That sounds great on paper. But in reality how are you going to enforce that payment for pollution damage with a small government with no teeth? Pollution damage is not going to be counted into the cost of producing a thing unless someone is there to enforce that cost. Left to it's own devices, the market doesn't end up measuring that cost because it takes too long to manifest. Where is the funding going to come from to engage in scientific research to figure out that, for example, a rise in a particular disease in a city is being caused by the pollutants coming from a particular factory?
Yes, I agree that the path to less pollution is to actually attach an accurate price tag to it so it appears in the ledgers of companies. I don't agree that that would happen in a lassiez-faire market, though. Long term effects are not acurately reflected in the finances of a typical company.
Speaking of hobby code written at home, the poster said:
[...] and that probably won't be as well refined as the stuff you do professionally.
That would depend on the code standards where you work. At a previous place of employment I was forced to write code in such a manner that I would be embarassed to show it to a potential employer as an example of "my" work,. In my opinion, work that was truly mine wouldn't have looked so awful as what the coding standards forced me to put out at that job. (The coding standards had been written at a time when a lot of the coders in the company had just switched to C from COBOL and FORTRAN, and were displeased with the shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-ness of C. So they wrote standards that tried to make their C code look a lot like the languages they were used to, instead of letting C look like it's supposed to. They also disallowed certain constructs that existed in C but not in their former languages. (such as the trinary operator: expr ? expr : expr,
turning the elegant "printf( "This location contains %d %s.", numP, numP > 2 ? "pallets" : "pallet" );" Into the unnecessarily verbose: "if( numP>2 ) printf( "This location contains %d pallets", numP); else printf( "This location contains 1 pallet");
Anyway, that rambled a bit. The point is that becuase of company coding practices, prefessionally produced code is not really indicative of the programmer's own style, and that can be detrimental as well as beneficial, depending on the standards in question.
The original point was to find a good potential programmer employee, what should be asked in the interview. Ideally you want someone who even if they didn't do if for a job, would still be writing code anyway because they like it. The question about stuff written outside of work is a test to see if you have that sort of person in front of you. I wouldn't trust a programmer who does no programming for himself on his own time, just as I wouldn't trust an auto mechanic who has never popped the hood of his own car.
Do you think a doctor likes examining sick people after work?
Do you think a doctor that donates some of his time to a charity is doing so because he is incompetent and can't hold down a real job? That was the sort of implication put forward by the grandparent of your post, but for programmers instead of doctors. Do you think a scientist who publishes his findings in a scientific journal instead of selling them to a company is doing so because his findings aren't worth anything? That's the kind of insulting crap the parent of your post was responding to.
If you were trying to cast it in a bad light you failed. With cell phones, despite the mess of different types, the competing companies still "play nice" with each other in that they let people with vastly different phones interact with each other. If the cellphone market was like the browser market, then you wouldn't be able to put a phone call through to people who use a different cell phone company than you.
The percentage of browsers that hits your site may or may not be 94% IE. You can't tell diddly squat from your weblogs since people using other browsers often have to configure them to *lie* and pretend to be IE in order to get in to prejudiced web sites.
I use Mozilla on a 512 MB 1.8 Ghz machine, and also on an older 400 Mhz, 256Mb machine. I don't notice any appreciable difference in page load speeds between the two of them. They are both plenty fast enough, going into that range where I stop caring about the speed (once it's down below 1 second). Mozilla seems to work just fine for me. I'm wondering after reading your post (and many similar ones here) whether my experience is atypical. If I was just reading one post claiming Mozilla is such a dog I'd assume it was just FUD, but *everyone* besides me seems to be having bad experiences with it, and I don't understand what I'm doing differently.
I used Opera as well, but had trouble getting it to interface properly with my java SDK for applets, so I've gone back to Mozilla. As far as speed goes, I consider the two a total wash.
Yes, Opera had MDI first, but since you originally had no choice in the matter and HAD to use MDI, that wasn't an advantage. Mozilla had non-MDI (which many people, myself included, prefer) first. Opera added non-MDI at about the same time Mozilla added tabbed browsing, so again, that's a wash between the two. At about the same time, they both gained the ability to let the user choose which way to make it work.
