Considering I have an IS degree and not a geology degree and this is the first time I've heard of it, yes it is news. And I find it worthy of news for nerds, as I am a nerd and find this fascinating.
I have a son interested in geology as well, he probably hasn't heard of this. Perhaps he'll get a head start on his degree and start looking things up now.
Okay first, it depends on where you did tech support.
Yes, it's true there might be some discrimination, but it's not because you have a specific kind of experience... it's because you DON'T have another specific kind of experience. I think you misconstrued "We don't want you because you worked in support" with "We don't want you because you don't have experience in an area we are looking for."
The #1 most attractive thing on a resume is relevant job experience, even if it's 10 years ago. You have experience in tech/customer support. Almost anyone can get that. We want you to have experience in computer engineering!
You are screwed first and foremost by the job market. It's a buyers market, meaning the businesses hold all the cards when it comes to hiring. It's hard for anyone to find a job. Those with relevant job experience get hired first. That's always been the case.
Make sure you list out anything that stands out that makes you a go to guy, or any unusual software packages you used to do your job. The perception that, for example, Dell is just a place that will take anyone as a support rep, is because it is! There are plenty of chop shops out there. At the same time, places that I work, actually invest in their people and try to create people who actually know what they are doing. You have to make yourself stand out, and places like gateway support don't help you stand out. My company is a B2B support shop, so the standards are much higher (businesses pay a premium for knowledgeable support). I stand out because of all the software packages I need to know and all the levels I've been thru. I work in support, but my resume looks good because I look like someone who can be counted on, can learn new things, and be a go to when the going gets rough (and all those other cliches HR likes to use).
If you have nothing you can use from this job, you can remove it from your resume, but I doubt it will help or hurt you. I predict you are one of the many americans who will be underemployed until the US economy recovers because no one is hiring anywhere except at the bankruptcy attorney's office.
The US government is notorious for giving itself exceptions, both directly and indirectly. Credit cards come with hidden fees that the merchant must pay. For example, of that $1 for the ticket, anywhere from 1 to 5% goes to a transaction processor who validates that the card is good and has an open balance. That's 95 to 99 cents that goes to the vendor of the ticket. It's illegal in the states to charge someone a different price for any item using a credit card instead of cash, so the merchant eats that. It's meant to encourage the use of credit cards as something just as good as cash, and makes the fee a cost of doing business. Since what I described is a federal rule, this is a good way to get around since this is only a state law.
There are probably many reasons for this law being enacted. Laws don't usually have only one true reason for existence, and you know that if it wasn't a law, some people would try to blow their $5000 platinum card on lottery tickets at some point.
side note: you may see many local mom and pop gas stations charging gas at two prices, one for credit and one for cash. Yes, that's illegal, and one of the reasons you don't see the big corporate chains doing it. However, the mom and pops are getting away with it because gas margins are slim and in the current economic climate the government isn't entirely unwilling to crack down on them since they have more important things to worry about at the moment.
This article, listed in the summary, has this as an official response from EA:
"Please do not continue to post these threads or you account may be at risk of banning, which in some cases would mean you would need to buy a new copy to play Spore."
I'm all for calling out bad summaries, but the summary appears to be correct.
The bottom of the article has the actual conclusion that the article was trying to make:
Follow-up questions revealed that the students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs. The results suggest that a familiarity with Windows dialogs have bred a degree of contempt and that users simply don't care what the boxes say anymore.
The authors suggest that user training might help more people recognize the risks involved with fake popups and the diagnostic signs of genuine Windows dialogs, but the fact that the students didn't appear to spend any more time evaluating the fake dialogs raises questions as to whether education is enough.
I'm not so sure I agree with the idea that gmail is that unprofessional. With yahoo I get your point. Yahoo feels kinda kiddie, everyone has a a yahoo address, and sometimes they get blocked by spam systems, etc. Gmail doesn't quite suffer from the same issues, and, at least for a while in the beginning, having a gmail address was a geek badge of honor, even though everyone could get one. Basically if you are dealing with anyone remotely nerdlike I'd say your gmail address isn't a bad thing. However, if you are dealing with nontechies or suits then yes you are probably going down the right road. I just wanted to throw that out there in case it could save you some time.
... and it's fallacious. Make it seem like someone who advocates creationism or intelligent design is under attack and that person garners sympathy, but that doesn't make their point of view a valid scientific argument. It's perfectly fine and reasonable in the scientific community for someone to be religious and have religious beliefs. When you start saying that it's okay to pass religion off as a counter argument to science, well then the scientific community has the right to question your credentials as a scientist because you are committing a scientific error, just like if you said the earth is flat.
Galileo used reason and the scientific method to determine the earth and the planets revolve around the sun. Creationism and intelligent design fail the scientific method's process because they are not something that can be supported by impirical evidence. Under the rules of logic they are merely conjecture.
Intelligent design is a great thing to discuss in philosophy or theology class in a private institution that is not funded by public money. Governments and scientific institutions should not be in the business of teaching our children religious beliefs and passing them off as biology or physics. Next thing you know, there will be subtle shifts that the government wants us to start believing in a specific religion, to the exclusion of others.
...but what if Apple pulled a Microsoft and put an intentional bug into the app? Sure, it might seem a little too sophisticated for such a small thing, and people will still blame iTunes since it's the main application, but what if tomorrow Steve releases a press release apologizing to Vista users but blames it squarely on Vista "oh sorry something in our new version invoked a buggy piece of vista and we had to work around it." And what if that's what all the support people at apple are instructed to say? What if friends down the street say "oh dude I have a Mac/XP and it works fine for me" might iPod users say "fuckin' vista!" With a little careful preparation, I think this might be possible... maybe only a little bit of a stretch?:)
Sounds a little conspiracy theory-ish, but keep an eye out the next couple of days. You never know.
I am a mac fan, but I don't put evil past Apple by any means, they are a corporation after all. At the same time, evil attacking evil is loads of fun to watch, but I pity the people who get caught in the middle who can't sync now until a fix is released.
It's easy for slashdotters to recommend telecommuting because, like driving, 98% of slashdotters act like they are good enough for telecommuting. That's patently false, because it's loads more difficult to manage most people via telecommuting.
The biggest barrier to telecommuting is bringing on entry level people who don't understand their job yet. Management and entry level people work best and most efficiently when seeing each other face to face. In a business, if it takes longer to ramp up an employee, or they are doing very poor as a remote employee, that goes to the bottom line as well, despite energy savings. I know it sucks that people aren't able to immediately telecommute, and it's true that some telecommuting is better than none at all. The problem is, just like everything else surrounding this energy issue, telecommuting is not the single panacea that one would believe.
I would in fact have IT work with HR and come up with a rough estimate of who might have the ability and willingness to work remotely and try to come up with a target figure. Then work with departments to determine who can and who can't work remotely, and come up with incentives for those who are able (but not necessarily willing). "Able" is of course a subjective term, which is why you need to involve HR. Don't let the IT asshole who can't figure out what TCP/IP means work from home as a network admin.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
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Quests
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· Score: 2, Interesting
While MMOs are not all that new (Ultima online anyone?), the quest part seems to be getting dumber and dumber as the world moves on to better graphics and larger quantities of gear. Grinding seems to be all you do in later games. I was originally a big Baldur's Gate fan, loved the quest line, side quests and customization there.
