Your message is interesting, but I can add a comment as a citizen of an ex-Soviet country - Moldova.
The Russians usually force themselves upon a culture and apply measures such as:
change the character set (from Latin to Cyrillic)
change the official language of the occupied country to Russian
prohibit the use of the ex-official language
discriminate the locals by promoting those who speak Russian and anti-promoting those who speak the native language
close schools that teach in anything other than Russian
'import' people from Russia and assign them to highly paid jobs, while the natives are not as fortunate
etc
Just to make sure that you don't think this is BS, check out some basic facts about Moldova.
Even today, more than 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union:
Russian is still widely used
Some of the country's politicians do not speak Romanian (which is the country's natural language)
The constitution was modified, the official language was changed from Romanian to Moldovan (a language that doesn't exist; the essence of this move.. well, it's a long story, I am sure Wikipedia will provide more details)
Some Russians who came to live here "back then" and their children who were born here still do not speak Romanian. And it is not because "we'll go back to Russia soon anyway" (as a sibling poster commented), it's just because they don't want to.
So I can conclude that Russia's language policy is very aggressive; and it is quite difficult to oppose it, because the Russia of today has a huge influence on ex-Soviet states, as their economies are still weak.
When natives say "they need to speak our language"
Sometimes this really means "they need to speak our language"; today you can bump into cases when you enter a store and try to buy something - you fail, because the seller doesn't speak Romanian. To counter that, the locals learn Russian, and they're very good at it. This is quite an interesting side-effect: there are more natives who speak Russian than there are foreigners who speak Romanian. As a result, you can feel like you're a part of a national minority, in your own damn country, walking on the land for which your grand*-fathers died in times when Russia didn't even exist.
Russian was my first language, I am glad I can fluently speak it; but when I see that they still use this language as a tool to enslave other peoples, I don't feel happy about it.
You know, I guess all of us are happy that you're almost a relative of someone who's a friend of Nina's.. But... uhm.. check this out:
[you] - [gf] - [gf.sis] - [Nina]
There are two nodes between you and Nina, both those nodes are females, and their primary source of information is Nina.
Do you really expect to receive any kind of info that places Nina in a bad light? Marriages fail for different reasons, and it's not always the husband's fault.
Let me help you with that: "Judging from the B.S. that _I was told_ was happening in that house this was not a happy marriage."
That can't be Steve Jobs! I heard Steve Jobs is 12 feet tall and shoots lightnings with his eyes, and if he were here, he would fix all your laptops with firebolts coming out of his arse!
Spammers have already laid.ru low. I know of more than a few small to medium companies that flat out drop emails if there's a.ru _anywhere_ in the email. Not just the from or reply to fields. If there's a http link pointing to a.ru domain, they drop it.
They cannot say "No Big Loss" because they don't know how much they lost, since any potential deals were rejected before being reviewed.
Obviously this depends on the business, if you're a local company that has no sales on the worldwide market - no problem; otherwise blocking emails just because they contain ".ru" is a bad idea, to say the least...
... then we can deal with it by generating artificial gravity, the space-ship can have a special section that rotates around itself, creating the desired effect.
Long term trips may require such a room, not only for potential pregnancies, but also because so far humans haven't spent that much time in zero G; perhaps it will be a must for long distance trips.
Indeed, the trilogy is interesting and it covers some of these issues. It is also worth pointing out that the trilogy tends to be hard sci-fi (the difference being the fact that the author discusses things which are technically correct, i.e. the story is not about "robots with light-bulbs instead of eyes")
The first book shows us how the relationships between the crew members were 'managed' during the trip to Mars;
The second book reveals another problem - that of relationships between children born on Mars. They are closely related to each other genetically (as they are descendents of the first hundred)
all the known black holes are a bajillion miles away
Donald Rumsfeld briefed President Bush today.
He told Bush that three Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq.
To everyones amazement, the colour ran from Bushs face, then he collapsed onto his desk, head in hands, visible shaken, almost whimpering. Finally, he composed himself and asked Rumsfeld, Just exactly how many is a brazillion?
