For what it's worth, your diatribe comes off as fairly melodramatic. You'd do well with a rewrite that puts more emphasis on the largest issues (management having no idea how long projects should take, lack of air conditioning, coworkers incapable of basic communication), de-emphasizing the most trivial complaints (manager that checks in "up to 3 times a day"? A company focused on profit? These seem par for the course), and omitting the dramatic hyperbole entirely -- especially the repeated mentions of being "almost in tears", and the paragraph of suicidal ideations.
It was clearly a lousy job, and you were right to leave, but the way you've written your account doesn't put you in a terribly positive light either.
Giving information to law enforcement is not "bowing down." The police are working for us, they are our employees... Cooperating with the police to do a job we give them is not evil.
...Unless the police have been tasked with an evil job. Like, I don't know... rounding up all the Jews so they can be systematically exterminated?
I hate to play the Godwin card, but it happened. And it's an obvious, concrete example of how unconditional cooperation with whoever happens to be in power can be unquestionably morally wrong.
Morality and legality may frequently overlap, (e.g. killing and stealing are generally both illegal and morally wrong), but they are nonetheless distinct, and there are many areas in which they don't overlap -- illegal actions that are moral, immoral actions that are legal, etc.
Install 6 extensions (especially firebug), and actively browse in at least 6, if not 12 tabs for a day. If your memory utilization doesn't hit AT LEAST 500 meg after 8 hours, call the editors of the Guiness Book.
This may sound like an extreme usage pattern, but it's all to common for anyone doing any sort of web development.
Who's going to watch a video review, much less a 70 minute one? Write it up on a web page with some illustrative clips.
I'm not sure why there's this trend to having high bandwidth video for stuff that the simple written word can handle. The Apple site comes to mind with the "Learn Your Way Around the Mac in Minutes" videos, that would take only seconds if it were text. Some of us still remember how to read.
Who's going to watch a movie trilogy filmed 20 years ago, much less a 5 hour one? Write it up in a book with a handful of pictures.
I'm not sure why there's this trend to having high bandwidth film for stuff that the simple written word can handle. Some uf us still remember how to read.
If they change the terms of the contract then those contracts are no longer valid, allowing customers to cancel them prematurely.
Given that those contracts are used to subsidize the cost of the phones, I don't think it's going to happen.
Changes to the contract do give the consumer the right to terminate without penalty, but few people are aware of this, or take advantage of it. It's not like they call you up and ask "Hey, we've changed the contract. Do you want out of it for free?".
Think back to the SMS rate hikes over the last few years, from 10 cents to 15 to 20. How many people canceled their contracts then? It certainly wasn't many.
Granted, I'd expect *more* response to any sort of data-usage billing change -- it's obviously a higher-profile issue -- but frankly, I wouldn't expect even 10% of iPhone users to cancel their contracts in such an event.
Typically I'd agree with you, but this statement here...
"Tatro said she was 'looking forward to Monday's embalming therapy"
Is reason enough to be concerned. When some kind of school shooting happens, there is typically a message before hand. Sure, you can shrug off the "I wana cuta bitch" but when you make statements like the one posted above, there needs to be some kind of action.
Let's take for granted that "When some kind of school shooting happens, there is typically a message before hand". That does not, in any way, imply that every time you encounter such a "message", there's a statistically significant chance that a violent act will follow.
In fact, most people will agree that most "threats" of this nature do *not* result in violent acts. There thousands, if not millions of "threats" like these, uttered idly every day -- a simple hyperbolic expression of frustration. Meanwhile, school shootings happen a handful of times a year, at worst.
Similarly, I can guarantee that almost every school shooter will have imbibed some form of liquid before committing their heinous crimes. It does not follow that everyone who has a drink with their breakfast is going to shoot up their school.
"A usually precedes B" does not necessarily mean "A has occurred, therefor B MUST occur." It doesn't even necessarily mean "A has occurred, therefor B is even 1% likely to occur".
Ping on a cell connection runs around 200 ms, in my experience. *That's* the part that makes tethering suck -- with pages requiring dozens of images and javascript files these days, waiting for a 200ms round trip for each request adds up FAST.
