It took me a little longer than 2-4 weeks to become proficient though, my productivity took a steep dive downwards!
Heh -- yeah. It took me three days to climb above 10 words per minute and 9 days to climb above 20 WPM. You have to pick a quiet week for those first days; writing e-mails at 7 WPM is brutal.
I stopped tracking soon after that because it stopped affecting my productivity; I think it took another month or two to get back to the happy 60-70 WPM range.
I'll second the vertical mouse. Here's how I've handled my RSI, and the degree to which I think each has helped my particular form of pain (different people hurt different tendons or nerves, so it's important to experiment). 1) A Kinesis Advantage Keyboard (not portable); I can type on a Kinesis for 12+ hours straight with no pain; a normal keyboard in QWERTY hurts after 1-2 hours. I cannot stamp my foot enough to emphasize the value of a true ergonomic keyboard for those prone to RSI. It takes about 4 hours to adjust to the new keyboard shape. 2) An Evoluent vertical mouse, with the thumb button set as a second primary button so I can alternate click fingers (semiportable). I work all day without pain on this mouse; a normal mouse hurts after minutes, due to the combination of the pinched wrist muscles to go flat an the extended-index-finger push. It takes less than half an hour to adjust to the new mouse shape. Trackballs never worked for my particular injury. 3) Switching to Dvorak layout (quite portable); It's nowhere near as effective as the above two, but when forced to use a laptop or normal keyboard I can type ~50% longer without pain per day in Dvorak (maybe 2-3 hours). For me, it's the far-stretch index-finger/pinky motions that are the problem, and there just aren't many in the Dvorak layout. It takes 2-4 weeks to adjust to Dvorak, and your pain often increases briefly while you learn, since you tense up while hunting and pecking. 4) Using a Droid for routine browsing. For me, my thumbs aren't part of my RSI, so click-based smart phones work great. Pinch to zoom hurts the moment I try it. 5) Sleeping with a wrist brace when the pain flares up. I don't need to do this often at all anymore, now that I do the other four, but it still helps on days where I've been bad and spent several hours on the family laptop.
Hmm...interesting. I hadn't realized there was uncertainty as to how this could be translated. The things in Wikipedia's version of the text that make it clearly support the miscarriage/mother-harm view are explanatory glosses, not translations. But it looks like a lot of commentators take that side.
On the live-and-learn side: this make us both wrong in our original statements: that is, this passage in the Jewish law did explicitly consider abortion wrong, but did not explicitly state fetuses were fully realized persons.
If you're talking about the Christian bible when you say 'some book', I don't even think you can use that as a source for the belief that abortion is wrong. The bible is pretty clear that an unborn fetus is not a person.
Interestingly, the phrase "an eye for an eye" comes from the direct contradiction of that statement -- wherein, in the Jewish/Old Testament laws, if someone causes a pregnant woman to go into labor and there is any harm to the child, that person is liable for every harm. That is to say -- "eye for an eye" refers to an even accidental abortion or harm to an unborn fetus. So whether or not that fetus is a person, it is considered equally precious as "real" people. Yes, Christians consider this law fulfilled and complete (which is why most of us don't go around enforcing this) -- but it rather directly addresses the issue.
To quote (Exodus 21): “If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
...or do the patent lawsuits that show up on/. seem frivolous to the point of absurdity? If so, is that sample bias? Or are all patent lawsuits intrinsically ridiculous?
More like: nine times out of ten, when it's not frivolous, it's not news because it's settled by negotiation behind closed doors. Companies have to want to make a public stand against a patent to choose to let it go to court, which means most cases involve a troll at one end or another. The tenth case is just the one where negotiations fell through. And you can tell those because they're inevitably answered by countersuits where the defendant returns fire against the plaintiff until somebody settles.
As to the Hindenburg, not a single person was harmed by the burning hydrogen which was up and away moments after the storage cells ruptured.
Well, seeing as it was up and away in a FIREBALL that melted metal in under a minute before dissipating, causing molten beams to fall on people, one could argue it was the falling molten girders that killed people, not the fireball that molten-ed the falling girders. http://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/myths#advocates
Some governments have common sense -- I'm about to shut down my NJ photography "business" because I make less annually than the minimum amount where a business ID is required. Below that, it's legally a "hobby that makes money." You still owe income tax on the profits, but don't need to handle any extra paperwork. Blogging really should be the same...
As a result my advice to riders of bicycles and motorcycles has been this: Do it off-road or only on lightly used, well-lit, straight, non-urban roadways with few intersections if you wish to avoid being killed or injured.