You knew damn well the poster was referring to how long it takes to load a page INTO an already running browser, not how long it takes to start the browser the first time.
How many times do you re-run the browser, in comparasin to how many times you load a page into the browser? The ratio for most people I would guess would be: Run the browser ONCE, then use it on many different pages, then close it when you are done surfing the net. That makes the initial load time of 12 seconds rather irrelevant to the overall experience.
It's like claiming game A is faster than game B based on the fact that A started up quicker, ignoring the fact that B has a higher frame rate.
What you are describing essentially *is* the original FCC before it got bloated. The sole purpose of having to get a FCC broadcast license used to merely be to keep a register of which frequencies were already taken, and make sure you stay within your own frequency. Originally the only sorts of stuff that would get your license revoked was when you wandered out of your allotted frequency range, or when you broadcast more powerfully than you are licensed to (and thus interfered with people far away who were assigned to the same frequency.) The crap about content control, threatening to pull the license if you *say* something the FCC doesn't think you should, came about a bit later.
There *is* a need for a fair partitioning of the WiFi spectrum. I don't trust the government to keep it down to *just* that and nothing else, as the FCC has already overstepped that boundry. But I also don't trust the industry to come up with it's own standard either, as the businesses currently on top have an incentive *not* to make the standard fair for the "little guy" who is trying to get started. I have no clue what the right answer would be for this.
No regulation does *not* mean no monopolies. Take the radio waves example. No regulation would mean it would be legal to stomp on a small competitor by just overriding his radio signal on his frequency with your own, using a more powerful transmitter.
That tight regulation existed long before Clearchannel took over, and it didn't change in any way that affected said takeover. Is the clearchannel takeover bad? Yes. Was it caaused by the fact that the FM space is regulated? No.
When people can do whatever they damn well please with the FM spectrum then he with the biggest transmitter wins, regardless of who *wants* to listen to which station. Don't like your competitor? Just stomp all over his signal by broadcasting your station more powerfully on the same frequency. Preventing that sort of abuse was originally the sole reason why the FCC was created in the first place. Now, I agree that since that time the FCC has waaay overstepped thier charter, especially with regards to content-control, and that that's a bad thing. But to take the extreme opposite stance that no regulation at all would lead to free use of the spectrum by "the people" is hogwash. He with the biggest transmitter would win. That's the way it used to be *before* regulation.
What really bothers me about cellphones is not the inital ringing. That I don't consider any more of a distraction than the occasional cough or sneeze from an audience member. What bothers me is when (and this isn't just in theatres) the person picks up the phone and starts talking right there and goes on and on and on. The continuous one-sided conversation is more distracting than the ringing.
If someone's phone goes off and they *leave* their seat to go take the call out in the hall, I have no problem with that.
Actually the reason for the taboo of elbows on tables, like many social taboos, has its roots in old methods of cleanliness and hygene that don't really apply anymore. It used to be common to eat meals without the ability to wash up first. And elbows were the dirtiest part of your arms, with all the dirt and grime buried in the wrinkled skin at the elbow joint. So in those days putting your elbow on the table meant getting the table surface dirty. And that's why it was taboo.
There is a similar taboo about shaking hands with your left hand. In times when bathing was not done frequently, people had developed a discipline of using your left hand for that stuff that might make it dirty and icky (like digging in the dirt, or wiping after, uhh, well "eliminating", and using your right hand for things that were more sanitary (like eating). And it was accepted that you don't let the two come into contact very much, for that would keep your right hand clean for tasks where you need a clean hand. (which is the origin of the phrase "don't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing".) Well, because of this, offering your left hand to shake hands with someone was an insult on two different levels. On the simple level it was insulting because it meant, "Here, let me touch you with my smelly, germy hand", but on a somewhat deeper level it was even more insulting because it meant, "Like dirt and feces, I consider you something scummy and unclean that I need to use my left hand to touch, because I don't want to dirty my right hand with the likes of you." That cultural meaning persisted long after the original need for the left hand/right hand hygene discipline went away.
