I'll have
"A Method of making megabucks by patenting the bleeding obvious"
reminds me of a trip to a garden store some years ago, they had plastic chains to hang your pot-plants from, the chains were marked with "Pat Pending" !
How could anyone in the patent office not have known that there was "prior art" on chains ????
#define XENOPHOBIC_RANT_MODE ON
So that would explain why the US has country code 1, because Alexander Graham Bell was... no wait a minute, Scotland has country code 44.
And then there's the curious fact that everywhere else in the world, longitude East is positive, (as you would expect from the usual Cartesian coordinate system) and West is negative, but in US maps, West is positive.
And your maps of the world, with the USA in the centre, which means the break has to come somewhere in India. Everyone else puts the break in the middle of the Pacific, where it doesn't matter, but that would put the USA off on the edge, can't have that...
And time zones, elsewhere time zones are expressed as GMT +- offset, which would make east coast USA GMT-6, but most US software expresses time zones as the offset to be added to local time to get GMT, thus making the good ol' US of A in the positives.
Then there's your curious attachment to a system of measurement that even the stick-in-the-mud English have abandoned (hello NASA, are you listening ?)
Agreed, web addresses with the state & city in them don't make a lot of sense for most things, but form some they're ideal, for example....
www.retailers-name-here.city.state.us
www.cityhall.city.state.us
www.tourism.city.state.us
You said: "The Theory of Evolution is not fact. That is why we say theory of evolution"
When will people stop spouting this drivel ?
The word theory does not mean something is unproven, for example, I spent 2 years at university studying "Number Theory", including large slabs of mathematical proofs that what we were studying was _known_to_be_true_, and you don't get anyone more finicky about 'proof' than a pure mathematician. In fact, when mathematicians want to make it clear that something is unproven, they usually call it a conjecture. In general, most things in science are called theories, including such well established and uncontroversial things as "the earth revolves around the sun" (Copernican Theory).
I went to a debate between a Scientist and Creationist on Evolution, and when the Creationist said "evolution is only a theory" the scientist produced a car-battery and set of jumper leads and said "wanna test the theory of electricity ?"
The supposed last survivor of the Czars family, who escaped Russia after the revolution. She made quite a nice living out of the story for a while, now we can find out if she was the real thing or not.
Looking at the North American team photos, I was struck by the narrow demographics represented... 1. Almost exclusively male. 2. Almost exclusively white or asian. Aren't there any black or hispanic geeks out there ? Or girlie geeks ? Why is geekdom so ethnically and sexually narrow ?
Granted, it's possible for someone closer to the point of reception (R) than he is to the point of transmission (T) to 'see' the reception before he 'sees' the transmission. And yes, from that observers viewpoint the reception would seem to happen before the transmission, but any signal that observer sent to (T), even if it was sent by the magical FTL device, would arrive at (T) _after_ the original signal was sent. So, nice try, but no time machine.
The forces holding the atoms in the pole together are electromagnetic in nature, so if you tug on one end of the pole, you create a wave that can't propagate along the pole any faster than the speed of light, and is quite probably _much_ slower.
Everything from the relatively mainstream political parties and pressure groups, through to absolute f**king lunatics (holocaust deniers, gun-nuts, conspiracy theorists, KKK wannabees, et al) have staked their claim on a little piece of cyber-space. This is a little-discussed aspect of the internet, but I think it deserves more attention, as it's one of the more real dangers. For example, if you happen to believe that ice-cream is the work of the Devil, and all your friends just laugh at you, eventually you learn to let the matter drop. If however, you find alt.satanic-plots.icecream, and spend a few months conversing with other like-minded (to use the term loosely) individuals, you might eventually convince yourself that you're on to something, and before you know it, you're parking truck-loads of fertilizer outside ice-cream parlours. Certainly there are some news-groups and web sites that are pedalling seriously dangerous ideas. And I'm not getting onto any sort of "censor the internet" soap-box, (anyone who thinks you can just doesn't understand) but there's a lot of really scary people out there, and they're networking far more effectively than most of the "normals".
The January edition of Dr Dobbs has an article by a guy who converted 300 CDs to MP3, and put them all on a $180 Hard Disk, for a "home Jukebox". Thats 60 cents per CD. Given that MP3s can be copied an infinite number of times without loss, and can be easily distributed electronically, either on web pages, or simply emailing them to your friends, it's hardly surprising that the recording industry is worried. Piracy is just so much easier in digital form. Of course, copy protection is not the solution, there's far too many clever hackers out there. Now if CDs cost, say, $5, most people wouldn't bother pirating them, they'd buy their own. Eventually the market will force this, but the recording companies won't like it.
