Slaves were a big up-front expense. If they dropped dead after 3 days you had a loss. Irishmen were paid per day. If they drop dead after 3 days, you get a new one.
It's still a pretty bad decision for *most* people.
And also: could this designer please fix my lung-design so the exhaust is on the bottom where it used to be when we were in the prototype phase (codename "monkey")?
My eyes could use an upgrade as well. And while I applaud the decision to incorporate a spare kidney, I would have preferred a heart and liver that is split in two smaller, separate entities as well. We could have one lung with a heart and a liver on each side, drastically reducing the chance of total failure. And also: why no distributed brain nodes? I mean, decentralized processing works for some other species (lobsters) so why not us? And going on that note: there are species that don't get cancer - I'd really like that design feature incorporated in Homo Sapiens 2.0.
Seriously, how intelligent IS this designer if I can improve the designs in 5 minutes of thinking?
You're censoring my internet. I do happen to drop by in India and China from time to time. This shit applies to me as well.
Apart from that, I know a lot of Indians who are just as unhappy about this as I am. And don't tell me the people implementing this are implementing the "will of the majority". They're just implementing 'minority clique hanging on to power, lesson 1' and you know it. The sole Indians who should cheer this on are the ones profiting from it. That leaves 99% of the Indians on my side.
Skilled Devs can program anything with Turing machines, if they have to. That doesn't mean it should be the default.
Point is, CSS is a programming language, designed by people who thought it wasn't. So we're left without variables, constants and other items that would make life much easier all around. You could use XSLT and XML to style everything, but that solution has its own problems.
I'm still not so sure about the "sham" thing with mrs. Knox. She went out of her way to make herself suspicious in any possible way. That attitude would not have gotten anyone off in the US either. She's lucky that in Italy, they don't (usually) shoot first and ask questions later. The fact they couldn't make it stick doesn't mean she didn't do it, either. However, there were errors in the investigation so she was released. She wasn't tortured either.
Would you suggest that a random EU citizen would get better treatment in any US jail when behaving as suspicious as mrs. Knox? Given the way things happen in US courts according to the news we see and hear, I strongly doubt it.
You are (incorrectly) assuming that ticking any of those boxes on LinkedIn actually means something for people. Basically, I always have all of them ticked, regardless of what I'm looking for: just send me the mails, I can decide for myself what I want to do with them thank-you-very-much. Because even when *I* am not looking, someone I know in my circle of friends may be looking for something just like it.
Could be any big multinational, basically. I don't see Linux used much outside universities and city councils, and even there the employees are bitching about it. Notable exception: a lot of Oracle databases run on RHEL(*). Apart from that, most of the internal servers I see are all Windows. With VM/ESX they're easy to manage and roll out. But MS SQL Server sure doesn't run on Linux and that is becoming the database of choice for a lot of smaller installations due to the braindead Oracle policies. Although if you ask me, these outfits would probably be better off with PostgresQL.
(*) But even Oracle doesn't support that very much. Try installing Oracle Warehouse Builder on a new version of RHEL, even one minor patchlevel above the certification - you'll spend weeks on the phone with Oracle support. Last time round it took them 6 weeks to get most of the errors fixed but we still have random errors.
Not sure which invasion you mean, unless you mean the one that was stopped in Austria a few centuries ago.
For The Netherlands, which is not completely representative of Europe but still close, the number of immigrants from Muslim countries has declined by 60% since 2003. Most migration nowadays is from new EU countries such as Romania and Bulgaria.
The banking cartels aren't destroying Germany, they're part of the state structure.
What *is* happening is that social gains are under assault. But not due to any invasions, or banking troubles, but because the banking crisis is the symptom of a much bigger issue, which is a classic capitalist overinvestment crisis. The onliest way in which profit growth can be maintained is by squeezing the workers. So that will happen.
Muslims provide easy scapegoats. However, Muslims are not the main issue at all. We are talking about pension funds that should hold billions of dollars. I fail to see how adding a few percentage points in population will bring down that system.
