My wet dream is for Pentax to come out with a DSLR (or rangefinder-style body) in the format and styling of the ME/ME Super. Bonus points for a BW only sensor (you gain another stop or so that way). That and one of the three pancakes and I have my second camera.
I'm happy to say I carry and use a cellphone camera as well:) Not as happy with the image quality of course, but as you say, at times it's the best tool for the job.
One guy on here actually claims that he never goes anywhere without his SLR. I'm sure that there are some people like that, but I don't think that I've ever seen an SLR out at a bar or club. You see lots of snapshot cameras, though.
That could be me in another comment. And yes, it goes with me to bars and clubs. And barbecues, year-end forgetting parties, work and after work drinks alike, and so on and so forth.
A small-sized DSLR with a prime lens is not actually all that big (I guess a Pentax K100 and the pancake 40/2.8 would be smaller than some digicams). With a small, dedicated bag to keep it in (and with a backpack along anyway, after work and so on), most people probably never realize I have a camera with me, and many who see it, especially in the dark, will assume it's a digicam.
I know some serious hikers... they buy light shoes to save a few ounces. They snap their stupid toothbrush in half to save the space.
Oh, the same kind of crowd who remove the mudguards on their bicycles to save 200g, not realizing that the rain and mud splattered on their clothes will weigh more than that. The kind of people who think that spelling "Xtreme" without an initial E is cool, not vaguely pathetic. People for whom preparing for something strenuous and dangerous is pointless unless you're being seen preparing for it. The Leet-speak scriptkiddies of the outdoor scene.
The word for that kind of people is not "serious", though the right word does start with the same letter.
no one would ever take an SLR camera on a serious hike, out to a bar, mountain biking, skiing, etc.
Mine has been coming along wherever I go and whatever I do. That does not include "serious hiking" or sports, true, but any number of barbecues, parties, barhopping evenings, festivals and other potentially messy, wet, crowded or otherwise less safe environments. They're not all that delicate machines, really.
And with the upcoming Pentax K10 (eagerly awaited) with its weather sealing, the occasional spilled beer or splash of river water will largely be a non-issue.
Most "pedestrian" jobs have plenty of local applicants already, in whatever country you're looking to move to. There is little reason for any employer to even consider an overseas applicant, considering the extra risk, hassle and paperwork involved. Also, in many countries the more common the job, the harder it is to get a permit.
Your best bet is to be specialized at something. You can be so focused and so good at a small slice of your profession that you don't really have any competition for the kind of jobs you apply to. You might have really extensive, real-world knowledge of a combination of technologies that few other do (you know both AJAX and Cobol inside and out and sideways) or you might be a clear cut over the rest in a normal area (you wrote the spec in your area). If you qualify you can search english-language postings for the area you're interested in (most countries have job boards and stuff aimed at foreign residents; look into them).
Or you can have a profession that is greatly in demand. Nursing is a very good bet, especially if you can swing the local language as well. Being a physician can work, but be alert for licensing issues - you may have to work as an overqualified lab technician for a year until you've got the local license to practice. Being a qualified teacher is another profession usually warmly welcomed.
Being an academic generally works well - get a PhD and go abroad for your post-doc. Being an academic also means you're also hooked up into the loose grapevine sending job openings and grant announcements around.
Language teaching is a time-honored way to go abroad. Some countries have formal teaching programs, bringing in people for a year or three, and many places have language schools always looking for native speakers. Unlike the real teaching jobs for qualified people, this is a pretty bad job, though with the benefit of not actually requiring too much in the way of qualifications.
There's quite a lot of academics adding information to the Wikipedia already. It's no stranger than writing a magazine article, or appearing on any kind of radio or TV show, or writing part of a primary school textbook - or writing an article in a paper encyclopedia for that matter. Reaching out to a wider audience is part and parcel of the job today, and just because you won't get a citation or a CV bullet point out of it doesn't mean it's completely worthless to you.
No, Wikipedia is not an authoritative reference, but then, neither is EB.