That I'll second. I ride a circuitous route to and from work, because it reduces the trip to only one major intersection and only one block of roads over 25 mph. The ability to find a place to live that allows this is a huge and tragic luxury in car-obsessed America. Took me over a year, and cost a pretty penny.
...there are benefits gained by riding on even a semi-regular basis (ie, fitness).
Serious benefits. For all the biker-putty on the roads, the mortality stats I've seen show that even casual bikers have longer life expectancies, since the odds of getting roadkilled are so much lower than the odds of being killed by heart disease.
Hmm...putting a huge but shoddily built seagoing vessel with insufficient safeguards in a place where its sinking could kill people and traumatize a nation after being accidentally subjected to sudden pressure coming from a great and frigid depth...who could bp so foolish as to repeat this mistake in this modern age?
When you look at the entire population, the percentage of male porn users stays around 100% in countries where it is allowed and available, and abuse is low. In countries where it is not allowed or available, usage is obviously lower and abuse rates are higher.
That anecdote ignores the fact that, for the past generation, laws permitting pornography have increased in countries simultaneously with laws protecting women.
Pornography use/availability is just a proxy for personal privacy/liberty rights and/or income. You could use availability of divorce, homosexual unions or iPhones as an equal proxy. Unless you control by, say, "equally wealthy Western countries that do or do not permit easy pornography availability while still firmly enforcing women's rights," all you are saying is "the current trend in many countries towards personal liberty has provided more personal liberty for women."
My proposal is to go to 3-day delivery, depending on zone. The east half of each delivery route receives residential mail Monday/Wednesday/Friday, the west half Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. People that want daily delivery can pay for a PO box or a commercial delivery license, and senders can pay extra for off-cycle residential delivery.
Half the residential delivery trucks can be mothballed on the spot. You avoid massive layoffs by dropping all postal route delivery workers to half time, increasing back to full time as workers quit or retire (or as commercial delivery routes grow). The huge collection of mothballed trucks means free repair parts for the next decade.
Honest question: what activities are recommended for improving focus?
I've noticed the same, and I would say: something along the lines of prayer and meditation, and maybe reading long-form books. Anything like video games does not count, because what you are doing changes each second. I'm even suspicious of some traditional things like gardening, since I tend to garden like I play on my computer -- weeding, pruning, pondering, picking, watering, weeding...something new every minute. It's amazingly easy to subvert something linear into something disorganized.
On a side note, why are people suddenly so in love with the term "infographic"? Can't we call it a "graph" or "chart"?
It is because your boss's nephew knows how to make graphs and charts. Never word anything in a way that might cause you to be replaced by your boss's nephew.
It's not forced at all to associate welfare with labor. Nobody is forced to go on welfare. Recipients in such a system would be free to not work and not collect a welfare check. They could appeal to charity or family to survive. All it means is welfare would change from "subsistence money to tide you over until you find work" to "government-paid work of final resort if you can't find a better job."
Now, I agree that it's not that simple -- impoverished mothers with multiple children would not receive enough money to pay childcare, people with certain mental disabilities are better left idle, crippling chronic pain is a real disability, etc. There would need to be careful exceptions, some of which would look exactly like the current system. But if you approach the problem of poverty as "people should always be able to put food on the table without resorting to inhumane activities" instead of "people should always be able to put food on the table, even if they don't show up for work," many entirely non-abusive options appear.
Also why does one project always have to 'copy' another ? What happened to innovation? new ideas? something that hasn't been done before?
Good innovation should be copied. With 4-5 major players, an even innovation playing field on creativity means 80% of the new features will be developed by other players. That's just the ugliness of statistics.
So every browser generation necessarily comes out with 1-2 innovative features, and 4-10 "what other people came out with last generation." That might not be exciting, but that's much more useful progress than ignoring what other folks came up with and plowing on into creative obscurity.
Slashdot Mirror
It took me a little longer than 2-4 weeks to become proficient though, my productivity took a steep dive downwards!
Heh -- yeah. It took me three days to climb above 10 words per minute and 9 days to climb above 20 WPM. You have to pick a quiet week for those first days; writing e-mails at 7 WPM is brutal.
I stopped tracking soon after that because it stopped affecting my productivity; I think it took another month or two to get back to the happy 60-70 WPM range.
I'll second the vertical mouse. Here's how I've handled my RSI, and the degree to which I think each has helped my particular form of pain (different people hurt different tendons or nerves, so it's important to experiment).
