I had the same problem. Then I became a freelance 'datawarehouse architect' and now I'm one of those asshole consultants who get paid a lot to say the same things you already told your boss. Believe me, it's way more fun then being ignored:)
But on a more serious note: a dental x-ray can vary between 5 and 170 micro Sievert (source: http://hps.org/hpspublications/articles/dentaldoses.html), so this could be between 500 and 17000 Sievert. A rather large uncertainty in such a statement. Not that it wouldn't be lethal, since anything over 6 Sievert (acute dosis) is considered lethal (and even 1 Sievert acute will get you radiation poisoning - see Wikipedia).
What's with scaring people about dental X-rays, though? While I appreciate the need for an analogy, couldn't they have come up with a better analogy for this one? Like "equivalent to standing inside Chernobyl starting on the first day of the accident, for 15 months in a row"? (*)
That'd make the picture much clearer, I'd say.
(*) using 20 Sv for Chernobyl first day exposure (max value) and the average value for the potential exposure with the 100 million dental x-rays, which gives 8750 Sievert total exposure.
The above sounds fine, but what ruins it is the response of the heli-crew to seeing kids in the van: "they shouldn't take kids to a warzone". They LIVE there, in that warzone, they can't help it. It's a callous lack of understanding of the entire situation people below them are living in, and it was reflected in the crews assessment and actions.
I thought it looked funny too. Commentator didn't say anything about it except that it was going really well, so I assume it was planned. I was thinking the same as you - spin-stabilizing it. Still, I'd like to know more.
So both school and family would have spent thousands of dollars on lawyers, the net result being the same as we have now. Yeah, sounds much better than what the principal did.
I think you fail to realize that 10 days suspension is a serious signal. I've been very unhappy with even 1 hour of detention, as a kid. But apparently people aren't properly punished unless they are either bankrupt or body parts are being cut off, it seems.
US society is starting to look very similar to the old Roman society of year zero, in some types of behavior. And last time round it didn't end all that well, for the Romans.
The school principal at least understood that adolescents are not completely developed in the areas of the brain that deal with judgement and morality. That's also why we have special laws for kids.
Yeah, let's start to torpedo civilian ships in international waters... great idea for any nation willing to do business in the rest of the world.
It didn't work out all that well for Germany in WW1, when they did that to the Lusitania (with more right to it than Israel now has, actually, since it was likely carrying munitions). And neither has it worked out so well for North-Korea who recently did that with a South-Korean naval vessel.
The VW was mandated by Hitler. And, not to cast aspirations on the left wing of any current political party, but Hitler was a leftist.
He was the head of the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party, which was very left-wing, anti-corporate, by the standards of the day. Of course, that didn't stop Hitler and his band of criminals from charming corporations when it suited their interests. But please, use proper english. "Conservative" and "benevolent" are two words that should never be applied to Adolph Hitler.
Are talking about the guy that smashed the workers organisations, physically eliminated the entire left wing in Germany and wherever he could find them, killed everyone that was even remotely considered to be aligned with the left (writers, artists, intellectuals etc. and in general killed just about everyone who disagreed with him) all the while providing slave labor to corporations who had funded him liberally? Because if you are, i have to wonder if your use of the term "left-wing" actually has any meaning in common with what the rest of the world uses that word for.
And while there certainly is a discussion possible about the leftist sympathies of the rank and file within the SA, the night of the long knives made very sure that those ideas could never become a factor in the party. That fact alone should provide a clue what Hitlers priorities were.
Whenever I hit my thumb, I blame the stupid hammer as well.
Or, in other words: a fool with a tool is still a fool.
You can use assembly and have decent code, with clear separation of concerns. Or you can have a 4GL programming tool and still make a mess. Which is exactly why some programmers are 10 times more productive than others.
So where I worked we had ASP+VBScript (supplemented with VB6 COM+ modules running with transactional integrity on an Oracle database) and clean modules, separation of concerns and code that we could easily understand and maintain (even the junior programmers had no trouble getting used to it in a few weeks). We built most of the business apps in the last place I worked on such a design. It still works, is very easy to maintain and transfers cleanly to IIS 8 and Windows 2008. All our database code is in a single (small) module, same as the business layers. Presentation layers is a bit more complex but when transferred to.NET you can just get rid of it altogether because.NET takes over that part. Which is exactly what is happening now, ofcourse.