As much as I despise people who long for power, this is all a bit misleading. Yes, they probably have poor grasp of IT while making decisions greatly affecting the field, but are you really prepared to say that is a real problem? If it is, then you imply they should have a good knowledge of every single field their decision making touches. Every single one - law, business economy, medicine, pharmaceutics, university research, child care, road planning, ship lane ice breaking, geology, hydrology, satellite communications, nutrition, animal husbandry, criminology, emergency veterinary care, time keeping, library organization, weapon systems development,....
I would certainly love to have such polymaths in any parliament; I doubt you could find 3-400 such people that are actually competent to make decisions in any country though.
Politicians don't know the ins and outs of their field any more than CxO:s know the details of their company operations. They rely on having people that are experts in their field give the needed input. Is that perfect? No, but, unlike the alternative, it is actually possible to implement.
Countries and societies differ from one another (this is generally a good thing). So do people. Even without dissatisfaction with current events there's nothing strange about perhaps fitting in better in some other place than where you happened to be born. Just like a country boy may be happest in a major city or lifetime city dwellers can find their true life on a farm, so can people find that they're happier in some societies than in other.
Me, I have lived in several countries, and found myself happiest in one of them - and that's not where I was born and raised.
If you want to move, do move for a year or two only at first. You can't know what a place really is like to live in after just a few weeks or a month. The best way to get the opportunity is probably to get a serious education. Many countries welcome specialists like scientists or health-care workers even if they're very closed otherwise. And once you're "in" it becomes easier to stay permanently if that's what you want; a lot of countries will give you a permanent residency or similar if you've been there long enough, have steady empleoyment and so on.
In any event, this taught me me a few things: 1) always encrypt entire partitions, including one's root partition, not individual files as I had been doing, 2) don't carry one's private encryption key when crossing borders [or in any obvious way the rest of the time], 3) always keep plenty of encrypted backups in different physical locations so that you can be back up to speed as soon as possible if your laptop is taken, 4) avoid carrying electronics across the border at all if one can't afford to replace the hardware soon afterward.
Or you can just go to 5) Don't go to US conferences when you can submit to a European or Asian one instead, and if you're doing business with a US company or research collaboration with a US university, have them fly to you, not the other way around.
The rules of evolution (from Darwin) are such that all species eventually split into seperate species.
Huh? Nope. You need some reason for speciation to occur, some form of genetic isolation (which may or may not mean geographical isolation, either is possible) as well as environmental or lifestyle differences large enough to actually push the groups in different directions, for long enough time for the groups not to be able to merge again.
There is nothing inevitable about those conditions arising, and there is nothing that says this will result in two daughter species rather than one surviving group and another that just goes extinct (most niches anywhere are already fully populated after all; if "you" as a group is pushed into a new niche, you're competing with species already very well adapted to exploiting it).
Yeah, I guesstimated the distance based on the distance to Sweden and I lowballed it a bit.
On the other hand, since they're radioactive they can of course tunnel straight through instead of bothering with this great-circle business, which would put my estimate back on track.
Plenty of time to make lead-lined welcome banners anyhow.
I for one will be happy to welcome our radioactive slime-spouting overlords.
In, oh, just over twenty years, which is the time it'll take for the snails to crawl from Spain to menace Tokyo (which, as we all know, is the ultimate goal of everything radioactive, oversize or alien in this world).
This brings up an interesting line of questioning. Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use?
No. It isn't. And ReiserFS isn't trusted for widespread use either (for various reasons).
If ReiserFS ever gets in the mainline kernel you can probably trust it; it would become part of overall kernel maintenance. From developments so far (and disregarding the recent events) however, it doesn't seem likely to get into the kernal proper at any time in the foreseeable future.
Correlation is not causality. There's three factors here: drinking or not, being social or not, and making more or not.
Are you making more because you're being social? It would not be surprising - if you're social you have a greater contact network, and you make a better early impression, so you'll tend to end up in better (higher paying) positions over time.
Are you social because you make more money? Perhaps to a small degree (don't discount it entirely), but on the face of it it should not be nearly as strong an effect as the opposite - and you can argue that with money comes power and there's no need to be nice anymore so you'd be just as likely to become less social instead.