It was smart to refuse to stay, even at triple the salary (if you can afford it ofcourse). I once stayed at a place that doubled my salary (to finish up, transfer knowledge and make sure they could hire someone) and that was the worst decision in my life because I allowed them to drag it out for 6 months. Once you've let go, mentally, staying is just the fast track to a burn out.
If he knows fortran and SQL, picking up Visual Basic shouldn't be that hard. Just give him the free version of Microsoft Visual Studio, and a book. That shouldn't cost more than 50 dollars. Now he can practice with the practice examples and then build from there. Most office automation software is at about the same level of complexity as the samples: you need to enter and store data, and it needs to look semi-decent. If he is good in talking to people and communicating, that should give him the combination of skills to get a job.
However, even then, the trick is to get the foot in the door. If he's unemployed he might be better off by becoming a freelancer and get experience and work that way. After a few years of freelance work and if you're good at it, most companies will offer you jobs if you do a good job when you're there. However, by that time he'll probably not want to accept it. Freelance work is addictive:)
An alternative is to use his knowledge about "software companies should have, but don't", such as a a VB web-app for entering days off, or registration of visitors - really simple stuff - and build those. With that, he could have "sales meetings" with companies. And if there is IT present in such a meeting (he could request it), he could also tell them that he could help them out if they needed some extra hands in that area. Which is much more powerful as a proposal than "please hire me!".
If it is possible to design a house that only consumes http://www.hollowtop.com/cls_html/solar_power.htm - gives them 2500 kWh/year. Uses a bit of real estate but we can get more efficient cells and then the price goes up but you can certainly get more power than this. And it is more than enough if you designed your house the right way. Even without a lot of measures, the average energy use for a Dutch household (2.1 persons) is around 3500 kWh/year. The more modern houses do better. And that is with just the general measures that every house has to follow.
So hopelessly optimistic, I think not. Optimistic yes, but certainly doable with current tech. Maybe not at a pricepoint you'd like, but doable? I think so.
Replacing... mm perhaps not. But I think that relegating it to backup-status for now will be common. Sort of like sails on ships. When they switched from sails to steam power, they kept them for backup for a long time. If it is only needed to provide electricity, you can tune it much better than when it needs to provide power to the wheels.
As for tea, it is for movies: Throw away the herbs and leaves after using them once and use some fresh ones. Even if that costs a few bucks, but at least you spare yourself the embarrassment of showing that you don't know jack about tea. Or movies.
Well... in China everyone uses the leaves multiple times. But hey, what do they know about tea, right?:)
Anyone ever consider the link between the War on Drugs and the illegal immigration problems? Our War on Drugs has funded the drug cartels south of the US (Mexico for sure, Central and South America also) so well that they pose a serious challenge to the government. That makes for a poor business environment, discouraging investment and job creation. No jobs, look North.
While I have no sympathy for those that chant "illegal immigrants are the cause of all our problems", I do think the business environment was pretty poor to start with. Given a state doing quite well, with opportunities for those on the bottom, noone would have had to turn to drugs. But yeah, add a not-really-functioning corrupt state to a mix of humongous amounts of money from drugs, spice it up with modern weapons imported from neighbouring countries then yeah, it all goes downhill from there.
Stopping the vicious circle now is much harder than it was even 10 years ago. The crisis did not make things easier at all.
True, that. Also, I would wager that in a starvation situation, it's not the fact you lack muscle which is the biggest issue, but the Ice Age, or bad droughts, or other factors beyond your control. In that case saving as much energy as possible would do more for you than saving muscle. If there's plants or roots to be found, you need very little muscle to eat them.
He never tried to improve his country. He imported for 700.000 dollars a year in Hennessey Cognac, drove around in a Mercedes, fucked a lot of women, who knew they and their family would die if they refused, and generally acted like an asshole. He may or may not have been a pedophile, but we cannot know that. However, given his character I'd not put it past him to have at least tried it.
