The caterers do not get royalties. Stop confusing the conversation.
The vast majority of the people who work on a film set (caterers, electricians, photographers, camera crew, hairdressers, costume managers, props masters, set builders, etc.) are all paid up front. They do a job and are paid for it, just like any other contractor. Once they are finished, they receive no more money.
If your film does not make money because you priced it high and no one wants to buy it, it does not affect these people. Does the construction crew that built a museum care if you charge a $200 admission and no one comes to the museum? No. They were paid up front.
If the film industry is making to many films and can't afford to hire more crews, again, that's NOT THE MARKET'S FAULT. Don't come crying to me because the second assistant grip has to send his kids to community college. He was paid for his services. If the industry really is losing money and can't afford to hire him, maybe he should be looking for work elsewhere.
Pi exists. It is a real number, between 3 and 4. However, the *significance* of pi is based on our human-defined methods of geometric measurement to an accuracy not found in nature. In the real world, there is no such thing as a perfect circle, and therefore there would be some error when dividing the circumference by the diameter. The accuracy of a specific irrational decimal to an infinite number of decimal places is a construction of our abstract geometric purity.
However, in geometry, pi has the same significance as other specific measurements. For example, the number 4 is significant in the same way as pi because it is the circumference of a square divided by its width (which again, in reality, would be an approximation due to the lack of perfectly square objects). We have named pi (and not 4) because it appears in our calculations quite often (especially in trigonometry, which is based on circular geometry), and it is semantically awkward to refer to a very specific irrational decimal if it doesn't have a catchy name. We also named "e" for this reason. The fact that pi appears in so many calculations makes it appear more significant than other numbers, but this is really just a function of the human brain's tendency to find patterns even if there are none to be found. The number 4 shows up a lot, too.
However, using pi in our measurement of radians is just as arbitrary as choosing 360 to measure the circle in degrees. We used it because it was convenient in our calculations, and made the answers come out to nice neat multiples of pi, which were easy to write down.
I'm fully aware of the competition between Airbus and Boeing. I work for Boeing as an engineer, in commercial airplanes.
However, there are only two companies that manufacture airplanes over a certain size. There are lots of other companies that are in competition with the smaller A320 and B737 models and make commuter and shuttle sized commercial aircraft, including Embraer, Bombardier, DeHavilland, Gulfstream, and several others.
If you want a 500 passenger airplane, then yes, there are only two companies to go to (excluding, of course, what China and Russia are cooking up -- we'll see that in the next ten years). However, "commercial fixed wing aircraft" also includes the shuttle-type airplanes and smaller models, and many times includes the business jet and general aviation markets, which have many players.
Except those approximations of pi are expressed in (usually) base-10 notation, which is a human-created construction.
Asking if there is something that exists that is not defined by humans is a tricky question. All of these things "exist", but all the tools we have for sensing them and measuring them are largely based on human-defined systems of measurements. We can't talk about these things without resorting to standards of measurement, which are wholly arbitrary and based on human experience.
So, yes, there are lots of things that exist that are not human defined. However, once we name it or measure it or look at it or smell it or hear it or touch it, we are ascribing human-created standards to it so we can describe it to other people. It is these standards of measurement which are defined by humans, not the things themselves.
Riders and amendments are another check and balance in our government, the same as the power of the SCOTUS to overturn legislation. They prevent the tyranny of the majority by allowing the minority party (or parties, ha!) to still get something done. It is part of the culture of compromise that Congress should be (and, day-to-day on a majority of issues, grandstanding aside, still is).
Pork is a vital part of the culture of compromise: "I'll let you add this amendment to get funding for X program in your district if you will vote for the bill." Without this compromise, the whole system would grind to a halt and nothing would get passed. The margins between the minority and the majority are too thin. In cases where the Executive and Legislative branches both have the same party in power, getting rid of amendments and riders would create an oppressive regime.
The reason it's abused is us, the voters. We let it happen. We vote in a couple senators and a few congressmen and send them off to Washington. When they come back to the district with pocketfuls of pork (subsidies, jobs, programs, funding, bridges to nowhere), we applaud their efforts to revitalize the community and vote them back in to do it again.
