I split from the conservative movement a long time ago due to issues like this. Truthfully, I've not made my mind up about abortion, because I can't objectively nail down when a child should be considered a human life.
To be perfectly scientifically pedantic, there is no question about this -- it is a live human organism at the moment of conception. That single cell is most certainly human, and it is most certainly life -- that it has a very high probability of an imminent natural death makes no scientific difference to this. Of course, the pedantic scientific answer probably isn't practically very useful. But remembering it should clarify that the question isn't scientific -- it's not actually "when is it objectively life" but the definitively subjective question "when is it worthy of our protection". As soon as a child is "worthy of your protection", I imagine it is harder for an individual to personally justify an a termination -- no matter how distressing or planned-future-threatening bringing the child to term is, for the deemed-worthy child it is certainly a matter of life and death.
The more complex question -- when should "society" deem a child worthy of protection against its mother's will is yet more subjective. There are occasions when society chooses to allow innocent people to die -- sending soldiers into a foreign war for instance. (And certainly there are some differing subjective views about the last one!) Is "a clear cut demonstration of the rights and self-determination of women" sufficient cause to allow even deemed-worthy lives to be sacrificed? Again, a question that is by definition subjective.
I'm not giving you an answer (though of course I personally have an opinion), but even if I'm not giving you a "moral of the story", the lesson of the story is that science won't get you out of this one -- you're going to have to make a decision about what you value. And politics and democracy will certainly come into play about what society decides it values.
That's a nice story, but unfortunately, it IS a civil process. It doesn't matter what it was 2000 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5 years ago. It doesn't matter who 'invented' the word "married", or what it meant to Jesus, the planters peanut guy, or whoever.
What is relevant is what it is right now. As far as the 'church' is concerned, it's just a word. Legally it is a whole other issue which has nothing to do with the Church.
Actually that's not true. Legally it is seen as both a religious and a civil rite, and that's where the tension lies. Legislation in most countries specifically recognises the right of religious ministers to perform legal marriages (without requiring a separate "celebrant" licence from the government). Even the US, which legally recognises foreign marriages, thus *legally recognises* foreign religious ministers as empowered to conduct marriages by virtue of their religious office. Thus *today*, *legally* it is an issue that certainly does have something to do with the Church.
In fact, most churches only object to homosexual civil unions, except that equality politics would then push for them to be called "marriages". The issue being that so far as the church is concerned, marriage is specifically a religious sacrament, and a civil ceremony (even between a heterosexual couple) is viewed as less than a Christian marriage. The Christian marriage is between three parties: the husband, the wife, and God -- "...therefore what *God* has joined let no man separate..." whereas a civil ceremony is simply a civil ceremony. Churches haven't objected too loudly about heterosexual civil unions being called "marriages" because historically most civil unions were still religious (marriages at sea were not necessarily atheist) and because they would like to attract the couple into the church and turn it into a marriage. But that's not really possible if the civil union is opposed to church law (homosexual, close-relation, multiple partner, or various other banned unions).
Put it this way. Of all alternate Earths, the surviving ones (and, if you are reading this, you are in one of those) are the ones that never managed to produce one.
Quite possible that Cardinality(all alternate earths) == Cardinality(the surviving ones) == 1. And, pretty much by definition, we have no empirical evidence that there are any more. In which case it's a bit of a bugger if you go and remove this one from the second set.
But really the ideal job is the one that's so much fun you don't even care about where the job ends and the personal life starts. And the other way around as well. Unfortunately there aren't enough jobs like that, leaving many people stuck on the 'the ideal job is the one I can forget about when I get home'-situation. But that's just because you haven't found the right job yet. Or because you've simply given up.
Or because you have a child or a spouse, and you damn well do care that you spend some time interacting with them regardless of how much fun you might have doing other things. "Work/life balance" isn't about "work/fun balance", it's about having responsibilities to other people than just yourself and your boss.
Why exactly is that unethical? A double-blind study doesn't mean you have to test on an unsuspecting public. It just means neither the "patients" or the people directly tending to them don't know who got the real vaccine. You can do this with volunteers..
