Desertification is a mounting threat to many regions around the world due to soil exhaustion. I can only imagine that large-scale ethanol farming would add to this problem.
My view on taking work home is that unless you're working for yourself or in fields that don't profit another person such as socialised healthcare or charities then it's idiotic to take work home with you. Why should a sensible person spend his nights for the enrichment of others?! Any person who finds himself in a situation of having to take work home often should consider whether he's getting abused, whether he's enduring the burden of inefficiencies at work, should scale down a lot on his useless ambition, check-in to a workaholics clinic, renegotiate his contract, get a decent life outside of work, or do whatever because he's not doing himself any favours.
A very important factor in the fall of the Islamic civilisation, other than the mongols, was the plague. The mongols carried the plague and it travelled farther than they did. It didn't seem to affect the mongols themselves. It hit both the Islamic world and Europe, though Europeans soon developed a relative immunity against it, but the Arabs didn't seem to and it continued to hit them hard and decimate them until the 19th century. I'm wondering if this is a case of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel theory. Jared Diamond speculated that Europeans had immunological advantage over the New World inhabitants due to the fact that they lived near their cattle and were well-exposed to pathogens. The Arabs at the time were perhaps a more urbane culture and, most notably, were obsessive washers due to the requirement of their religion, washing 5 times a day for prayers and even required to wash again if they fart and their fart made a noise or smell, and this was at a time when even European kings and queens never bathed. Who knows, sanitation and cleanliness standards seem high now amongst Westerners eventhough most men still don't wash after they use toilets, so much so that modern allergies are blamed on inadequate exposure to pathogens, so perhaps western civilisation will be threatened by a global pandemic that kills off most of its people and some rural civilisation of a more resistant people in China and India will emerge.
Re: Senator Byrd is Correct to Equate Bush With Hitler: I don't care who he is; if he compared Bush to Hitler as reported he's right on this, and he's not being inventive and this isn't new; it is widely known by anyone in the know. Anyone who knows enough about History and Political Philosophy knows for sure that Bush is comparable to Hitler as both are on the same side of History, same side of ideology, and same side of conduct, and the GOP ideologues are not shy about this; they have not hidden their admiration of the chilean fascist economics model, they have not hidden their cultish affiliation around Leo Strauss the protege of Carl Schmitt the prime Nazi ideologue, and they have not hidden their originalist and essentialist fixation on the relevant thought of Aristotle and Plato. Yes, it goes that far back in History, to Ancient Greece; Bush and Hitler, and the Nazi party and the GOP, are upholders of Sparta, the violent rural oligarchic dictatorship, they are not upholders of Athens, the peaceful cosmopolitan liberal democracy.
I'll repeat this if you did not get it first time; he's right.
Both Hitler and Bush were ultra-nationalist simpletons who exploited the Nation-Under-Attack anxieties and the 'patriotic' impulses of the simple, blood-and-soil masses and enlisted the interests of a corrupt, racketeering cadre of industrialists and financiers that foresaw in their domestic, social restructuring projects at home and warmongering, imperialist ambitions abroad ample profit opportunities. Both Hitler and Bush were messianic men with a passionate 'vision' and a sense of 'mission' who were obsessed with their personal safety and paranoid about the risk of assassination and their parties (Nazi, GOP) were suspicious and intolerant of disagreement and dissent to the extent of using the "treason" label (treason, un-Patriotic, un-American, hates America, and so on) against those who don't tow the party line. Both the parties of Hitler and Bush scapegoated minorities as political devices to forewarn of calamitious dangers to the original integrity of a good and glorious nation, most prominent of whom in Hitler's Germany were the Jews, and in Bush's USA were the Gays. Both parties pushed for legislation that suspended civil liberties and human rights in the name of national security, in Hitler's case it was the Enabling Act, and in Bush's it was the Patriot Act, which presence served to intimidate many ordinary citizens for fear of being suspected of "treason" and being persecuted on mere suspicion without due process, and both leaders and parties maintained an atmosphere of terror, applauded military armament and endorsed doctrines of preemptive war, with which they invaded other countries. Furthermore, Bush is supported by the same wealthy elements that tried to erect a fascist government in the US in the 1933 after the election of a populist president, Franklin D Roosevelt; the businessmen and bankers who admired European Fascism at the time and its heavy-handed stance against communists in its countries, and intensely disliked Roosevelt's "communist" reforms that entailed heavier taxes on the wealthy, concessions to labor rights movements, relief for the unemployed, controls over corporations, a social security program, a legal right for the government to regulate the economy, and so on, and conspired with Major General Smedley Butler to erect a Fascist government in the US. Butler exposed the attempt, and Roosevelt went on to enact his populist reforms, then later on he went to war against European fascism and went on to defeat Hitler in WWII, and several decades later here we have a leader in the US akin to Hitler, widely compared to Hitler, supported by the same those who tried to erect a fascist government in the US, who is at war domestically with Roosevelt's legacy and is disassembling the Roosevelt reforms one by one, from tax cuts f
Why does no one see the irony in an administration that spouts off about, "A culture of respect for life in every stage", which then pushes for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes." From yesterday's news: "California's oldest death row inmate, who was blind, deaf and in a wheelchair has been executed, minutes after the end of his 76th birthday... Allen's heart stopped in September, but doctors revived him and returned him to death row." (!!)
