Separation of church and state? Sounds like the government forcing church: "If you don't toe the line on secularity, we're gonna fire your ass." That's a threat if I ever heard one. There are many legitimate reasons to fire this guy (creating a workplace environment detrimental to business objectives, i.e., making people uncomfortable to the point that they can't get their work done). Religious beliefs are not one of them.
Except that you aren't. If 1000 cans is a low dose, then we're talking linear. If 1000 cans is a high dose, we're talking a higher power (whether quadratic or other polynomial, or exponential). If the study is for a non-linear dosage and we try to extrapolate linearly to low dosage, we're gonna overestimate the effect. Well, that, and the body often has the ability to handle low doses of many toxins without any long-term effect (kidneys are wonderful things), which means there's a maximum "no-effect" amount. That's where the "safe dose" amounts of aceteminophen (sp) and other drugs out on the floor of your local drugstore come in to play.
Seriously? No, I don't think Coke or Pepsi think it's a joke. I think they think the warning labels are very serious and they don't want to have to use them. The fact the labels are required at all, now that's the joke. A "consumer would have to drink more than 1,000 cans a day to reach the doses administered that have shown links to cancer in rodents." That's not a study, that's poison. That's useless as far as extrapolating to human affects. Have they never heard of a dose/response relationship? How about a study of the same chemical with a dose approximating ten cans a day. That's still excessive, but it's at least two orders of magnitude closer to reality. If no statistically significant number of cancers emerge from this, we can get rid of the labels, right? Somehow, I doubt there's any mechanism to remove something from a precautionary-principle-based boogeyman list when debunked by valid science.
Why don't we just reciprocate and counterfeit NK money? (I kid, I kid)
You mean print more US dollars?:-)
Hell, look how much Visa sucks out of the economy every year.
Does it? Or does it enable more money to flow through the economy? If it really was sucking retailers dry like that, wouldn't they just choose not to accept the card? After all, AmEx charges way more than Visa/MC, and it shows by how few retailers accept AmEx, relatively speaking. The cost of accepting AmEx is too high - by extention the cost of accepting Visa is not. Retailers feel, and rightly so I would estimate, that the cost of not accepting credit cards is too high.
Compared to other choices, credit cards can be downright cheap. You avoid counterfit currencies for starters. If you're in a touristy location, you don't have to deal with other currencies and risk a hit when you go sell it for the local stuff (here I'm thinking of when I visited Playa del Carmen, Mexico or Disneyland or Niagara Falls, all of which largely accepted foriegn currencies - the USD in most places in PdC and NF, and CAD in many places around Anaheim - I always used my Canadian credit cards, no problem). You also largely avoid employee theft (employees writing down customers' credit card numbers is a separate problem that doesn't hit your bottom line nearly as often, partially because it's not your money being stolen and partially because it's much harder to convert a written card number to something of value vs cash) because the credit purchases go directly into your bank account at the end of every day. You also don't have to wait for customers' checks to clear.
Re:Ooopps... lots of maths but no book reading
on
Physics Is (NP-)Hard
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· Score: 1
If you average out the engineer's body's movement, you'll find that he has not, actually, traversed farther than half way to the treasure. Only a mathematician or physicist would consider the leading edge to be representative of the body, whereas an engineer would consider the centre of gravity to be representative (assume a spherical body... hey, no assumption required!), and thus there'd be no problem in reaching out to grab the treasure as long as his centre of gravity hasn't proceeded more than halfway between his previous location and the treasure. Mind you, if it's very heavy treasure, this may be more difficult.
Except that 30% of those scanned in the study now have autism... coincidence?;)
I bet most of that 30% also were exposed to that super-dangerous Dihydrogen Monoxide, too. That's where I'd put my money. After all, some kids have autism without ever being scanned, and most of them were probably exposed to DHMO. Parents give that stuff to their kids like it was water, without ever realising how dangerous it is!
I'd go on, but I have to go take my kids to their swimming class.