I agree with you. I expect an "A straight" kid to be a little bit more intelligent. It didn't take a genius to extrapolate what would happen (in the context of the recent developments).
On the other hand, maybe he 'spilled gas on fire' precisely for that reason, to point out how incorrect it is to try to monitor what people write and make decisions afterwards.
Hmm.. If I were him I would not write it. Not because I am afraid to express my thoughts, but because I realize that some will find them disturbing. According to my definition, an intelligent person is also a person who is able to see themselves in somebody else's shoes; his actions could mean that he is not good at this. But is this the correct conclusion?
I think this would have happened sooner or later... a problem waiting to happen. Does it make a difference that it happened just a couple of weeks after the shootings? Would it be less of a problem had this happened months or years later? I don't think so.
Hmm.. works exactly like the evil bit. In fact, I'm sure that when they broadcast "terrorist code", somewhere in a lower-level function the evil bit is set too!
I've gone through the same thing with my old printer - Epson Stylus Color 670. I used cheap cartridges, they cost me 3$; and I've used a LOT of them before the printer 'died' (the ink leaks made everything a mess). While it worked (which is 3 years of high-school, and the first ~3 years at the university; note that it was a 2nd hand printer, I don't know how long it was used before it got into my hands), the cartridges were long-lasting, and the print quality was ok.
Now I have a HP PSC1410, the cartridges are much more expensive and they don't last that long. My conclusion is that I would rather use a printer with cheap cartridges; even if it will 'die' one day, I'd still spend less than I would have, had I used a solution that relies on expensive cartridges.
The advantage of the Epson printer is that the heads were a part of the printer, which is why the cartridges were dirt-cheap. In the case of HP, the cartridge costs almost half the price of the printer itself, so this approach is not cost-effective for the end-user.
Another issue with this HP all-in-one printer is that I can't print b&w if I have no colour left, even if "use black cartridge only" is checked. It's really weird, why would they use a two-cartridge scheme, if I cannot use one without the other? I print colour once in a million years, so I am now crafting a plan - sell the unit before the entire world understands how inefficient such printers are.
This is not a new technology. Take a look at Psylock, it is a similar mechanism developed by a group in a German university.
I know in person a guy who is working on it, and I've tried it myself in October 2006 at the Systems expo in Munich. I guess they've had a working version of it long before that.
the philippines is a beautiful land, with beautiful people... and a corrupt political establishment, it's a sad commentary on corruption the philippines, the vote buying
There was a very wealthy gentleman who wanted a scientific method to be able to predict the outcome of any horse race. He asked a geneticist, a statistician and a physicist to look at the problem and promised each a million dollars if they could find a solution.
After a year of study the gentleman asks the scientists what they have come up with.
The geneticist says, "Well, we have looked at parentage, gentic composition, hormone levels, musculature and sexual activity of all the horses raced last year, and we could find no pattern amongst the winners.."
The statistician says, "We looked at the history of each and every race. We compared times, owners, ages, parentage, and many other variables. We could find no pattern."
The physicist says, "We calculated the solution from first principles, and here it is!" He hands a huge sheaf of papers to the wealthy gentleman. The gentleman responds by returning a million dollars in cash to the physicist.
"Well done!" he cries, "But how did you do it?"
"Well remember," says the physicist, "it only works for a spherical horse moving in a vacuum...."
I once read about Google's image labeler, and decided to create a similar program, which would offer the same functionality, with additional features that are not available in Google's toy.
The project does not have a name, it is described on my site - advanced image labeling tool. What makes it different is that besides collecting tags for an image, it also gathers other data about the tagger - age, sex, education, etc. My initial idea was to use it for various studies and establish connections between one's social status and the image labels they provide.
Anyway, my point is that harvesting information about images can be fun, and it can have an impact on fields other than image processing or search engines.
