I don't actually think it's easier, and I don't generally find that being polite takes any effort for me, but I've been around enough nerds to know that many of them take the obnoxious approach when the pleasant approach would do the trick just fine. All it takes is a bit of time on Slashdot to see that.
If you've ever worked at a software company, you see this kind of behavior among your socially inept coworkers all the time. I've had to manage teams of people like this and it isn't fun.
Fictional?. Clearly there is much that is exaggerated or mythologized in Old Testament writings, but I think fictional is too strong a word to describe a historical figure.
No, actually, he's right. There really is no such thing as Hindu doctrine. It is simply not a doctrinal, prescriptive religion. I am a Jewish American of Eastern European and British descent, by the way, so not speaking of my own culture in any way.
It is hard for many people from the Judeo-Christian tradition to understand that unlike Christianity, Hinduism doesn't really mandate that you have "faith" in a particular event - there is a large tradition of mythology and stories, but there is no requirement that to call yourself a Hindu you believe that these are literal truth. And there are relatively few truly religious behavioral mandates - there have been many social and cultural mandates (suttee, which you refer to, is really one of those, as was much of the purity rules, though those were based on a socio-religious caste system).
As there are many gods in India, there are many modes of worship and ways of showing devotion. The common religious texts of Hinduism are a combination of written versions of old mythology and spiritual writings and poems. There's no 10 commandments, no edict from God channelled by a prophet, no sayings of Jesus that tell you how to live a good life.
No, that's an example of terrible board oversight. The whole point of a Board of Directors is that they have a fiduciary duty to represent shareholder and company interests and are supposed to be composed of a mix of folks representing different constituencies.
They are supposed to make sure a CEO's ego doesn't take precedence over the interests of shareholders, employees and other persons with an interest in the company's success. When the Board fails in this role, as at SCO, the consequences can be dire.
I seem to recall that the SCO Board was padded with Ralph Yarro and a Mormon cabal of Ray Noorda (founder of Canopy Group, SCO's largest shareholder) buddies. Yarro put McBride in the CEO's chair and his yes-men bought into their immensely stupid plan. The end result was millions squandered, an old UNIX brand absolutely destroyed forever, and worst of all, several suicides, including Ray Noorda's daughter. She had apparently engineered Yarro's ouster, which was followed by the mysterious settlement transferring all of Canopy's SCO shares to Yarro immediately before her suicide - I don't know if all of these events were ever adequately explained.
Truly one of the most sordid tech industry stories in years.
Oh, bullshit. If you go around and act nasty and accuse people blindly of "not being compliant" because your head is too far up your ass to see what's going on around you, you should expect to be told to fuck off, and deservedly so.
There is a prominent link on their download page. So you can obtain the source code from the same place they distribute the binaries. This seems to be perfectly compliant with the GPL. Or go type "Ubuntu source code" into Google - it took me 10 seconds to find archive.ubuntu.com.
Nothing mandates coddling of morons. There will always be some self-righteous asshole who thinks the world owes him a hand-holding. To him and those like him, a resounding "fuck you". Learn to treat people with respect and basic decency, and you'll get much farther in life.
Well, it doesn't do absolutely everything on your list but it's a pretty good start: http://www.gpg4win.org/.
It does the first two, and the third - it does cache passphrases for short periods of time. I don't know off the top of my head how to change the cache duration, but there should be a config option somewhere. Sending encrypted or signed email is just a matter of two toggles in a toolbar on every email - you should be able to change a setting somewhere so they always default to on (right now they default to off unless I'm replying to a PGP-encrypted/signed email).
It is GPL.
As for this: * Attach the pubkey to all outgoing mails where the address isn't in my keyring.
Seems like it would be a pretty easy addition to the existing GPG4Win codebase.
* Automatically (just ask for password confirmation or something) addition of incoming pubkeys to my keyring.
Not sure about this since I don't think I ever get such emails, but I believe you can just double click on a pubkey attachment in the correct format and it will open it in WinPT, the key management software packaged with GPG4Win.
* The people who got the pubkey would also get a link to where to download the plugin.
This is trivial if you are already attaching the pubkey, just stick a link in your sig.
The one thing GPG4Win needs is some English documentation - it's got decent documentation, but in German only. A bit more professional looking web design would be nice too. And some parts of the software feel a touch rough around the edges, but overall it "just works" most of the time.