The problem with salaried staff is that they get paid the same for a 40 hour week, or 70. Employers often fall into the trap of "encouraging" their salaried workers to put in lots of extra hours. Big mistake. 1. The quality of work produced towards the end of a 70 hour week is very poor. 2. Your staff turnover will climb. Turnover costs big $$$, especially if key people leave close to a project deadline. I know, I've recently seen the entire project team I was working on leave (including me). We were just burnt out. It's far better to hire a few more people and work them reasonable hours. 7 people working 40 hours will cost the same as 4 people working 70, you'll get far better quality, and be far less vulnerable to losing key people.
As I was reading all this very-serious stuff about the ABM treaty, and whether the USA was still bound by it, my part native-american wife was reading over my shoulder. She made a comment on the value of a treaty with Uncle Sam, but this is a family forum, and it sounded anatomically impossible (or at least highly dangerous), so I'd better not repeat it here.
As a contractor, I'd have to agree that your description fits several of the contractors I've worked with over the years. The sad truth is, there are people out there who are contractors because they need to change jobs every few months, before their incompetence becomes too apparent to the boss. I don't believe the above describes 80% of contractors, maybe 10% Mind you, I've also encountered a few permanent employees whos IQs closely approximate their shoe-sizes. Fortunately, these tend to gravitate fairly quickly to management, where their stupidity can do less harm. I've also worked with some excellent contractors, people with a wealth of experience, who have gone contracting either for the money, or because they just enjoy the variety. After all, not everyone wants to spend a couple of years developing a system, and the next 10 maintaining it. And there are, of course, a great many highly skilled permies out there. The gypsie life doesn't suit everyone. Overall, I'd have to say that the contractors I've worked with probably are slightly better than the average permanent, but probably only because they tend to have had a few more years experience. Certainly it would be a mistake to staff a project entirely with contractors purely on the assumption that they'll be "better" than a room full of permanents.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have
"A Method of making megabucks by patenting the bleeding obvious"
reminds me of a trip to a garden store some years ago, they had plastic chains to hang your pot-plants from, the chains were marked with "Pat Pending" !
How could anyone in the patent office not have known that there was "prior art" on chains ????
#define XENOPHOBIC_RANT_MODE ON
...
...... :-)
So that would explain why the US has country code 1, because Alexander Graham Bell was... no wait a minute, Scotland has country code 44.
And then there's the curious fact that everywhere else in the world, longitude East is positive, (as you would expect from the usual Cartesian coordinate system) and West is negative, but in US maps, West is positive.
And your maps of the world, with the USA in the centre, which means the break has to come somewhere in India. Everyone else puts the break in the middle of the Pacific, where it doesn't matter, but that would put the USA off on the edge, can't have that
And time zones, elsewhere time zones are expressed as GMT +- offset, which would make east coast USA GMT-6, but most US software expresses time zones as the offset to be added to local time to get GMT, thus making the good ol' US of A in the positives.
Then there's your curious attachment to a system of measurement that even the stick-in-the-mud English have abandoned (hello NASA, are you listening ?)
And don't even start me on US spelling
#define XENOPHOBIC_RANT_MODE OFF
There, I feel much better now.
Agreed, web addresses with the state & city in them don't make a lot of sense for most things, but form some they're ideal, for example.... www.retailers-name-here.city.state.us www.cityhall.city.state.us www.tourism.city.state.us
Why on earth would they think the US isn't going to invade ?
It's only a few months since NATO pounded a Russian ally (Yugoslavia) into submission, then there's Iraq, Grenada, Panama....
In fact, the difficulty is in thinking of countries that haven't been attacked by the USA at some time or other.
You said: "The Theory of Evolution is not fact. That is why we say theory of evolution" When will people stop spouting this drivel ? The word theory does not mean something is unproven, for example, I spent 2 years at university studying "Number Theory", including large slabs of mathematical proofs that what we were studying was _known_to_be_true_, and you don't get anyone more finicky about 'proof' than a pure mathematician. In fact, when mathematicians want to make it clear that something is unproven, they usually call it a conjecture. In general, most things in science are called theories, including such well established and uncontroversial things as "the earth revolves around the sun" (Copernican Theory). I went to a debate between a Scientist and Creationist on Evolution, and when the Creationist said "evolution is only a theory" the scientist produced a car-battery and set of jumper leads and said "wanna test the theory of electricity ?"
