Today's conservatives wants the government to control things they don't like. Liberals also like the government to control things they don't like. The only difference I can see is the particular things they don't like.
I can't for the life of me figure out why people ever wanted SUVs. Well, actually I can. Until recently, there was not much choice to seat 5+ people and have AWD or 4WD. SUVs were really the only option if you had a good-sized family in a place with lots of snow.
But 2WD SUVs? Pointless!
We have one wagon (Mazda 6) and one "crossover" (Pacifica). I'm not sure what the Pacifica is... it's is essentially a big minivan minus a sliding door and plus AWD, or a big wagon plus AWD. The wagon is just perfect, and I don't understand why they aren't more popular in the US. Insanely useful, good mileage, and looks great. Maybe they'll get more popular as the SUV refugees wake up.
That's just it. I have three kids all under 7. Despite having the two smallest booster seats available, I can just barely fit all three of the car seats them into my Mazda 6 wagon, so I don't do it. The baby seat is just enormous. And in New England, there are lots of hills and snow. AWD or 4WD is a must. So I have a Pacifica as the family hauler, you know, because all those minivans just have great AWD.
Here in MA, they just changed the car seats laws from 4/40 to 8/80. I'm sure when the kids are about 8, they will change the law again and require car seats until they are 16. Boosters in the freaking driver's seat, that's what's next, I tell you!
You know, I keep thinking of inventing a bunch of booster seats glued together, so you can fit 3 or 4 kids into a back row legally. (The stupid conspiracy nut in me sometimes thinks the lack of such an obvious product is proof that The Man wants you to buy a Big Fuggin' Car and thus a lot of oil for Bush's cronies.)
I'm wondering if the tide is changing. From my view, permissive feel-good parenting is out of fashion nowadays. (Paranoid parenting *is* in fashion, but that's for another day.)
I have three of young kids just getting into school, and know plenty of parents in the same situation as me. Most of us are keenly aware of grade and self-esteem inflation, and are working to avoid it. If anything, we tend to be a little on the strict side, because we keep hearing about stories like this all the time. Kids who graduate high school with a 4.0 and can't read.
My middle son has a little trouble getting along at school, and so is my godson. If we get a call from the school, we're thankful they are trying to help us out. We are sure to back up the teacher's decisions at home.
The latest tend I know of in parenting is encouragement. You don't give false praise, but you don't totally ignore or berate your kid. Instead, you reward effort. Think of the difference between "Wow, you're a great baseball player!" vs. "I can tell you've really worked hard on your batting!" and the signals they send, over the course of 18 years or so.
Part of our job is to teach the kids to handle bad news, and to learn how to self-improve. You aren't born #1, but you can get there if you work at it.
Have you ever sold a house in a tight market? If it was only as simple as "cleaning". You can have the cleanest, neatest, most perfectly maintained house in the world. However, if the items inside are unfashionable or slightly worn, good luck selling it.
Really, buyers are that stupid. They walk in otherwise perfect house, see mint-green wall they don't like that could be painted for $30, and don't make an offer.
You can't make bread without some form of sugar. The yeast eat the sugar, put out CO2 and rise the dough. Yeast don't eat starch, as would you need enzymes to break starch down into sugar. The sugar is gone, because the yeast ate it, not you.
Now, if you're a business owner, and a you need a gazillion tons of sugar per year just to feed the yeast to make your bread, you can save a lot of amount of money by using HFCS instead of other forms of sugar. But there really is no health reason to avoid it in bread.
HFCS in sugary products is an altogether different thing.
The variables are more complicated than you think.
Yeast is alive, and doesn't always do what you want it to do. One speck of bacteria in the wrong place can change the entire of character the batch. One generation of yeast may ferment more than the second. Different batches of grains have different yields and flavors, hops batches have different flavors and bittering strength. It's not totally reproducible, unless you can control all the microorganisms and DNA, and only the largest brewers own a yeast lab and have the knowledge to use it.