But Microsoft suggesting that with their software, you could never "come into the office one day and the software looks completely different" is quite frankly hilarious to anyone who had to suffer the upgrade from MS Office 2003 to 2007 or 2010.
What are you talking about? Microsoft is completely in the right on this one. That type of rollout would take weeks at least. More if you have a second employee!
Yup. "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon HD 3870" - and full blu-ray quality video plays in dragon in fullscreen mode just fine. And I used to use it with two monitors until my wife's computer went kaputs and I bought a bigger, faster machine for myself and gave her the hand-me-down. By the time I upgraded, the problems were nearly non-existent. The bigger issues ended up being keeping up with KDE/Qt's compositing requirements in the driver (KDE 4.0 through about 4.3 or 4.4), but they basically just work now.
Yes, my bigger/faster machine is Intel/nVidia. AMD Phenom 9850 Quadcore w/ATI HD3870 and 8GB RAM vs Intel i7/930 Quadcore w/GTX 470 and 12GB RAM. Just a wee bit faster.
I liked the way that the ATI drivers (at least the open source ones) did dual monitors better than nVidia's binary driver. And I've had the nVidia driver locking up on me recently. It was a solid lock-up for a while, then I upgraded xorg. Now I get X "pausing" for 5-15 seconds from time to time. Not problems I had with the ATI drivers. And the guys writing the radeonhd drivers were friendly, responsive, and accessible. Always nice to see.
I had more than my share of problems with the Catalyst driver. Switched to the radeonhd driver in its infancy, and got better results, albeit more crashes. It quickly matured. Later I switched to the radeon driver, once it had reasonably mature support for my HD3870 or whatever it is. The performance is great, the stability is great, and I expect that compositing will continue to work.
Basically, AMD has helped the open-source community to develop this driver sufficiently for it to take over as far as I'm concerned.
I know that somehow (scent?) animals can tell the difference. If you have herbivorous animals and you give them a choice between eating naturally-occurring crops and genetically-engineered crops, they will eat the naturally-occurring ones every time. If nothing else is available they would eat the engineered ones but they definitely don't want to.
Just like the way animals suddenly evacuate an area prior to a tsunami, don't you think maybe this is telling us something?
Yeah, it's telling us that there are poisonous plants out there and animals prefer a whitelist of known non-poisonous plants over a blacklist of known poisonous plants. We all know that whitelists are more secure than blacklists, why is it surprising that evolution played out that way, too?
I'll do it. If the government weren't so tightly regulating the spectrum making the barrier of entry into the market unbearably high, we'd see more competitors, some of which would understand that "selling the customer what they want" and "following through on contractual commitments" would net them a fair chunk of the customer base. And then AT&T would have to compete for customers instead of dictate to them.
Now, I get that regulation of the airwaves has some benefit. But here is one of the costs.
Hmm - I've seen a lot of numbers thrown around here about how much US debt China "owns", which tells me mostly that no one really knows, and secondarily that all the numbers are probably wrong. Anyway, as a thought excersise, what would happen if China simply decided to "cash out"? Not all at once - dumping $1T worth of bonds on the open market would render them valueless. How about just not trading in US bonds anymore? As their bonds mature, take the cash, but do not buy anymore. That would decrease the demand quite significantly - if by enough, that may mean that the US simply cannot raise sufficient funds to continue to operate, or they'd be forced to increase the yield sufficiently to increase demand. Either one would be costly for the US government. Of course, China could "be nice" at that point and buy the higher-yield bonds so the US could continue its funding while locking in that costly mistake. And the US would thank them for it.
It's a pretty big "if". Perhaps just the threat of the "if" is sufficient a sabre for China's rattling.
