Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
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Lisp and Ruby
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· Score: 1
It's not just not-invented-here. The ministry of industry did a series of botched "standards" for glyph encoding (the JIS standards) that were widely reviled and largely unused outside the ministry and those who had to deal with them (among other things, the ministry didn't contact people like the culture and education ministry - people who know about this stuff and who decide what is being taught in school about it). When Unicode came along, well, Unicode was a computer thingy and fell under the industry ministry's domain, who assigned the same groups who've done a long, proud job of messing up their own standards in this field and had them give the "Japanese" view on Unicode.
Nobody liked or wanted the JIS standards before, and so nobody wants Unicode now, and in both cases because the result doesn't map to the real-life requirements for an encoding of the language. AFAIK, Microsoft's Shift-JIS, horrible cludge as it is, was necessary; once MS decided (mistakenly) that the Industry ministry standard is the way to go, they had no choice but to break it, since the original standard is unusable for actual contemporary Japanese.
The basic problem really is that once again you're stuck with having to mix font and encoding to get the right glyphs; that's exactly what Unicode was designed to get away from. There's two issues: first, some kanji/han glyphs have been conflated because they share the same ancestry and the same meaning, even though they are written differently. The character for "bone" for example, looks different in Japanese and Chinese, but has the same code point in both languages. It's like if the Swedish character "Ä" and Norwegian "Æ" got the same Unicode code point because they are just variations on the same character.
The other problem is that the ministry "cleaned up" their character lists, so Unicode is missing a lot of old forms - forms which are very common still in names. Going to this new, nifty standard with just the tiny drawback that you can no longer write your own name properly is not exactly going down like wildfire.
The most general problem, though is that it's not all static. Forms change, new characters come into use. This is something Unicode isn't really set up to deal with (and neither is any of the other encodings used today), and if the country is going to change to a standard encoding, it may make more sense to make something which can.
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
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Lisp and Ruby
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· Score: 4, Insightful
To me, as an old Perl programmer, Ruby basically feels like what Perl 6 should have become: keeping with the idea of making things discoverable for the programmer and not having to work around syntax, but greatly cleaned up and with objects as an integrated part of the language, not so tacked-on as in Perl 5.
Ruby still has some pretty significant drawbacks, of course; it's slow, and has little support for Unicode (not that surprising, seeing it's from Japan). The libraries aren't as mature yet either; Perl has many year's headstart there so again no surprise. All of these are improving, though.
Mostly my worry would not be documenting "shameful" behavior in itself, but being inaccurate about it, and essentially punishing people that have not actually done anything wrong. It can range from taking information out of context (film their dog pooping on the street and cut before you see them conscientiously pick it all up) to completely made-up accusations.
Of course, as mean and narrow-minded people tend to be today, it's probably only a matter of time before so many of us are added to so many "accusation" websites - rightly or not - that it'll just end up as noise. When everybody seems to be the devil incarnate if you do a search on them, the information ceases to have any prospective value anymore. And of course that greatly helps the small minority of people that really do have something to be shameful about; nobody's going to care if a possible pornographer (or rapist, or pedophile) moves into the neighbourhood since any such accusations more than likely are false, and you'd find the same kind of misinformation on two-thirds of all residents anyway.
Noise is not just useless data, it degrades the real data as well. In this case, I think it is a good thing since it effectively restores privacy again.
Because Sony has not made as many PS3s as Nintendo has made Wiis. Rather simple isn't it?
Except that the ps3 is not sold out here in Japan any more, and the Wii is. They're not selling as fast as they're being produced and shipped to stores, despite that volume being lower than Wii.
"You do realize, of course, that using metric units in no way stops you from using fractions rather than decimal whenever it is convenient?"
Actually, it does because ten has less factors (1,2,5,10) than twelve (1,2,3,4,6,12) or sixteen (1,2,4,8,16).
Huh? What stops you from counting in whatever fractions you're comfortable with? If you want to use 4 3/12 deciliters or something, just go ahead.
If I take a stick that's 1 foot long and cut it into four pieces, I have four sticks that are 3 inches long. If I take a stick that's one meter long and cut it into four pieces, I have four sticks that are 25 centimeters long.