The fact that the announcement is buried inside the concession advertisements is *why* it gets ignored. People are in the habit of mentally filtering out advertisements subconsiously. Something independent of the ads might get more notice, like putting it up on a seperate sign, as the poster suggested.
I "failed to provide" references because my argument was not dependant upon them. I simply pointed out that measuring pollution per population is meaningless. His statement, on the other hand, is the sort that needs to be backed up by references.
No one should be forced to use any type of software. Its stupid
I agree, which is why I'm against the government using things like.doc files that force me to use one particular type of software. Forcing users to have to use open source is dumb, but so is the current situation where the government can (and does) produce documents that force users (read: the citizens) to buy a particular product to use them. The right answer is to force them to use open formats only. Go ahead and type in your government document in MS Word. But when you put it out for public consumption don't save it as a Word doc. Save it as something open.
Go to the orielly site linked to at the top of the article and read the first response to O'rielly. Someone familiar with the Peruvian law said it was a case of spreading FUD to claim that the law prevented people from chosing anything other than open source. According to him it merely makes it illegal to force a choice *away* from open source on the users in the government. his claim is that it's a rule *against* the common practice in offices of standardizing on one platform only and forcing everyone to use that. The gist of it is that all required work must be done in a fashion that *can be* done with open source tools if users so choose.
I would like to know how true that claim is. What is the actual law? Can I read an English version of it somewere?
You provide all the evidence I need right there in your own post. If the patches weren't broken you wouldn't need multiple ones to fix the same problems.
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Yes, I agree that the path to less pollution is to actually attach an accurate price tag to it so it appears in the ledgers of companies. I don't agree that that would happen in a lassiez-faire market, though. Long term effects are not acurately reflected in the finances of a typical company.
Anyway, that rambled a bit. The point is that becuase of company coding practices, prefessionally produced code is not really indicative of the programmer's own style, and that can be detrimental as well as beneficial, depending on the standards in question.
The original point was to find a good potential programmer employee, what should be asked in the interview. Ideally you want someone who even if they didn't do if for a job, would still be writing code anyway because they like it. The question about stuff written outside of work is a test to see if you have that sort of person in front of you. I wouldn't trust a programmer who does no programming for himself on his own time, just as I wouldn't trust an auto mechanic who has never popped the hood of his own car.
Do you think a doctor that donates some of his time to a charity is doing so because he is incompetent and can't hold down a real job? That was the sort of implication put forward by the grandparent of your post, but for programmers instead of doctors. Do you think a scientist who publishes his findings in a scientific journal instead of selling them to a company is doing so because his findings aren't worth anything? That's the kind of insulting crap the parent of your post was responding to.
If you were trying to cast it in a bad light you failed. With cell phones, despite the mess of different types, the competing companies still "play nice" with each other in that they let people with vastly different phones interact with each other. If the cellphone market was like the browser market, then you wouldn't be able to put a phone call through to people who use a different cell phone company than you.
The percentage of browsers that hits your site may or may not be 94% IE. You can't tell diddly squat from your weblogs since people using other browsers often have to configure them to *lie* and pretend to be IE in order to get in to prejudiced web sites.
I use Mozilla on a 512 MB 1.8 Ghz machine, and also on an older 400 Mhz, 256Mb machine. I don't notice any appreciable difference in page load speeds between the two of them. They are both plenty fast enough, going into that range where I stop caring about the speed (once it's down below 1 second). Mozilla seems to work just fine for me. I'm wondering after reading your post (and many similar ones here) whether my experience is atypical. If I was just reading one post claiming Mozilla is such a dog I'd assume it was just FUD, but *everyone* besides me seems to be having bad experiences with it, and I don't understand what I'm doing differently.
I used Opera as well, but had trouble getting it to interface properly with my java SDK for applets, so I've gone back to Mozilla. As far as speed goes, I consider the two a total wash.
Yes, Opera had MDI first, but since you originally had no choice in the matter and HAD to use MDI, that wasn't an advantage. Mozilla had non-MDI (which many people, myself included, prefer) first. Opera added non-MDI at about the same time Mozilla added tabbed browsing, so again, that's a wash between the two. At about the same time, they both gained the ability to let the user choose which way to make it work.
