Enter some paintball tourneys. You like playing an FPS? Paintball is the ultimate FPS thrill. Good advice:) Oddly enough, I don't like FPS but I'd like to play Paintball on a regular basis. I've only played against my co-workers so far and I've done far better than in FPSs:) plus yes, you get to exercise. We played in one of very few paintball places in my country, and we rented the equipment, is good equipment as expensive as I've heard it is? What I did find expensive was ammo, I was forced to save it:(
Run/cycle to/from work. Ignoring the fact the GP asked how to gain weight, I always see this answer, and wonder... don't you people sweat while running/cycling???
Not to mention I am required to go to work in formal attire (that would be shoes, tie, dress pants, etc.) which don't mesh well with a bycicle. However, I do walk to work everyday, and I'm still overweight (but nothing like some Americans I've seen, hell, I'd be considered average to slim there).
Indeed... as many have posted since I wrote that, she could have just ventilated the area.
Still, I wouldn't be taking chances with my daughter either.
About the Sulfur or Zinc, it says there you can buy them from gardening supply stores.
Just to whore some more karma:) , here are the important points to follow in case of a spill:
1- Evacuate the spill area
2- Lower the temperature
3- Turn off ventilation or AC
4- Close interior doors
5- Determine if the spill must be reported
6- Contain the spill
7- Ventilate the room to the outdoors . Never use a household vacuum cleaner or shop vac to clean up mercury.
8- Assemble the list of cleanup supplies (this is what the parent was talking about)
eye dropper, goggles , paper towel
plastic container with lid
plastic sheeting
powdered zinc *2
rubber squeegee, tape; wide, duct, or masking
tray or box, flashlight
napkins , plastic bags with zipper seal
plastic dust pan , powdered sulfur *1
rubber gloves , syringe without needle
trash bags , wide mouth container
9- Dress Appropiately (no jewelry, etc)
10- Pick up all mercury droplets by using a plastic squeegee or index card, slide droplets onto a sheet of rigid paper like an index card.
11- Next, gently transfer into an unbreakable container, like a 35mm film canister with a locking or airtight lid. If necessary, suction off the droplets using an eye dropper or syringe
12- Place into a zip-top plastic bag
13- Remove and dispose of contaminated carpeting (sorry, maybe not U$ 2.000 but this will cost).
14- Sprinkle fine powder sulfur or zinc on the spill site, to bind any remaining mercury.
(skipped a few steps)
n-1 - Wash with alkaline soap
n - continue ventilation
According to the article, after breaking the lightbulb in her daughter's bedroom, Mrs Bridges called Home Depot which directed her to Poison Control hotline which directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, which sent a specialist.
The specialist found an unacceptable quantity of mercury (six times the "safe" level), and directed Mrs Bridges to a cleanup firm that gave the U$ 2.000 estimate (way high in my opinion, is it that hard to clean?).
Insurance, as usual, won't cover it (sounds reasonable this time).
An interesting point is that each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, and Maine's "safety" standard is 300 nanograms per cubic meter.
I'm not the OP, but I live in Uruguay, where sales of used/refurbished hardware are at an all time high, although a little cheaper
We're talking about a Pentium II with 128 Mb of RAM and HDD, 17' screen, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. for U$ 140 here, which are, as the GP posted, very popular for schoolchildren and small families.
It's not individual sellers what we're talking about, but companies that buy bulk from companies with a 2-year desktop replacement program and sell them with one-year warranties. See here: http://eurocomputer.com.uy/ for example.
Remember when they tried to make those cheap internet appliances that grandma could use to check her email and surf the web? They had a dumbed down OS and scaled back hardware to make them cheap and simple to use, they also bombed horribly because they couldn't run any of the standard apps that a full on pc could.(snipped) Thoughts? Well, an appliance just like that which our local monopoly telco/ISP is promoting has been selling well, it's just for chat and e-mail. The advantage is that they are selling it as "always-on" (through the cellular network I presume), so there could conceivably be a market, I guess the particular implementations weren't that well thought out, and they don't have monopoly power like our local telco (Antel in Uruguay).
The government of Uruguay (my country) has commited 50 million dollars to the project, if it survives next year's budget assignment (aka political slugfest) it's a done deal.
And it will, the government is making this a high-profile part of their campaign, and the "think-of-the-children" part will make it political suicide to cancel.
