Actually in Canada you DO get off if the cop does not show up for the court date.
Further more, I once went with my friend who was fighting a ticket and got to listen to a couple of cases before his. On one of them, the guy was clearly speeding and didn't care who knew it. But when the officer was reading the details of the event, he read the date wrong. That is, it was written down correctly on the file but he (for some reason) said the wrong date. He corrected himself immediately but it was too late, the case got thrown out.
That is in fact completely correct (at least as far as I know). I have lived in Israel for four years (during which I went to public school), and the Old Testament *is* written with the vowels in place. On the other hand, any other modern text consists of only consonants. Basically it means that you can only read a word if you are familiar with it already (unlike English where even if you have not come across the word before, you can still "sound it out").
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
My husband is an avid hater of any sort of nonsense that invades his privacy so about two years ago when applying for a "SaveOnFoods" card (without which you cannot get the sale prices on some of the food iteams of course) he put "Darth Vader" as the name on the card.
It still gets me when they try to do the whole "Have a nice day Mr. ___" after you pay them, take a look at the name, pause, and then give up on the whole tactic altogether.
No, I think it's a reference to Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the very last book, "Mostly Harmless", Arthur gets stranded on a small planet where the inhabitants think that they were created by Bob. In fact, at one point in the book Arthur goes "For Bob's sake...". (Just finished reading it, in fact, which is why I remember).
Actually no. Introverts definitely do feel easier around people when they are slightly tipsy but for a different reason than you think.
One of the more interesting theories I learned in my third year psychology class was this: Being introverted or extroverted depends on how sensitive your central nervous system is to stimuli. And everyone has their own optimum level at which they like it to be stimulized.
So for introverts, that level is fairly low and their nervous system is pretty sensitive. Get a lot of people around them (lots of external stimuli) and they're way over their optimum and start to feel overwhealmed and uncomfortable. But for extroverts, their system is pretty insensitive so they need to get a higher level of stimulation to reach their optimum.
Now mix alcohol into the situation, which everyone knows is a depressant. When an introvert drinks, the depressant suppresses the stimulation to the central nervous system and so they are momentaraly less sensitive and can handle a higher level of stimulation. Hence, at a party they will become more relaxed and chatty. For an extrovert, however, that's a bad idea. Their central nervous system already has trouble and needs a high level of stimulation. Now, it will need even more. So these are the types of guys who can become obnoxious, loud, and even violent, because they are seeking to raise the stimulation even higher to compensate for the depressing effect of alcohol.
To take the theory even further, why do you think Ritalin works on attention deficit disorder kids, even though it's a stimulant? Because, those kids have an extreme version of the extrovert's central nervous system - it's constantly seeking stimulation to compensate for a lack of sensitivity. So, when given a stimulant, they no longer need to seek external stimulation as hard. One of the lesser known things is that ADD adults tend to often self medicate with coffee. Which is, coincidentally, also a stimulant.
Anyways, this was only a theory of course, but a rather neat one I think (with, yes, some research to back it up).
You have 9 brass balls and one set of scales (the old fashioned "justice" kind). One of the balls is very slightly heavier than the others. By only using the scales twice, how can you find out which one that is? That is, how would you weigh them?
Horror stories happen everywhere and having known someone who worked at WebCT tech support, I can tell you that a significant portion of them start with the sys admin working for the university. No, this is not meant to be a troll on sys admins, there are some very smart and competent people out there. But you can't help but giggle when you hear of one guy who hot-swapped the network cards and then was puzzled as to why the server went down, oracle crashed and students couldn't connect. I suspect what happens is that some of the smaller universities don't have the budget to hire people with a lot of experience and so you end up having someone on the job that doesn't always know what they're doing but trying to learn it as they go along.
My personal experience with the product interface is mixed. Older versions were not too bad, then newer ones got worse and the very latest one (Vista) is supposed to be much better. So it totally depends on which university you go to and which version they happen to be using at the time.