If chimps are given human rights, it would mean that society accepts the fact that humans evolved from animals. This is "a little bit" problematic for the religious zealots out there, becuase man was created by god & co.
In other words, I say we let our religious comrades deal with this one.
Hmm.. interesting... Did you manage to figure out what the culprit was?
I mean, if it did not charge when the computer was turned off, doesn't it help one conclude that it had nothing to do with the OS? Perhaps the switch to Linux was accompanied by another change (that went unnoticed), and that change was the thing that actually 'solved' the problem?
As a person who deals with technical support, I can state that in certain cases the instructions given by the tech-guy *must* be followed.
For instance, someone has an issue with an application which uses a kernel-mode driver. The procedure is to upate the driver by rewriting the file with a new one and then restarting the system, so that the new driver is loaded (it is the kind of a driver that is somewhere down the driver stack, and it cannot be unloaded without unloading all the drivers above it, so a restart is a must).
The user can simply rewrite the file and launch the program again. Naturally, the error persists because the old driver is still in use. The user is not competent enough to understand that a reboot is actually needed in this case, and it is not done for the sake of rebooting the system (like many installers demand us to).
While I agree with your point, I hope you will not encourage your friends to ignore what the tech-support people say; not all technical support personnel are idiots. It is much easier to tell someone to restart the PC instead of explaining them what a driver is, what kernel mode is, what a driver stack is, and why a restart is really needed.
Unfortunately I fail to see how FTP will solve the problem. If it wasn't the rest of your comment, I would say that this FTP thing was taken from a movie scene... One of those movies where 'hackers' 'hack' into banks by disabling a screensaver and then typing something (without looking at the keyboard or pressing Space\Backspace a single time) in a shiny 3D GUI, etc.
Just think about it, deep inside the FTP client will call the same CreateFile, FileWrite, FileRead functions that exist in the Windows API, why would these calls be faster if they are issued by a FTP client? Are all FTP clients alike? Sheesh...
You mentioned FTP as if it was some sort of a mythical silver bullet.
I can only think of one possibility - when files are copied locally, the respective functions are called to read the input file and then called once again to write the output file; while the other approach (download it from a network) only calls those functions once*. This explains the speed boost, but I doubt it is significant.
You can test this 'file off the network theory' by downloading from something other than a FTP server (try HTTP, SCP, SMB, etc).
* It depends on how they were implemented; it is very likely that copying files via NetBIOS is also triggered by CreateFile (and a UNC path is used), but somewhere inside it will call network-related code.
I don't think there is a universal strategy against such folk, but there are some generic steps you can base your strategy on.
If you are a person who does not like to talk much, or fast, always lean towards "I will send you an email in delta minutes, I got a draft and it is almost complete"; or carry a notebook and a pen to make sketches during the conversation while you're getting your message across. Paper and pen are great tools - the bottleneck is in your speed of drawing, don't hurry. They'll have to patiently wait as you express yourself graphically and spill out the comments. If they choose to be impatient, then go for the "check your email in..." approach. The trick is that:
You comply with their request by having a solution at hand; (i.e. they cannot blame you for being incompetent)
You are so generous that you offer them options: sketch+comments or email;
It will be foolish of them to say they don't like either of the options. You can further extend the concept and provide other choices (pseudo-options) which will be there for the sake of "Look how many choices I offer you", but will certainly be less likely to be chosen by them(like: I can set up a meeting with the rest of the team in X minutes and I will discuss this there).
The cool part about this is that they have to be really careful with their behaviour. If they keep forcing you into lightning fast answers without getting your thoughts straight first - you can always use that against them (ex: when you're engaged in a conversation that targets a field in which you are highly-experienced, and they are not). If they push too far, and "which question would you like me to answer?" does not work, tell them you will provide an uber-detailed answer via email; this will set a historical precedent - from that point on you will always do it the email-way because otherwise the conversation will end in a similar fashion.
As always, if you send it via email, make sure you CC the relevant persons, so that others know how hard working you are, how clear your messages are, etc. As a consequence, the bad guy will not be able to initiate negative discussions about you behind your back.
