"The production of tiny black holes is one of the predictions. " Man I hope they know what they are doing.
Microscopic black holes disappear quickly due to Hawking radiation. So if your goal is to destroy the earth, creating a microscopic black hole is not the way you want to go.
The bigger a black hole is, the more slowly it evaporates. So if you want your black hole to do any damage, it'll have to be more than a certain threshold size. Turns out that minimum-size black hole you'll need to destroy Earth is roughly the mass of Mt Everest.
If we take the density of such a black hole to be 3 * 10^18 kg/m^3, then our black hole will look like a ball with a radius of about 12 cm, i.e. it looks like a soccer ball.*
* no idea if my density assumption is reasonable. I'm not a physicist -- I got the number from 20 seconds of googling. The volume of your black hole may vary.
> As a hiring manager, I can tell you that I almost never have the time to go dig through a prospective candidate's open source code
I also have had the responsibility for hiring people from time to time. And OMG you are hiring a *programmer*. This is the *primary* thing they are going to be doing after you hire them. Their code is their main work product. The information is available to you and you're just going to *ignore* it? Who cares how charming and articulate they are if their code is crappy?
You could assess these things in 15 minutes in a 13kLOC code base. Did they write clear and useful comments? Is the code well organized? Is the high-level structure obvious? It's an excellent second- or third-pass method, and I've always found it pretty weird that it's not a more common practice.
Okay, maybe you have some reason to doubt that they actually wrote it or whatever. And of course they will be showing you the awesomest, cleanest little gem they ever wrote. Weigh it appropriately. But don't weigh it at 0%!
I want programmers who can write code AND are articulate and charming. Someone who is articulate and charming but cannot write code should not be hired as a programmer.
OTOH someone who can write code but is not particularly charming can still be a great contributor if they are not a total asshole, and can explain their code clearly in comments or in small meetings.
Probably the reason most hiring managers don't want to review candidates' code is because they are not particularly skilled at reading code quickly and making a useful judgment about its quality. This just means that the hiring manager isn't qualified to judge the candidate on this critical dimension. They should admit this limitation and farm out the task to someone else in their company whom they trust. (If there is no such person in their company then their company is pretty well fucked anyway.)
> Not to mention, most of the time open repositories like that are blocked from my work network anyway
Okay, but this is not a statement about the objective predictive utility of a hiring process that involves code reviews. It's just a statement that your company is toopid.:-) And you can always have the candidate email you the code. They key problem here is that *you* do not believe that reviewing people's code adds a lot of value, and on that point I believe you are quite mistaken.
> can the candidate speak, in detail, to their resume. Many can't, by the way
Totally agree with you on this point. It's amazing how many people just blatantly lie on their resume. In my experience it's, like, way more than half.
This makes it frustrating for people who are honest on their resumes, since managers have to take steps to weed out the significant population of liars out there.
"So what's the difference between TCP and UDP?"
"I have been writing network protocol stacks for 138 years. I sleep with a printed copy of the TCP state machine under my pillow, and all night little synsies and finsies dance through my dreams. I hang out with Vint Cerf every weekend. It says so right on my resume. Why don't you believe me?"
"Because 95% of people who say that cannot articulate a reasonable answer to my question.:-("
I guess until we can get most people to stop lying on their resumes, that will just be a fact of life.
That's probably the best single post made on/. in many years!
It would have been even better if it were not wildly incorrect. You can't cancel an order once it has been executed. The grandparent sounds super confident, but is largely making stuff up.
My personal programming hero, D. Richard Hipp, works with a very small team on SQLite (which you may have heard of). He uses his own, home-grown SCM called fossil. It probably doesn't scale to a zillion contributors but, like all of Hipp's work that I'm aware of, it's super clean and easy to use. Sounds pretty great for your use case.
And, as other people on this thread have already said: your habit of throwing stuff into production without testing it is similar to playing Russian Roulette with your company. Stop that. Stop that right now.
1. Install your own wireless hub and 3G station in your store.
2. Actively inject fake higher prices into competing web pages' HTML as it flies through your local router. Customer thinks the price in your store is the best one.
3. Profit!
To everybody here suggesting relational databases: you are on the wrong track here, I'm afraid to tell you. Relational databases handle large sets of completely homogenious data
Wrong. We're not on the wrong track. Databases don't only handle "homogeneous data" sets. You just don't know how to use them flexibly.
if you can be bothered to write software for all the I/O around them
Wrong. Databases abstract away I/O primitives and file formats, making creating/accessing your data much simpler than using (e.g.) flat text files.
nothing beats plain old ASCII text files!
Wrong. A great many things beat flat text files, under a great many use cases. The capabilities of (e.g.) a sqlite database are a strict (and much larger) superset of those of flat text files, while usually being *less* burdensome to their users.
how would you load the contents your database table into gnuplot
You can always dump your db contents to a flat ascii format if you need to (like to send the data to gnuplot).
Just because *you* don't know how to properly use a db doesn't mean you should shoot down the very idea in such broad strokes.
Others have already mentioned SQLite. Let me briefly expound on the features that are likely the most important to you, assuming (if you'll permit me) that you don't have much experience with databases:
0. The basic idea here is that you are replacing this whole hierarchy of files and directories by a single file that will contain all your data from an experiment. You figure out ahead of time what data the database will hold and specify that to SQLite. Then you to create, update, read, and destroy records as you see fit--pretty much as many records as you want. (I personally have created billions of records in a single database, though I'm sure you could make more.) Once you have records in your database, you can with great flexibility define which result sets you want from the data. SQLite will compute the result sets for you.
1. SQLite is easy to learn and use properly. This is as opposed to other database management systems, which require you to do lots of computery things that are probably overkill for you.
2. Your entire data set sits in a single file. If you're not in the middle of using the file, you can back up the database by simply copying the file somewhere else.
3. Transactions. You can wrap a large set of updates into a single "transaction". These have some nice properties that you will want:
3.1. Atomic. A transaction either fully happens or (if e.g. there was some problem) fully does not happen.
3.2. Consistent. If you write some consistency rules into your database, then those consistency rules are always satisfied after a transaction (whether or not the transaction was successful).
3.3 Isolated. (Not likely to be important to you.) If you have two programs, one writing a transaction to the database file while the other reads it, then the reader will either see the WHOLE transaction or NONE of it, even if the writer and reader are operating concurrently.
3.4. Durable. Once SQLite tells you the transaction has happened, it never "un-happens".
These properties hold even if your computer loses power in the middle of the transaction.
4. Excellent scripting APIs. You are a physical sciences researcher -- in my experience this means you have at least a little knowledge of basic programming. Depending on what you're doing, this might greatly help you to get what you need out of your data set. You may have a scripting language that you prefer -- if so, it likely has a nice interface to SQLite. If you don't already know a language, I personally recommend Tcl -- it's an extremely easy language to get going with, and has tremendous support directly from the SQLite developers.
