I graduated early and went to University about 4 years early. I was the only non-adult for a few years in my classes, but it was fine. 90% of the people I met were half-wits and the other 10% didn't mind that I was young. I ceased to notice the age difference in my first year. I'm glad I missed out on those 4 years of pre-college school.
Social skills, like mental skills, are in the mind. They can't be accelerated in the same way as academic development, because you can't cram them like you might some academic subject. Nonetheless they can be learnt as quickly as you like. I suppose what's wanting is a little imagination and conscious effort to learn them.
It's a bad idea there too. No aspiring young researcher would dream of using a short word if a longer one means just the same. Method becomes methodology, near becomes approximate, and just about every verbal insanity is tried as long as Word's grammar check won't complain. If anything, Orwell under-stated the problem in his essay Politics and the English Language. The situation has gotten much worse.
What's more without cache! That is, for every request, the PHP webpage is being recompiled. I hope he doesn't call that a fair comparison, as anyone even remotely interested in high throughput takes ten minutes to install a caching system like xcache or one of five other alternatives. I bet you anything that lighty, fastcgi and xcache would serve 1.5-2 times as many requests per second as his homebrew code.
Oh yes? So who do you think is going to pay? Private enterprise? That's never worked. If the taxpayer pays, the taxpayer's got a right to a voice.
What happens in effect is that the people are led by leaders, not by themselves, and these leaders make the decisions. The only difference is that in private enterprise they're completely unaccountable, in government, they are, just a bit.
Private enterprise has not funded more than a hundredth of scientific achievements in the last century.
Let me chip in as a legal immigrant that it is about 20 times harder to get in or live in the US legally than illegally, if at all. I've seen plenty of illegal families, sending their kids to colleges at rates I never had access to, getting scholarships and loans I never was eligible for, skipping taxes I paid duly, getting emergency treatment that cost me a struggle to pay in deductibles and co-pays, getting jobs and graduate programs that rejected me because of my papers, and on top of it all regularly having naive and ill-informed people protesting for their benefit and never mine. And those that were not so lucky, working under minimum wage with no protection at all sorts of jobs. It's truly disgusting what the US is doing, to both of us. They should just have guest worker and exchange student programmes like all the rest of the civilised world.
But here I am, dreaming away. I ought to get back to my jobs to pay off those debts I incurred, just living in this country legally. I like this country overall, but some things about it are more bizarre than anything Kafka thought up in a fevered dream.
20 years? We have acid-free paper these days, you know. More like indefinite. I regularly read books at my library from between the 1850s and the 1920s. Most of them have never even been re-bound.
Oh, great, thanks for the info. By character I just meant smell, taste, colour -- it's easier to just say character as a shorthand for these, just as with cigars or cigarettes (I don't smoke). Anyway, I've grown up just tasting vodka that is ethanol and water and maybe some fruit flavouring. Some low-end brandies in Hungary are like that too, although most of what we produce is very good (try elderberry brandy once).
We let that sort of thing happen every time we concede more and more to the government in terms of providing services for us. With all of the extra money and the ability to represent everyone, you suddenly realize that corps don't have to care what individuals want any more, they only have to care what the government wants.
Huh? Did you even read the story? You're making no sense at all. This just looks like some canned rant you posted to a choice phrase that triggered it in the OP.
With you until you went all politico. The fact is, humans are the same and always have been. Most are just happy to live on as they always have. Some want to cause trouble and strife. These are a very small minority. Increasing security a bit is a perfectly valid way to deal with almost all of this minority. Unless you happen to be the coloniser in a colony, this relation holds true, and the percentage of the vandals varies only very slightly, typically as a function of unemployment and general level of education. You needn't really worry about external destruction unless you happen to be at war or in a civil war (a dictatorship being a special case of the former). This covers virtually all cases we could contemplate in the entirety of human history, from Spartacus to the Gestapo to the IRA. The very few cases where it breaks down, like Guy Fawkes or Kennedy or 9/11, are a statistical blip that's pointless to waste resources guarding against in the conventional sense. The only thing that has ever been effective against this infinitesimal minority that's destructive and intelligent and organised is good intelligence. Incidentally that's the only thing that's working against the Islamist threats some Western countries face today.