I don't have any good answers on how to change the system for the better. Each community wants legislation that benefits its populace, so its representatives work hard to get them those programs, things that the rest of the country calls "pork." However, a one-bill-one-topic law would destroy one of the systems of checks and balances and remove a major vehicle for compromise.
Democracy may be about rule by majority, but a free democracy also protects the minority.
Sounds great, but lets be honest, to succeed you need to be a bit evil. Nice people get bulldozed aside. OK I don't mean it's ok to be a complete asshole, but predatory tendancies are an essential trait for success, or you'll never make it, even if all you do with it is defend yourself from the people who'll take what you have given half a chance. There is a large difference between predation and ambition.
You do not have to destroy your opponents to succeed.
The bigger problem here is the use of nonspecific pronouns and passive voice to present data. I'm not picking on you specifically here; this trend is endemic in my personal experience, and I've seen that it causes confusion and allows hearsay to be repeated as fact.
Examples from your post (and the GP's):
There have been studies that have shown... This is a passive voice construction which allows someone to make the assertion without including any hard data. Which studies? Who performed them? Which organization funded them? What was their methodology? Were they peer-reviewed? "There have been studies" isn't enough information.
i've read that when they engineer the flu vaccination... "They" is a nonspecific pronoun that seems to refer to a shady group of individuals whose sole purpose is to be shady and perform the alleged acts. Are you referring to the doctors who developed the vaccination? The executives who made the decision? A secret cabal of devil-worshippers who have all the employees of Pfizer and GSK under direct mind control?
Try this: every time you hear yourself saying (or typing) "they do this", try to replace the word "they" with the names of specific people. Once you are able to replace such terms with actual values, your statements become much more authoritative. If you don't have a value to fill in, then the correct response is, "I don't know."
The things to consider: Does getting the vaccination do more good than harm? Does not getting the vaccination do more harm than good? What are the odds of harm happening in both cases, and which one is lower statistically?
Because many people have trouble typing their own names correctly without using the backspace key a few times, and typing a password in a box gives no visual feedback. Higher letter count gives a higher chance of typos, and a higher chance of getting locked out after typing "atrulystrongpasswordshouldhaveatleastthreeoftehfollowingifnotallfour" five times in a row.
Chances of a typo are even higher if someone routinely types in MS Word with AutoComplete turned on and is now physically incapable of typing "the", "from", or any number of words correctly the first time. Double bonus points if they work in a major corporation and hunt'n'peck.
Those non-trivial support costs also apply to the $800 Dell computer being split between 16 students in the school, which is why I left them out. They cancel out of the comparative exercise.
Oh, and I noticed that the first set of numbers add to $450, not $400. I must have missed it in the preview.
Yes, but she didn't do that. The analogy with stealing from Wal*Mart would be downloading the songs.
Instead, she "made the songs available", i.e., distributed to other people. So the real analogy would be if she stole a few CDs from Wal*Mart, then made copies and left them out in front of the store with a little sign saying "Free - Take one!" (But we don't know if she ripped them herself--if she downloaded them from someone else, perhaps a better analogy would be that she picked up the CDs from that pile of illegal free ones outside Wal*Mart, copied them a few times, and then replenished the pile for others.)
If she did that, would she still be fined $222,000?
Standard paper textbooks - Math: $100 - History: $100 - Language: $100 - Social Studies: $100 - Additional computers (per student): $50 (assuming student:machine ratio of 16 and an $800 Dell machine) Total: $400
Don't allow the failures of one particular implementation to color your opinion of the entire concept.
Outlook should not let any random person sending you an invite decide when *you* will get the reminder. The person getting the reminder should control that setting, not the sender. That was a dumb move on Microsoft's part, and I argue with it every day at work.
I would imagine that any sane OSS alternative to Outlook would include global functions that override the per-invite settings, and allow the user to change those settings on incoming invites very easily. A sane OSS program will also probably allow the invite to automatically decide on "busy" vs. "out of office" based on the location, but again, be easily overridden.
There are a million things I wish Outlook did right. I, for one, welcome any upcoming OSS calendaring overlords.
This is just a version 1.0 hack, but I could see lots of different uses for this.
