So if someone at AT&T commits a computer crime, the Feds should come in and seize all of a CO's equipment and knock out phone and Internet service to a several square mile region? And then people should just blame the criminal, not the overzealous, incompetent cops, because it was their fault for committing a crime? This argument doesn't seem to hold much water to me. If a company provides important infrastructure to a large number of businesses, then seizing all of that infrastructure is a very, very serious, critical action that should not be undertaken unless it's absolutely the only way to proceed in an investigation.
Do you think the cops really put the necessary level of thought into what they were doing, or do you think the judge had no idea this company was a web hosting business that would have lots of servers hosting thousands of clients web sites, and the cops just interpreted the warrant in the broadest way possible and took everything in sight?
Listen, you can go get yourself the source code for JavaXM or OpenXM and with a couple of other library files, you could probably hack this same functionality (take the song data off the digital stream, and record the audio to a file, which you name and categorize appropriately) in a couple of hours. And if you really want to do it with a nice GUI and stuff, you could do it with a few days work. As long as you make the thing and have it interface with a computer, AND you even encourage developers to write third party apps, there's not much you can do to prevent people from doing stuff like this.
I'm all for supporting the artists, but I am already paying 10 bucks a month for XM radio (actually it'll be about 21 a month, with my second radio, and the Opie and Anthony premium subscriptions). If I want to record a few songs for my own personal use, as long as I don't put them up on Kazaa, who the hell's business is that - this is supposed to be my damned right, and the artists ARE getting paid. XM needs to pull the stick out of its ass re: their EULA, and the RIAA needs to die.
You can't sell people on a product (the XM PCR) and the freedoms and flexibility it gives you (seriously, read their marketing copy selling these things), then get pissed when people start paying you money in order to take advantage of its freedoms and flexibility using third party software.
Murray and Hernstein, the Bell Curve? Seriously, I don't know if you believe that IQ really corresponds to what most of us mean when we say "smartness" or "dumbness", but it appears that these sorts of tests measure something that has some vague correspondence to the meaning we ascribe to being smart or dumb, though it's very far from perfect, and certainly fails to measure a lot of important characteristics of the mind that can be very valuable.
Anyway, I don't think IQ distributions are perfectly normal, but they do look pretty roughly bell-like (if you don't believe that IQ has any correlation to intelligence, then I guess you can't really conclude much from the bell-like distribution). Of course, if you use some other, non-linearized scale for measuring intelligence than the mean and median will be nowhere near each other (i.e. if you consider the difference between Goethe and Joe Sixpack to be substantially more or substantially less than the difference between Joe Sixpack and a cucumber).
The only blurb I was able to find from Software Development magazine online quoted some guy as saying, without proof, that LISP was 3-5 times "faster" to develop in (than what was not clear, presumably than your average imperative language). If you can find a better source to back up this assertion (that doesn't require me to fish up an old issue of a dead tree publication), I'd love to find it.
I do believe that in some cases, LISP could be faster to develop in than, say, C or C++. Maybe even than Java - which despite being annoying in many ways, is quite fast to develop certain types of apps in, due to its class library and documentation quality, and much faster to read other people's code in since it's much more constrained than C++ for example. I mean, this issue was addressed to a certain extent in the classic "Worse is Better" series of essays. But I still think it's one that's ripe for more work.
In sny case, I mentioned OCaml because I've used it in the last 3 years. I last used Common LISP about 7 or 8 years ago, freshman year in college when I was apparently quite proficient in it. So my memory of it is pretty poor, other than the paren-matching madness, car, cdr, cadr, et. al., and vague remembrances of passing anonymous lambda functions as arguments. I've implemented fairly complex algorithmic problems with LISP, even wrote a large portion of a LISP interpreter in LISP (in fact, we used Paul Graham's LISP book at Harvard), but I've never tried to write a real business application from a 40 page requirements document with a team of 5 programmers using LISP, and can't even imagine how to begin doing such a thing.
Well, you hit on an interesting point, but I think your expectations are unrealistic. Humans just don't do a good job thinking in that way. There are a very few people who do, and they are mathematicians - and it even takes them a long time to write successful, logically complete proofs.
You could take the approach that every piece of software you write has to have that level of detail and accuracy, proof-like precision if you will. I think you'd find that your productivity would be far lower in terms of logical constructs completed per unit time. This is probably an acceptable trade-off if you write control systems for nuclear power plants or if you work for NASA where budget and time-frame are vastly greater than for your average business programming problem.
But for most applications, there is not only a set of requirements, things it needs to do, but a very short period of time to make it do them in. And if you go to the boss and tell him it's going to take 14 months and cost 1.3 million dollars because everything has to be written as a logical proof, he's just going to fire your ass and get a team of third-world guys to puke it out in Java in 3 months.
I'd love to be proven wrong here - if you can show me a study that indicates that use of ML or some other language type results in substantially more bug-free code _without_ sacrificing development speed, then by all means, I'll admit that I'm wrong. My own personal experience is limited to small apps I've written in OCaml, which were cool and everything, but OCaml isn't purely functional, and I found several aspects of its use quite painful, despite feeling very "elite" as I hacked away in a semi-functional language.
Most particularly, the idea of not specifying an explicit contract between chunks of a system with the types of information passed between them really irks me - to me this makes a development language unusable by more than one person, or even by one person in a sizeable programming project. I constantly refer back to other chunks of my code to see what type of data I need to feed to some function or method - and when using somebody else's code I'm far more likely to be interested in the interface than the implementation. Without that kind of separation, I don't see how this stuff is usable (I can't "keep the whole proof" in my mind at one time when I'm doing mathematics either, that's why you have lemmas and theorems and other mini-proofs that you call out to).