Make sure you take other factors into account:
where you stand in the hierarchy and where they are.
what your objective is (defeat them with a counter attack, or simply protect yourself).
are you easily getting yourself involved in a conflict?
do they have a history of generating conflicts out of nothing?
Another idea is that you could return random acknowledge strings, just for the sake of filling the aether with something. For instance:
yes, the doc is almost done.
aha, I am waiting for some feedback from Joe.
it is almost done, the draft email is ready.
the code is ready, I got a functional version but I found a way to make it nicer, so it will take a bit more. (if they ask for the non-nice version tell them that the code is being worked on "as we speak" and you cannot interrupt the process)
it is 87% ready, I will call/email/visit you when it is done.
These are just template answers that will make them shut up. Keep your answers consistent, by incrementing the X% ready value if they ask again, and don't say that you wait for feedback from Joe if Joe is in the office and the 'bad guy' may actually walk up to him and ask about the issue. In other words, you can withold the truth, but never lie. Lean towards things they are not competent enough to verify, or things they are physically unable to check (Joe is absent, your code is being debugged right now and you're going to lose everything if you are forced to switch context ASAP, etc)
Also, if you happen to speak Romanian, check out Ji
It sounds like a typical Nigerian scam email; a significant amount of today's spam is made of such messages.
See the wikipedia entry on Internet fraud.
You are enjoying a movie, your appartment catches fire^, invaluable memories turn into ashes while you're watching how 300 spartans are preparing to have dinner in hell.
Sure, you can tell yourself "insurance will deal with the loss" or "firefighters do what they are paid for", etc, but I won't believe you if you tell me that afterwards you will never ever medidate about things going less bad if you were there sooner.
^ you can change fire with something else, like your child getting hit by a car, or somebody breaking into the office, and so on. (the idea is that it is a problem that affects you directly, rather than one that targets a hypothetical doctor or administrator)
Can't do that in conversation, you have to get it right the first time, and know exactly where you're going and how you're going to get there before you start.
Correct; the only problem is that you want it to happen instantly - which is exactly why it ends up in failure.
I've been researching this issue myself and I concluded that the solution is not to let somebody push you towards a quick answer. Things done/said in haste are usually not well-planned. What email does is that it gives you that ability to take your time and think things over; you can do the same in a real discussion by not replying if you don't have an answer. Tell them that you don't know yet, tell them that you need some extra time, but don't talk out of/dev/random.
Many people know this and use this against us - the trick is to force someone provide a quick answer to a question. The person who answers focuses on providing a fast solution, rather than providing an optimal solution - this is where we lose. I also have to add that those who generate the questions that are 'designed' to knock us down are people who carefully plan their attack. In conversations they can bring up non-essential things that you will waste your CPU cycles on, while they think about their next 'hit'.
Another idea is that you are afraid that the person you're having a conversation with will laugh at you (in the worst case) if you tell them you can't provide an immediate answer. But fear that not, any reasonable human being is understanding and only someone unpolite and ignorant will have something against your taking your time. Personally, I never push people towards making decisions in a rush, I admire those who are not afraid to tell me that they are 'not ready' yet, and I try to avoid those who consciously use this technique as an 'offensive weapon'.
Slashdot Mirror
The Russians usually force themselves upon a culture and apply measures such as:
- change the character set (from Latin to Cyrillic)
- change the official language of the occupied country to Russian
- prohibit the use of the ex-official language
- discriminate the locals by promoting those who speak Russian and anti-promoting those who speak the native language
- close schools that teach in anything other than Russian
- 'import' people from Russia and assign them to highly paid jobs, while the natives are not as fortunate
- etc
Just to make sure that you don't think this is BS, check out some basic facts about Moldova.Even today, more than 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union:
- Russian is still widely used
- Some of the country's politicians do not speak Romanian (which is the country's natural language)
- The constitution was modified, the official language was changed from Romanian to Moldovan (a language that doesn't exist; the essence of this move.. well, it's a long story, I am sure Wikipedia will provide more details)
- Some Russians who came to live here "back then" and their children who were born here still do not speak Romanian. And it is not because "we'll go back to Russia soon anyway" (as a sibling poster commented), it's just because they don't want to.