I was doing tech support to a school network in Uganda a couple of years ago.(snipped) So in hot, dusty under-developed countries, it is a problem. And the OLPC's membrane keyboard and sealed widgets are certainly welcome. I'm from Uruguay, and while the OLPCs will certainly be welcome, the "mud hut" stereotype certainly doesn't apply, and I'd worry more about humidity than dust over here.
Here's a photo of a better than average, but still representative, school over here (I work in the next-door building btw):
I don't know about other countries, but in mine (Uruguay), we split "basic" education into 6 years of elementary/basic school (from ages 6 to 12 roughly), then 4 years of "high school", after which you HAVE to specialize into 3 basic "pre-university"* branches which are Sciences, Humanities and Biological/Agriculture studies (you can also leave high school after those first 10 years and get a technical degree, apparently similar to those "community colleges" I hear about).
For example, to get an Engineering or Sciences degree (we don't have that BSc and BA things), you must have studied at least some math those last 2 years of high school (teaching quality varies from school to school, some are much better than US equivalents while others are as bad or worse), similarly for Medicine you get lots of biology, etc.
I heard this system is modeled after the French and other European ones (though the German one is quite different from what I know).
*which is oddly named "bachillerato" (baccalaureate) so at first I understood that a bachelor's degree in the US was having gotten out of high school when in fact it means 4-5 years of college/university.
Good advice. I've already switched to diet sodas and water whenever possible and started losing weight (though I'm fairly addicted to sweet drinks), but what do you suggest to hold off cravings instead of white flours (bread, etc)?
It's called the Hacker's Diet and although it's pretty basic it helped me in my determination to lose weight so far (I use the included Excel table to chart my moving average weight).
Those of you who can't understand ANY motivation if it does not involve making money will have a hard time even considering this possibility. Indeed, my first thought was that it doesn't make much sense from a financial point of view.
They'll have to rely on the network effect from now on, and woe of them if someone manages to make a better implementation than what they have currently.
On the other hand, that would require substantial resources, and it's likely those hypothetical others would rather have their own code, and I'm not ruling out Open Source or peer-to-peer, even if that is an option, it still applies (see the comments about some OSS implementations above)
There are currently 36,511 users currently logged into SecondLife right now. Somewhat hard to call that 'no one'. That's quite a lot, but it still pales in comparison to many online games.
Soccer sim Hattrick http://www.hattrick.org/ usally has more than that (not right now, it has 13.000 because it's 2 am in Europe but on weekends and Wednesdays, it reaches 50.000 users simultaneously connected).
I've been on the interviewer side of the table more than once when a woman showed up to be interviewed. In general, the reaction (not in front of her of course) has been to be flabbergasted and pleased that we might actually end up with a girl who was working in the tech side of the business.
We did apply the same standards of hiring both (yes, I said both, it only happened twice, and both times the girl was Asian) times and she made it. Once just scraping by (she didn't care a lot about quality and took criticism very poorly, but she did know how to program fairly well) and the other doing pretty well.
I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers. I don't think it's a harassment issue. That's not something I've especially noticed. Though, since I'm a guy, it's possible it just passed me by.
Odd... I work for one of the largest IT companies in my country, and we have a decent representation of women - still quite low, about one in four, but that's similar to the enrollment rate at University too so it's to be expected.
My boss is a woman, there are some very good programmers, SQA, quality assurance, etc. that are all women. The administrative positions and secretaries are all women, so it's men that are lacking there:).
However, women are quite underrepresented in high management (only two out of eight "higher ups" and almost none in middle management). That's probably a cultural bias, or maybe men are really more motivated to seek power positions.
Anyway, he solves it in a way that is completely unlike the related methodology presented in the textbook. Well, this story illustrates your point perfectly (left unquoted for readability):
"The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:
"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."
One student replied:
"You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."
This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.
The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.
For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:
"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer."
"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper."
"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T =2 pi sqr root (l/g)."
"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up."
"If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building."
"But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."
The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for physics."
This is allegedly an Urban Legend according to Snopes, but it's no less good for it:)
And if there's one thing the fall of the Soviet Union has taught us it's that people prefer a free society where chaos sometimes happens to any sort of totalitarian regime. Not all of them. I remember a National Geographic interview on the subject in Russia a few years ago, where many, especially among the elderly, strongly preferred the old totalitarian regime.