Actually, there have been a few. For example, there was a recent controlled trial of an HIV vaccine in Africa. However, these kinds of trial are potentially unethical. For instance consider a hypothetical trial of an HIV vaccine. Having received the placebo, members of the control group might become less careful about sexual safety than if they had not taken part at all, thinking "there's a good chance I'm immune to HIV now". This behaviour change could cause some of them to contract HIV where they would not have if they had not taken part. If an experimental design is likely to lead to significant harm for some of its volunteers (regardless of whether that harm is through personal choices), it's an experiment than can be accused of being unethical.
Great job, AC, summarizing that summary and all. I can see your MIT education really pays for itself.
Oh dear. You've just made me feel that little bit sadder and geekier today for knowing where that reference is from. And you still haven't got me that beer you owe me.
Computers can NOT replace humans, no matter how advanced they are. Another step in the *wrong* direction - towards unwilling submissive *mindwash*.
What are you talking about? Slashdot members 839459 through to 1627286 have already been successfully replaced by Perl scripts auto-posting Soviet Russia jokes, and nobody here's spotted anything wrong.
As a writing instructor, let me put it this way: I very, very seldom see a paper with misspellings and grammar mistakes that is nonetheless a well-written paper. It happens, but not often. Grammar and spelling mistakes are a symptom of sloppiness, as are poor reasoning, lack of organization, and lack of adequate support. If you can't be bothered to remember primary-school English, it is not likely that you are willing to master rhetorical structure.
When we read a paper, we actually don't care what you're saying. There usually isn't an "interesting" score. In my case, I evaluate on three, ten-point, holistic scales: Content (which basically refers to amount and quality of support), Organization (rhetorical structure), and Mechanics (yes, grammar, vocabulary, adhering to the style guide, etc.). I do this so I don't have people claiming that their hopeless muddle of a paper got marked down for "obscure grammar errors (which no one in the real world even knows about) and simple typos".
Guess what? Writing is not speaking. Those "obscure rules" are, indeed, usually only applied in writing. I ramble, swear, and disregard the conventions of "proper" English when speaking. But that is because those rules do not really apply in that sociocultural setting. In formal writing--you know, what you're being taught in writing class--they matter a great deal. If you don't follow them, you sound like an idiot, and no one will listen to you.
Why are these "obscure" rules used as a "canary test" of your intelligence and noteworthiness?
Because of what I wrote in my first paragraph. Intelligent, methodical, and rational people care enough to follow them.
I'm sorry, but that's how it works in the "real world".
Analysis report: - Excessive use of parenthesis. - Excessive use of "quoted phrases" suggesting an unrigorous approach to terminology - Rhetorical question and its answer incorrectly separated by paragraph breaks. - Incorrect capitalisation of non-proper nouns. - But no bloody clue whether what you're actually saying has any intellectual value because I am a computer.
Overall grade: D.
Thank you for using the Electronic Assessment Tool for Standard Higher Instruction Tests.
If I recall, China's People's Liberation Army is part-owner of Lenovo.
Exactly why do the Aussies thing there won't be back doors built into the hardware or BIOS?
Newsflash: ASIO investigations have revealed that China's latest nuclear missile design was deviously stolen from the hacked notebook of Josh Simpkins, a fourteen year-old student at Inala State High School. Chinese authorities strenuously deny the accusations, although one source who refused to be named did say "The new design is ideally suited to attacking the little green aliens from Zebulon from his English essays." George Bungle, the physics teacher at Inala State High School blamed the lax security regime. "This was bound to happen eventually. We've had endless problems with Josh throwing missiles in class. It was only a matter of time before one of them ended up in the wrong hands."
Why would anyone issue a challenge like that over netbooks for students? Unhackable? Bullshit! Some hacker out there is going to take that as a challenge and hack into the thing in, I'm guessing, less than a week. And some poor student is going to have his netbook hacked because some nimrod decided to talk smack about how awesome-sauce these netbooks are and described it a "unhackable." Unreal...
