1: Provide each voter with a certificate 2: On voting day that certificate entitles you to a tax rebate on beer/wine/spirits bought in pubs on that day.
This is a good idea because:
1: Pubs are the centre of politcal debate in the UK 2: We Brits will sell out own mother for free / cheap drink.
Only as much as I get annoyed by Americans calling their 'language' English.
Freedom/French Fries are chips Pavements go on the outside of the road Router is pronounced rooter not row-ter, unless its cutting wood. Colour has a u in it, because its not pronounced like collar. Free Willy is an inappropriate name for a childrens movie No you can't put anything my my girlfriends fanny pack. And smoking fags is dirty habbit, and not a sexual offense.
The only really annoying thing is that like the 'English' language, Americans have embraced, enhanced and destroyed imperial too, best example is gallons. But you've got more nukes, money and better TV (loving 'Heroes'... thanks for the internet too). So I guess I can let these faux pars go;)
I'm British, so I deal with both systems on a daily basis and I think we've got it pretty sorted. Doing something important, where you need accuracy do it in metric doing something fun, do it in imperial.
Distance to the shops in miles, distance to the sun in kilometers I measure my weight in stones and pounds, but I cook in grams. Size of my wang in feet (ok, ok inches) size of my windows in cm.
I'm not sure why Americans feel the need to stick to imperial, especially in light of computers. At least NASA has now seen the light.
My wish for web 3.0 is that Javascript is replaced entirely. The ONLY thing that Javascript has going for it is ubiquity (which I guess is down to its ease of implementation). Its not all Javascripts fault, in general, as in most things webby I blame Microsoft, but hte language itself seems to make everything you write look lke a dogs dinner.
Wouldn't the web be a nicer place if you could script the browser using Ruby or Python? Can you imagine the fun you could have working with constructs like:
@page.findById( "myID" ).each do |ajaxReturn|... end
The web could be beautiful. Next on my hit list is an improved HTML / CSS. Should rounding corners, or drawing shapes / shadows really be done with gif/pngs?
I think it's an interesting side effect of the cannis cannid edit society America has chosen to develop. Choosing not to have a welfare state and to make it (relatively) easy to hire and fire means that Americans work longer and harder, and expect little. It's part of what makes your country great and is in part due to the fact that your ancestors recent fight for survival is still within cultural memory. But I'd also say that it forces many Americans to make short sighted economic decisions.
Faced with the problem of 'I'm hot and I can't sleep/think' do you go for the cheap, instant solution that you know you can afford now and you won't be repaying for the next 3 years, or do you go for the long ranging decision that may save you money in 10 years time?
With ever looming threat of unemployment, expensive illness and horrendous legal fees should you prang the wrong car, I know which option I'd go for. "So what if Manhattan's summer heat is magnified by the exhaust of a million ACs, I'm getting a good nights sleep that will mean I keep my job tomorrow!".
I don't think its the raw market value. Yes its cheaper to buy a window AC unit than a new window, but the benefits of better insulation make it much cheaprt in the long run and Americans (no matter what the international press say) are bright enough to relise that. What American's don't like is the associated risk, which is much higher than for your softer European cousins.
We also take insulation more seriously: use brick/breze block cavity walls almost across the board and have double glazing - but compared to Scandiavians we're still savages when it comes to heat efficiency. I was in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago and the room was so hot because of the insulation I had to put a fan on to keep me cool.
What I don't understand is that a wealthy and educated country like America sees air-conditioning as the solution to being too hot and not quadruple glazing. Insulation keeps you cool too (and makes it cheaper to run said air-conditioning if nothing else).
Yup, it really is the only I find that works effectively. I've tried virtual desktops, multiple desktops and XPs god forsaken application bar, but Expose is the one that works for me.
I don't mind virtual desktops, its what I use on Ubuntu and I'm looking forward to the feature in Leopard (although having to remember the desktop is a PITA).
I sometimes use multiple desktops, but find the the additonal mouse/neck travel meant that it was only useful to have one monitor for reference material and one for working - quite tempted by having an eInk reader on my desk.
I've tried bigger monitors and higer resolutions, but without Expose all that does is reduce eye strain.