So I can conclude that Russia's language policy is very aggressive; and it is quite difficult to oppose it, because the Russia of today has a huge influence on ex-Soviet states, as their economies are still weak.Sometimes this really means "they need to speak our language"; today you can bump into cases when you enter a store and try to buy something - you fail, because the seller doesn't speak Romanian. To counter that, the locals learn Russian, and they're very good at it. This is quite an interesting side-effect: there are more natives who speak Russian than there are foreigners who speak Romanian. As a result, you can feel like you're a part of a national minority, in your own damn country, walking on the land for which your grand*-fathers died in times when Russia didn't even exist.
Russian was my first language, I am glad I can fluently speak it; but when I see that they still use this language as a tool to enslave other peoples, I don't feel happy about it.
You know, I guess all of us are happy that you're almost a relative of someone who's a friend of Nina's.. But... uhm.. check this out:
[you] - [gf] - [gf.sis] - [Nina]
There are two nodes between you and Nina, both those nodes are females, and their primary source of information is Nina.
Do you really expect to receive any kind of info that places Nina in a bad light? Marriages fail for different reasons, and it's not always the husband's fault.
Let me help you with that: "Judging from the B.S. that _I was told_ was happening in that house this was not a happy marriage."
That can't be Steve Jobs! I heard Steve Jobs is 12 feet tall and shoots lightnings with his eyes, and if he were here, he would fix all your laptops with firebolts coming out of his arse!
Obviously this depends on the business, if you're a local company that has no sales on the worldwide market - no problem; otherwise blocking emails just because they contain ".ru" is a bad idea, to say the least...
... then we can deal with it by generating artificial gravity, the space-ship can have a special section that rotates around itself, creating the desired effect.
Long term trips may require such a room, not only for potential pregnancies, but also because so far humans haven't spent that much time in zero G; perhaps it will be a must for long distance trips.
Actually, the first words on Mars were "Well, here we are!" (c) John Boone
He told Bush that three Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq.
To everyones amazement, the colour ran from Bushs face, then he collapsed onto his desk, head in hands, visible shaken, almost whimpering. Finally, he composed himself and asked Rumsfeld, Just exactly how many is a brazillion?
I agree with you. I expect an "A straight" kid to be a little bit more intelligent. It didn't take a genius to extrapolate what would happen (in the context of the recent developments).
On the other hand, maybe he 'spilled gas on fire' precisely for that reason, to point out how incorrect it is to try to monitor what people write and make decisions afterwards.
Hmm.. If I were him I would not write it. Not because I am afraid to express my thoughts, but because I realize that some will find them disturbing. According to my definition, an intelligent person is also a person who is able to see themselves in somebody else's shoes; his actions could mean that he is not good at this. But is this the correct conclusion?
I think this would have happened sooner or later... a problem waiting to happen. Does it make a difference that it happened just a couple of weeks after the shootings? Would it be less of a problem had this happened months or years later? I don't think so.
This reminds me of... pkunzip.zip
Hmm.. works exactly like the evil bit. In fact, I'm sure that when they broadcast "terrorist code", somewhere in a lower-level function the evil bit is set too!
I've gone through the same thing with my old printer - Epson Stylus Color 670. I used cheap cartridges, they cost me 3$; and I've used a LOT of them before the printer 'died' (the ink leaks made everything a mess). While it worked (which is 3 years of high-school, and the first ~3 years at the university; note that it was a 2nd hand printer, I don't know how long it was used before it got into my hands), the cartridges were long-lasting, and the print quality was ok.