But with results like 2-1 it's pretty much down to $random circumstance of the day.
My god. What are the moderators thinking?
I've been playing the game for 23 years, was trained by world-class coaches, and I'm here to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about.
Because in 80% of the matches it makes fans go "If only..."
It's part of the joy of the game, part of the culture of the game to wish and hope for your team to win. But just because a fan thinks something doesn't make it so.
this is mostly luck
If that were true, a group of randomly-chosen people would have a similar chance of winning the world cup as e.g. Germany. Which is, of course, ridiculous.
Obviously the game has a lot of problems, and some of those topics are hot today. The game arguably needs to be refined in a couple ways.
But it is absolutely *not true* soccer "isn't about making the best team win" or that it's "mostly luck". The overwhelming majority of the time, the best team *does* win. It's just that when that happens, it isn't big news.
I read all the +3 -> +5 comments here and am shocked to see no one mention the importance of referrals!
You already know people connected to the industry -- talk to them! Ask your profs if they know anybody in the industry. Ask your jobful friends to pass your resume along. Is there a famous prof at your uni? Did you take a class with them? Bring your chutzpah to their office and ask for a rec.
A referral from a trusted third party is thousands of times more likely to get your foot in the door than your resume, no matter how bloody sparkly the thing is.
Case in point, I graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy school, and no one really gave much of a shit. Until I knocked on my algo prof's door once during his office hours, asked him whether he knew someone in industry looking for a smart hard-working youngster. He gave me the name of his contact (the CEO of a tiny co). (I didn't even do that well in the Prof's class, slightly below median IIRC.)
Next thing I know the CEO's shaking my hand congratulating me on my new 50%-pay job. He's telling me "boy have you ever got a lot to learn, but Prof so-n-so says you're smart and you do seem to come off that way". Worked my arse off til it turned into a real job. And now there are *2* people out there who think I'm smart, so, you know, twice the network:)
If you don't have a network, make one. Think about doing an unpaid internship at a company that has a future. (Look into funding options from your uni for this kind of stuff.) Be careful with this one -- the network you create here must be valuable to justify the work and the resume gap.
I had the privilege once to speak with the former-CFO of Coke, and asked her (rather lamely) how one winds up being the CFO of Coke. She said, "If you really want a big-time job you gotta be aggressive and you gotta be charming."
Note that "qualified" is not a part of that sentence.
I can program!
Broken thinking. Getting hired isn't about being good at the job. It's about being good at getting hired, which is a largely orthogonal skill set.
Need new skill set = need to practice. Interviews are like first dates: they pretty much all suck, but get less nerve-wrecking with practice.
I should mention that once you have job 1, the network it creates (or doesn't create) will bear heavily on how your search for job 2 goes. So take good care of your network at job 1. I've seen a ton of smart people with amazing resumes, who are actually quite good programmers, who can't find jobs because they are huge pains in the ass. The days of the cranky-bitch-genius-programmer are limited (if not completely over), because there are plenty of pleasant-genius-programmers out there who need jobs too.
Approach your job like a pro: learn the politics and the people, be friendly, be polite but not stodgy. Choose very carefully which personal details to share with which people. Never express a negative emotion unless you've thought about it extremely thoroughly. Never write an email to/from a work account that you wouldn't want the CEO to read. Get people to like you: morally it shouldn't matter, but practically it makes a gigantic difference to how your career will go.
Finally and of course most importantly, work your ass off and get results. Nothing will make boss-man like you more than if you are generating two times the output as everyone else, with a smile and a joke handy at lunch time. It makes him look fabulous to his boss, and ten years from now when he's working at google (or whatever the "google" of 2020 will be, probably "google"), guess where you can ship an email and probably get a job.
So Microsoft secretly filed a suit against 27 unnamed individuals, and got a secret order taking 277 domain names away from them, all based on a mere accusation.
Oh, but since we're fighting spam, I guess that's okay.
Wait until Microsoft starts doing this to go after copyright violations. Will y'all be cheering then?
My fiancée IAL working in a federal district court. I have mod points, but I guess it's more illuminating to reply than mod down this ridiculous comment.
Stuff is filed under seal in court all the time. The idea is that you don't want the defendant you're pursuing to know you're pursuing them if there's a high chance they can cover their tracks. You can't just make a "mere accusation" and get a court to do whatever you want. That, of course, would be silly.
Most judges are really quite reasonable about the decision to keep things sealed. In any event, all the docs will become unsealed relatively quickly -- and if you think the court was *unreasonable*, that they abused their discretion somehow, you can take your complaint to the appellate court.
Court proceedings are slow, but some crooks (especially intelligent, well-funded crooks) can move fast. This is the balance we've found between thinking things through carefully, and satisfying the public's right to this information, while still prosecuting agile crooks.
In copyright infringement cases, the plaintiff would probably have a hard time convincing the judge that docs need to stay sealed.
Believe it or not, the system actually works pretty well sometimes.
Look, I'm all for an intelligent discussion of the shortcomings of the legal system, of which there are plenty. But you should really try to learn something about it before criticizing it. Otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time.
So I've been using this line in my crontab for a long time now without any problems (well no more problems than I usually experience with Flash under Linux):
* * * * * rm -fr/home/me/.macromedia
I think this solves the problem, but maybe I'm mistaken...?
That depends on your threat model. Your cron job might keep your kid brother from discovering your cookies. If you *really* don't want people to know what flash is caching, I'd s/rm -rf/shred -uf/ there for starters. Then I'd think about putting my whole OS on an encrypted partition (trivial these days with Fedora, not sure about other distribs).
Of course, you still have problem with sniffing and all manner of malware, all of which could defeat your goal of preventing people from knowing what kind of flash content you're downloading.
I hung out with Bruce Schneier for a 1-hour talk once. If you want to scale up your paranoia further, you can do what he does: never let your computer touch a network or another person's hands. He has no wireless card, never plugs an ethernet cord into the slot, and never gives his compy to anyone else. Very difficult to sniff traffic that doesn't exist (but not impossible).
Emphasis mine.
So basically these investigators took something that was legal at it's source and imported it into an area where it was illegal, and then blamed the supplier.
If they had of not actively done this, then no crime would have been committed.
(Of course IANAL etc).
My fiancée IAL who wrote her thesis partially on this issue. This was basically just a riff on a sting operation, which is obviously an extremely common technique for gathering evidence against various flavors of consensual crook (prostitutes, drug dealers, etc). The courts will not reject the technique any time soon, and legislators will never write laws banning the technique because they would hate to seem soft on crime.