Don't blame the tools for the lack of ability of most programmers.
Unless you consider the negative environmental impact of disposing/recycling all those used cars and the manufacture of newer ones. We would have done less damage to the planet by forcing everyone to drive the car they had an additional year before they could buy a new one.
And thats completely ignoring the fact that the fuel saved by cash for clunkers was only about 1/5th the cost of the program.
If I had traded in my 18mpg Oldsmobile for a 30mpg car, I would have only saved about 250gallons a year. At 3 per gallon, that only saved me $750 dollars. How much of my tax money did the government spend on it though? Oops.
Even disregarding all other arguments for the program, you are comparing a yearly saving with a one-time tax rebate. How long would you drive your new car? Normally cars write off to 0 value in 10 years, so that would save you $7500 in gas over the lifetime of the car. And that is if we put zero value on the environmental and political benefits of needing less oil, because that would skew the benefits even more.
I really don't see why people wouldn't want to drive a stick. The excuse "I don't know how" isn't a valid excuse, except they're too lazy to learn.
The main reason I'm driving an automatic is because my wife isn't licensed to drive with a stick. An automatic is much easier to drive, because you don't need to focus on two things, just on one thing. Now I'm used to it I find I'm much more rested when arriving at home while driving in heavy traffic all the time. So for me it's a matter of safe driving and relaxed driving (which also leads to safer driving). Yes, you can reduce this advantage by then doing other stuff like makeup, etc. - but over here (Netherlands) a lot of people are doing that while driving with a stick, so it's not like stick-driving would reduce it long-term. Only at first.
As for fuel economy: I'm driving a 7-step CVT diesel (CDI), so I'm on average using 6 liters of diesel on 100 km, which is slightly better than 39.2 miles to the gallon.
It seems that manufacturers don't want to build things that last forever. Planned obsolescence is the current fashion.
Planned obsolescence because of new safety measures, new gadgets on-board and new designs yes. Because of breakdowns, no. Perception in the eyes of buyers about how reliable your brand of cars is, can kill the sales of any car if people think your car breaks down faster than other cars. Toyota sells so many cars precisely because they don't break down (or are perceived as more robust) as US cars. In fact, it's incredibly difficult to sell US made cars in Europe because of exactly this problem. So any car manufacturer who can make his cars more reliable, in whatever way, *while not heavily impacting the manufacturing cost*, will do so.
It's a nice disclaimer, but given the current ruling I don't think you could get away with that if you delivered open-source software (say, Pentaho) and it didn't work for the purpose you said it would be good for. Remember, open source is not the same as free. Pentaho et al would certainly be liable if their software did not perform according to the claims they made.
Even for free software, I can think of a situation where someone might get sued for delivering free software that doesn't work. However, that is mostly theoretical.
In the main: if you just deliver normal software and don't make outrageous claims in order to sell the software, you are unlikely to face any trouble.
So you can include that statement as many times as you want, but it just won't apply if you sell stuff that just doesn't work as stated
Emphasis mine: stated where?
If this clause is the only one describing the product, it is perfectly valid. What's not possible is advertising certain capabilities elsewhere (demo, advert) and then relying on this clause to defend you from those promises made.
I think I can agree on that. It would be highly unlikely that this clause will be the onliest communication of the capabilities of the program.
Could be fun though - it would lead to statements such as "I could tell you what this program does, but then I'd have to kill you":)
No, the judge basically said that even with that clause (which they had!), you still have to sell something that actually does what you say it does. So you can include that statement as many times as you want, but it just won't apply if you sell stuff that just doesn't work as stated.
But even free software should do what it claims. Ofcourse, for free software there is (a) the possibility to evaluate the software free of charge and (b) no pressure to advertize it being fit for some purpose it can't meet. So it would be hard to actually get a lawsuit going on this one.
However, I think for malware and software containg trojans this ruling provides interesting possibilities for civil lawsuits.
You know, I know a few Chinese folk, including the owner of a couple of factories, and they complain that the American buyers don't want the slightly higher priced quality goods but always buy the lowest priced crap they also put out. Tariffs won't solve that issue at all because it just increases the prices for all of their stuff. Apart from that, if you institute tariffs the next step would be for China to retaliate likewise or demand compensation from the WTO.