I contend that they are getting smarter, but I think your definition of smarter and mine are not the same. Grinding is very very hard to eliminate, because to eliminate grinding, you have to provide quests making leveling easy enough that the laziest, stupidest person can do it without grinding. MMORPGs have to cater to literally hundreds of different kinds of interests, to get the most people, while balancing everyone's needs and giving them choices. Every MMORPG will become grind because you reach a point of diminishing returns on your personal enjoyment. If you reach that point, you should move on.
I don't play WOW but I've seen plenty of huge boss character that are too powerful for just one character. You have to create teams, come up with tactics, and then execute. On a personal level, doing this a couple times is very fulfilling to actually be able to pull it off. And there are two sides to this. If you have to kill the boss 20 times to get one item to drop, that's annoying, not fun. On the same token if you can run into any situation like Leeroy Jenkins and not have any consequences, that's not as much fun either. Again, all about balance. How well balanced WOW is compared to other MMORPGs is where I find the intelligence. They have more people playing that than any other MMORPG so they are doing something right.
I contend that MMOs wont get to this level of questing again until we go back to unique items. Eg the holy grail gaining a faction special privileges like +2 to all skills and only one can be in a realm/server at a time. Then the players can quest over it and battle and gain things that way. As the grail goes from faction to faction they can either guard it themselves or they can use resources to put it in an adequately difficult location. Have enough items like this and you get quests defined by players rather than the grind of doing it over and over again. As a guild gets more and more of the unique items it would get more powerful as a whole. You would get small uprisings with people trying to take over the guild and people moving around rouge style stealing items. It would be fantastic game play. Princesses giving special trade privileges, Relics gaining stats, deities granting favor.
The problem with this is that you would immediately institute everything that was bad about Evercrack (there were good things, this was simply one thing that isn't). EQ had tons of rare items that were hard to get, but so hard that it was discouraging to go after, and also certain people would camp at repop sites until the beast came back and they'd kill it, hope the item dropped, then sell the item/character on ebay to some sap who thinks it's okay to pay $500 for a virtual piece of property. That type of thing really discourages middle and low end gamers. And to sustain any MMORPG you have to have some kind of volume. Perhaps someone can create such a world and make money off it. I encourage it and wish you the best. Blizzard makes good games that appear to the most number of people possible. There will be people not satisfied on the high end, and I can't blame you if you are one of those people, you just aren't always the target audience.
As for "guild uprisings" most MMORPGs are trying to deal with the fact that a majority of people do NOT want to fight each other. Some people think that in order for such games to be enjoyable, everyone should be fighting each other. That is entirely untrue. Many of us don't want to have to deal with griefers, and find cooperation more fun than competition.
If the items were completely unique, you create a situation where one person would complete the quest and everyone else would no
What was it that prompted Slashdot to start posting its hate mail? Was someone clamoring for this?
I can only guess that posting stuff like this which causes a flurry of messages proclaiming it's stupidity is merely the result of slashdot trying to get more eyeballs on advertisements.
I come to that conclusion by process of elimination because there is no other intelligent reason for this.
I mean c'mon! Okay you post duplicate articles, you don't read summaries, and you once let JonKatz sully this site. But cmon! Do you really have any journalistic integrity? If you want to post letters from users, post constructive letters and have a discussion about them, rather than post flamebait.
The entire "idle" section is horrible, it's not even entertaining. To top it all off, Idle's layout is ugly, and when I post a comment, the comment field is 2 inches wide in the latest version of firefox! Why do I want to see anything here?
Kill Idle and bury it. For all of those who agree with me, I suggest you go to your preferences and set your content for the Idle section to "none." I'll be blocking the entire section because it seems to be the only way to get thru to the slashdot editors that crap should not be tolerated. This is because if you block the article, you block the ad that comes with it, and that hits home in the pocketbook. Follow the money...
Thanks to a lot of culture bashing, Unions got a bad rep since the 80s. Lest we forget, unions help give us reforms such as the 40 hour work week, safety standards for the work place, and minimum wage, etc. These are all good things.
Unions became so powerful, however, that people thought they were a block to progress. People have been busting unions since the 80s, and look where it's got us. The biggest problem here is that the working wage is not keeping up with inflation.
Yes, SOME unions got mixed up with organized crime... yes SOME unions promoted mediocre people over talented ones and got into shady politics... yes SOME people with union mentality want an obsessive number of perks and encourage not standing out so that no one "looks bad" when one person shines. But unions also protect us from corporations who want to raid pension plans and push workers to work longer hours for low wages. Obviously when unions did so many good things for us and then suddenly had some problems because they are two powerful, you don't throw them out entirely. Companies will find any reason to make employees work as hard as they can and resist paying them that little extra raise, especially in companies with huge numbers of employees.
Unions are an important check and balance with corporations. Right now the corporations are out of control.
IT can't unionize now... that loner mentality is too strong, and most IT identify with a while collar job. However, IT has to run cable, do heavy lifting, work long hours, be on call. In the IT industry that's all worn as a badge of honor but in truth, are you getting properly paid? Are you being ask to work too long? The average true number of hours worked in the US has been going up, because companies can get away with squeezing extra hours out of salaried white collar employees. Those same employees don't get the benefit of more pay for those extra hours and as such are getting a little screwed here.
If anything, we should not take away the message "unions are evil" and be thinking, are we treating our IT reps right?
You see, people incorrectly assume that prices are tied to costs, and that when costs go down, prices go down. That's a lie that businesses have been foisting on the populace for decades because they aren't telling you the whole truth. Economics shows us different.
Prices are tied to supply and demand. When demand goes up, prices go up. When demand goes down, prices go down. Supply is the opposite. Supply is up, prices down, supply down prices up.
The supply for text messages is basically near infinity, and is not changing. Therefore only changes in demand will change prices. Now, have you noticed that prices are going up lately, plans are getting higher, and they are looking at 15c a message rates now? Demand is going up, of course. The cell phone market is saturated, but text messaging is still a growth sub-industry as more teens get phones and more people try texting.
We are willing to pay these rates because the market will bear it. What's worse is that they still easily allow overages. I put a block on my son's cell phone for texting, because the monthly unlimited rate to text on verizon is outrageous and he can't control his texting. We got him a new phone to replace his old one, and we found out he had texting back and had started texting again. He ran up a $64 bill on texting alone! We called Verizon and they found out the block was "accidentally lifted" with the new phone and they refunded us the money. Of course they refunded the money, because they conveniently dropped it "by mistake" and they got caught being sleazy. How many people would just pay the bill? And how many people are willing to pay $20 a month just so they don't have to pay $64 a month? All the major telecoms take advantage of this on purpose, and it goes to their bottom line.
To fix this problem, you need to choke off demand. The market will have to saturate the with texting so that there are no more new customers. Instead of competing to get more new customers, they are competing to get customers away from other companies. That's typically when prices start coming down. Right now Verizon and Sprint offer $100 talk and text all you like plans, and there is a company that just came into the area called MetroPCS which offers the same plan for $40. The cell phone market is saturated, so now you are going to see some price competition. Because texting piggy backs on phone plans, you'll see that begin to drop.