My brother-in-law is a professional brewer, and while they produce excellent results, there's always a degree of variability they have to live with and adjust to. Only the largest brewers, with a team of microbiologists, and pushing significant enough volume to blend out errors can really produce really consistent beer.
It may be stupid, but government is stupid. It was illegal to homebrew in the US until 1978. Sure, you could mix water, sugar, yeast, but you weren't allowed to ferment it. To this day, you can't make an eisbock by freezing it and taking the ice chunks out, which is considered distilling by law.
That's pretty funny. Maybe I can translate it for you.
When you have hundreds or thousands of users, you try to support them all of them. This entails compromise. Putting in the union of all features, long term, results in Junk. Everyone wants different, almost always contradictory, things. Ever see the Simpson's episode where Homer builds his own car, and how it's a pile of garbage nobody but Homer wants?
You get something like: User 1 wants feature X. User 2 wants contradictory feature Y. User 3 wants a GUI widget on the main window to switch between the two. User 4 is scared off by too many complicated widget, and won't use your product if has too many option. And so on.
Now, when a user asks for something, their concern usually only for themselves. Or, at the most, everyone else who shares their view on the particular bug being reported ("lots of people hate this bug").
The developer is asking you for your reasoning behind the problem, because he's trying to solve the long-term problem for everyone. Let's say you want feature X. From your perspective, all you need is for the developer to implement feature 1 and you're happy, and 3 maybe would be OK. It's so simple! It takes five minutes! Why are they being such jerks?
Because, as soon as we fix your feature, now Users 2 and 4 are unhappy. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
In this example, if you said something like "well, all my family is on MSN, and all my friends are on Yahoo... so when a window pops up I know not to accidentally type 'what's up motherfucker!' to my Mom, by quickly looking at the protocol icon"... that's a reason. The developer can take a look to see if he can solve that problem another way. Maybe his solution would be something you never thought of. Then the next person who has the problem, or the next 500, never ever realize it was a problem, because now it's fixed in a way that makes everyone happy.
In general, we realize that maybe you don't self-analyze to know this. The ideal situation is to observe people using the product. You don't tell me what you want, rather, I observe you trying to do something and see what problems you have. That's the best feedback we can get, because when users self-report on what they want they often get it wrong, or it's just too self-serving to apply to other people.
In this case, you are not in the same room, so he's asking what you are trying to accomplish. It's a less-than-ideal way of observing you.
This is exactly right. You are the first and only self-admitted conservative that actually makes any sense. It's also precisely why I prefer to be an independent, as I can't bear to be associated with either side right now. If someone thinks it's OK for GWB to have unlimited, Constitution-defying power but not Hillary, then they are simply authoritarian statists. And, the worst insult: they are identical in my mind identical to the dreaded "nanny state" liberals. It's just a different kind of nanny. A mean nanny that raps your knuckles, instead the nice nanny who gives you candy. But, still a nanny.
Not inherently, but they typically do. You don't "add" or "remove" pixels to make a widescreen. They are different objects! So the difference is in what you choose to compare them against.
As an example: my old 4:3 19" is 1280x1024 = that's 1.3 million pixels. A Dell widescreen 19" is 1440x900, which is 1.29 million pixels. Pretty close, but you lose 100 pixels on the bottom.
So what about gaining the horizontal pixels? It usually doesn't matter. Applications are more designed to scroll vertically than horizontally. My wife likes to maximize web browsers on our 24" widescreen monitor - all it does is create lots of useless blank space on the edges. What's the last website you saw that actually uses all that space? I can barely find one, and when I do, it makes all the paragraphs one line long - hard to read.
Now, I use that monitor for music editing work which scrolls horizontally, where it can make use of all that space... but most people don't.
Most laptops are the same. You just don't get the same amount of vertical pixels out of it than you used to. And it's getting harder to find 3:2 screens if you need that really useful vertical resolution.