I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of the misogynists likely don't care about looking silly, as long as they appeal to each other, and, as a voting block, to their government representatives at all levels (municipal, state/provincial, federal/national, and any others that their jurisdiction may have). And, in my experience, it is awfully hard to tell the difference between "promoted on merit" and "promoted for reasons other than merit." Is she sleeping with the boss? Probably not in public. And rumours likely wouldn't get past the corporate doors, so us outsiders would be unlikely to hear about it. I'm not claiming that is the case, merely pointing out that we can't tell the difference. Was Robyn promoted because she's the best person they could find for the job (yay for her), or because she's a convenient woman available for the job (boo for equality)? We don't know. I don't see the affirmative action claim as implausible, I merely hope it's not the case. I have no evidence one way or the other, and we're never going to be told. Sure, RH can deny it, but they have to deny it even if it were true, so that doesn't tell us anything.
A press release stating "RedHat is proud to announce Robyn Bergeron as the Fedora Project Leader" is fine. That's all Fedora users and the Fedora community cares about anyway - who is in charge. Their gender is irrelevant. Now, if the position was "Women in Fedora Liaison"... that would be a position that gender matters.
For the record, since I don't have any evidence, I have no opinion either way. However, that's the problem. Since I have no evidence, all I can go on is whatever I see. And since what I see is promotion of her gender, I get the impression that this had some weight in the decision. If it had no weight in the decision, as a techie, I wonder why it was brought up. If it wasn't important, it's not interesting, and there's no reason to trumpet it. Trumpeting the unimportant smacks of politics, in what should be a politics-free job change.
The more we focus on the gender of the applicant rather than their skill in doing the job, the more we encourage people to treat others different based on gender. And the misogynists will continue to blame "affirmative action" for their lack of progression in their jobs. Seriously. Congrats to Robyn. I assume she's the most qualified for the job, though I have no idea who she is so shouldn't (and don't) have an opinion on the matter. But to focus on her gender rather than her skills will only focus attention away from what she accomplishes and to her gender. That doesn't do her any justice, women in general any justice, or Fedora any justice.
Sure there is. If you want to defuse the politics of the debate and stick to facts because you are thoroughly convinced that the facts back up your side, you stick to them. You do not denigrate your critics through political-style mudslinging as that only gives credence to their claims that your position is not fact-based but politically-based (thus a grab for power, money, interns, etc.). You play nice with your critics because that way you fail to give them ammunition to use against you.
Of course, if you don't think that all the facts support your hypothesis, then, by all means, throw the mud. Because then it really is political.
(This applies regardless of the topic of debate, which is why I'm not actually mentioning the topic here, despite it being obvious in context.)
This. We (okay, really, it was my wife) did about 70% of our Christmas shopping online, mostly Amazon and Chapters. For some items that wouldn't show up in time, we called to local brick&mortar stores, found one with the item in stock, asked to hold it, and I drove out to get it that evening. Walked in, waited for my turn in line, they fetched it, I paid for it, walked out. Sure, it took an hour all-told, but the overall amount of time we spent on shopping was so reduced it wasn't even funny.
Note that Costco seems to have Costco-specific models already. Doesn't stop me from shopping around. As long as you're aware of the actual requirements you have, and anything that isn't one of your requirements are valued properly, i.e., as $0, you should do fine. Great, your version of a vacuum cleaner has a pet attachment. I don't have pets. That has zero value to me. I don't care that your bundle has more stuff in it, it has nothing of value over a similar bundle at Amazon, and costs more, I'm buying from Amazon. Or vice versa, for that matter.
What I don't understand is how the CC companies can't be employing anyone with any knowledge in the field. Seriously, they don't have anyone on staff that doesn't have a hobby in this area who could have explained it to them? Or are they just putting a banana in their ear and claiming they didn't hear anything?
Then again, tobacco companies seem to have plenty of people on staff to tell them how safe tobacco is, so I guess I shouldn't be quite so surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually considering that the other day. I'm not sure why, but I changed my mind. ThEy ArE wOnDeRfUl ApPs.
Separation of church and state? Sounds like the government forcing church: "If you don't toe the line on secularity, we're gonna fire your ass." That's a threat if I ever heard one. There are many legitimate reasons to fire this guy (creating a workplace environment detrimental to business objectives, i.e., making people uncomfortable to the point that they can't get their work done). Religious beliefs are not one of them.