It evens goes so far as to have quite strong Communist parties which get a surprising amount of votes (and I believe they've won an election or two in the old USSR block)
My actions at work would never result in a minor's civil rights being trampled on. Right... mine would result in 50-odd people losing their email and internet connectivity:P
I can second that, living here (Uruguay) right now, we unfortunately have an inordinate amount of poor people (even for one of the better off countries in South America), and yes, most of them make shacks out of cardboard or "bloques"-cheap bricks, corrugated steel/tin/glass?fiber("fibra de vidrio") and very similar conditions. It's similar everywhere in South America, the "favelas" in Brazil, "villa miseria" in Argentina, "cantegril" in Uruguay... that is the description of the typical aglomeration of poor people on the outskirts of the city of people living in those conditions.
The Mevir movement (movement against unhealthy housing, government sponsored) tried to outfit some of the homeless or those in worse condition with houses... you know what happened? They sold the sinks and all the bathroom porcelain, took out the floor and burned it (in those houses with wooden floors), some tried selling, dismantling or just abandoning them, and it ended up very badly.
Newer attempts try to determine that those receiving houses actually will care for them.
There were some bad blunders, like uprooting people and giving them houses way too far away from their sources of income (garbage classification is a big one and a way of life for many poor families) or far from their extended family or whatever, but some people just aren't (mentally?) fit to live in a house (due to lack of education, experience, whatever)
Since the people with the means tend not to reproduce as much, and the people without the means tend to breed like rabbits, I would have to say, YES, that would be an improvement. I live in Uruguay, one of the more succesful countries in South America. We have a very good literacy rate, decent education (lots of university graduates which emigrate:( ), more doctors per capita than any other country in the world, a thriving IT community (0% unemployment, you wouldn't like the wages though - even India outsources here, I wish I was kidding), 4 cows per person... yet the future looks dire, because the poorer 20% of society has 80% of the children.
Educated but relatively poor people understand they don't have the means to adequately raise more than 1 or at most 2 children, while the poorest breed like rabbits and send their children to ask for money in the street, ransack through garbage, etc.
Whenever I see a poor mother with a kid begging in the street (way too often) I feel angry at the mother - I understand she's a by-product of society, education, etc. but strict measures have to be taken, or else the future will be dire. Maybe I'm being Malthusian about it and the poor kids will grow to actually improve their stock
I think modern society is selectively breeding out successful people. Hmm. I don't know about that, I've seen very poor kids that looked smart (or at least street-smart), and you wouldn't believe it but kids getting 4 dollars a day off begging spend 1/4th of their income to go to cyber-cafés to get a dose of 1st world bliss. That's an odd combination you get only in Uruguay I think, where beggar kids are literate and go to school (mainly because of a well thought out plan where they are rewarded with a good meal a day if they attend)
MSN is also the default IM app over here (Uruguay, South America) - to the extent that I'd say 99% of the local Internet users don't even know another one exists, we certainly never hear of AOL here (the few AOL users are ports from ICQ users), and Yahoo is seldom used.
On the other hand, CyberCafés are installing Firefox left and right - less sidebars and popups: more happy users and less maintenance. They still use software to wipe clean machines at night, but at least they last an entire day spyware-free now.
Universities too, though IE is still the default where I study, but Firefox is also installed at least.
Open Office hasn't gotten there yet, and while I haven't tried it in a while, a few friends are forced to use it at work and want MS Office back.
Safari only gives you a taste of what KDE has for Konqueror users. Missing items include split panes, sftp and other common features. Konqueror is the network transparency people have dreamed about for more than a decade.
Mozilla makes a good browser but it's not a great file manager.
Maybe it has improved, but I wasn't that much impressed by KDE as a file manager, I'd rather have a separate one (I used to have Suse 8). I know, there must be an infinite number of file managers for Linux but that was the one installed by default (and I don't like tinkering that much, I went back to Windows XP)
Now of course, Vista has an explorer that resembles KDE's and I'm very annoyed (I have to maintain Vista desktops, until next month fortunately, when I switch to maintaining VB6 apps... going from frying pan to the fire?)
My point was, I'd rather have a good browser (I use Firefox currently, am annoyed by IE7) and a good file manager (I'm not saying Explorer is, I use Tree Size Professional to supplement it, reminds me a bit of XTree Gold), than the "network transparency" I've never dreamed of (maybe if I see a good implementation I'll be sold).