And nobody is likely to care because the machine can get re-imaged with the standard software set-up very quickly and he of course is backing his schoolwork (which is the only valuable data on the device so far as the school is concerned) onto external media. This isn't a machine for doing your online banking we're talking about here; it's a machine for doing schoolwork on.
This is the same govt. that put a guy in jail on child pornography charges for having a Simpson's parody porno on his computer.
Actually it's the "twelve good people of the jury" that people into jail. Australia has a fair degree of separation between the political and judicial systems. Political interference in the decision to prosecute is also usually frowned upon here.
why isn't microsoft doing everything possible to destroy linux? Is this a "saved apple" moment all over again??
Not quite. Saving Apple was (presumably) to help stave off the anti-trust suits against Microsoft by preserving a weak but "potentially credible" competitor. Helping Linux seems much more straightforward: Linux's overlap with Windows is much smaller than its overlap with HP, IBP, and Sun/Oracle. So, Microsoft might well help Linux to weaken HP, IBM, and Sun/Oracle, reckoning that Linux is unlikely itself ever to be a credible threat to Microsoft's own sales. Which (Linux-cheerleading aside) is an understandable assessment as most commercial purchasers tend to run different software on Linux machines than on Windows machines, and it is more often the software decision that drives the hardware purchase (rather than the other way around). So, Microsoft doesn't primarily need to "compete Windows with Linux", they need to "compete SQL-Server with Oracle", "Exchange with Lotus Notes", "IIS with Apache and JBoss", etc.
Sometimes it feels like for every one hobby project I take on there are nine more that die at some point in development. Perhaps today we bet on sure things -- like incremental developments on things already existing -- instead of investing our time in risky ventures? Possibly because development and production of an idea is a costly venture with many people needed along the way. It gets harder to be a one stop shop as we're trained to be specialized and therefore our failures become more costly. Our economic system has evolved to reward only those that succeed and really really punish those that don't.
I'm not so sure -- the problem has long been apparent in infrastructure. For instance, today, the US's plans for high speed rail between a few cities, and the UK's plans for a line across London and a partial high-speed upgrade to a main line sound like "terribly expensive ventures -- no private company could afford it and we're not really sure the government can either". In the 19th century, private companies very rapidly built the entire railway network we have today (Actually, if you're reading this in the UK, they built more rail than we currently have today, because the Beeching report had a lot of it ripped up mid-20th-century.)
Similarly, you could see the same issue with nuclear power. The UK is facing the costly problem of how to replace nuclear power stations that are reaching end-of-life. They're not sure they can afford it. And yet the governments of the 1960s had no problem affording the original reactors in the first place. (But we're supposedly so much richer now.)
If you are particularly tied to "Scrum" as a methodology, and want to bet your house on it, then your ScrumMaster should be someone who knows Scrum inside and out. However, if your intention is to be actually agile, rather than legalistic and restrictive, though, then it's usually good advice to put someone well-respected (eg, the team lead) in the position of holding the team to account, rather than getting an outsider just because they have the right keyword ("Scrum") on their CV -- external keyword-hiring tends to produce disenchantment as people feel that the organisation is not rewarding ability and effort (by promoting internally) but is putting a glass ceiling above them ("we're hiring from outside because you do not have experience of the next job up the tree").
This is why the interface should be distinct from the core. They should just focus on writing a good word processing engine, and let others design user interfaces for it.
It's open source, so you are of course welcome to take the word processing engine from it and stick a different user interface on it if you like -- as, indeed, IBM's Lotus have
When you file a suit, you have the option of asking for a jury trial if you pay an extra fee. If either party requests a jury, then you get a jury.
They have a similar system in some other countries: it depends on which of the price options you pick. The cheapest gets you time in front of a judge, the middle package gets you a jury, and the with premium package they skip the whole trial malarkey and go straight to breaking the other guy's legs.
In Australia I paid 1% of my income as a tax, or 1.5% when my income hit 45,000 a year. Alternatively, I could opt in for private coverage, and pay as much or as little as I liked, and not have that tax.