Our street is plainly labeled "Private Road, No Trespassing" because it's still under construction and not public yet. Not that I care about having the picture, but Google doesn't care either, they put it on street view anyway. So, it's not a stretch to say they willfully ignore such signs.
I was a music major before I went into Comp Sci, and wound up with degrees in both.
The music major was far more time-intensive. Music majors regularly took 21-24 credits while the "libbies" would complain at 16. And, those credits were not "dense" time-wise, I'd frequently have 3 or 4 different performance groups for 3 hours a week each, yet only get one credit for each. You'd have to practice 2 or 3 hours a day to acheive your instrumental proficiency, and I wasn't even a performance major.
When I finished the music and was working F/T on CS, I had a whole lot more drinking time, yet my average was a lot higher in CS.
In art, you have to make a metric ton of garbage before you're capable making anything good. And everything that comes out good looks easy and obvious, until you try to actually do it.
Are you joking? Calc is one thing that's about one step removed from most programming, but the kind of applied math you get in statistics is critical. You can't do any sort of performance analysis without the latter.
I've been in this boat with Quicken for the last ten years, or so.
All I want is to use the online banking features. It saves me tons of time downloading everything directly into Quicken, by not messing around logging into 12 different web interfaces to 12 different banks. But, every version timebombs after three years, and I'm forced to buy a new one. The new one has so many extra features that it's usually 10 times slower, because my computer is a few years old. Now I have to upgrade the entire freaking computer to run one piece of very important software.
What I want to do is to use my software indefinitely, until I decide to upgrade.
I had this happen to me when teaching. I'd simply ask the student to explain a particular bit of code. Usually the most syntatically or semantically complicated part, or maybe a little bit of extraneous code that I can see really wasn't needed to solve the problem. They couldn't. Not even admitting a guess - something like "well, I'm not sure how it works, but I tried a bunch of things before which didn't work, and this seemed to work."
If you want to shape your "personal brand" (to use the author's term) on Facebook so you appear to be a sophisticated scholar of the finer things in life, then you're free to do so.
...until someone uploads a photo of you doing a keg stand. And tags you.
2. Writers are about the least respected guild in Hollywood. Seriously, food craft gets more respect. (probably because they aren't a union)
Not the lowest. The lowest are performing musicians. Ever notice on the credits to a movie, they list such high-skill jobs as caterers and the 3rd assistant janitor... but the actual musicians are never mentioned?
That's right, you can spend 20 years training to become a professional musician, graduate the top of your class from Juilliard, win international competitions, be the best player in the entire time zone, beating out thousands and thousands of people to a single spot in a world-renowned symphony orchestra... and they'll list Joe the Janitor, a few thousand extras, and few hundred "production babies" instead of you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're a bit low on the estimate.
Today's conservatives wants the government to control things they don't like. Liberals also like the government to control things they don't like. The only difference I can see is the particular things they don't like.
But 2WD SUVs? Pointless!
We have one wagon (Mazda 6) and one "crossover" (Pacifica). I'm not sure what the Pacifica is... it's is essentially a big minivan minus a sliding door and plus AWD, or a big wagon plus AWD. The wagon is just perfect, and I don't understand why they aren't more popular in the US. Insanely useful, good mileage, and looks great. Maybe they'll get more popular as the SUV refugees wake up.
Here in MA, they just changed the car seats laws from 4/40 to 8/80. I'm sure when the kids are about 8, they will change the law again and require car seats until they are 16. Boosters in the freaking driver's seat, that's what's next, I tell you!
You know, I keep thinking of inventing a bunch of booster seats glued together, so you can fit 3 or 4 kids into a back row legally. (The stupid conspiracy nut in me sometimes thinks the lack of such an obvious product is proof that The Man wants you to buy a Big Fuggin' Car and thus a lot of oil for Bush's cronies.)
I'm wondering if the tide is changing. From my view, permissive feel-good parenting is out of fashion nowadays. (Paranoid parenting *is* in fashion, but that's for another day.)