Well, by your definition, no intervention in a marketplace is ever "needed" since supply and demand will always take care of things. This is true, but you may destroy an industry or lose your national competitive advantage in the process. In the late 90s and up until the end of 2000 really, wages had been driven so high the costs of starting a tech company had ballooned. You needed to raise huge sums of VC to pay ridiculously prissy workers who wanted 150k a year and perks out the ass to do no work.
This was a short term labor supply shortage and labor demand spike, all wrapped up in one. When the bubble burst, demand subsided and the supply spiked, and prices dropped through the floor. Massively unstable wage levels are bad for the economy as a whole and bad for an industry. I would say I support immigration rule-changes when necessary to stabilize critical industries.
However, it really isn't necessary now. There are some local areas where tech wages have started a rapid runup again - apparently this is happening in Seattle now. I blame the blind trendfollowing of VCs for much of this effect, and the silliness of the IPO market that unfortunately drives the VCs (mind you, if more businesses were built to make money and not for IPO or M&A activity, this would be much less of a problem). But I digress - the point is that if wages have in fact been quite depressed in much of the tech industry and unemployment has been high, then it seems unjustified to continue to implement an immigration "hack" like the H1B program.
And when you say "industry didn't want that to continue" - it bears mentioning that domestic companies have to compete globally, especially in the software market. If you prevent all flows of international labor, you again just serve to benefit foreign incorporated firms at the expense of domestic firms. There is a balance in a healthy economy between good domestic jobs and globally competitive firms.
No, democracy may be bad, but affirmative action is much worse. Democracy produces mediocre results with much inefficiency, is subject to the tyrrany of the masses and certainly has other weaknesses, but it does meet the baseline requirement of being built on a sense of fairness and moral justice. While not always the most efficient system, nor one that reaches the best results the most easily, it is the best system we know of from a moral perspective.
Affirmative action, on the other hand, is built on a morally bankrupt core. The principle that the ends justify the means lies at the core of affirmative action. The end is a noble one - get more of some underrepresented, "disadvantaged" minority group to participate in an important career or educational path in society. The means - quotas and admission preferences - lead to bitterness and anger toward the same groups who, previously oppressed, are now trying to become an accepted part of the social mainstream. Not to mention reinforcing rational biases about the competency levels of those people that will be assumed by those around them.
Furthermore, the assumption that "disadvantaged" can be determined by an ill-defined ethnic label is absurd. I can't tell you how many wealthy, privileged people who happen to be black or latino that I've met at the Ivy League universities I've attended (undergrad and grad school). While most of them, especially in grad school, deserved to be there, many, especially those I saw as an undergrad, did not.
The construction of intentional injustice by arbitrary racial boundaries reinforces the very kind of prejudice we should eschew at all costs. This doesn't just happen in the minds of "racist" people, it happens in the minds of any rational, thinking person and is unavoidable under an affirmative action regime. We need to address the causes of discrepancies at an early age, not their effects later in life by punishing those who have worked hard to achieve certain goals.
Umm, RMS's smug demeanor and obsessive behavior about things like naming conventions piss off a lot of people. Not sure if you've noticed, but he's generally not well liked on Slashdot. If he's not even well-liked here among his own constituency, well, doesn't bode well for his role as a figurehead, regardless of what you may think of his ideals.
The International Herald Tribune is a fully owned subsidiary of the New York Times Company and has been since 2003. Previously, it was jointly owned by the Washington Post and the New York Times Company.
This is why you will frequently see the same article printed in both papers.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it sucks, but you basically got the essence of it. There are too many damned libraries that are just joyous combinations of way-too-many C++ features. For some reason people seem to feel like they can only prove what badass programmers they are by using all the damned features in C++.
I don't want the people working for me spending all day figuring out what some other person who works for me is trying to do with their code. That's why Java and C# are nice for big, many-person development projects. Don't get me wrong, sometimes Java can be frustrating because of missing features (1.5 is far less so than earlier versions though), but I can read other peoples code remarkably fast and I just can't do the same with a decent amount of C++ code out there.
C++ is fine as long as you treat it as object oriented C and make sparing use of the nasty constructs possible with the language. Otherwise it becomes completely unmanageable very fast.