You have four stick of 1/4 meter each. If you take one meter and cut into five pieces you get five sticks of 2dm. What does cutting a one foot stick in five pieces get you?
I think you need to calm down a bit; you're sounding quite obsessive about this, to the point of being irrational.
It's natural to look at the edges of any feature or performance envelope. People that want to store petabytes of particle accellerator data, do complex queries to serve a million webpages a second, have hundreds of thousands of employees doing concurrent things to the backend.
But for most uses of databases - or any back-end processing - performance just isn't a factor and haven't been for years. Enron may have needed a huge data warehouse system; "Icepick Johhny's Bail Bonds and Securities Management" does not. Amazon needs the cutting edge in customer management; "Betty's Healing Crystals Online Shop (Now With 30% More Karma!)" not so much.
For the large majority of uses - whether you measure in aggregate volume or number of users - one size really fits all.
First, what I meant about the customer wanting metric is just that - they want m-series threads, spacings in even millimeters and all the rest, because it is supposed to be used with other stuff already in metric. And how often that happens depends a lot on how much mass-produced gear (in whatever field you're dealing in) is designed in metric, rather than imperial, units. If you're asked to make a part replacement, for instance, you do it in whatever units the original was done. If you're making a custom device for someone, they will probably want to use the same units (and thus the same tools and so on) as their existing gear. As a machinist, you basically are on the reacting end, not on the originating one of such a change.
And yes, doing work temporarily in a different set of units is doable just as you say, basically by converting the plans to your preferred work units and take it from there. That's not just between metric and imperial either, of course; anytime you need to make a replacement part for or repair a pre-WWII British anything, you'll be dealing with a third set of units (and since it's both old and British, there'll be work to do far out of proportion to the actual prevalence of such machinery). And for really old mechanics, you're looking at one-off custom pieces, including making custom nuts matched to one specific bolt and other joys of utter non-standardization.
Should you ever want to cross to metric as your shop standard, your lathe and other machine tools should be easily remodeled for metric; there should be replacement dial scales in metric rather than imperial available from the manufacturer, for instance. Again, keeping chucks, bit holders and all the rest as it is isn't a problem; you only really come to such a decision if you ever need to replace the lathe (fat chance) or need a second, perhaps larger (or smaller) one, and need to decide on how compatible you want the new one to be with your old pieces (and most stuff will be compatible no matter what anyway).
Um, why could you not just keep using your expensive imperial-gauge machines? I mean, it's not like you need tools built in metric units to cut or thread stuff in metric units, right? Same with expensive measuring equipment; it will all measure metric as well as imperial; you need to do a quick conversion but in the overall scheme of things - with measurement, re-measurement, checking the blueprint and so on - doing it is not a time-consuming part of the operation. All you'd really need is a few tools specific for doing some metric stuff (for cutting M-screws for instance), but I'd be surprised if you don't have that already, considering how common metric parts are.
I mean, I could easily make parts in imperial units if I needed to, using metric tools. There's not a whole lot of things you really need (as opposed to finding convenient). And in the end, of course, as a small-scale manufacturer or builder, it's not you who decides what you use. If your clients want stuff conforming to metric units, you take the order or miss out on the job to someone who will.
You do realize, of course, that using metric units in no way stops you from using fractions rather than decimal whenever it is convenient?
You may use 3/4 cups of something; I'll use 1 1/2 dl. And one pint is a fairly good size for a beer, but then, so is 40cl, the normal size in Sweden. But of course we don't call it "40cl"; it's a "large beer".
If I estimate people's height, I'll just estimate to the nearest 5cm. That is a pretty convenient scale; fine enough to get close, and rough enough for me to have a good chance of being right.
Pretty much none of your arguments have anything to do with the units used, but with how you use them - and you can do it equally with either measurement system. As a guess, you have not had to use metric very much so you just have never built up a collection of mental tools equal to the one's you use for inches and stuff, and so you see it as clumsy and ill-fitting.
My first bike (a ten year old Honda CM400T) had the warning, prominently placed on the tank, not to engage the steering lock while you're riding it.