The process would accelerate if we had more competition, and if they would stop allowing phones to be tied to a specific carrier and forced companies to allow us to chose the phone and the plan. The justice department and the SEC need to put some pressure on and stop allowing cell phone company mergers.
What poor has Reaganomics fucked, prey tell? The poor that now have at least one family car? The poor that have TV's, designer shoes, new clothes, food so much that they are fat, a higher home ownership rate than ever before, playstations, xboxes, ipods, cell phones... do you mean those poor?
Exactly which poor are you looking at? I'm looking at the poor that don't have cars and rely on public transportation every day, eat McDonalds every day (which is why they get fat), sit at home because it's too dangerous to go outside and get activity, and got foreclosed on because of those lovely loans we were giving out to increase home ownership so they moved into an overly expensive apartment, or back with other families into houses too small to accomodate them all. Come visit some families in the inner city or in depressed rural area that lost a factory or something like that. I'd love to show you sometime. Stop making up facts, and stop attacking the poor like it's all their fault for wanting more.
Let's look at one thing, a heart bypass. That will set you back anywhere from 50k to 200k, depending on what's involved. That's at least a car, if not a house. Now, let's toss in a few months at nursing home for grandma, maybe mom does a year long cancer battle, and you can pretty much see that there's just no way people can afford to pay for all of this.
You make a good point, but then if the government can't pay for it, how in the hell does private business pay for it? As you should be able to see... THEY DON'T! A record number of people in the US have no health insurance, because insurance keeps going up. Insurance companies continue to pump up rates, because insurance companies can make more money the more they do it. Doctors and hospitals charge higher and higher rates because they can get away with it. It's a vicious cycle.
The funny thing is, a government system can stop those spiraling costs. Everyone thinks that costs will continue to go up and that the government will simply pay them. That's not true, prices would have to be negotiated with the government and these out of control costs that are being foisted on everyone will stop spiraling upwards out of control. We have several systems world wide that are working just fine. Some have to be tweaked because budgets aren't met, but such is the evolution of such programs. They are in no danger of collapse. The US system, however, is in danger of collapse.
Since we are firing the political Liberal and conservative cannons, allow me to fire back.
Reaganomics has been adopted world wide and as such has produced the largest wave of economic expansion, on the planet, in human history. There's two problems with the USA right now. One is short term and the other long. The short term problem is admittedly part of some fiscal stupidity by President Bush, but the long term problem is by fiscal stupidity of liberals.
Just like conservatives, to concentrate on the big wave of expansion, and forget the little guy. Reaganomics has led to very very large corporations with tons of power, and ever steadily increasing inflation. That inflation is outpacing growth in wages, and business an politicians continue to say that they can't afford to increase the minimum wage, but no single person can live on minimum wage! On top of that, the middle class is eroding, while the money continues to be concentrated in the upper one percent.
When the middle and lower class stop being able to buy, the economy slows. People get frustrated. Those who can't find a decent job have a higher and higher tendency to turn to illicit means to surviving, and we blame those people for not "working hard enough" to be able to support themselves, when there is no evidence that those who are in the most elite of the rich ever truly actually work that hard or that they are any smarter than the rest of the populace, but they certainly have a leg up. Let's see Carl Icahn or The Donald try to survive by flipping burgers for a year for once.
Plus, I saw only one real wave of economic expansion. It happened when the internet took off in the 90s. Reagan actually did a few things important to help the economy recover from the 70s, but most of his policies were stupid, because they lead to exactly what we experience now... unregulated bubbles where businesses make huge profits then suddenly explode and the taxpayer bails them out.
And what proof do you have that the rest of the world has adopted Reaganomics? Many Europeans have national health care, and support labor unions and quality of life policies. Reagan destroyed unions in this country, and the common man has suffered. The common man has no money, so he can't spend it on the economy, and the economy slows. Trickle down doesn't work!!
The long term and fundamental economic problem faced by most governments is that they have exploding costs for entitlements. The liberal mistake here, is that they built these entitlements based on the idea that the population would rapidly expand, which is fine because everything worked when the population was expanding.
This is just horseshit for one very good reason... the population is expanding! It may not be expanding at the same rate but it continues to do so. Changes in the rate are to be expected. The problem with our entitlements is that the money that's supposed to be for them have been raided by democrats and republicans alike. They are running out of money because politicians take money out inappropriately and don't put it back. You blame liberals, but I blame all politicians. We've run deficits for years. Reagan and bushes are responsible for those deficits. Ironically enough, we had balanced budgets under Clinton, a liberal. Yet people, including yourself, think Fiscal responsibility is the domain of "conservatives." I'm all for fiscal responsibility, it's just that we aren't willing to allocate the money. There are plenty of stupid projects we can cut (hello bridge to nowhere?) as well as crack down on wasteful government contracts that include too many kick backs. Plus perhaps we should not be fighting wars that put us deeper into debt but don't improve our standing in the world.
So basically, what you are saying is, that someone who works through college, grad school, works extra hours and gets ahead, or starts a business, now, has to carry the people that just smoked pot in high school and graduated through social promotion. Boy, t
However, you better not try that debunking thing on Global Warming by pointing to studies by scientists working for corporations with a vested interest in continuing to burn fossil fuels that contribute to the problem. Try to present misconceptions unscientific, or non-evidence based claims, and you're dead meat.
There, fixed it for you.
If you can post inflammatory unrelated comments, so can I.
I live in a condo in one of the suburbs of Philadelphia where FiOS was specifically being rolled out to originally. I STILL cannot get FiOS even though people in the development across the street and in the development behind me can!
I have a 2nd revision aluminum iMac 20 inch and the 16 GB version of the first iPhone... the one that came out 6 months before the first release date. I have had unusual reception issues, where my reception jumps up and down constantly in places when before the 2.0 update it was consistent. They aren't severe though, as this usually only happens in areas with poor receiption anyway. But that does make me sympathize with the 3G users and makes me think it's a firmware issue.
Even so, in terms of roll outs of new products, the 3G has not gone as well as other roll outs have. Hell even the original iPhone was much better than this. At the same time, the press is right of the most part, but it's also being bolder than usual. I think this is due to the fact that #1 Vista went badly, and they are emboldened by the fact that they were able to trash that so thoroughly, and #2 the press recognises that readers seem to love reading about when a giant stumbles or falls.
I'm not saying the press isn't justified, nor am I saying that this is the end of Apple. Not everyone is having problems, but more people than one would usually expect for an Apple product are having problems. And the press is leaping on it like a starving tiger.
Such is the world. I look forward to the iPhone releases in the next two years when I possibly consider an upgrade.
Even though you have tons of sports in the Olympics, each sport is different, especially in culture.
In order to groom a good gymnast you have to start very young and you have to practice constantly, training for much of her life. You must be physically strong, flexible, have incredible coordination and balance, have low weight and low body fat and be relatively fearless. The types of things female gymnasts are asked to do are best performed by teenage girls who have made a life long career out of gymnastics. The problem is that once you realize this, you press gymnasts to train harder and harder, faster and faster. You get into situations were girls train too much, ignore schooling, get injuries because they push too hard, begin to suffer from bolemia and anorexia, etc. To top it off, you typically only get 1 shot at olympic gold, if at all, because in 4 years your "washed up" because the next girl who comes along is the new star and at 20 you can't do the same things you can at 16. At that young age, all you want to do is get your moment in the spotlight, make your coach and your parents happy, and get your pony. You aren't thinking about your long term future, and most gymnasts don't have a future in gymnastics outside of their teen years. If you look at this culture, women's gymnastics no longer looks like such a pretty sport.