The fact that Mohammed married a 9-year-old girl (or rather, married a 6-year-old girl and consummated the marriage when she was 9) comes from hadith sahih bukhari 7.62.64. The hadith sahih bukhari are a primary muslim religious text, secondary only to the Qu'ran to most Sunnis, though apparently Shi'a have a more nuanced view of the factuality of the hadith.
In any case, I agree this is a silly reason to attack a religion, since the Hebrew Old Testament has many protagonists and prophets who did things that would be considered immoral or illegal by modern standards. But that doesn't make the underlying comment untrue.
As for the Iran-badges-for-non-Muslims story, I read it originally on Canada.com, where it was posted on the National Post site. They have since removed the story. However, the UPI news wire story on the subject is still up. This story was published in several mainstream outlets. It seems the story was basically untrue at least based on corrections like these, but it wasn't just printed in some fringe outlet by any means.
However, I will grant you that a real news outlet should fact check and withdraw stories that turn out to be false. Many "blogs" and online rant sites don't qualify as news since they don't follow basic rules of journalistic conduct.
Okay, here you go. It's right there. Not from the Qu'ran, but from the Hadith Sahih Bukhari. This is not part of the Qu'ran per se, but is considered the primary trusted book by Sunni muslims (and less so by Shi'a). Also see this page for an explanation of the Hadith's role in Islam. It is similar to the role of the Midrash, or maybe the way Prophets and Writings are viewed relative to the Pentateuch or Torah in Judaism.
So yes, it's true that this is from Muslim holy writings, but no, it's not from the Qu'ran per se.
I just don't get it. With such a laundry list of problems, why not look to making more efficient something we already have today that is far easier to produce and store, and has most of the benefits of gasoline but can be produced domestically at a (currently) competitive cost?
Ethanol is far simpler to store, work with, produce and use in internal combustion engines. There are several means of production from *non-corn* sources that are economically viable on a larger scale in today's energy market. It can be made from cellulose-based feedstock via SSF or any number of variant processes. Making it efficient at large scale is a straightforward process engineering problem, not a matter of coming up with the 5-10 major scientific breakthroughs needed to make hydrogen efficient.
It's been good to hear people finally taking fuel ethanol seriously in the last few months, since I've been talking about this for about 5 years now and people used to look at me like I was crazy.
The question is, is the system radically misdesigned, or has it just accumulated some cruft? If it's radically misdesigned because the requirements have changed so many times over the years, then a ground-up redesign, with the benefit of reams of documentation of what the real requirements and specifications are *might* be a good idea.
But if the system just happens to use some older technologies or has code that appears messy or spaghetti-ish, then I would strongly suggest refactoring over rewriting. If the capabilities of the current system are limited in some way, make sure you understand exactly in which way and why they are limited so you don't waste time rebuilding only to find that those limitations are fundamental to some combination of business requirements, rather than incidental to the engineering decisions.
If the scope and breadth of what a system is supposed to do has changed drastically and you can demonstrably prove to a room full of developers that the architecture is to blame for your current problems, then the bad design/architecture flag could legitimately be thrown. Understand that you will be throwing away the baby with the bathwater when you rewrite. And don't try rewriting using tools your team isn't familiar with - that's just asking for disaster.
I have been in one situation where a poorly specified system was replaced about 85-90% with a ground-up rewritten system (we reused a few components), where the original took a team of 10 people over 2 years to write and the replacement was done in 2 months by 2 people. This was accomplished because the original system was supposed to do everything for everybody and turned into a totally flexible architecture and infrastructure for enterprise apps in Java and basically became a slow bloated mess. The replacement just stuck to a well-defined set of requirements and did its job well, and was between 20 and 50 times faster than the original.
However, I have also seen situations where an otherwise good, working system that was complex and underdocumented (but where the complexity was necessary) was thrown away for political reasons, and we ended up wasting 3 months rebuilding the system from scratch ("porting" it from C++ to Java with a JNI/C++ core). The new system worked well, and was somewhat more flexible, but since the original system had been revised to reflect dozens of additional rules of business logic and corner cases that were never documented anywhere, replicating it all to the actual needs of this customer would have been a prohibitively complicated process.
This is nonsense for the vast majority of LCD RP sets. I've had my Sony Grand Wega 50" LCD RP set for almost 2 years now and have yet to replace a bulb. Others I know have had similar experiences.