Now I have a HP PSC1410, the cartridges are much more expensive and they don't last that long. My conclusion is that I would rather use a printer with cheap cartridges; even if it will 'die' one day, I'd still spend less than I would have, had I used a solution that relies on expensive cartridges.
The advantage of the Epson printer is that the heads were a part of the printer, which is why the cartridges were dirt-cheap. In the case of HP, the cartridge costs almost half the price of the printer itself, so this approach is not cost-effective for the end-user.
Another issue with this HP all-in-one printer is that I can't print b&w if I have no colour left, even if "use black cartridge only" is checked. It's really weird, why would they use a two-cartridge scheme, if I cannot use one without the other? I print colour once in a million years, so I am now crafting a plan - sell the unit before the entire world understands how inefficient such printers are.
This is not a new technology. Take a look at Psylock, it is a similar mechanism developed by a group in a German university.
I know in person a guy who is working on it, and I've tried it myself in October 2006 at the Systems expo in Munich. I guess they've had a working version of it long before that.
Things become crystal clear, especially after the purchase of IBM by a Russian company was officially announced.
Requirements: knowledge of Russian; IT-oriented sense of humour.
I once read about Google's image labeler, and decided to create a similar program, which would offer the same functionality, with additional features that are not available in Google's toy.
The project does not have a name, it is described on my site - advanced image labeling tool. What makes it different is that besides collecting tags for an image, it also gathers other data about the tagger - age, sex, education, etc. My initial idea was to use it for various studies and establish connections between one's social status and the image labels they provide.
Anyway, my point is that harvesting information about images can be fun, and it can have an impact on fields other than image processing or search engines.
If chimps are given human rights, it would mean that society accepts the fact that humans evolved from animals. This is "a little bit" problematic for the religious zealots out there, becuase man was created by god & co.
In other words, I say we let our religious comrades deal with this one.
Hmm.. interesting... Did you manage to figure out what the culprit was?
I mean, if it did not charge when the computer was turned off, doesn't it help one conclude that it had nothing to do with the OS? Perhaps the switch to Linux was accompanied by another change (that went unnoticed), and that change was the thing that actually 'solved' the problem?
As a person who deals with technical support, I can state that in certain cases the instructions given by the tech-guy *must* be followed.
For instance, someone has an issue with an application which uses a kernel-mode driver. The procedure is to upate the driver by rewriting the file with a new one and then restarting the system, so that the new driver is loaded (it is the kind of a driver that is somewhere down the driver stack, and it cannot be unloaded without unloading all the drivers above it, so a restart is a must).
The user can simply rewrite the file and launch the program again. Naturally, the error persists because the old driver is still in use. The user is not competent enough to understand that a reboot is actually needed in this case, and it is not done for the sake of rebooting the system (like many installers demand us to).
While I agree with your point, I hope you will not encourage your friends to ignore what the tech-support people say; not all technical support personnel are idiots. It is much easier to tell someone to restart the PC instead of explaining them what a driver is, what kernel mode is, what a driver stack is, and why a restart is really needed.
Unfortunately I fail to see how FTP will solve the problem. If it wasn't the rest of your comment, I would say that this FTP thing was taken from a movie scene... One of those movies where 'hackers' 'hack' into banks by disabling a screensaver and then typing something (without looking at the keyboard or pressing Space\Backspace a single time) in a shiny 3D GUI, etc.
Just think about it, deep inside the FTP client will call the same CreateFile, FileWrite, FileRead functions that exist in the Windows API, why would these calls be faster if they are issued by a FTP client? Are all FTP clients alike? Sheesh...
You mentioned FTP as if it was some sort of a mythical silver bullet.
I can only think of one possibility - when files are copied locally, the respective functions are called to read the input file and then called once again to write the output file; while the other approach (download it from a network) only calls those functions once*. This explains the speed boost, but I doubt it is significant.
You can test this 'file off the network theory' by downloading from something other than a FTP server (try HTTP, SCP, SMB, etc).
