I have actually known this to happen once -- a co-worker accidentally ran over his laptop with his car (not kidding) and got a new one.
I've never destroyed company equipment, but I do buy a lot of my own stuff. Our IT guy knows what he's doing, but he's overworked and doesn't have much of a budget, so eventually I just bought what I needed -- new box, extra monitor, a bunch of other stuff -- and I maintain it myself. Before you ask, no, of course the company will never reimburse me for it, and the money I spent will not lead to me being directly rewarded by the company for it, but so what. I like my job and this lets me do it better.
Because the more children you have, the more likely one of them will grow to adulthood. I have a letter written to my great-great-great-grandfather by a nephew of his in the 1860s; the writer mentions, matter-of-factly, that three of his children have died of scarlet fever since he last wrote; since four more of his children had died of scarlet fever previously, that left him with only two children.
Don't know about the other two, but I can tell you that in Massachusetts the police union is tremendously powerful, and it is essentially impossible to get elected without their backing. This is true regardless of what party a candidate belongs to.
I have. A book store in Harvard Square (since closed) wouldn't take a hundred-dollar bill to pay for thirty dollars' worth of books. That was in the nineties sometime. Last summer I paid a twenty-dollar toll on I-90 in New York with a hundred, and the collector came out of the booth to write down my license plate number.
If I hire a gardener the deal is something like "Get my lawn mowed and the bushes trimmed and the winter debris cleared up, and have it done before the weekend. I'll pay you $X." As long as the gardener gets everything I asked for done before the deadline we agreed on, he can spend half his time in a hammock for all I care.
Some time ago there was a fad for a collectible card game called "Magic". The cards were sold in random packs, and there were some cards that weren't found very often and so became sought after among the people who collected the cards. Some of them sold for quite a lot of money -- in the hundreds of dollars. I had a friend who was working at a hotel where there was a big convention for people who, among other things, were really into collecting these cards. He went out to buy a big pile of the random packs and managed to round up a number of these rare Magic cards. He then laminated them, cut them in half, and used them as coat-check claim cards. He said the expressions on the attendees' faces when they saw their claim cards made that whole crappy job worth while.
Evolution doesn't work that way, though. Individuals don't evolve to benefit the group, they evolve to benefit themselves. My genes don't give a crap what happens to my neighbors.
I'm only going on what's in TFA, but they seem to be saying that what happens is that when there's severe damage to the spinal cord, the stress causes spinal cord chemicals (which in ordinary spine operation are beneficial) to form a simple aldehyde called acrolein, which is highly toxic, and this prevents healing.
In that case, it just sounds like a tradeoff. "We'll use chemicals A, B, and C in the spinal column. The pro is that they allow higher brain function; the con is that under trauma they go wrong and can't be fixed." Since trauma is by definition an unusual event, that's actually not a bad tradeoff.
I suppose we haven't evolved a way around it because generally people who experience spinal trauma die anyway, so it's not worth devoting a lot of body resources to the problem.
If I could, I would travel around the world with dynamite and blow up every awful pile of garbage Le Corbusier inflicted on the public.
"ugly in an interesting way" is fine for sculptures in a gallery where people want to see them. It's not fine for a huge building smack in the middle of a busy part of the city, where everyone has to look at it whether they want to or not. Just having to work near that thing damages my life. Working in it would be like carrying a great weight around all the time. I mean, just the fact that the style is named "Brutalist" should tell you that the architect didn't care that looking at the thing makes people depressed.
Never mind that the architect apparently never stopped to think that flat-roofed concrete buildings are not suited to a city that gets as much rain and snow as Boston does; City Hall is covered with nasty brown stains where rust from the rebar is leaching out.
It's true about the good location, but my concern is not so much with putting in a new building as it is getting rid of the old building. I'd be happy if they housed the city government in a warehouse while they dynamited City Hall and built a new one on the same footprint. Or, hell, let them all work in tents on the Plaza from now on. Anything to get rid of that building.
It's more than "idiosyncratic". It has been voted in several international polls as the single ugliest building in the whole world.
I haven't seen every building in the world, but City Hall is certainly the ugliest building I have ever seen. I hate it, and so does everyone else I have ever spoken to about it. I would happily endorse any amount of government corruption to get rid of that thing. Having it gone would improve my life, and I wouldn't care how many of Menino's friends got rich off the project.
According to TFA (and I have also read this in the Boston newspapers many times over the years) Menino simply does not use email. So in his case there's nothing to save or delete.