Basically, consensual crimes are more expensive to prosecute because no involved party is interested in revealing information that could lead to a conviction. The most effective ways cops and feds have come up with to do so is through intricate surveillance methods (wiretaps, inside informants) and sting ops. The reasoning is that if a person commits a consensual crime with an undercover agent then the person would probably have committed the crime anyway.
Of course, I believe it's stupid to criminalize most of the consensual crimes we hear about (drug dealing, prostitution, (adult) porn creation/consumption), but once you decide that it's illegal, you have to come up with a way to prosecute it.
This leads to some pretty hilarious cop behaviors. Fiancée told me about a sting in which cops leave an old car parked unlocked with the keys in the ignition in a crappy neighborhood with a bunch of audio recording equipment in the trunk. The minute someone tries to take the car, a cop swings around the corner, arrests the guy and sends him off to jail for grand theft auto.
So in one particular neighborhood they parked their sting car in front of a nice couple's house. Couple called the police multiple times to report the apparently lost vehicle. But the cops didn't want to give away their little ploy, so they just ignored them. After two weeks, the couple decides to go have a look at the car to see if there was an ID or something there. The minute they open the door, the cops pull up from around the corner, arrest both of them, and charge them with attempted grand theft auto.
I think the point is that currently the language is "de"-volving.
Ugh, I almost managed to get to the end of this thread without blowing my stack. Who the hell mods up this kind of drivel?
Your comment captures the thoughts of middle-aged people all around the globe and all through time--speakers of every language in every literate culture believe that their language was "correct" or "at its peak" one to two generations ago. They decry the laziness or moral decrepitude of the young generation. They extend this criticism to art, architecture, music, and all other human forms of expression.
This has always been the case. When the waltz first became popular in America, it was considered tawdry and unclean. When people started pronouncing "knife" without the initial [k]-sound, their parents thought they were butchering the language. (Yeah, we used to say that word with an initial [k]-sound.) Ancient Latin speakers published books saying "don't say it this way, say it that way, because this is how our language is supposed to be". Spanish speakers wanted their future tense to be spelled cantar he and not cantaré, recognizing its periphrastic etymological root.
Try spelling it that way today. Try pronouncing "knife" with a [k]-sound. People will raise their eyebrows. Not because the words are wrong, but because the standard is cultural and, hence, arbitrary.
The critics in these examples were as ignorant and wrong then as you are now: you fail to perceive the subjectivity of your viewpoint. And every time I hear this crap I die a little bit inside.
Yes, the American education system is profoundly broken. Yes, literally thousands of children with shitloads of potential are being flushed down the pipes each year. Stupid parents, stupid system, stupid policymakers, whatever. But languages do not "de"-volve. They change.
Languages exist as a mapping from mostly arbitrary vocalizations and gestures into the semantic web of the experiential universe of the speakers, which in turn is influenced heavily by anthropological, cultural, and personal variables. These variables are subject to tremendous change across geographical, socioeconomic, ethnic, gender, political, occupational, generational, and temporal barriers (to name just those that came off the top of my head).
The fluidity and rapidness of language change are a direct result of the arbitrariness of this mapping, the fact that all those variables are in constant flux, and probably the fact that children are evolutionarily inclined to distance themselves from their parents' generation.
In other words, just cause you speak languages doesn't mean you know how they work. That's tantamount to thinking you know how the ocean works cause you swim in it sometimes.
English will survive just fine in all registers, including academic papers, in spite of the changes it will go through.
Even if we change the way we spell "through". (Horrors!)
"Matt is pleading guilty on the advice of his public defender in hopes of getting a three and a half year sentence."
In other words, he doesn't have the money to actually fight this.
... where by "he" you mean the PD himself.
Look, public defenders almost *always* encourage their clients to settle, because their compensation structure incentivizes them that way. PDs barely make ends meet, and they get compensated by the number of cases they take on, with very little marginal compensation for taking a case to trial. So they wind up taking on 50, 100 cases at a time. The faster they can get rid of you, the faster they can take on another case.
Notice that the merits of your case didn't appear in the above reasoning chain.
Of course if the client insists on going to trial, the PD is legally obliged to do so--but how many criminal defendants know enough AND have the cojones to argue with their lawyer when their liberty is at stake?
The PD compensation system is b0rkd, and innocent people are in jail because of it.
The radius is not explicitly stated in the paper, and the estimated masses are around one solar mass, which means they are no where near earth-sized.
Wrong. WDs are *ridiculously* dense, with a rho of about 10^6 g/cm^3, so a 1M_sun WD has a volume of like 2*10^31 cubic meters, which means the radius is around 8000 kilometers. R_earth is about 6400 kilometers, so Earth is actually really useful to get an intuitive picture of how these guys look.
The cool thing about WDs is that they shrink in volume when you add mass. Which means they get denser the more mass you add. Even cooler is that lots of them are in a co-orbit with other stars in a binary system, and they steal mass from the other star, so it's not so strange to see WDs gaining mass and getting denser over time.
It turns out there is one special mass at which the electron degeneracy pressure holding the star up is not enough to fight the force of gravity pushing it inward. (This mass is about 1.4 times the mass of the sun, depending on whether the star is rotating.) At that point the thing collapses from the size of earth to about the size of a soccer ball in less than a second, generating one of the most spectacular explosions in nature. I mean this thing is blown apart at around 3% of the speed of light and is 5 billion times brighter than the sun.
This is called a "type Ia supernova" -- a pretty boring name for what is, technically speaking, the awesomest thing in the universe.
I've always thought the term "infant" meant that they had already been born?
Infant comes from a Latin word meaning "speechless". So I guess anything that can't speak (a young baby, an unborn baby, a wet piece of string, a sloth, a carp, an orangutan, a breakfast cereal, a fruit bat) is an infant.:)
A friend of mine was a columnist in my Uni's newspaper and he actually used a similar example... "Should a family who's loved one is currently on life support and in a coma, upon being told by the attending physician that they expect the patient to be able to come off of life support and regain consciousness in three months, and then eventually go on to lead a normal fully functional life afterward, be allowed to have the patient removed from life support simply due to not wanting the financial burden? No? Then why is abortion legal?"
Your friend makes a crappy analogy.
I can't legally pay you to have sex with me. But, I can legally pay you to have sex with my friend, film that sex act, burn it to a DVD, make 1 million copies of that DVD and sell those copies to strangers.
So why is making pornography legal? Or why is prostitution illegal?
Because, while they share traits, they are different in ways that we have decided are important. We decided early on in the USA to be damn careful about limiting freedom of expression. It's hard to say how a law against prostitution treads on one's freedom of expression, but it's easy to argue that a law against pornography does so.