Maybe somebody can point me to a more usable version of a functional language that doesn't "feature" static typing, or that was designed with real programming tasks in mind and thus would be worthy of more study re: the development speed and team usability characteristics I mentioned above?
You are mixing and matching labels in a way that is confusing. The words you reference just aren't used the way you mean them anymore - whether their current usage is "correct" or not is a topic I don't want to bother addressing. In any case, knee-jerk and conservative is not an oxymoron, since most modern conservatives (i.e. conservative Republicans) aren't classical conservatives in the sense that you mean, they are populists like Rush Limbaugh or Christian Coalition types. Their conservatism per se is more because a small, disempowered central government allows them to pursue their other, true goals at the state level (outlawing abortion, conflating church and state, oppressing minorities, or whatever their hearts desire), or in the case of populists, more because they seem to identify with simple, ranting arguments more than nuanced thought (this is why liberal talk radio just doesn't work - it's hard to rant about complex arguments). The alliance between these elements and wealthy capitalist conservatives (who are usually actually liberal, but just don't want to pay liberal tax rates) is a very strange one indeed, but if you look at it, that's what got Dubya elected.
Anyway, I think it's usually safer to talk about Republican and Democrat since the historical policies of the parties don't necessarily relate directly to the current makeup or policies of the parties, and the conservative/liberal labels are so often misapplied. Of course, these labels usually need regional context too, since a Democrat in Massachusetts and a Democrat in South Carolina are bound to have quite a few ideological differences.
I don't think I could agree with what you said any more. These people mouthing off are usually kids who've never faced death firsthand, at least not in any direct, deeply personal way. Those of us who have are very well acquainted with the fact that we'll all be in that position someday, that we all die eventually, but that there's damn well nothing wrong with trying to live a longer, fuller, happier life than "Nature intended". I think we also know that there does come a time when hard decisions about the extent and nature of treatment pursued need to be made - and those are decisions both family members and patients need to be involved in since it impacts everybody.
I just wanted to let you know that what you did, taking full time care of your father, is one of the most honorable things I can imagine a person doing. I, likewise, have taken several years off from my career to help take care of my mother who has been ill for some time with cancer now. The aggressive surgical and chemotherapy treatment we've pursued has given her 3 or 4 years of life that the doctors never thought she'd have originally.
Having taken the time to spend with my mother in her illness, and having been there for my whole family will allow me to look myself in the face every morning for the rest of my life without feeling shame. And the memories of the time I've spent with her these last few years will stay with me the rest of my life. You're right, it's pretty hard to put a financial value on that - in our case, the cost has been well over a hundred thousand dollars (and I mean above and beyond what the insurance companies would cover, not including the hundreds of thousands of dollars of money not earned). Luckily we're financially able to handle that. And like I said, it seems a reasonable price (to me) for the quality and quantity of life it's given.
In any case, I just wanted to reiterate the praise you deserve for what you did. I seem to encounter people all the time these days who act like I'm crazy to take time off from a very successful, financially lucrative career at the age of 24 (and now 25) to spend with my ill mother. Of course, these people usually don't seem to get the concept that my mother is divorced, that I am an only child, and she raised me essentially herself, and worked to put me through a great high school and through my education at Harvard. Given the situation, how could you _not_ do the same?
I'm sorry to hear that's how things happened for your family. My mother has been ill with colon cancer for almost 4 years now - when she was first diagnosed, she was told she had 8-10 months to live, maximum. The last 4 years have involved many surgeries, painful chemotherapy and basically lots of unpleasant stuff a good 30-40% of the time. But the other 60-70% of the time has included many precious months and years I have been able to spend with my mother that I would not have had otherwise, to have many wonderful experiences with my mother, trips to Colorado, the Caribbean, Florida. Walks in Central Park, near where we live in New York. It's forced me to reassess my own priorities in life, to come to terms with my own mortality, and possibly to shift my career path as well.
Have those good times made up for the pain, suffering and cost involved in prolonging my mother's life? Yes, definitely, in this case. But every case is unique. I guess if I was offered a binary choice, 2 weeks of peaceful existance followed by death or 6 months of agony followed by death, it would be a pretty straightforward decision. But in the real world, medical decisions are often made with lots of uncertainties and unknowns. I think one thing missing from modern health care is the idea of doing a better job at discussing those priorities and options with patients in a caring and compassionate way.
Unfortunately, like I said before, sometimes doctors are wrong. In any case, the level of aggressiveness with which you would treat a sickly 79 year old vs. an otherwise healthy 55 year old are very different, as likely are the wishes of the individual and their family in those two cases. But you're right in that ultimately it's not just about prolonging life, it's about the quality of the life that you're prolonging. I know that some doctors, at least the really good ones (who are few and far between sometimes), do understand that concept and do make their best effort to try to help the patient and their family make a balanced decision about the type of care to provide.
That guy's not capitalist, he's just nuts. I'm all for people taking personal responsibility, but much of the time, illness just happens, by virtue of genetics, bad luck, stray gamma rays or whatever. Sure, sometimes you can directly trace somebody's sickness to their own foolhardy behavior, but the vast majority of the time that's not the case. Having seen lots of young, otherwise healthy cancer patients who were hit by nothing more than bad luck and/or bad genetics, and seeing how crappy a job our healthcare system (at least in its mainstream form) has done for them, I will testify to the fact that it's perfectly possible to be a capitalist and still support a better, more compassionate universal health care system in the US.