Some people who had earlier versions of Sony LCD RP sets suffered from a bulb burnout defect like the one you describe. But this is a defect in a specific set or line and the correct solution is to get a replacement unit from the manufacturer.
As the other respondant said, if the bulbs are rated for 10,000 hours, that's something like 60 weeks of continuous-on usage. If you watch 30 hours a week of TV (i.e. you have no life), that's still more than 6 years. I'd much rather replace one of these bulbs every couple years than do the plasma thing and replace the whole set when burn-in sets in.
Re:I got the CVS cop-out from the cscope maintaine
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 1
It sounds like that was a project with poor/no release schedule or release engineering in place. If everybody writes code and nobody ever bothers to get a release out the door, then OF COURSE "fixed in CVS" becomes meaningless to users.
The solution here is a better documented release policy that project admins try to stick to. If you release a stable version every 6 months, and agree to fix critical security and functionality bugs on the stable release if they occur, then users know what "stable release" means. If they want new functionality or minor bugfixes, you can tell them to use a nightly build or to to wait until the next stable release.
This is the way things should and do work for a well-maintained and managed software project of any sort.
"Has been shown"? You are referring to the linear-no-threshold model, which is not agreed upon universally by any means. Radiation hormesis seems to have a decent amount of high statistical quality evidence backing it up, though the mechanism for a causal relationship is not fully understood.
Exposure seems to behave linearly over a certain range of dosage levels, true, but not necessarily for all dosage levels.
"Psychology Ninjas" is distinct from "Well-trained marketing and PR department". In fact, your use of such a snarky, distortive phrase suggests that you didn't want to tackle my argument, but instead resort to an attempt to discredit me. I am an MBA, not a "psychology ninja" and I understand these concepts perfectly well. I don't accept that nobody at Walmart does.
In any case, you've done nothing to undermine my point that selection of facts in and of itself creates a point of view and introduces biases. I am glad to suggest some readings to you, if you are curious. If you disagree that such a process has occurred in the editing of that article, fine, but try counting the facts presented, looking at the headlines in the articles, and the placement
Nonsense. Presentation of only factual information is not at all an indication of lack of bias. Anybody who has taken basic courses in behavioral psychology can tell you this. The selection of facts from a nearly limitless pool of factual information can highly bias the perception of a reader of a set of facts. It is nearly trivial to choose a set of facts that lead a reader to radically different conclusions, if one chooses to do so.
The Walmart page falls victim to this, as well as presenting a set of very positive facts at the top of the "Debates" page to create an anchor point for perceptions skewed toward the positive. Setting such an anchor point goes a huge way to diminish the perceptual impact of any following negative information.
Clearly the people on Walmart's side have a solid understanding of these psychological principles, which doesn't surprise me from a company that employs "greeters" to make themselves feel more friendly. The people at Wikipedia obviously are missing the point if they think NPOV means "just presenting facts".
Avoiding bias entirely is impossible, but the best way to minimize it would be eliminate excessively positive framing on a page intended to highlight debate over negative aspects of the company, and enforcing that a roughly comparable amount of information gets to be presented by both sides.
If the sides can't get along or agree, the arguments can always be broken out into two separate pages, each of which gets to be edited by a contingent of people who clearly fall on one side or the other of the argument, and each gets to select their own set of facts that support their argument (but still attempt to maintain at least a neutral use of language). NPOV or not, I've seen this approach used on other pages, such as some Israeli-Palestinian related pages, where the participants otherwise would just get into non-productive edit-wars.
The entire goal of communism is to deny human nature. The reason capitalism won is that it recognizes the primacy of incentives in driving and controlling human behavior. The only way to make communism work is to have very tight controls - either in the form of homogeneous social norms (common in small religious communities and communes that are essentially communist) or a fear-inducing government security apparatus, which has been used in every single communist nation-state the world has seen.
Of course, the people wielding that security apparatus tend to end up succumbing to their base desires for power and wealth. And thus communism always fails and always will fail.
Having a government that guarantees basic social services is not necessarily "communist". And if the social safety network is TOO strong, there have to be other factors in place to strong-arm people into economic productivity. I am not sure what they are in Sweden or Switzerland as I'm not too familiar with the cultures or economic systems of either country, but I am 100% certain they are they.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't actually think it's easier, and I don't generally find that being polite takes any effort for me, but I've been around enough nerds to know that many of them take the obnoxious approach when the pleasant approach would do the trick just fine. All it takes is a bit of time on Slashdot to see that.