We haven't decided yet when a fetus becomes a person. This is a hot topic, and it stays hot because there is no objective way to say that a bag of cells is a person. Conception, heartbeat, brain function, viability, birth: these are all just arbitrary choices we make because we think that they somehow indicate that the bag of cells has become a person.
Until we do decide, the rights of the person carrying the fetus will outweigh those of the fetus itself. It's really the only sensible way to proceed.
OTOH, we all agree that a person in a coma is still a person. Just because we may want to protect hir rights, and give less protection to something we don't agree is a person, does not mean our thinking is flawed.
In fact, it kinda means our thinking is consistent.
Your friend would be better off arguing that the boundary between being a person and not being a person is arbitrary, that there is no magical moment when a fetus becomes a person. But we all agree that after the fetus has been born, it is certainly a person. So since we know that the fetus at some point becomes a person, but we don't know exactly when, we should pick the earliest time at which it is reasonable to suspect that the fetus is a person. And that time is conception [insert reasoning here]. So, since a conceived fetus is a person, we can't kill it because we have a law against killing persons.
The latter argument, while still deeply flawed, is less transparently so.:)
Propaganda on the other hand cannot possibly bring down a plane from the sky, and it is surely protected to some extent by freedom of speech.
Firstly, they're not looking for things that can bring down an airplane -- they're looking for things that could indicate your intent to bring down an airplane. Though I agree with you that such-and-such a t-shirt is not necessarily an indicator.
In terms of your First Amendment rights, there are two locations that we care about here, and they're treated differently in the law: (1) the airport, and (2) the airplane.
The airplane is simple: it's owned by a private company, so you're on private property. That means your free speech protections are nonexistent: the airline can impose any ban on speech or expression it wants. Sue them on First Amendment grounds all you want: the judge will throw out your case.
The airport is a little more complicated. Under the law, it's a "non-public forum" (which is different than being a private place). The Supreme Court has shaken it out like this: your rights to speech and expression may be restricted by regulation as long as the restriction is "reasonable" (as determined by the courts) and as long as the regulation is not intended to suppress expression simply because it's counter to airport officials' views.
Lower courts have decided that "reasonable" means "in line with the main public purpose for the airport".
As an obvious example, you can't hold a rally in an airport. It creates congestion, which is counter to the interests of the bulk of people using the airport: they want to get to their destination speedily.
So, getting back to the main point, a US airport is within its rights to impose bans on (let's say) t-shirts picturing known terrorists, because such t-shirts could reasonably cause airport delays.
How is this not racketeering and extortion? I mean, c'mon... It's not either of those things, I'm afraid.
My girlfriend IAL; she says this particular practice of the RIAA is perfectly legal. A party to a civil litigation can alter the settlement terms basically however they want, whenever they want (subject to public policy, of course: RIAA can't alter the terms to include the forfeit of your firstborn child or whatever). A settlement is just a contract, after all.
This makes sense, so the argument goes, because a party's costs for litigating a particular case become higher and higher as the case progresses. So, the settlement costs must increase concordantly.
6 million dollars. Hah. But seriously, the website says:
Q. How much does it cost?
A. The i-LIMB Hand is two to three times more expensive than other more traditional myoelectric devices. Each i-LIMB Hand costs about $18,000 (12,000 euro) reflecting the significant research and development that has been invested into these next-generation devices.
Aw, c'mon; how many English dialects pronounce "mom" and "aunt" similarly?
Don't count dialects; count individuals. Determining what a "dialect" even is will get you into theoretical and field-method trouble relatively quickly.
To answer your question: lots of them, at least in America. Many (if not most) Americans pronounce mom as [ma:m] and aunt as [a:nt'?]. The latter is pronounced in isolation with a word-final unreleased voiceless alveolar stop and a simultaneous glottal stop, a cluster which is hardly audible.
And [m] and [n], both voiced front nasals, are quite similar as well -- even very decent DSP living behind a very decent microphone can have trouble distinguishing between the waveforms produced thereby. Have you ever tried to spell something with an "m" or "n" to someone over the phone? Even a human living behind a crappy microphone has trouble distinguishing [m] and [n].
Certainly the midwestern, Kansas-type dialects have [a:nt'?]; and I would imagine, since those dialects form the basis of the American prestige dialect, that this is the prototypical pronunciation of the word for the purposes of the software.
So I'd say in the universe of English lexemes, these two are pretty damn similar. Of course, you didn't define "similarly", so I guess there's not a whole lot to measure or argue about here.
On my workstation, 84 lines were generated. This means that at the time the ps task was running, it was only one of 84 different tasks that were competing for time to run on the CPU.
Those 84 tasks were most certainly not competing for time to run on the CPU. If they were, they'd have been in the run queue, and their states would've been reported as R, not S.
Also:
Most of the tasks are also sleeping; that is, they are waiting for some resource to become available.
This conclusion is also not true. In fact, the correct conclusion is the opposite: those processes are listed as sleeping because they're not interested in any resources!
I wonder if you are in Australia?.. Leuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay isn't very easy to find outside of Aus (in my experience anyway)...
A quick google and I found it's also available in New Jersey. But they don't offer shipping, so you'd have to hike to NJ anyway. I'd rather make the trip to Aus.:/
Woh buddy, hold your horses. In the past, blacks may not have been treated like human beings in America, but what makes you think this is different from how blacks treated blacks in Africa? You don't even need to pick up a history book for this one, you can just look at the current situation there, nope, hasn't changed. Civil war and bloodshed everywhere. You ever wonder how it was so easy to get so many black slaves over from Africa? It's because they had other blacks from different tribes helping them!
I'll say this, whites don't owe blacks shit. Blacks are just as responsible for the enslavement of other blacks as white people are. What do you want anyway? Your acres and mule? You want to be sent back?! Get real, don't try to get by on your ancestors suffering, everyones ancestors have suffered unjustfully. You're not special, sorry.
Oh please. Just because nonwhites enslave people doesn't mean whites are justified in doing it.
Btw, a side note, the poorest of the poor blacks in America are kings compared to the average black African. Better yet, they probably won't have AIDS or any of the others sickness that plague Africa. So, you're welcome.
This exemplifies an attitude that developed in white America after just a couple generations of slavery, and (obviously) still persists today: that Africans were better off for having been enslaved. That they even enjoyed it. That if we let black people go free, they'll have no idea what to do with themselves, because they're stupid, no better than animals.
I don't think that's how the conversation went. I don't think that better AIDS treatment in 400 years was part of the whole enslavement "deal". I don't think white Americans had the best interests of Africans in mind when they enslaved them. I think it was probably more for personal economic gain.