Well, I don't appreciate the assholery, and it does diminish my enthusiasm, but I am still watching. What annoys me the most is that the NBC HD coverage is so much better, and has so many fewer commercials than the non-HD coverage, but in exchange they seem to have delayed all the events by at least an extra 12-24 hours in the coverage. It's bad enough that you have to see the headline on cnn.com telling you that Phelps won his 7th medal 4 hours before it's broadcast, it's really annoying you have to see it 28 hours before you can watch it in high def.
But I do put up with it and watch the events I care about anyway, because it is thrilling to watch the world's best compete. It's hard to keep yourself from admiring them, all the rampantly over-commercialized nature of the event and the IOC itself aside. The Olympics name does still mean something and the athletes care, and everybody puts their best performances on the line for it.
It was much more specific than that. Quite a few years back, MS actually had what was originally dubbed the "Office.NET" group working on a web-based version of Office that would run entirely off of a workgroup level server. This group was doing their thing while the traditional Office group was working on the next rev of old school office - my friend who was fresh out of school ended up in this group. Anyway, politics did its thing and I guess somebody realized it was a dumb idea and people didn't want "software as a service" or their office apps running over the web or any of that stupid shit, and they ended up axing the entire group (i.e. reassigning pretty much everyone to other groups).
This basically sounds like they have just fished that same idea/project back up again - then again, with the number of groups and divisions doing their own thing at MS, it's hardly surprising that history repeats itself, that groups overlap or compete with each other, and that tons of stuff ends up getting axed and never seeing the light of day (just like most software companies, to be honest).
MicroCenter is great, but there are only 20 locations nationwide according to their website. There's one in Cambridge, MA that I go to frequently - their prices aren't going to match NewEgg, but for immediate local purchases, they are a much better option than CompUSA or WorstBuy (in terms of selection, salespeople, prices, and just about everything) for computer hardware/software/accessories.
I disagree, I definitely observed phrase generation. Of course, there is none of the sophisticated grammatical construction that occurs in even young human children, but birds definitely do have some ability to conjoin words or word groups that have meaning. My bird Caesar would often use the construct "Caesar want..." where... was usually one of "food", "veggies", "toy", etc. Sometimes it would be followed by a more insistent "WANT VEGGIES!". I definitely heard "Bad boy", "Bad bird" (phrases he definitely heard), but also phrases like "Raefer BAD" (Raefer being my name). The 'phrase construction' that a parrot exhibits is very simplistic, I agree, but it does go beyond bare mimicry - this source (scroll down and read the main article starting at "THAT DAMN BIRD") seems to confirm that 2 and even 3 label combinations are comprehensible and replicatable by African Grey parrots. It's an interesting read, I recommend it.
Additionally, read some of the studies done with Koko the gorilla - gorillas can absolutely combine words and concepts into phrases, with far more sophistication than a bird (again, not at a human level, but comparable with a 2-3 year old child, perhaps). I just dug up an actual online interview that was performed with Koko the gorilla (with a sign language interpreter typing for the gorilla of course - check it out).
These birds love to laugh - I don't know if it's because they associate it with a certain set of emotions they can read from their owners, but they definitely do associate laughter with certain kinds of situations or sentiments. Both Greys I'm familiar with would imitate their owners laughs, and would use them, either when they did something bad (the "mockery" laugh) or just as a general attention grabber.
This is why I like dogs as pets - my dog is smart, but I never worry that my dog is going to outsmart me. He may misbehave, but he knows he's been bad and he runs and hides, he doesn't get angry and try to bite my hand off (unless I try to take a napkin that he's snatched out of his mouth - then he may take a nip). He'll be bad, but he'll never trick or deceive me - it's just not in the temprament, wiring or brain capacity of a dog. If I want that I can get it from plenty of humans (women, for example).
This may seem like a long post, but your post brought back some serious memories that are actually on topic and relevant in this context.
As a one-time owner of an African Grey, I can testify to this. I got my bird, Caesar, for my 11th birthday, and hand-fed him. Anyway, these days he lives with my grandparents (who have another African Grey) since it was too hard to keep him in a small New York apartment when my family moved here when I was 15 (I'm 25 now, so the bird is about 14 years old now, still a kid by Grey standards - they often live 50-60 years or even longer in captivity, sometimes as long as 70 or 80, barring illness. In fact, I'm pretty sure he'll outlive my grandparents and I'll end up with him again some day.
In any case, he had a vocabulary of at least 60-80 words when he was 3 or 4 years old. He exhibited exactly the kind of word combination that you reference - often semi-sensical, sometimes very amusing, sometimes scarily accurate and meaningful. They are fast to pick up on words or phrases, often times without a clear idea of what the words or phrases mean, but just as often they clearly DO associate meaning. "Caesar good boy", "Caesar good bird" or just "good bird" were often cooed out when he was feeling mellow after a meal. He seemed to take delight in yelling my name from across the apartment in my mother's voice to get my attention (they definitely learn names and associate them with people).
Interestingly, Greys have long memories - Caesar recognized my mother when she visited my grandparents in Florida recently even though he hadn't seen her in at least 3 or 4 years. The first thing he tried to do was regurgitate some food for her (yuck, but that's just their way of showing love).