I should say that in itself that doesn't mean he's hiding something. He is, after all, almost seventy. My dad doesn't use email either.
First off, the Hippocratic Oath does not say "do no harm"
Yes it does. epi dhlhsei de kai adikihi eirxein: "abstain from doing harm".
The National Institute of Health phrases it as "I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone."
doctors don't take it any more and haven't in my lifetime
Some still do. Most medical schools administer some form of oath, and many use the Hippocratic version.
Fair enough. I hadn't thought of that aspect...also, I suppose, the time the Death Star spends chasing the Falcon is time it isn't spending strolling around blowing up inhabited planets.
True -- not to mention that Paris didn't just run off with the Queen; the two of them took the nation's treasury with them. In the Iliad, the Greeks' demands are that Troy should punish Paris, return Helen, AND return the treasure.
So, how do you excuse away the fact that there are almost no rails overlook huge falls?
Have you ever been to China? Ever seen a construction project there? There are no rails, no ropes, no traffic cones, often not even any signs.
When my dad was a kid (before WWII) construction projects in Boston would store their explosives in a dynamite shack -- a wooden shed right next to the sidewalk, with no lock and no safety precautions whatever except a sign on the door that said "DYNAMITE". It was just assumed that people were smart enough to stay away.
Just because we happen to live in a time and place where we've made a fad out of giving big priority to safety precautions, that doesn't make it a universal principle. Fads are temporary. I could easily believe that thirty years from now, kids will be looking at old pictures and asking their parents "Why did you wear those funny-looking things on your heads when you were riding bikes?" This one isn't even a plot hole. It's just that the people in the Star Wars movies happen to live in a time and place where the culture does not have much interest in safety precautions.
The Sarlacc is just a gigantic ant-lion. Since it's sessile it probably doesn't need to eat much (and obviously it makes its food last, since it digests things slowly over a period of a thousand years.) And we see several times that the Tatooine deserts are filled with large animal life.
Star Wars is a fairy tale. It's not science fiction. It takes place in an imaginary universe where things work differently. (Why didn't Scalzi include on his list, "It's not actually possible to lift large objects with your mind"?)
Speaking for myself, the only sorts of script problems that really bother me are ones of human motivation, because imaginary universe or not, these are supposed to be real people. I don't want to watch a movie and think, "Wait, he/she wouldn't do that." (Leia sees that the Empire let them escape from the Death Star. So why does she go straight to the rebels' secret base, when she must know that the only reason for the Empire to let them go is to follow them?)
Right....because "large numbers of non-doctors" have done two minutes' poking around on Google, and decided that they can now speak with authority on a subject they've never heard of until five minutes ago, therefore the kid's doctors are incompetent.
Heh. My recruiting sergeant phrased it something like this:
"Yeah, there's this question here about whether you've used drugs. If, you know, you maybe just smoked a couple joints back in high school or something...I'm not telling you to lie...nobody's gonna go looking for that." (Pause) "I'm not telling you to lie." (Meaningful look.)
That doesn't make any sense. When I needed a new power supply for my old T21 Thinkpad, I just called IBM and ordered one. They didn't ask why I wanted it, or ask me to prove I hadn't stolen my laptop. Why would they? It's a spare part. They have no reason to care what I do with it.
The same seems to apply to this case, from what I can tell. The guy wanted a spare part. He called Alienware to order it. Why did they even ask what he wanted it for? If he were going to use it as a paper weight, or as a weird kind of sex toy, what difference does that make to them? It's a spare part.
Yes, that's true. Because humans and pigs are so similar, almost all parasites that live in pigs, like trichinosis, can also live in humans, so we have to cook the pig meat enough to kill parasites before we eat it. On the other hand, humans and cows are not very similar, so cow parasites generally cannot live in humans; we don't have to cook cow meat thoroughly, because any parasites that may be living in the cow meat won't affect us.
Similarly, if a cow gets sick, that's not really a concern for people; if you're a farmer, and your cow gets a bronchial infection, you don't have to worry about catching it if the cow coughs on you, because most cow diseases can't live in human hosts. However, if your pig gets the flu, then you do have to worry, because there are many variants of pig diseases that can live in humans.
People died of infectious diseases long before sanitization began. Europeans in the 14th and 17th centuries lived their whole lives massively exposed to germs of every kind (living shorter, less generally healthy lives than they do now as a consequence), and that was no help at all when the bubonic plague came.