Credit Suisse made headlines this summer when it estimated that YouTube was binging on bandwidth, losing Google a half a billion dollars in 2009 as it streams 75 billion videos. But a new report from Arbor Networks suggests that Google's traffic is approaching 10 percent of the net's traffic, and that it's got so much fiber optic cable, it is simply trading traffic, with no payment involved, with the net's largest ISPs
As countless of such laments throughout recorded history have shown, worries about intellectual demise of the youth are greatly overblown.
Sure. On average, human knowledge has grown throughout history. But that doesn't mean there haven't been slumps. Periods when we took a huge step backwards.
I just don't want you getting the impression that most people like or hate things because it's "cool" to do so
Got it. People who hate macs aren't just jumping on the bandwagon
my experience with most (but not all) Apple users is that they pay a premium price in order to join an exclusive little club where they are permitted to sneer at anyone who doesn't use Apple products
...But people who like macs are just jumping on the bandwagon? Wait, didn't you just say "I just don't want you getting the impression that most people like... things because it's "cool" to do so"?
Schools are again not in the business of presenting moral arguments, they are in the business of presenting facts
That's not entirely true.
Especially with respect to the study of racism, the moral aspect is heavily emphasized, in my experience.
In elementary school, when covering the civil rights movement, several students were moved to the back of the class and ignored for perhaps 5 minutes, as a simple illustration of segregation. Some of those students didn't take well to the lack of attention. It's one of the few moments in elementary school I still remember.
There was a similar exercise in middle school, related to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, in which certain students were marked with blue stickers (analogous to the star of david).
Both exercises were clearly intended to show segregation and racism as morally wrong.
the [Oregon] report urged a mandate for all drivers to install GPS tracking devices that would report driving habits to roadside RFID scanning devices.
You want us to give The Man complete GPS records of all driving?
I actually worked on a small project that involved deploying headless desktop-based Debian servers to locations all over the continental US.
We'd fed-ex the boxes, and most of the time, they'd show up with a hard drive detached, or worse (one fedex ground shipment from CA to FL knocked the RAM right out of the slots on one box). What was worse, we didn't have any technical expertise on site to speak of, so even simple problems were hard to diagnose.
The ASUS motherboards we were using happened to have serial ports, and the BIOS also happened to natively support pumping text-mode input/output over said serial interface -- so you could edit BIOS settings, tweak bootloader settings, put the machine in single user mode and fsck the whole disk, etc. etc. all over serial.
We experimented with plugging these things into serial-over-ip devices; specifically, one like this one -- although I think we paid about $60 each. Results were mixed. For one, it was pretty painful getting things operating at a reasonable serial bitrate (especially for curses-esque interfaces like the BIOS settings interface -- characters were getting lost), and making them reliably accessible over IP wasn't easy either. You could configure these things to "phone home" when they were powered on, but the configuration interface and documentation was pretty bad.
If I recall correctly, KVM over IP devices were a bit more pricey.
So, long story short, when it comes to low-cost remote server management, in my experience, there's something of a lack of quality offerings.
What does he mean that most browsers aren't keeping pace with the web? By definition, browsers define the pace of the web. If your browser can't see it then it doesn't exist yet.
There's no one out there making a good living by creating webpages that browsers can't display.
There are several examples to the contrary. An earlier reply to your comment mentions the ACID test, which has always been "ahead" of browsers, so to speak.
And the recent explosion in javascript optimization (firefox 3.5, safari 4, chrome)? That's also a "following" feature, driven by web app developers using more and more javascript in their products.
And there's another example: AJAX. Back before AJAX had a flashy name, and xmlhttprequest() was made available, the technique that would later be called AJAX was being pioneered using javascript and hidden iframes in the late '90s. xmlhttprequest started seeing wide adoption in browsers starting in 2004.
Browsers are part of driving web innovation, but only part. There are at least two other forces at play: W3C, and web developers.
Ok I'll bite. They aren't a facade because they clearly have the manpower to overthrow their government, but have not done so. Either they keep their current form of government because it works better than anything they've had in their history, or because they are completely broken as a people and thus indifferent.