At least in men's gymnastics, they can attend at least two olympics, because their events are based more on strength and men can continue to get stronger past their teen years
Just to paint a little more broad picture, look at swimming this year. There's a 40 year old woman swimming for the american team this year. Phelps has been in two and could be in three olympics. Swimmers train hard, but in general they can get better as they get older, as Phelps did, but gymnasts peak early. When have you seen a woman gymnast in more than 1 olympics? When have you seen a 24 year old female gymnast, much less a 40 year old one?
The point of the rule is a stop gap to prevent downward pressure on the average age of a gymnast, and allow them to grow up at least a little bit in the hopes they can make better decisions for themselves, and so that coaches and countries don't start pushing 12 year olds as gymnasts. A 14 year old is a little more fearless than a 16 year old... in a very bad way. One bad decision could cause severe injury, and pushing a girl that young will have lasting effects on her life, mostly bad. I would not put it past communist regimes like China to have a state run program where they don't care about their girls and create a program which churns out 12-14 year old world class gymnasts who in turn are discarded with severe emotional and physical problems later in life.
So in short, it's their to protect the girls from themselves and everyone else who would push them too hard to early. Personally, I'd want the limit higher, because calling those gymnasts "women" is downright upsetting to me, and they still start incredibly young for a fleeting chance at a bit of stardom.
I've been getting a whole bunch of CNN top ten news stories spam (seriously, they are NOT from CNN but they look convincing at first glance), a bunch of fake news story spam, and an increase in "you have a greeting card" spam. The funny thing is the uptick also coincides with the whole Russia-Georgia conflict.
First, I read all three articles. Once you overcome that heart attack, allow me to rebuff this nonsense.
the NYT article and the summary say: Before you dismiss this notion, consider what we're stuck with today. The system is ostensibly designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes' health and set an example for children, but it fails on all counts.
Exactly how does it fail on all accounts? Where is the proof of this allegation in this article? I don't myself see this as a broken system, so this statement is not self evident. If someone has some proof please provide it. To dissect this statement, I don't see athletes dropping dead in sports where steroids are banned, and I know plenty of kids who think Steroids are wrong. I also see that, at least in high schools, steroids are the exception, not the rule. I have however, seen stories of kids and athletes dropping dead from a steroid overdose, or running into emotional, or worse, legal, problems resulting from behavioral changes that current steroids are known to cause. So show me what's broken.
The rest of the article falls on it's face because it's making an assumption I don't see as being there.
The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that "antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear"
If you read the Nature article, it's slant is more a rebuke of the drug testing authorities who are not open about their processes, and athletes who are having problems disputing drug tests. I agree with that, if you are accused of doping you have a moral right to contest that. But to me that doesn't give any weight to a pro doping stance.
If doping was allowed, would there be an increase in the rate of death and chronic illness among athletes? Would athletes have a shorter lifespan than the general population? Would there be more examples like the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in the former East-German republic? We do not think so. Only a small proportion of the population engages in elite sports. Furthermore, legalisation of doping, we believe, would encourage more sensible, informed use of drugs in amateur sport, leading to an overall decline in the rate of health problems associated with doping. Finally, by allowing medically supervised doping, the drugs used could be assessed for a clearer view of what is dangerous and what is not.
This is from the PDF. More false assumptions. Only a small proportion of the population engages in elite sports because only a few are gifted to play that sport. The point is that with doping, more may attempt to be just that gifted, and then you have an explosion of talent. Everyone wants to be like Mike, just shoot up and you will be! That will then lead to health problems and side effects that come from doping. Sure you are guaranteed to get muscles and improve your performance, but there's more to life than sports, and if you dope for sports, absolutely everything else suffers.
And it's not the kids and the athletes I really have a problem with when it comes to doping. The number one problem I have with doping are all the people surrounding kids and athletes who will pressure the kids to dope! Coaches with pride on the line (and maybe an increased paycheck), principals and superintendents trying to increase notoriety of their school district. Deans trying to increase enrollments. Endorsers promising big contracts for more touchdowns this season. The money chain will explode! All at the expense of he health of one kid who just wants to be badass and land a big contract. Other people get fat and rich at his expense. I absolutely abhor that possibility.
There are things in health science that are working to improve performance of athletes without doping. It's my understanding that doping not only gives you an unfair competitive edge, but also leads to health problems down the road. If that's not true, someone please dispute what I'm saying. But that's the basis for the ban country wide of Steroids. The last thing we need are mega corporations shoving athletic performance enhancing drugs down our gullets, because if you think prescription drugs are bad now..............
Most CEOs definitely take last years performance and use it to gauge this years performance. It's a decent gauge but they rarely take into account what possible changes there are in the market. However, if they missed a sale because they didn't try to do it, that's a CEO's fault. If they try to make that sale, and didn't, it's the market's fault because the people would not buy.
But in truth it's the CEO's fault for mistiming the market, and misjudging the consumer. In the 90s, consumerism took off as people bought like crazy. We were riding the wave of high investment in the dot com bubble and the y2k scare. People were taking advantage of the web to create new services, and businesses were retooling their technology to make sure they were Y2K compliant. That meant plenty of jobs and jobs meant people had money to spend.
Fast forward to Bush and jobs went from middle class white color jobs to retail walmart and burger flipping joints for minimum wage, and in the past couple of years we've been losing a lot of jobs. People don't have the money to buy large screen TVs or spend additional money when you can get a regular DVD for 5-10 in the bargain bin. If VHS was still out and movies cost $2.99, you'd see a huge amount of people buying those because that's what they could afford! DVDs are a luxury, and blu-ray is an extreme luxury. We can't afford luxuries like that.
The middle class has a money problem, so companies have a money problem. This hasn't been something that just popped up on us, it's been coming for years. Middle class wages have not kept up with inflation, and they expect us to shell out more money for something which is a mediocre upgrade. Sony picked the absolute worst time to introduce a new format, which is funny, because they haven't been able to do anything right in the innovation sector since the walkman.
I'm having problems following the money on this article. Does an article that says COBOL may not be so bad really attract a lot of eyeballs for ads?
I say this because the article is bullshit on a tortilla. They talk about how much bugs cost and how many people found, but how does that truly compare to 10, 20 even 30 years ago? They had a source, why didn't they put that in?
No software is perfect. I'm even willing to agree that complexity has increased while quality has decreased, but by how much? The problem is you can't make these assertions without proper comparative facts, including adjustments for inflation.
Finally, COBOL is COBOL. Programs designed in COBOL are, on average, less complex than today's programs. They require more resources to develop, which means more manpower or more time. Also can COBOL be integrated with a front end website? Generate PDFs on demand? Perform EDI? Have sophisticated tools to make integration with newer languages and systems easier? Can you build it as an app on top of a relational or OO database?
COBOL was sufficient for it's time to do what it needed to do. It may be sufficient for many processes now. But COBOL isn't going to magically come back and everyone's going to start creating sophisticated ERPs from scratch with it. It's just another tool.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering I have an IS degree and not a geology degree and this is the first time I've heard of it, yes it is news. And I find it worthy of news for nerds, as I am a nerd and find this fascinating.