If you've ever worked at a software company, you see this kind of behavior among your socially inept coworkers all the time. I've had to manage teams of people like this and it isn't fun.
Fictional?. Clearly there is much that is exaggerated or mythologized in Old Testament writings, but I think fictional is too strong a word to describe a historical figure.
No, actually, he's right. There really is no such thing as Hindu doctrine. It is simply not a doctrinal, prescriptive religion. I am a Jewish American of Eastern European and British descent, by the way, so not speaking of my own culture in any way.
It is hard for many people from the Judeo-Christian tradition to understand that unlike Christianity, Hinduism doesn't really mandate that you have "faith" in a particular event - there is a large tradition of mythology and stories, but there is no requirement that to call yourself a Hindu you believe that these are literal truth. And there are relatively few truly religious behavioral mandates - there have been many social and cultural mandates (suttee, which you refer to, is really one of those, as was much of the purity rules, though those were based on a socio-religious caste system).
As there are many gods in India, there are many modes of worship and ways of showing devotion. The common religious texts of Hinduism are a combination of written versions of old mythology and spiritual writings and poems. There's no 10 commandments, no edict from God channelled by a prophet, no sayings of Jesus that tell you how to live a good life.
No, that's an example of terrible board oversight. The whole point of a Board of Directors is that they have a fiduciary duty to represent shareholder and company interests and are supposed to be composed of a mix of folks representing different constituencies.
They are supposed to make sure a CEO's ego doesn't take precedence over the interests of shareholders, employees and other persons with an interest in the company's success. When the Board fails in this role, as at SCO, the consequences can be dire.
I seem to recall that the SCO Board was padded with Ralph Yarro and a Mormon cabal of Ray Noorda (founder of Canopy Group, SCO's largest shareholder) buddies. Yarro put McBride in the CEO's chair and his yes-men bought into their immensely stupid plan. The end result was millions squandered, an old UNIX brand absolutely destroyed forever, and worst of all, several suicides, including Ray Noorda's daughter. She had apparently engineered Yarro's ouster, which was followed by the mysterious settlement transferring all of Canopy's SCO shares to Yarro immediately before her suicide - I don't know if all of these events were ever adequately explained.
Truly one of the most sordid tech industry stories in years.
Oh, bullshit. If you go around and act nasty and accuse people blindly of "not being compliant" because your head is too far up your ass to see what's going on around you, you should expect to be told to fuck off, and deservedly so.
There is a prominent link on their download page. So you can obtain the source code from the same place they distribute the binaries. This seems to be perfectly compliant with the GPL. Or go type "Ubuntu source code" into Google - it took me 10 seconds to find archive.ubuntu.com.
Nothing mandates coddling of morons. There will always be some self-righteous asshole who thinks the world owes him a hand-holding. To him and those like him, a resounding "fuck you". Learn to treat people with respect and basic decency, and you'll get much farther in life.
Well, it doesn't do absolutely everything on your list but it's a pretty good start: http://www.gpg4win.org/.
It does the first two, and the third - it does cache passphrases for short periods of time. I don't know off the top of my head how to change the cache duration, but there should be a config option somewhere.
Sending encrypted or signed email is just a matter of two toggles in a toolbar on every email - you should be able to change a setting somewhere so they always default to on (right now they default to off unless I'm replying to a PGP-encrypted/signed email).
It is GPL.
As for this:
* Attach the pubkey to all outgoing mails where the address isn't in my keyring.
Seems like it would be a pretty easy addition to the existing GPG4Win codebase.
* Automatically (just ask for password confirmation or something) addition of incoming pubkeys to my keyring.
Not sure about this since I don't think I ever get such emails, but I believe you can just double click on a pubkey attachment in the correct format and it will open it in WinPT, the key management software packaged with GPG4Win.
* The people who got the pubkey would also get a link to where to download the plugin.
This is trivial if you are already attaching the pubkey, just stick a link in your sig.
The one thing GPG4Win needs is some English documentation - it's got decent documentation, but in German only. A bit more professional looking web design would be nice too. And some parts of the software feel a touch rough around the edges, but overall it "just works" most of the time.
