You really think there's no risk in turning down $180,000 in your pocket for a chance to owe your lawyers "a thousand or two"? (By the way, that's an insanely low estimate on what it costs to try a case like this. Even if your lawyers are working on a contingency fee basis and you only pay for the costs, the expert witnesses are going to cost you on the order of $50,000 to try that case.) Most people would consider that a pretty significant risk. The subjective question is whether the chance of a better payout justifies the risk, and these plaintiffs obviously decided it did not.
You can opt out of a class action. The biggest expense in pursuing a class action lawsuit is often the task of informing the class members of their right to opt out.
But your point and mine are not the same. I wasn't a member of the classes in question in the cases I was talking about. You left out an entire group of people in your breakdown between the defendant, the plaintiffs, and the lawyers. Specifically, you left out the general public who benefit from the defendant incurring too much risk and/or too much expense in its bad behavior to make it profitable to continue.
Here's an example of what the ledow is talking about with point #1. Or at least a corollary of his point in action. About a decade ago, I wanted to play with XML files in C++. There were no good, small libraries to do that. There were a couple of ridiculously large, complicated libraries that would handle XML files, but you'd lose more time learning the library than you would ever put into your actual code. So I created libxml++, to scratch my own personal itch. It was, at the time, a small but useful wrapper around libxml. Very basic, and demonstrated mostly that I knew less about either C++ or XML than I thought I did.
But people used it. (They also used my CLI Yahoo Messenger client, but that became defunct after I handed it off to other developers, due to the then-rapidly changing Yahoo protocol. The single most touching e-mail I have ever received was from a user of that client.) One of them submitted some patches, and eventually in 2002 I passed off ownership of the libxml++ project to him. I don't code in C++ much anymore, so I don't use my own library, but I do check in on it every so often. There are regular commits, including one last week, and an active mailing list, with several thousand messages. It's in Debian's main package repository and a number of diverse other packages depend on it.
All of this is the result of an itch I had ten years ago. Don't let anyone tell you that this kind of thing never happens and that there are just a billion useless libraries and programs half-written out there. There are a billion of those, but if you have a need for something that nothing on the market seems to fill, the chances are good that you're not alone in that unfilled need. Fill it and make it easy for others to use it and contribute to it, and see where it ends up in 2020.
I don't know about that. I'm pretty happy about some of the class action lawsuits that have resulted in a lower likelihood of banks and pharmaceutical companies screwing me over, even though I never got a dime from them being settled or tried.
It may not be a poor decision. We don't have enough information to decide that. (We also don't have enough information to decide if the lawyer was overpaid, underpaid, or appropriately paid. But, O Slashdot, don't let lack of knowledge get in the way of your prejudices about other vocations.) In settling a lawsuit, both sides have the same decision to make: What is the marginal risk of holding out for that next dollar? If you don't take the current offer, do the odds of getting more tomorrow weigh favorably against the odds of getting less tomorrow?
I actually wish Facebook had a Dislike button exclusively because it would reduce (but of course not eliminate due to human stupidity) the number of "Dislike button, really works, click here for a free iPad while you're at it!" apps that too many of my moron ex-friends-to-be keep clicking on.
The Helios probes didn't exactly take 3 months to travel 8 light minutes. I'm not sure where you're getting the numbers, but most likely they mean that the probes took 3 months to get from perihelion to aphelion. The article you linked to on Wikipedia claims their speed record to be 0.000234c, which is over 1/5000th the speed of light, around 3 times the speed you quoted. That's only 100,000 years to go 20 light years. Still impractical.
The real question is the delta-v required to make the trip, including navigation along the way and corrections that must be made due to the impossibility of accurately calculating everything ahead of time. The minimal delta-v solution may indeed be around 180,000 years in duration, although other solutions may become practical with time to reduce that figure. Reducing it to only a few human generations in duration, though, will almost certainly require more than incremental improvements in technology.
For now, I think we're definitely better off pointing a radio telescope in that direction and trying to see what the early years of MTV were like for the Gliese 581g-icans.
There is a problem with your comment. By saying, "Slashdot is working as it's supposed to. You can relax now," you imply that there is a logical connection between these two things. Experience has shown that relaxation and Slashdot mix nearly as well as oil and water.