I have a son interested in geology as well, he probably hasn't heard of this. Perhaps he'll get a head start on his degree and start looking things up now.
Okay first, it depends on where you did tech support.
Yes, it's true there might be some discrimination, but it's not because you have a specific kind of experience... it's because you DON'T have another specific kind of experience. I think you misconstrued "We don't want you because you worked in support" with "We don't want you because you don't have experience in an area we are looking for."
The #1 most attractive thing on a resume is relevant job experience, even if it's 10 years ago. You have experience in tech/customer support. Almost anyone can get that. We want you to have experience in computer engineering!
You are screwed first and foremost by the job market. It's a buyers market, meaning the businesses hold all the cards when it comes to hiring. It's hard for anyone to find a job. Those with relevant job experience get hired first. That's always been the case.
Make sure you list out anything that stands out that makes you a go to guy, or any unusual software packages you used to do your job. The perception that, for example, Dell is just a place that will take anyone as a support rep, is because it is! There are plenty of chop shops out there. At the same time, places that I work, actually invest in their people and try to create people who actually know what they are doing. You have to make yourself stand out, and places like gateway support don't help you stand out. My company is a B2B support shop, so the standards are much higher (businesses pay a premium for knowledgeable support). I stand out because of all the software packages I need to know and all the levels I've been thru. I work in support, but my resume looks good because I look like someone who can be counted on, can learn new things, and be a go to when the going gets rough (and all those other cliches HR likes to use).
If you have nothing you can use from this job, you can remove it from your resume, but I doubt it will help or hurt you. I predict you are one of the many americans who will be underemployed until the US economy recovers because no one is hiring anywhere except at the bankruptcy attorney's office.
The US government is notorious for giving itself exceptions, both directly and indirectly. Credit cards come with hidden fees that the merchant must pay. For example, of that $1 for the ticket, anywhere from 1 to 5% goes to a transaction processor who validates that the card is good and has an open balance. That's 95 to 99 cents that goes to the vendor of the ticket. It's illegal in the states to charge someone a different price for any item using a credit card instead of cash, so the merchant eats that. It's meant to encourage the use of credit cards as something just as good as cash, and makes the fee a cost of doing business. Since what I described is a federal rule, this is a good way to get around since this is only a state law.
There are probably many reasons for this law being enacted. Laws don't usually have only one true reason for existence, and you know that if it wasn't a law, some people would try to blow their $5000 platinum card on lottery tickets at some point.
side note: you may see many local mom and pop gas stations charging gas at two prices, one for credit and one for cash. Yes, that's illegal, and one of the reasons you don't see the big corporate chains doing it. However, the mom and pops are getting away with it because gas margins are slim and in the current economic climate the government isn't entirely unwilling to crack down on them since they have more important things to worry about at the moment.
This article, listed in the summary, has this as an official response from EA:
"Please do not continue to post these threads or you account may be at risk of banning, which in some cases would mean you would need to buy a new copy to play Spore."
I'm all for calling out bad summaries, but the summary appears to be correct.
The bottom of the article has the actual conclusion that the article was trying to make:
Follow-up questions revealed that the students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs. The results suggest that a familiarity with Windows dialogs have bred a degree of contempt and that users simply don't care what the boxes say anymore.
The authors suggest that user training might help more people recognize the risks involved with fake popups and the diagnostic signs of genuine Windows dialogs, but the fact that the students didn't appear to spend any more time evaluating the fake dialogs raises questions as to whether education is enough.
I'm not so sure I agree with the idea that gmail is that unprofessional. With yahoo I get your point. Yahoo feels kinda kiddie, everyone has a a yahoo address, and sometimes they get blocked by spam systems, etc. Gmail doesn't quite suffer from the same issues, and, at least for a while in the beginning, having a gmail address was a geek badge of honor, even though everyone could get one. Basically if you are dealing with anyone remotely nerdlike I'd say your gmail address isn't a bad thing. However, if you are dealing with nontechies or suits then yes you are probably going down the right road. I just wanted to throw that out there in case it could save you some time.
... and it's fallacious. Make it seem like someone who advocates creationism or intelligent design is under attack and that person garners sympathy, but that doesn't make their point of view a valid scientific argument. It's perfectly fine and reasonable in the scientific community for someone to be religious and have religious beliefs. When you start saying that it's okay to pass religion off as a counter argument to science, well then the scientific community has the right to question your credentials as a scientist because you are committing a scientific error, just like if you said the earth is flat.
Galileo used reason and the scientific method to determine the earth and the planets revolve around the sun. Creationism and intelligent design fail the scientific method's process because they are not something that can be supported by impirical evidence. Under the rules of logic they are merely conjecture.
Intelligent design is a great thing to discuss in philosophy or theology class in a private institution that is not funded by public money. Governments and scientific institutions should not be in the business of teaching our children religious beliefs and passing them off as biology or physics. Next thing you know, there will be subtle shifts that the government wants us to start believing in a specific religion, to the exclusion of others.
...but what if Apple pulled a Microsoft and put an intentional bug into the app? Sure, it might seem a little too sophisticated for such a small thing, and people will still blame iTunes since it's the main application, but what if tomorrow Steve releases a press release apologizing to Vista users but blames it squarely on Vista "oh sorry something in our new version invoked a buggy piece of vista and we had to work around it." And what if that's what all the support people at apple are instructed to say? What if friends down the street say "oh dude I have a Mac/XP and it works fine for me" might iPod users say "fuckin' vista!" With a little careful preparation, I think this might be possible... maybe only a little bit of a stretch? :)
Sounds a little conspiracy theory-ish, but keep an eye out the next couple of days. You never know.
I am a mac fan, but I don't put evil past Apple by any means, they are a corporation after all. At the same time, evil attacking evil is loads of fun to watch, but I pity the people who get caught in the middle who can't sync now until a fix is released.
It's easy for slashdotters to recommend telecommuting because, like driving, 98% of slashdotters act like they are good enough for telecommuting. That's patently false, because it's loads more difficult to manage most people via telecommuting.
The biggest barrier to telecommuting is bringing on entry level people who don't understand their job yet. Management and entry level people work best and most efficiently when seeing each other face to face. In a business, if it takes longer to ramp up an employee, or they are doing very poor as a remote employee, that goes to the bottom line as well, despite energy savings. I know it sucks that people aren't able to immediately telecommute, and it's true that some telecommuting is better than none at all. The problem is, just like everything else surrounding this energy issue, telecommuting is not the single panacea that one would believe.
I would in fact have IT work with HR and come up with a rough estimate of who might have the ability and willingness to work remotely and try to come up with a target figure. Then work with departments to determine who can and who can't work remotely, and come up with incentives for those who are able (but not necessarily willing). "Able" is of course a subjective term, which is why you need to involve HR. Don't let the IT asshole who can't figure out what TCP/IP means work from home as a network admin.
While MMOs are not all that new (Ultima online anyone?), the quest part seems to be getting dumber and dumber as the world moves on to better graphics and larger quantities of gear. Grinding seems to be all you do in later games. I was originally a big Baldur's Gate fan, loved the quest line, side quests and customization there.