Well, by your definition, no intervention in a marketplace is ever "needed" since supply and demand will always take care of things. This is true, but you may destroy an industry or lose your national competitive advantage in the process. In the late 90s and up until the end of 2000 really, wages had been driven so high the costs of starting a tech company had ballooned. You needed to raise huge sums of VC to pay ridiculously prissy workers who wanted 150k a year and perks out the ass to do no work.
This was a short term labor supply shortage and labor demand spike, all wrapped up in one. When the bubble burst, demand subsided and the supply spiked, and prices dropped through the floor. Massively unstable wage levels are bad for the economy as a whole and bad for an industry. I would say I support immigration rule-changes when necessary to stabilize critical industries.
However, it really isn't necessary now. There are some local areas where tech wages have started a rapid runup again - apparently this is happening in Seattle now. I blame the blind trendfollowing of VCs for much of this effect, and the silliness of the IPO market that unfortunately drives the VCs (mind you, if more businesses were built to make money and not for IPO or M&A activity, this would be much less of a problem). But I digress - the point is that if wages have in fact been quite depressed in much of the tech industry and unemployment has been high, then it seems unjustified to continue to implement an immigration "hack" like the H1B program.
And when you say "industry didn't want that to continue" - it bears mentioning that domestic companies have to compete globally, especially in the software market. If you prevent all flows of international labor, you again just serve to benefit foreign incorporated firms at the expense of domestic firms. There is a balance in a healthy economy between good domestic jobs and globally competitive firms.
No, democracy may be bad, but affirmative action is much worse. Democracy produces mediocre results with much inefficiency, is subject to the tyrrany of the masses and certainly has other weaknesses, but it does meet the baseline requirement of being built on a sense of fairness and moral justice. While not always the most efficient system, nor one that reaches the best results the most easily, it is the best system we know of from a moral perspective.
Affirmative action, on the other hand, is built on a morally bankrupt core. The principle that the ends justify the means lies at the core of affirmative action. The end is a noble one - get more of some underrepresented, "disadvantaged" minority group to participate in an important career or educational path in society. The means - quotas and admission preferences - lead to bitterness and anger toward the same groups who, previously oppressed, are now trying to become an accepted part of the social mainstream. Not to mention reinforcing rational biases about the competency levels of those people that will be assumed by those around them.
Furthermore, the assumption that "disadvantaged" can be determined by an ill-defined ethnic label is absurd. I can't tell you how many wealthy, privileged people who happen to be black or latino that I've met at the Ivy League universities I've attended (undergrad and grad school). While most of them, especially in grad school, deserved to be there, many, especially those I saw as an undergrad, did not.
The construction of intentional injustice by arbitrary racial boundaries reinforces the very kind of prejudice we should eschew at all costs. This doesn't just happen in the minds of "racist" people, it happens in the minds of any rational, thinking person and is unavoidable under an affirmative action regime. We need to address the causes of discrepancies at an early age, not their effects later in life by punishing those who have worked hard to achieve certain goals.
Umm, RMS's smug demeanor and obsessive behavior about things like naming conventions piss off a lot of people. Not sure if you've noticed, but he's generally not well liked on Slashdot. If he's not even well-liked here among his own constituency, well, doesn't bode well for his role as a figurehead, regardless of what you may think of his ideals.
Creativity, innovation, a couple billion dollars in Google stock and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight.
There's also a new series of Choose Your Own Adventure interactive DVDs coming out soon.
The International Herald Tribune is a fully owned subsidiary of the New York Times Company and has been since 2003. Previously, it was jointly owned by the Washington Post and the New York Times Company.
This is why you will frequently see the same article printed in both papers.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it sucks, but you basically got the essence of it. There are too many damned libraries that are just joyous combinations of way-too-many C++ features. For some reason people seem to feel like they can only prove what badass programmers they are by using all the damned features in C++.
I don't want the people working for me spending all day figuring out what some other person who works for me is trying to do with their code. That's why Java and C# are nice for big, many-person development projects. Don't get me wrong, sometimes Java can be frustrating because of missing features (1.5 is far less so than earlier versions though), but I can read other peoples code remarkably fast and I just can't do the same with a decent amount of C++ code out there.
C++ is fine as long as you treat it as object oriented C and make sparing use of the nasty constructs possible with the language. Otherwise it becomes completely unmanageable very fast.
Thank you for proving the original poster's point, that it's just semantics.