The chief postbellum reason for blacks having reached their current position in our society is the civil rights movement, which I'm pretty sure wasn't started by white people. In fact, I believe there was a lot of white resistance to the movement at the time; you may have seen it on TV. Were those whites of the same magnanimous ideology as the ones who enslaved those blacks' ancestors?
So, I mean, the claim is hypocritical. Which, of course, doesn't make it wrong.
Here's what does make it wrong:
Citing one reason why black life is better in America today than it is in Africa doesn't prove that it was a moral Good to enslave black people. Your argument entails that the ends justify the means, but the only sound moral frameworks under which that is true are utilitarian.
Fine, so how do you quantify the amount of moral Bad contained in the rape, robbery, battery, and murder of all those black people for all those years, for economic gain? How do you quantify the amount of moral Good contained in providing proper medical treatment? Even if you could do such a thing, I doubt the total would land on the Good side of zero.
Orthogonally, yet equally devastating to your argument, most blacks don't have access to the same medical treatment as whites in this country anyway, due to their lower average socioeconomic status. And don't argue that said status is their fault: since you've already implicitly adopted the premise that black people are unable to take care of themselves, and that therefore they are whites' responsibility, that argument is logically unavailable to you.
So is this all you have to support the moral justification of the enslavement of a race? A weak-ass tu quoque argument and a 250-year-old white supremacist archaism?
Slashdot Mirror
"The production of tiny black holes is one of the predictions. "
Man I hope they know what they are doing.
Microscopic black holes disappear quickly due to Hawking radiation. So if your goal is to destroy the earth, creating a microscopic black hole is not the way you want to go.
The bigger a black hole is, the more slowly it evaporates. So if you want your black hole to do any damage, it'll have to be more than a certain threshold size. Turns out that minimum-size black hole you'll need to destroy Earth is roughly the mass of Mt Everest.
If we take the density of such a black hole to be 3 * 10^18 kg/m^3, then our black hole will look like a ball with a radius of about 12 cm, i.e. it looks like a soccer ball.*
See here for more details.
* no idea if my density assumption is reasonable. I'm not a physicist -- I got the number from 20 seconds of googling. The volume of your black hole may vary.
> As a hiring manager, I can tell you that I almost never have the time to go dig through a prospective candidate's open source code
I also have had the responsibility for hiring people from time to time. And OMG you are hiring a *programmer*. This is the *primary* thing they are going to be doing after you hire them. Their code is their main work product. The information is available to you and you're just going to *ignore* it? Who cares how charming and articulate they are if their code is crappy?
You could assess these things in 15 minutes in a 13kLOC code base. Did they write clear and useful comments? Is the code well organized? Is the high-level structure obvious? It's an excellent second- or third-pass method, and I've always found it pretty weird that it's not a more common practice.
Okay, maybe you have some reason to doubt that they actually wrote it or whatever. And of course they will be showing you the awesomest, cleanest little gem they ever wrote. Weigh it appropriately. But don't weigh it at 0%!
I want programmers who can write code AND are articulate and charming. Someone who is articulate and charming but cannot write code should not be hired as a programmer.
OTOH someone who can write code but is not particularly charming can still be a great contributor if they are not a total asshole, and can explain their code clearly in comments or in small meetings.
Probably the reason most hiring managers don't want to review candidates' code is because they are not particularly skilled at reading code quickly and making a useful judgment about its quality. This just means that the hiring manager isn't qualified to judge the candidate on this critical dimension. They should admit this limitation and farm out the task to someone else in their company whom they trust. (If there is no such person in their company then their company is pretty well fucked anyway.)
> Not to mention, most of the time open repositories like that are blocked from my work network anyway
Okay, but this is not a statement about the objective predictive utility of a hiring process that involves code reviews. It's just a statement that your company is toopid. :-) And you can always have the candidate email you the code. They key problem here is that *you* do not believe that reviewing people's code adds a lot of value, and on that point I believe you are quite mistaken.
> can the candidate speak, in detail, to their resume. Many can't, by the way
Totally agree with you on this point. It's amazing how many people just blatantly lie on their resume. In my experience it's, like, way more than half.
This makes it frustrating for people who are honest on their resumes, since managers have to take steps to weed out the significant population of liars out there.
"So what's the difference between TCP and UDP?"
"I have been writing network protocol stacks for 138 years. I sleep with a printed copy of the TCP state machine under my pillow, and all night little synsies and finsies dance through my dreams. I hang out with Vint Cerf every weekend. It says so right on my resume. Why don't you believe me?"
"Because 95% of people who say that cannot articulate a reasonable answer to my question. :-("
I guess until we can get most people to stop lying on their resumes, that will just be a fact of life.
That's probably the best single post made on /. in many years!
It would have been even better if it were not wildly incorrect. You can't cancel an order once it has been executed. The grandparent sounds super confident, but is largely making stuff up.
My personal programming hero, D. Richard Hipp, works with a very small team on SQLite (which you may have heard of). He uses his own, home-grown SCM called fossil. It probably doesn't scale to a zillion contributors but, like all of Hipp's work that I'm aware of, it's super clean and easy to use. Sounds pretty great for your use case.
And, as other people on this thread have already said: your habit of throwing stuff into production without testing it is similar to playing Russian Roulette with your company. Stop that. Stop that right now.
1. Install your own wireless hub and 3G station in your store.
2. Actively inject fake higher prices into competing web pages' HTML as it flies through your local router. Customer thinks the price in your store is the best one.
3. Profit!
To everybody here suggesting relational databases: you are on the wrong track here, I'm afraid to tell you. Relational databases handle large sets of completely homogenious data
Wrong. We're not on the wrong track. Databases don't only handle "homogeneous data" sets. You just don't know how to use them flexibly.
if you can be bothered to write software for all the I/O around them
Wrong. Databases abstract away I/O primitives and file formats, making creating/accessing your data much simpler than using (e.g.) flat text files.
nothing beats plain old ASCII text files!
Wrong. A great many things beat flat text files, under a great many use cases. The capabilities of (e.g.) a sqlite database are a strict (and much larger) superset of those of flat text files, while usually being *less* burdensome to their users.
how would you load the contents your database table into gnuplot
You can always dump your db contents to a flat ascii format if you need to (like to send the data to gnuplot).
Just because *you* don't know how to properly use a db doesn't mean you should shoot down the very idea in such broad strokes.
Good luck and enjoy!
But with results like 2-1 it's pretty much down to $random circumstance of the day.
My god. What are the moderators thinking?
I've been playing the game for 23 years, was trained by world-class coaches, and I'm here to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about.
Because in 80% of the matches it makes fans go "If only..."
It's part of the joy of the game, part of the culture of the game to wish and hope for your team to win. But just because a fan thinks something doesn't make it so.
this is mostly luck
If that were true, a group of randomly-chosen people would have a similar chance of winning the world cup as e.g. Germany. Which is, of course, ridiculous.