Flu viruses live in bird populations, and mostly people don't get sick from them because birds and humans are so dissimilar. But pigs can get the flu from birds -- mainly from drinking water that infected birds have crapped in -- and pigs and humans are so similar that we can catch many pig diseases. (This is why you can eat rare beef but not rare pork.) These viruses mutate in the pigs, that's why they're so deadly. The H1N1 strain that caused the 1918 pandemic is still around, it's just that it isn't as deadly any more because we've accomodated ourselves to it.
This current strain is not a "previously harmless germ"; it's new, and so no amount of previous exposure to other germs would have any effect at all on our reaction to this one. Worrying about over-sanitization leading to immune weakness is probably a valid concern, but it doesn't apply here, and invoking it is an example of one-theory-to-fit-everything sloppy thinking.
Amazon has an automated feature that tags any book as "adult" if a certain number of people complain about it (using the "report this as inappropriate" button.)
A hacker, apparently as revenge for some delisting on Craigslist for which he blamed gay people, scraped Amazon for books whose metadata tagged them as GBLT, and then mass-reported them as "adult" to get them removed from search rankings. (The details are here: http://pastebin.ca/1390576.)
So it was both a glitch *and* a hack: that is, the glitch was that a hacker could take advantage of an automated feature in this way. The reply sent to Mark Probst -- that Amazon excludes adult material from searches -- was perfectly accurate, and simply sent to him at a time when Amazon had not yet realized that this hack was taking place.
I also have to point out people have no right to tell any store what they can and can't sell
Of course they do. It's called the free market. It goes like this:
1) Amazon decides to categorize what they sell in a manner that a certain group of people finds objectionable.
2) The offended group responds by withholding their business from Amazon.
3) If the losses Amazon suffers from this are above a certain threshold, they will reverse the policy; if not, they won't.
Every interest group in America uses this approach all the time. It was probably an interest group that caused the policy decision at Amazon in the first place. It's Amazon's fiduciary responsibility to maximize its income, so it will appease whichever group spends more money.
So, if I run into the guy who owns one of the two gas stations in my town, and I tell him, "You know, Jim, I use Bill's gas station instead of yours because I can get coffee at his place," I am forcing Jim to start selling coffee?
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I have actually known this to happen once -- a co-worker accidentally ran over his laptop with his car (not kidding) and got a new one.
I've never destroyed company equipment, but I do buy a lot of my own stuff. Our IT guy knows what he's doing, but he's overworked and doesn't have much of a budget, so eventually I just bought what I needed -- new box, extra monitor, a bunch of other stuff -- and I maintain it myself. Before you ask, no, of course the company will never reimburse me for it, and the money I spent will not lead to me being directly rewarded by the company for it, but so what. I like my job and this lets me do it better.
Because the more children you have, the more likely one of them will grow to adulthood. I have a letter written to my great-great-great-grandfather by a nephew of his in the 1860s; the writer mentions, matter-of-factly, that three of his children have died of scarlet fever since he last wrote; since four more of his children had died of scarlet fever previously, that left him with only two children.
Don't know about the other two, but I can tell you that in Massachusetts the police union is tremendously powerful, and it is essentially impossible to get elected without their backing. This is true regardless of what party a candidate belongs to.
Both my old Dell 620 and my current Dell E6400 use a trackpoint. (I still call it the "eraser mouse", even though the Dell ones are concave.)
I have. A book store in Harvard Square (since closed) wouldn't take a hundred-dollar bill to pay for thirty dollars' worth of books. That was in the nineties sometime. Last summer I paid a twenty-dollar toll on I-90 in New York with a hundred, and the collector came out of the booth to write down my license plate number.
If I hire a gardener the deal is something like "Get my lawn mowed and the bushes trimmed and the winter debris cleared up, and have it done before the weekend. I'll pay you $X." As long as the gardener gets everything I asked for done before the deadline we agreed on, he can spend half his time in a hammock for all I care.
Some time ago there was a fad for a collectible card game called "Magic". The cards were sold in random packs, and there were some cards that weren't found very often and so became sought after among the people who collected the cards. Some of them sold for quite a lot of money -- in the hundreds of dollars. I had a friend who was working at a hotel where there was a big convention for people who, among other things, were really into collecting these cards. He went out to buy a big pile of the random packs and managed to round up a number of these rare Magic cards. He then laminated them, cut them in half, and used them as coat-check claim cards. He said the expressions on the attendees' faces when they saw their claim cards made that whole crappy job worth while.
Evolution doesn't work that way, though. Individuals don't evolve to benefit the group, they evolve to benefit themselves. My genes don't give a crap what happens to my neighbors.