Yeah, that's one egg that doesn't get laid too often, I'd bet.
The fact that Mohammed married a 9-year-old girl (or rather, married a 6-year-old girl and consummated the marriage when she was 9) comes from hadith sahih bukhari 7.62.64. The hadith sahih bukhari are a primary muslim religious text, secondary only to the Qu'ran to most Sunnis, though apparently Shi'a have a more nuanced view of the factuality of the hadith.
In any case, I agree this is a silly reason to attack a religion, since the Hebrew Old Testament has many protagonists and prophets who did things that would be considered immoral or illegal by modern standards. But that doesn't make the underlying comment untrue.
As for the Iran-badges-for-non-Muslims story, I read it originally on Canada.com, where it was posted on the National Post site. They have since removed the story. However, the UPI news wire story on the subject is still up. This story was published in several mainstream outlets. It seems the story was basically untrue at least based on corrections like these, but it wasn't just printed in some fringe outlet by any means.
However, I will grant you that a real news outlet should fact check and withdraw stories that turn out to be false. Many "blogs" and online rant sites don't qualify as news since they don't follow basic rules of journalistic conduct.
Okay, here you go. It's right there. Not from the Qu'ran, but from the Hadith Sahih Bukhari. This is not part of the Qu'ran per se, but is considered the primary trusted book by Sunni muslims (and less so by Shi'a). Also see this page for an explanation of the Hadith's role in Islam. It is similar to the role of the Midrash, or maybe the way Prophets and Writings are viewed relative to the Pentateuch or Torah in Judaism.
So yes, it's true that this is from Muslim holy writings, but no, it's not from the Qu'ran per se.
I just don't get it. With such a laundry list of problems, why not look to making more efficient something we already have today that is far easier to produce and store, and has most of the benefits of gasoline but can be produced domestically at a (currently) competitive cost?
Ethanol is far simpler to store, work with, produce and use in internal combustion engines. There are several means of production from *non-corn* sources that are economically viable on a larger scale in today's energy market. It can be made from cellulose-based feedstock via SSF or any number of variant processes. Making it efficient at large scale is a straightforward process engineering problem, not a matter of coming up with the 5-10 major scientific breakthroughs needed to make hydrogen efficient.
It's been good to hear people finally taking fuel ethanol seriously in the last few months, since I've been talking about this for about 5 years now and people used to look at me like I was crazy.
The question is, is the system radically misdesigned, or has it just accumulated some cruft? If it's radically misdesigned because the requirements have changed so many times over the years, then a ground-up redesign, with the benefit of reams of documentation of what the real requirements and specifications are *might* be a good idea.
But if the system just happens to use some older technologies or has code that appears messy or spaghetti-ish, then I would strongly suggest refactoring over rewriting. If the capabilities of the current system are limited in some way, make sure you understand exactly in which way and why they are limited so you don't waste time rebuilding only to find that those limitations are fundamental to some combination of business requirements, rather than incidental to the engineering decisions.
If the scope and breadth of what a system is supposed to do has changed drastically and you can demonstrably prove to a room full of developers that the architecture is to blame for your current problems, then the bad design/architecture flag could legitimately be thrown. Understand that you will be throwing away the baby with the bathwater when you rewrite. And don't try rewriting using tools your team isn't familiar with - that's just asking for disaster.
I have been in one situation where a poorly specified system was replaced about 85-90% with a ground-up rewritten system (we reused a few components), where the original took a team of 10 people over 2 years to write and the replacement was done in 2 months by 2 people. This was accomplished because the original system was supposed to do everything for everybody and turned into a totally flexible architecture and infrastructure for enterprise apps in Java and basically became a slow bloated mess. The replacement just stuck to a well-defined set of requirements and did its job well, and was between 20 and 50 times faster than the original.
However, I have also seen situations where an otherwise good, working system that was complex and underdocumented (but where the complexity was necessary) was thrown away for political reasons, and we ended up wasting 3 months rebuilding the system from scratch ("porting" it from C++ to Java with a JNI/C++ core). The new system worked well, and was somewhat more flexible, but since the original system had been revised to reflect dozens of additional rules of business logic and corner cases that were never documented anywhere, replicating it all to the actual needs of this customer would have been a prohibitively complicated process.