Agreed. Its like the authors have never used windows. Within 10 minutes of sitting at my desk at work I have 20 or so application instances running from cmd and textpad to Eclipse. It renders the bottom of my screen useless. You might say "Ahh, but XP collates them into a single button!", thats worse!!! The only system I've found that manages 20+ windows effectively is Expose.
As for the comment about printer support... plug printer into Airport, press print in any application on any computer on the network and then select printer from the bonjour printer list. Easy. Want a direct connection, skip the part about the Airport.
They had a point with the look and feel, but to be honest it doesn't bother me as perhaps it should. And cut and paste is just not the mac way of doing things... we drag and drop EVERYTHING and Expose makes that easy.
I'm sure given time I could come up with 15 things that annoy me about OS X, but their gripes seem trivial at best. How about disconnection from network drives slowing down the WHOLE system? Or the way the firewall settings are in 'Sharing'. Trivial things that annoy me are that fink hasn't been absorbed into the default install and X11 is still concidered an optional extra - being able to install quality free software like Scribus/The Gimp from a Synaptic like interface could really open peoples eyes to OSS.
The difference is that flash fails with writes (not reads) and HDD fails with reads AND writes (bad sectors?). Early flash failed after only 10,000 writes per sector, newer flash is in the millions. Flash spreads the writes around, so to reduce the chance of any one sector failing and can do this because flash is genuinely RAM (unlike HDD where location affects transfer speed). Both HDD and SSD employ firmware stratergies that hide sector failure from the OS, only flash can do that without any real cost to performance.
The end result is that if either are working after 3 or 4 years your doing well, and should really be looking for a replacement unit.
Seriously maaan, don't give the Corproment any ideas. They'll just start hurding all of us coders into 'state correctional institions' where we're kept below ground with nothing but a dirty, single matress and three meals a day provided by an omnipresent dictator known only as 'Mom'.
The difference being that instead of the internet theres only a T1 to Micrsofts source repository and they have us working on bug fixes for Vista and Office.
This has been covered in much more detail in the weekly documentary "Heroes". In addition to the abilities recorded in TFA people can: fly; warp space and time and heal.
Remember, if it wasn't for the brave efforts of these "Heroes", the cheerleader might not have been saved, and the world would be doomed.
Lost technologies always make me think of patents. If the blacksmith at the time had patented his technique (not that it was an option), we would probably still have it today.
I just get the feeling that this amazing skill would have been a guarded secret, probably held by people who couldn't write effectively (if they understoof the chemistry at all, or weather it would have just been a recipe) and passed down through an apprentice. Which was all very well and good until there was a little too much competition and Wootz guys monopoly was under threat or he was killed before he could pass on his secret.
This is clearly a dumb idea, but its wrapped up in a way that will make sense to dumb people in power: Can't stand the heat? Get in to the shade!
But along similar lines I was thinking about using hydrogen for fuel. There is a serious by product of creating hydrogen from oceans: oxygen. Oxygen is poisonous in high concentrations, but perhaps more worryingly its also a catalyst for fire. Isn't there a real chance that creating that much oxygen and pumping it into the atmosphere is going to take us from the relatively safe 2.5% up to the scary-fireball-of-death 3% oxygen levels?
I know at the moment is seems like wacko talk, but if they had said 80 years ago that using coal and oil would make the planet warmer they'd have been laughed off Ye Olde SolidusPeriod. I understand this is a closed system (at least in theory) and most of the hydrogen that is release will be oxidized, but what about the little bit that isn't? How big a scale of industry would it take before we had a serious problem with O2, H2 and H20 levels in the atmosphere?
I might be a skeptic, but I think its only healthy to approach all news as propaganda. Modern journalists are acutely aware of the power that they have over their readers and they are professional wordsmiths who make a living not by selling the truth, but by selling advertising and copy.
Why should I trust a journalist who is paid by the military (who's end game is national security) any less than a journalist who is paid by News Corp. (who's end game is making Rupert Murdock even more money)?
Just take a look at slashdot. One of the most valuable things about this site is the opinions. Not because there is any one shining light of common sense, not because they are based on any fact, but because seeing how different people react to the same datum can have a profound affect on your own initially cursory glance at TFA.