But perhaps you might want to take this up with your local store-owner? It seems they're best positioned to solve this. Because surely, it can't be that the fact you buy the cheapest stuff you can find, has anything to do with the fact you end up with crap?
So what would happen if the standards committee had a standard publication, containing all these proposals with a request for patentholders to come forward within 12 months?
I think you can make a good case that if you're working in an industry, you should be required to know of new standards affecting that industry. This is already required in several areas, like law. In most countries a law becomes official once it is published in a certain place. This could also be done for proposed standards, perhaps in a publication by the patent bureau?
Patent holders all get a free copy of that publication. If they don't care to read it because it might hurt their profit, too bad for them. If they do and they see a standard including a patent or possibly including a patent, they are required to notify the standards committee.
And about the rambus scenario: that was bad, because it was so obvjous. But it's much worse. A friend of mine worked for one of the largest patent holders in the world and at some point was their number 3 patent writer (in amount of patents, not in money). Ofcourse, this was when he was working on an industry standard (curently implemented in nearly every router, PC and printer). As he explained it, the trick was to say that you didn't have any patents, then quickly write them the day after you declared that.
The whole patent scam needs to be revisited, and while the original article misses the mark, it sure aims in the right direction.
Agreed. The translation isn't perfect, but for such a difficult language it did an amazing job. Dutch and Chinese translations are getting better too. With all of the input from suggestions improving their knowledgebase constantly, I'd think that in a few more years you'd be hardpressed to actually see a difference between the human-translated text and the computer-translated text. You'd have to be able to do the translation yourself to see it.
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I had the same problem. Then I became a freelance 'datawarehouse architect' and now I'm one of those asshole consultants who get paid a lot to say the same things you already told your boss. Believe me, it's way more fun then being ignored :)
Beat me to it :)
But on a more serious note: a dental x-ray can vary between 5 and 170 micro Sievert (source: http://hps.org/hpspublications/articles/dentaldoses.html),
so this could be between 500 and 17000 Sievert. A rather large uncertainty in such a statement. Not that it wouldn't be lethal, since anything over 6 Sievert (acute dosis) is considered lethal (and even 1 Sievert acute will get you radiation poisoning - see Wikipedia).
What's with scaring people about dental X-rays, though? While I appreciate the need for an analogy, couldn't they have come up with a better analogy for this one? Like "equivalent to standing inside Chernobyl starting on the first day of the accident, for 15 months in a row"? (*)
That'd make the picture much clearer, I'd say.
(*) using 20 Sv for Chernobyl first day exposure (max value) and the average value for the potential exposure with the 100 million dental x-rays, which gives 8750 Sievert total exposure.
Woooosh....
The above sounds fine, but what ruins it is the response of the heli-crew to seeing kids in the van: "they shouldn't take kids to a warzone". They LIVE there, in that warzone, they can't help it. It's a callous lack of understanding of the entire situation people below them are living in, and it was reflected in the crews assessment and actions.
I thought it looked funny too. Commentator didn't say anything about it except that it was going really well, so I assume it was planned. I was thinking the same as you - spin-stabilizing it. Still, I'd like to know more.
They called it National Socialism for a reason!
Probably for similar reasons why North Korea calls itself the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
I knew it! Damn democrats!
So both school and family would have spent thousands of dollars on lawyers, the net result being the same as we have now. Yeah, sounds much better than what the principal did.
I think you fail to realize that 10 days suspension is a serious signal. I've been very unhappy with even 1 hour of detention, as a kid. But apparently people aren't properly punished unless they are either bankrupt or body parts are being cut off, it seems.
US society is starting to look very similar to the old Roman society of year zero, in some types of behavior. And last time round it didn't end all that well, for the Romans.
The school principal at least understood that adolescents are not completely developed in the areas of the brain that deal with judgement and morality. That's also why we have special laws for kids.
Yeah, let's start to torpedo civilian ships in international waters... great idea for any nation willing to do business in the rest of the world.
It didn't work out all that well for Germany in WW1, when they did that to the Lusitania (with more right to it than Israel now has, actually, since it was likely carrying munitions).