Do you drink because you're social? Quite probably. Being social means getting along with people, and that includes spending time with people and doing what they do. And not infrequently social gatherings include drinking.
On the hand, does drink promote sociality? Yes, it does. For most people, moderate amounts does loosen inhibitions and relax the mind, making alcohol the renowned social grease it is.
So you can argue that if you're more social you make more. And you become more social by drinking, and if you're more social you're more likely to drink as well.
I don't think anybody would seriously try to argue that alcohol directly is connected to earning power. I'd like to hear a coherent argument in favour though.
Also, yes, usually research is, "do whatever you were going to do, but tie it to defense somehow."
Well, no, in most places that is actually not the case. I have yet to work in any department where that country's military directly or indirectly is funding the research.
It may be somewhat department-dependent; you tend to seek grants from places where your lab has gotten grants before, and people know how to do a good application, know the ropes so to speak. So if you're working in a place where most money has come from military sources it's natural to think of that as the "natural" or main source in your field.
It's clear "national security" has become what "the internet" or "the cold war" were in their prime: an all-purpose catchphrase to get funding for any research whatsoever, no matter how tenuously connected.
Look at the two project proposals below and imagine which one will have an easier time getting funding:
"An epistemological metaanalysis of object-subject interrelations and conflict avoidance in Beowulf"
or
"An epistemological metaanalysis of object-subject interrelations and conflict avoidance in Beowulf to better understand threats to NATIONAL SECURITY"
Slashdot Mirror
My wet dream is for Pentax to come out with a DSLR (or rangefinder-style body) in the format and styling of the ME/ME Super. Bonus points for a BW only sensor (you gain another stop or so that way). That and one of the three pancakes and I have my second camera.
I'm happy to say I carry and use a cellphone camera as well :) Not as happy with the image quality of course, but as you say, at times it's the best tool for the job.
One guy on here actually claims that he never goes anywhere without his SLR. I'm sure that there are some people like that, but I don't think that I've ever seen an SLR out at a bar or club. You see lots of snapshot cameras, though.
That could be me in another comment. And yes, it goes with me to bars and clubs. And barbecues, year-end forgetting parties, work and after work drinks alike, and so on and so forth.
A small-sized DSLR with a prime lens is not actually all that big (I guess a Pentax K100 and the pancake 40/2.8 would be smaller than some digicams). With a small, dedicated bag to keep it in (and with a backpack along anyway, after work and so on), most people probably never realize I have a camera with me, and many who see it, especially in the dark, will assume it's a digicam.
I know some serious hikers... they buy light shoes to save a few ounces. They snap their stupid toothbrush in half to save the space.
Oh, the same kind of crowd who remove the mudguards on their bicycles to save 200g, not realizing that the rain and mud splattered on their clothes will weigh more than that. The kind of people who think that spelling "Xtreme" without an initial E is cool, not vaguely pathetic. People for whom preparing for something strenuous and dangerous is pointless unless you're being seen preparing for it. The Leet-speak scriptkiddies of the outdoor scene.
The word for that kind of people is not "serious", though the right word does start with the same letter.
no one would ever take an SLR camera on a serious hike, out to a bar, mountain biking, skiing, etc.
Mine has been coming along wherever I go and whatever I do. That does not include "serious hiking" or sports, true, but any number of barbecues, parties, barhopping evenings, festivals and other potentially messy, wet, crowded or otherwise less safe environments. They're not all that delicate machines, really.
And with the upcoming Pentax K10 (eagerly awaited) with its weather sealing, the occasional spilled beer or splash of river water will largely be a non-issue.
Most "pedestrian" jobs have plenty of local applicants already, in whatever country you're looking to move to. There is little reason for any employer to even consider an overseas applicant, considering the extra risk, hassle and paperwork involved. Also, in many countries the more common the job, the harder it is to get a permit.
Your best bet is to be specialized at something. You can be so focused and so good at a small slice of your profession that you don't really have any competition for the kind of jobs you apply to. You might have really extensive, real-world knowledge of a combination of technologies that few other do (you know both AJAX and Cobol inside and out and sideways) or you might be a clear cut over the rest in a normal area (you wrote the spec in your area). If you qualify you can search english-language postings for the area you're interested in (most countries have job boards and stuff aimed at foreign residents; look into them).