When you pick up an opened can of soda, do you have to shake it vigorously to figure out how full it is? No... you generally know how heavy a full can is, and how heavy an empty can is. When you pick up the can, the amount of inertia the can has tells you how heavy it is, just in one motion. Our brains rely on this kind of feedback when we handle physical objects. Ever picked up an empty can you thought was full? You end up exaggerating the amount of force needed to pick it up, and more likely than not end up almost throwing it across the room. It certainly surprises you.
Now imagine that the combination of an accelerometer and some clever programming of an off-center vibrate weight could simulate different weights in an object that doesn't actually change weight. (I don't think that's what the technology in the article does, but it might lead to the new uses I describe.) When you first pick up your phone off the table, if the battery is low, it would simulate an "empty" phone. If the battery was full, it would simulate a "full" phone, and resist movement more. This kind of tactile feedback would be readily used by a great many people, and would give them a better appreciation of battery life. They would know instantly, every time they handled their phone, whether they looked at the screen or not, how much battery it had. This has lots of potential uses. Even if the phone was in your pocket, you would be able to feel the "weight" of the phone as you moved.
Tactile feedback is a Good Thing (tm). More devices should use it in creative ways however they can. The only drawback I could see is adoption: the phone manufacturers might realize that this would clue the users in on just how awful the battery life of their phones is, and refuse to add it to keep people blissfully using power-hungry phones with crappy battery life.
Then, again, this particular woman has already been cited for:
engaging in a pattern of rude, impatient and undignified treatment of self-represented litigants in the courtroom. This included inappropriately interrupting them, addressing them in an angry or condescending or demeaning tone of voice, and threatening to rule against them if they interrupted or annoyed her. I think I saw her on TV somewhere...
2 full seconds? At highway speeds that's like 20 car-lengths.
75 mph * 2 seconds = 110 f/s * 2s = 220 feet
Methinks you might have trouble staying almost a full football field behind anyone. The rule I heard was 1 car length for each 10 mph you are traveling, but even that seems like a bit much at higher speeds, especially in congested areas.
Back on topic, I sure wish my car had the same amount of automation as the Mars Rovers. I could just type in "work" to the GPS, the autopilot takes over, and I nap on the way there.
...Reagan (Kennedy after the Democrats swiftboated his first choice, Robert Bork)... Hmmm... can a verb coined based on an event be used to describe events that happened prior to the coining of the verb?
Slashdot Mirror
The caterers do not get royalties. Stop confusing the conversation.
The vast majority of the people who work on a film set (caterers, electricians, photographers, camera crew, hairdressers, costume managers, props masters, set builders, etc.) are all paid up front. They do a job and are paid for it, just like any other contractor. Once they are finished, they receive no more money.
If your film does not make money because you priced it high and no one wants to buy it, it does not affect these people. Does the construction crew that built a museum care if you charge a $200 admission and no one comes to the museum? No. They were paid up front.
If the film industry is making to many films and can't afford to hire more crews, again, that's NOT THE MARKET'S FAULT. Don't come crying to me because the second assistant grip has to send his kids to community college. He was paid for his services. If the industry really is losing money and can't afford to hire him, maybe he should be looking for work elsewhere.
Pi exists. It is a real number, between 3 and 4. However, the *significance* of pi is based on our human-defined methods of geometric measurement to an accuracy not found in nature. In the real world, there is no such thing as a perfect circle, and therefore there would be some error when dividing the circumference by the diameter. The accuracy of a specific irrational decimal to an infinite number of decimal places is a construction of our abstract geometric purity.
However, in geometry, pi has the same significance as other specific measurements. For example, the number 4 is significant in the same way as pi because it is the circumference of a square divided by its width (which again, in reality, would be an approximation due to the lack of perfectly square objects). We have named pi (and not 4) because it appears in our calculations quite often (especially in trigonometry, which is based on circular geometry), and it is semantically awkward to refer to a very specific irrational decimal if it doesn't have a catchy name. We also named "e" for this reason. The fact that pi appears in so many calculations makes it appear more significant than other numbers, but this is really just a function of the human brain's tendency to find patterns even if there are none to be found. The number 4 shows up a lot, too.
However, using pi in our measurement of radians is just as arbitrary as choosing 360 to measure the circle in degrees. We used it because it was convenient in our calculations, and made the answers come out to nice neat multiples of pi, which were easy to write down.
I'm fully aware of the competition between Airbus and Boeing. I work for Boeing as an engineer, in commercial airplanes.