Another thought, I don't see web browsing and file managing overlapping in features that much (maybe in the visual presentation a bit), why do you assume that it makes sense for them to be integrated? To have one less app?
On: Weapon Stolen
Why do you anti-gun people keep pulling that one out? Do you really believe it? I've seen it happen. I was a classmate of the son of an Armed Forces officer in my country - we have very strict gun control here, and the gun crime rate is astonishingly low, which doesn't mean there is no crime, but rather that it is commited with "white" weapons (knives, etc) - and a burglar entered his house, found his cache of weapons, threatened him and his family (armed forces father absent) , stole all the valuables and left - with their weapons.
Really, do you carry your gun with you in your house at all times???
Another very famous case: the son of a police officer was threatened every day (unfortunately he went to the same school as the children of criminals), so his father gave him a gun to defend himself (bad idea), and it accidentally shot and got an innocent girl paralytic.
A very good point I usually see/raise in this kind of discussions is that if you're carrying a gun, you must be willing to shoot it and face the consequences(else it doesn't help)... and the "bad guys" will always be willing to, while you might have qualms or be scared. Simply put, they help the criminals more than they help you.
BTW, my brother emigrated to Canada and he was simply appalled at the amount of gun crime, he had never even seen a gun, it's simply unthinkable here (once again, very good gun control, and we - Uruguay - are a Third World Country!!!).
Let's suppose they really were the first to make the (tiny) leap of logic of "I have the customer information, credit card, item information, all in my database, but I'm asking for confirmation item by item. Let's tie all of this in one step instead of the (n) steps we were making before"
If anything, the real feat is making the customer comfortable enough with Amazon to trust them with buying in one click (I don't like that, I'd rather confirm my purchases), the amount of credibility Amazon had (and has), and the amount of impulse buyers:P.
What would have happened if Software Patents didn't exist? I suspect that the One-click buy would still have been invented and implemented (so patents-as-invention-encouragement does not apply here) and would have given Amazon competitive advantage, and other companies would have caught up and copied it. Is that such a bad thing? If Amazon's edge is the One-click patent, then they're in deep trouble. I'd say Amazon's real edge is the trust of its customers, and whatever distribution advantages they have, and the inventory management. I'm not against patents in general, but I am against "trivial" patents, and software patents are notoriously hard to qualify - not to mention that the Australian Patent office adds:
You cannot patent artistic creations, mathematical models, plans, schemes or other purely mental processes. where many software patents are very close to the boundary. Another such patent is the famed Eolas patent.
Well, I have not sucessfuly stated my point:( other than pointing to my belief that the existance of software patents did not contribute to encourage this "invention". It was an interesting exercise (and I ommitted the AIPLA definition of Patents and other stuff:) ).
I have to get my thoughts clear, and I'm still thinking of a good way to differentiate "obvious" from "non-obvious" in the case of software patents. Not to mention software is already covered by copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention I am required to go to work in formal attire (that would be shoes, tie, dress pants, etc.) which don't mesh well with a bycicle. However, I do walk to work everyday, and I'm still overweight (but nothing like some Americans I've seen, hell, I'd be considered average to slim there).
Indeed... as many have posted since I wrote that, she could have just ventilated the area.
:) , here are the important points to follow in case of a spill:
Still, I wouldn't be taking chances with my daughter either.
About the Sulfur or Zinc, it says there you can buy them from gardening supply stores.
Just to whore some more karma
1- Evacuate the spill area
2- Lower the temperature
3- Turn off ventilation or AC
4- Close interior doors
5- Determine if the spill must be reported
6- Contain the spill
7- Ventilate the room to the outdoors . Never use a household vacuum cleaner or shop vac to clean up mercury.
8- Assemble the list of cleanup supplies (this is what the parent was talking about)
eye dropper, goggles , paper towel
plastic container with lid
plastic sheeting
powdered zinc *2
rubber squeegee, tape; wide, duct, or masking
tray or box, flashlight
napkins , plastic bags with zipper seal
plastic dust pan , powdered sulfur *1
rubber gloves , syringe without needle
trash bags , wide mouth container
9- Dress Appropiately (no jewelry, etc)
10- Pick up all mercury droplets by using a plastic squeegee or index card, slide droplets onto a sheet of rigid paper like an index card.
