You're right, but even if you reduced the mass of the average star to 1/5 in the ballpark calculation, that would still leave a 20:1 mass ratio between the average star and planet. Also, an average of 10 Jupiter masses for a planet is a somewhat generous figure if you compare it to estimated masses of planets known so far, and observational bias probably skews even those figures towards the larger end.
In the end, it might be a small constant factor here or there, and that wouldn't altogether remove the couple of orders of magnitude of difference. Also, not all visible matter is in stars and planets, so the ratio between total mass in planets and total visible mass in the universe would be even lower than the ratio between planets and stars (although I don't know by what kind of a factor), and since the total mass of dark matter is more than the total mass of visible matter, the proportion of dark matter these planets could make up for is again lower.
On the other hand, I guess it might also be that planets are more frequent than we imagine by a large factor.
Apparently it's not very significant since not only are planets smaller than stars, they are smaller by a pretty large factor.
The mass of Jupiter is about 1/1000 solar masses. Let's say the average mass of these independently floating planets is about 10 times that of Jupiter, and that the average star is about the same as our Sun or less. That would make the mass of an average planet about 1/100 of the average star, so you'd still need planets to outnumber stars by a factor of 100 just to equal the mass of stars. Wikipedia says that visible matter makes up for about 17% of the total matter of the universe, so even if the mass of planets equaled that of stars (which, with the very very rough figures above, would mean a planet-to-star ratio of 100, or something pretty large anyway), there would still be plenty of dark matter to explain.
Very true, many of the everyday routines of paying bills don't require ever handling paper. A slight problem at least here in Finland is that you're technically supposed to keep bills etc. for a number of years (I think five, but am not exactly sure). They might be relevant if you need to prove something regarding your tax deductions, for example, or if you need to show that you've been wrongly billed. Banks usually offer to store electronic bills for a year and a half, so that doesn't fulfill the legal requirements of document retention. (I don't know if the online billing system would otherwise satisfy the legal requirements but that alone means it doesn't.)
I guess you might be able to get an extended retention period by paying the bank extra for the service, but it's sort of ridiculous to design a system to make things more straightforward by moving them from paper to digital, yet leave in shortcomings that make it difficult to fulfill official requirements using that system. I think many people just ignore the problem or are oblivious to the retention requirements, but there's something wrong with the system if the number one solution is to ignore the legislation.
It only indicates that it is not an idealized free market. A free market does not preclude a single party from gaining significant power over the entire market through lobbying and gaming. If you had a free market of infinite size, or with 100% rational far-sighted actors or other such idealizations, perhaps that wouldn't happen, but it does happen in the real world.
I don't know the history of major scientific journals and as such I can't comment on whether they emerged through free market or not. However, the quote from grandparent is not enough to indicate that they didn't.
I didn't read the original article with full thought, but I got the impression that the key points were:
1) an efficient distributed algorithm for a self-organizing network where each node behaves independently, with no central control
and
2) even though it doesn't produce the maximum independent set, maybe its method of selecting the nodes for the independent set produces a better (closer to maximum) maximal independent set than a basic algorithm for just any maximal independent set would likely produce?
(I'm particularly not sure about the latter -- I'm not really sure if finding a maximum set was even relevant to their goals, or whether the main point was just to have an efficient distributed algorithm for finding a maximal independent set in an ad-hoc network/graph with minimal inter-node communication.)
I'm not really sure what you mean, but, well, dunno. My cell phone is around five years old, and I paid in the order of 160 euros for it. That really isn't big money if you divide it between five years. The monthly bills (calls + a smallish fixed fee only, as I bought the phone with straight money back then) are in the order of 15-20 euros per month.
Of course my phone isn't a mobile internet terminal or something else modern and fancy but if I consider the plain ease of life I get by being able to make a call any time and anywhere, it's a lot of bang for those 200-250 bucks per year. That is not even taking into account that other options such as landlines and payphones (of which both would be needed without a cell phone) also have a cost, and for me they would almost certainly be more expensive than the more convenient option. A lot of people don't even have landlines around here anymore due to the relatively high fixed monthly fees.
