I happen to have the same first and last name as a mildly-well-known professional athlete; I just did an ego-surf and found nearly all the results were for him, with several dozen other people of the same name having one or two hits each. Results for me: 0. I consider that ideal. My online presence, using my real name, is nil. Anyone searching for me will get piles of game charts and athletic statistics, but nothing about me.
The Prince has nothing to do with evil or with dictatorship. It is simply an objective, unemotional study of the best method for a head of state to maintain his power and the power of his state. Machiavelli was himself a republican (which is obvious if you read I Discorsi, the longer work of which The Prince is an abstract.)
I don't quite see how padding object files could hide a buffer overflow bug -- a buffer overflow is a run-time error, not a compile-time error. How did that work?
Meh. Fallen Angels is what a friend of mine calls "fan porn" -- a book cynically designed to flatter the vanity of its target audience. The book features a group of (what else?) science-fiction-fan nerds who are persecuted for being smart, creative, and open-minded -- exactly the fantasy that many SF fans construct about their own lives. (Hey, it's not that people avoid you because you're an obnoxious ass -- it's that they're all jealous because you're special.) There is no plot that sits so well with the SF market as a story about a small group of superior people who are oppressed by the inferior masses.
This project didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars, or anything close to that.
Yes, there is more than one way to land on Mars. But those other ways cost more money. The Phoenix project wasn't designed from scratch; it was a reasonably cheap way to get some use out of the aborted Polar Lander hardware, which otherwise would have gone to waste. So they designed it as cheaply as possible consistent with a reasonably good chance of surviving the landing. If it works, great. If not, the hardware was going to waste anyway and trying this didn't cost that much.
I didn't care much for the sequels to Ender's Game, but I thought the ancillary series with Bean was really, really bad. Admittedly I only read the first one and half of the second one before giving up.
My reaction was exactly the opposite of yours -- the characters are much less real. The "shadow" stories are just doing Ender over again, only this time EVEN YOUNGER and EVEN SMARTER! The strength of Ender's Game is that Ender is both a believable military genius and a believable little kid. He is, in the abstract, smarter than his teachers -- he consistently beats the game, aces their tests -- but they still manipulate him and control his life, because they're experienced adults and he's an inexperienced kid.
Card wanted Bean to be Ender only more so, so Bean is not only smarter than his teachers, he manipulates them, even though he's only, like, four years old. It's not believable. Neither are any of the other super-smart kids in the story. They don't act like super-smart kids; they act like super-smart adults. If you're going to write a story about little kids, you have to either make them act like real little kids would act, or provide a believable explanation for why they don't. Card does neither.
In my last period of interviewing for jobs (all in New England, a few years ago) a common question was "What's the last book you read?" I believe this is intended as a conversation-starter, to let the interviewer get an idea of your personality, but it also lets them know if you're a one-track savant.
Actually, I think the reason "most people run Windows" is that it's what comes pre-installed on their computer when they buy it. The majority of people don't even know there's an alternative.
In the recent book "Tamerlane's Children", which is a study of contemporary Uzbekistan, the author reports that he was pulled over in Tashkent because a cop saw him wearing his seatbelt. The cop assumed he was drunk, and had buckled up because he was driving drunk -- "why else would anyone wear a seatbelt?"
It would also have the third effect of allowing the criticized cops to attack the posters both openly and clandestinely. If I publicly criticized a cop, using my real name, I would be harassed day and night from that day forward, by that cop and by his friends. The police have enormous power; we don't need to allow them to silence criticism too.
The problem is often people's definition of "going slow for no reason". Based on evidence from last night, there's at least one driver in my home town who thinks that "being on a steep hill at night on an unlighted twisty road that's only wide enough for two cars and has heavy forest right up to the verge plus there was snow and sleet earlier and it's raining now so the road is slippery plus there's heavy fog" is not a sufficient reason to drive five MPH below the posted limit.
I think the real problem of tailgating is that it becomes an ingrained habit, and the drivers who do it tailgate in all circumstances on all roads. Yesterday I was driving at 65 MPH in the right-most lane. Traffic was not particularly congested. To my left was a big rig, some hundred yards back but moving faster than I was. In the left-most lane were a few cars passing by at about 80. So a car appears further back in the right lane doing 90 or so. He didn't want to slow down the time it would take for the 80 MPH cars to get far enough ahead of the big rig to change lanes safely, so he decided to shift two lanes over to the right lane, pass the big rig on the right, and then change two lanes again to get in front of the other cars in the left lane. However, just as he changed lanes, the road graded downward and the big rig picked up speed, so by the time the speedy guy got up on the right of the big rig the gap between the rear of my car and the front of the big rig was too small for him to get through. So he angrily rode right on my rear bumper, so close I couldn't see his headlights, though even an idiot could see I had nowhere to go, since there was a car ahead of me and a big rig to my left and a Jersey barrier to my right. And I'm sure that guy thinks he was being a really good driver, and I'm sure he self-righteously complains that other people are morons who don't know how to drive.