What is the bottom line? Human societies have always been similarly fashioned, and from what we can tell they always will be. The response should therefore be the same unless we can come up with a convincingly better alternative, but we've had for ever so long to do so and haven't yet. Just keep a level of security in proportion to the actual amount of incidents you have, don't go overboard, and keep good intelligence to try to prevent those very rare but important exceptions.
In this specific instance, emergency services should just be better prepared, non-emergencies there's no point guarding against right now.
Sacrilege though it may sound, I don't give a toss if Teacher's or Glenlivet becomes some flavoured powder added to water and ethanol, as long as I can't taste the difference to what it used to be. Mind you, I think in the EU they have some strict laws against this, so you can't sell a Scotch unless it's actually been fermented in a barrel for 3 years or what have you. I've never looked at it, I just like the taste of (Scotch) whisky. Anyway, vodka is absolutely characterless, so I'm not surprised you can manufacture it by just adding some impurities to what is in theory just water and ethanol anyway. Vodka is for people who want to get drunk, whisky is for people who care about the taste. I look on it as a stimulant (not in the biological sense), and as such I prefer it to taste well.
I remember this happening at our campus library (University of Washington) a year or two ago. I first noticed it when they removed the actual physical borrowing records from the back of books. I often read some good novels written a century ago, and the library typically has editions between 1870 and 1910 of them. It used to amuse me to browse through them sometimes on the bus when I'd finish the actual book -- look, a gap of 14 years starting from 1950. (I once even found a 75-year old bookmark someone had casually left in a Raffles book; it makes you think). Then I noticed they had all been taken out. I asked about it, but I only talked to some student employees and they didn't know the reason. Thanks for explaining!
I think you and the GP are missing the point that yes, civilians are off-limits in war, for good reason. This is why we have so many conventions named after capitals of neutral European countries.
Just before my 20s, something about sweet foods began to disgust me. I expect it was the lingering aftertaste of a sugary tea. I started to leave sugar out of my tea (I drank tea most of the time, very rarely soft drinks or soda water). Super-sweet cakes and candy began to taste worse and worse to me. About a year after that, having dramatically cut down my sugar consumption for no apparent reason, I began to notice that if I had a Coke, I would get a sugar high, but the low made me tired and unproductive until I had another. After that, I cut soft drinks out too. I really couldn't say why all this happened, I'm not diabetic or anything. (I rarely drink coffee, almost only for social occasions.) So now I just drink tea, or soda water sometimes, and I take exercise of course, and I really could not imagine ever going back to a high-sugar diet.
Thank you very much for pointing this out. I usually do so when the slavery issue and demand for reparations comes up, but it seems the proportion of rational folk to the sentimental is very small indeed.
"The Swiss government walked a tightrope between doing the morally right thing and securing its own survival."
You could say the same of Vichy. The fact is, all governments were faced with a choice between resisting or submitting. Some fought, some submitted. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Britain, France -- fought. Switzerland, Norway, Spain, Austria, Vichy France -- submitted. I am not talking about the people, just the governments.
"If government got out of the school system entirely you would have lots of schools opening and competing with each other, forcing prices down. It would be in every school's best interest to increase enrollment and student loans with reasonable, market-determined interest rates would become common for poor students."
Are you mad? Nowhere in the world has that happened. America is a shining example: the college system is mostly private, as are the professional schools (medicine, law). As a consequence, they have the highest tuition in the world on average, and at the college level typically provide a much worse education into the bargain. (The professional schools provide a good education, mind.) The long and short of it is that in America, education is a middle class game, and becoming a doctor or a lawyer is absolutely a rich man's game (and an old boy network).
"According to him [Ron Paul] charities and churches would build hospitals and even in the private for-profit hospitals no one was ever turned away because they couldn't afford to pay."
Again, complete bullshit. Private hospitals turn patients away by the bucketload. To counter anecdote with anecdote, some of the cases were filmed by Michael Moore for his film Sicko.