I contend that they are getting smarter, but I think your definition of smarter and mine are not the same. Grinding is very very hard to eliminate, because to eliminate grinding, you have to provide quests making leveling easy enough that the laziest, stupidest person can do it without grinding. MMORPGs have to cater to literally hundreds of different kinds of interests, to get the most people, while balancing everyone's needs and giving them choices. Every MMORPG will become grind because you reach a point of diminishing returns on your personal enjoyment. If you reach that point, you should move on.
I don't play WOW but I've seen plenty of huge boss character that are too powerful for just one character. You have to create teams, come up with tactics, and then execute. On a personal level, doing this a couple times is very fulfilling to actually be able to pull it off. And there are two sides to this. If you have to kill the boss 20 times to get one item to drop, that's annoying, not fun. On the same token if you can run into any situation like Leeroy Jenkins and not have any consequences, that's not as much fun either. Again, all about balance. How well balanced WOW is compared to other MMORPGs is where I find the intelligence. They have more people playing that than any other MMORPG so they are doing something right.
I contend that MMOs wont get to this level of questing again until we go back to unique items. Eg the holy grail gaining a faction special privileges like +2 to all skills and only one can be in a realm/server at a time. Then the players can quest over it and battle and gain things that way. As the grail goes from faction to faction they can either guard it themselves or they can use resources to put it in an adequately difficult location. Have enough items like this and you get quests defined by players rather than the grind of doing it over and over again. As a guild gets more and more of the unique items it would get more powerful as a whole. You would get small uprisings with people trying to take over the guild and people moving around rouge style stealing items. It would be fantastic game play. Princesses giving special trade privileges, Relics gaining stats, deities granting favor.
The problem with this is that you would immediately institute everything that was bad about Evercrack (there were good things, this was simply one thing that isn't). EQ had tons of rare items that were hard to get, but so hard that it was discouraging to go after, and also certain people would camp at repop sites until the beast came back and they'd kill it, hope the item dropped, then sell the item/character on ebay to some sap who thinks it's okay to pay $500 for a virtual piece of property. That type of thing really discourages middle and low end gamers. And to sustain any MMORPG you have to have some kind of volume. Perhaps someone can create such a world and make money off it. I encourage it and wish you the best. Blizzard makes good games that appear to the most number of people possible. There will be people not satisfied on the high end, and I can't blame you if you are one of those people, you just aren't always the target audience.
As for "guild uprisings" most MMORPGs are trying to deal with the fact that a majority of people do NOT want to fight each other. Some people think that in order for such games to be enjoyable, everyone should be fighting each other. That is entirely untrue. Many of us don't want to have to deal with griefers, and find cooperation more fun than competition.
If the items were completely unique, you create a situation where one person would complete the quest and everyone else would no
What was it that prompted Slashdot to start posting its hate mail? Was someone clamoring for this?
I can only guess that posting stuff like this which causes a flurry of messages proclaiming it's stupidity is merely the result of slashdot trying to get more eyeballs on advertisements.
I come to that conclusion by process of elimination because there is no other intelligent reason for this.
I mean c'mon! Okay you post duplicate articles, you don't read summaries, and you once let JonKatz sully this site. But cmon! Do you really have any journalistic integrity? If you want to post letters from users, post constructive letters and have a discussion about them, rather than post flamebait.
The entire "idle" section is horrible, it's not even entertaining. To top it all off, Idle's layout is ugly, and when I post a comment, the comment field is 2 inches wide in the latest version of firefox! Why do I want to see anything here?
Kill Idle and bury it. For all of those who agree with me, I suggest you go to your preferences and set your content for the Idle section to "none." I'll be blocking the entire section because it seems to be the only way to get thru to the slashdot editors that crap should not be tolerated. This is because if you block the article, you block the ad that comes with it, and that hits home in the pocketbook. Follow the money...
Thanks to a lot of culture bashing, Unions got a bad rep since the 80s. Lest we forget, unions help give us reforms such as the 40 hour work week, safety standards for the work place, and minimum wage, etc. These are all good things.
Unions became so powerful, however, that people thought they were a block to progress. People have been busting unions since the 80s, and look where it's got us. The biggest problem here is that the working wage is not keeping up with inflation.
Yes, SOME unions got mixed up with organized crime... yes SOME unions promoted mediocre people over talented ones and got into shady politics... yes SOME people with union mentality want an obsessive number of perks and encourage not standing out so that no one "looks bad" when one person shines. But unions also protect us from corporations who want to raid pension plans and push workers to work longer hours for low wages. Obviously when unions did so many good things for us and then suddenly had some problems because they are two powerful, you don't throw them out entirely. Companies will find any reason to make employees work as hard as they can and resist paying them that little extra raise, especially in companies with huge numbers of employees.
Unions are an important check and balance with corporations. Right now the corporations are out of control.
IT can't unionize now... that loner mentality is too strong, and most IT identify with a while collar job. However, IT has to run cable, do heavy lifting, work long hours, be on call. In the IT industry that's all worn as a badge of honor but in truth, are you getting properly paid? Are you being ask to work too long? The average true number of hours worked in the US has been going up, because companies can get away with squeezing extra hours out of salaried white collar employees. Those same employees don't get the benefit of more pay for those extra hours and as such are getting a little screwed here.
If anything, we should not take away the message "unions are evil" and be thinking, are we treating our IT reps right?
You see, people incorrectly assume that prices are tied to costs, and that when costs go down, prices go down. That's a lie that businesses have been foisting on the populace for decades because they aren't telling you the whole truth. Economics shows us different.
Prices are tied to supply and demand. When demand goes up, prices go up. When demand goes down, prices go down. Supply is the opposite. Supply is up, prices down, supply down prices up.
The supply for text messages is basically near infinity, and is not changing. Therefore only changes in demand will change prices. Now, have you noticed that prices are going up lately, plans are getting higher, and they are looking at 15c a message rates now? Demand is going up, of course. The cell phone market is saturated, but text messaging is still a growth sub-industry as more teens get phones and more people try texting.
We are willing to pay these rates because the market will bear it. What's worse is that they still easily allow overages. I put a block on my son's cell phone for texting, because the monthly unlimited rate to text on verizon is outrageous and he can't control his texting. We got him a new phone to replace his old one, and we found out he had texting back and had started texting again. He ran up a $64 bill on texting alone! We called Verizon and they found out the block was "accidentally lifted" with the new phone and they refunded us the money. Of course they refunded the money, because they conveniently dropped it "by mistake" and they got caught being sleazy. How many people would just pay the bill? And how many people are willing to pay $20 a month just so they don't have to pay $64 a month? All the major telecoms take advantage of this on purpose, and it goes to their bottom line.
To fix this problem, you need to choke off demand. The market will have to saturate the with texting so that there are no more new customers. Instead of competing to get more new customers, they are competing to get customers away from other companies. That's typically when prices start coming down. Right now Verizon and Sprint offer $100 talk and text all you like plans, and there is a company that just came into the area called MetroPCS which offers the same plan for $40. The cell phone market is saturated, so now you are going to see some price competition. Because texting piggy backs on phone plans, you'll see that begin to drop.
The process would accelerate if we had more competition, and if they would stop allowing phones to be tied to a specific carrier and forced companies to allow us to chose the phone and the plan. The justice department and the SEC need to put some pressure on and stop allowing cell phone company mergers.