China has a reputation for strong oppression of political dissidents -- hence the "great firewall of China", and the massacre of hundreds of protesters in Tienanmen Square 20 years ago. If the government is so well loved, why can't dissidents be allowed to speak freely? Clearly, they fear revolution.
From my comcast connection at home, we've had difficulty accessing: twitter.com, ezrider.bart.gov, and facebook.com
From my AT&T smartphone, via both the native browser (which uses AT&T's net connection) and Skyfire (which uses Skyfire's net connection -- they effectively proxy), I've had difficulty with: twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov
Now I'm finally in the office, on our DSL (sonic.net, copper owned by AT&T), and still can't access: twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov
I wonder if twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov are sharing a datacenter or something.
Fuck no. Nobody wants to play with someone who constantly tries to bribe the DM. And nobody wants to play with a DM who can be bribed.
You already have a working business model out there, follow that: in WoW everyone is equal.
...except for the people who buy gold from other players. They're able to buy themselves a little bit of a competitive edge.
In a 5 million player game of D&D, the DM may not take bribes, but some of the players will. The demand exists, and someone's going to satisfy it. It can be you, or your players.
Once you, as "the DM", accept the inevitability of RMT, you might as well get a cut of that money yourself. Not only do you get paid, but you make RMT more fair, by bringing it above the table, where all players have equal opportunity to partake, and hell -- you might even help reduce exploitation of underpaid "farmers" in the 3rd world.
Lots of "uber-secretive" people and companies have made it in the business world. Microsoft, Apple
Sure, they're secretive NOW, now that they have proven technology and established markets.
But was it really their secretive nature that got them off the ground? Or is that just the nature of big business, once you've gotten up to the level of the Apples and Microsofts of the world?
So, since this light is directly related to biological processes, that means in theory it should be tied to mood. For instance, clinical depression is tied to a general depression of all physiological processes. So, it would stand to reason that if you're down, you would emit less light. Someone who is euphoric should look (relatively) like a lightbulb in comparison. I know in the article it says that the amount and color of light varies, I wonder if this would lead towards a mood-ring style ability to read emotions. For instance, someone who is emitting a "pensive" light spectrum, along with other biological cues like sweat, and fidgiting may be a good suspect for scrutiny.
To actually detect this, wouldn't you need the subject to be in a completely dark room?
Otherwise, how do you differentiate their 'trickle' of emitted photons, from the flood of ambient photons reflecting off them?
And once you have them alone, in a room so dark that they can't see their hand in front of their face... Well, that's probably going alter the subject's mood a little.
Wow. Beacon Power's flywheels are actually pretty amazing:
The basic unit of Beacon Power approach is the Smart Energy 25, that is basically an enormous steel vacuum bottle holding a 2,800-pound cylinder made of carbon and fiberglass composite that is levitated by magnets.
Beacon's flywheels take in electricity and use a motor to spin the cylinder so fast that the surface hits Mach 2. The spinning cylinder stores most of the electricity's energy for as long as needed (thanks to the near frictionless vacuum and levitation, it spins for a long time).....with so few moving parts that Beacon Power says they'll last 20 years with no scheduled maintenance.
Slashdot Mirror
The point TFA was making, was 24 FPS film works, is because 24 FPS film is, as you call it "inherently blurry".
Therefor, for 24 FPS games to work equally well, they, too, must be "inherently blurry"
For what it's worth, your diatribe comes off as fairly melodramatic. You'd do well with a rewrite that puts more emphasis on the largest issues (management having no idea how long projects should take, lack of air conditioning, coworkers incapable of basic communication), de-emphasizing the most trivial complaints (manager that checks in "up to 3 times a day"? A company focused on profit? These seem par for the course), and omitting the dramatic hyperbole entirely -- especially the repeated mentions of being "almost in tears", and the paragraph of suicidal ideations.
It was clearly a lousy job, and you were right to leave, but the way you've written your account doesn't put you in a terribly positive light either.
...Unless the police have been tasked with an evil job. Like, I don't know... rounding up all the Jews so they can be systematically exterminated?