I'm only going on what's in TFA, but they seem to be saying that what happens is that when there's severe damage to the spinal cord, the stress causes spinal cord chemicals (which in ordinary spine operation are beneficial) to form a simple aldehyde called acrolein, which is highly toxic, and this prevents healing.
In that case, it just sounds like a tradeoff. "We'll use chemicals A, B, and C in the spinal column. The pro is that they allow higher brain function; the con is that under trauma they go wrong and can't be fixed." Since trauma is by definition an unusual event, that's actually not a bad tradeoff.
I suppose we haven't evolved a way around it because generally people who experience spinal trauma die anyway, so it's not worth devoting a lot of body resources to the problem.
If I could, I would travel around the world with dynamite and blow up every awful pile of garbage Le Corbusier inflicted on the public.
"ugly in an interesting way" is fine for sculptures in a gallery where people want to see them. It's not fine for a huge building smack in the middle of a busy part of the city, where everyone has to look at it whether they want to or not. Just having to work near that thing damages my life. Working in it would be like carrying a great weight around all the time. I mean, just the fact that the style is named "Brutalist" should tell you that the architect didn't care that looking at the thing makes people depressed.
Never mind that the architect apparently never stopped to think that flat-roofed concrete buildings are not suited to a city that gets as much rain and snow as Boston does; City Hall is covered with nasty brown stains where rust from the rebar is leaching out.
It's true about the good location, but my concern is not so much with putting in a new building as it is getting rid of the old building. I'd be happy if they housed the city government in a warehouse while they dynamited City Hall and built a new one on the same footprint. Or, hell, let them all work in tents on the Plaza from now on. Anything to get rid of that building.
It's more than "idiosyncratic". It has been voted in several international polls as the single ugliest building in the whole world.
I haven't seen every building in the world, but City Hall is certainly the ugliest building I have ever seen. I hate it, and so does everyone else I have ever spoken to about it. I would happily endorse any amount of government corruption to get rid of that thing. Having it gone would improve my life, and I wouldn't care how many of Menino's friends got rich off the project.
According to TFA (and I have also read this in the Boston newspapers many times over the years) Menino simply does not use email. So in his case there's nothing to save or delete.
I should say that in itself that doesn't mean he's hiding something. He is, after all, almost seventy. My dad doesn't use email either.
First off, the Hippocratic Oath does not say "do no harm"
Yes it does. epi dhlhsei de kai adikihi eirxein: "abstain from doing harm".
The National Institute of Health phrases it as "I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone."
doctors don't take it any more and haven't in my lifetime
Some still do. Most medical schools administer some form of oath, and many use the Hippocratic version.
Fair enough. I hadn't thought of that aspect...also, I suppose, the time the Death Star spends chasing the Falcon is time it isn't spending strolling around blowing up inhabited planets.
True -- not to mention that Paris didn't just run off with the Queen; the two of them took the nation's treasury with them. In the Iliad, the Greeks' demands are that Troy should punish Paris, return Helen, AND return the treasure.
So, how do you excuse away the fact that there are almost no rails overlook huge falls?
Have you ever been to China? Ever seen a construction project there? There are no rails, no ropes, no traffic cones, often not even any signs.
When my dad was a kid (before WWII) construction projects in Boston would store their explosives in a dynamite shack -- a wooden shed right next to the sidewalk, with no lock and no safety precautions whatever except a sign on the door that said "DYNAMITE". It was just assumed that people were smart enough to stay away.
Just because we happen to live in a time and place where we've made a fad out of giving big priority to safety precautions, that doesn't make it a universal principle. Fads are temporary. I could easily believe that thirty years from now, kids will be looking at old pictures and asking their parents "Why did you wear those funny-looking things on your heads when you were riding bikes?" This one isn't even a plot hole. It's just that the people in the Star Wars movies happen to live in a time and place where the culture does not have much interest in safety precautions.
The Sarlacc is just a gigantic ant-lion. Since it's sessile it probably doesn't need to eat much (and obviously it makes its food last, since it digests things slowly over a period of a thousand years.) And we see several times that the Tatooine deserts are filled with large animal life.
Star Wars is a fairy tale. It's not science fiction. It takes place in an imaginary universe where things work differently. (Why didn't Scalzi include on his list, "It's not actually possible to lift large objects with your mind"?)