1) A Kinesis Advantage Keyboard (not portable); I can type on a Kinesis for 12+ hours straight with no pain; a normal keyboard in QWERTY hurts after 1-2 hours. I cannot stamp my foot enough to emphasize the value of a true ergonomic keyboard for those prone to RSI. It takes about 4 hours to adjust to the new keyboard shape.
2) An Evoluent vertical mouse, with the thumb button set as a second primary button so I can alternate click fingers (semiportable). I work all day without pain on this mouse; a normal mouse hurts after minutes, due to the combination of the pinched wrist muscles to go flat an the extended-index-finger push. It takes less than half an hour to adjust to the new mouse shape. Trackballs never worked for my particular injury.
3) Switching to Dvorak layout (quite portable); It's nowhere near as effective as the above two, but when forced to use a laptop or normal keyboard I can type ~50% longer without pain per day in Dvorak (maybe 2-3 hours). For me, it's the far-stretch index-finger/pinky motions that are the problem, and there just aren't many in the Dvorak layout. It takes 2-4 weeks to adjust to Dvorak, and your pain often increases briefly while you learn, since you tense up while hunting and pecking.
4) Using a Droid for routine browsing. For me, my thumbs aren't part of my RSI, so click-based smart phones work great. Pinch to zoom hurts the moment I try it.
5) Sleeping with a wrist brace when the pain flares up. I don't need to do this often at all anymore, now that I do the other four, but it still helps on days where I've been bad and spent several hours on the family laptop.
Could the monkey distinguish a human being who is authorized to be somewhere from one who is not?
More importantly, could a monkey insure that all of a human being's gels are in a quart-sized plastic bag?
They'd better, or by God I'll go over there and finish what the Revolutionary war started!
America?
Hmm...interesting. I hadn't realized there was uncertainty as to how this could be translated. The things in Wikipedia's version of the text that make it clearly support the miscarriage/mother-harm view are explanatory glosses, not translations. But it looks like a lot of commentators take that side.
On the live-and-learn side: this make us both wrong in our original statements: that is, this passage in the Jewish law did explicitly consider abortion wrong, but did not explicitly state fetuses were fully realized persons.
If you're talking about the Christian bible when you say 'some book', I don't even think you can use that as a source for the belief that abortion is wrong. The bible is pretty clear that an unborn fetus is not a person.
Interestingly, the phrase "an eye for an eye" comes from the direct contradiction of that statement -- wherein, in the Jewish/Old Testament laws, if someone causes a pregnant woman to go into labor and there is any harm to the child, that person is liable for every harm. That is to say -- "eye for an eye" refers to an even accidental abortion or harm to an unborn fetus. So whether or not that fetus is a person, it is considered equally precious as "real" people. Yes, Christians consider this law fulfilled and complete (which is why most of us don't go around enforcing this) -- but it rather directly addresses the issue.
To quote (Exodus 21): “If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
What gives him the idea he can take on a dozen major tech companies out of the Valley?
That would be patent 5714015...
Having alerted you users all to these items of interest, I will now proceed to pay Paul Allen.
Gasp! And you used my browser to do it, you patent-cheating fiend!
...or do the patent lawsuits that show up on /. seem frivolous to the point of absurdity?
If so, is that sample bias? Or are all patent lawsuits intrinsically ridiculous?
More like: nine times out of ten, when it's not frivolous, it's not news because it's settled by negotiation behind closed doors. Companies have to want to make a public stand against a patent to choose to let it go to court, which means most cases involve a troll at one end or another. The tenth case is just the one where negotiations fell through. And you can tell those because they're inevitably answered by countersuits where the defendant returns fire against the plaintiff until somebody settles.
As to the Hindenburg, not a single person was harmed by the burning hydrogen which was up and away moments after the storage cells ruptured.
Well, seeing as it was up and away in a FIREBALL that melted metal in under a minute before dissipating, causing molten beams to fall on people, one could argue it was the falling molten girders that killed people, not the fireball that molten-ed the falling girders. http://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/myths#advocates
Once we have fusion reactors, yes, in small quantities. Not enough to float blimps, though.
Some governments have common sense -- I'm about to shut down my NJ photography "business" because I make less annually than the minimum amount where a business ID is required. Below that, it's legally a "hobby that makes money." You still owe income tax on the profits, but don't need to handle any extra paperwork. Blogging really should be the same...