Excel is crap! Here's the Abstract from a statisticians' report: "The open source spreadsheet package "Gnumeric" was such a good clone of Microsoft Excel that it even had errors in its statistical functions similar to those in Excel's statistical functions. When apprised of the errors in v1.0.4, the developers of Gnumeric indicated that they would try to fix the errors. Indeed, Gnumeric v1.1.2, has largely fixed its flaws, while Microsoft has not fixed its errors through many successive versions. Persons who desire to use a spreadsheet package to perform statistical analyses are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel." (ps, I'm not linking to the site so it doesn't get slashdotted, but the interested reader can google it)
What nonsense. Who modded this insightful?! "Pathology is a science that is fairly solid. There is a pathogen or there isn't, we may miss it but we sure are good at diagnosing it if you have it. More importantly, pathologists can agree with each other. With the status of the environment, no one agrees with anyone else." This is regurgitated US-republican bullshit. Climatology is a science that's far more "solid" (though "solid" isn't a scientific word!) than pathology, which is mostly a diagnostic art performed on individual specimens, and there is almost unanimous agreement amongst scientists on "the status of the environement".
Are you sure Microsoft is staying afloat on much thinner margins than Apple? See, for $499 I could either get an Imac Mini from Apple or, again for $499, I could get a CD in a thin cardboard box and a license to use the professional version of MS Office from Microsoft.
Culinary perversions? Are you saying you never ate brains? Brains are a delicacy in many cultures. Well, not human brains, but lamb and calves' brains and such. The French eat them, the Arabs do too, and many such mediterranean and mideastern cultures. I ate them when i was a kid, they tasted good, though now i wouldn't. Many cultures still preserve their rural traditions from times of ancient scarcity, for example, in England they still eat this thing made of congealed pigs' blood, called black pudding. Now that is something I could never stomach. It's part of that incredibly unhealthy, clot-inducing concoction called a Full English breakfast.
I'll make the argument here the legacy machines don't matter. Cheapest new computers are now so cheap yet so powerful that the space and power requirements needed to run an old machine are just not worth it. Get a new machine, send yours to recycling. That said, last thing you need when you have an old clunker that's not worth keeping is to pay for a windows license for it. Microsoft must be on crack to make such irrelevant comparison, unless they intend to give free licenses. And even so, it requires an immense degree of cluelessness to prefer an old version of windows over a new version of a minimalist linux distro.
It's not just a freakin' job and you don't understand how that stuff works. I remember a guy who was in medschool and he got in trouble with the school because a girl he liked reported him to the police for stalking her. Now that's a "24/7" situation. You might argue they don't own him and that bullshit but the school thought it was very relevant, and he was in very bad trouble due to it. The police didn't do much about it, but the school tormented him over it. Think what you want to think, but I see perfect sense in that. These are called the caring professions. They don't train people to deal with computers and cold machines, they train them to deal with vulnerable people. Their personal qualities matter ablve all else. Don't think 'competence or knowledge' count for much in medicine, they're taken for granted, they won't forgive a thing, everyone there is competent and knowledgable, otherwise they shouldn't be there. If you have questionable conduct, being 'competent and knowledgeable' won't excuse it.