"During the 1800's the USA economy grew at a tremendous rate. The country was seen as the land of opportunity where you could make it with a bit of hard work. Gradually the government started to expand and intervene with programs sold to the public as a way to help overcome the problems that they perceived in the system. Problems which are all relative. If you compare today's standard of living with that of 1700 England under Serfdom"
Now you're becoming frankly ridiculous. Don't you think the US's rate of growth slowed at the end of the nineteenth century because all the resources had finally been discovered and industrialisation settled to an even pace? The US's rate of growth picked up in the twentieth century when it armed the world and itself at enormous scales. Oh, and feudalism (serfdom) in England ended in the 14th-16th centuries. Not the 18th. You seem to have no grasp of history whatsoever. How, then, can you try to understand the present?
I'm not Swiss, but I have a regular Swiss bank account (not a "numbered" account), although I've read about the "numbered" accounts you describe above. What you describe is also what I knew. However, I must take exception to the "strictest identification policies" thing. In Switzerland, my experience has been that identification is rather informal.
The most shocking incident that ever happened to me was when I was chatting with a very dear Swiss friend in Berne about the banking policies, and she said that they treat the Swiss and foreigners very differently. The long and short of it was that we took a bet; she would go to the bank, provide my account number and name, and try to withdraw cash for me, telling them only that she was doing it as a favour as I couldn't. And lo, with just that information and because she was Swiss, they were happy to give her the sum she wanted. Now, the sum was a mere 200 francs (about 20 years ago), so the experiment was of limited interest. But still, this is something I could not have imagined in any first world country.
Nowadays, when I travel to the US, I have to get fingerprinted, photographed, practically give every last detail of my life and a thorough search of my person and belongings just to get into the country. To apply for a visa (I am not in a country with a waiver agreement) I have to give very strict identification from my home country. That's what I would call strict identification...
As a Swiss banker, would you be so kind as to comment on the bank incident, tell me whether this is commonplace? I'm very curious, and perhaps things have changed in the last 20 years. Thank you.
The problem is, a great deal and perhaps a majority of people are not fully rational (which is how I see it, rather than "proper pyschological functioning"). But simply put, with high responsibility come high standards.
Depending on the style manual the journalist used, this is correct. For instance, if you read the BBC, acronyms are spelled with only the first letter capitalised -- hence Nato, Isaf, etc. This rule is not followed under some circumstances (probably depending on whether you can pronounce the word), so DHS, BBC, USA.
They certainly do not view themselves as having anything to do with the British government. They are funded not by taxpayers but by television viewers, and by a provision of law. Their ties to the government are merely that the legislature determines their increase in funding, and around that time, the government might try to suppress or delay some embarrassing stories. That's pretty much as it is around the world, though.
Considering the BBC spend millions on each episode of some of their more expensive programmes, and how much they pay the announcers on their news channels, they might have figured the possible legal damages as an acceptable risk in making the programme.
Perhaps Sir Humphrey Appleby spoke the truth about the true purpose behind Britain's independent deterrent?...
Haha, excellent! One of the very few Yes, Minister references on Slashdot, and so fitting, too. For those who haven't watched the programme (it ran in the 80s), an inexperienced Cabinet minister (later prime minister) is being "educated" by his Department's top civil servant, Sir Humphrey. Sir Humphrey tells the astonished minister that Britain's nuclear deterrent isn't intended against the Russians, but the French.
Exactly. Plus we already have an OS keeps data on disk and merely uses memory as a checkpoint -- Coyotos. You can unplug it and boot it again and everything will be exactly the same, it's just slower.
Plus, it is actually a good thing to serialise/unserialise data sometimes. First of all, the serialised representation is much, much more compact. Second, what if the program crashes or gets into some undefined state? You can't share the data between processes, so whatever you were editing is lost. Imagine a system where the persistence of any piece of data is guaranteed only so long as the program that created it is still running and able to access it! Now imagine just one program in the system with a memory leak...