"Private" health insurance in Australia is actually mostly publicly funded -- 30% rebate on the premium, plus Medicare (the taxpayer) pays 75% of the list fee for any private operation anyway, plus the public system indirectly ends up paying most of the private system's training costs (very significant) and a fair chunk of its infrastructure development costs. Even with all that subsidy, to the point that the taxpayer is possibly paying more per private patient than per public patient if you consider the full economic cost, private health insurance still struggles to compete. As a taxpayer, you actually pay the Medicare levy (1.5%) even if you have private insurance, but if you don't have private insurance, there's a penalty 1% surcharge if you are over a certain income level. Worst of all, however, the "private" system takes the pressure off improving the public system, as "if you don't like it go private" gets parroted as an excuse, and those with the political weight to actually force any change all have private insurance for snob value and so don't care so much about the public system.
The Australian experience seems to be that publicly subsidised private health insurance is the worst of both worlds -- the price gets set by what the market is willing to pay, the complicated (expensive) cases often get passed back to the public system anyway (as they go over the limit the insurance covers, or as the private clinic can't actually deal with complex cases), and the massive taxpayer subsidy goes to inefficiency and profit. There's no incentive to increase efficiency when you can just hit up the government for a bigger subsidy, and the incentive to improve the public system disappears (it'd just mean more people drop their private insurance until the system is just as strained again).
I think I speak for all of Slashdot when I say that the answer to his question is: 1. Open source rules 2. Send every RIAA executive to burn in hell 3. Make an angry post about how hell is an unscientific concept 4. In Soviet Russia, mistakes make universities 5. ??? 6. Profit.
I must say this is about the best summary of quite a few business changes since the Internet came along:
"What happens when you're selling bottled water in the desert and it starts to rain." - Nesson.
You brand it with a French name and double the price.
1. First of all, it isn't up to the judge to preemptively prohibit an affirmative defense.
Hang on... IANAL, but I'm pretty sure the judge is one. If the judge has ruled this way, then until we see an appeal get up, I think we should assume the judge can make this ruling after all.
And what the hell is he even talking about? There haven't been any advances in "machine intelligence" that should make *anyone* worried, unless your job requires very little intelligence and no actual decision making.
Ssshhh, this is Slashdot! You've just scared everybody witless!
In my opinion, two issues compound each other. The first is that because functional programming is seen as very pure and simple, there is a myth that Scheme programs do not need much documentation. The second is that Scheme functions do not declare return or argument types. This means that in order to read someone else's code, if structures of any complexity are used, you can have to manually walk the full call depth of each function, possibly many calls deep, just to know what kind of structure it returns in the end. That makes it painful to work with someone else's code, compounding the other well-known problem with computer science education: in the course, you're usually writing your own code from scrach; in the real world you usually have to deal with code your colleagues (or even third party projects) have written.
There are many levels of time people put into games. How exactly do you definite 'casual'? If you look at it from the MMO perspective (wow for example) do you count a casual gamer as someone who doesnt raid? how about someone who only spends time in the game for raiding and not much else? What about if the non-raider spends more time in game than the raider, which one is casual?
In my personal opinion, if the idea of paying a monthly subscription for a game appealed to you in the first place, then you are probably not a casual gamer.
No, you chopped most of them, selecting a segment fragment without its surrounding clauses, in what now seems to be a deliberate attempt to adjust the meaning for your own rhetorical ends. The remainder of your latest post is similarly based on assertions that I made subtly different claims than I did, and even a sly accusation that I'm lying about my job. How very infantile. Frankly I can't be bothered to argue about different claims than those I made, and I certainly can't be bothered with an infantile debate about whether my job is what I say it is, so I'm just going to wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours. Reply if you like, but I won't be reading it (I'm sorry if this sounds rude but my patience has run out and you have now fallen foul of my bozo filter) and given the story is so old and this is so deep in the threads I doubt anybody else would read it either.
Slashdot Mirror
I split from the conservative movement a long time ago due to issues like this. Truthfully, I've not made my mind up about abortion, because I can't objectively nail down when a child should be considered a human life.