Or you can have a profession that is greatly in demand. Nursing is a very good bet, especially if you can swing the local language as well. Being a physician can work, but be alert for licensing issues - you may have to work as an overqualified lab technician for a year until you've got the local license to practice. Being a qualified teacher is another profession usually warmly welcomed.
Being an academic generally works well - get a PhD and go abroad for your post-doc. Being an academic also means you're also hooked up into the loose grapevine sending job openings and grant announcements around.
Language teaching is a time-honored way to go abroad. Some countries have formal teaching programs, bringing in people for a year or three, and many places have language schools always looking for native speakers. Unlike the real teaching jobs for qualified people, this is a pretty bad job, though with the benefit of not actually requiring too much in the way of qualifications.
There's quite a lot of academics adding information to the Wikipedia already. It's no stranger than writing a magazine article, or appearing on any kind of radio or TV show, or writing part of a primary school textbook - or writing an article in a paper encyclopedia for that matter. Reaching out to a wider audience is part and parcel of the job today, and just because you won't get a citation or a CV bullet point out of it doesn't mean it's completely worthless to you.
No, Wikipedia is not an authoritative reference, but then, neither is EB.
As much as I despise people who long for power, this is all a bit misleading. Yes, they probably have poor grasp of IT while making decisions greatly affecting the field, but are you really prepared to say that is a real problem? If it is, then you imply they should have a good knowledge of every single field their decision making touches. Every single one - law, business economy, medicine, pharmaceutics, university research, child care, road planning, ship lane ice breaking, geology, hydrology, satellite communications, nutrition, animal husbandry, criminology, emergency veterinary care, time keeping, library organization, weapon systems development, ....
I would certainly love to have such polymaths in any parliament; I doubt you could find 3-400 such people that are actually competent to make decisions in any country though.
Politicians don't know the ins and outs of their field any more than CxO:s know the details of their company operations. They rely on having people that are experts in their field give the needed input. Is that perfect? No, but, unlike the alternative, it is actually possible to implement.
But if the distro is THAT popular, you might wanna get an icon for Ubuntu too.
/. art department isn't what you'd call speedy.
Well, slashdot hasn't managed to update to the new Gnome icon for over two years either. The
Countries and societies differ from one another (this is generally a good thing). So do people. Even without dissatisfaction with current events there's nothing strange about perhaps fitting in better in some other place than where you happened to be born. Just like a country boy may be happest in a major city or lifetime city dwellers can find their true life on a farm, so can people find that they're happier in some societies than in other.
Me, I have lived in several countries, and found myself happiest in one of them - and that's not where I was born and raised.
If you want to move, do move for a year or two only at first. You can't know what a place really is like to live in after just a few weeks or a month. The best way to get the opportunity is probably to get a serious education. Many countries welcome specialists like scientists or health-care workers even if they're very closed otherwise. And once you're "in" it becomes easier to stay permanently if that's what you want; a lot of countries will give you a permanent residency or similar if you've been there long enough, have steady empleoyment and so on.
In any event, this taught me me a few things: 1) always encrypt entire partitions, including one's root partition, not individual files as I had been doing, 2) don't carry one's private encryption key when crossing borders [or in any obvious way the rest of the time], 3) always keep plenty of encrypted backups in different physical locations so that you can be back up to speed as soon as possible if your laptop is taken, 4) avoid carrying electronics across the border at all if one can't afford to replace the hardware soon afterward.
Or you can just go to 5) Don't go to US conferences when you can submit to a European or Asian one instead, and if you're doing business with a US company or research collaboration with a US university, have them fly to you, not the other way around.
The rules of evolution (from Darwin) are such that all species eventually split into seperate species.
Huh? Nope. You need some reason for speciation to occur, some form of genetic isolation (which may or may not mean geographical isolation, either is possible) as well as environmental or lifestyle differences large enough to actually push the groups in different directions, for long enough time for the groups not to be able to merge again.