You didn't literally deny that but you pretty much hinted towards it with your entire previous post. You didn't deny it but you said exactly the kinds of things people tend to say when they want to deny warming or its significance.
The kinds of "arguments" you gave in that post are exactly the kinds that people usually say when they fail to understand the very things I brought up, so while I noticed the potential for trolling, I couldn't really resist in case it was indeed real lack of understanding. From your later post it's evident that you aren't one of those people in lack of understanding. However, there was little indication of that or, indeed, hardly any real argumentation in your earlier one.
It’s a shame you can’t be as objective in your analysis of the warmist position as you seem to be when considering the sceptic position. What would it take to get you to question the consensus?
I'm no climate scientist and can't really judge very technical arguments for or against, although I do have some degree of general understanding of science. Therefore, since you posed the question that way, it would probably take an argument that would win a significant share of scientists on its side, in addition to not being easily shot down, having support from measurements and data from a statistically significant period of time, not having apparent ulterior political motives, and just seeming to make sense.
I don't have to be on the side of consensus, but I do need an actual reason for believing that most of the experts in the field are wrong. It's not impossible but it's, at base, less likely than their being on the right track, so there needs to be something to offset that.
End users of software don't have to comply with the (L)GPL. The license only places restrictions on distribution. The problem is that the App Store terms and services also place restrictions on the software downloaded from the App Store, and any license provided by the authors of the software applies in addition to that. Apple's terms place restrictions that the (L)GPL disallows and thus the two conflict.
It is, of course, no surprise that Apple would remove a piece of software rather than modify their terms of service to be compatible with the GPL. Apple's terms serve the interests of Apple above all, and the interests of app authors are secondary; even if an app were deemed desirable by itself, a single app isn't significant enough to warrant changes that Apple might consider risky, difficult or otherwise undesirable; and Apple doesn't even like the GPL.
There's so much wrong with your post that I don't even know where to get started, which is a positive sign that you're probably just trolling, but here goes:
The only drastic change I've witnessed recently is the rapid onset of colder winters
I don't know how many cold winters you've seen in your town or even country but that doesn't matter. For me that's been the previous winter and this one; the two winters before that were warm (as far as winters here go) and wet. (Also, the last couple of summers have been pretty warm here and in many other places even if the winters were cold.) But anything in the range of everyday experience counts little when we're discussing phenomena that happen on time scales of at least several decades. Only data and evidence gathered over those decades as well as the preceding decades, centuries and millennia will help there.
Even the word "drastic" gets a slightly different meaning than it would in everyday weather discussion: in everyday life it's "drastic" if you're shivering cold today, but that bears no significance to trends that happen during decades. The last two years don't count either, nor do the two before that, but if you look at actual data globally and from a longer period of time, you can see that the previous decade was statistically warmer than the previous ones.
On the other hand, change that takes place during, say, a couple of decades can be drastic if the same kind of change would usually -- statistically, according to data -- take several decades more or even centuries. The change probably wouldn't feel drastic in your everyday life as it happens but that's not what we're talking about here. These things happen with lag, and large systems change slowly -- a few decades is a rather short period of time in such phenomena.
I don't understand why perfectly smart people so often don't get this.
and our "Global Warming" obsessed government's complete lack of preparedness for them.
Well, the last couple of winters have been a rare occurrence. The very fact that you've noticed them as a "drastic change" pretty much points towards that. If they went on for a couple of decades we'd have data, but right now it's just a rare event. Do you have any actual reason to believe that they aren't?