To be perfectly scientifically pedantic, there is no question about this -- it is a live human organism at the moment of conception. That single cell is most certainly human, and it is most certainly life -- that it has a very high probability of an imminent natural death makes no scientific difference to this. Of course, the pedantic scientific answer probably isn't practically very useful. But remembering it should clarify that the question isn't scientific -- it's not actually "when is it objectively life" but the definitively subjective question "when is it worthy of our protection". As soon as a child is "worthy of your protection", I imagine it is harder for an individual to personally justify an a termination -- no matter how distressing or planned-future-threatening bringing the child to term is, for the deemed-worthy child it is certainly a matter of life and death.
The more complex question -- when should "society" deem a child worthy of protection against its mother's will is yet more subjective. There are occasions when society chooses to allow innocent people to die -- sending soldiers into a foreign war for instance. (And certainly there are some differing subjective views about the last one!) Is "a clear cut demonstration of the rights and self-determination of women" sufficient cause to allow even deemed-worthy lives to be sacrificed? Again, a question that is by definition subjective.
I'm not giving you an answer (though of course I personally have an opinion), but even if I'm not giving you a "moral of the story", the lesson of the story is that science won't get you out of this one -- you're going to have to make a decision about what you value. And politics and democracy will certainly come into play about what society decides it values.
That's a nice story, but unfortunately, it IS a civil process. It doesn't matter what it was 2000 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5 years ago. It doesn't matter who 'invented' the word "married", or what it meant to Jesus, the planters peanut guy, or whoever.
What is relevant is what it is right now. As far as the 'church' is concerned, it's just a word. Legally it is a whole other issue which has nothing to do with the Church.
Actually that's not true. Legally it is seen as both a religious and a civil rite, and that's where the tension lies. Legislation in most countries specifically recognises the right of religious ministers to perform legal marriages (without requiring a separate "celebrant" licence from the government). Even the US, which legally recognises foreign marriages, thus *legally recognises* foreign religious ministers as empowered to conduct marriages by virtue of their religious office. Thus *today*, *legally* it is an issue that certainly does have something to do with the Church.
In fact, most churches only object to homosexual civil unions, except that equality politics would then push for them to be called "marriages". The issue being that so far as the church is concerned, marriage is specifically a religious sacrament, and a civil ceremony (even between a heterosexual couple) is viewed as less than a Christian marriage. The Christian marriage is between three parties: the husband, the wife, and God -- "...therefore what *God* has joined let no man separate..." whereas a civil ceremony is simply a civil ceremony. Churches haven't objected too loudly about heterosexual civil unions being called "marriages" because historically most civil unions were still religious (marriages at sea were not necessarily atheist) and because they would like to attract the couple into the church and turn it into a marriage. But that's not really possible if the civil union is opposed to church law (homosexual, close-relation, multiple partner, or various other banned unions).
Put it this way. Of all alternate Earths, the surviving ones (and, if you are reading this, you are in one of those) are the ones that never managed to produce one.
Quite possible that Cardinality(all alternate earths) == Cardinality(the surviving ones) == 1. And, pretty much by definition, we have no empirical evidence that there are any more. In which case it's a bit of a bugger if you go and remove this one from the second set.
But really the ideal job is the one that's so much fun you don't even care about where the job ends and the personal life starts. And the other way around as well. Unfortunately there aren't enough jobs like that, leaving many people stuck on the 'the ideal job is the one I can forget about when I get home'-situation. But that's just because you haven't found the right job yet. Or because you've simply given up.
Or because you have a child or a spouse, and you damn well do care that you spend some time interacting with them regardless of how much fun you might have doing other things. "Work/life balance" isn't about "work/fun balance", it's about having responsibilities to other people than just yourself and your boss.
Why exactly is that unethical? A double-blind study doesn't mean you have to test on an unsuspecting public. It just means neither the "patients" or the people directly tending to them don't know who got the real vaccine. You can do this with volunteers..