Besides, if medicine was just a freakin' job, I assure you most people there wouldn't want to be in it. It takes a hell of a long time and a hell of a lot of personal sacrifice to become a doctor, and the pay, regardless of what you think, considering the long and unsociable hours, responsibilities and stress, and so on, is surely not worth it. Many people who go into medicine, if not most, don't see it as just a freakin' job, otherwise they would've put their effort into something else much easier and far, freakin' more rewarding in that 'just a freakin' job' terms.
Did I ever solve any of my problems? Let's see, I finished school without a delay at all, despite a serious personal problem I had in my final year with a senior faculty member who refused to sign my assessment form, which could've delayed me, and who must've been very surprised when the rules were set aside to allow me to sit the finals, and not only that, but I got offered a job with the dean of the school himself! Considering that he had over 472 published papers to his name at the time and was the elected head of a national association of the profession, I'd say I did pretty well. I also had references from 7 hihgly prestigious names for my next job when only two were required, I felt obliged to include all 7 out of gratitude for their offer; it would've been embarrassing to remove any of them from the list. I then applied for a top school for my postgrads, and when I went to the interview, feeling nervous and expecting a grilling, I was told in the first minute that they had already made their mind up before the interview, persumably based on the weight of my references, and just wanted to get to know me! Let me spell it out for you; when you're young and mixing with wise old men, it's not your knowledge that matters, trust me, you don't know shit! It's your attitdue that matters, and that's all that matters to them.
IBM thinkpads were expensive and that put me off them, but having had two sony vaios fail after the warranty periods just expiring I vowed never, ever to buy sony and, though I switched to desktops after that, if i again buy a laptop it'll probably be one famed for reliability above all. I hope lenovo doesn't drop standards of thinkpads.
I don't see what they did as draconian. What did he expect? hold him in detention? A school is a school. You're in the company of respectable scholars and men. You're expected, above all, before any knowledge, to learn to behave well if you don't already know how to. You're not treated like a child because you're not expected to behave like one. Medical and dental schools have high expectations for conduct, it's assumed that you're a reasonable and responsible young man who'll take care of patients in the near future. I think that prestigious scholarship might've gotten into his head, I don't know about that for sure, but it sounds like it considering some personalities I had seen in university. Some people think they're the brightest thing there is, the one-man future hope of humanity, and that all teachers and people revolve around them. No, seriously, I have seen such personalities in university. You could tell from sitting with them once they were brats. They leave their home school where they're top of the class and spoilt rotten and come to university where they find themselves with much tougher competition. I don't know that applies to him for sure, but his blogpost sure sounds brattish. Every school has procedures for student grievances, did he follow those? Did he talk to his personal tutor, in confidence? did he consult with some of his yearmates who share his grievances and go talk to the academic sub-dean, again in confidence? I can't see an excuse for what he did, at all; you just don't call a faculty member a 'cockmaster' and expect to get away with it if found out.
Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System This is a very, very wise decision.
Here, here's an example of a modern history course taught by a professor of history - it lists as lecture "34 Development Models--Communist China" and then as lecture "35 Development Models--Democratic India". It's a textbook comparison, I didn't invent it. You need to read more.
It's you who needs to "learn some history" and the reason is simple; you ask me why I chose India to compare it with China. Guess what, I didn't, this is a classic textbook case. You need to read more.
Usenet has not become more civil and reliable as it got popular, on the contrary. I don't see a reason why wikipedia will be any different. In fact, it's worse than usenet, where your posts persist forever for all to see; wikipedia is essentially a usenet where "trolls and idiots" can edit out or, even worse, bastardise your posts to support their biases. I personally have a hard time finding my stuff within the history of the page, why should anyone else bother finding what I wrote? The point is, whomever has more time to play on wikipedia, and the "trolls and idiots" always have more time on their hands for such leisure than the "experts", will have wikipedia aligned to his trolls and idiocies.
You guys are so full of shit propaganda, it's okay, that's what you've been fed. China is following what is called the authoritative model of development, and it's working wonders. It happens to be exactly the same one taken by the Japanese, and the Japanese took it from Germany. If you consider Germany and Japan failtures, I don't think you think well. The statement "Communism will always fail" is bullshit in this context, disproven by history. Compare China with India. China and India are textbook cases of why socialism is good and capitalism is rotten; China and India started from the same post-colonialist situation yet half the Indian population, more than half a billion people, still suffers from endemic hunger, desperate destitution, illiteracy, high infant mortality, disease, low life expectancy, and other problems that would shame any self-respecting nation and that China has done much better on. India has forgotten half its population, half a billion people, the Indian politicians and the Indian well-off classes don't have a care for them, whereas China has provided universal healthcare, education and services or its people that have been decent and wise and now China is in a *far* better situation than India by any measure and that's indisputable.