However, there are only two companies that manufacture airplanes over a certain size. There are lots of other companies that are in competition with the smaller A320 and B737 models and make commuter and shuttle sized commercial aircraft, including Embraer, Bombardier, DeHavilland, Gulfstream, and several others.
If you want a 500 passenger airplane, then yes, there are only two companies to go to (excluding, of course, what China and Russia are cooking up -- we'll see that in the next ten years). However, "commercial fixed wing aircraft" also includes the shuttle-type airplanes and smaller models, and many times includes the business jet and general aviation markets, which have many players.
Only two companies?
These people would disagree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_manufacturers
Except those approximations of pi are expressed in (usually) base-10 notation, which is a human-created construction.
Asking if there is something that exists that is not defined by humans is a tricky question. All of these things "exist", but all the tools we have for sensing them and measuring them are largely based on human-defined systems of measurements. We can't talk about these things without resorting to standards of measurement, which are wholly arbitrary and based on human experience.
So, yes, there are lots of things that exist that are not human defined. However, once we name it or measure it or look at it or smell it or hear it or touch it, we are ascribing human-created standards to it so we can describe it to other people. It is these standards of measurement which are defined by humans, not the things themselves.
</philosophy>
I disagree.
Riders and amendments are another check and balance in our government, the same as the power of the SCOTUS to overturn legislation. They prevent the tyranny of the majority by allowing the minority party (or parties, ha!) to still get something done. It is part of the culture of compromise that Congress should be (and, day-to-day on a majority of issues, grandstanding aside, still is).
Pork is a vital part of the culture of compromise: "I'll let you add this amendment to get funding for X program in your district if you will vote for the bill." Without this compromise, the whole system would grind to a halt and nothing would get passed. The margins between the minority and the majority are too thin. In cases where the Executive and Legislative branches both have the same party in power, getting rid of amendments and riders would create an oppressive regime.
The reason it's abused is us, the voters. We let it happen. We vote in a couple senators and a few congressmen and send them off to Washington. When they come back to the district with pocketfuls of pork (subsidies, jobs, programs, funding, bridges to nowhere), we applaud their efforts to revitalize the community and vote them back in to do it again.
I don't have any good answers on how to change the system for the better. Each community wants legislation that benefits its populace, so its representatives work hard to get them those programs, things that the rest of the country calls "pork." However, a one-bill-one-topic law would destroy one of the systems of checks and balances and remove a major vehicle for compromise.
Democracy may be about rule by majority, but a free democracy also protects the minority.
You do not have to destroy your opponents to succeed.
Examples from your post (and the GP's): There have been studies that have shown... This is a passive voice construction which allows someone to make the assertion without including any hard data. Which studies? Who performed them? Which organization funded them? What was their methodology? Were they peer-reviewed? "There have been studies" isn't enough information. i've read that when they engineer the flu vaccination... "They" is a nonspecific pronoun that seems to refer to a shady group of individuals whose sole purpose is to be shady and perform the alleged acts. Are you referring to the doctors who developed the vaccination? The executives who made the decision? A secret cabal of devil-worshippers who have all the employees of Pfizer and GSK under direct mind control?
Try this: every time you hear yourself saying (or typing) "they do this", try to replace the word "they" with the names of specific people. Once you are able to replace such terms with actual values, your statements become much more authoritative. If you don't have a value to fill in, then the correct response is, "I don't know."
Nothing is 100% safe.
The things to consider:
Does getting the vaccination do more good than harm?
Does not getting the vaccination do more harm than good?
What are the odds of harm happening in both cases, and which one is lower statistically?
Because many people have trouble typing their own names correctly without using the backspace key a few times, and typing a password in a box gives no visual feedback. Higher letter count gives a higher chance of typos, and a higher chance of getting locked out after typing "atrulystrongpasswordshouldhaveatleastthreeoftehfollowingifnotallfour" five times in a row.
Chances of a typo are even higher if someone routinely types in MS Word with AutoComplete turned on and is now physically incapable of typing "the", "from", or any number of words correctly the first time. Double bonus points if they work in a major corporation and hunt'n'peck.
The Path Tool, Stroke Path, and Selection to Path are your friends.
They are much more powerful than any 'draw square' tool could be.
You seem to imply that would be a bad thing.