The supposed last survivor of the Czars family, who escaped Russia after the revolution. She made quite a nice living out of the story for a while, now we can find out if she was the real thing or not.
Looking at the North American team photos, I was struck by the narrow demographics represented... 1. Almost exclusively male. 2. Almost exclusively white or asian. Aren't there any black or hispanic geeks out there ? Or girlie geeks ? Why is geekdom so ethnically and sexually narrow ?
Granted, it's possible for someone closer to the point of reception (R) than he is to the point of transmission (T) to 'see' the reception before he 'sees' the transmission. And yes, from that observers viewpoint the reception would seem to happen before the transmission, but any signal that observer sent to (T), even if it was sent by the magical FTL device, would arrive at (T) _after_ the original signal was sent. So, nice try, but no time machine.
The forces holding the atoms in the pole together are electromagnetic in nature, so if you tug on one end of the pole, you create a wave that can't propagate along the pole any faster than the speed of light, and is quite probably _much_ slower.
Everything from the relatively mainstream political parties and pressure groups, through to absolute f**king lunatics (holocaust deniers, gun-nuts, conspiracy theorists, KKK wannabees, et al) have staked their claim on a little piece of cyber-space. This is a little-discussed aspect of the internet, but I think it deserves more attention, as it's one of the more real dangers. For example, if you happen to believe that ice-cream is the work of the Devil, and all your friends just laugh at you, eventually you learn to let the matter drop. If however, you find alt.satanic-plots.icecream, and spend a few months conversing with other like-minded (to use the term loosely) individuals, you might eventually convince yourself that you're on to something, and before you know it, you're parking truck-loads of fertilizer outside ice-cream parlours. Certainly there are some news-groups and web sites that are pedalling seriously dangerous ideas. And I'm not getting onto any sort of "censor the internet" soap-box, (anyone who thinks you can just doesn't understand) but there's a lot of really scary people out there, and they're networking far more effectively than most of the "normals".
The January edition of Dr Dobbs has an article by a guy who converted 300 CDs to MP3, and put them all on a $180 Hard Disk, for a "home Jukebox". Thats 60 cents per CD. Given that MP3s can be copied an infinite number of times without loss, and can be easily distributed electronically, either on web pages, or simply emailing them to your friends, it's hardly surprising that the recording industry is worried. Piracy is just so much easier in digital form. Of course, copy protection is not the solution, there's far too many clever hackers out there. Now if CDs cost, say, $5, most people wouldn't bother pirating them, they'd buy their own. Eventually the market will force this, but the recording companies won't like it.
The problem with salaried staff is that they get paid the same for a 40 hour week, or 70. Employers often fall into the trap of "encouraging" their salaried workers to put in lots of extra hours. Big mistake. 1. The quality of work produced towards the end of a 70 hour week is very poor. 2. Your staff turnover will climb. Turnover costs big $$$, especially if key people leave close to a project deadline. I know, I've recently seen the entire project team I was working on leave (including me). We were just burnt out. It's far better to hire a few more people and work them reasonable hours. 7 people working 40 hours will cost the same as 4 people working 70, you'll get far better quality, and be far less vulnerable to losing key people.
As I was reading all this very-serious stuff about the ABM treaty, and whether the USA was still bound by it, my part native-american wife was reading over my shoulder. She made a comment on the value of a treaty with Uncle Sam, but this is a family forum, and it sounded anatomically impossible (or at least highly dangerous), so I'd better not repeat it here.
As a contractor, I'd have to agree that your description fits several of the contractors I've worked with over the years. The sad truth is, there are people out there who are contractors because they need to change jobs every few months, before their incompetence becomes too apparent to the boss. I don't believe the above describes 80% of contractors, maybe 10% Mind you, I've also encountered a few permanent employees whos IQs closely approximate their shoe-sizes. Fortunately, these tend to gravitate fairly quickly to management, where their stupidity can do less harm. I've also worked with some excellent contractors, people with a wealth of experience, who have gone contracting either for the money, or because they just enjoy the variety. After all, not everyone wants to spend a couple of years developing a system, and the next 10 maintaining it. And there are, of course, a great many highly skilled permies out there. The gypsie life doesn't suit everyone. Overall, I'd have to say that the contractors I've worked with probably are slightly better than the average permanent, but probably only because they tend to have had a few more years experience. Certainly it would be a mistake to staff a project entirely with contractors purely on the assumption that they'll be "better" than a room full of permanents.