Preparedness costs. This winter as well as the previous one have been unusually cold and snowy here, and (some) people complain. Some of that may be for a reason, but let's face it: the circumstances have also been rare, and often it just doesn't make economical sense to invest much in preparing for something that's rare and exceptional. Would you want to pay for that preparedness? (It might still make sense to do that, yes, but then you have to at least face the fact that it's probably going to cost more than just letting rare occurrences happen.)
The reason for the absence of preparedness is the advice given by the Global Warming cultists at the Met Office
Cultists of data are rather preferable over cultists of inference from cold last week.
To be honest, there's a vast difference between a 10-year-old (or even younger) and an 18-year-old. Vast. I would expect 18-year-olds to have sex and watch porn, or 15- or 16-year olds (amongst each other), but not 10-year-olds.
The bigger question is, is it better to have these controls at the source (or, rather the middleman known as the ISP) or should the parents be responsible for this. I'd vote for the latter, although I can sort of understand the rationale behind the desire to have an opt-in scheme instead because a lot of parents just aren't tech-savvy enough to know how to do it at the client end even if they wanted to. I just don't think it's enough of a justification.
The other obvious concern is that what counts as porn is a rather ambiguous matter an will most likely lead to a lot of non-porn get blocked, even more than in the child porn case which has also caused false positives.
Sometimes it feels like there are approximately two people in the world who understand the political structure of the EU, so it's not particularly surprising that a random Slashdot staffer isn't one of them.
The three years are used for experimenting with different kernel configs and compilation flags so that you can make the server all of 100 kilobytes smaller and 0.1% faster.
But hey, you save 100 KiB and several microseconds for each day you spend doing that!
Of course its a conflict of interests. They are working on a competing product. Its like a Windows developer contributing to WINE.
I took a look at the IRC meeting log and agree that there may be a conflict of interest, regardless of whether there's a corporation such as Oracle involved.
The parallel you draw doesn't work, however. Since both OpenOffice.org and any fork of it are both free software projects building on the same codebase, improvements made to one can often be employed in the other as well. It's possible to make this difficult (e.g. by conflicting requirements for copyright assignment) but unless something like that is being done, the relationship between an original project and its fork may not be purely black-and-white competitive. The relationship between something like Wine and Windows is more so.
I don't think I'd ever do it again, but this sort of thing *is* humanly possible. However, just because it's possible doesn't make it a good idea.
I agree -- but let's remember that a month is a pretty short time. If you can manage to do something only for a month, it's not sustainable, and it's not reasonable to compare it to the regular effort at any job. Crunches are possible but they should be a true exception, not the norm.
Why do you think that you have the right to waste the employers time and money watching youtube videos, updating facebook and surfing the web. They are paying you to work, not to have fun. Sounds like you're just an asshole slacker.
I might agree somewhat if GP had talked about 25 hours a week or something, but 40-50 hours of true working time a week in a programming job without slacking is bordering between heroic and impossible.
Nobody I know can really program -- or do another similar mentally intensive and somewhat creative work -- very efficiently for even 8 hours a day without having small breaks every now and then. If you don't have those breaks consciously, your brain begins to have small breaks every now and then, your concentration will falter more easily, and you begin to make more mistakes. Even if you think you're constantly working at full steam, your brain probably isn't. The difference is that making those breaks conscious (and not having superiors watching you all the time as long as you get your job done) is a lot more comfortable and less stressful than trying to force yourself through without them to no avail.
Of course there's the occasional case of deep hack mode now and then where you can focus on your single task for hours and hours on end, at least seemingly without loss of productivity, but most people certainly can't keep that up all the time. Perhaps some exceptionally focused people can do it a lot of the time but most people certainly can't and would just be cheating themselves if they pretended so.
For that vast majority of people it's simply inevitable that working 40-50 hours a week (as GP said he did) will mean mental breaks every now and then, much more often than 2x10 min + lunch per day. I'd say that regularly working upwards of 40 hours a week in a programming job doesn't make much sense in the first place, though, for the very reason that most people will have their productivity suffer if they try to do that. They simply wouldn't get much (if any) more work done in total if they tried to do 50 hours per week rather than, say, 35. The total work done would just span over a longer period of time with more breaks and non-productive periods in between, whether conscious or not.