11- Next, gently transfer into an unbreakable container, like a 35mm film canister with a locking or airtight lid. If necessary, suction off the droplets using an eye dropper or syringe
12- Place into a zip-top plastic bag
13- Remove and dispose of contaminated carpeting (sorry, maybe not U$ 2.000 but this will cost).
14- Sprinkle fine powder sulfur or zinc on the spill site, to bind any remaining mercury.
(skipped a few steps)
n-1 - Wash with alkaline soap n - continue ventilation
According to the article, after breaking the lightbulb in her daughter's bedroom, Mrs Bridges called Home Depot which directed her to Poison Control hotline which directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, which sent a specialist.
r mometer
9 3_4175-11751--,00.html
l ls.pdf
s ustainability/archive_2006/reduction_in_mercury.ph p?main=global&parent=4390&id=gl_en_news&lang=en
The specialist found an unacceptable quantity of mercury (six times the "safe" level), and directed Mrs Bridges to a cleanup firm that gave the U$ 2.000 estimate (way high in my opinion, is it that hard to clean?).
Insurance, as usual, won't cover it (sounds reasonable this time).
An interesting point is that each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, and Maine's "safety" standard is 300 nanograms per cubic meter.
By comparison, according to Wikipedia, "the typical "fever thermometer" contains between 0.5 to 3 g (.3 to 1.7 dr) of elemental mercury."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-in-glass_the
She could have saved some money by reading this:
"Cleaning Up Small Mercury Spills, For spills of less than two tablespoons:" by the government of Michigan
http://www.michigan.gov/deq/0,1607,7-135-3307_296
or this (PDF warning) http://www.newmoa.org/prevention/mercury/smallspi
Not every CFL has that much mercury:
http://www.lighting.philips.com/gl_en/news/press/
Still, it's good to be warned and be aware about the potential environmental hazard.
I'm not the OP, but I live in Uruguay, where sales of used/refurbished hardware are at an all time high, although a little cheaper
We're talking about a Pentium II with 128 Mb of RAM and HDD, 17' screen, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. for U$ 140 here, which are, as the GP posted, very popular for schoolchildren and small families.
It's not individual sellers what we're talking about, but companies that buy bulk from companies with a 2-year desktop replacement program and sell them with one-year warranties. See here: http://eurocomputer.com.uy/ for example.
The government of Uruguay (my country) has commited 50 million dollars to the project, if it survives next year's budget assignment (aka political slugfest) it's a done deal.
1 2/2006121402.htm
And it will, the government is making this a high-profile part of their campaign, and the "think-of-the-children" part will make it political suicide to cancel.
http://www.presidencia.gub.uy/_Web/noticias/2006/
So in hot, dusty under-developed countries, it is a problem. And the OLPC's membrane keyboard and sealed widgets are certainly welcome. I'm from Uruguay, and while the OLPCs will certainly be welcome, the "mud hut" stereotype certainly doesn't apply, and I'd worry more about humidity than dust over here.
Here's a photo of a better than average, but still representative, school over here (I work in the next-door building btw):
http://www.infanciaenred.org.ar/margarita/Uruguay
I don't know about other countries, but in mine (Uruguay), we split "basic" education into 6 years of elementary/basic school (from ages 6 to 12 roughly), then 4 years of "high school", after which you HAVE to specialize into 3 basic "pre-university"* branches which are Sciences, Humanities and Biological/Agriculture studies (you can also leave high school after those first 10 years and get a technical degree, apparently similar to those "community colleges" I hear about).
For example, to get an Engineering or Sciences degree (we don't have that BSc and BA things), you must have studied at least some math those last 2 years of high school (teaching quality varies from school to school, some are much better than US equivalents while others are as bad or worse), similarly for Medicine you get lots of biology, etc.
I heard this system is modeled after the French and other European ones (though the German one is quite different from what I know).
*which is oddly named "bachillerato" (baccalaureate) so at first I understood that a bachelor's degree in the US was having gotten out of high school when in fact it means 4-5 years of college/university.
Good advice. I've already switched to diet sodas and water whenever possible and started losing weight (though I'm fairly addicted to sweet drinks), but what do you suggest to hold off cravings instead of white flours (bread, etc)?
l
BTW I recommend this book on dieting I found thanks to Slashdot comments: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.htm
It's called the Hacker's Diet and although it's pretty basic it helped me in my determination to lose weight so far (I use the included Excel table to chart my moving average weight).