Incidentally, while Blackboard is a publicly traded company, WebCT is not so concerning the stock options owned by employees and owners, rumours have it that there will be a cash out rather than a stock swap. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
Incidentally, they *are* somewhat on the path at looking to cure the flu because according to TFA, the flu going around now is descendant from the Spanish Influenza that they are studying. And yes, for everyone who feels a bit of panic at the thought, the lab facility is a biosafety level 3.
In my experience, Americans tend to be oblivious as to what's going on outside their country.
A prime example that currently comes to my mind is the Canadian/American lumber dispute. Basically the US has been charging tarrifs on lumber exported from Canada. Thus far every single court has ruled those tarrifs illegal under the free trade agreement that US and Canada have. And while it has been a big issue in Canada, media-wise and just general population-wise, it hasn't even hit the radar in US. No one I've talked to seems to have a clue what's going on and why Canadians are getting pissed off.
I suspect it is the same with other issues as well. And maybe that's where you get special sites from where Americans can order little badges (with guess whose flag... just guess!) that they can sew on their luggage when they travel because the rest of the world doesn't view them as favourably as it used to.
A call comes in from a university admin guy to the WebCT premium tech support guys (who write online educational software, fyi). The admin says he was upgrading the servers and decided to stick in some new network cards. Now the educational system (Vista) is down and refuses to work. No one can connect and frantic calls from students are escalating. A long Q&A session begins with the tech support guy asking exactly what kind of cards, system settings, error logs, etc. Finally, it emerges that the admin didn't bother shutting anything down before the upgrades but just did a hot swap; pulled the network cards out and stuck new ones in. So of course Oracle, Java and everything else that was running is down.
Tech support guy puts the admin on hold and the entire office is laughing for about 5 minutes straight. Then a discussion starts on how to shut Vista down and bring it up again until someone has a bright idea and tells the admin to just take the new network cards out and stick the old ones back in. System is up again and running like a charm.
Something similar happens here in Canada during boxing day sales at Futureshop (owned by BestBuy if I'm not mistaken) and A&B Sound.
The lineups start around 5am and there's a huge rush to get in once the doors open, grab the first thing you see that is mildly appealing and buy it "cause it was on sale, see?". My sister-in-law who works as a sales-clerk at Futureshop usually comes home absolutely exhausted after the 12 hour shift that they make them work that day. The funny thing is, you can usually get better deals during regular, non-rush times of the year if you just keep an eye out for them.
From what I heard this morning on cbc radio, Telus claims they are blocking the site because it contains pictures of some Telus employees crossing the picket line. Their reasoning is that they are trying to protect those people from violent retributions of union employees that are striking.
Speaking as someone who is (from what I can tell) that rare combination of artist by night and developer by day, I think the dividing line between the two is more narrow than we realize.
From my experience, art, or at least painting/drawing, involves a lot of formula technique than meets the eye. Say, for example, that you're drawing a red object. What happens is: after staring at it for a while, your eye will start to produce an after-image, in the "opposite" colour (a kind of greenish tint, in this case). So the red starts to look less red and more grey. Solution? When drawing, constantly compare the colour of the object. Is it as light/dark as the one next to it? What about compared to the background? Likewise with shading and light. You get shadow at the bottom of the object if the light is shining from the top, but you will also get some reflected light from the surface on which the object is sitting on. The more reflective it is, the brighter the reflected light, and thus the lighter that shadow on the bottom will be.
Looking at the opposite end of the scale, I still remember sitting back after hours of coding looking stuff up, redesigning, rewriting functions, and thinking "Man, this is beautiful!" (For enquiring minds - it was a perl script for parsing multiple/irregular format reports).
P.S. I still haven't put up the site for my latest coding project but here's the art gallery. Hmm... wonder if enough people will care that it will get/.'ed.
There are some passwords that I think *must* be committed to memory - those being your ATM card pins and a couple others of that sort. Basically the ones that are really really important.
The rest (work account passwords of which I have about 10, which tend to follow different rules and are reset every month with no chance of reuse until the 10th iteration) I write down and put in my wallet. Usually that will be the most secure and guarded possession you will have on you. So why not. It's better than picking obvious easily guessed passwords. And you're less likely to have someone at work going through your wallet than just glancing around at the post-it notes on your monitor.