Those non-trivial support costs also apply to the $800 Dell computer being split between 16 students in the school, which is why I left them out. They cancel out of the comparative exercise.
Oh, and I noticed that the first set of numbers add to $450, not $400. I must have missed it in the preview.
A Briton thinks 100 miles is a long way and an American thinks 100 years is a long time.
...so long as you're not using Exchange... And which companies would that be?In Soviet Russia, work becomes joke!
Wait...
Yes, but she didn't do that. The analogy with stealing from Wal*Mart would be downloading the songs.
Instead, she "made the songs available", i.e., distributed to other people. So the real analogy would be if she stole a few CDs from Wal*Mart, then made copies and left them out in front of the store with a little sign saying "Free - Take one!" (But we don't know if she ripped them herself--if she downloaded them from someone else, perhaps a better analogy would be that she picked up the CDs from that pile of illegal free ones outside Wal*Mart, copied them a few times, and then replenished the pile for others.)
If she did that, would she still be fined $222,000?
Standard paper textbooks
- Math: $100
- History: $100
- Language: $100
- Social Studies: $100
- Additional computers (per student): $50 (assuming student:machine ratio of 16 and an $800 Dell machine)
Total: $400
XO Laptop
- Laptop: $100
- Online textbook subscription: $100
- Additional computers (per student): $0
Total: $200
Seems pretty simple to me.
Don't allow the failures of one particular implementation to color your opinion of the entire concept.
Outlook should not let any random person sending you an invite decide when *you* will get the reminder. The person getting the reminder should control that setting, not the sender. That was a dumb move on Microsoft's part, and I argue with it every day at work.
I would imagine that any sane OSS alternative to Outlook would include global functions that override the per-invite settings, and allow the user to change those settings on incoming invites very easily. A sane OSS program will also probably allow the invite to automatically decide on "busy" vs. "out of office" based on the location, but again, be easily overridden.
There are a million things I wish Outlook did right. I, for one, welcome any upcoming OSS calendaring overlords.
This is just a version 1.0 hack, but I could see lots of different uses for this.
When you pick up an opened can of soda, do you have to shake it vigorously to figure out how full it is? No... you generally know how heavy a full can is, and how heavy an empty can is. When you pick up the can, the amount of inertia the can has tells you how heavy it is, just in one motion. Our brains rely on this kind of feedback when we handle physical objects. Ever picked up an empty can you thought was full? You end up exaggerating the amount of force needed to pick it up, and more likely than not end up almost throwing it across the room. It certainly surprises you.
Now imagine that the combination of an accelerometer and some clever programming of an off-center vibrate weight could simulate different weights in an object that doesn't actually change weight. (I don't think that's what the technology in the article does, but it might lead to the new uses I describe.) When you first pick up your phone off the table, if the battery is low, it would simulate an "empty" phone. If the battery was full, it would simulate a "full" phone, and resist movement more. This kind of tactile feedback would be readily used by a great many people, and would give them a better appreciation of battery life. They would know instantly, every time they handled their phone, whether they looked at the screen or not, how much battery it had. This has lots of potential uses. Even if the phone was in your pocket, you would be able to feel the "weight" of the phone as you moved.
Tactile feedback is a Good Thing (tm). More devices should use it in creative ways however they can. The only drawback I could see is adoption: the phone manufacturers might realize that this would clue the users in on just how awful the battery life of their phones is, and refuse to add it to keep people blissfully using power-hungry phones with crappy battery life.
Citation needed.
My first question would be: Why in the hell is a component of the networking stack contained in a DLL that is also used to run a component of the UI?
*hums the Judge Judy theme*
2 full seconds? At highway speeds that's like 20 car-lengths.
75 mph * 2 seconds = 110 f/s * 2s = 220 feet
Methinks you might have trouble staying almost a full football field behind anyone. The rule I heard was 1 car length for each 10 mph you are traveling, but even that seems like a bit much at higher speeds, especially in congested areas.
Back on topic, I sure wish my car had the same amount of automation as the Mars Rovers. I could just type in "work" to the GPS, the autopilot takes over, and I nap on the way there.
...Reagan (Kennedy after the Democrats swiftboated his first choice, Robert Bork)... HmmmA temporal linguistics quandary, indeed.