I actually did a prize-winning middle school science project on Caesar, working on teaching him object differentiation skills, by color and shape, and associating them with words. He was pretty decent at simple object differentiation and fetching tasks administered verbally when you could get him to cooperate (he was less good at wanting to cooperate).
These birds can have AMAZINGLY strong personalities, be very willful and sometimes even nasty. Caesar was prone to losing his temper (okay, now I'm definitely ascribing human traits here, but he would have these fits of anger) and biting my fingers and ears. My fingers still bear the scars to this day. He was always timid or downright scared around strangers and could get nasty with even other less-favored family members who he saw every day, despite having been hand raised, lovingly treated, well fed and so on. He could also be very sweet and loving, desired affection, petting and human contact.
But Greys are the only animals I've ever seen capable of what I can only label "deceit". When a dog comes up to you and licks you, he wants to be petted, and if you pet him, he'll be happy. Caesar would sometimes play a nasty trick on people where he'd say "Rub my head" and cock his head like he wanted the attention. Somebody would slowly approach and gently extend their fingers to rub his head, then he's suddenly turn his head and take a big nip at their finger, usually accompanied by "OW! Stop That!" or "Bad bird!". I think it was mostly a way of getting more attention, which they do crave, but the effect was downright spooky coming from an animal.
Well, see, there are these people called _shareholders_, and the founders of and investors in Google are still the biggest ones. So while overpricing the IPO would have netted more current operating capital, it would have pushed down the current trading price, thus reducing the net worth of the executives, investors and employees. It also would have made Google a laughing stock in the finance world, which would have had negative long term impact on their stock price due to market perceptions (again, founders' net worth, VC's net worth, and ability to raise more funds with small equity allotments in follow-on public offerings, and ability to incentivize new workers with tiny helpings of options).
So yes, movement of the stock price post-IPO does net Google something, just not immediate cash in the corporate account, and they were absolutely right to be concerned about having a first day of trading 20% in the red.
Hi, this post is all about the Ninth Circuit Judges, THE REAL NINTH CIRCUIT JUDGES. This post is awesome. My name is Robert and I can't stop thinking about the Ninth Circuit Judges. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.
Facts:
1. The Ninth Circuit Judges are liberals.
2. Ninth Circuit Judges get overturned ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the ninth circuit judge is to flip out and create new laws out of thin air.
Ninth Circuit Judges can decide any cases they want! Ninth Circuit Judges piss off conservatives ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this Ninth Circuit Judge who was eating at a smoothie bar. And when some dude dropped his iPod the Ninth Circuit Judge legalized filesharing. My friend Mark said that he saw a Ninth Circuit Judge totally uppercut some law just because the law was passed by a Republican Congress and made no sense.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Except that there's been substantial legislative intervention since the Betamax decision in the form of the DMCA and all its vagueries. I would still be very surprised to see this decision stand. Heck, I don't think Betamax would have gone the way it did in light of the DMCA.
The "specialists" are generally people who parents pay to give them the diagnosis they want, namely early onset bipolar disorder. My family member was taken to exactly such a specialist. I can tell you, having looked at the symptom lists we both refer to, though she does exhibit some of those symptoms, so does every willful, spoiled child I've ever encountered. And so did I at a certain age - I had a terrible temper as a child, mostly my frustration with the way people treated me and the world fucked me over. And while I have had my share of psychological issues (anxiety and panic attacks at certain points in my teenage years - doesn't really bother me anymore these days), I certainly am not bipolar.
I have seen true adult bipolars before, and had a friend who suffered from hypomania - sometimes degenerating into full fledged manic episodes (pressure of speech, flight of ideas, energy surges, and all that - in his case, getting on depakote finally helped him become more functional). Maybe early onset bipolar disorder exists, but unless and until I see ACTUAL cycling between a manic phase and a depressed phase in a young child (I'm talking about a 6 year old here, at diagnosis time, in my family), then I won't believe it exists.
The kind of meds they are putting 6 year olds on for this shit are absolutely unreal - atypical antipsychotics, they are basic major tranquilizers. Sure, no more temper tantrums, but you could put them on 5mg of Valium a day and probably accomplish the same thing, they are too zombied out to have temper tantrums. At least for a while, until they become more accustomed to the dosage level, then they still have the temper problems sometimes, maybe not quite as often as before, mostly since there are fewer opportunities for attention-grabbing tantrums as they fall asleep early every night thanks to the tranqs. No, I don't believe in this diagnosis at all, and god knows I'd never put a 6 year old kid on those kind of meds unless they were SERIOUSLY disabled, not just undisciplined.
The problem with some of these conditions (MCS, CFS, etc.) is that they are trashcan diagnoses. They don't necessarily mean shit, but they might, and it's hard to say since they seem to be commonly misdiagnosed or overdiagnosed, sometimes by "specialists" in the disorder who are dealing with somewhat hypochondriacal patients who go in _seeking_ a certain diagnosis.
My good friend was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome - we had been joking about this because he had been tired a lot recently, and had a bout of mono when he was in college a few years back. He laughed and said he didn't believe in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, that it was a crazy person's disease. In any case, they were unable to identify, after many blood tests and an MRI/CT scan of his head, any particular cause of his exhaustion. So they seemed to toss off a "well, maybe it's chronic fatigue syndrome" line. Basically, he just ignored it, found that if he takes an Advil Cold and Sinus before his workouts he has enough energy, and moved on with life. Seems fine to me now - I think it was just exhaustion from working too hard, which he did.