Forget keystroke logging. How about just running all Internet access through a proxy and then blocking ALL (and I really mean all) web-based personal email login sites - gmail, hotmail, shaw, etc as well as all web chat program login sites... msn, icq, you name it.
And of course since that might not do it, just run Tivoli on everyone's PC and scan them once a week for mp3s and whatever other type of files that the company considers illegal.
"... he was pressured to the point where he had to 'resign'"
Exactly. What else would *YOU* do if they told you that unless you leave, they will fire the whole department along with you? If not loyalty to your department then at least loyalty and respect for your colleagues should make you give in and quit. There are other ways to fight this kind of battle.
This is a problem that plagues most legal documents, user manuals, and scientific papers. I recall being very frustrated (not to mention bored out of my mind) reading published research material for a 3rd year psychology course. Of all the people, you would think at least psychologists would appreciate clear, concise descriptions.
Personally I think the problem is cultural and affects people who are intelligent and know it, but not intelligent enough that they feel they don't have to prove themselves. The more obscure your references are and the more complicated your train of thought, the smarter you must be, right?
Luckly there are folks like the Plain English Campaign, " fighting for public information to be written in plain English." If you ever have to write a public document, I recommend reading through their Examples and Free Tutorials sections.
I'm not excessively familiar with Canadian judicial law, but from what I've heard, the ban on those select few testimonies is because the individuals involved are also part of a criminal trial for something else (possibly related). So this is not just a case of the judge going "Well, since this information looks important and will definitely influence the next election, lets put a ban on it so that no one gets to find out."
*sigh*
Despite the ban, it seems that everyone I know has already lost their faith in the Canadian government accomplishing more than one term without some sort of corruption occuring.
"It must be something about high office.The high altitude sends people mad." - Terry Pratchett
I recall from my social psychology lecture, several studies that dealt with violent television shows (slightly different but agreeably comparable to violent video games) and their effects on adolecents. While most studies do show only correlations, several long terms studies were able to show a definite cause-effect relationship between violent television viewing and increased violent behaviour.
Of course the most common/. argument is always "well I play violent video games and I'm not a murderer" and yes, of course that's true for majority of the population as well. But violent acts do not always have to be as drastic as 5-year-prison-term felony. Have you ever cut someone off while driving? Have you ever snapped at someone for no reason other than you've had a bad day? Ever yelled at a member of your family or a friend? All of those constitute violent acts, although to a mild degree. The point is not that you'll become a hardened criminal from playing these games but that your behavior will become more violent than it would have been otherwise (had you never played them).
IANAL so I can't be certain, but from what I've heard, the reason for the "keep everything in beta as long as possible" that we've been seeing from Google is largely due to legal rather than technical reasons. When the product is still in beta and hasn't been "officially" released, as it were, you can make changes to the User Argreement Contract without being liable to anyone else (such as perhaps the users that signed up under the old agreement).
In this case, I can see how it would make a lot of sense for Google to keep most of their new (or not so new) products in beta while all the wrinkes resulting from those are being smoothed out. After all, you never know when you'll be sued by some random European government over some unintended effect (*cough*France*cough*).
On the subject of treating people like objects: Most importantly, try to keep your integrity and be honest with the people working under you. If you have some boring tasks coming up that have to get done no matter what, don't promise them fireworks and excitement. When the time comes, they'll clue in and then hate you forever (speaking as a java developer who had to do copy/paste job with excel spreadsheets for the last month, trust me on this one).
It's far better to say ahead of time - "Yes, this will suck but we'll get through it soon enough."
Slashdot Mirror
Further more, I once went with my friend who was fighting a ticket and got to listen to a couple of cases before his. On one of them, the guy was clearly speeding and didn't care who knew it. But when the officer was reading the details of the event, he read the date wrong. That is, it was written down correctly on the file but he (for some reason) said the wrong date. He corrected himself immediately but it was too late, the case got thrown out.
That is in fact completely correct (at least as far as I know). I have lived in Israel for four years (during which I went to public school), and the Old Testament *is* written with the vowels in place. On the other hand, any other modern text consists of only consonants. Basically it means that you can only read a word if you are familiar with it already (unlike English where even if you have not come across the word before, you can still "sound it out").