Obviously the game has a lot of problems, and some of those topics are hot today. The game arguably needs to be refined in a couple ways.
But it is absolutely *not true* soccer "isn't about making the best team win" or that it's "mostly luck". The overwhelming majority of the time, the best team *does* win. It's just that when that happens, it isn't big news.
You already know people connected to the industry -- talk to them! Ask your profs if they know anybody in the industry. Ask your jobful friends to pass your resume along. Is there a famous prof at your uni? Did you take a class with them? Bring your chutzpah to their office and ask for a rec.
A referral from a trusted third party is thousands of times more likely to get your foot in the door than your resume, no matter how bloody sparkly the thing is.
Case in point, I graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy school, and no one really gave much of a shit. Until I knocked on my algo prof's door once during his office hours, asked him whether he knew someone in industry looking for a smart hard-working youngster. He gave me the name of his contact (the CEO of a tiny co). (I didn't even do that well in the Prof's class, slightly below median IIRC.)
Next thing I know the CEO's shaking my hand congratulating me on my new 50%-pay job. He's telling me "boy have you ever got a lot to learn, but Prof so-n-so says you're smart and you do seem to come off that way". Worked my arse off til it turned into a real job. And now there are *2* people out there who think I'm smart, so, you know, twice the network :)
If you don't have a network, make one. Think about doing an unpaid internship at a company that has a future. (Look into funding options from your uni for this kind of stuff.) Be careful with this one -- the network you create here must be valuable to justify the work and the resume gap.
I had the privilege once to speak with the former-CFO of Coke, and asked her (rather lamely) how one winds up being the CFO of Coke. She said, "If you really want a big-time job you gotta be aggressive and you gotta be charming."
Note that "qualified" is not a part of that sentence.
I can program!
Broken thinking. Getting hired isn't about being good at the job. It's about being good at getting hired, which is a largely orthogonal skill set.
Need new skill set = need to practice. Interviews are like first dates: they pretty much all suck, but get less nerve-wrecking with practice.
I should mention that once you have job 1, the network it creates (or doesn't create) will bear heavily on how your search for job 2 goes. So take good care of your network at job 1. I've seen a ton of smart people with amazing resumes, who are actually quite good programmers, who can't find jobs because they are huge pains in the ass. The days of the cranky-bitch-genius-programmer are limited (if not completely over), because there are plenty of pleasant-genius-programmers out there who need jobs too.
Approach your job like a pro: learn the politics and the people, be friendly, be polite but not stodgy. Choose very carefully which personal details to share with which people. Never express a negative emotion unless you've thought about it extremely thoroughly. Never write an email to/from a work account that you wouldn't want the CEO to read. Get people to like you: morally it shouldn't matter, but practically it makes a gigantic difference to how your career will go.
Finally and of course most importantly, work your ass off and get results. Nothing will make boss-man like you more than if you are generating two times the output as everyone else, with a smile and a joke handy at lunch time. It makes him look fabulous to his boss, and ten years from now when he's working at google (or whatever the "google" of 2020 will be, probably "google"), guess where you can ship an email and probably get a job.
So Microsoft secretly filed a suit against 27 unnamed individuals, and got a secret order taking 277 domain names away from them, all based on a mere accusation.
Oh, but since we're fighting spam, I guess that's okay.
Wait until Microsoft starts doing this to go after copyright violations. Will y'all be cheering then?
My fiancée IAL working in a federal district court. I have mod points, but I guess it's more illuminating to reply than mod down this ridiculous comment.
Stuff is filed under seal in court all the time. The idea is that you don't want the defendant you're pursuing to know you're pursuing them if there's a high chance they can cover their tracks. You can't just make a "mere accusation" and get a court to do whatever you want. That, of course, would be silly.
Most judges are really quite reasonable about the decision to keep things sealed. In any event, all the docs will become unsealed relatively quickly -- and if you think the court was *unreasonable*, that they abused their discretion somehow, you can take your complaint to the appellate court.
Court proceedings are slow, but some crooks (especially intelligent, well-funded crooks) can move fast. This is the balance we've found between thinking things through carefully, and satisfying the public's right to this information, while still prosecuting agile crooks.
In copyright infringement cases, the plaintiff would probably have a hard time convincing the judge that docs need to stay sealed.
Believe it or not, the system actually works pretty well sometimes.
Look, I'm all for an intelligent discussion of the shortcomings of the legal system, of which there are plenty. But you should really try to learn something about it before criticizing it. Otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time.
So I've been using this line in my crontab for a long time now without any problems (well no more problems than I usually experience with Flash under Linux):
/home/me/.macromedia
* * * * * rm -fr
I think this solves the problem, but maybe I'm mistaken...?
That depends on your threat model. Your cron job might keep your kid brother from discovering your cookies. If you *really* don't want people to know what flash is caching, I'd s/rm -rf/shred -uf/ there for starters. Then I'd think about putting my whole OS on an encrypted partition (trivial these days with Fedora, not sure about other distribs).
Of course, you still have problem with sniffing and all manner of malware, all of which could defeat your goal of preventing people from knowing what kind of flash content you're downloading.
I hung out with Bruce Schneier for a 1-hour talk once. If you want to scale up your paranoia further, you can do what he does: never let your computer touch a network or another person's hands. He has no wireless card, never plugs an ethernet cord into the slot, and never gives his compy to anyone else. Very difficult to sniff traffic that doesn't exist (but not impossible).
Emphasis mine.
So basically these investigators took something that was legal at it's source and imported it into an area where it was illegal, and then blamed the supplier.
If they had of not actively done this, then no crime would have been committed.
(Of course IANAL etc).
My fiancée IAL who wrote her thesis partially on this issue. This was basically just a riff on a sting operation, which is obviously an extremely common technique for gathering evidence against various flavors of consensual crook (prostitutes, drug dealers, etc). The courts will not reject the technique any time soon, and legislators will never write laws banning the technique because they would hate to seem soft on crime.
Basically, consensual crimes are more expensive to prosecute because no involved party is interested in revealing information that could lead to a conviction. The most effective ways cops and feds have come up with to do so is through intricate surveillance methods (wiretaps, inside informants) and sting ops. The reasoning is that if a person commits a consensual crime with an undercover agent then the person would probably have committed the crime anyway.
Of course, I believe it's stupid to criminalize most of the consensual crimes we hear about (drug dealing, prostitution, (adult) porn creation/consumption), but once you decide that it's illegal, you have to come up with a way to prosecute it.