There is nothing inevitable about those conditions arising, and there is nothing that says this will result in two daughter species rather than one surviving group and another that just goes extinct (most niches anywhere are already fully populated after all; if "you" as a group is pushed into a new niche, you're competing with species already very well adapted to exploiting it).
Since when does US care about international law?
Since you want to sell your products and services to other countries in turn.
It makes sense that the south would gain more, because I can't see how we can support that many more people in the bigger northern cities.
Tokyo metropolitan area has 35 million people and is still growing. I'd say the risk of your cities getting full is not an argument.
It's also worth pointing out that WorldNetDaily could be described as just wee bit conservative
Yes, like Charles Manson was a wee bit disturbed.
Yeah, I guesstimated the distance based on the distance to Sweden and I lowballed it a bit.
On the other hand, since they're radioactive they can of course tunnel straight through instead of bothering with this great-circle business, which would put my estimate back on track.
Plenty of time to make lead-lined welcome banners anyhow.
I for one will be happy to welcome our radioactive slime-spouting overlords.
In, oh, just over twenty years, which is the time it'll take for the snails to crawl from Spain to menace Tokyo (which, as we all know, is the ultimate goal of everything radioactive, oversize or alien in this world).
This brings up an interesting line of questioning. Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use?
No. It isn't. And ReiserFS isn't trusted for widespread use either (for various reasons).
If ReiserFS ever gets in the mainline kernel you can probably trust it; it would become part of overall kernel maintenance. From developments so far (and disregarding the recent events) however, it doesn't seem likely to get into the kernal proper at any time in the foreseeable future.
People need to remember that there are human lives involved here. There are also children in the mix. This is NOT a tragedy for the Reiser filesystem.
One does not preclude the other.
Correlation is not causality. There's three factors here: drinking or not, being social or not, and making more or not.
Are you making more because you're being social? It would not be surprising - if you're social you have a greater contact network, and you make a better early impression, so you'll tend to end up in better (higher paying) positions over time.
Are you social because you make more money? Perhaps to a small degree (don't discount it entirely), but on the face of it it should not be nearly as strong an effect as the opposite - and you can argue that with money comes power and there's no need to be nice anymore so you'd be just as likely to become less social instead.
Do you drink because you're social? Quite probably. Being social means getting along with people, and that includes spending time with people and doing what they do. And not infrequently social gatherings include drinking.
On the hand, does drink promote sociality? Yes, it does. For most people, moderate amounts does loosen inhibitions and relax the mind, making alcohol the renowned social grease it is.
So you can argue that if you're more social you make more. And you become more social by drinking, and if you're more social you're more likely to drink as well.
I don't think anybody would seriously try to argue that alcohol directly is connected to earning power. I'd like to hear a coherent argument in favour though.
"It's spelled Uppsala."
Or Upsala. Either is fine (Upsala is the older spelling).
Why this segregative midset?
Segregating? You're welcome to post and view videos on Bubblare any time you want!
Also, yes, usually research is, "do whatever you were going to do, but tie it to defense somehow."
Well, no, in most places that is actually not the case. I have yet to work in any department where that country's military directly or indirectly is funding the research.
It may be somewhat department-dependent; you tend to seek grants from places where your lab has gotten grants before, and people know how to do a good application, know the ropes so to speak. So if you're working in a place where most money has come from military sources it's natural to think of that as the "natural" or main source in your field.
A bit of an unfair example (any true slashdotter care to decode the first bit?), but a good point nonetheless.
Unfair? Decode? What, you think there is any actual meaning embedded in that string of words I put together?
It's clear "national security" has become what "the internet" or "the cold war" were in their prime: an all-purpose catchphrase to get funding for any research whatsoever, no matter how tenuously connected.
Look at the two project proposals below and imagine which one will have an easier time getting funding:
"An epistemological metaanalysis of object-subject interrelations and conflict avoidance in Beowulf"
or
"An epistemological metaanalysis of object-subject interrelations and conflict avoidance in Beowulf to better understand threats to NATIONAL SECURITY"