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I graduated early and went to University about 4 years early. I was the only non-adult for a few years in my classes, but it was fine. 90% of the people I met were half-wits and the other 10% didn't mind that I was young. I ceased to notice the age difference in my first year. I'm glad I missed out on those 4 years of pre-college school. Social skills, like mental skills, are in the mind. They can't be accelerated in the same way as academic development, because you can't cram them like you might some academic subject. Nonetheless they can be learnt as quickly as you like. I suppose what's wanting is a little imagination and conscious effort to learn them.
It's a bad idea there too. No aspiring young researcher would dream of using a short word if a longer one means just the same. Method becomes methodology, near becomes approximate, and just about every verbal insanity is tried as long as Word's grammar check won't complain. If anything, Orwell under-stated the problem in his essay Politics and the English Language. The situation has gotten much worse.
What's more without cache! That is, for every request, the PHP webpage is being recompiled. I hope he doesn't call that a fair comparison, as anyone even remotely interested in high throughput takes ten minutes to install a caching system like xcache or one of five other alternatives. I bet you anything that lighty, fastcgi and xcache would serve 1.5-2 times as many requests per second as his homebrew code.
I did say the twentieth century. Only the laser would qualify from your list. Proves my point, really.
Oh yes? So who do you think is going to pay? Private enterprise? That's never worked. If the taxpayer pays, the taxpayer's got a right to a voice.
What happens in effect is that the people are led by leaders, not by themselves, and these leaders make the decisions. The only difference is that in private enterprise they're completely unaccountable, in government, they are, just a bit.
Private enterprise has not funded more than a hundredth of scientific achievements in the last century.
Let me chip in as a legal immigrant that it is about 20 times harder to get in or live in the US legally than illegally, if at all. I've seen plenty of illegal families, sending their kids to colleges at rates I never had access to, getting scholarships and loans I never was eligible for, skipping taxes I paid duly, getting emergency treatment that cost me a struggle to pay in deductibles and co-pays, getting jobs and graduate programs that rejected me because of my papers, and on top of it all regularly having naive and ill-informed people protesting for their benefit and never mine. And those that were not so lucky, working under minimum wage with no protection at all sorts of jobs. It's truly disgusting what the US is doing, to both of us. They should just have guest worker and exchange student programmes like all the rest of the civilised world.
But here I am, dreaming away. I ought to get back to my jobs to pay off those debts I incurred, just living in this country legally. I like this country overall, but some things about it are more bizarre than anything Kafka thought up in a fevered dream.
20 years? We have acid-free paper these days, you know. More like indefinite. I regularly read books at my library from between the 1850s and the 1920s. Most of them have never even been re-bound.
Oh, great, thanks for the info. By character I just meant smell, taste, colour -- it's easier to just say character as a shorthand for these, just as with cigars or cigarettes (I don't smoke). Anyway, I've grown up just tasting vodka that is ethanol and water and maybe some fruit flavouring. Some low-end brandies in Hungary are like that too, although most of what we produce is very good (try elderberry brandy once).
We let that sort of thing happen every time we concede more and more to the government in terms of providing services for us. With all of the extra money and the ability to represent everyone, you suddenly realize that corps don't have to care what individuals want any more, they only have to care what the government wants.
Huh? Did you even read the story? You're making no sense at all. This just looks like some canned rant you posted to a choice phrase that triggered it in the OP.
With you until you went all politico. The fact is, humans are the same and always have been. Most are just happy to live on as they always have. Some want to cause trouble and strife. These are a very small minority. Increasing security a bit is a perfectly valid way to deal with almost all of this minority. Unless you happen to be the coloniser in a colony, this relation holds true, and the percentage of the vandals varies only very slightly, typically as a function of unemployment and general level of education. You needn't really worry about external destruction unless you happen to be at war or in a civil war (a dictatorship being a special case of the former). This covers virtually all cases we could contemplate in the entirety of human history, from Spartacus to the Gestapo to the IRA. The very few cases where it breaks down, like Guy Fawkes or Kennedy or 9/11, are a statistical blip that's pointless to waste resources guarding against in the conventional sense. The only thing that has ever been effective against this infinitesimal minority that's destructive and intelligent and organised is good intelligence. Incidentally that's the only thing that's working against the Islamist threats some Western countries face today.