What poor has Reaganomics fucked, prey tell? The poor that now have at least one family car? The poor that have TV's, designer shoes, new clothes, food so much that they are fat, a higher home ownership rate than ever before, playstations, xboxes, ipods, cell phones... do you mean those poor?
Exactly which poor are you looking at? I'm looking at the poor that don't have cars and rely on public transportation every day, eat McDonalds every day (which is why they get fat), sit at home because it's too dangerous to go outside and get activity, and got foreclosed on because of those lovely loans we were giving out to increase home ownership so they moved into an overly expensive apartment, or back with other families into houses too small to accomodate them all. Come visit some families in the inner city or in depressed rural area that lost a factory or something like that. I'd love to show you sometime. Stop making up facts, and stop attacking the poor like it's all their fault for wanting more.
Let's look at one thing, a heart bypass. That will set you back anywhere from 50k to 200k, depending on what's involved. That's at least a car, if not a house. Now, let's toss in a few months at nursing home for grandma, maybe mom does a year long cancer battle, and you can pretty much see that there's just no way people can afford to pay for all of this.
You make a good point, but then if the government can't pay for it, how in the hell does private business pay for it? As you should be able to see... THEY DON'T! A record number of people in the US have no health insurance, because insurance keeps going up. Insurance companies continue to pump up rates, because insurance companies can make more money the more they do it. Doctors and hospitals charge higher and higher rates because they can get away with it. It's a vicious cycle.
The funny thing is, a government system can stop those spiraling costs. Everyone thinks that costs will continue to go up and that the government will simply pay them. That's not true, prices would have to be negotiated with the government and these out of control costs that are being foisted on everyone will stop spiraling upwards out of control. We have several systems world wide that are working just fine. Some have to be tweaked because budgets aren't met, but such is the evolution of such programs. They are in no danger of collapse. The US system, however, is in danger of collapse.
Since we are firing the political Liberal and conservative cannons, allow me to fire back.
Reaganomics has been adopted world wide and as such has produced the largest wave of economic expansion, on the planet, in human history. There's two problems with the USA right now. One is short term and the other long. The short term problem is admittedly part of some fiscal stupidity by President Bush, but the long term problem is by fiscal stupidity of liberals.
Just like conservatives, to concentrate on the big wave of expansion, and forget the little guy. Reaganomics has led to very very large corporations with tons of power, and ever steadily increasing inflation. That inflation is outpacing growth in wages, and business an politicians continue to say that they can't afford to increase the minimum wage, but no single person can live on minimum wage! On top of that, the middle class is eroding, while the money continues to be concentrated in the upper one percent.
When the middle and lower class stop being able to buy, the economy slows. People get frustrated. Those who can't find a decent job have a higher and higher tendency to turn to illicit means to surviving, and we blame those people for not "working hard enough" to be able to support themselves, when there is no evidence that those who are in the most elite of the rich ever truly actually work that hard or that they are any smarter than the rest of the populace, but they certainly have a leg up. Let's see Carl Icahn or The Donald try to survive by flipping burgers for a year for once.
Plus, I saw only one real wave of economic expansion. It happened when the internet took off in the 90s. Reagan actually did a few things important to help the economy recover from the 70s, but most of his policies were stupid, because they lead to exactly what we experience now... unregulated bubbles where businesses make huge profits then suddenly explode and the taxpayer bails them out.
And what proof do you have that the rest of the world has adopted Reaganomics? Many Europeans have national health care, and support labor unions and quality of life policies. Reagan destroyed unions in this country, and the common man has suffered. The common man has no money, so he can't spend it on the economy, and the economy slows. Trickle down doesn't work!!
The long term and fundamental economic problem faced by most governments is that they have exploding costs for entitlements. The liberal mistake here, is that they built these entitlements based on the idea that the population would rapidly expand, which is fine because everything worked when the population was expanding.
This is just horseshit for one very good reason... the population is expanding! It may not be expanding at the same rate but it continues to do so. Changes in the rate are to be expected. The problem with our entitlements is that the money that's supposed to be for them have been raided by democrats and republicans alike. They are running out of money because politicians take money out inappropriately and don't put it back. You blame liberals, but I blame all politicians. We've run deficits for years. Reagan and bushes are responsible for those deficits. Ironically enough, we had balanced budgets under Clinton, a liberal. Yet people, including yourself, think Fiscal responsibility is the domain of "conservatives." I'm all for fiscal responsibility, it's just that we aren't willing to allocate the money. There are plenty of stupid projects we can cut (hello bridge to nowhere?) as well as crack down on wasteful government contracts that include too many kick backs. Plus perhaps we should not be fighting wars that put us deeper into debt but don't improve our standing in the world.
So basically, what you are saying is, that someone who works through college, grad school, works extra hours and gets ahead, or starts a business, now, has to carry the people that just smoked pot in high school and graduated through social promotion. Boy, t
However, you better not try that debunking thing on Global Warming by pointing to studies by scientists working for corporations with a vested interest in continuing to burn fossil fuels that contribute to the problem. Try to present misconceptions unscientific, or non-evidence based claims, and you're dead meat.
There, fixed it for you.
If you can post inflammatory unrelated comments, so can I.
I live in a condo in one of the suburbs of Philadelphia where FiOS was specifically being rolled out to originally. I STILL cannot get FiOS even though people in the development across the street and in the development behind me can!
... what if they announce McCain won?
I have a 2nd revision aluminum iMac 20 inch and the 16 GB version of the first iPhone... the one that came out 6 months before the first release date. I have had unusual reception issues, where my reception jumps up and down constantly in places when before the 2.0 update it was consistent. They aren't severe though, as this usually only happens in areas with poor receiption anyway. But that does make me sympathize with the 3G users and makes me think it's a firmware issue.
Even so, in terms of roll outs of new products, the 3G has not gone as well as other roll outs have. Hell even the original iPhone was much better than this. At the same time, the press is right of the most part, but it's also being bolder than usual. I think this is due to the fact that #1 Vista went badly, and they are emboldened by the fact that they were able to trash that so thoroughly, and #2 the press recognises that readers seem to love reading about when a giant stumbles or falls.
I'm not saying the press isn't justified, nor am I saying that this is the end of Apple. Not everyone is having problems, but more people than one would usually expect for an Apple product are having problems. And the press is leaping on it like a starving tiger.
Such is the world. I look forward to the iPhone releases in the next two years when I possibly consider an upgrade.
Even though you have tons of sports in the Olympics, each sport is different, especially in culture.
In order to groom a good gymnast you have to start very young and you have to practice constantly, training for much of her life. You must be physically strong, flexible, have incredible coordination and balance, have low weight and low body fat and be relatively fearless. The types of things female gymnasts are asked to do are best performed by teenage girls who have made a life long career out of gymnastics. The problem is that once you realize this, you press gymnasts to train harder and harder, faster and faster. You get into situations were girls train too much, ignore schooling, get injuries because they push too hard, begin to suffer from bolemia and anorexia, etc. To top it off, you typically only get 1 shot at olympic gold, if at all, because in 4 years your "washed up" because the next girl who comes along is the new star and at 20 you can't do the same things you can at 16. At that young age, all you want to do is get your moment in the spotlight, make your coach and your parents happy, and get your pony. You aren't thinking about your long term future, and most gymnasts don't have a future in gymnastics outside of their teen years. If you look at this culture, women's gymnastics no longer looks like such a pretty sport.