Just google for information and learn if you don't already know
"In Education, 99.1% of Chinese children attend school for 9 years, this ensures a high level of literacy. In India, literacy is 50 to 60%... China with lesser cultivable land, produces double the food grains, at 415 million tons per year compared with India's 208 million tons per year.... India's per capita earning is US$440 per year against US$990 per year in China... As per the World Bank, the poverty line definition is US$1 per person per day or US$365/person/year, for underdeveloped countries like India, China etc. As per the official data from both governments, China has 3% population below the poverty line, compared to India's 26 to 29%... China attracts 87 million tourists per year (this is expected to reach 90 million in 2002) against 2.5 million per year to India.... China started their family planning policy in 1970, India in 1952, in 2001 our birth rate was nearly 3 times more than China...." From http://www.wakeupcall.org/china_india_comparision/ china_india_compari...
And there's more and more and more measures why socialism in China had been a Success and Capitalism in India had been rotten. And guess what, it isn't limited to China and India, here's the example of Cuba that the US has terrorised with severe ecomonic sanctions and tried to make sure it never succeeds as a nation. Compared to Latin America and despite the US sanctions against it, Cuba has done very, very well. In fact, socialism is proven
""Cuba's achievements in social development are impressive given the size of its gross domestic product per capita. As the human development index of the United Nations makes clear year after year, Cuba should be the envy of many other nations, ostensibly far richer. [Cuba] demonstrates how much nations can do with the resources they have if they focus on the right priorities - health, education, and literacy."" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/castro/sfeature/sf_vi ews_uriarte.html
I know a guy who'd sit a couple of yards away from me yet disturbs me with how loud his earbuds are. Unfortunately he's not the only one I know with such habit. To add to that he took me once to a club where the DJ was his friend and the music was so loud my ears were buzzing like crazy for days afterwards. I cursed, no friendship of a guy nor sex of a girl is worth that. Unfortunately, that's not how it is for most youngsters who'd prefer to endure a hearing loss than the malfeasance of peer pressure.
"I could do a thesis with Oppy only if it was his thesis, not mine."This is very common in Academia, especially the experimental sciences, in fact, if you want to do a thesis with someone famous and reputable, as I had the experience with a world authority on a topic, you better be humble enough to bin your ideas for a good while and do his, however hard you try to be assertive and however nice he may try to be. It just won't work out otherwise. If this is not the case, you're not working with someone important enough, you're not working with someone who has more important work than he can fit into a lifetime. Do your own stuff when you get a tenure and even more so when you become a professor, but till then, just be a humble servant who knows the sceitnific method from A to Z and who'd antitipate what his master's next order is and politely suggests it. The better you get at anticipating what his next order is and suggesting it to him the faster you'll shoot up the ranks. All the rest about originally and et cetera is a facade. Trust me, a facade. That's how you make it in Academia, that's what you should spend your nights thinking about, not brainstorming your own ideas. Your own ideas, however brilliant, will be shot down, unless you're willing to relocate halfway around the world to where there is an interested authority for your idea of the month, and you shouldn't, because until your ideas are tested and replicated, they're not worth betting anything on. Modern Academia is a place filled with pride and politics, they'll bark at the wrong tree as long as they please and when they tire they'll bark at another tree without regard to who might've barked at it before. No one cares where the ideas came from, untested ideas are fantasies, the person who's got the job to enable him to secure the funding, men and equipment required to test them is whom they'll thank. If you have other plans just get out of Academia, and remember that Einstein wasn't a junior Academic when he had the freedom to work on his own stuff, and that they took their time to accept his, and that without his luck, yes, luck no doubt however brilliant, his ideas could've been disproved by experiment, and that for every recognised Einstein there must be countless unrecognised ones.
Slashdot Mirror
What do Americans think of seeking $50m in "damages" for the California resident who bought a copy of the book?
Desertification is a mounting threat to many regions around the world due to soil exhaustion. I can only imagine that large-scale ethanol farming would add to this problem.