Indeed, my first thought was that it doesn't make much sense from a financial point of view.
They'll have to rely on the network effect from now on, and woe of them if someone manages to make a better implementation than what they have currently.
On the other hand, that would require substantial resources, and it's likely those hypothetical others would rather have their own code, and I'm not ruling out Open Source or peer-to-peer, even if that is an option, it still applies (see the comments about some OSS implementations above)
Soccer sim Hattrick http://www.hattrick.org/ usally has more than that (not right now, it has 13.000 because it's 2 am in Europe but on weekends and Wednesdays, it reaches 50.000 users simultaneously connected).
I don't play it, but according to this site, World of Warcraft reaches 200.000 simultaneous users!!! and for all I know it could reach millions... http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december05/kirriemuir/12
Other games I know of like Magic Online also have 10.000 to 15.000 users online at certain times, and googling showed EVE Online can have 50.000.
I've been on the interviewer side of the table more than once when a woman showed up to be interviewed. In general, the reaction (not in front of her of course) has been to be flabbergasted and pleased that we might actually end up with a girl who was working in the tech side of the business.
We did apply the same standards of hiring both (yes, I said both, it only happened twice, and both times the girl was Asian) times and she made it. Once just scraping by (she didn't care a lot about quality and took criticism very poorly, but she did know how to program fairly well) and the other doing pretty well.
I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers. I don't think it's a harassment issue. That's not something I've especially noticed. Though, since I'm a guy, it's possible it just passed me by.
Odd... I work for one of the largest IT companies in my country, and we have a decent representation of women - still quite low, about one in four, but that's similar to the enrollment rate at University too so it's to be expected.My boss is a woman, there are some very good programmers, SQA, quality assurance, etc. that are all women. The administrative positions and secretaries are all women, so it's men that are lacking there
However, women are quite underrepresented in high management (only two out of eight "higher ups" and almost none in middle management). That's probably a cultural bias, or maybe men are really more motivated to seek power positions.
"The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:
"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."
One student replied:
"You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."
This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.
The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.
For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:
"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer."
"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper."
"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T =2 pi sqr root (l
"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up."
"If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building."
"But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."
The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for physics."
This is allegedly an Urban Legend according to Snopes, but it's no less good for it
Source:
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp
Not all of them. I remember a National Geographic interview on the subject in Russia a few years ago, where many, especially among the elderly, strongly preferred the old totalitarian regime.
It evens goes so far as to have quite strong Communist parties which get a surprising amount of votes (and I believe they've won an election or two in the old USSR block)
I can second that, living here (Uruguay) right now, we unfortunately have an inordinate amount of poor people (even for one of the better off countries in South America), and yes, most of them make shacks out of cardboard or "bloques"-cheap bricks, corrugated steel/tin/glass?fiber("fibra de vidrio") and very similar conditions. It's similar everywhere in South America, the "favelas" in Brazil, "villa miseria" in Argentina, "cantegril" in Uruguay... that is the description of the typical aglomeration of poor people on the outskirts of the city of people living in those conditions.
The Mevir movement (movement against unhealthy housing, government sponsored) tried to outfit some of the homeless or those in worse condition with houses... you know what happened? They sold the sinks and all the bathroom porcelain, took out the floor and burned it (in those houses with wooden floors), some tried selling, dismantling or just abandoning them, and it ended up very badly.
Newer attempts try to determine that those receiving houses actually will care for them.
There were some bad blunders, like uprooting people and giving them houses way too far away from their sources of income (garbage classification is a big one and a way of life for many poor families) or far from their extended family or whatever, but some people just aren't (mentally?) fit to live in a house (due to lack of education, experience, whatever)
Educated but relatively poor people understand they don't have the means to adequately raise more than 1 or at most 2 children, while the poorest breed like rabbits and send their children to ask for money in the street, ransack through garbage, etc.
Whenever I see a poor mother with a kid begging in the street (way too often) I feel angry at the mother - I understand she's a by-product of society, education, etc. but strict measures have to be taken, or else the future will be dire. Maybe I'm being Malthusian about it and the poor kids will grow to actually improve their stock I think modern society is selectively breeding out successful people. Hmm. I don't know about that, I've seen very poor kids that looked smart (or at least street-smart), and you wouldn't believe it but kids getting 4 dollars a day off begging spend 1/4th of their income to go to cyber-cafés to get a dose of 1st world bliss. That's an odd combination you get only in Uruguay I think, where beggar kids are literate and go to school (mainly because of a well thought out plan where they are rewarded with a good meal a day if they attend)
MSN is also the default IM app over here (Uruguay, South America) - to the extent that I'd say 99% of the local Internet users don't even know another one exists, we certainly never hear of AOL here (the few AOL users are ports from ICQ users), and Yahoo is seldom used.