If GP's managers in the job he described didn't understand this, and they were actually monitoring him to make sure he (supposedly, not actually) was getting things done all the time, they were fighting against the very reality and were doing so at GP's expense, and probably also at that of the employer because GP wasn't at his most productive. I fully understand his frustration with the situation.
An anecdote is always just that, but sometime last year I was working part-time around 25-30 hours a week on a project (mostly non-programming, though, but in a software project nevertheless), and if I wasn't at the most productive I've ever been, I was at least damn close to it. That is, I've got more things done within an single week than I got within a single week at that time but the productivity I was able to sustain for a few months was almost certainly higher than that of any other period of similar duration. I was highly motivated and was working pretty intensively and productively (not entirely without surfing/youtube/whatever breaks, but with relatively few of them, and with strong concentration), but I certainly couldn't have kept the same pace for even 35-40 hours a week, much less 50. I'd probably have got less done in total if I had tried to do that. If someone had forced me to do that and expected me to do it without any slack, they'd have also shot themselves in the foot, not just me. My managers were smarter than that.
I appreciate high motivation to work but it should be motivation towards getting things done, not towards sweating your ass off. The amount and quality of "done" in a programming job doesn't scale with the amount of effort infinitely, and maximising the latter rather than the former just makes no sense.
The main motivation, as with all other commercial endeavours, is to gain advantage for one's self (profit).
Obviously.
That doesn't mean what they're doing here isn't beneficial to the community around them as well, though. If fulfilling the selfish goals of a corporation (such as Google) also happens to benefit the greater community around them, that means something in the free market system is working. That's a great situation IMO.
We should encourage that. We should encourage corporations doing things that are good for the community. By demanding and encouraging community-friendly behaviour and shunning community-unfriendly behaviour we can drive commercial endeavours towards being good for the community even if their motives for that are selfish.
This is, of course, an idealized model, and I don't really believe it works exactly like that in reality, but it's enough of an approximation to be useful. You have to choose between selfish corporations, so why wouldn't you pick the one whose actions are also good for you and the society, not only the corporation itself.
With that said, Google has also done their share of evil, but this news sounds like good news to me.
Not to mention that for every "non-normal" person who becomes successful partially thanks to their eccentricity there are a whole bunch of non-normal people who predominantly suffer from it. They just aren't quite as visible because, well, you know, they didn't become successful.
Sure being in the top 1% or even the top 10% of anything probably means you need to have something that distinguishes you from the rest, pretty much by definition. But how many people are "non-normal" and don't fit in the top? And do the bottom 10% also have features that distinguish them from most other people?
Saying that fixing deficiencies is generally wrong because many extraordinary people have deficiencies doesn't make much sense. Not that anybody really went so far as to suggest that here.
If the system is working properly, the banks are supposed to have business interest in not driving their customers away.
Of course they try to gain an advantage in every deal they make with you, requiring service fees etc., and you should look closely into the terms and compare with other banks. You know, exactly the same thing you should do as a customer in any business.
If you have other trouble trusting your bank with your money, something is wrong. Grossly cheating their customer is so far from their interests that they won't want to do that. If it's not, your system is horribly broken.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, but even if you reduced the mass of the average star to 1/5 in the ballpark calculation, that would still leave a 20:1 mass ratio between the average star and planet. Also, an average of 10 Jupiter masses for a planet is a somewhat generous figure if you compare it to estimated masses of planets known so far, and observational bias probably skews even those figures towards the larger end.
In the end, it might be a small constant factor here or there, and that wouldn't altogether remove the couple of orders of magnitude of difference. Also, not all visible matter is in stars and planets, so the ratio between total mass in planets and total visible mass in the universe would be even lower than the ratio between planets and stars (although I don't know by what kind of a factor), and since the total mass of dark matter is more than the total mass of visible matter, the proportion of dark matter these planets could make up for is again lower.