Childhood or early-onset bipolar disorder is another one of these trashcans, this one in the psychiatric realm, but this is a far more damaging diagnosis. True bipolar disease generally doesn't onset until teenage years, and I'd guesstimate based on the ridiculous criteria lists I've seen that at least 80% of early-onset bipolar diagnoses are just spoiled/misbehaved children - I've seen it in a family member who was diagnosed who is clearly not bipolar, but is heavily medicated to keep her from having temper tantrums and otherwise under control by her parents.
In any case, MCS may actually exist, but it seems like there are a good number of nutjobs who are convinced they are sensitive to toxins and chemicals in the environment (but only manmade things, not "natural" things, whatever the fuck that means). Most of these people are clearly nutjobs. If people actually exist with MCS, I feel bad for them, since they are likely to be written off as nutjobs too. Clearly better diagnostic criteria are needed for some of these conditions.
Hmm, I agree there are some strange software imperfections, but in my experience my old series 1 standalone Tivo is about 10-20 times more reliable than my digital cable box from Time Warner (measured primarily in terms of relative number of times the two boxes have to be hard rebooted to fix a major screwup). The digital cable box needs a reboot on a weekly basis at least, especially if you've been watching any HDTV - now THAT is unacceptable for consumer electronics. The Tivo gets rebooted once every 5-6 months perhaps, if that.
Business school case study #1: shitty clone products use existing market penetration and/or low price point to destroy premium product offering from market first mover.
I don't get it. I've used DirecTivo plenty of times at my friend's house and it always works much better - meaning faster and more reliable channel switching, better picture quality, etc. - than regular Tivo + digital cable box, in my experience (which is what I currently have). In fact, I had a DirecTivo box for a few months in my old apartment where I had DTV satellite exposure and could mount a dish, and it was great in my experience. Maybe you just have a defective box?
No, for 15 year old protest-mongering nutjobs, "tolerance" and "open-mindedness" only apply to ideas they agree with. I see quite a few posts in this story by liberals who want Bush out of office who are decrying this sort of childish technique to stifle speech because it inevitably alienates people and will produce a backlash. This does more for the Republican cause than for the Democratic cause any day of the week.
In fact, I just saw an excellent post explaining that the Republicans want lots of youthful looney tunes protestors raging around the streets of New York - they think it will help alienate middle America and swing voters. I agree with this - I'm a moderate liberal Democrat myself, not a party-voter, but one who votes on issues. No chance I'm voting for Bush in this election, since he has no redeeming qualities as a person or a leader, but I would vote for the right Republican in the right circumstances. I have always been put off by rampaging protestors, having lived in Boston and New York for years. Nobody has EVER successfully changed my mind by getting in my face and yelling while I'm trying to walk to the bank or go out with my girlfriend to a restaurant. Nobody has EVER successfully changed my mind or influenced my vote by blocking traffic and making me late to a meeting, except by successfully labelling themselves and their candidates/causes as "thoroughly looney" in my mind and making me steer well clear of them.
I support peoples' right to peaceful assembly, but most of the time I see lots of youthful exhuberence and ill-educated idiots who are out to protest because "it's cool", not because they truly believe in a cause or feel that this is their only way to make people aware of the cause. I saw this going on at Harvard all the time - you would expect better of a top Ivy League student body. By the time I graduated, I had hardened in my conservative beliefs because I'd gotten so thoroughly sick of all the ivory tower sheeple behavior. In any case, I've realized since that just because I'm a conservative by the standards of radically liberal college students, I'm still a moderate liberal compared to the rest of the world and my views are still more within the Democratic party fold than not.
The moral of the story: don't piss people off in your zeal to convert them to your cause. Same message goes out to all the Republicans voting for a nutjob like Bush. Moderates don't want to hear about your so-called "faith" or "conversion" to born-again Christianity. This shit just alienates you from every moderately educated person out there. I guess the Republicans are lucky that roughly 50% of people are below average.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think the cops really put the necessary level of thought into what they were doing, or do you think the judge had no idea this company was a web hosting business that would have lots of servers hosting thousands of clients web sites, and the cops just interpreted the warrant in the broadest way possible and took everything in sight?
I'm all for supporting the artists, but I am already paying 10 bucks a month for XM radio (actually it'll be about 21 a month, with my second radio, and the Opie and Anthony premium subscriptions). If I want to record a few songs for my own personal use, as long as I don't put them up on Kazaa, who the hell's business is that - this is supposed to be my damned right, and the artists ARE getting paid. XM needs to pull the stick out of its ass re: their EULA, and the RIAA needs to die.
You can't sell people on a product (the XM PCR) and the freedoms and flexibility it gives you (seriously, read their marketing copy selling these things), then get pissed when people start paying you money in order to take advantage of its freedoms and flexibility using third party software.
Anyway, I don't think IQ distributions are perfectly normal, but they do look pretty roughly bell-like (if you don't believe that IQ has any correlation to intelligence, then I guess you can't really conclude much from the bell-like distribution). Of course, if you use some other, non-linearized scale for measuring intelligence than the mean and median will be nowhere near each other (i.e. if you consider the difference between Goethe and Joe Sixpack to be substantially more or substantially less than the difference between Joe Sixpack and a cucumber).
But I can predict with 100% certainty that my eyes will meltdown in their sockets if they don't change the IT section color scheme soon.