I have three of young kids just getting into school, and know plenty of parents in the same situation as me. Most of us are keenly aware of grade and self-esteem inflation, and are working to avoid it. If anything, we tend to be a little on the strict side, because we keep hearing about stories like this all the time. Kids who graduate high school with a 4.0 and can't read.
My middle son has a little trouble getting along at school, and so is my godson. If we get a call from the school, we're thankful they are trying to help us out. We are sure to back up the teacher's decisions at home.
The latest tend I know of in parenting is encouragement. You don't give false praise, but you don't totally ignore or berate your kid. Instead, you reward effort. Think of the difference between "Wow, you're a great baseball player!" vs. "I can tell you've really worked hard on your batting!" and the signals they send, over the course of 18 years or so.
Part of our job is to teach the kids to handle bad news, and to learn how to self-improve. You aren't born #1, but you can get there if you work at it.
Really, buyers are that stupid. They walk in otherwise perfect house, see mint-green wall they don't like that could be painted for $30, and don't make an offer.
Or use Mike Lin's awesome MakeAppsNotSuck control panel. Well, that's my name for it.
You can't make bread without some form of sugar. The yeast eat the sugar, put out CO2 and rise the dough. Yeast don't eat starch, as would you need enzymes to break starch down into sugar. The sugar is gone, because the yeast ate it, not you.
Now, if you're a business owner, and a you need a gazillion tons of sugar per year just to feed the yeast to make your bread, you can save a lot of amount of money by using HFCS instead of other forms of sugar. But there really is no health reason to avoid it in bread.
HFCS in sugary products is an altogether different thing.
The variables are more complicated than you think.
Yeast is alive, and doesn't always do what you want it to do. One speck of bacteria in the wrong place can change the entire of character the batch. One generation of yeast may ferment more than the second. Different batches of grains have different yields and flavors, hops batches have different flavors and bittering strength. It's not totally reproducible, unless you can control all the microorganisms and DNA, and only the largest brewers own a yeast lab and have the knowledge to use it.
My brother-in-law is a professional brewer, and while they produce excellent results, there's always a degree of variability they have to live with and adjust to. Only the largest brewers, with a team of microbiologists, and pushing significant enough volume to blend out errors can really produce really consistent beer.
It may be stupid, but government is stupid. It was illegal to homebrew in the US until 1978. Sure, you could mix water, sugar, yeast, but you weren't allowed to ferment it. To this day, you can't make an eisbock by freezing it and taking the ice chunks out, which is considered distilling by law.
That's pretty funny. Maybe I can translate it for you.
When you have hundreds or thousands of users, you try to support them all of them. This entails compromise. Putting in the union of all features, long term, results in Junk. Everyone wants different, almost always contradictory, things. Ever see the Simpson's episode where Homer builds his own car, and how it's a pile of garbage nobody but Homer wants?
You get something like: User 1 wants feature X. User 2 wants contradictory feature Y. User 3 wants a GUI widget on the main window to switch between the two. User 4 is scared off by too many complicated widget, and won't use your product if has too many option. And so on.
Now, when a user asks for something, their concern usually only for themselves. Or, at the most, everyone else who shares their view on the particular bug being reported ("lots of people hate this bug").
The developer is asking you for your reasoning behind the problem, because he's trying to solve the long-term problem for everyone. Let's say you want feature X. From your perspective, all you need is for the developer to implement feature 1 and you're happy, and 3 maybe would be OK. It's so simple! It takes five minutes! Why are they being such jerks?
Because, as soon as we fix your feature, now Users 2 and 4 are unhappy. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
In this example, if you said something like "well, all my family is on MSN, and all my friends are on Yahoo... so when a window pops up I know not to accidentally type 'what's up motherfucker!' to my Mom, by quickly looking at the protocol icon"... that's a reason. The developer can take a look to see if he can solve that problem another way. Maybe his solution would be something you never thought of. Then the next person who has the problem, or the next 500, never ever realize it was a problem, because now it's fixed in a way that makes everyone happy.