My view on taking work home is that unless you're working for yourself or in fields that don't profit another person such as socialised healthcare or charities then it's idiotic to take work home with you. Why should a sensible person spend his nights for the enrichment of others?! Any person who finds himself in a situation of having to take work home often should consider whether he's getting abused, whether he's enduring the burden of inefficiencies at work, should scale down a lot on his useless ambition, check-in to a workaholics clinic, renegotiate his contract, get a decent life outside of work, or do whatever because he's not doing himself any favours.
A very important factor in the fall of the Islamic civilisation, other than the mongols, was the plague. The mongols carried the plague and it travelled farther than they did. It didn't seem to affect the mongols themselves. It hit both the Islamic world and Europe, though Europeans soon developed a relative immunity against it, but the Arabs didn't seem to and it continued to hit them hard and decimate them until the 19th century. I'm wondering if this is a case of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel theory. Jared Diamond speculated that Europeans had immunological advantage over the New World inhabitants due to the fact that they lived near their cattle and were well-exposed to pathogens. The Arabs at the time were perhaps a more urbane culture and, most notably, were obsessive washers due to the requirement of their religion, washing 5 times a day for prayers and even required to wash again if they fart and their fart made a noise or smell, and this was at a time when even European kings and queens never bathed. Who knows, sanitation and cleanliness standards seem high now amongst Westerners eventhough most men still don't wash after they use toilets, so much so that modern allergies are blamed on inadequate exposure to pathogens, so perhaps western civilisation will be threatened by a global pandemic that kills off most of its people and some rural civilisation of a more resistant people in China and India will emerge.
Re: Senator Byrd is Correct to Equate Bush With Hitler:
I don't care who he is; if he compared Bush to Hitler as reported he's
right on this, and he's not being inventive and this isn't new; it is
widely known by anyone in the know. Anyone who knows enough about
History and Political Philosophy knows for sure that Bush is comparable
to Hitler as both are on the same side of History, same side of
ideology, and same side of conduct, and the GOP ideologues are not shy
about this; they have not hidden their admiration of the chilean
fascist economics model, they have not hidden their cultish affiliation
around Leo Strauss the protege of Carl Schmitt the prime Nazi
ideologue, and they have not hidden their originalist and essentialist
fixation on the relevant thought of Aristotle and Plato. Yes, it goes
that far back in History, to Ancient Greece; Bush and Hitler, and the
Nazi party and the GOP, are upholders of Sparta, the violent rural
oligarchic dictatorship, they are not upholders of Athens, the peaceful
cosmopolitan liberal democracy.
I'll repeat this if you did not get it first time; he's right.
Both Hitler and Bush were ultra-nationalist simpletons who exploited
the Nation-Under-Attack anxieties and the 'patriotic' impulses of the
simple, blood-and-soil masses and enlisted the interests of a corrupt,
racketeering cadre of industrialists and financiers that foresaw in
their
domestic, social restructuring projects at home and warmongering,
imperialist ambitions abroad ample profit opportunities. Both Hitler
and Bush were messianic men with a passionate 'vision' and a sense of
'mission' who were obsessed with their personal safety and paranoid
about the risk of assassination and their parties (Nazi, GOP) were
suspicious and intolerant of disagreement and dissent to the extent of
using the "treason" label (treason, un-Patriotic, un-American, hates
America, and so on) against those who don't tow the party line. Both
the parties of Hitler and Bush scapegoated minorities as political
devices to forewarn of calamitious dangers to the original integrity of
a good and glorious nation, most prominent of whom in Hitler's Germany
were the Jews, and in Bush's USA were the Gays. Both parties pushed for
legislation that suspended civil liberties and human rights in the name
of national security, in Hitler's case it was the Enabling Act, and in
Bush's it was the Patriot Act, which presence served to intimidate many
ordinary citizens for fear of being suspected of "treason" and being
persecuted on mere suspicion without due process, and both leaders and
parties maintained an atmosphere of terror, applauded military armament
and endorsed doctrines of preemptive war, with which they invaded other
countries. Furthermore, Bush is supported by the same wealthy elements
that tried to erect a fascist government in the US in the 1933 after
the election of a populist president, Franklin D Roosevelt; the
businessmen and bankers who admired European Fascism at the time and
its heavy-handed stance against communists in its countries, and
intensely disliked Roosevelt's "communist" reforms that entailed
heavier taxes on the wealthy, concessions to labor rights movements,
relief for the unemployed, controls over corporations, a social
security program, a legal right for the government to regulate the
economy, and so on, and conspired with Major General Smedley Butler to
erect a Fascist government in the US. Butler exposed the attempt, and
Roosevelt went on to enact his populist reforms, then later on he went
to war against European fascism and went on to defeat Hitler in WWII,
and several decades later here we have a leader in the US akin to
Hitler, widely compared to Hitler, supported by the same those who
tried to erect a fascist government in the US, who is at war
domestically with Roosevelt's legacy and is disassembling the Roosevelt
reforms one by one, from tax cuts f
Why does no one see the irony in an administration that spouts off about, "A culture of respect for life in every stage", which then pushes for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes." From yesterday's news: "California's oldest death row inmate, who was blind, deaf and in a wheelchair has been executed, minutes after the end of his 76th birthday... Allen's heart stopped in September, but doctors revived him and returned him to death row." (!!)