A simple compressor/Co2 cartridges with tubes blowing onto the panels in different places could remove quite a bit of the dust without fancy arms and brushes.
Leaving aside the weight and moving-parts issues, how much volume of compressed gas could the rover carry? I'd think it would all get used up pretty fast and then the rover would be right where it is now, only with a useless empty gas tank to lug around.
It's not an illusion at all. The distinction the original poster was making is not between the people who work for a company and the people who run it, but between working at a big company versus starting your own business. Obviously, the risk is much greater for the latter choice.
I work for a biggish company. What's the worst thing that can happen to me if the company tanks? I lose my job. End of story. On the other hand, suppose I start my own business and it fails. What are my risks then? Being personally responsible for the business' debts; getting sued by the business' customers; lawyers, courts, bankruptcy, homelessness.
Now, obviously, the potential rewards of running your own business are much greater than working for someone else. But so are the risks.
You can bomb a patch of ground, you can fly over it, you can shoot missiles at it, but until you stand an eighteen-year-old kid with a rifle on it, you don't own it.
The article is right about "users you never hear from = lost productivity". I have generally found the IT people at my job so repellent (which seems to be a deliberate strategy on their part) that I never talk to them about anything. If I have a problem with an application, I just stop using it, because finding some other way to do the work is both less stressful and less time-consuming than dealing with IT. At one point I just stopped using my workstation and bought my own computer so I could manage it myself. (Stop having hysterics, I didn't connect it to the network.)
It did seem the Register was using pretty loose standards here. It says that Bagley "became convinced" that Weiss was sock-puppeting, and that Bagley "was sure" that Weiss was the real identity behind a few IP addresses. But the Register did not investigate that for itself, nor, apparently, did it even ask Bagley what his reasons were for believing it. From the article you could just as easily conclude that Bagley is a paranoid troll. Be nice if the paper actually did some research.
Actually I could work at home, but I prefer to work at the office, because the office is the only place I can ever go where I don't have to listen to somebody's kid screaming.
it's impossible to say "I don't care what people think about me" if you use violence or otherwise disrupt their right to freedom.
Is it really? I don't see any logical connection between those two things. I mean, if I were a person who used violence to take away other people's freedom, and some one said to me, "How can you do that, it's wrong and immoral," I would see nothing at all inconsistent in answering, "I don't care what you think is wrong and immoral, I'm doing what I want to do."
If I am correctly interpreting the statement, "As long as I don't force my own views on other people, I do what I want and I don't give a fsck what people say or think about me" to really mean, "As long as I don't force my own views on other people, THEN I AM MORALLY JUSTIFIED AND CONSISTENT to do what I want and [not] give a fsck what people say or think about me", then that is consistent and unassailable. However, it is still a statement in favor of caring what other people think.
To use the body-piercing example, let's suppose I am a person who dislikes body piercing. I don't try to stop people from piercing; I also don't get on their case about doing it. But I refrain from those two things for two different reasons. Trying to stop them would be wrong and immoral, since I have no right to force my dislikes on them. Getting on their case about it wouldn't be wrong or immoral, since I'm not taking anything away from them or infringing on their rights, but I don't do it anyway because that would be acting like a jerk. In the first case, I'm motivated by an abstract interest in rights; in the second case, I'm motivated by the desire not to have people think I'm a jerk.
I just do what feels good and natural for me. If some people dislike it, that's their problem, not mine, and I don't like changing my behaviour and my personality to suit people's opinions about what is considered socially acceptable or good.
That shows self-reliance, certainly...but couldn't a serial killer say exactly the same thing? I care rather a lot about how other people view my personality and behavior; if I didn't, I wouldn't have any friends.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to have the same first and last name as a mildly-well-known professional athlete; I just did an ego-surf and found nearly all the results were for him, with several dozen other people of the same name having one or two hits each. Results for me: 0. I consider that ideal. My online presence, using my real name, is nil. Anyone searching for me will get piles of game charts and athletic statistics, but nothing about me.