The steering lock itself was located to the left and below the trunk bundle of wires going to the front panel and instrumentation, and needed the key that presumably is in the ignition (or you would not be driving it) or the backup key. Fair enough.
But the steering lock would only engage when the front wheel was engaged fully in one direction or the other. Which was a seriously tight turning radius. If you are able to actually keep your balance and keep the bike moving while gong full tilt to the right, and at the same time find and push-twist the key sitting under a bundle of cables below your line of sight and to the left then you do not need a warning label - you need a contract to perform at a motor circus, as you have just found your true calling.
Color is another big issue. Professional processing labs would adjust your images depending on the color of the light under which they were exposed, and their experts knew what they were doing. Now people are doing their own color, and, simply put, not everybody has an eye for it. Before, even a crappy photographer could deliver an image that was at least well exposed and color-correct, just because the lab did those last two parts for them. Today, not so much.
Naturally, under the assumption that people are printing, and that they're printing at home. When I have wanted to print (both times), I never even briefly considered printing myself. I just went down to a photoprinter and had them print it, getting the same service as the film photographer does. And it really isn't expensive; especially if you're not printing a lot it probably costs far more per print to buy and keep a good color inkjet stocked with inks, paper and so on.
And more and more, of course, images are never printed. They're used in their digital form from start to finish.
Take a look at graphic design. I think it's a pretty good parallel to what's happening in photography (my SO is a graphic designer, so I have some insight into this).
There used to be a lot of graphic designers and it used to be that a lot of them made it their bread-and-butter business to do restaurant menus, business cards, leaflets - any kind of small scale, frequently revised job like that. It wasn't glamorous, but it paid the bills between the big jobs.
Then DTP happened. And when people could start churning out the simple stuff on their own, that marked gradually dried up. The truth is, while a menu for a neighbourhood joint designed and set by the owner and cranked out on a badly trimmed Kinko's machine is clearly inferior to what a professional will do, it is good enough. The price premium a professional will charge (and has to, to stay in business) just isn't worth it, no matter how much better the results.
For a lot of graphic design like that, the cost of entry - and the baseline quality you get - for interested amateurs is compelling enough that there is no price point at which you can make a living churning out the stuff anymore. The market for "pro" work has shrunk substantially even as the total amount of work has increased. The high-end jobs are still there, naturally, but those were a pretty small proportion of the whole job market.
I suspect it is the case with stock photography and some news and feature photography as well. There's enough people doing decent enough work and selling it through cheap stock agencies - or licensing it completely for free, just for bragging rights - that the bottom will fall out of those markets as well. Just as for graphic design, the high-end stuff will still be there of course - and is arguably even more important than before - but not that many people will be able to make a living on doing it. The top, the cream of the crop, will be just fine. The journeyman base, however, will probably not be very large anymore.
Reasonable but you do realize that most newborns are not sentient? Are you okay with legally killing a newborn? What about people in a coma even if they have a high probability of recovering?
"Active central nervous system" takes care of both. Someone without an active CNS is not in a coma, they are braindead. Which is recognized as the criterion for death in a number of countries already. So no, pulling the plug on someone with no higher brain functions intact is not something I have a problem with.
And making a distinction between a fetus and a person in a coma presents no difficulty. The person in a coma is a person; they've been granted personhood and that can't be taken away. A fetus is not a person and can't be granted personhood until developed enough to be one.
However, I believe there is no better protection against quakes than living in a flexible wooden house that 'moves' together with the seismic waves as they pass, instead of these stupid concrete boxes that break apart because they tend to resist against the seismic waves (and we all know nothing artificial can resist natural forces for too long, except for those things that are inspired by nature itself, like wooden houses).
Most deaths in Kobe were in "flexible wooden houses", while your "stupid concrete boxes" are standing nicely today.
In many simple-wood frame houses here in the USA doorframes are usually a couple of 2x4's nailed together. However that is not to say every doorframe is that way. A bunker doorframe would do nicely, however not everyone has such a thing
If you live in an area where significant earthquakes are probable you have laws restricting how you are allowed to build; you won't have doorframes made from a couple of flimsy boards.
