domain of people who had sold their souls.
But hey, actually researching the rationale behind religious practices would force you to acknowledge that there was, indeed, a rationale, which in turn would imply that the people practicing them weren't doing so out of stupidity or malice. It's much easier to stay ignorant and make snide remarks to karma whore at any given opportunity, now isn't it?
It's ironic how Slashdot atheists are just another version of Jack Chick.
Yeah. They had real work ethic in the early days of Industrial Revolution: 16-hour work days and the rest of the time spent on-call in case of fire or something, none of this "safety regulation" stuff, the manager could ask you to bend over (literally) anytime to get himself a little extra morality boost perk, and the children also worked rather than waste time in school or playing! And when you got injured or crippled by those machines with no profit-eating safety devices, you didn't suck on public teat by expecting to be fed, no: you starved to death so your betters didn't need to pay taxes. Then Marx went and invented communism, and suddenly everyone is afraid workers rather than treating them as the subhuman wage slaves they are, and giving them things like rises and social security!
Good thing we can outsource to India, China and Africa to help return us to those glory days when hads were gods and had-nots were nothing.
So basically, just like every other time laissez-faire system have been set up, people acted true to their dickhead nature, and the system fell down in flames. Now if only the people running the economy would learn from this, and stop pushing the destructive right-wing no-regulation policies...
I guess the hawks don't like being in the receiving end of shock and awe. BWAAAA!!!
You are making the assumption that resistance to a particular antibiotic comes with no strings attached. However, both dublicating the gene itself and the proteins it encodes take resources that could be better used to reproduce, or perhaps defend against some other threat. Consequently, at some small - but still greater than zero - level on concentration being resistant to antibiotics is actually a hindrance rather than edge.
If we could put a man on the Moon, why can't we get rid of non-sequiters?
Penicillin itself is still in use.
And your point is moot, anyway; if bacteria didn't become resistant to penicillin until it was used in massive quantities, why would they become resistant to these "artificial" (oohh, scary!) antibiotics any faster?
Actually, I'd be asking for more funding for the police and the army, as well as forming a neighbourhood militia.
My society is stable because violent extremists are put down with as much force as needed and publicly condemned, not accomodated. If they get their way by violence, they'll simply resort to it again and again and again, and so will every other bunch of lunatics, since they'll note that it works.
If you let people get their way by threatening violence, it will never end.
I disagree with the last part. If two nations have free trade between themselves, and one has higher wages and better labour protection laws than the other, then the people in the first will actually be worse off with free trade than without it, since the companies will outsource the production to the second (exactly as has happened lately). The people in the second may be better off or they might actually be worse off too, if their government realizes that it can encourage foreign investment by keeping its citizens down.
In the long run, free trade might well benefit us all, but currently it's creating a rush to the bottom: we're standardizing on US copyright law, Chinese political freedoms, and Indian wages. All that's missing is African rule of law and EU's level of bureaucracy.
Median income is a better single-number wealth indicator, as it guarantees that at least half of the population is getting that mcuh.
So, "imposing his own beliefs and values on everyone" is Newspeak for "not shutting someone up when the local government tells you to"?
Freedom of speech is not about imposing our believes on others, it's about letting them know about their options. This is opposed by those who want to force others to take a certain option by hiding all others. At best, these people see themselves as shepherds and the rest of their population as sheeps; people who can't be given freedom to choose because they might choose wrong. At worst they're outright villains who want to lord it over others. In both cases they have a serious case of hubris.
These accusations of "cultural imperialism" are simply a particularly stupid attempt to justify denying other people the choice of how they want to live. They are false: giving someone knowledge doesn't in any way force him to adapt your culture. It simply gives him the option of doing that, if he so desires. And frankly, if your culture can't survive when people have a chance to choose between that and another culture... then good riddance.
Hmm... A company policy that actually helps prevent the problem it's meant to prevent, does this without disrupting productivity, and doesn't harm - and in fact helps - the rest of the society. How surreal.
No it doesn't. Other selection pressures completely overwhelm it. It's a bit like why humans don't grow bone armors despite this making them more resistant to bear attacks: bear attacks are too rare to cause a selection pressure strong enough to overcome the downsides.
Antibiotics originated from the ecosystem. Penicillin was named after the mold that produces it, a common enough mold that some got into a petri dish accidentally.
No, we aren't. A bunch of lunatics got lucky with their terrorist strike, prompting a few opportunistic politicians to declare "war on terror" to act as a veil for a power grap. Equating this "war" to the actual threat of being overrun Europe faced during the Dark Ages is ludicrous.
Really? What goodies, exactly speaking, has science "taken back"? I seem to have lost none, and in fact am in the process of getting some new rather advanced electronic computing components to faciliate my use of the worldwide communication network I'm sending this message through. For that matter, my shelves are barely able to hold the weight of printing press oriented works on them, and my coat hangers have various artificial fabrics hanging from them.
So, I ask again: what has been taken back?
H-1B engineers are necessary to suppress wages, which is necessary to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. That's commonly known as "right-wing" politics, which have been practiced at least since Reagan's time, for the detriment of almost all.