The Prince has nothing to do with evil or with dictatorship. It is simply an objective, unemotional study of the best method for a head of state to maintain his power and the power of his state. Machiavelli was himself a republican (which is obvious if you read I Discorsi, the longer work of which The Prince is an abstract.)
I don't quite see how padding object files could hide a buffer overflow bug -- a buffer overflow is a run-time error, not a compile-time error. How did that work?
Meh. Fallen Angels is what a friend of mine calls "fan porn" -- a book cynically designed to flatter the vanity of its target audience. The book features a group of (what else?) science-fiction-fan nerds who are persecuted for being smart, creative, and open-minded -- exactly the fantasy that many SF fans construct about their own lives. (Hey, it's not that people avoid you because you're an obnoxious ass -- it's that they're all jealous because you're special.) There is no plot that sits so well with the SF market as a story about a small group of superior people who are oppressed by the inferior masses.
This project didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars, or anything close to that.
Yes, there is more than one way to land on Mars. But those other ways cost more money. The Phoenix project wasn't designed from scratch; it was a reasonably cheap way to get some use out of the aborted Polar Lander hardware, which otherwise would have gone to waste. So they designed it as cheaply as possible consistent with a reasonably good chance of surviving the landing. If it works, great. If not, the hardware was going to waste anyway and trying this didn't cost that much.
I didn't care much for the sequels to Ender's Game, but I thought the ancillary series with Bean was really, really bad. Admittedly I only read the first one and half of the second one before giving up.
My reaction was exactly the opposite of yours -- the characters are much less real. The "shadow" stories are just doing Ender over again, only this time EVEN YOUNGER and EVEN SMARTER! The strength of Ender's Game is that Ender is both a believable military genius and a believable little kid. He is, in the abstract, smarter than his teachers -- he consistently beats the game, aces their tests -- but they still manipulate him and control his life, because they're experienced adults and he's an inexperienced kid.
Card wanted Bean to be Ender only more so, so Bean is not only smarter than his teachers, he manipulates them, even though he's only, like, four years old. It's not believable. Neither are any of the other super-smart kids in the story. They don't act like super-smart kids; they act like super-smart adults. If you're going to write a story about little kids, you have to either make them act like real little kids would act, or provide a believable explanation for why they don't. Card does neither.
In my last period of interviewing for jobs (all in New England, a few years ago) a common question was "What's the last book you read?" I believe this is intended as a conversation-starter, to let the interviewer get an idea of your personality, but it also lets them know if you're a one-track savant.
Actually, I think the reason "most people run Windows" is that it's what comes pre-installed on their computer when they buy it. The majority of people don't even know there's an alternative.
In the recent book "Tamerlane's Children", which is a study of contemporary Uzbekistan, the author reports that he was pulled over in Tashkent because a cop saw him wearing his seatbelt. The cop assumed he was drunk, and had buckled up because he was driving drunk -- "why else would anyone wear a seatbelt?"
It would also have the third effect of allowing the criticized cops to attack the posters both openly and clandestinely. If I publicly criticized a cop, using my real name, I would be harassed day and night from that day forward, by that cop and by his friends. The police have enormous power; we don't need to allow them to silence criticism too.
You mean "abaci". "Abacii" would be the plural of "abacius".
The problem is often people's definition of "going slow for no reason". Based on evidence from last night, there's at least one driver in my home town who thinks that "being on a steep hill at night on an unlighted twisty road that's only wide enough for two cars and has heavy forest right up to the verge plus there was snow and sleet earlier and it's raining now so the road is slippery plus there's heavy fog" is not a sufficient reason to drive five MPH below the posted limit.
I think the real problem of tailgating is that it becomes an ingrained habit, and the drivers who do it tailgate in all circumstances on all roads. Yesterday I was driving at 65 MPH in the right-most lane. Traffic was not particularly congested. To my left was a big rig, some hundred yards back but moving faster than I was. In the left-most lane were a few cars passing by at about 80. So a car appears further back in the right lane doing 90 or so. He didn't want to slow down the time it would take for the 80 MPH cars to get far enough ahead of the big rig to change lanes safely, so he decided to shift two lanes over to the right lane, pass the big rig on the right, and then change two lanes again to get in front of the other cars in the left lane. However, just as he changed lanes, the road graded downward and the big rig picked up speed, so by the time the speedy guy got up on the right of the big rig the gap between the rear of my car and the front of the big rig was too small for him to get through. So he angrily rode right on my rear bumper, so close I couldn't see his headlights, though even an idiot could see I had nowhere to go, since there was a car ahead of me and a big rig to my left and a Jersey barrier to my right. And I'm sure that guy thinks he was being a really good driver, and I'm sure he self-righteously complains that other people are morons who don't know how to drive.