In Kobe most of the damage and almost all of the deaths were in old buildings erected before there was any meaningful building codes in effect. And many of the deaths were not directly from the quake itself, but from trapped or unconcious people getting caught in fires. And a warning system like this could stop most fires by shutting electricity and gas beforehand. Even if you still would have had some fire, the amount and severity would have been greatly reduced, making it feasible for the rescue and firefighting teams to get on top of it much faster.
The ads are SPONSORING the program! Somebody has to pay the bills.
Yes. And if the ads no longer pull in enough money to pay the bills, it's not the fault of the public. There's no natural law stating that, say, the TV advertising market will always be big enough to support the kind of high-budget programming you're getting at the moment.
People think of this backwards, seeing themselves as the consumers. They aren't. Mass media companies are selling eyeballs to other companies to advertise for, and all the TV and radio programming and magazine articles are the necessary ingredients to produce said eyeballs for sale. If the programming is no longer compelling enough to pull in enough eyeballs to pay for itself, then it's time to reevaluate how to value programming. And if the eyeballs are dissociating the programming and the advertising then it's time to reevaluate the business model.
WTF? The employee has no obligation to do something he does not want to. Period.
The OP was asking about the moral implications, not legal ones.
Legally he has whatever period is in his contract for terminating his employment, naturally. And legally, the company is probably free to can him the moment he refuses to do the job he's hired to.
But that was not what the OP was asking about. He was asking about what would be the moral thing to do. And from a moral (not legal) standpoint, finishing what you said you started, especially when a decision to bail will hurt third parties, is the moral choice.
>> If you feel strongly enough about it, find another >> job where such issues are not likely to arise.
> That's the crux of the matter. There are approximately one slew of jobs out there that won't be > morally questionable, and you'll sleep better at night knowing that you're not enabling nasty > behavior. It's a small victory but an important one.
If, that is, the project is indeed just about to begin - the OP seems to imply that is not the case. If it's the case that you've already spent months working on the project, and you're weeks from finishing, I would say you made your choice when you started your willing participation. You took on the job and now have a duty to see it through. This goes double if it, as the OP says, is a small company that will be hurt badly by a late defection.
If you're already deep in the project, finish the job as best you know how - you've already done most of the job, and your fellow workers depend on you to finish what you agreed to do. Then, _after_ the delivery, talk with your boss. Tell him that the latest job made you seriously uncomfortable, and that you are not prepared to do a similar job again. You saw it through because you'd promised to, but you will not repeat the experience.
One of two things will happen: he'll tell you that there's no such job again on the horizon, and he'll keep this in mind if he needs to assign people t o another such thing; or he'll say this is part of the business and you need to accept doing the job to continue working there.
It would be nice to get - I bought NWN and both add-on extensions, and had a blast with it for over two years.
But reality today is that the battle lines is not Windows on one hand and Mac/Linux on the other, it's desktop computer versus console. And apart from a few niche genres, the consoles are winning big.
If I want to do gaming today I would not consider dual-booting, I would just get a console (a Wii and/or DS2 is on the horizon for me; perhaps after the holidays).
The question becomes if the spammers filling in captcha's for blog comments will win or lose over the spammers creating fake blogs. Will some spammers (not the sharpest knives in the drawer) end up paying one set of people doing captchas for new blogs and another set to junk their own blogs by choking them with fake comments?
In any case, the economy of spamming changes fundamentally once it's no longer cost free to do.
We got paid nothing during our five years of graduate school. We got paid nothing during our five year-year post-doc. We certainly don't get rich running a lab. Why shouldn't we make money off of something we spent years of our lives working on?
Last time I looked (like on my monthly statement), a post-doc is a salaried position, and pretty well paid too.
In Sweden, doctoral students are paid a real salary, since, after all, they are doing research and teaching. The salary isn't all that high - they're doing it under close supervision after all - but certainly livable.
For all the kvetching, a researcher in the sciences is not poor. Please take a comparison to most normal jobs. And if you want to make lots of money instead, why not just go into industry then?