This, in a time when there was starvation in the country, with areas resorting to cannibalism. His focus on personal and military spending while everyone starved, his refusal to have anything to do with the rest of the world, even to accept aid, makes him a world-class scumbag. And good riddance.
Anything he did to improve his country was at best an accidental side-effect of his other ambitions. And I couldn't point to a single thing that has improved in North Korea in the past years, so please, give it a try.
Your attitude is shared by a lot of Chinese. However, if I ask them if they'd like everything they do on Weibo to be approved by a government official first, they say no. If I ask them if they want to know about the things that Weibo reports, they say yes. If I ask them: do you want corrupt government officials to be removed from power, they say yes. If I ask them: would you like to know that your cooking oil is poisonous and that your babies' milk contains melanin, killing him, they say yes.
Basically they want free speech for those issues where it suits them. But it doesn't work that way, because the corrupt factory owners never appreciate free speech. So unless you get something we call "free speech", you are giving a blank cheque to those in power who want their corruption to remain secret.
Remember: if an idea cannot stand criticism, it's probably because it's not as good as you thought it was.
Now I have heard it said that people in the city think the peasants are easily incited by some people providing silly ideas (a la Falun Gong). But in most Western countries this type of thing is still illegal: see your own examples. No nation in the world has absolute free speech. But the Chinese should have the freedom to criticize what is going on. Because one thing is certain: the corrupt owners of factories and companies will not stop poisoning people, or putting up buildings that colllapse, or steal the land of the peasants, if noone can speak about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Slaves were a big up-front expense. If they dropped dead after 3 days you had a loss. Irishmen were paid per day. If they drop dead after 3 days, you get a new one.
Disabling JavaScript works here to get around the SOPA banners (which are pretty pointless outside the US, since we can't do anything much about it).
Which is the point. You can't do much about it, but you'll suffer the consequences with the rest of the world.
It's still a pretty bad decision for *most* people.
And also: could this designer please fix my lung-design so the exhaust is on the bottom where it used to be when we were in the prototype phase (codename "monkey")?
My eyes could use an upgrade as well. And while I applaud the decision to incorporate a spare kidney, I would have preferred a heart and liver that is split in two smaller, separate entities as well. We could have one lung with a heart and a liver on each side, drastically reducing the chance of total failure. And also: why no distributed brain nodes? I mean, decentralized processing works for some other species (lobsters) so why not us? And going on that note: there are species that don't get cancer - I'd really like that design feature incorporated in Homo Sapiens 2.0.
Seriously, how intelligent IS this designer if I can improve the designs in 5 minutes of thinking?
I guess he was talking about IPv666 :)
Before we had internet, we were trading tapes and disks in schoolyards and in closed meetings. These were distributed over the entire country again.
If they push hard enough, it will go back to those days. The net effect on piracy will be near zero.
You're censoring my internet. I do happen to drop by in India and China from time to time. This shit applies to me as well.
Apart from that, I know a lot of Indians who are just as unhappy about this as I am. And don't tell me the people implementing this are implementing the "will of the majority". They're just implementing 'minority clique hanging on to power, lesson 1' and you know it. The sole Indians who should cheer this on are the ones profiting from it. That leaves 99% of the Indians on my side.
Skilled Devs can program anything with Turing machines, if they have to. That doesn't mean it should be the default.
Point is, CSS is a programming language, designed by people who thought it wasn't. So we're left without variables, constants and other items that would make life much easier all around. You could use XSLT and XML to style everything, but that solution has its own problems.
I think the definition came out of Ambrose Bierce's dictionary :)
(nope, I checked, it's not there. But it would fit in nicely - http://www.thedevilsdictionary.com/)
propaganda is concerned with selling ideas, marketing with selling goods.
I'm still not so sure about the "sham" thing with mrs. Knox. She went out of her way to make herself suspicious in any possible way. That attitude would not have gotten anyone off in the US either. She's lucky that in Italy, they don't (usually) shoot first and ask questions later. The fact they couldn't make it stick doesn't mean she didn't do it, either. However, there were errors in the investigation so she was released. She wasn't tortured either.