In general, we realize that maybe you don't self-analyze to know this. The ideal situation is to observe people using the product. You don't tell me what you want, rather, I observe you trying to do something and see what problems you have. That's the best feedback we can get, because when users self-report on what they want they often get it wrong, or it's just too self-serving to apply to other people.
In this case, you are not in the same room, so he's asking what you are trying to accomplish. It's a less-than-ideal way of observing you.
This is exactly right. You are the first and only self-admitted conservative that actually makes any sense. It's also precisely why I prefer to be an independent, as I can't bear to be associated with either side right now. If someone thinks it's OK for GWB to have unlimited, Constitution-defying power but not Hillary, then they are simply authoritarian statists. And, the worst insult: they are identical in my mind identical to the dreaded "nanny state" liberals. It's just a different kind of nanny. A mean nanny that raps your knuckles, instead the nice nanny who gives you candy. But, still a nanny.
As an example: my old 4:3 19" is 1280x1024 = that's 1.3 million pixels. A Dell widescreen 19" is 1440x900, which is 1.29 million pixels. Pretty close, but you lose 100 pixels on the bottom.
So what about gaining the horizontal pixels? It usually doesn't matter. Applications are more designed to scroll vertically than horizontally. My wife likes to maximize web browsers on our 24" widescreen monitor - all it does is create lots of useless blank space on the edges. What's the last website you saw that actually uses all that space? I can barely find one, and when I do, it makes all the paragraphs one line long - hard to read.
Now, I use that monitor for music editing work which scrolls horizontally, where it can make use of all that space... but most people don't.
Most laptops are the same. You just don't get the same amount of vertical pixels out of it than you used to. And it's getting harder to find 3:2 screens if you need that really useful vertical resolution.
Duh, forgot the link.
Our street is plainly labeled "Private Road, No Trespassing" because it's still under construction and not public yet. Not that I care about having the picture, but Google doesn't care either, they put it on street view anyway. So, it's not a stretch to say they willfully ignore such signs.
No need to wait. I'm sure there's already a fetish site for that.
The music major was far more time-intensive. Music majors regularly took 21-24 credits while the "libbies" would complain at 16. And, those credits were not "dense" time-wise, I'd frequently have 3 or 4 different performance groups for 3 hours a week each, yet only get one credit for each. You'd have to practice 2 or 3 hours a day to acheive your instrumental proficiency, and I wasn't even a performance major.
When I finished the music and was working F/T on CS, I had a whole lot more drinking time, yet my average was a lot higher in CS.
In art, you have to make a metric ton of garbage before you're capable making anything good. And everything that comes out good looks easy and obvious, until you try to actually do it.
Are you joking? Calc is one thing that's about one step removed from most programming, but the kind of applied math you get in statistics is critical. You can't do any sort of performance analysis without the latter.
All I want is to use the online banking features. It saves me tons of time downloading everything directly into Quicken, by not messing around logging into 12 different web interfaces to 12 different banks. But, every version timebombs after three years, and I'm forced to buy a new one. The new one has so many extra features that it's usually 10 times slower, because my computer is a few years old. Now I have to upgrade the entire freaking computer to run one piece of very important software.
What I want to do is to use my software indefinitely, until I decide to upgrade.
So in other words, please turn off cell network (except when we're using it to activate bombs).
Not the lowest. The lowest are performing musicians. Ever notice on the credits to a movie, they list such high-skill jobs as caterers and the 3rd assistant janitor... but the actual musicians are never mentioned?
That's right, you can spend 20 years training to become a professional musician, graduate the top of your class from Juilliard, win international competitions, be the best player in the entire time zone, beating out thousands and thousands of people to a single spot in a world-renowned symphony orchestra... and they'll list Joe the Janitor, a few thousand extras, and few hundred "production babies" instead of you.
Great, I now have 3 different OpenIDs... and no place to use them!