Excel is crap! Here's the Abstract from a statisticians' report: "The open source spreadsheet package "Gnumeric" was such a good clone of Microsoft Excel that it even had errors in its statistical functions similar to those in Excel's statistical functions. When apprised of the errors in v1.0.4, the developers of Gnumeric indicated that they would try to fix the errors. Indeed, Gnumeric v1.1.2, has largely fixed its flaws, while Microsoft has not fixed its errors through many successive versions. Persons who desire to use a spreadsheet package to perform statistical analyses are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel." (ps, I'm not linking to the site so it doesn't get slashdotted, but the interested reader can google it)
What nonsense. Who modded this insightful?! "Pathology is a science that is fairly solid. There is a pathogen or there isn't, we may miss it but we sure are good at diagnosing it if you have it. More importantly, pathologists can agree with each other. With the status of the environment, no one agrees with anyone else." This is regurgitated US-republican bullshit. Climatology is a science that's far more "solid" (though "solid" isn't a scientific word!) than pathology, which is mostly a diagnostic art performed on individual specimens, and there is almost unanimous agreement amongst scientists on "the status of the environement".
Are you sure Microsoft is staying afloat on much thinner margins than Apple? See, for $499 I could either get an Imac Mini from Apple or, again for $499, I could get a CD in a thin cardboard box and a license to use the professional version of MS Office from Microsoft.
Culinary perversions? Are you saying you never ate brains? Brains are a delicacy in many cultures. Well, not human brains, but lamb and calves' brains and such. The French eat them, the Arabs do too, and many such mediterranean and mideastern cultures. I ate them when i was a kid, they tasted good, though now i wouldn't. Many cultures still preserve their rural traditions from times of ancient scarcity, for example, in England they still eat this thing made of congealed pigs' blood, called black pudding. Now that is something I could never stomach. It's part of that incredibly unhealthy, clot-inducing concoction called a Full English breakfast.
I'll make the argument here the legacy machines don't matter. Cheapest new computers are now so cheap yet so powerful that the space and power requirements needed to run an old machine are just not worth it. Get a new machine, send yours to recycling. That said, last thing you need when you have an old clunker that's not worth keeping is to pay for a windows license for it. Microsoft must be on crack to make such irrelevant comparison, unless they intend to give free licenses. And even so, it requires an immense degree of cluelessness to prefer an old version of windows over a new version of a minimalist linux distro.
Cygwin of course!
It's not just a freakin' job and you don't understand how that stuff works. I remember a guy who was in medschool and he got in trouble with the school because a girl he liked reported him to the police for stalking her. Now that's a "24/7" situation. You might argue they don't own him and that bullshit but the school thought it was very relevant, and he was in very bad trouble due to it. The police didn't do much about it, but the school tormented him over it. Think what you want to think, but I see perfect sense in that. These are called the caring professions. They don't train people to deal with computers and cold machines, they train them to deal with vulnerable people. Their personal qualities matter ablve all else. Don't think 'competence or knowledge' count for much in medicine, they're taken for granted, they won't forgive a thing, everyone there is competent and knowledgable, otherwise they shouldn't be there. If you have questionable conduct, being 'competent and knowledgeable' won't excuse it. Besides, if medicine was just a freakin' job, I assure you most people there wouldn't want to be in it. It takes a hell of a long time and a hell of a lot of personal sacrifice to become a doctor, and the pay, regardless of what you think, considering the long and unsociable hours, responsibilities and stress, and so on, is surely not worth it. Many people who go into medicine, if not most, don't see it as just a freakin' job, otherwise they would've put their effort into something else much easier and far, freakin' more rewarding in that 'just a freakin' job' terms.