At least in men's gymnastics, they can attend at least two olympics, because their events are based more on strength and men can continue to get stronger past their teen years
Just to paint a little more broad picture, look at swimming this year. There's a 40 year old woman swimming for the american team this year. Phelps has been in two and could be in three olympics. Swimmers train hard, but in general they can get better as they get older, as Phelps did, but gymnasts peak early. When have you seen a woman gymnast in more than 1 olympics? When have you seen a 24 year old female gymnast, much less a 40 year old one?
The point of the rule is a stop gap to prevent downward pressure on the average age of a gymnast, and allow them to grow up at least a little bit in the hopes they can make better decisions for themselves, and so that coaches and countries don't start pushing 12 year olds as gymnasts. A 14 year old is a little more fearless than a 16 year old... in a very bad way. One bad decision could cause severe injury, and pushing a girl that young will have lasting effects on her life, mostly bad. I would not put it past communist regimes like China to have a state run program where they don't care about their girls and create a program which churns out 12-14 year old world class gymnasts who in turn are discarded with severe emotional and physical problems later in life.
So in short, it's their to protect the girls from themselves and everyone else who would push them too hard to early. Personally, I'd want the limit higher, because calling those gymnasts "women" is downright upsetting to me, and they still start incredibly young for a fleeting chance at a bit of stardom.
I've been getting a whole bunch of CNN top ten news stories spam (seriously, they are NOT from CNN but they look convincing at first glance), a bunch of fake news story spam, and an increase in "you have a greeting card" spam. The funny thing is the uptick also coincides with the whole Russia-Georgia conflict.
First, I read all three articles. Once you overcome that heart attack, allow me to rebuff this nonsense.
the NYT article and the summary say:
Before you dismiss this notion, consider what we're stuck with today. The system is ostensibly designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes' health and set an example for children, but it fails on all counts.
Exactly how does it fail on all accounts? Where is the proof of this allegation in this article? I don't myself see this as a broken system, so this statement is not self evident. If someone has some proof please provide it. To dissect this statement, I don't see athletes dropping dead in sports where steroids are banned, and I know plenty of kids who think Steroids are wrong. I also see that, at least in high schools, steroids are the exception, not the rule. I have however, seen stories of kids and athletes dropping dead from a steroid overdose, or running into emotional, or worse, legal, problems resulting from behavioral changes that current steroids are known to cause. So show me what's broken.
The rest of the article falls on it's face because it's making an assumption I don't see as being there.
The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that "antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear"
If you read the Nature article, it's slant is more a rebuke of the drug testing authorities who are not open about their processes, and athletes who are having problems disputing drug tests. I agree with that, if you are accused of doping you have a moral right to contest that. But to me that doesn't give any weight to a pro doping stance.
If doping was allowed, would there be an increase in the rate of death and chronic illness among athletes? Would athletes have a shorter lifespan than the general population? Would there be more examples like the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in the former East-German republic? We do not think so. Only a small proportion of the population engages in elite sports. Furthermore, legalisation of doping, we believe, would encourage more sensible, informed use of drugs in amateur sport, leading to an overall decline in the rate of health problems associated with doping. Finally, by allowing medically supervised doping, the drugs used could be assessed for a clearer view of what is dangerous and what is not.
This is from the PDF. More false assumptions. Only a small proportion of the population engages in elite sports because only a few are gifted to play that sport. The point is that with doping, more may attempt to be just that gifted, and then you have an explosion of talent. Everyone wants to be like Mike, just shoot up and you will be! That will then lead to health problems and side effects that come from doping. Sure you are guaranteed to get muscles and improve your performance, but there's more to life than sports, and if you dope for sports, absolutely everything else suffers.
And it's not the kids and the athletes I really have a problem with when it comes to doping. The number one problem I have with doping are all the people surrounding kids and athletes who will pressure the kids to dope! Coaches with pride on the line (and maybe an increased paycheck), principals and superintendents trying to increase notoriety of their school district. Deans trying to increase enrollments. Endorsers promising big contracts for more touchdowns this season. The money chain will explode! All at the expense of he health of one kid who just wants to be badass and land a big contract. Other people get fat and rich at his expense. I absolutely abhor that possibility.
There are things in health science that are working to improve performance of athletes without doping. It's my understanding that doping not only gives you an unfair competitive edge, but also leads to health problems down the road. If that's not true, someone please dispute what I'm saying. But that's the basis for the ban country wide of Steroids. The last thing we need are mega corporations shoving athletic performance enhancing drugs down our gullets, because if you think prescription drugs are bad now..............
But the first thing I thought when I saw "honey.bunny77@hotmail.de" was that it was a spam address.
Most CEOs definitely take last years performance and use it to gauge this years performance. It's a decent gauge but they rarely take into account what possible changes there are in the market. However, if they missed a sale because they didn't try to do it, that's a CEO's fault. If they try to make that sale, and didn't, it's the market's fault because the people would not buy.
But in truth it's the CEO's fault for mistiming the market, and misjudging the consumer. In the 90s, consumerism took off as people bought like crazy. We were riding the wave of high investment in the dot com bubble and the y2k scare. People were taking advantage of the web to create new services, and businesses were retooling their technology to make sure they were Y2K compliant. That meant plenty of jobs and jobs meant people had money to spend.
Fast forward to Bush and jobs went from middle class white color jobs to retail walmart and burger flipping joints for minimum wage, and in the past couple of years we've been losing a lot of jobs. People don't have the money to buy large screen TVs or spend additional money when you can get a regular DVD for 5-10 in the bargain bin. If VHS was still out and movies cost $2.99, you'd see a huge amount of people buying those because that's what they could afford! DVDs are a luxury, and blu-ray is an extreme luxury. We can't afford luxuries like that.
The middle class has a money problem, so companies have a money problem. This hasn't been something that just popped up on us, it's been coming for years. Middle class wages have not kept up with inflation, and they expect us to shell out more money for something which is a mediocre upgrade. Sony picked the absolute worst time to introduce a new format, which is funny, because they haven't been able to do anything right in the innovation sector since the walkman.
I'm having problems following the money on this article. Does an article that says COBOL may not be so bad really attract a lot of eyeballs for ads?
I say this because the article is bullshit on a tortilla. They talk about how much bugs cost and how many people found, but how does that truly compare to 10, 20 even 30 years ago? They had a source, why didn't they put that in?
No software is perfect. I'm even willing to agree that complexity has increased while quality has decreased, but by how much? The problem is you can't make these assertions without proper comparative facts, including adjustments for inflation.
Finally, COBOL is COBOL. Programs designed in COBOL are, on average, less complex than today's programs. They require more resources to develop, which means more manpower or more time. Also can COBOL be integrated with a front end website? Generate PDFs on demand? Perform EDI? Have sophisticated tools to make integration with newer languages and systems easier? Can you build it as an app on top of a relational or OO database?
COBOL was sufficient for it's time to do what it needed to do. It may be sufficient for many processes now. But COBOL isn't going to magically come back and everyone's going to start creating sophisticated ERPs from scratch with it. It's just another tool.