I hate to play the Godwin card, but it happened. And it's an obvious, concrete example of how unconditional cooperation with whoever happens to be in power can be unquestionably morally wrong.
Morality and legality may frequently overlap, (e.g. killing and stealing are generally both illegal and morally wrong), but they are nonetheless distinct, and there are many areas in which they don't overlap -- illegal actions that are moral, immoral actions that are legal, etc.
Install 6 extensions (especially firebug), and actively browse in at least 6, if not 12 tabs for a day. If your memory utilization doesn't hit AT LEAST 500 meg after 8 hours, call the editors of the Guiness Book.
This may sound like an extreme usage pattern, but it's all to common for anyone doing any sort of web development.
Who's going to watch a movie trilogy filmed 20 years ago, much less a 5 hour one? Write it up in a book with a handful of pictures.
I'm not sure why there's this trend to having high bandwidth film for stuff that the simple written word can handle. Some uf us still remember how to read.
Changes to the contract do give the consumer the right to terminate without penalty, but few people are aware of this, or take advantage of it. It's not like they call you up and ask "Hey, we've changed the contract. Do you want out of it for free?".
Think back to the SMS rate hikes over the last few years, from 10 cents to 15 to 20. How many people canceled their contracts then? It certainly wasn't many.
Granted, I'd expect *more* response to any sort of data-usage billing change -- it's obviously a higher-profile issue -- but frankly, I wouldn't expect even 10% of iPhone users to cancel their contracts in such an event.
Let's take for granted that "When some kind of school shooting happens, there is typically a message before hand". That does not, in any way, imply that every time you encounter such a "message", there's a statistically significant chance that a violent act will follow.
In fact, most people will agree that most "threats" of this nature do *not* result in violent acts. There thousands, if not millions of "threats" like these, uttered idly every day -- a simple hyperbolic expression of frustration. Meanwhile, school shootings happen a handful of times a year, at worst.
Similarly, I can guarantee that almost every school shooter will have imbibed some form of liquid before committing their heinous crimes. It does not follow that everyone who has a drink with their breakfast is going to shoot up their school.
"A usually precedes B" does not necessarily mean "A has occurred, therefor B MUST occur."
It doesn't even necessarily mean "A has occurred, therefor B is even 1% likely to occur".
Good URIs are just a good idea, period. That's not advice from some shady SEO scumbag, either. That's tim berners-lee and the w3c.
Surely:
http://example.com/articles/man-bites-dog
is vastly superior from the user's point of view to:
http://example.com/cgi-bin/article.php3?PHPSESSID=0983sdf0er888fsd&article_id=73522
Which one are you going to remember? Which one would you rather read over the phone?
It's not the bandwidth. It's the latency.
Ping on a cell connection runs around 200 ms, in my experience. *That's* the part that makes tethering suck -- with pages requiring dozens of images and javascript files these days, waiting for a 200ms round trip for each request adds up FAST.
They already are:
As countless of such laments throughout recorded history have shown, worries about intellectual demise of the youth are greatly overblown.
Sure. On average, human knowledge has grown throughout history. But that doesn't mean there haven't been slumps. Periods when we took a huge step backwards.
The Dark Ages is a term in historiography referring to a perceived period of cultural decline or societal collapse that took place in Western Europe between the fall of Rome and the eventual recovery of learning...
Got it. People who hate macs aren't just jumping on the bandwagon
...But people who like macs are just jumping on the bandwagon? Wait, didn't you just say "I just don't want you getting the impression that most people like... things because it's "cool" to do so"?
That's not entirely true.
Especially with respect to the study of racism, the moral aspect is heavily emphasized, in my experience.
In elementary school, when covering the civil rights movement, several students were moved to the back of the class and ignored for perhaps 5 minutes, as a simple illustration of segregation. Some of those students didn't take well to the lack of attention. It's one of the few moments in elementary school I still remember.
There was a similar exercise in middle school, related to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, in which certain students were marked with blue stickers (analogous to the star of david).
Both exercises were clearly intended to show segregation and racism as morally wrong.
You want us to give The Man complete GPS records of all driving?
Am I the only one who finds that terrifying?
I actually worked on a small project that involved deploying headless desktop-based Debian servers to locations all over the continental US.