And neither has it worked out so well for North-Korea who recently did that with a South-Korean naval vessel.
Dijkstra, not Djikstra. Brrr....
The VW was mandated by Hitler. And, not to cast aspirations on the left wing of any current political party, but Hitler was a leftist.
He was the head of the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party, which was very left-wing, anti-corporate, by the standards of the day. Of course, that didn't stop Hitler and his band of criminals from charming corporations when it suited their interests. But please, use proper english. "Conservative" and "benevolent" are two words that should never be applied to Adolph Hitler.
Are talking about the guy that smashed the workers organisations, physically eliminated the entire left wing in Germany and wherever he could find them, killed everyone that was even remotely considered to be aligned with the left (writers, artists, intellectuals etc. and in general killed just about everyone who disagreed with him) all the while providing slave labor to corporations who had funded him liberally? Because if you are, i have to wonder if your use of the term "left-wing" actually has any meaning in common with what the rest of the world uses that word for.
And while there certainly is a discussion possible about the leftist sympathies of the rank and file within the SA, the night of the long knives made very sure that those ideas could never become a factor in the party. That fact alone should provide a clue what Hitlers priorities were.
Whenever I hit my thumb, I blame the stupid hammer as well.
Or, in other words: a fool with a tool is still a fool.
You can use assembly and have decent code, with clear separation of concerns. Or you can have a 4GL programming tool and still make a mess. Which is exactly why some programmers are 10 times more productive than others.
So where I worked we had ASP+VBScript (supplemented with VB6 COM+ modules running with transactional integrity on an Oracle database) and clean modules, separation of concerns and code that we could easily understand and maintain (even the junior programmers had no trouble getting used to it in a few weeks). We built most of the business apps in the last place I worked on such a design. It still works, is very easy to maintain and transfers cleanly to IIS 8 and Windows 2008. All our database code is in a single (small) module, same as the business layers. Presentation layers is a bit more complex but when transferred to .NET you can just get rid of it altogether because .NET takes over that part. Which is exactly what is happening now, ofcourse.
Don't blame the tools for the lack of ability of most programmers.
Unless you consider the negative environmental impact of disposing/recycling all those used cars and the manufacture of newer ones. We would have done less damage to the planet by forcing everyone to drive the car they had an additional year before they could buy a new one.
And thats completely ignoring the fact that the fuel saved by cash for clunkers was only about 1/5th the cost of the program.
If I had traded in my 18mpg Oldsmobile for a 30mpg car, I would have only saved about 250gallons a year. At 3 per gallon, that only saved me $750 dollars. How much of my tax money did the government spend on it though? Oops.
Even disregarding all other arguments for the program, you are comparing a yearly saving with a one-time tax rebate. How long would you drive your new car? Normally cars write off to 0 value in 10 years, so that would save you $7500 in gas over the lifetime of the car. And that is if we put zero value on the environmental and political benefits of needing less oil, because that would skew the benefits even more.
I really don't see why people wouldn't want to drive a stick. The excuse "I don't know how" isn't a valid excuse, except they're too lazy to learn.
The main reason I'm driving an automatic is because my wife isn't licensed to drive with a stick. An automatic is much easier to drive, because you don't need to focus on two things, just on one thing. Now I'm used to it I find I'm much more rested when arriving at home while driving in heavy traffic all the time. So for me it's a matter of safe driving and relaxed driving (which also leads to safer driving). Yes, you can reduce this advantage by then doing other stuff like makeup, etc. - but over here (Netherlands) a lot of people are doing that while driving with a stick, so it's not like stick-driving would reduce it long-term. Only at first.
As for fuel economy: I'm driving a 7-step CVT diesel (CDI), so I'm on average using 6 liters of diesel on 100 km, which is slightly better than 39.2 miles to the gallon.
it may increase the life of the car/machine.
Sadly, this may kill the project.
It seems that manufacturers don't want to build things that last forever. Planned obsolescence is the current fashion.