Actually, there have been a few. For example, there was a recent controlled trial of an HIV vaccine in Africa. However, these kinds of trial are potentially unethical. For instance consider a hypothetical trial of an HIV vaccine. Having received the placebo, members of the control group might become less careful about sexual safety than if they had not taken part at all, thinking "there's a good chance I'm immune to HIV now". This behaviour change could cause some of them to contract HIV where they would not have if they had not taken part. If an experimental design is likely to lead to significant harm for some of its volunteers (regardless of whether that harm is through personal choices), it's an experiment than can be accused of being unethical.
Great job, AC, summarizing that summary and all. I can see your MIT education really pays for itself.
Oh dear. You've just made me feel that little bit sadder and geekier today for knowing where that reference is from. And you still haven't got me that beer you owe me.
Computers can NOT replace humans, no matter how advanced they are. Another step in the *wrong* direction - towards unwilling submissive *mindwash*.
What are you talking about? Slashdot members 839459 through to 1627286 have already been successfully replaced by Perl scripts auto-posting Soviet Russia jokes, and nobody here's spotted anything wrong.
As a writing instructor, let me put it this way: I very, very seldom see a paper with misspellings and grammar mistakes that is nonetheless a well-written paper. It happens, but not often. Grammar and spelling mistakes are a symptom of sloppiness, as are poor reasoning, lack of organization, and lack of adequate support. If you can't be bothered to remember primary-school English, it is not likely that you are willing to master rhetorical structure.
When we read a paper, we actually don't care what you're saying. There usually isn't an "interesting" score. In my case, I evaluate on three, ten-point, holistic scales: Content (which basically refers to amount and quality of support), Organization (rhetorical structure), and Mechanics (yes, grammar, vocabulary, adhering to the style guide, etc.). I do this so I don't have people claiming that their hopeless muddle of a paper got marked down for "obscure grammar errors (which no one in the real world even knows about) and simple typos".
Guess what? Writing is not speaking. Those "obscure rules" are, indeed, usually only applied in writing. I ramble, swear, and disregard the conventions of "proper" English when speaking. But that is because those rules do not really apply in that sociocultural setting. In formal writing--you know, what you're being taught in writing class--they matter a great deal. If you don't follow them, you sound like an idiot, and no one will listen to you.
Why are these "obscure" rules used as a "canary test" of your intelligence and noteworthiness?
Because of what I wrote in my first paragraph. Intelligent, methodical, and rational people care enough to follow them.
I'm sorry, but that's how it works in the "real world".
Analysis report:
- Excessive use of parenthesis.
- Excessive use of "quoted phrases" suggesting an unrigorous approach to terminology
- Rhetorical question and its answer incorrectly separated by paragraph breaks.
- Incorrect capitalisation of non-proper nouns.
- But no bloody clue whether what you're actually saying has any intellectual value because I am a computer.
Overall grade: D.
Thank you for using the Electronic Assessment Tool for Standard Higher Instruction Tests.
If I recall, China's People's Liberation Army is part-owner of Lenovo.
Exactly why do the Aussies thing there won't be back doors built into the hardware or BIOS?
Newsflash: ASIO investigations have revealed that China's latest nuclear missile design was deviously stolen from the hacked notebook of Josh Simpkins, a fourteen year-old student at Inala State High School. Chinese authorities strenuously deny the accusations, although one source who refused to be named did say "The new design is ideally suited to attacking the little green aliens from Zebulon from his English essays." George Bungle, the physics teacher at Inala State High School blamed the lax security regime. "This was bound to happen eventually. We've had endless problems with Josh throwing missiles in class. It was only a matter of time before one of them ended up in the wrong hands."
Why would anyone issue a challenge like that over netbooks for students? Unhackable? Bullshit! Some hacker out there is going to take that as a challenge and hack into the thing in, I'm guessing, less than a week. And some poor student is going to have his netbook hacked because some nimrod decided to talk smack about how awesome-sauce these netbooks are and described it a "unhackable." Unreal...