I do believe that in some cases, LISP could be faster to develop in than, say, C or C++. Maybe even than Java - which despite being annoying in many ways, is quite fast to develop certain types of apps in, due to its class library and documentation quality, and much faster to read other people's code in since it's much more constrained than C++ for example.
I mean, this issue was addressed to a certain extent in the classic "Worse is Better" series of essays. But I still think it's one that's ripe for more work.
In sny case, I mentioned OCaml because I've used it in the last 3 years. I last used Common LISP about 7 or 8 years ago, freshman year in college when I was apparently quite proficient in it. So my memory of it is pretty poor, other than the paren-matching madness, car, cdr, cadr, et. al., and vague remembrances of passing anonymous lambda functions as arguments. I've implemented fairly complex algorithmic problems with LISP, even wrote a large portion of a LISP interpreter in LISP (in fact, we used Paul Graham's LISP book at Harvard), but I've never tried to write a real business application from a 40 page requirements document with a team of 5 programmers using LISP, and can't even imagine how to begin doing such a thing.
You could take the approach that every piece of software you write has to have that level of detail and accuracy, proof-like precision if you will. I think you'd find that your productivity would be far lower in terms of logical constructs completed per unit time. This is probably an acceptable trade-off if you write control systems for nuclear power plants or if you work for NASA where budget and time-frame are vastly greater than for your average business programming problem.
But for most applications, there is not only a set of requirements, things it needs to do, but a very short period of time to make it do them in. And if you go to the boss and tell him it's going to take 14 months and cost 1.3 million dollars because everything has to be written as a logical proof, he's just going to fire your ass and get a team of third-world guys to puke it out in Java in 3 months.
I'd love to be proven wrong here - if you can show me a study that indicates that use of ML or some other language type results in substantially more bug-free code _without_ sacrificing development speed, then by all means, I'll admit that I'm wrong. My own personal experience is limited to small apps I've written in OCaml, which were cool and everything, but OCaml isn't purely functional, and I found several aspects of its use quite painful, despite feeling very "elite" as I hacked away in a semi-functional language.
Most particularly, the idea of not specifying an explicit contract between chunks of a system with the types of information passed between them really irks me - to me this makes a development language unusable by more than one person, or even by one person in a sizeable programming project. I constantly refer back to other chunks of my code to see what type of data I need to feed to some function or method - and when using somebody else's code I'm far more likely to be interested in the interface than the implementation. Without that kind of separation, I don't see how this stuff is usable (I can't "keep the whole proof" in my mind at one time when I'm doing mathematics either, that's why you have lemmas and theorems and other mini-proofs that you call out to).
Maybe somebody can point me to a more usable version of a functional language that doesn't "feature" static typing, or that was designed with real programming tasks in mind and thus would be worthy of more study re: the development speed and team usability characteristics I mentioned above?
Anyway, I think it's usually safer to talk about Republican and Democrat since the historical policies of the parties don't necessarily relate directly to the current makeup or policies of the parties, and the conservative/liberal labels are so often misapplied. Of course, these labels usually need regional context too, since a Democrat in Massachusetts and a Democrat in South Carolina are bound to have quite a few ideological differences.
I just wanted to let you know that what you did, taking full time care of your father, is one of the most honorable things I can imagine a person doing. I, likewise, have taken several years off from my career to help take care of my mother who has been ill for some time with cancer now. The aggressive surgical and chemotherapy treatment we've pursued has given her 3 or 4 years of life that the doctors never thought she'd have originally.
Having taken the time to spend with my mother in her illness, and having been there for my whole family will allow me to look myself in the face every morning for the rest of my life without feeling shame. And the memories of the time I've spent with her these last few years will stay with me the rest of my life. You're right, it's pretty hard to put a financial value on that - in our case, the cost has been well over a hundred thousand dollars (and I mean above and beyond what the insurance companies would cover, not including the hundreds of thousands of dollars of money not earned). Luckily we're financially able to handle that. And like I said, it seems a reasonable price (to me) for the quality and quantity of life it's given.
In any case, I just wanted to reiterate the praise you deserve for what you did. I seem to encounter people all the time these days who act like I'm crazy to take time off from a very successful, financially lucrative career at the age of 24 (and now 25) to spend with my ill mother. Of course, these people usually don't seem to get the concept that my mother is divorced, that I am an only child, and she raised me essentially herself, and worked to put me through a great high school and through my education at Harvard. Given the situation, how could you _not_ do the same?
Have those good times made up for the pain, suffering and cost involved in prolonging my mother's life? Yes, definitely, in this case. But every case is unique. I guess if I was offered a binary choice, 2 weeks of peaceful existance followed by death or 6 months of agony followed by death, it would be a pretty straightforward decision. But in the real world, medical decisions are often made with lots of uncertainties and unknowns. I think one thing missing from modern health care is the idea of doing a better job at discussing those priorities and options with patients in a caring and compassionate way.
Unfortunately, like I said before, sometimes doctors are wrong. In any case, the level of aggressiveness with which you would treat a sickly 79 year old vs. an otherwise healthy 55 year old are very different, as likely are the wishes of the individual and their family in those two cases. But you're right in that ultimately it's not just about prolonging life, it's about the quality of the life that you're prolonging. I know that some doctors, at least the really good ones (who are few and far between sometimes), do understand that concept and do make their best effort to try to help the patient and their family make a balanced decision about the type of care to provide.