This is nonsense for the vast majority of LCD RP sets. I've had my Sony Grand Wega 50" LCD RP set for almost 2 years now and have yet to replace a bulb. Others I know have had similar experiences.
Some people who had earlier versions of Sony LCD RP sets suffered from a bulb burnout defect like the one you describe. But this is a defect in a specific set or line and the correct solution is to get a replacement unit from the manufacturer.
As the other respondant said, if the bulbs are rated for 10,000 hours, that's something like 60 weeks of continuous-on usage. If you watch 30 hours a week of TV (i.e. you have no life), that's still more than 6 years. I'd much rather replace one of these bulbs every couple years than do the plasma thing and replace the whole set when burn-in sets in.
It sounds like that was a project with poor/no release schedule or release engineering in place. If everybody writes code and nobody ever bothers to get a release out the door, then OF COURSE "fixed in CVS" becomes meaningless to users.
The solution here is a better documented release policy that project admins try to stick to. If you release a stable version every 6 months, and agree to fix critical security and functionality bugs on the stable release if they occur, then users know what "stable release" means. If they want new functionality or minor bugfixes, you can tell them to use a nightly build or to to wait until the next stable release.
This is the way things should and do work for a well-maintained and managed software project of any sort.
"Has been shown"? You are referring to the linear-no-threshold model, which is not agreed upon universally by any means. Radiation hormesis seems to have a decent amount of high statistical quality evidence backing it up, though the mechanism for a causal relationship is not fully understood.
Exposure seems to behave linearly over a certain range of dosage levels, true, but not necessarily for all dosage levels.
"Psychology Ninjas" is distinct from "Well-trained marketing and PR department". In fact, your use of such a snarky, distortive phrase suggests that you didn't want to tackle my argument, but instead resort to an attempt to discredit me. I am an MBA, not a "psychology ninja" and I understand these concepts perfectly well. I don't accept that nobody at Walmart does.
In any case, you've done nothing to undermine my point that selection of facts in and of itself creates a point of view and introduces biases. I am glad to suggest some readings to you, if you are curious. If you disagree that such a process has occurred in the editing of that article, fine, but try counting the facts presented, looking at the headlines in the articles, and the placement
Nonsense. Presentation of only factual information is not at all an indication of lack of bias. Anybody who has taken basic courses in behavioral psychology can tell you this. The selection of facts from a nearly limitless pool of factual information can highly bias the perception of a reader of a set of facts. It is nearly trivial to choose a set of facts that lead a reader to radically different conclusions, if one chooses to do so.
The Walmart page falls victim to this, as well as presenting a set of very positive facts at the top of the "Debates" page to create an anchor point for perceptions skewed toward the positive. Setting such an anchor point goes a huge way to diminish the perceptual impact of any following negative information.
Clearly the people on Walmart's side have a solid understanding of these psychological principles, which doesn't surprise me from a company that employs "greeters" to make themselves feel more friendly. The people at Wikipedia obviously are missing the point if they think NPOV means "just presenting facts".
Avoiding bias entirely is impossible, but the best way to minimize it would be eliminate excessively positive framing on a page intended to highlight debate over negative aspects of the company, and enforcing that a roughly comparable amount of information gets to be presented by both sides.
If the sides can't get along or agree, the arguments can always be broken out into two separate pages, each of which gets to be edited by a contingent of people who clearly fall on one side or the other of the argument, and each gets to select their own set of facts that support their argument (but still attempt to maintain at least a neutral use of language). NPOV or not, I've seen this approach used on other pages, such as some Israeli-Palestinian related pages, where the participants otherwise would just get into non-productive edit-wars.
The entire goal of communism is to deny human nature. The reason capitalism won is that it recognizes the primacy of incentives in driving and controlling human behavior. The only way to make communism work is to have very tight controls - either in the form of homogeneous social norms (common in small religious communities and communes that are essentially communist) or a fear-inducing government security apparatus, which has been used in every single communist nation-state the world has seen.
Of course, the people wielding that security apparatus tend to end up succumbing to their base desires for power and wealth. And thus communism always fails and always will fail.
Having a government that guarantees basic social services is not necessarily "communist". And if the social safety network is TOO strong, there have to be other factors in place to strong-arm people into economic productivity. I am not sure what they are in Sweden or Switzerland as I'm not too familiar with the cultures or economic systems of either country, but I am 100% certain they are they.