Learning to read between the lines and spot the agendas of the authors is one of the most important skills somebody can have in a media-centric society - and unfortunately its damn hard. Just as you can't un-invent nuclear technology you can't suddenly get rid of all printing presses and the internet and in many ways they are as wonderful and as dangerous as each other.
I'm all for this. As long as they don't demand that newspapers publish their stories and only their stories (or more likely that the major netwoprks get lazy and just go to them to get their stories) or make it illegal to believe anything else, this is democracy and freedom in action.
Knowing what the military want you to think is fascinating, providied its balanced by the free press. Having the news delivered by different agendas is what makes watching modern history unfold so exciting and makes it easier to get down to the facts and through the bullshit.
It might not be all things to all web developers and its far more of a paradigm shift than a casual glance at the syntax would have you believe. As a Java developer I expected to jump into Rails and be competent almost instantly. The reality was that there was a very steep learning curve when you wanted to stretch the framework away from a SOA portal or yet another blog, but IMHO it was well worth it.
There are many things in Rails that make you start to wonder why J2EE wasn't designed in a similar vain.
Perhapps the most gauling aspect of Rails is that it does impose a lot of 'good practice' on you: REST is pretty much compulsory; as is having a single primary key and it encourages you not to use session variables.
The way I think of it is that Rails answers the questions that J2EE developers are asking 5 years on.
Its not compulsery, but I'm a certified java programmer / web components, I've got a computer science degree from a top 10 university, I've got industrial experience and the kind folks at the BCS decided that was enough to give me CEng after my name.
So although there isn't a direct correlation, Java certainly helped me get my chartered engineer status.
I'll say it loud and proud: "I'm a Senior Java Developer and I'm an Engineer"... do I get my free coffee, round of applause and a hug now?
Slashdot Mirror
I can massively improve turnout at elections:
1: Provide each voter with a certificate
2: On voting day that certificate entitles you to a tax rebate on beer/wine/spirits bought in pubs on that day.
This is a good idea because:
1: Pubs are the centre of politcal debate in the UK
2: We Brits will sell out own mother for free / cheap drink.
I'm only half joking.
and in yards not meters.
Only as much as I get annoyed by Americans calling their 'language' English.
;)
Freedom/French Fries are chips
Pavements go on the outside of the road
Router is pronounced rooter not row-ter, unless its cutting wood.
Colour has a u in it, because its not pronounced like collar.
Free Willy is an inappropriate name for a childrens movie
No you can't put anything my my girlfriends fanny pack.
And smoking fags is dirty habbit, and not a sexual offense.
The only really annoying thing is that like the 'English' language, Americans have embraced, enhanced and destroyed imperial too, best example is gallons. But you've got more nukes, money and better TV (loving 'Heroes'... thanks for the internet too). So I guess I can let these faux pars go
I'm British, so I deal with both systems on a daily basis and I think we've got it pretty sorted. Doing something important, where you need accuracy do it in metric doing something fun, do it in imperial.
Distance to the shops in miles, distance to the sun in kilometers
I measure my weight in stones and pounds, but I cook in grams.
Size of my wang in feet (ok, ok inches) size of my windows in cm.
I'm not sure why Americans feel the need to stick to imperial, especially in light of computers. At least NASA has now seen the light.
The answer is clear! A Beowulf cluster of Mainframes!!
You just made me fall in love with Rails all over again.
Ruby: def foo n Proc.new {|i| n += i } end or with the lambda synonym def foo n lambda {|i| n += i } end Looks pretty neat to me.
My wish for web 3.0 is that Javascript is replaced entirely. The ONLY thing that Javascript has going for it is ubiquity (which I guess is down to its ease of implementation). Its not all Javascripts fault, in general, as in most things webby I blame Microsoft, but hte language itself seems to make everything you write look lke a dogs dinner.
... end
Wouldn't the web be a nicer place if you could script the browser using Ruby or Python? Can you imagine the fun you could have working with constructs like:
@page.findById( "myID" ).each do |ajaxReturn|
The web could be beautiful. Next on my hit list is an improved HTML / CSS. Should rounding corners, or drawing shapes / shadows really be done with gif/pngs?
Crime.
I think it's an interesting side effect of the cannis cannid edit society America has chosen to develop. Choosing not to have a welfare state and to make it (relatively) easy to hire and fire means that Americans work longer and harder, and expect little. It's part of what makes your country great and is in part due to the fact that your ancestors recent fight for survival is still within cultural memory. But I'd also say that it forces many Americans to make short sighted economic decisions.