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It's not just not-invented-here. The ministry of industry did a series of botched "standards" for glyph encoding (the JIS standards) that were widely reviled and largely unused outside the ministry and those who had to deal with them (among other things, the ministry didn't contact people like the culture and education ministry - people who know about this stuff and who decide what is being taught in school about it). When Unicode came along, well, Unicode was a computer thingy and fell under the industry ministry's domain, who assigned the same groups who've done a long, proud job of messing up their own standards in this field and had them give the "Japanese" view on Unicode.
Nobody liked or wanted the JIS standards before, and so nobody wants Unicode now, and in both cases because the result doesn't map to the real-life requirements for an encoding of the language. AFAIK, Microsoft's Shift-JIS, horrible cludge as it is, was necessary; once MS decided (mistakenly) that the Industry ministry standard is the way to go, they had no choice but to break it, since the original standard is unusable for actual contemporary Japanese.
The basic problem really is that once again you're stuck with having to mix font and encoding to get the right glyphs; that's exactly what Unicode was designed to get away from. There's two issues: first, some kanji/han glyphs have been conflated because they share the same ancestry and the same meaning, even though they are written differently. The character for "bone" for example, looks different in Japanese and Chinese, but has the same code point in both languages. It's like if the Swedish character "Ä" and Norwegian "Æ" got the same Unicode code point because they are just variations on the same character.
The other problem is that the ministry "cleaned up" their character lists, so Unicode is missing a lot of old forms - forms which are very common still in names. Going to this new, nifty standard with just the tiny drawback that you can no longer write your own name properly is not exactly going down like wildfire.
The most general problem, though is that it's not all static. Forms change, new characters come into use. This is something Unicode isn't really set up to deal with (and neither is any of the other encodings used today), and if the country is going to change to a standard encoding, it may make more sense to make something which can.
To me, as an old Perl programmer, Ruby basically feels like what Perl 6 should have become: keeping with the idea of making things discoverable for the programmer and not having to work around syntax, but greatly cleaned up and with objects as an integrated part of the language, not so tacked-on as in Perl 5.
Ruby still has some pretty significant drawbacks, of course; it's slow, and has little support for Unicode (not that surprising, seeing it's from Japan). The libraries aren't as mature yet either; Perl has many year's headstart there so again no surprise. All of these are improving, though.
Mostly my worry would not be documenting "shameful" behavior in itself, but being inaccurate about it, and essentially punishing people that have not actually done anything wrong. It can range from taking information out of context (film their dog pooping on the street and cut before you see them conscientiously pick it all up) to completely made-up accusations.
Of course, as mean and narrow-minded people tend to be today, it's probably only a matter of time before so many of us are added to so many "accusation" websites - rightly or not - that it'll just end up as noise. When everybody seems to be the devil incarnate if you do a search on them, the information ceases to have any prospective value anymore. And of course that greatly helps the small minority of people that really do have something to be shameful about; nobody's going to care if a possible pornographer (or rapist, or pedophile) moves into the neighbourhood since any such accusations more than likely are false, and you'd find the same kind of misinformation on two-thirds of all residents anyway.
Noise is not just useless data, it degrades the real data as well. In this case, I think it is a good thing since it effectively restores privacy again.
Because Sony has not made as many PS3s as Nintendo has made Wiis. Rather simple isn't it?
Except that the ps3 is not sold out here in Japan any more, and the Wii is. They're not selling as fast as they're being produced and shipped to stores, despite that volume being lower than Wii.
40 cl a LARGE beer? You're being ripped off...
You think that is being ripped off? Take a look at the cost.
"You do realize, of course, that using metric units in no way stops you from using fractions rather than decimal whenever it is convenient?"
Actually, it does because ten has less factors (1,2,5,10) than twelve (1,2,3,4,6,12) or sixteen (1,2,4,8,16).
Huh? What stops you from counting in whatever fractions you're comfortable with? If you want to use 4 3/12 deciliters or something, just go ahead.
If I take a stick that's 1 foot long and cut it into four pieces, I have four sticks that are 3 inches long. If I take a stick that's one meter long and cut it into four pieces, I have four sticks that are 25 centimeters long.
You have four stick of 1/4 meter each. If you take one meter and cut into five pieces you get five sticks of 2dm. What does cutting a one foot stick in five pieces get you?