What is the bottom line? Human societies have always been similarly fashioned, and from what we can tell they always will be. The response should therefore be the same unless we can come up with a convincingly better alternative, but we've had for ever so long to do so and haven't yet. Just keep a level of security in proportion to the actual amount of incidents you have, don't go overboard, and keep good intelligence to try to prevent those very rare but important exceptions.
In this specific instance, emergency services should just be better prepared, non-emergencies there's no point guarding against right now.
Sacrilege though it may sound, I don't give a toss if Teacher's or Glenlivet becomes some flavoured powder added to water and ethanol, as long as I can't taste the difference to what it used to be. Mind you, I think in the EU they have some strict laws against this, so you can't sell a Scotch unless it's actually been fermented in a barrel for 3 years or what have you. I've never looked at it, I just like the taste of (Scotch) whisky. Anyway, vodka is absolutely characterless, so I'm not surprised you can manufacture it by just adding some impurities to what is in theory just water and ethanol anyway. Vodka is for people who want to get drunk, whisky is for people who care about the taste. I look on it as a stimulant (not in the biological sense), and as such I prefer it to taste well.
I remember this happening at our campus library (University of Washington) a year or two ago. I first noticed it when they removed the actual physical borrowing records from the back of books. I often read some good novels written a century ago, and the library typically has editions between 1870 and 1910 of them. It used to amuse me to browse through them sometimes on the bus when I'd finish the actual book -- look, a gap of 14 years starting from 1950. (I once even found a 75-year old bookmark someone had casually left in a Raffles book; it makes you think). Then I noticed they had all been taken out. I asked about it, but I only talked to some student employees and they didn't know the reason. Thanks for explaining!
I think you and the GP are missing the point that yes, civilians are off-limits in war, for good reason. This is why we have so many conventions named after capitals of neutral European countries.
Just before my 20s, something about sweet foods began to disgust me. I expect it was the lingering aftertaste of a sugary tea. I started to leave sugar out of my tea (I drank tea most of the time, very rarely soft drinks or soda water). Super-sweet cakes and candy began to taste worse and worse to me. About a year after that, having dramatically cut down my sugar consumption for no apparent reason, I began to notice that if I had a Coke, I would get a sugar high, but the low made me tired and unproductive until I had another. After that, I cut soft drinks out too. I really couldn't say why all this happened, I'm not diabetic or anything. (I rarely drink coffee, almost only for social occasions.) So now I just drink tea, or soda water sometimes, and I take exercise of course, and I really could not imagine ever going back to a high-sugar diet.
Thank you very much for pointing this out. I usually do so when the slavery issue and demand for reparations comes up, but it seems the proportion of rational folk to the sentimental is very small indeed.
I usually say the twentyseventh of February. Then again I also write 27-02, so perhaps it's a case of one influencing the other.
Bollocks. Just look at the figures only for second language. Mandarin has no currency.
"The Swiss government walked a tightrope between doing the morally right thing and securing its own survival."
You could say the same of Vichy. The fact is, all governments were faced with a choice between resisting or submitting. Some fought, some submitted. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Britain, France -- fought. Switzerland, Norway, Spain, Austria, Vichy France -- submitted. I am not talking about the people, just the governments.
"If government got out of the school system entirely you would have lots of schools opening and competing with each other, forcing prices down. It would be in every school's best interest to increase enrollment and student loans with reasonable, market-determined interest rates would become common for poor students."
Are you mad? Nowhere in the world has that happened. America is a shining example: the college system is mostly private, as are the professional schools (medicine, law). As a consequence, they have the highest tuition in the world on average, and at the college level typically provide a much worse education into the bargain. (The professional schools provide a good education, mind.) The long and short of it is that in America, education is a middle class game, and becoming a doctor or a lawyer is absolutely a rich man's game (and an old boy network).
"According to him [Ron Paul] charities and churches would build hospitals and even in the private for-profit hospitals no one was ever turned away because they couldn't afford to pay."