On the other hand, I guess it might also be that planets are more frequent than we imagine by a large factor.
Apparently it's not very significant since not only are planets smaller than stars, they are smaller by a pretty large factor.
The mass of Jupiter is about 1/1000 solar masses. Let's say the average mass of these independently floating planets is about 10 times that of Jupiter, and that the average star is about the same as our Sun or less. That would make the mass of an average planet about 1/100 of the average star, so you'd still need planets to outnumber stars by a factor of 100 just to equal the mass of stars. Wikipedia says that visible matter makes up for about 17% of the total matter of the universe, so even if the mass of planets equaled that of stars (which, with the very very rough figures above, would mean a planet-to-star ratio of 100, or something pretty large anyway), there would still be plenty of dark matter to explain.
Very true, many of the everyday routines of paying bills don't require ever handling paper. A slight problem at least here in Finland is that you're technically supposed to keep bills etc. for a number of years (I think five, but am not exactly sure). They might be relevant if you need to prove something regarding your tax deductions, for example, or if you need to show that you've been wrongly billed. Banks usually offer to store electronic bills for a year and a half, so that doesn't fulfill the legal requirements of document retention. (I don't know if the online billing system would otherwise satisfy the legal requirements but that alone means it doesn't.)
I guess you might be able to get an extended retention period by paying the bank extra for the service, but it's sort of ridiculous to design a system to make things more straightforward by moving them from paper to digital, yet leave in shortcomings that make it difficult to fulfill official requirements using that system. I think many people just ignore the problem or are oblivious to the retention requirements, but there's something wrong with the system if the number one solution is to ignore the legislation.
indicates that it is not, in fact, a free market
It only indicates that it is not an idealized free market. A free market does not preclude a single party from gaining significant power over the entire market through lobbying and gaming. If you had a free market of infinite size, or with 100% rational far-sighted actors or other such idealizations, perhaps that wouldn't happen, but it does happen in the real world.
I don't know the history of major scientific journals and as such I can't comment on whether they emerged through free market or not. However, the quote from grandparent is not enough to indicate that they didn't.
I didn't read the original article with full thought, but I got the impression that the key points were:
1) an efficient distributed algorithm for a self-organizing network where each node behaves independently, with no central control
and
2) even though it doesn't produce the maximum independent set, maybe its method of selecting the nodes for the independent set produces a better (closer to maximum) maximal independent set than a basic algorithm for just any maximal independent set would likely produce?
(I'm particularly not sure about the latter -- I'm not really sure if finding a maximum set was even relevant to their goals, or whether the main point was just to have an efficient distributed algorithm for finding a maximal independent set in an ad-hoc network/graph with minimal inter-node communication.)
cell phones are damned expensive.
Cell phones are an excellent way to cut costs.
I'm not really sure what you mean, but, well, dunno. My cell phone is around five years old, and I paid in the order of 160 euros for it. That really isn't big money if you divide it between five years. The monthly bills (calls + a smallish fixed fee only, as I bought the phone with straight money back then) are in the order of 15-20 euros per month.
Of course my phone isn't a mobile internet terminal or something else modern and fancy but if I consider the plain ease of life I get by being able to make a call any time and anywhere, it's a lot of bang for those 200-250 bucks per year. That is not even taking into account that other options such as landlines and payphones (of which both would be needed without a cell phone) also have a cost, and for me they would almost certainly be more expensive than the more convenient option. A lot of people don't even have landlines around here anymore due to the relatively high fixed monthly fees.
Things might be different where you're located.
Where did I deny that warming has occurred?
You didn't literally deny that but you pretty much hinted towards it with your entire previous post. You didn't deny it but you said exactly the kinds of things people tend to say when they want to deny warming or its significance.