That guy's not capitalist, he's just nuts. I'm all for people taking personal responsibility, but much of the time, illness just happens, by virtue of genetics, bad luck, stray gamma rays or whatever. Sure, sometimes you can directly trace somebody's sickness to their own foolhardy behavior, but the vast majority of the time that's not the case. Having seen lots of young, otherwise healthy cancer patients who were hit by nothing more than bad luck and/or bad genetics, and seeing how crappy a job our healthcare system (at least in its mainstream form) has done for them, I will testify to the fact that it's perfectly possible to be a capitalist and still support a better, more compassionate universal health care system in the US.
But I do put up with it and watch the events I care about anyway, because it is thrilling to watch the world's best compete. It's hard to keep yourself from admiring them, all the rampantly over-commercialized nature of the event and the IOC itself aside. The Olympics name does still mean something and the athletes care, and everybody puts their best performances on the line for it.
This basically sounds like they have just fished that same idea/project back up again - then again, with the number of groups and divisions doing their own thing at MS, it's hardly surprising that history repeats itself, that groups overlap or compete with each other, and that tons of stuff ends up getting axed and never seeing the light of day (just like most software companies, to be honest).
MicroCenter is great, but there are only 20 locations nationwide according to their website. There's one in Cambridge, MA that I go to frequently - their prices aren't going to match NewEgg, but for immediate local purchases, they are a much better option than CompUSA or WorstBuy (in terms of selection, salespeople, prices, and just about everything) for computer hardware/software/accessories.
Additionally, read some of the studies done with Koko the gorilla - gorillas can absolutely combine words and concepts into phrases, with far more sophistication than a bird (again, not at a human level, but comparable with a 2-3 year old child, perhaps). I just dug up an actual online interview that was performed with Koko the gorilla (with a sign language interpreter typing for the gorilla of course - check it out).
This is why I like dogs as pets - my dog is smart, but I never worry that my dog is going to outsmart me. He may misbehave, but he knows he's been bad and he runs and hides, he doesn't get angry and try to bite my hand off (unless I try to take a napkin that he's snatched out of his mouth - then he may take a nip). He'll be bad, but he'll never trick or deceive me - it's just not in the temprament, wiring or brain capacity of a dog. If I want that I can get it from plenty of humans (women, for example).
As a one-time owner of an African Grey, I can testify to this. I got my bird, Caesar, for my 11th birthday, and hand-fed him. Anyway, these days he lives with my grandparents (who have another African Grey) since it was too hard to keep him in a small New York apartment when my family moved here when I was 15 (I'm 25 now, so the bird is about 14 years old now, still a kid by Grey standards - they often live 50-60 years or even longer in captivity, sometimes as long as 70 or 80, barring illness. In fact, I'm pretty sure he'll outlive my grandparents and I'll end up with him again some day.
In any case, he had a vocabulary of at least 60-80 words when he was 3 or 4 years old. He exhibited exactly the kind of word combination that you reference - often semi-sensical, sometimes very amusing, sometimes scarily accurate and meaningful. They are fast to pick up on words or phrases, often times without a clear idea of what the words or phrases mean, but just as often they clearly DO associate meaning. "Caesar good boy", "Caesar good bird" or just "good bird" were often cooed out when he was feeling mellow after a meal. He seemed to take delight in yelling my name from across the apartment in my mother's voice to get my attention (they definitely learn names and associate them with people).
Interestingly, Greys have long memories - Caesar recognized my mother when she visited my grandparents in Florida recently even though he hadn't seen her in at least 3 or 4 years. The first thing he tried to do was regurgitate some food for her (yuck, but that's just their way of showing love).
I actually did a prize-winning middle school science project on Caesar, working on teaching him object differentiation skills, by color and shape, and associating them with words. He was pretty decent at simple object differentiation and fetching tasks administered verbally when you could get him to cooperate (he was less good at wanting to cooperate).
These birds can have AMAZINGLY strong personalities, be very willful and sometimes even nasty. Caesar was prone to losing his temper (okay, now I'm definitely ascribing human traits here, but he would have these fits of anger) and biting my fingers and ears. My fingers still bear the scars to this day. He was always timid or downright scared around strangers and could get nasty with even other less-favored family members who he saw every day, despite having been hand raised, lovingly treated, well fed and so on. He could also be very sweet and loving, desired affection, petting and human contact.
But Greys are the only animals I've ever seen capable of what I can only label "deceit". When a dog comes up to you and licks you, he wants to be petted, and if you pet him, he'll be happy. Caesar would sometimes play a nasty trick on people where he'd say "Rub my head" and cock his head like he wanted the attention. Somebody would slowly approach and gently extend their fingers to rub his head, then he's suddenly turn his head and take a big nip at their finger, usually accompanied by "OW! Stop That!" or "Bad bird!". I think it was mostly a way of getting more attention, which they do crave, but the effect was downright spooky coming from an animal.
So yes, movement of the stock price post-IPO does net Google something, just not immediate cash in the corporate account, and they were absolutely right to be concerned about having a first day of trading 20% in the red.
Facts:
1. The Ninth Circuit Judges are liberals.
2. Ninth Circuit Judges get overturned ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the ninth circuit judge is to flip out and create new laws out of thin air.
Ninth Circuit Judges can decide any cases they want! Ninth Circuit Judges piss off conservatives ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this Ninth Circuit Judge who was eating at a smoothie bar. And when some dude dropped his iPod the Ninth Circuit Judge legalized filesharing. My friend Mark said that he saw a Ninth Circuit Judge totally uppercut some law just because the law was passed by a Republican Congress and made no sense.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Except that there's been substantial legislative intervention since the Betamax decision in the form of the DMCA and all its vagueries. I would still be very surprised to see this decision stand. Heck, I don't think Betamax would have gone the way it did in light of the DMCA.