It still gets me when they try to do the whole "Have a nice day Mr. ___" after you pay them, take a look at the name, pause, and then give up on the whole tactic altogether.
No, I think it's a reference to Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the very last book, "Mostly Harmless", Arthur gets stranded on a small planet where the inhabitants think that they were created by Bob. In fact, at one point in the book Arthur goes "For Bob's sake...". (Just finished reading it, in fact, which is why I remember).
One of the more interesting theories I learned in my third year psychology class was this: Being introverted or extroverted depends on how sensitive your central nervous system is to stimuli. And everyone has their own optimum level at which they like it to be stimulized.
So for introverts, that level is fairly low and their nervous system is pretty sensitive. Get a lot of people around them (lots of external stimuli) and they're way over their optimum and start to feel overwhealmed and uncomfortable. But for extroverts, their system is pretty insensitive so they need to get a higher level of stimulation to reach their optimum.
Now mix alcohol into the situation, which everyone knows is a depressant. When an introvert drinks, the depressant suppresses the stimulation to the central nervous system and so they are momentaraly less sensitive and can handle a higher level of stimulation. Hence, at a party they will become more relaxed and chatty. For an extrovert, however, that's a bad idea. Their central nervous system already has trouble and needs a high level of stimulation. Now, it will need even more. So these are the types of guys who can become obnoxious, loud, and even violent, because they are seeking to raise the stimulation even higher to compensate for the depressing effect of alcohol.
To take the theory even further, why do you think Ritalin works on attention deficit disorder kids, even though it's a stimulant? Because, those kids have an extreme version of the extrovert's central nervous system - it's constantly seeking stimulation to compensate for a lack of sensitivity. So, when given a stimulant, they no longer need to seek external stimulation as hard. One of the lesser known things is that ADD adults tend to often self medicate with coffee. Which is, coincidentally, also a stimulant.
Anyways, this was only a theory of course, but a rather neat one I think (with, yes, some research to back it up).
Then again maybe it's just my slightly paranoid conscience jumping to silly conclusions.
You have 9 brass balls and one set of scales (the old fashioned "justice" kind). One of the balls is very slightly heavier than the others. By only using the scales twice, how can you find out which one that is? That is, how would you weigh them?
My personal experience with the product interface is mixed. Older versions were not too bad, then newer ones got worse and the very latest one (Vista) is supposed to be much better. So it totally depends on which university you go to and which version they happen to be using at the time.
Incidentally, while Blackboard is a publicly traded company, WebCT is not so concerning the stock options owned by employees and owners, rumours have it that there will be a cash out rather than a stock swap. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
Incidentally, they *are* somewhat on the path at looking to cure the flu because according to TFA, the flu going around now is descendant from the Spanish Influenza that they are studying. And yes, for everyone who feels a bit of panic at the thought, the lab facility is a biosafety level 3.
A prime example that currently comes to my mind is the Canadian/American lumber dispute. Basically the US has been charging tarrifs on lumber exported from Canada. Thus far every single court has ruled those tarrifs illegal under the free trade agreement that US and Canada have. And while it has been a big issue in Canada, media-wise and just general population-wise, it hasn't even hit the radar in US. No one I've talked to seems to have a clue what's going on and why Canadians are getting pissed off.
I suspect it is the same with other issues as well. And maybe that's where you get special sites from where Americans can order little badges (with guess whose flag... just guess!) that they can sew on their luggage when they travel because the rest of the world doesn't view them as favourably as it used to.
A call comes in from a university admin guy to the WebCT premium tech support guys (who write online educational software, fyi). The admin says he was upgrading the servers and decided to stick in some new network cards. Now the educational system (Vista) is down and refuses to work. No one can connect and frantic calls from students are escalating. A long Q&A session begins with the tech support guy asking exactly what kind of cards, system settings, error logs, etc. Finally, it emerges that the admin didn't bother shutting anything down before the upgrades but just did a hot swap; pulled the network cards out and stuck new ones in. So of course Oracle, Java and everything else that was running is down.