Except that you aren't. If 1000 cans is a low dose, then we're talking linear. If 1000 cans is a high dose, we're talking a higher power (whether quadratic or other polynomial, or exponential). If the study is for a non-linear dosage and we try to extrapolate linearly to low dosage, we're gonna overestimate the effect. Well, that, and the body often has the ability to handle low doses of many toxins without any long-term effect (kidneys are wonderful things), which means there's a maximum "no-effect" amount. That's where the "safe dose" amounts of aceteminophen (sp) and other drugs out on the floor of your local drugstore come in to play.
Is 1000 cans per day a "low" dose or a "high" dose?
Seriously? No, I don't think Coke or Pepsi think it's a joke. I think they think the warning labels are very serious and they don't want to have to use them. The fact the labels are required at all, now that's the joke. A "consumer would have to drink more than 1,000 cans a day to reach the doses administered that have shown links to cancer in rodents." That's not a study, that's poison. That's useless as far as extrapolating to human affects. Have they never heard of a dose/response relationship? How about a study of the same chemical with a dose approximating ten cans a day. That's still excessive, but it's at least two orders of magnitude closer to reality. If no statistically significant number of cancers emerge from this, we can get rid of the labels, right? Somehow, I doubt there's any mechanism to remove something from a precautionary-principle-based boogeyman list when debunked by valid science.
Hey! My MS4000 keyboard and MS mouse are working jut fine.
Why don't we just reciprocate and counterfeit NK money? (I kid, I kid)
You mean print more US dollars? :-)
Hell, look how much Visa sucks out of the economy every year.
Does it? Or does it enable more money to flow through the economy? If it really was sucking retailers dry like that, wouldn't they just choose not to accept the card? After all, AmEx charges way more than Visa/MC, and it shows by how few retailers accept AmEx, relatively speaking. The cost of accepting AmEx is too high - by extention the cost of accepting Visa is not. Retailers feel, and rightly so I would estimate, that the cost of not accepting credit cards is too high.
Compared to other choices, credit cards can be downright cheap. You avoid counterfit currencies for starters. If you're in a touristy location, you don't have to deal with other currencies and risk a hit when you go sell it for the local stuff (here I'm thinking of when I visited Playa del Carmen, Mexico or Disneyland or Niagara Falls, all of which largely accepted foriegn currencies - the USD in most places in PdC and NF, and CAD in many places around Anaheim - I always used my Canadian credit cards, no problem). You also largely avoid employee theft (employees writing down customers' credit card numbers is a separate problem that doesn't hit your bottom line nearly as often, partially because it's not your money being stolen and partially because it's much harder to convert a written card number to something of value vs cash) because the credit purchases go directly into your bank account at the end of every day. You also don't have to wait for customers' checks to clear.
If you average out the engineer's body's movement, you'll find that he has not, actually, traversed farther than half way to the treasure. Only a mathematician or physicist would consider the leading edge to be representative of the body, whereas an engineer would consider the centre of gravity to be representative (assume a spherical body... hey, no assumption required!), and thus there'd be no problem in reaching out to grab the treasure as long as his centre of gravity hasn't proceeded more than halfway between his previous location and the treasure. Mind you, if it's very heavy treasure, this may be more difficult.
The technique is essentially harmless.
Except that 30% of those scanned in the study now have autism... coincidence? ;)
I bet most of that 30% also were exposed to that super-dangerous Dihydrogen Monoxide, too. That's where I'd put my money. After all, some kids have autism without ever being scanned, and most of them were probably exposed to DHMO. Parents give that stuff to their kids like it was water, without ever realising how dangerous it is!
I'd go on, but I have to go take my kids to their swimming class.
But Microsoft suggesting that with their software, you could never "come into the office one day and the software looks completely different" is quite frankly hilarious to anyone who had to suffer the upgrade from MS Office 2003 to 2007 or 2010.