A simple compressor/Co2 cartridges with tubes blowing onto the panels in different places could remove quite a bit of the dust without fancy arms and brushes.
Leaving aside the weight and moving-parts issues, how much volume of compressed gas could the rover carry? I'd think it would all get used up pretty fast and then the rover would be right where it is now, only with a useless empty gas tank to lug around.
It's not an illusion at all. The distinction the original poster was making is not between the people who work for a company and the people who run it, but between working at a big company versus starting your own business. Obviously, the risk is much greater for the latter choice.
I work for a biggish company. What's the worst thing that can happen to me if the company tanks? I lose my job. End of story. On the other hand, suppose I start my own business and it fails. What are my risks then? Being personally responsible for the business' debts; getting sued by the business' customers; lawyers, courts, bankruptcy, homelessness.
Now, obviously, the potential rewards of running your own business are much greater than working for someone else. But so are the risks.
recently the Chinese were accused of doctoring a moon photo
That was just a stitching error. There was no new crater and no doctoring.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/12/03/chinese-moon-update/
You can bomb a patch of ground, you can fly over it, you can shoot missiles at it, but until you stand an eighteen-year-old kid with a rifle on it, you don't own it.
The article is right about "users you never hear from = lost productivity". I have generally found the IT people at my job so repellent (which seems to be a deliberate strategy on their part) that I never talk to them about anything. If I have a problem with an application, I just stop using it, because finding some other way to do the work is both less stressful and less time-consuming than dealing with IT. At one point I just stopped using my workstation and bought my own computer so I could manage it myself. (Stop having hysterics, I didn't connect it to the network.)
Why not just remember where they are? I own something like ten thousand books and I could find any one of them in the dark.
It did seem the Register was using pretty loose standards here. It says that Bagley "became convinced" that Weiss was sock-puppeting, and that Bagley "was sure" that Weiss was the real identity behind a few IP addresses. But the Register did not investigate that for itself, nor, apparently, did it even ask Bagley what his reasons were for believing it. From the article you could just as easily conclude that Bagley is a paranoid troll. Be nice if the paper actually did some research.
Actually I could work at home, but I prefer to work at the office, because the office is the only place I can ever go where I don't have to listen to somebody's kid screaming.
If you're dishonest, you've positioned yourself so that you only do about 15 hours of work but everybody thinks you work 60+ hours
Fixed that for ya.
it's impossible to say "I don't care what people think about me" if you use violence or otherwise disrupt their right to freedom.
Is it really? I don't see any logical connection between those two things. I mean, if I were a person who used violence to take away other people's freedom, and some one said to me, "How can you do that, it's wrong and immoral," I would see nothing at all inconsistent in answering, "I don't care what you think is wrong and immoral, I'm doing what I want to do."
If I am correctly interpreting the statement, "As long as I don't force my own views on other people, I do what I want and I don't give a fsck what people say or think about me" to really mean, "As long as I don't force my own views on other people, THEN I AM MORALLY JUSTIFIED AND CONSISTENT to do what I want and [not] give a fsck what people say or think about me", then that is consistent and unassailable. However, it is still a statement in favor of caring what other people think.
To use the body-piercing example, let's suppose I am a person who dislikes body piercing. I don't try to stop people from piercing; I also don't get on their case about doing it. But I refrain from those two things for two different reasons. Trying to stop them would be wrong and immoral, since I have no right to force my dislikes on them. Getting on their case about it wouldn't be wrong or immoral, since I'm not taking anything away from them or infringing on their rights, but I don't do it anyway because that would be acting like a jerk. In the first case, I'm motivated by an abstract interest in rights; in the second case, I'm motivated by the desire not to have people think I'm a jerk.
I just do what feels good and natural for me. If some people dislike it, that's their problem, not mine, and I don't like changing my behaviour and my personality to suit people's opinions about what is considered socially acceptable or good.
That shows self-reliance, certainly...but couldn't a serial killer say exactly the same thing? I care rather a lot about how other people view my personality and behavior; if I didn't, I wouldn't have any friends.
For what it's worth, Leadbelly didn't write "Gallis Pole" either. It's a traditional English folk ballad (often called "Hangman, Hangman.")
There is very little true originality in any creative field. It's all been done before.
I wouldn't say Led Zeppeiln was original; I would call them innovative -- "taking a tradition and giving it a unique sound."