I have seen true adult bipolars before, and had a friend who suffered from hypomania - sometimes degenerating into full fledged manic episodes (pressure of speech, flight of ideas, energy surges, and all that - in his case, getting on depakote finally helped him become more functional). Maybe early onset bipolar disorder exists, but unless and until I see ACTUAL cycling between a manic phase and a depressed phase in a young child (I'm talking about a 6 year old here, at diagnosis time, in my family), then I won't believe it exists.
The kind of meds they are putting 6 year olds on for this shit are absolutely unreal - atypical antipsychotics, they are basic major tranquilizers. Sure, no more temper tantrums, but you could put them on 5mg of Valium a day and probably accomplish the same thing, they are too zombied out to have temper tantrums. At least for a while, until they become more accustomed to the dosage level, then they still have the temper problems sometimes, maybe not quite as often as before, mostly since there are fewer opportunities for attention-grabbing tantrums as they fall asleep early every night thanks to the tranqs. No, I don't believe in this diagnosis at all, and god knows I'd never put a 6 year old kid on those kind of meds unless they were SERIOUSLY disabled, not just undisciplined.
My good friend was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome - we had been joking about this because he had been tired a lot recently, and had a bout of mono when he was in college a few years back. He laughed and said he didn't believe in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, that it was a crazy person's disease. In any case, they were unable to identify, after many blood tests and an MRI/CT scan of his head, any particular cause of his exhaustion. So they seemed to toss off a "well, maybe it's chronic fatigue syndrome" line. Basically, he just ignored it, found that if he takes an Advil Cold and Sinus before his workouts he has enough energy, and moved on with life. Seems fine to me now - I think it was just exhaustion from working too hard, which he did.
Childhood or early-onset bipolar disorder is another one of these trashcans, this one in the psychiatric realm, but this is a far more damaging diagnosis. True bipolar disease generally doesn't onset until teenage years, and I'd guesstimate based on the ridiculous criteria lists I've seen that at least 80% of early-onset bipolar diagnoses are just spoiled/misbehaved children - I've seen it in a family member who was diagnosed who is clearly not bipolar, but is heavily medicated to keep her from having temper tantrums and otherwise under control by her parents.
In any case, MCS may actually exist, but it seems like there are a good number of nutjobs who are convinced they are sensitive to toxins and chemicals in the environment (but only manmade things, not "natural" things, whatever the fuck that means). Most of these people are clearly nutjobs. If people actually exist with MCS, I feel bad for them, since they are likely to be written off as nutjobs too. Clearly better diagnostic criteria are needed for some of these conditions.
Hmm, I agree there are some strange software imperfections, but in my experience my old series 1 standalone Tivo is about 10-20 times more reliable than my digital cable box from Time Warner (measured primarily in terms of relative number of times the two boxes have to be hard rebooted to fix a major screwup). The digital cable box needs a reboot on a weekly basis at least, especially if you've been watching any HDTV - now THAT is unacceptable for consumer electronics. The Tivo gets rebooted once every 5-6 months perhaps, if that.
Business school case study #1: shitty clone products use existing market penetration and/or low price point to destroy premium product offering from market first mover.
I don't get it. I've used DirecTivo plenty of times at my friend's house and it always works much better - meaning faster and more reliable channel switching, better picture quality, etc. - than regular Tivo + digital cable box, in my experience (which is what I currently have). In fact, I had a DirecTivo box for a few months in my old apartment where I had DTV satellite exposure and could mount a dish, and it was great in my experience. Maybe you just have a defective box?
In fact, I just saw an excellent post explaining that the Republicans want lots of youthful looney tunes protestors raging around the streets of New York - they think it will help alienate middle America and swing voters. I agree with this - I'm a moderate liberal Democrat myself, not a party-voter, but one who votes on issues. No chance I'm voting for Bush in this election, since he has no redeeming qualities as a person or a leader, but I would vote for the right Republican in the right circumstances. I have always been put off by rampaging protestors, having lived in Boston and New York for years. Nobody has EVER successfully changed my mind by getting in my face and yelling while I'm trying to walk to the bank or go out with my girlfriend to a restaurant. Nobody has EVER successfully changed my mind or influenced my vote by blocking traffic and making me late to a meeting, except by successfully labelling themselves and their candidates/causes as "thoroughly looney" in my mind and making me steer well clear of them.
I support peoples' right to peaceful assembly, but most of the time I see lots of youthful exhuberence and ill-educated idiots who are out to protest because "it's cool", not because they truly believe in a cause or feel that this is their only way to make people aware of the cause. I saw this going on at Harvard all the time - you would expect better of a top Ivy League student body. By the time I graduated, I had hardened in my conservative beliefs because I'd gotten so thoroughly sick of all the ivory tower sheeple behavior. In any case, I've realized since that just because I'm a conservative by the standards of radically liberal college students, I'm still a moderate liberal compared to the rest of the world and my views are still more within the Democratic party fold than not.
The moral of the story: don't piss people off in your zeal to convert them to your cause. Same message goes out to all the Republicans voting for a nutjob like Bush. Moderates don't want to hear about your so-called "faith" or "conversion" to born-again Christianity. This shit just alienates you from every moderately educated person out there. I guess the Republicans are lucky that roughly 50% of people are below average.