As a result my advice to riders of bicycles and motorcycles has been this: Do it off-road or only on lightly used, well-lit, straight, non-urban roadways with few intersections if you wish to avoid being killed or injured.
That I'll second. I ride a circuitous route to and from work, because it reduces the trip to only one major intersection and only one block of roads over 25 mph. The ability to find a place to live that allows this is a huge and tragic luxury in car-obsessed America. Took me over a year, and cost a pretty penny.
...there are benefits gained by riding on even a semi-regular basis (ie, fitness).
Serious benefits. For all the biker-putty on the roads, the mortality stats I've seen show that even casual bikers have longer life expectancies, since the odds of getting roadkilled are so much lower than the odds of being killed by heart disease.
Hmm...putting a huge but shoddily built seagoing vessel with insufficient safeguards in a place where its sinking could kill people and traumatize a nation after being accidentally subjected to sudden pressure coming from a great and frigid depth...who could bp so foolish as to repeat this mistake in this modern age?
Wait...if they claim they are losing money on every copy they sell, aren't the pirates saving them money?
And you'll have the one you deleted, too. I rue the day securidrones find out that recovery software can undelete photos in two mouse clicks.
When you look at the entire population, the percentage of male porn users stays around 100% in countries where it is allowed and available, and abuse is low. In countries where it is not allowed or available, usage is obviously lower and abuse rates are higher.
That anecdote ignores the fact that, for the past generation, laws permitting pornography have increased in countries simultaneously with laws protecting women.
Pornography use/availability is just a proxy for personal privacy/liberty rights and/or income. You could use availability of divorce, homosexual unions or iPhones as an equal proxy. Unless you control by, say, "equally wealthy Western countries that do or do not permit easy pornography availability while still firmly enforcing women's rights," all you are saying is "the current trend in many countries towards personal liberty has provided more personal liberty for women."
"Using conventional models, such tests can cost over $2 million."
Conventional methods for testing human lungs? Like, for shackles, hiding bodies and bribing the local police?
My proposal is to go to 3-day delivery, depending on zone. The east half of each delivery route receives residential mail Monday/Wednesday/Friday, the west half Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. People that want daily delivery can pay for a PO box or a commercial delivery license, and senders can pay extra for off-cycle residential delivery.
Half the residential delivery trucks can be mothballed on the spot. You avoid massive layoffs by dropping all postal route delivery workers to half time, increasing back to full time as workers quit or retire (or as commercial delivery routes grow). The huge collection of mothballed trucks means free repair parts for the next decade.
Honest question: what activities are recommended for improving focus?
I've noticed the same, and I would say: something along the lines of prayer and meditation, and maybe reading long-form books. Anything like video games does not count, because what you are doing changes each second. I'm even suspicious of some traditional things like gardening, since I tend to garden like I play on my computer -- weeding, pruning, pondering, picking, watering, weeding...something new every minute. It's amazingly easy to subvert something linear into something disorganized.
On a side note, why are people suddenly so in love with the term "infographic"? Can't we call it a "graph" or "chart"?
It is because your boss's nephew knows how to make graphs and charts. Never word anything in a way that might cause you to be replaced by your boss's nephew.
It's not forced at all to associate welfare with labor. Nobody is forced to go on welfare. Recipients in such a system would be free to not work and not collect a welfare check. They could appeal to charity or family to survive. All it means is welfare would change from "subsistence money to tide you over until you find work" to "government-paid work of final resort if you can't find a better job."
Now, I agree that it's not that simple -- impoverished mothers with multiple children would not receive enough money to pay childcare, people with certain mental disabilities are better left idle, crippling chronic pain is a real disability, etc. There would need to be careful exceptions, some of which would look exactly like the current system. But if you approach the problem of poverty as "people should always be able to put food on the table without resorting to inhumane activities" instead of "people should always be able to put food on the table, even if they don't show up for work," many entirely non-abusive options appear.
... and Greece stopped them with only 300 men.
That's....just........brilliant.
Somebody better mod parent "informative" and send me a new coffee/keyboard combo.
Also why does one project always have to 'copy' another ? What happened to innovation? new ideas? something that hasn't been done before?
Good innovation should be copied. With 4-5 major players, an even innovation playing field on creativity means 80% of the new features will be developed by other players. That's just the ugliness of statistics.
So every browser generation necessarily comes out with 1-2 innovative features, and 4-10 "what other people came out with last generation." That might not be exciting, but that's much more useful progress than ignoring what other folks came up with and plowing on into creative obscurity.