This leads to some pretty hilarious cop behaviors. Fiancée told me about a sting in which cops leave an old car parked unlocked with the keys in the ignition in a crappy neighborhood with a bunch of audio recording equipment in the trunk. The minute someone tries to take the car, a cop swings around the corner, arrests the guy and sends him off to jail for grand theft auto.
So in one particular neighborhood they parked their sting car in front of a nice couple's house. Couple called the police multiple times to report the apparently lost vehicle. But the cops didn't want to give away their little ploy, so they just ignored them. After two weeks, the couple decides to go have a look at the car to see if there was an ID or something there. The minute they open the door, the cops pull up from around the corner, arrest both of them, and charge them with attempted grand theft auto.
So by "hilarious" I guess I meant "terrifying".
I think the point is that currently the language is "de"-volving.
Ugh, I almost managed to get to the end of this thread without blowing my stack. Who the hell mods up this kind of drivel?
Your comment captures the thoughts of middle-aged people all around the globe and all through time--speakers of every language in every literate culture believe that their language was "correct" or "at its peak" one to two generations ago. They decry the laziness or moral decrepitude of the young generation. They extend this criticism to art, architecture, music, and all other human forms of expression.
This has always been the case. When the waltz first became popular in America, it was considered tawdry and unclean. When people started pronouncing "knife" without the initial [k]-sound, their parents thought they were butchering the language. (Yeah, we used to say that word with an initial [k]-sound.) Ancient Latin speakers published books saying "don't say it this way, say it that way, because this is how our language is supposed to be". Spanish speakers wanted their future tense to be spelled cantar he and not cantaré, recognizing its periphrastic etymological root.
Try spelling it that way today. Try pronouncing "knife" with a [k]-sound. People will raise their eyebrows. Not because the words are wrong, but because the standard is cultural and, hence, arbitrary.
The critics in these examples were as ignorant and wrong then as you are now: you fail to perceive the subjectivity of your viewpoint. And every time I hear this crap I die a little bit inside.
Yes, the American education system is profoundly broken. Yes, literally thousands of children with shitloads of potential are being flushed down the pipes each year. Stupid parents, stupid system, stupid policymakers, whatever. But languages do not "de"-volve. They change.
Languages exist as a mapping from mostly arbitrary vocalizations and gestures into the semantic web of the experiential universe of the speakers, which in turn is influenced heavily by anthropological, cultural, and personal variables. These variables are subject to tremendous change across geographical, socioeconomic, ethnic, gender, political, occupational, generational, and temporal barriers (to name just those that came off the top of my head).
The fluidity and rapidness of language change are a direct result of the arbitrariness of this mapping, the fact that all those variables are in constant flux, and probably the fact that children are evolutionarily inclined to distance themselves from their parents' generation.
In other words, just cause you speak languages doesn't mean you know how they work. That's tantamount to thinking you know how the ocean works cause you swim in it sometimes.
English will survive just fine in all registers, including academic papers, in spite of the changes it will go through.
Even if we change the way we spell "through". (Horrors!)
"Matt is pleading guilty on the advice of his public defender in hopes of getting a three and a half year sentence."
In other words, he doesn't have the money to actually fight this.
... where by "he" you mean the PD himself.
Look, public defenders almost *always* encourage their clients to settle, because their compensation structure incentivizes them that way. PDs barely make ends meet, and they get compensated by the number of cases they take on, with very little marginal compensation for taking a case to trial. So they wind up taking on 50, 100 cases at a time. The faster they can get rid of you, the faster they can take on another case.
Notice that the merits of your case didn't appear in the above reasoning chain.
Of course if the client insists on going to trial, the PD is legally obliged to do so--but how many criminal defendants know enough AND have the cojones to argue with their lawyer when their liberty is at stake?
The PD compensation system is b0rkd, and innocent people are in jail because of it.
The radius is not explicitly stated in the paper, and the estimated masses are around one solar mass, which means they are no where near earth-sized.
Wrong. WDs are *ridiculously* dense, with a rho of about 10^6 g/cm^3, so a 1M_sun WD has a volume of like 2*10^31 cubic meters, which means the radius is around 8000 kilometers. R_earth is about 6400 kilometers, so Earth is actually really useful to get an intuitive picture of how these guys look.
The cool thing about WDs is that they shrink in volume when you add mass. Which means they get denser the more mass you add. Even cooler is that lots of them are in a co-orbit with other stars in a binary system, and they steal mass from the other star, so it's not so strange to see WDs gaining mass and getting denser over time.
It turns out there is one special mass at which the electron degeneracy pressure holding the star up is not enough to fight the force of gravity pushing it inward. (This mass is about 1.4 times the mass of the sun, depending on whether the star is rotating.) At that point the thing collapses from the size of earth to about the size of a soccer ball in less than a second, generating one of the most spectacular explosions in nature. I mean this thing is blown apart at around 3% of the speed of light and is 5 billion times brighter than the sun.
This is called a "type Ia supernova" -- a pretty boring name for what is, technically speaking, the awesomest thing in the universe.
I've always thought the term "infant" meant that they had already been born?
Infant comes from a Latin word meaning "speechless". So I guess anything that can't speak (a young baby, an unborn baby, a wet piece of string, a sloth, a carp, an orangutan, a breakfast cereal, a fruit bat) is an infant. :)
A friend of mine was a columnist in my Uni's newspaper and he actually used a similar example... "Should a family who's loved one is currently on life support and in a coma, upon being told by the attending physician that they expect the patient to be able to come off of life support and regain consciousness in three months, and then eventually go on to lead a normal fully functional life afterward, be allowed to have the patient removed from life support simply due to not wanting the financial burden? No? Then why is abortion legal?"
Your friend makes a crappy analogy.
I can't legally pay you to have sex with me. But, I can legally pay you to have sex with my friend, film that sex act, burn it to a DVD, make 1 million copies of that DVD and sell those copies to strangers.
So why is making pornography legal? Or why is prostitution illegal?
Because, while they share traits, they are different in ways that we have decided are important. We decided early on in the USA to be damn careful about limiting freedom of expression. It's hard to say how a law against prostitution treads on one's freedom of expression, but it's easy to argue that a law against pornography does so.
We haven't decided yet when a fetus becomes a person. This is a hot topic, and it stays hot because there is no objective way to say that a bag of cells is a person. Conception, heartbeat, brain function, viability, birth: these are all just arbitrary choices we make because we think that they somehow indicate that the bag of cells has become a person.
Until we do decide, the rights of the person carrying the fetus will outweigh those of the fetus itself. It's really the only sensible way to proceed.
OTOH, we all agree that a person in a coma is still a person. Just because we may want to protect hir rights, and give less protection to something we don't agree is a person, does not mean our thinking is flawed.
In fact, it kinda means our thinking is consistent.