Faced with the problem of 'I'm hot and I can't sleep/think' do you go for the cheap, instant solution that you know you can afford now and you won't be repaying for the next 3 years, or do you go for the long ranging decision that may save you money in 10 years time?
With ever looming threat of unemployment, expensive illness and horrendous legal fees should you prang the wrong car, I know which option I'd go for. "So what if Manhattan's summer heat is magnified by the exhaust of a million ACs, I'm getting a good nights sleep that will mean I keep my job tomorrow!".
I don't think its the raw market value. Yes its cheaper to buy a window AC unit than a new window, but the benefits of better insulation make it much cheaprt in the long run and Americans (no matter what the international press say) are bright enough to relise that. What American's don't like is the associated risk, which is much higher than for your softer European cousins.
We also take insulation more seriously: use brick/breze block cavity walls almost across the board and have double glazing - but compared to Scandiavians we're still savages when it comes to heat efficiency. I was in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago and the room was so hot because of the insulation I had to put a fan on to keep me cool.
What I don't understand is that a wealthy and educated country like America sees air-conditioning as the solution to being too hot and not quadruple glazing. Insulation keeps you cool too (and makes it cheaper to run said air-conditioning if nothing else).
Yup, it really is the only I find that works effectively. I've tried virtual desktops, multiple desktops and XPs god forsaken application bar, but Expose is the one that works for me.
I don't mind virtual desktops, its what I use on Ubuntu and I'm looking forward to the feature in Leopard (although having to remember the desktop is a PITA).
I sometimes use multiple desktops, but find the the additonal mouse/neck travel meant that it was only useful to have one monitor for reference material and one for working - quite tempted by having an eInk reader on my desk.
I've tried bigger monitors and higer resolutions, but without Expose all that does is reduce eye strain.
Expose is the best for me. YMMV.
Agreed. Its like the authors have never used windows. Within 10 minutes of sitting at my desk at work I have 20 or so application instances running from cmd and textpad to Eclipse. It renders the bottom of my screen useless. You might say "Ahh, but XP collates them into a single button!", thats worse!!! The only system I've found that manages 20+ windows effectively is Expose.
As for the comment about printer support... plug printer into Airport, press print in any application on any computer on the network and then select printer from the bonjour printer list. Easy. Want a direct connection, skip the part about the Airport.
They had a point with the look and feel, but to be honest it doesn't bother me as perhaps it should. And cut and paste is just not the mac way of doing things... we drag and drop EVERYTHING and Expose makes that easy.
I'm sure given time I could come up with 15 things that annoy me about OS X, but their gripes seem trivial at best. How about disconnection from network drives slowing down the WHOLE system? Or the way the firewall settings are in 'Sharing'. Trivial things that annoy me are that fink hasn't been absorbed into the default install and X11 is still concidered an optional extra - being able to install quality free software like Scribus/The Gimp from a Synaptic like interface could really open peoples eyes to OSS.
Do you really believe that harddisks don't fail?
The difference is that flash fails with writes (not reads) and HDD fails with reads AND writes (bad sectors?). Early flash failed after only 10,000 writes per sector, newer flash is in the millions. Flash spreads the writes around, so to reduce the chance of any one sector failing and can do this because flash is genuinely RAM (unlike HDD where location affects transfer speed). Both HDD and SSD employ firmware stratergies that hide sector failure from the OS, only flash can do that without any real cost to performance.
The end result is that if either are working after 3 or 4 years your doing well, and should really be looking for a replacement unit.
Seriously maaan, don't give the Corproment any ideas. They'll just start hurding all of us coders into 'state correctional institions' where we're kept below ground with nothing but a dirty, single matress and three meals a day provided by an omnipresent dictator known only as 'Mom'.
The difference being that instead of the internet theres only a T1 to Micrsofts source repository and they have us working on bug fixes for Vista and Office.
No OSS
No Porn
No WoW!!!!!!
The horror!!!!!
This has been covered in much more detail in the weekly documentary "Heroes". In addition to the abilities recorded in TFA people can: fly; warp space and time and heal.