We'd fed-ex the boxes, and most of the time, they'd show up with a hard drive detached, or worse (one fedex ground shipment from CA to FL knocked the RAM right out of the slots on one box). What was worse, we didn't have any technical expertise on site to speak of, so even simple problems were hard to diagnose.
The ASUS motherboards we were using happened to have serial ports, and the BIOS also happened to natively support pumping text-mode input/output over said serial interface -- so you could edit BIOS settings, tweak bootloader settings, put the machine in single user mode and fsck the whole disk, etc. etc. all over serial.
We experimented with plugging these things into serial-over-ip devices; specifically, one like this one -- although I think we paid about $60 each. Results were mixed. For one, it was pretty painful getting things operating at a reasonable serial bitrate (especially for curses-esque interfaces like the BIOS settings interface -- characters were getting lost), and making them reliably accessible over IP wasn't easy either. You could configure these things to "phone home" when they were powered on, but the configuration interface and documentation was pretty bad.
If I recall correctly, KVM over IP devices were a bit more pricey.
So, long story short, when it comes to low-cost remote server management, in my experience, there's something of a lack of quality offerings.
More like one of the only sci-fi dramas since Battlestar Galactica.
The one episode I endured seemed to spend 95% of its time on the "drama", and 5% on the sci-fi. It's a soap opera in orbit.
There are several examples to the contrary. An earlier reply to your comment mentions the ACID test, which has always been "ahead" of browsers, so to speak.
And the recent explosion in javascript optimization (firefox 3.5, safari 4, chrome)? That's also a "following" feature, driven by web app developers using more and more javascript in their products.
And there's another example: AJAX. Back before AJAX had a flashy name, and xmlhttprequest() was made available, the technique that would later be called AJAX was being pioneered using javascript and hidden iframes in the late '90s. xmlhttprequest started seeing wide adoption in browsers starting in 2004.
Browsers are part of driving web innovation, but only part. There are at least two other forces at play: W3C, and web developers.
China has a reputation for strong oppression of political dissidents -- hence the "great firewall of China", and the massacre of hundreds of protesters in Tienanmen Square 20 years ago. If the government is so well loved, why can't dissidents be allowed to speak freely? Clearly, they fear revolution.
It appears the ezrider.bart.gov issue is simply one of configuration.
http://ezrider.bart.gov/ times out.
https://ezrider.bart.gov/ does not.
From my comcast connection at home, we've had difficulty accessing:
twitter.com, ezrider.bart.gov, and facebook.com
From my AT&T smartphone, via both the native browser (which uses AT&T's net connection) and Skyfire (which uses Skyfire's net connection -- they effectively proxy), I've had difficulty with:
twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov
Now I'm finally in the office, on our DSL (sonic.net, copper owned by AT&T), and still can't access:
twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov
I wonder if twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov are sharing a datacenter or something.
Even better, that thread points to two even older transparent aluminum headlines from 2004 and 2002.
...except for the people who buy gold from other players. They're able to buy themselves a little bit of a competitive edge.
In a 5 million player game of D&D, the DM may not take bribes, but some of the players will. The demand exists, and someone's going to satisfy it. It can be you, or your players.
Once you, as "the DM", accept the inevitability of RMT, you might as well get a cut of that money yourself. Not only do you get paid, but you make RMT more fair, by bringing it above the table, where all players have equal opportunity to partake, and hell -- you might even help reduce exploitation of underpaid "farmers" in the 3rd world.
Sure, they're secretive NOW, now that they have proven technology and established markets.
But was it really their secretive nature that got them off the ground? Or is that just the nature of big business, once you've gotten up to the level of the Apples and Microsofts of the world?
To actually detect this, wouldn't you need the subject to be in a completely dark room?
Otherwise, how do you differentiate their 'trickle' of emitted photons, from the flood of ambient photons reflecting off them?
And once you have them alone, in a room so dark that they can't see their hand in front of their face... Well, that's probably going alter the subject's mood a little.
Wow. Beacon Power's flywheels are actually pretty amazing:
That's really pretty fucking remarkable. (source)