Speaking for myself, the only sorts of script problems that really bother me are ones of human motivation, because imaginary universe or not, these are supposed to be real people. I don't want to watch a movie and think, "Wait, he/she wouldn't do that." (Leia sees that the Empire let them escape from the Death Star. So why does she go straight to the rebels' secret base, when she must know that the only reason for the Empire to let them go is to follow them?)
Right....because "large numbers of non-doctors" have done two minutes' poking around on Google, and decided that they can now speak with authority on a subject they've never heard of until five minutes ago, therefore the kid's doctors are incompetent.
Heh. My recruiting sergeant phrased it something like this:
"Yeah, there's this question here about whether you've used drugs. If, you know, you maybe just smoked a couple joints back in high school or something...I'm not telling you to lie...nobody's gonna go looking for that." (Pause) "I'm not telling you to lie." (Meaningful look.)
That doesn't make any sense. When I needed a new power supply for my old T21 Thinkpad, I just called IBM and ordered one. They didn't ask why I wanted it, or ask me to prove I hadn't stolen my laptop. Why would they? It's a spare part. They have no reason to care what I do with it.
The same seems to apply to this case, from what I can tell. The guy wanted a spare part. He called Alienware to order it. Why did they even ask what he wanted it for? If he were going to use it as a paper weight, or as a weird kind of sex toy, what difference does that make to them? It's a spare part.
Yes, that's true. Because humans and pigs are so similar, almost all parasites that live in pigs, like trichinosis, can also live in humans, so we have to cook the pig meat enough to kill parasites before we eat it. On the other hand, humans and cows are not very similar, so cow parasites generally cannot live in humans; we don't have to cook cow meat thoroughly, because any parasites that may be living in the cow meat won't affect us.
Similarly, if a cow gets sick, that's not really a concern for people; if you're a farmer, and your cow gets a bronchial infection, you don't have to worry about catching it if the cow coughs on you, because most cow diseases can't live in human hosts. However, if your pig gets the flu, then you do have to worry, because there are many variants of pig diseases that can live in humans.
People died of infectious diseases long before sanitization began. Europeans in the 14th and 17th centuries lived their whole lives massively exposed to germs of every kind (living shorter, less generally healthy lives than they do now as a consequence), and that was no help at all when the bubonic plague came.
Flu viruses live in bird populations, and mostly people don't get sick from them because birds and humans are so dissimilar. But pigs can get the flu from birds -- mainly from drinking water that infected birds have crapped in -- and pigs and humans are so similar that we can catch many pig diseases. (This is why you can eat rare beef but not rare pork.) These viruses mutate in the pigs, that's why they're so deadly. The H1N1 strain that caused the 1918 pandemic is still around, it's just that it isn't as deadly any more because we've accomodated ourselves to it.
This current strain is not a "previously harmless germ"; it's new, and so no amount of previous exposure to other germs would have any effect at all on our reaction to this one. Worrying about over-sanitization leading to immune weakness is probably a valid concern, but it doesn't apply here, and invoking it is an example of one-theory-to-fit-everything sloppy thinking.
Amazon has an automated feature that tags any book as "adult" if a certain number of people complain about it (using the "report this as inappropriate" button.)
A hacker, apparently as revenge for some delisting on Craigslist for which he blamed gay people, scraped Amazon for books whose metadata tagged them as GBLT, and then mass-reported them as "adult" to get them removed from search rankings. (The details are here: http://pastebin.ca/1390576.)
So it was both a glitch *and* a hack: that is, the glitch was that a hacker could take advantage of an automated feature in this way. The reply sent to Mark Probst -- that Amazon excludes adult material from searches -- was perfectly accurate, and simply sent to him at a time when Amazon had not yet realized that this hack was taking place.
I also have to point out people have no right to tell any store what they can and can't sell
Of course they do. It's called the free market. It goes like this:
1) Amazon decides to categorize what they sell in a manner that a certain group of people finds objectionable.
2) The offended group responds by withholding their business from Amazon.
3) If the losses Amazon suffers from this are above a certain threshold, they will reverse the policy; if not, they won't.
Every interest group in America uses this approach all the time. It was probably an interest group that caused the policy decision at Amazon in the first place. It's Amazon's fiduciary responsibility to maximize its income, so it will appease whichever group spends more money.
So, if I run into the guy who owns one of the two gas stations in my town, and I tell him, "You know, Jim, I use Bill's gas station instead of yours because I can get coffee at his place," I am forcing Jim to start selling coffee?
According to TFA the guy has been in and out of hospitals getting various treatments for twenty years. So your thesis does not seem likely.