On the other hand, CyberCafés are installing Firefox left and right - less sidebars and popups: more happy users and less maintenance. They still use software to wipe clean machines at night, but at least they last an entire day spyware-free now.
Universities too, though IE is still the default where I study, but Firefox is also installed at least.
Open Office hasn't gotten there yet, and while I haven't tried it in a while, a few friends are forced to use it at work and want MS Office back.
Mozilla makes a good browser but it's not a great file manager.
Maybe it has improved, but I wasn't that much impressed by KDE as a file manager, I'd rather have a separate one (I used to have Suse 8). I know, there must be an infinite number of file managers for Linux but that was the one installed by default (and I don't like tinkering that much, I went back to Windows XP)Now of course, Vista has an explorer that resembles KDE's and I'm very annoyed (I have to maintain Vista desktops, until next month fortunately, when I switch to maintaining VB6 apps... going from frying pan to the fire?)
My point was, I'd rather have a good browser (I use Firefox currently, am annoyed by IE7) and a good file manager (I'm not saying Explorer is, I use Tree Size Professional to supplement it, reminds me a bit of XTree Gold), than the "network transparency" I've never dreamed of (maybe if I see a good implementation I'll be sold).
Another thought, I don't see web browsing and file managing overlapping in features that much (maybe in the visual presentation a bit), why do you assume that it makes sense for them to be integrated? To have one less app?
Really, do you carry your gun with you in your house at all times???
Another very famous case: the son of a police officer was threatened every day (unfortunately he went to the same school as the children of criminals), so his father gave him a gun to defend himself (bad idea), and it accidentally shot and got an innocent girl paralytic.
A very good point I usually see/raise in this kind of discussions is that if you're carrying a gun, you must be willing to shoot it and face the consequences(else it doesn't help)... and the "bad guys" will always be willing to, while you might have qualms or be scared. Simply put, they help the criminals more than they help you.
BTW, my brother emigrated to Canada and he was simply appalled at the amount of gun crime, he had never even seen a gun, it's simply unthinkable here (once again, very good gun control, and we - Uruguay - are a Third World Country!!!).
I have exactly the same problem... I can't stand some 3D games. I distinctly recall getting dizzy playing Wolfenstein 3D.
Let's suppose they really were the first to make the (tiny) leap of logic of "I have the customer information, credit card, item information, all in my database, but I'm asking for confirmation item by item. Let's tie all of this in one step instead of the (n) steps we were making before"
If anything, the real feat is making the customer comfortable enough with Amazon to trust them with buying in one click (I don't like that, I'd rather confirm my purchases), the amount of credibility Amazon had (and has), and the amount of impulse buyers
What would have happened if Software Patents didn't exist? I suspect that the One-click buy would still have been invented and implemented (so patents-as-invention-encouragement does not apply here) and would have given Amazon competitive advantage, and other companies would have caught up and copied it. Is that such a bad thing? If Amazon's edge is the One-click patent, then they're in deep trouble. I'd say Amazon's real edge is the trust of its customers, and whatever distribution advantages they have, and the inventory management. I'm not against patents in general, but I am against "trivial" patents, and software patents are notoriously hard to qualify - not to mention that the Australian Patent office adds: You cannot patent artistic creations, mathematical models, plans, schemes or other purely mental processes. where many software patents are very close to the boundary. Another such patent is the famed Eolas patent.
Well, I have not sucessfuly stated my point
I have to get my thoughts clear, and I'm still thinking of a good way to differentiate "obvious" from "non-obvious" in the case of software patents. Not to mention software is already covered by copyright.
Sorry for the rant
If you look at the above post, you need to be at least 4 meters away (some 14 feet according to an online calculator) to be able to view it correctly.
I've seen several US houses that don't have that much space in any room (not the kind that buys that kind of display, though).
Sorry, I don't understand why it would simplify your cabling... If you don't need the PATA, just don't put the cable?.
Is the board cheaper by not having PATA?