Again, complete bullshit. Private hospitals turn patients away by the bucketload. To counter anecdote with anecdote, some of the cases were filmed by Michael Moore for his film Sicko.
"During the 1800's the USA economy grew at a tremendous rate. The country was seen as the land of opportunity where you could make it with a bit of hard work. Gradually the government started to expand and intervene with programs sold to the public as a way to help overcome the problems that they perceived in the system. Problems which are all relative. If you compare today's standard of living with that of 1700 England under Serfdom"
Now you're becoming frankly ridiculous. Don't you think the US's rate of growth slowed at the end of the nineteenth century because all the resources had finally been discovered and industrialisation settled to an even pace? The US's rate of growth picked up in the twentieth century when it armed the world and itself at enormous scales. Oh, and feudalism (serfdom) in England ended in the 14th-16th centuries. Not the 18th. You seem to have no grasp of history whatsoever. How, then, can you try to understand the present?
I'm not Swiss, but I have a regular Swiss bank account (not a "numbered" account), although I've read about the "numbered" accounts you describe above. What you describe is also what I knew. However, I must take exception to the "strictest identification policies" thing. In Switzerland, my experience has been that identification is rather informal.
The most shocking incident that ever happened to me was when I was chatting with a very dear Swiss friend in Berne about the banking policies, and she said that they treat the Swiss and foreigners very differently. The long and short of it was that we took a bet; she would go to the bank, provide my account number and name, and try to withdraw cash for me, telling them only that she was doing it as a favour as I couldn't. And lo, with just that information and because she was Swiss, they were happy to give her the sum she wanted. Now, the sum was a mere 200 francs (about 20 years ago), so the experiment was of limited interest. But still, this is something I could not have imagined in any first world country.
Nowadays, when I travel to the US, I have to get fingerprinted, photographed, practically give every last detail of my life and a thorough search of my person and belongings just to get into the country. To apply for a visa (I am not in a country with a waiver agreement) I have to give very strict identification from my home country. That's what I would call strict identification...
As a Swiss banker, would you be so kind as to comment on the bank incident, tell me whether this is commonplace? I'm very curious, and perhaps things have changed in the last 20 years. Thank you.
The problem is, a great deal and perhaps a majority of people are not fully rational (which is how I see it, rather than "proper pyschological functioning"). But simply put, with high responsibility come high standards.
Depending on the style manual the journalist used, this is correct. For instance, if you read the BBC, acronyms are spelled with only the first letter capitalised -- hence Nato, Isaf, etc. This rule is not followed under some circumstances (probably depending on whether you can pronounce the word), so DHS, BBC, USA.
They certainly do not view themselves as having anything to do with the British government. They are funded not by taxpayers but by television viewers, and by a provision of law. Their ties to the government are merely that the legislature determines their increase in funding, and around that time, the government might try to suppress or delay some embarrassing stories. That's pretty much as it is around the world, though.
Considering the BBC spend millions on each episode of some of their more expensive programmes, and how much they pay the announcers on their news channels, they might have figured the possible legal damages as an acceptable risk in making the programme.
Perhaps Sir Humphrey Appleby spoke the truth about the true purpose behind Britain's independent deterrent?...
Haha, excellent! One of the very few Yes, Minister references on Slashdot, and so fitting, too. For those who haven't watched the programme (it ran in the 80s), an inexperienced Cabinet minister (later prime minister) is being "educated" by his Department's top civil servant, Sir Humphrey. Sir Humphrey tells the astonished minister that Britain's nuclear deterrent isn't intended against the Russians, but the French.
Exactly. Plus we already have an OS keeps data on disk and merely uses memory as a checkpoint -- Coyotos. You can unplug it and boot it again and everything will be exactly the same, it's just slower.
Plus, it is actually a good thing to serialise/unserialise data sometimes. First of all, the serialised representation is much, much more compact. Second, what if the program crashes or gets into some undefined state? You can't share the data between processes, so whatever you were editing is lost. Imagine a system where the persistence of any piece of data is guaranteed only so long as the program that created it is still running and able to access it! Now imagine just one program in the system with a memory leak...
Sorry, but this is a horrible idea.