The kinds of "arguments" you gave in that post are exactly the kinds that people usually say when they fail to understand the very things I brought up, so while I noticed the potential for trolling, I couldn't really resist in case it was indeed real lack of understanding. From your later post it's evident that you aren't one of those people in lack of understanding. However, there was little indication of that or, indeed, hardly any real argumentation in your earlier one.
It’s a shame you can’t be as objective in your analysis of the warmist position as you seem to be when considering the sceptic position. What would it take to get you to question the consensus?
I'm no climate scientist and can't really judge very technical arguments for or against, although I do have some degree of general understanding of science. Therefore, since you posed the question that way, it would probably take an argument that would win a significant share of scientists on its side, in addition to not being easily shot down, having support from measurements and data from a statistically significant period of time, not having apparent ulterior political motives, and just seeming to make sense.
I don't have to be on the side of consensus, but I do need an actual reason for believing that most of the experts in the field are wrong. It's not impossible but it's, at base, less likely than their being on the right track, so there needs to be something to offset that.
I predict that the VLC project will die on the vine.
I predict that it won't die as long as people keep thinking it's useful for them, you know, on all the other platforms they use than iOS.
End users of software don't have to comply with the (L)GPL. The license only places restrictions on distribution. The problem is that the App Store terms and services also place restrictions on the software downloaded from the App Store, and any license provided by the authors of the software applies in addition to that. Apple's terms place restrictions that the (L)GPL disallows and thus the two conflict.
(source: http://www.fsf.org/news/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement)
It is, of course, no surprise that Apple would remove a piece of software rather than modify their terms of service to be compatible with the GPL. Apple's terms serve the interests of Apple above all, and the interests of app authors are secondary; even if an app were deemed desirable by itself, a single app isn't significant enough to warrant changes that Apple might consider risky, difficult or otherwise undesirable; and Apple doesn't even like the GPL.
Even with cold this and last winter, 2010 might still have been the warmest year ever in modern history.
Apparently it takes only a few months for people to forget that the rest of the year between the winters was pretty warm.
Please refer to your dictionary and find the difference between "anecdote" and "data".
There's so much wrong with your post that I don't even know where to get started, which is a positive sign that you're probably just trolling, but here goes:
The only drastic change I've witnessed recently is the rapid onset of colder winters
I don't know how many cold winters you've seen in your town or even country but that doesn't matter. For me that's been the previous winter and this one; the two winters before that were warm (as far as winters here go) and wet. (Also, the last couple of summers have been pretty warm here and in many other places even if the winters were cold.) But anything in the range of everyday experience counts little when we're discussing phenomena that happen on time scales of at least several decades. Only data and evidence gathered over those decades as well as the preceding decades, centuries and millennia will help there.
Even the word "drastic" gets a slightly different meaning than it would in everyday weather discussion: in everyday life it's "drastic" if you're shivering cold today, but that bears no significance to trends that happen during decades. The last two years don't count either, nor do the two before that, but if you look at actual data globally and from a longer period of time, you can see that the previous decade was statistically warmer than the previous ones.
On the other hand, change that takes place during, say, a couple of decades can be drastic if the same kind of change would usually -- statistically, according to data -- take several decades more or even centuries. The change probably wouldn't feel drastic in your everyday life as it happens but that's not what we're talking about here. These things happen with lag, and large systems change slowly -- a few decades is a rather short period of time in such phenomena.
I don't understand why perfectly smart people so often don't get this.
and our "Global Warming" obsessed government's complete lack of preparedness for them.
Well, the last couple of winters have been a rare occurrence. The very fact that you've noticed them as a "drastic change" pretty much points towards that. If they went on for a couple of decades we'd have data, but right now it's just a rare event. Do you have any actual reason to believe that they aren't?