Would you suggest that a random EU citizen would get better treatment in any US jail when behaving as suspicious as mrs. Knox? Given the way things happen in US courts according to the news we see and hear, I strongly doubt it.
You are (incorrectly) assuming that ticking any of those boxes on LinkedIn actually means something for people. Basically, I always have all of them ticked, regardless of what I'm looking for: just send me the mails, I can decide for myself what I want to do with them thank-you-very-much. Because even when *I* am not looking, someone I know in my circle of friends may be looking for something just like it.
Could be any big multinational, basically. I don't see Linux used much outside universities and city councils, and even there the employees are bitching about it. Notable exception: a lot of Oracle databases run on RHEL(*). Apart from that, most of the internal servers I see are all Windows. With VM/ESX they're easy to manage and roll out. But MS SQL Server sure doesn't run on Linux and that is becoming the database of choice for a lot of smaller installations due to the braindead Oracle policies. Although if you ask me, these outfits would probably be better off with PostgresQL.
(*) But even Oracle doesn't support that very much. Try installing Oracle Warehouse Builder on a new version of RHEL, even one minor patchlevel above the certification - you'll spend weeks on the phone with Oracle support. Last time round it took them 6 weeks to get most of the errors fixed but we still have random errors.
Not sure which invasion you mean, unless you mean the one that was stopped in Austria a few centuries ago.
For The Netherlands, which is not completely representative of Europe but still close, the number of immigrants from Muslim countries has declined by 60% since 2003. Most migration nowadays is from new EU countries such as Romania and Bulgaria.
The banking cartels aren't destroying Germany, they're part of the state structure.
What *is* happening is that social gains are under assault. But not due to any invasions, or banking troubles, but because the banking crisis is the symptom of a much bigger issue, which is a classic capitalist overinvestment crisis. The onliest way in which profit growth can be maintained is by squeezing the workers. So that will happen.
Muslims provide easy scapegoats. However, Muslims are not the main issue at all. We are talking about pension funds that should hold billions of dollars. I fail to see how adding a few percentage points in population will bring down that system.
It was smart to refuse to stay, even at triple the salary (if you can afford it ofcourse). I once stayed at a place that doubled my salary (to finish up, transfer knowledge and make sure they could hire someone) and that was the worst decision in my life because I allowed them to drag it out for 6 months. Once you've let go, mentally, staying is just the fast track to a burn out.
If he knows fortran and SQL, picking up Visual Basic shouldn't be that hard. Just give him the free version of Microsoft Visual Studio, and a book. That shouldn't cost more than 50 dollars. Now he can practice with the practice examples and then build from there. Most office automation software is at about the same level of complexity as the samples: you need to enter and store data, and it needs to look semi-decent. If he is good in talking to people and communicating, that should give him the combination of skills to get a job.
However, even then, the trick is to get the foot in the door. If he's unemployed he might be better off by becoming a freelancer and get experience and work that way. After a few years of freelance work and if you're good at it, most companies will offer you jobs if you do a good job when you're there. However, by that time he'll probably not want to accept it. Freelance work is addictive :)
An alternative is to use his knowledge about "software companies should have, but don't", such as a a VB web-app for entering days off, or registration of visitors - really simple stuff - and build those. With that, he could have "sales meetings" with companies. And if there is IT present in such a meeting (he could request it), he could also tell them that he could help them out if they needed some extra hands in that area. Which is much more powerful as a proposal than "please hire me!".
This may be of interest: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/BoiLu.shtml
If it is possible to design a house that only consumes http://www.hollowtop.com/cls_html/solar_power.htm - gives them 2500 kWh/year. Uses a bit of real estate but we can get more efficient cells and then the price goes up but you can certainly get more power than this. And it is more than enough if you designed your house the right way. Even without a lot of measures, the average energy use for a Dutch household (2.1 persons) is around 3500 kWh/year. The more modern houses do better. And that is with just the general measures that every house has to follow.