* It depends on how they were implemented; it is very likely that copying files via NetBIOS is also triggered by CreateFile (and a UNC path is used), but somewhere inside it will call network-related code.
I don't think there is a universal strategy against such folk, but there are some generic steps you can base your strategy on.
If you are a person who does not like to talk much, or fast, always lean towards "I will send you an email in delta minutes, I got a draft and it is almost complete"; or carry a notebook and a pen to make sketches during the conversation while you're getting your message across. Paper and pen are great tools - the bottleneck is in your speed of drawing, don't hurry. They'll have to patiently wait as you express yourself graphically and spill out the comments. If they choose to be impatient, then go for the "check your email in
It will be foolish of them to say they don't like either of the options. You can further extend the concept and provide other choices (pseudo-options) which will be there for the sake of "Look how many choices I offer you", but will certainly be less likely to be chosen by them(like: I can set up a meeting with the rest of the team in X minutes and I will discuss this there).
The cool part about this is that they have to be really careful with their behaviour. If they keep forcing you into lightning fast answers without getting your thoughts straight first - you can always use that against them (ex: when you're engaged in a conversation that targets a field in which you are highly-experienced, and they are not). If they push too far, and "which question would you like me to answer?" does not work, tell them you will provide an uber-detailed answer via email; this will set a historical precedent - from that point on you will always do it the email-way because otherwise the conversation will end in a similar fashion.
As always, if you send it via email, make sure you CC the relevant persons, so that others know how hard working you are, how clear your messages are, etc. As a consequence, the bad guy will not be able to initiate negative discussions about you behind your back.
Make sure you take other factors into account:
Another idea is that you could return random acknowledge strings, just for the sake of filling the aether with something. For instance:
These are just template answers that will make them shut up. Keep your answers consistent, by incrementing the X% ready value if they ask again, and don't say that you wait for feedback from Joe if Joe is in the office and the 'bad guy' may actually walk up to him and ask about the issue. In other words, you can withold the truth, but never lie. Lean towards things they are not competent enough to verify, or things they are physically unable to check (Joe is absent, your code is being debugged right now and you're going to lose everything if you are forced to switch context ASAP, etc)
Also, if you happen to speak Romanian, check out Ji
It sounds like a typical Nigerian scam email; a significant amount of today's spam is made of such messages. See the wikipedia entry on Internet fraud.
Ok, let me further simplify the scenario.
You are enjoying a movie, your appartment catches fire^, invaluable memories turn into ashes while you're watching how 300 spartans are preparing to have dinner in hell.
Sure, you can tell yourself "insurance will deal with the loss" or "firefighters do what they are paid for", etc, but I won't believe you if you tell me that afterwards you will never ever medidate about things going less bad if you were there sooner.
^ you can change fire with something else, like your child getting hit by a car, or somebody breaking into the office, and so on. (the idea is that it is a problem that affects you directly, rather than one that targets a hypothetical doctor or administrator)
I've been researching this issue myself and I concluded that the solution is not to let somebody push you towards a quick answer. Things done/said in haste are usually not well-planned. What email does is that it gives you that ability to take your time and think things over; you can do the same in a real discussion by not replying if you don't have an answer. Tell them that you don't know yet, tell them that you need some extra time, but don't talk out of
Many people know this and use this against us - the trick is to force someone provide a quick answer to a question. The person who answers focuses on providing a fast solution, rather than providing an optimal solution - this is where we lose. I also have to add that those who generate the questions that are 'designed' to knock us down are people who carefully plan their attack. In conversations they can bring up non-essential things that you will waste your CPU cycles on, while they think about their next 'hit'.
Another idea is that you are afraid that the person you're having a conversation with will laugh at you (in the worst case) if you tell them you can't provide an immediate answer. But fear that not, any reasonable human being is understanding and only someone unpolite and ignorant will have something against your taking your time. Personally, I never push people towards making decisions in a rush, I admire those who are not afraid to tell me that they are 'not ready' yet, and I try to avoid those who consciously use this technique as an 'offensive weapon'.