Preparedness costs. This winter as well as the previous one have been unusually cold and snowy here, and (some) people complain. Some of that may be for a reason, but let's face it: the circumstances have also been rare, and often it just doesn't make economical sense to invest much in preparing for something that's rare and exceptional. Would you want to pay for that preparedness? (It might still make sense to do that, yes, but then you have to at least face the fact that it's probably going to cost more than just letting rare occurrences happen.)
The reason for the absence of preparedness is the advice given by the Global Warming cultists at the Met Office
Cultists of data are rather preferable over cultists of inference from cold last week.
To be honest, there's a vast difference between a 10-year-old (or even younger) and an 18-year-old. Vast. I would expect 18-year-olds to have sex and watch porn, or 15- or 16-year olds (amongst each other), but not 10-year-olds.
The bigger question is, is it better to have these controls at the source (or, rather the middleman known as the ISP) or should the parents be responsible for this. I'd vote for the latter, although I can sort of understand the rationale behind the desire to have an opt-in scheme instead because a lot of parents just aren't tech-savvy enough to know how to do it at the client end even if they wanted to. I just don't think it's enough of a justification.
The other obvious concern is that what counts as porn is a rather ambiguous matter an will most likely lead to a lot of non-porn get blocked, even more than in the child porn case which has also caused false positives.
Sometimes it feels like there are approximately two people in the world who understand the political structure of the EU, so it's not particularly surprising that a random Slashdot staffer isn't one of them.
Neither am I, really.
The thing is, with these guys the par is 1, so it's awfully difficult to get birdies.
so that you can make the server
Note to self: if you're trying to sound like a smartass, it's better to check that you don't mix server with kernel yourself.
The three years are used for experimenting with different kernel configs and compilation flags so that you can make the server all of 100 kilobytes smaller and 0.1% faster.
But hey, you save 100 KiB and several microseconds for each day you spend doing that!
Of course its a conflict of interests. They are working on a competing product. Its like a Windows developer contributing to WINE.
I took a look at the IRC meeting log and agree that there may be a conflict of interest, regardless of whether there's a corporation such as Oracle involved.
The parallel you draw doesn't work, however. Since both OpenOffice.org and any fork of it are both free software projects building on the same codebase, improvements made to one can often be employed in the other as well. It's possible to make this difficult (e.g. by conflicting requirements for copyright assignment) but unless something like that is being done, the relationship between an original project and its fork may not be purely black-and-white competitive. The relationship between something like Wine and Windows is more so.
And #2 isn't likely considering that any such species would probably have machines do the physical work so they wouldn't actually need slaves.
I don't think I'd ever do it again, but this sort of thing *is* humanly possible. However, just because it's possible doesn't make it a good idea.
I agree -- but let's remember that a month is a pretty short time. If you can manage to do something only for a month, it's not sustainable, and it's not reasonable to compare it to the regular effort at any job. Crunches are possible but they should be a true exception, not the norm.
Why do you think that you have the right to waste the employers time and money watching youtube videos, updating facebook and surfing the web. They are paying you to work, not to have fun. Sounds like you're just an asshole slacker.
I might agree somewhat if GP had talked about 25 hours a week or something, but 40-50 hours of true working time a week in a programming job without slacking is bordering between heroic and impossible.
Nobody I know can really program -- or do another similar mentally intensive and somewhat creative work -- very efficiently for even 8 hours a day without having small breaks every now and then. If you don't have those breaks consciously, your brain begins to have small breaks every now and then, your concentration will falter more easily, and you begin to make more mistakes. Even if you think you're constantly working at full steam, your brain probably isn't. The difference is that making those breaks conscious (and not having superiors watching you all the time as long as you get your job done) is a lot more comfortable and less stressful than trying to force yourself through without them to no avail.
Of course there's the occasional case of deep hack mode now and then where you can focus on your single task for hours and hours on end, at least seemingly without loss of productivity, but most people certainly can't keep that up all the time. Perhaps some exceptionally focused people can do it a lot of the time but most people certainly can't and would just be cheating themselves if they pretended so.