What are you talking about? Microsoft is completely in the right on this one. That type of rollout would take weeks at least. More if you have a second employee!
Yup. "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon HD 3870" - and full blu-ray quality video plays in dragon in fullscreen mode just fine. And I used to use it with two monitors until my wife's computer went kaputs and I bought a bigger, faster machine for myself and gave her the hand-me-down. By the time I upgraded, the problems were nearly non-existent. The bigger issues ended up being keeping up with KDE/Qt's compositing requirements in the driver (KDE 4.0 through about 4.3 or 4.4), but they basically just work now.
Yes, my bigger/faster machine is Intel/nVidia. AMD Phenom 9850 Quadcore w/ATI HD3870 and 8GB RAM vs Intel i7/930 Quadcore w/GTX 470 and 12GB RAM. Just a wee bit faster.
I liked the way that the ATI drivers (at least the open source ones) did dual monitors better than nVidia's binary driver. And I've had the nVidia driver locking up on me recently. It was a solid lock-up for a while, then I upgraded xorg. Now I get X "pausing" for 5-15 seconds from time to time. Not problems I had with the ATI drivers. And the guys writing the radeonhd drivers were friendly, responsive, and accessible. Always nice to see.
I don't know who you are, or even what your name is, but you already have my vote.
I had more than my share of problems with the Catalyst driver. Switched to the radeonhd driver in its infancy, and got better results, albeit more crashes. It quickly matured. Later I switched to the radeon driver, once it had reasonably mature support for my HD3870 or whatever it is. The performance is great, the stability is great, and I expect that compositing will continue to work.
Basically, AMD has helped the open-source community to develop this driver sufficiently for it to take over as far as I'm concerned.
I know that somehow (scent?) animals can tell the difference. If you have herbivorous animals and you give them a choice between eating naturally-occurring crops and genetically-engineered crops, they will eat the naturally-occurring ones every time. If nothing else is available they would eat the engineered ones but they definitely don't want to. Just like the way animals suddenly evacuate an area prior to a tsunami, don't you think maybe this is telling us something?
Yeah, it's telling us that there are poisonous plants out there and animals prefer a whitelist of known non-poisonous plants over a blacklist of known poisonous plants. We all know that whitelists are more secure than blacklists, why is it surprising that evolution played out that way, too?
I'll do it. If the government weren't so tightly regulating the spectrum making the barrier of entry into the market unbearably high, we'd see more competitors, some of which would understand that "selling the customer what they want" and "following through on contractual commitments" would net them a fair chunk of the customer base. And then AT&T would have to compete for customers instead of dictate to them.
Now, I get that regulation of the airwaves has some benefit. But here is one of the costs.
Hmm - I've seen a lot of numbers thrown around here about how much US debt China "owns", which tells me mostly that no one really knows, and secondarily that all the numbers are probably wrong. Anyway, as a thought excersise, what would happen if China simply decided to "cash out"? Not all at once - dumping $1T worth of bonds on the open market would render them valueless. How about just not trading in US bonds anymore? As their bonds mature, take the cash, but do not buy anymore. That would decrease the demand quite significantly - if by enough, that may mean that the US simply cannot raise sufficient funds to continue to operate, or they'd be forced to increase the yield sufficiently to increase demand. Either one would be costly for the US government. Of course, China could "be nice" at that point and buy the higher-yield bonds so the US could continue its funding while locking in that costly mistake. And the US would thank them for it.
It's a pretty big "if". Perhaps just the threat of the "if" is sufficient a sabre for China's rattling.
never isn't a real need to get things done on time.
This is likely why my coworkers in India never seem to take deadlines seriously. *sigh*
You're too subtle for me. Stop beating about the bush and tell us how you really feel!