How many times do you re-run the browser, in comparasin to how many times you load a page into the browser? The ratio for most people I would guess would be: Run the browser ONCE, then use it on many different pages, then close it when you are done surfing the net. That makes the initial load time of 12 seconds rather irrelevant to the overall experience.
It's like claiming game A is faster than game B based on the fact that A started up quicker, ignoring the fact that B has a higher frame rate.
You failed to capitalize the first letters of your sentences. Hope this helps. (See, isn't pointless pendantry fun?)
There *is* a need for a fair partitioning of the WiFi spectrum. I don't trust the government to keep it down to *just* that and nothing else, as the FCC has already overstepped that boundry. But I also don't trust the industry to come up with it's own standard either, as the businesses currently on top have an incentive *not* to make the standard fair for the "little guy" who is trying to get started. I have no clue what the right answer would be for this.
No regulation does *not* mean no monopolies. Take the radio waves example. No regulation would mean it would be legal to stomp on a small competitor by just overriding his radio signal on his frequency with your own, using a more powerful transmitter.
That tight regulation existed long before Clearchannel took over, and it didn't change in any way that affected said takeover. Is the clearchannel takeover bad? Yes. Was it caaused by the fact that the FM space is regulated? No.
When people can do whatever they damn well please with the FM spectrum then he with the biggest transmitter wins, regardless of who *wants* to listen to which station. Don't like your competitor? Just stomp all over his signal by broadcasting your station more powerfully on the same frequency. Preventing that sort of abuse was originally the sole reason why the FCC was created in the first place. Now, I agree that since that time the FCC has waaay overstepped thier charter, especially with regards to content-control, and that that's a bad thing. But to take the extreme opposite stance that no regulation at all would lead to free use of the spectrum by "the people" is hogwash. He with the biggest transmitter would win. That's the way it used to be *before* regulation.
What really bothers me about cellphones is not the inital ringing. That I don't consider any more of a distraction than the occasional cough or sneeze from an audience member. What bothers me is when (and this isn't just in theatres) the person picks up the phone and starts talking right there and goes on and on and on. The continuous one-sided conversation is more distracting than the ringing.
If someone's phone goes off and they *leave* their seat to go take the call out in the hall, I have no problem with that.
There is a similar taboo about shaking hands with your left hand. In times when bathing was not done frequently, people had developed a discipline of using your left hand for that stuff that might make it dirty and icky (like digging in the dirt, or wiping after, uhh, well "eliminating", and using your right hand for things that were more sanitary (like eating). And it was accepted that you don't let the two come into contact very much, for that would keep your right hand clean for tasks where you need a clean hand. (which is the origin of the phrase "don't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing".) Well, because of this, offering your left hand to shake hands with someone was an insult on two different levels. On the simple level it was insulting because it meant, "Here, let me touch you with my smelly, germy hand", but on a somewhat deeper level it was even more insulting because it meant, "Like dirt and feces, I consider you something scummy and unclean that I need to use my left hand to touch, because I don't want to dirty my right hand with the likes of you." That cultural meaning persisted long after the original need for the left hand/right hand hygene discipline went away.
The fact that the announcement is buried inside the concession advertisements is *why* it gets ignored. People are in the habit of mentally filtering out advertisements subconsiously. Something independent of the ads might get more notice, like putting it up on a seperate sign, as the poster suggested.
I "failed to provide" references because my argument was not dependant upon them. I simply pointed out that measuring pollution per population is meaningless. His statement, on the other hand, is the sort that needs to be backed up by references.
How many of those patches are related to the same exact thing? The windows patches keep fixing the same problems over and over.
I agree, which is why I'm against the government using things like
I would like to know how true that claim is. What is the actual law? Can I read an English version of it somewere?
Then please provide an alternate motive for why a government would need to keep it's actions secret from its people.
References please? I'm espeicially interested in what is and isn't being counted as "pollution".
You provide all the evidence I need right there in your own post. If the patches weren't broken you wouldn't need multiple ones to fix the same problems.