For that vast majority of people it's simply inevitable that working 40-50 hours a week (as GP said he did) will mean mental breaks every now and then, much more often than 2x10 min + lunch per day. I'd say that regularly working upwards of 40 hours a week in a programming job doesn't make much sense in the first place, though, for the very reason that most people will have their productivity suffer if they try to do that. They simply wouldn't get much (if any) more work done in total if they tried to do 50 hours per week rather than, say, 35. The total work done would just span over a longer period of time with more breaks and non-productive periods in between, whether conscious or not.
If GP's managers in the job he described didn't understand this, and they were actually monitoring him to make sure he (supposedly, not actually) was getting things done all the time, they were fighting against the very reality and were doing so at GP's expense, and probably also at that of the employer because GP wasn't at his most productive. I fully understand his frustration with the situation.
An anecdote is always just that, but sometime last year I was working part-time around 25-30 hours a week on a project (mostly non-programming, though, but in a software project nevertheless), and if I wasn't at the most productive I've ever been, I was at least damn close to it. That is, I've got more things done within an single week than I got within a single week at that time but the productivity I was able to sustain for a few months was almost certainly higher than that of any other period of similar duration. I was highly motivated and was working pretty intensively and productively (not entirely without surfing/youtube/whatever breaks, but with relatively few of them, and with strong concentration), but I certainly couldn't have kept the same pace for even 35-40 hours a week, much less 50. I'd probably have got less done in total if I had tried to do that. If someone had forced me to do that and expected me to do it without any slack, they'd have also shot themselves in the foot, not just me. My managers were smarter than that.
I appreciate high motivation to work but it should be motivation towards getting things done, not towards sweating your ass off. The amount and quality of "done" in a programming job doesn't scale with the amount of effort infinitely, and maximising the latter rather than the former just makes no sense.
The main motivation, as with all other commercial endeavours, is to gain advantage for one's self (profit).
Obviously.
That doesn't mean what they're doing here isn't beneficial to the community around them as well, though. If fulfilling the selfish goals of a corporation (such as Google) also happens to benefit the greater community around them, that means something in the free market system is working. That's a great situation IMO.
We should encourage that. We should encourage corporations doing things that are good for the community. By demanding and encouraging community-friendly behaviour and shunning community-unfriendly behaviour we can drive commercial endeavours towards being good for the community even if their motives for that are selfish.
This is, of course, an idealized model, and I don't really believe it works exactly like that in reality, but it's enough of an approximation to be useful. You have to choose between selfish corporations, so why wouldn't you pick the one whose actions are also good for you and the society, not only the corporation itself.
With that said, Google has also done their share of evil, but this news sounds like good news to me.
I'm not sure if there's a subtle joke I'm missing or something but it sure does, also accessible right from the front page through the navigation bar.
Not to mention that for every "non-normal" person who becomes successful partially thanks to their eccentricity there are a whole bunch of non-normal people who predominantly suffer from it. They just aren't quite as visible because, well, you know, they didn't become successful.
Sure being in the top 1% or even the top 10% of anything probably means you need to have something that distinguishes you from the rest, pretty much by definition. But how many people are "non-normal" and don't fit in the top? And do the bottom 10% also have features that distinguish them from most other people?
Saying that fixing deficiencies is generally wrong because many extraordinary people have deficiencies doesn't make much sense. Not that anybody really went so far as to suggest that here.
If the system is working properly, the banks are supposed to have business interest in not driving their customers away.
Of course they try to gain an advantage in every deal they make with you, requiring service fees etc., and you should look closely into the terms and compare with other banks. You know, exactly the same thing you should do as a customer in any business.
If you have other trouble trusting your bank with your money, something is wrong. Grossly cheating their customer is so far from their interests that they won't want to do that. If it's not, your system is horribly broken.