Did I ever solve any of my problems? Let's see, I finished school without a delay at all, despite a serious personal problem I had in my final year with a senior faculty member who refused to sign my assessment form, which could've delayed me, and who must've been very surprised when the rules were set aside to allow me to sit the finals, and not only that, but I got offered a job with the dean of the school himself! Considering that he had over 472 published papers to his name at the time and was the elected head of a national association of the profession, I'd say I did pretty well. I also had references from 7 hihgly prestigious names for my next job when only two were required, I felt obliged to include all 7 out of gratitude for their offer; it would've been embarrassing to remove any of them from the list. I then applied for a top school for my postgrads, and when I went to the interview, feeling nervous and expecting a grilling, I was told in the first minute that they had already made their mind up before the interview, persumably based on the weight of my references, and just wanted to get to know me! Let me spell it out for you; when you're young and mixing with wise old men, it's not your knowledge that matters, trust me, you don't know shit! It's your attitdue that matters, and that's all that matters to them.
IBM thinkpads were expensive and that put me off them, but having had two sony vaios fail after the warranty periods just expiring I vowed never, ever to buy sony and, though I switched to desktops after that, if i again buy a laptop it'll probably be one famed for reliability above all. I hope lenovo doesn't drop standards of thinkpads.
I don't see what they did as draconian. What did he expect? hold him in detention? A school is a school. You're in the company of respectable scholars and men. You're expected, above all, before any knowledge, to learn to behave well if you don't already know how to. You're not treated like a child because you're not expected to behave like one. Medical and dental schools have high expectations for conduct, it's assumed that you're a reasonable and responsible young man who'll take care of patients in the near future. I think that prestigious scholarship might've gotten into his head, I don't know about that for sure, but it sounds like it considering some personalities I had seen in university. Some people think they're the brightest thing there is, the one-man future hope of humanity, and that all teachers and people revolve around them. No, seriously, I have seen such personalities in university. You could tell from sitting with them once they were brats. They leave their home school where they're top of the class and spoilt rotten and come to university where they find themselves with much tougher competition. I don't know that applies to him for sure, but his blogpost sure sounds brattish. Every school has procedures for student grievances, did he follow those? Did he talk to his personal tutor, in confidence? did he consult with some of his yearmates who share his grievances and go talk to the academic sub-dean, again in confidence? I can't see an excuse for what he did, at all; you just don't call a faculty member a 'cockmaster' and expect to get away with it if found out.
Wow, I had no idea helium was so scarce. I'll think of that next time I see those kids inhaling it en masse from cheap balloons to cuss at each other.
Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System This is a very, very wise decision.
I agree. Why must everything be computerised? Elections can be done pretty well on paper.
Here, here's an example of a modern history course taught by a professor of history - it lists as lecture "34 Development Models--Communist China" and then as lecture "35 Development Models--Democratic India". It's a textbook comparison, I didn't invent it. You need to read more.
It's you who needs to "learn some history" and the reason is simple; you ask me why I chose India to compare it with China. Guess what, I didn't, this is a classic textbook case. You need to read more.
Usenet has not become more civil and reliable as it got popular, on the contrary. I don't see a reason why wikipedia will be any different. In fact, it's worse than usenet, where your posts persist forever for all to see; wikipedia is essentially a usenet where "trolls and idiots" can edit out or, even worse, bastardise your posts to support their biases. I personally have a hard time finding my stuff within the history of the page, why should anyone else bother finding what I wrote? The point is, whomever has more time to play on wikipedia, and the "trolls and idiots" always have more time on their hands for such leisure than the "experts", will have wikipedia aligned to his trolls and idiocies.