Remember, if it wasn't for the brave efforts of these "Heroes", the cheerleader might not have been saved, and the world would be doomed.
was that it was a nice little inuitive game. This crys out to played on the DS or the Wii (more likely the DS).
analog stick mouse touch pad
I think the wrong super power bought this game - in the same way as trying to squeeze GTA onto a DS would be stupid.
Astrologists were right all along!
Lost technologies always make me think of patents. If the blacksmith at the time had patented his technique (not that it was an option), we would probably still have it today.
I just get the feeling that this amazing skill would have been a guarded secret, probably held by people who couldn't write effectively (if they understoof the chemistry at all, or weather it would have just been a recipe) and passed down through an apprentice. Which was all very well and good until there was a little too much competition and Wootz guys monopoly was under threat or he was killed before he could pass on his secret.
No all patents are bad - just software ones.
My maths isn't great, but I did a few simple calculations and that is still a metric fuckload of porn.
Feel free to convert it into imperial. I think rods would be an appropriate measure.
This is clearly a dumb idea, but its wrapped up in a way that will make sense to dumb people in power: Can't stand the heat? Get in to the shade!
But along similar lines I was thinking about using hydrogen for fuel. There is a serious by product of creating hydrogen from oceans: oxygen. Oxygen is poisonous in high concentrations, but perhaps more worryingly its also a catalyst for fire. Isn't there a real chance that creating that much oxygen and pumping it into the atmosphere is going to take us from the relatively safe 2.5% up to the scary-fireball-of-death 3% oxygen levels?
I know at the moment is seems like wacko talk, but if they had said 80 years ago that using coal and oil would make the planet warmer they'd have been laughed off Ye Olde SolidusPeriod. I understand this is a closed system (at least in theory) and most of the hydrogen that is release will be oxidized, but what about the little bit that isn't? How big a scale of industry would it take before we had a serious problem with O2, H2 and H20 levels in the atmosphere?
I might be a skeptic, but I think its only healthy to approach all news as propaganda. Modern journalists are acutely aware of the power that they have over their readers and they are professional wordsmiths who make a living not by selling the truth, but by selling advertising and copy.
Why should I trust a journalist who is paid by the military (who's end game is national security) any less than a journalist who is paid by News Corp. (who's end game is making Rupert Murdock even more money)?
Just take a look at slashdot. One of the most valuable things about this site is the opinions. Not because there is any one shining light of common sense, not because they are based on any fact, but because seeing how different people react to the same datum can have a profound affect on your own initially cursory glance at TFA.
Learning to read between the lines and spot the agendas of the authors is one of the most important skills somebody can have in a media-centric society - and unfortunately its damn hard. Just as you can't un-invent nuclear technology you can't suddenly get rid of all printing presses and the internet and in many ways they are as wonderful and as dangerous as each other.
I'm all for this. As long as they don't demand that newspapers publish their stories and only their stories (or more likely that the major netwoprks get lazy and just go to them to get their stories) or make it illegal to believe anything else, this is democracy and freedom in action.
Knowing what the military want you to think is fascinating, providied its balanced by the free press. Having the news delivered by different agendas is what makes watching modern history unfold so exciting and makes it easier to get down to the facts and through the bullshit.
It might not be all things to all web developers and its far more of a paradigm shift than a casual glance at the syntax would have you believe. As a Java developer I expected to jump into Rails and be competent almost instantly. The reality was that there was a very steep learning curve when you wanted to stretch the framework away from a SOA portal or yet another blog, but IMHO it was well worth it. There are many things in Rails that make you start to wonder why J2EE wasn't designed in a similar vain. Perhapps the most gauling aspect of Rails is that it does impose a lot of 'good practice' on you: REST is pretty much compulsory; as is having a single primary key and it encourages you not to use session variables. The way I think of it is that Rails answers the questions that J2EE developers are asking 5 years on.
Its not compulsery, but I'm a certified java programmer / web components, I've got a computer science degree from a top 10 university, I've got industrial experience and the kind folks at the BCS decided that was enough to give me CEng after my name.
So although there isn't a direct correlation, Java certainly helped me get my chartered engineer status.
I'll say it loud and proud: "I'm a Senior Java Developer and I'm an Engineer"... do I get my free coffee, round of applause and a hug now?