Your friend would be better off arguing that the boundary between being a person and not being a person is arbitrary, that there is no magical moment when a fetus becomes a person. But we all agree that after the fetus has been born, it is certainly a person. So since we know that the fetus at some point becomes a person, but we don't know exactly when, we should pick the earliest time at which it is reasonable to suspect that the fetus is a person. And that time is conception [insert reasoning here]. So, since a conceived fetus is a person, we can't kill it because we have a law against killing persons.
The latter argument, while still deeply flawed, is less transparently so. :)
Propaganda on the other hand cannot possibly bring down a plane from the sky, and it is surely protected to some extent by freedom of speech.
Firstly, they're not looking for things that can bring down an airplane -- they're looking for things that could indicate your intent to bring down an airplane. Though I agree with you that such-and-such a t-shirt is not necessarily an indicator.
In terms of your First Amendment rights, there are two locations that we care about here, and they're treated differently in the law: (1) the airport, and (2) the airplane.
The airplane is simple: it's owned by a private company, so you're on private property. That means your free speech protections are nonexistent: the airline can impose any ban on speech or expression it wants. Sue them on First Amendment grounds all you want: the judge will throw out your case.
The airport is a little more complicated. Under the law, it's a "non-public forum" (which is different than being a private place). The Supreme Court has shaken it out like this: your rights to speech and expression may be restricted by regulation as long as the restriction is "reasonable" (as determined by the courts) and as long as the regulation is not intended to suppress expression simply because it's counter to airport officials' views.
Lower courts have decided that "reasonable" means "in line with the main public purpose for the airport".
As an obvious example, you can't hold a rally in an airport. It creates congestion, which is counter to the interests of the bulk of people using the airport: they want to get to their destination speedily.
So, getting back to the main point, a US airport is within its rights to impose bans on (let's say) t-shirts picturing known terrorists, because such t-shirts could reasonably cause airport delays.
My girlfriend IAL; she says this particular practice of the RIAA is perfectly legal. A party to a civil litigation can alter the settlement terms basically however they want, whenever they want (subject to public policy, of course: RIAA can't alter the terms to include the forfeit of your firstborn child or whatever). A settlement is just a contract, after all.
This makes sense, so the argument goes, because a party's costs for litigating a particular case become higher and higher as the case progresses. So, the settlement costs must increase concordantly.
A. The i-LIMB Hand is two to three times more expensive than other more traditional myoelectric devices. Each i-LIMB Hand costs about $18,000 (12,000 euro) reflecting the significant research and development that has been invested into these next-generation devices.
Don't count dialects; count individuals. Determining what a "dialect" even is will get you into theoretical and field-method trouble relatively quickly.
To answer your question: lots of them, at least in America. Many (if not most) Americans pronounce mom as [ma:m] and aunt as [a:nt'?]. The latter is pronounced in isolation with a word-final unreleased voiceless alveolar stop and a simultaneous glottal stop, a cluster which is hardly audible.
And [m] and [n], both voiced front nasals, are quite similar as well -- even very decent DSP living behind a very decent microphone can have trouble distinguishing between the waveforms produced thereby. Have you ever tried to spell something with an "m" or "n" to someone over the phone? Even a human living behind a crappy microphone has trouble distinguishing [m] and [n].
Certainly the midwestern, Kansas-type dialects have [a:nt'?]; and I would imagine, since those dialects form the basis of the American prestige dialect, that this is the prototypical pronunciation of the word for the purposes of the software.
So I'd say in the universe of English lexemes, these two are pretty damn similar. Of course, you didn't define "similarly", so I guess there's not a whole lot to measure or argue about here.
On my workstation, 84 lines were generated. This means that at the time the ps task was running, it was only one of 84 different tasks that were competing for time to run on the CPU.
Those 84 tasks were most certainly not competing for time to run on the CPU. If they were, they'd have been in the run queue, and their states would've been reported as R, not S.
Also:
Most of the tasks are also sleeping; that is, they are waiting for some resource to become available.
This conclusion is also not true. In fact, the correct conclusion is the opposite: those processes are listed as sleeping because they're not interested in any resources!
Not quite: the load average also takes into account processes in uninterruptible sleep states (i.e. waiting for disk i/o).
While we're on the subject, I found this interesting: the load average isn't your average average.
A quick google and I found it's also available in New Jersey. But they don't offer shipping, so you'd have to hike to NJ anyway. I'd rather make the trip to Aus. :/
I'll say this, whites don't owe blacks shit. Blacks are just as responsible for the enslavement of other blacks as white people are. What do you want anyway? Your acres and mule? You want to be sent back?! Get real, don't try to get by on your ancestors suffering, everyones ancestors have suffered unjustfully. You're not special, sorry.
Oh please. Just because nonwhites enslave people doesn't mean whites are justified in doing it.
Btw, a side note, the poorest of the poor blacks in America are kings compared to the average black African. Better yet, they probably won't have AIDS or any of the others sickness that plague Africa. So, you're welcome.
This exemplifies an attitude that developed in white America after just a couple generations of slavery, and (obviously) still persists today: that Africans were better off for having been enslaved. That they even enjoyed it. That if we let black people go free, they'll have no idea what to do with themselves, because they're stupid, no better than animals.
I don't think that's how the conversation went. I don't think that better AIDS treatment in 400 years was part of the whole enslavement "deal". I don't think white Americans had the best interests of Africans in mind when they enslaved them. I think it was probably more for personal economic gain.
The chief postbellum reason for blacks having reached their current position in our society is the civil rights movement, which I'm pretty sure wasn't started by white people. In fact, I believe there was a lot of white resistance to the movement at the time; you may have seen it on TV. Were those whites of the same magnanimous ideology as the ones who enslaved those blacks' ancestors?
So, I mean, the claim is hypocritical. Which, of course, doesn't make it wrong.
Here's what does make it wrong:
Citing one reason why black life is better in America today than it is in Africa doesn't prove that it was a moral Good to enslave black people. Your argument entails that the ends justify the means, but the only sound moral frameworks under which that is true are utilitarian.
Fine, so how do you quantify the amount of moral Bad contained in the rape, robbery, battery, and murder of all those black people for all those years, for economic gain? How do you quantify the amount of moral Good contained in providing proper medical treatment? Even if you could do such a thing, I doubt the total would land on the Good side of zero.
Orthogonally, yet equally devastating to your argument, most blacks don't have access to the same medical treatment as whites in this country anyway, due to their lower average socioeconomic status. And don't argue that said status is their fault: since you've already implicitly adopted the premise that black people are unable to take care of themselves, and that therefore they are whites' responsibility, that argument is logically unavailable to you.
So is this all you have to support the moral justification of the enslavement of a race? A weak-ass tu quoque argument and a 250-year-old white supremacist archaism?