I think you need to calm down a bit; you're sounding quite obsessive about this, to the point of being irrational.
It's natural to look at the edges of any feature or performance envelope. People that want to store petabytes of particle accellerator data, do complex queries to serve a million webpages a second, have hundreds of thousands of employees doing concurrent things to the backend.
But for most uses of databases - or any back-end processing - performance just isn't a factor and haven't been for years. Enron may have needed a huge data warehouse system; "Icepick Johhny's Bail Bonds and Securities Management" does not. Amazon needs the cutting edge in customer management; "Betty's Healing Crystals Online Shop (Now With 30% More Karma!)" not so much.
For the large majority of uses - whether you measure in aggregate volume or number of users - one size really fits all.
First, what I meant about the customer wanting metric is just that - they want m-series threads, spacings in even millimeters and all the rest, because it is supposed to be used with other stuff already in metric. And how often that happens depends a lot on how much mass-produced gear (in whatever field you're dealing in) is designed in metric, rather than imperial, units. If you're asked to make a part replacement, for instance, you do it in whatever units the original was done. If you're making a custom device for someone, they will probably want to use the same units (and thus the same tools and so on) as their existing gear. As a machinist, you basically are on the reacting end, not on the originating one of such a change.
And yes, doing work temporarily in a different set of units is doable just as you say, basically by converting the plans to your preferred work units and take it from there. That's not just between metric and imperial either, of course; anytime you need to make a replacement part for or repair a pre-WWII British anything, you'll be dealing with a third set of units (and since it's both old and British, there'll be work to do far out of proportion to the actual prevalence of such machinery). And for really old mechanics, you're looking at one-off custom pieces, including making custom nuts matched to one specific bolt and other joys of utter non-standardization.
Should you ever want to cross to metric as your shop standard, your lathe and other machine tools should be easily remodeled for metric; there should be replacement dial scales in metric rather than imperial available from the manufacturer, for instance. Again, keeping chucks, bit holders and all the rest as it is isn't a problem; you only really come to such a decision if you ever need to replace the lathe (fat chance) or need a second, perhaps larger (or smaller) one, and need to decide on how compatible you want the new one to be with your old pieces (and most stuff will be compatible no matter what anyway).
Um, why could you not just keep using your expensive imperial-gauge machines? I mean, it's not like you need tools built in metric units to cut or thread stuff in metric units, right? Same with expensive measuring equipment; it will all measure metric as well as imperial; you need to do a quick conversion but in the overall scheme of things - with measurement, re-measurement, checking the blueprint and so on - doing it is not a time-consuming part of the operation. All you'd really need is a few tools specific for doing some metric stuff (for cutting M-screws for instance), but I'd be surprised if you don't have that already, considering how common metric parts are.
I mean, I could easily make parts in imperial units if I needed to, using metric tools. There's not a whole lot of things you really need (as opposed to finding convenient). And in the end, of course, as a small-scale manufacturer or builder, it's not you who decides what you use. If your clients want stuff conforming to metric units, you take the order or miss out on the job to someone who will.
You do realize, of course, that using metric units in no way stops you from using fractions rather than decimal whenever it is convenient?
You may use 3/4 cups of something; I'll use 1 1/2 dl. And one pint is a fairly good size for a beer, but then, so is 40cl, the normal size in Sweden. But of course we don't call it "40cl"; it's a "large beer".
If I estimate people's height, I'll just estimate to the nearest 5cm. That is a pretty convenient scale; fine enough to get close, and rough enough for me to have a good chance of being right.
Pretty much none of your arguments have anything to do with the units used, but with how you use them - and you can do it equally with either measurement system. As a guess, you have not had to use metric very much so you just have never built up a collection of mental tools equal to the one's you use for inches and stuff, and so you see it as clumsy and ill-fitting.
My first bike (a ten year old Honda CM400T) had the warning, prominently placed on the tank, not to engage the steering lock while you're riding it.
The steering lock itself was located to the left and below the trunk bundle of wires going to the front panel and instrumentation, and needed the key that presumably is in the ignition (or you would not be driving it) or the backup key. Fair enough.