You guys are so full of shit propaganda, it's okay, that's what you've been fed. China is following what is called the authoritative model of development, and it's working wonders. It happens to be exactly the same one taken by the Japanese, and the Japanese took it from Germany. If you consider Germany and Japan failtures, I don't think you think well. The statement "Communism will always fail" is bullshit in this context, disproven by history. Compare China with India. China and India are textbook cases of why socialism is good and capitalism is rotten; China and India started from the same post-colonialist situation yet half the Indian population, more than half a billion people, still suffers from endemic hunger, desperate destitution, illiteracy, high infant mortality, disease, low life expectancy, and other problems that would shame any self-respecting nation and that China has done much better on. India has forgotten half its population, half a billion people, the Indian politicians and the Indian well-off classes don't have a care for them, whereas China has provided universal healthcare, education and services or its people that have been decent and wise and now China is in a *far* better situation than India by any measure and that's indisputable.
/ china_india_compari...
i ews_uriarte.html
Just google for information and learn if you don't already know
"In Education, 99.1% of Chinese children attend school for 9 years,
this ensures a high level of literacy. In India, literacy is 50 to
60%... China with lesser cultivable land, produces double the food
grains, at 415 million tons per year compared with India's 208 million
tons per year.... India's per capita earning is US$440 per year against
US$990 per year in China... As per the World Bank, the poverty line
definition is US$1 per person per day or US$365/person/year, for
underdeveloped countries like India, China etc. As per the official
data from both governments, China has 3% population below the poverty
line, compared to India's 26 to 29%... China attracts 87 million
tourists per year (this is expected to reach 90 million in 2002)
against 2.5 million per year to India.... China started their family
planning policy in 1970, India in 1952, in 2001 our birth rate was
nearly 3 times more than China...." From
http://www.wakeupcall.org/china_india_comparision
And there's more and more and more measures why socialism in China had
been a Success and Capitalism in India had been rotten. And guess what,
it isn't limited to China and India, here's the example of Cuba that
the US has terrorised with severe ecomonic sanctions and tried to make
sure it never succeeds as a nation. Compared to Latin America and
despite the US sanctions against it, Cuba has done very, very well. In
fact, socialism is proven
""Cuba's achievements in social development are impressive given the
size of its gross domestic product per capita. As the human development
index of the United Nations makes clear year after year, Cuba should be
the envy of many other nations, ostensibly far richer. [Cuba]
demonstrates how much nations can do with the resources they have if
they focus on the right priorities - health, education, and literacy.""
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/castro/sfeature/sf_v
I know a guy who'd sit a couple of yards away from me yet disturbs me with how loud his earbuds are. Unfortunately he's not the only one I know with such habit. To add to that he took me once to a club where the DJ was his friend and the music was so loud my ears were buzzing like crazy for days afterwards. I cursed, no friendship of a guy nor sex of a girl is worth that. Unfortunately, that's not how it is for most youngsters who'd prefer to endure a hearing loss than the malfeasance of peer pressure.
"I could do a thesis with Oppy only if it was his thesis, not mine."This is very common in Academia, especially the experimental sciences, in fact, if you want to do a thesis with someone famous and reputable, as I had the experience with a world authority on a topic, you better be humble enough to bin your ideas for a good while and do his, however hard you try to be assertive and however nice he may try to be. It just won't work out otherwise. If this is not the case, you're not working with someone important enough, you're not working with someone who has more important work than he can fit into a lifetime. Do your own stuff when you get a tenure and even more so when you become a professor, but till then, just be a humble servant who knows the sceitnific method from A to Z and who'd antitipate what his master's next order is and politely suggests it. The better you get at anticipating what his next order is and suggesting it to him the faster you'll shoot up the ranks. All the rest about originally and et cetera is a facade. Trust me, a facade. That's how you make it in Academia, that's what you should spend your nights thinking about, not brainstorming your own ideas. Your own ideas, however brilliant, will be shot down, unless you're willing to relocate halfway around the world to where there is an interested authority for your idea of the month, and you shouldn't, because until your ideas are tested and replicated, they're not worth betting anything on. Modern Academia is a place filled with pride and politics, they'll bark at the wrong tree as long as they please and when they tire they'll bark at another tree without regard to who might've barked at it before. No one cares where the ideas came from, untested ideas are fantasies, the person who's got the job to enable him to secure the funding, men and equipment required to test them is whom they'll thank. If you have other plans just get out of Academia, and remember that Einstein wasn't a junior Academic when he had the freedom to work on his own stuff, and that they took their time to accept his, and that without his luck, yes, luck no doubt however brilliant, his ideas could've been disproved by experiment, and that for every recognised Einstein there must be countless unrecognised ones.