Tech support guy puts the admin on hold and the entire office is laughing for about 5 minutes straight. Then a discussion starts on how to shut Vista down and bring it up again until someone has a bright idea and tells the admin to just take the new network cards out and stick the old ones back in. System is up again and running like a charm.
The lineups start around 5am and there's a huge rush to get in once the doors open, grab the first thing you see that is mildly appealing and buy it "cause it was on sale, see?". My sister-in-law who works as a sales-clerk at Futureshop usually comes home absolutely exhausted after the 12 hour shift that they make them work that day. The funny thing is, you can usually get better deals during regular, non-rush times of the year if you just keep an eye out for them.
From what I heard this morning on cbc radio, Telus claims they are blocking the site because it contains pictures of some Telus employees crossing the picket line. Their reasoning is that they are trying to protect those people from violent retributions of union employees that are striking.
From my experience, art, or at least painting/drawing, involves a lot of formula technique than meets the eye. Say, for example, that you're drawing a red object. What happens is: after staring at it for a while, your eye will start to produce an after-image, in the "opposite" colour (a kind of greenish tint, in this case). So the red starts to look less red and more grey. Solution? When drawing, constantly compare the colour of the object. Is it as light/dark as the one next to it? What about compared to the background? Likewise with shading and light. You get shadow at the bottom of the object if the light is shining from the top, but you will also get some reflected light from the surface on which the object is sitting on. The more reflective it is, the brighter the reflected light, and thus the lighter that shadow on the bottom will be.
Looking at the opposite end of the scale, I still remember sitting back after hours of coding looking stuff up, redesigning, rewriting functions, and thinking "Man, this is beautiful!" (For enquiring minds - it was a perl script for parsing multiple/irregular format reports).
P.S. I still haven't put up the site for my latest coding project but here's the art gallery. Hmm... wonder if enough people will care that it will get /.'ed.
There are some passwords that I think *must* be committed to memory - those being your ATM card pins and a couple others of that sort. Basically the ones that are really really important.
The rest (work account passwords of which I have about 10, which tend to follow different rules and are reset every month with no chance of reuse until the 10th iteration) I write down and put in my wallet. Usually that will be the most secure and guarded possession you will have on you. So why not. It's better than picking obvious easily guessed passwords. And you're less likely to have someone at work going through your wallet than just glancing around at the post-it notes on your monitor.
And of course since that might not do it, just run Tivoli on everyone's PC and scan them once a week for mp3s and whatever other type of files that the company considers illegal.
Speaking from bitter paranoid experience.
Exactly. What else would *YOU* do if they told you that unless you leave, they will fire the whole department along with you? If not loyalty to your department then at least loyalty and respect for your colleagues should make you give in and quit. There are other ways to fight this kind of battle.
Personally I think the problem is cultural and affects people who are intelligent and know it, but not intelligent enough that they feel they don't have to prove themselves. The more obscure your references are and the more complicated your train of thought, the smarter you must be, right?
Luckly there are folks like the Plain English Campaign, " fighting for public information to be written in plain English." If you ever have to write a public document, I recommend reading through their Examples and Free Tutorials sections.
*sigh*
Despite the ban, it seems that everyone I know has already lost their faith in the Canadian government accomplishing more than one term without some sort of corruption occuring.
"It must be something about high office.The high altitude sends people mad." - Terry Pratchett
Of course the most common /. argument is always "well I play violent video games and I'm not a murderer" and yes, of course that's true for majority of the population as well. But violent acts do not always have to be as drastic as 5-year-prison-term felony. Have you ever cut someone off while driving? Have you ever snapped at someone for no reason other than you've had a bad day? Ever yelled at a member of your family or a friend? All of those constitute violent acts, although to a mild degree. The point is not that you'll become a hardened criminal from playing these games but that your behavior will become more violent than it would have been otherwise (had you never played them).
Just my $0.02 on the subject.
In this case, I can see how it would make a lot of sense for Google to keep most of their new (or not so new) products in beta while all the wrinkes resulting from those are being smoothed out. After all, you never know when you'll be sued by some random European government over some unintended effect (*cough*France*cough*).
It's far better to say ahead of time - "Yes, this will suck but we'll get through it soon enough."