But the steering lock would only engage when the front wheel was engaged fully in one direction or the other. Which was a seriously tight turning radius. If you are able to actually keep your balance and keep the bike moving while gong full tilt to the right, and at the same time find and push-twist the key sitting under a bundle of cables below your line of sight and to the left then you do not need a warning label - you need a contract to perform at a motor circus, as you have just found your true calling.
OK, I'm confused now - wasn't Ford's problem that they we're selling too few vehicles? This sounds like a solution to the very opposite problem to me.
Color is another big issue. Professional processing labs would adjust your images depending on the color of the light under which they were exposed, and their experts knew what they were doing. Now people are doing their own color, and, simply put, not everybody has an eye for it. Before, even a crappy photographer could deliver an image that was at least well exposed and color-correct, just because the lab did those last two parts for them. Today, not so much.
Naturally, under the assumption that people are printing, and that they're printing at home. When I have wanted to print (both times), I never even briefly considered printing myself. I just went down to a photoprinter and had them print it, getting the same service as the film photographer does. And it really isn't expensive; especially if you're not printing a lot it probably costs far more per print to buy and keep a good color inkjet stocked with inks, paper and so on.
And more and more, of course, images are never printed. They're used in their digital form from start to finish.
Take a look at graphic design. I think it's a pretty good parallel to what's happening in photography (my SO is a graphic designer, so I have some insight into this).
There used to be a lot of graphic designers and it used to be that a lot of them made it their bread-and-butter business to do restaurant menus, business cards, leaflets - any kind of small scale, frequently revised job like that. It wasn't glamorous, but it paid the bills between the big jobs.
Then DTP happened. And when people could start churning out the simple stuff on their own, that marked gradually dried up. The truth is, while a menu for a neighbourhood joint designed and set by the owner and cranked out on a badly trimmed Kinko's machine is clearly inferior to what a professional will do, it is good enough. The price premium a professional will charge (and has to, to stay in business) just isn't worth it, no matter how much better the results.
For a lot of graphic design like that, the cost of entry - and the baseline quality you get - for interested amateurs is compelling enough that there is no price point at which you can make a living churning out the stuff anymore. The market for "pro" work has shrunk substantially even as the total amount of work has increased. The high-end jobs are still there, naturally, but those were a pretty small proportion of the whole job market.
I suspect it is the case with stock photography and some news and feature photography as well. There's enough people doing decent enough work and selling it through cheap stock agencies - or licensing it completely for free, just for bragging rights - that the bottom will fall out of those markets as well. Just as for graphic design, the high-end stuff will still be there of course - and is arguably even more important than before - but not that many people will be able to make a living on doing it. The top, the cream of the crop, will be just fine. The journeyman base, however, will probably not be very large anymore.
Reasonable but you do realize that most newborns are not sentient? Are you okay with legally killing a newborn? What about people in a coma even if they have a high probability of recovering?
"Active central nervous system" takes care of both. Someone without an active CNS is not in a coma, they are braindead. Which is recognized as the criterion for death in a number of countries already. So no, pulling the plug on someone with no higher brain functions intact is not something I have a problem with.
And making a distinction between a fetus and a person in a coma presents no difficulty. The person in a coma is a person; they've been granted personhood and that can't be taken away. A fetus is not a person and can't be granted personhood until developed enough to be one.
Sentience seems to be a pretty good line to draw. Before here's a developed, active central nervous system it is not and can not be a person.
However, I believe there is no better protection against quakes than living in a flexible wooden house that 'moves' together with the seismic waves as they pass, instead of these stupid concrete boxes that break apart because they tend to resist against the seismic waves (and we all know nothing artificial can resist natural forces for too long, except for those things that are inspired by nature itself, like wooden houses).
Most deaths in Kobe were in "flexible wooden houses", while your "stupid concrete boxes" are standing nicely today.
In many simple-wood frame houses here in the USA doorframes are usually a couple of 2x4's nailed together. However that is not to say every doorframe is that way. A bunker doorframe would do nicely, however not everyone has such a thing
If you live in an area where significant earthquakes are probable you have laws restricting how you are allowed to build; you won't have doorframes made from a couple of flimsy boards.