So hopelessly optimistic, I think not. Optimistic yes, but certainly doable with current tech. Maybe not at a pricepoint you'd like, but doable? I think so.
Replacing... mm perhaps not. But I think that relegating it to backup-status for now will be common. Sort of like sails on ships. When they switched from sails to steam power, they kept them for backup for a long time. If it is only needed to provide electricity, you can tune it much better than when it needs to provide power to the wheels.
Did you bother to read the entire argument? Because it looks like you stopped reading after the first 9 words...
As for tea, it is for movies: Throw away the herbs and leaves after using them once and use some fresh ones. Even if that costs a few bucks, but at least you spare yourself the embarrassment of showing that you don't know jack about tea. Or movies.
Well... in China everyone uses the leaves multiple times. But hey, what do they know about tea, right? :)
Anyone ever consider the link between the War on Drugs and the illegal immigration problems? Our War on Drugs has funded the drug cartels south of the US (Mexico for sure, Central and South America also) so well that they pose a serious challenge to the government. That makes for a poor business environment, discouraging investment and job creation. No jobs, look North.
While I have no sympathy for those that chant "illegal immigrants are the cause of all our problems", I do think the business environment was pretty poor to start with. Given a state doing quite well, with opportunities for those on the bottom, noone would have had to turn to drugs. But yeah, add a not-really-functioning corrupt state to a mix of humongous amounts of money from drugs, spice it up with modern weapons imported from neighbouring countries then yeah, it all goes downhill from there.
Stopping the vicious circle now is much harder than it was even 10 years ago. The crisis did not make things easier at all.
True, that. Also, I would wager that in a starvation situation, it's not the fact you lack muscle which is the biggest issue, but the Ice Age, or bad droughts, or other factors beyond your control. In that case saving as much energy as possible would do more for you than saving muscle. If there's plants or roots to be found, you need very little muscle to eat them.
Woops - you're right. Freudian slip? :)
two foreign wars have not been enough to do this. What do they hope to gain with a third.
Wait, who are we talking about?
Good point. At first I thought it was about Nork but now I'm not so sure anymore :)
He never tried to improve his country. He imported for 700.000 dollars a year in Hennessey Cognac, drove around in a Mercedes, fucked a lot of women, who knew they and their family would die if they refused, and generally acted like an asshole. He may or may not have been a pedophile, but we cannot know that. However, given his character I'd not put it past him to have at least tried it.
This, in a time when there was starvation in the country, with areas resorting to cannibalism. His focus on personal and military spending while everyone starved, his refusal to have anything to do with the rest of the world, even to accept aid, makes him a world-class scumbag. And good riddance.
Anything he did to improve his country was at best an accidental side-effect of his other ambitions. And I couldn't point to a single thing that has improved in North Korea in the past years, so please, give it a try.
Your attitude is shared by a lot of Chinese. However, if I ask them if they'd like everything they do on Weibo to be approved by a government official first, they say no. If I ask them if they want to know about the things that Weibo reports, they say yes. If I ask them: do you want corrupt government officials to be removed from power, they say yes. If I ask them: would you like to know that your cooking oil is poisonous and that your babies' milk contains melanin, killing him, they say yes.
Basically they want free speech for those issues where it suits them. But it doesn't work that way, because the corrupt factory owners never appreciate free speech. So unless you get something we call "free speech", you are giving a blank cheque to those in power who want their corruption to remain secret.
Remember: if an idea cannot stand criticism, it's probably because it's not as good as you thought it was.
Now I have heard it said that people in the city think the peasants are easily incited by some people providing silly ideas (a la Falun Gong). But in most Western countries this type of thing is still illegal: see your own examples. No nation in the world has absolute free speech. But the Chinese should have the freedom to criticize what is going on. Because one thing is certain: the corrupt owners of factories and companies will not stop poisoning people, or putting up buildings that colllapse, or steal the land of the peasants, if noone can speak about it.