And nobody is likely to care because the machine can get re-imaged with the standard software set-up very quickly and he of course is backing his schoolwork (which is the only valuable data on the device so far as the school is concerned) onto external media. This isn't a machine for doing your online banking we're talking about here; it's a machine for doing schoolwork on.
This is the same govt. that put a guy in jail on child pornography charges for having a Simpson's parody porno on his computer.
Actually it's the "twelve good people of the jury" that people into jail. Australia has a fair degree of separation between the political and judicial systems. Political interference in the decision to prosecute is also usually frowned upon here.
why isn't microsoft doing everything possible to destroy linux? Is this a "saved apple" moment all over again??
Not quite. Saving Apple was (presumably) to help stave off the anti-trust suits against Microsoft by preserving a weak but "potentially credible" competitor. Helping Linux seems much more straightforward: Linux's overlap with Windows is much smaller than its overlap with HP, IBP, and Sun/Oracle. So, Microsoft might well help Linux to weaken HP, IBM, and Sun/Oracle, reckoning that Linux is unlikely itself ever to be a credible threat to Microsoft's own sales. Which (Linux-cheerleading aside) is an understandable assessment as most commercial purchasers tend to run different software on Linux machines than on Windows machines, and it is more often the software decision that drives the hardware purchase (rather than the other way around). So, Microsoft doesn't primarily need to "compete Windows with Linux", they need to "compete SQL-Server with Oracle", "Exchange with Lotus Notes", "IIS with Apache and JBoss", etc.
Sometimes it feels like for every one hobby project I take on there are nine more that die at some point in development. Perhaps today we bet on sure things -- like incremental developments on things already existing -- instead of investing our time in risky ventures? Possibly because development and production of an idea is a costly venture with many people needed along the way. It gets harder to be a one stop shop as we're trained to be specialized and therefore our failures become more costly. Our economic system has evolved to reward only those that succeed and really really punish those that don't.
I'm not so sure -- the problem has long been apparent in infrastructure. For instance, today, the US's plans for high speed rail between a few cities, and the UK's plans for a line across London and a partial high-speed upgrade to a main line sound like "terribly expensive ventures -- no private company could afford it and we're not really sure the government can either". In the 19th century, private companies very rapidly built the entire railway network we have today (Actually, if you're reading this in the UK, they built more rail than we currently have today, because the Beeching report had a lot of it ripped up mid-20th-century.)
Similarly, you could see the same issue with nuclear power. The UK is facing the costly problem of how to replace nuclear power stations that are reaching end-of-life. They're not sure they can afford it. And yet the governments of the 1960s had no problem affording the original reactors in the first place. (But we're supposedly so much richer now.)
If you are particularly tied to "Scrum" as a methodology, and want to bet your house on it, then your ScrumMaster should be someone who knows Scrum inside and out. However, if your intention is to be actually agile, rather than legalistic and restrictive, though, then it's usually good advice to put someone well-respected (eg, the team lead) in the position of holding the team to account, rather than getting an outsider just because they have the right keyword ("Scrum") on their CV -- external keyword-hiring tends to produce disenchantment as people feel that the organisation is not rewarding ability and effort (by promoting internally) but is putting a glass ceiling above them ("we're hiring from outside because you do not have experience of the next job up the tree").
Just IMHO though
This is why the interface should be distinct from the core. They should just focus on writing a good word processing engine, and let others design user interfaces for it.
It's open source, so you are of course welcome to take the word processing engine from it and stick a different user interface on it if you like -- as, indeed, IBM's Lotus have
When you file a suit, you have the option of asking for a jury trial if you pay an extra fee. If either party requests a jury, then you get a jury.
They have a similar system in some other countries: it depends on which of the price options you pick. The cheapest gets you time in front of a judge, the middle package gets you a jury, and the with premium package they skip the whole trial malarkey and go straight to breaking the other guy's legs.
In Australia I paid 1% of my income as a tax, or 1.5% when my income hit 45,000 a year. Alternatively, I could opt in for private coverage, and pay as much or as little as I liked, and not have that tax.