In Kobe most of the damage and almost all of the deaths were in old buildings erected before there was any meaningful building codes in effect. And many of the deaths were not directly from the quake itself, but from trapped or unconcious people getting caught in fires. And a warning system like this could stop most fires by shutting electricity and gas beforehand. Even if you still would have had some fire, the amount and severity would have been greatly reduced, making it feasible for the rescue and firefighting teams to get on top of it much faster.
The ads are SPONSORING the program! Somebody has to pay the bills.
Yes. And if the ads no longer pull in enough money to pay the bills, it's not the fault of the public. There's no natural law stating that, say, the TV advertising market will always be big enough to support the kind of high-budget programming you're getting at the moment.
People think of this backwards, seeing themselves as the consumers. They aren't. Mass media companies are selling eyeballs to other companies to advertise for, and all the TV and radio programming and magazine articles are the necessary ingredients to produce said eyeballs for sale. If the programming is no longer compelling enough to pull in enough eyeballs to pay for itself, then it's time to reevaluate how to value programming. And if the eyeballs are dissociating the programming and the advertising then it's time to reevaluate the business model.
This reminds me of the "You can teach a man to fish" saying...
You mean:
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day
Teach a man to fish and he gets rammed by a US submarine?
WTF? The employee has no obligation to do something he does not want to. Period.
The OP was asking about the moral implications, not legal ones.
Legally he has whatever period is in his contract for terminating his employment, naturally. And legally, the company is probably free to can him the moment he refuses to do the job he's hired to.
But that was not what the OP was asking about. He was asking about what would be the moral thing to do. And from a moral (not legal) standpoint, finishing what you said you started, especially when a decision to bail will hurt third parties, is the moral choice.
>> If you feel strongly enough about it, find another
>> job where such issues are not likely to arise.
> That's the crux of the matter. There are approximately one slew of jobs out there that won't be
> morally questionable, and you'll sleep better at night knowing that you're not enabling nasty
> behavior. It's a small victory but an important one.
If, that is, the project is indeed just about to begin - the OP seems to imply that is not the case. If it's the case that you've already spent months working on the project, and you're weeks from finishing, I would say you made your choice when you started your willing participation. You took on the job and now have a duty to see it through. This goes double if it, as the OP says, is a small company that will be hurt badly by a late defection.
If you're already deep in the project, finish the job as best you know how - you've already done most of the job, and your fellow workers depend on you to finish what you agreed to do. Then, _after_ the delivery, talk with your boss. Tell him that the latest job made you seriously uncomfortable, and that you are not prepared to do a similar job again. You saw it through because you'd promised to, but you will not repeat the experience.
One of two things will happen: he'll tell you that there's no such job again on the horizon, and he'll keep this in mind if he needs to assign people t o another such thing; or he'll say this is part of the business and you need to accept doing the job to continue working there.
It would be nice to get - I bought NWN and both add-on extensions, and had a blast with it for over two years.
But reality today is that the battle lines is not Windows on one hand and Mac/Linux on the other, it's desktop computer versus console. And apart from a few niche genres, the consoles are winning big.
If I want to do gaming today I would not consider dual-booting, I would just get a console (a Wii and/or DS2 is on the horizon for me; perhaps after the holidays).
The question becomes if the spammers filling in captcha's for blog comments will win or lose over the spammers creating fake blogs. Will some spammers (not the sharpest knives in the drawer) end up paying one set of people doing captchas for new blogs and another set to junk their own blogs by choking them with fake comments?
In any case, the economy of spamming changes fundamentally once it's no longer cost free to do.
We got paid nothing during our five years of graduate school. We got paid nothing during our five year-year post-doc. We certainly don't get rich running a lab. Why shouldn't we make money off of something we spent years of our lives working on?
Last time I looked (like on my monthly statement), a post-doc is a salaried position, and pretty well paid too.
In Sweden, doctoral students are paid a real salary, since, after all, they are doing research and teaching. The salary isn't all that high - they're doing it under close supervision after all - but certainly livable.
For all the kvetching, a researcher in the sciences is not poor. Please take a comparison to most normal jobs. And if you want to make lots of money instead, why not just go into industry then?