I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of the misogynists likely don't care about looking silly, as long as they appeal to each other, and, as a voting block, to their government representatives at all levels (municipal, state/provincial, federal/national, and any others that their jurisdiction may have). And, in my experience, it is awfully hard to tell the difference between "promoted on merit" and "promoted for reasons other than merit." Is she sleeping with the boss? Probably not in public. And rumours likely wouldn't get past the corporate doors, so us outsiders would be unlikely to hear about it. I'm not claiming that is the case, merely pointing out that we can't tell the difference. Was Robyn promoted because she's the best person they could find for the job (yay for her), or because she's a convenient woman available for the job (boo for equality)? We don't know. I don't see the affirmative action claim as implausible, I merely hope it's not the case. I have no evidence one way or the other, and we're never going to be told. Sure, RH can deny it, but they have to deny it even if it were true, so that doesn't tell us anything.
A press release stating "RedHat is proud to announce Robyn Bergeron as the Fedora Project Leader" is fine. That's all Fedora users and the Fedora community cares about anyway - who is in charge. Their gender is irrelevant. Now, if the position was "Women in Fedora Liaison" ... that would be a position that gender matters.
For the record, since I don't have any evidence, I have no opinion either way. However, that's the problem. Since I have no evidence, all I can go on is whatever I see. And since what I see is promotion of her gender, I get the impression that this had some weight in the decision. If it had no weight in the decision, as a techie, I wonder why it was brought up. If it wasn't important, it's not interesting, and there's no reason to trumpet it. Trumpeting the unimportant smacks of politics, in what should be a politics-free job change.
The more we focus on the gender of the applicant rather than their skill in doing the job, the more we encourage people to treat others different based on gender. And the misogynists will continue to blame "affirmative action" for their lack of progression in their jobs. Seriously. Congrats to Robyn. I assume she's the most qualified for the job, though I have no idea who she is so shouldn't (and don't) have an opinion on the matter. But to focus on her gender rather than her skills will only focus attention away from what she accomplishes and to her gender. That doesn't do her any justice, women in general any justice, or Fedora any justice.
Sure there is. If you want to defuse the politics of the debate and stick to facts because you are thoroughly convinced that the facts back up your side, you stick to them. You do not denigrate your critics through political-style mudslinging as that only gives credence to their claims that your position is not fact-based but politically-based (thus a grab for power, money, interns, etc.). You play nice with your critics because that way you fail to give them ammunition to use against you.
Of course, if you don't think that all the facts support your hypothesis, then, by all means, throw the mud. Because then it really is political.
(This applies regardless of the topic of debate, which is why I'm not actually mentioning the topic here, despite it being obvious in context.)
Or, to look at it another way, sometimes even my enemy's interests align with my own.
And sometimes my friends do things I don't like.
This. We (okay, really, it was my wife) did about 70% of our Christmas shopping online, mostly Amazon and Chapters. For some items that wouldn't show up in time, we called to local brick&mortar stores, found one with the item in stock, asked to hold it, and I drove out to get it that evening. Walked in, waited for my turn in line, they fetched it, I paid for it, walked out. Sure, it took an hour all-told, but the overall amount of time we spent on shopping was so reduced it wasn't even funny.
Note that Costco seems to have Costco-specific models already. Doesn't stop me from shopping around. As long as you're aware of the actual requirements you have, and anything that isn't one of your requirements are valued properly, i.e., as $0, you should do fine. Great, your version of a vacuum cleaner has a pet attachment. I don't have pets. That has zero value to me. I don't care that your bundle has more stuff in it, it has nothing of value over a similar bundle at Amazon, and costs more, I'm buying from Amazon. Or vice versa, for that matter.
What I don't understand is how the CC companies can't be employing anyone with any knowledge in the field. Seriously, they don't have anyone on staff that doesn't have a hobby in this area who could have explained it to them? Or are they just putting a banana in their ear and claiming they didn't hear anything?
Then again, tobacco companies seem to have plenty of people on staff to tell them how safe tobacco is, so I guess I shouldn't be quite so surprised.
4GB may have been the cap back in 1998. Now, however, I get 50Mbps down, 3Mbps up, and a cap of 450GB per month from Shaw.