"Private" health insurance in Australia is actually mostly publicly funded -- 30% rebate on the premium, plus Medicare (the taxpayer) pays 75% of the list fee for any private operation anyway, plus the public system indirectly ends up paying most of the private system's training costs (very significant) and a fair chunk of its infrastructure development costs. Even with all that subsidy, to the point that the taxpayer is possibly paying more per private patient than per public patient if you consider the full economic cost, private health insurance still struggles to compete. As a taxpayer, you actually pay the Medicare levy (1.5%) even if you have private insurance, but if you don't have private insurance, there's a penalty 1% surcharge if you are over a certain income level. Worst of all, however, the "private" system takes the pressure off improving the public system, as "if you don't like it go private" gets parroted as an excuse, and those with the political weight to actually force any change all have private insurance for snob value and so don't care so much about the public system.
The Australian experience seems to be that publicly subsidised private health insurance is the worst of both worlds -- the price gets set by what the market is willing to pay, the complicated (expensive) cases often get passed back to the public system anyway (as they go over the limit the insurance covers, or as the private clinic can't actually deal with complex cases), and the massive taxpayer subsidy goes to inefficiency and profit. There's no incentive to increase efficiency when you can just hit up the government for a bigger subsidy, and the incentive to improve the public system disappears (it'd just mean more people drop their private insurance until the system is just as strained again).
I think I speak for all of Slashdot when I say that the answer to his question is:
1. Open source rules
2. Send every RIAA executive to burn in hell
3. Make an angry post about how hell is an unscientific concept
4. In Soviet Russia, mistakes make universities
5. ???
6. Profit.
I must say this is about the best summary of quite a few business changes since the Internet came along: "What happens when you're selling bottled water in the desert and it starts to rain." - Nesson.
You brand it with a French name and double the price.
1. First of all, it isn't up to the judge to preemptively prohibit an affirmative defense.
Hang on ... IANAL, but I'm pretty sure the judge is one. If the judge has ruled this way, then until we see an appeal get up, I think we should assume the judge can make this ruling after all.
And what the hell is he even talking about? There haven't been any advances in "machine intelligence" that should make *anyone* worried, unless your job requires very little intelligence and no actual decision making.
Ssshhh, this is Slashdot! You've just scared everybody witless!
Are they talking all men or just some men? I would be fairly shocked if they weren't already smarter than at least some people.
Well, they waste less time on Slashdot, so I guess that's already one victory chalked up to the machines.
In my opinion, two issues compound each other. The first is that because functional programming is seen as very pure and simple, there is a myth that Scheme programs do not need much documentation. The second is that Scheme functions do not declare return or argument types. This means that in order to read someone else's code, if structures of any complexity are used, you can have to manually walk the full call depth of each function, possibly many calls deep, just to know what kind of structure it returns in the end. That makes it painful to work with someone else's code, compounding the other well-known problem with computer science education: in the course, you're usually writing your own code from scrach; in the real world you usually have to deal with code your colleagues (or even third party projects) have written.
There are many levels of time people put into games. How exactly do you definite 'casual'? If you look at it from the MMO perspective (wow for example) do you count a casual gamer as someone who doesnt raid? how about someone who only spends time in the game for raiding and not much else? What about if the non-raider spends more time in game than the raider, which one is casual?
In my personal opinion, if the idea of paying a monthly subscription for a game appealed to you in the first place, then you are probably not a casual gamer.
All I hear is FUD
Actually, I quoted your exact words.
No, you chopped most of them, selecting a segment fragment without its surrounding clauses, in what now seems to be a deliberate attempt to adjust the meaning for your own rhetorical ends. The remainder of your latest post is similarly based on assertions that I made subtly different claims than I did, and even a sly accusation that I'm lying about my job. How very infantile. Frankly I can't be bothered to argue about different claims than those I made, and I certainly can't be bothered with an infantile debate about whether my job is what I say it is, so I'm just going to wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours. Reply if you like, but I won't be reading it (I'm sorry if this sounds rude but my patience has run out and you have now fallen foul of my bozo filter) and given the story is so old and this is so deep in the threads I doubt anybody else would read it either.