Planned obsolescence because of new safety measures, new gadgets on-board and new designs yes. Because of breakdowns, no. Perception in the eyes of buyers about how reliable your brand of cars is, can kill the sales of any car if people think your car breaks down faster than other cars. Toyota sells so many cars precisely because they don't break down (or are perceived as more robust) as US cars. In fact, it's incredibly difficult to sell US made cars in Europe because of exactly this problem. So any car manufacturer who can make his cars more reliable, in whatever way, *while not heavily impacting the manufacturing cost*, will do so.
The GPL license includes a warranty disclaimer, though.
It's a nice disclaimer, but given the current ruling I don't think you could get away with that if you delivered open-source software (say, Pentaho) and it didn't work for the purpose you said it would be good for. Remember, open source is not the same as free. Pentaho et al would certainly be liable if their software did not perform according to the claims they made.
Even for free software, I can think of a situation where someone might get sued for delivering free software that doesn't work. However, that is mostly theoretical.
In the main: if you just deliver normal software and don't make outrageous claims in order to sell the software, you are unlikely to face any trouble.
So you can include that statement as many times as you want, but it just won't apply if you sell stuff that just doesn't work as stated
Emphasis mine: stated where?
If this clause is the only one describing the product, it is perfectly valid. What's not possible is advertising certain capabilities elsewhere (demo, advert) and then relying on this clause to defend you from those promises made.
I think I can agree on that. It would be highly unlikely that this clause will be the onliest communication of the capabilities of the program.
Could be fun though - it would lead to statements such as "I could tell you what this program does, but then I'd have to kill you" :)
No, the judge basically said that even with that clause (which they had!), you still have to sell something that actually does what you say it does. So you can include that statement as many times as you want, but it just won't apply if you sell stuff that just doesn't work as stated.
But even free software should do what it claims. Ofcourse, for free software there is (a) the possibility to evaluate the software free of charge and (b) no pressure to advertize it being fit for some purpose it can't meet. So it would be hard to actually get a lawsuit going on this one.
However, I think for malware and software containg trojans this ruling provides interesting possibilities for civil lawsuits.
I'd love the see that advertisement...
Because if it advertizes something besides "juggling ones and zeroes", you're not going to get out of it when the lawsuit comes around.
You know, I know a few Chinese folk, including the owner of a couple of factories, and they complain that the American buyers don't want the slightly higher priced quality goods but always buy the lowest priced crap they also put out. Tariffs won't solve that issue at all because it just increases the prices for all of their stuff. Apart from that, if you institute tariffs the next step would be for China to retaliate likewise or demand compensation from the WTO.
But perhaps you might want to take this up with your local store-owner? It seems they're best positioned to solve this. Because surely, it can't be that the fact you buy the cheapest stuff you can find, has anything to do with the fact you end up with crap?
So what would happen if the standards committee had a standard publication, containing all these proposals with a request for patentholders to come forward within 12 months?
I think you can make a good case that if you're working in an industry, you should be required to know of new standards affecting that industry. This is already required in several areas, like law. In most countries a law becomes official once it is published in a certain place. This could also be done for proposed standards, perhaps in a publication by the patent bureau?
Patent holders all get a free copy of that publication. If they don't care to read it because it might hurt their profit, too bad for them. If they do and they see a standard including a patent or possibly including a patent, they are required to notify the standards committee.
And about the rambus scenario: that was bad, because it was so obvjous. But it's much worse. A friend of mine worked for one of the largest patent holders in the world and at some point was their number 3 patent writer (in amount of patents, not in money). Ofcourse, this was when he was working on an industry standard (curently implemented in nearly every router, PC and printer). As he explained it, the trick was to say that you didn't have any patents, then quickly write them the day after you declared that.
The whole patent scam needs to be revisited, and while the original article misses the mark, it sure aims in the right direction.
A right is a concession won from the dominant class in society by the underlying class in society. By force and coercion.
Currently there is no right to run Flash on an iPhone. But if enough people care, you could get that right - by forcing Apple to back down.
EULAS are contracts of adhesion, and therefore unenforceable bullshit.
Try that in court. You might get a shock.
Agreed. The translation isn't perfect, but for such a difficult language it did an amazing job. Dutch and Chinese translations are getting better too. With all of the input from suggestions improving their knowledgebase constantly, I'd think that in a few more years you'd be hardpressed to actually see a difference between the human-translated text and the computer-translated text. You'd have to be able to do the translation yourself to see it.