Actually, it can't, unless you give it a bit of a push. Assuming no air resistance, after 2 seconds from a stationary start it will be falling at 19.6m/s, which is about 44mph. I don't post to be a pedant, but to point out that 0-60 in 2.6 seconds is better than 1G of forward acceleration, which is pretty cool.
A Lamborghini can run the quarter mile in 10 seconds, but the full mile takes 9 weeks because you have to hire a team of specialists to replace the clutch halfway through and, let's face it, they're Italian so they're not going to work too fast on the job.
Those two possibilities are not logical foundations of my point. They were suggested as reasons you may hold onto a misconception. I don't care about you. I care about your argument. Your argument explicitly said the quote I've now repeated more than once. You refuse to explain it or give any reason why you believe it to be true. Your argument requires it to be true as it is the foundational premise upon which the argument is built. It is quite clear that you have no interest in a rational discourse on the subject, and I will happily oblige.
I do not see where I am making any assumptions that you have demonstrated to be wrong. You start from the premise that "being bored with guns is a core activity of [hunters]." That premise is shaky on the face of it and you have presented no support for it whatsoever. On what do you base this premise? Without it, the argument you presented lacks any foundation, so presumably you have some strong reason for believing in this point. I happen to disagree with it as any kind of general statement, based on a lifetime of experience both being a hunter and being around other hunters. However, I invite you to tell me exactly what it is that makes you right and me wrong on this one point.
If there was an MD present at the majority of deaths, but they represent only 0.001% of all MDs in the world, is it still a fair statement to you?
The fact that you think "being bored with guns is a core activity of" hunters fairly well demonstrates that one of two things is true. Either you have no idea what hunting is about other than through a biased viewpoint or, more likely, you have had experience with people who were bored with guns who called themselves "hunters" - the visible minority, as happens with many groups (Muslims, for instance).
I am a lifelong hunter and know many others. I have found that the irresponsible variety is relatively scarce. Of the people I've met or heard of in my area who have done property damage while carrying a weapon with any intention of taking game, I can't think of any who have shot at others' property - it's always damage to gates in attempting to trespass on others' land to hunt. I don't tolerate that nonsense, either, and in fact will not hunt with anyone I do not personally witness using safe weapon handling routines, etc. The people I've known who have shot at stop signs and the like have invariably done so when they were not looking for game (these are the "bored, with guns" type - and are not hunting at the time). I don't put up with their company, either, for obvious reasons.
But since you do think that being bored with guns is a core activity of all hunters, of course the logic that flows from that is irrefutable. It's that belief that I would ask you to reconsider, just as I would ask you to reconsider a belief that plotting to destroy America is a core activity of all Muslims, that bombing abortion clinics is a core activity of all Christians, or that molesting young boys is a core activity of all Boy Scout scoutmasters.
I consider the terms orthogonal in this context and the headline to be no more fair than "Medical Doctors Murder Millions" would be in reference to the Holocaust. They may be both hunters and vandals, but hunting is hardly the operative part of their existence or their real activity at the time they commit the vandalism.
I have to disagree. I have seen more responsible hunters than irresponsible. However, the irresponsible types are always most visible. I would not call the people who shoot at other people's property "hunters" at all. At least for the time that they are shooting at fiber optic lines or the like, they are not hunting and are in fact vandals.
Consider the difficult but efficient solution to be a tool in the box. Having that tool available will come in handy. Most of the time, you can use higher-level solutions that are easier to debug, easier to modify, etc. But when you do come across the procedure that takes 0.1 seconds and needs to take 0.01, you will have a tool at your disposal to fix it.
But, in those other fields, you need to understand how the underlying system works in order fully to benefit from the modern technology. You can't just hook a modern IV pump up to someone and expect them to stop feeling ill. The abstractions and conveniences you mentioned do not demand of most programmers that they understand the underlying hardware interfaces, but they do demand that of some programmers. In addition, the rest of the world's programmers do benefit from a basic understanding of what goes on under the hood.
There are reasons not to trust banks regardless of the source of the gains. While a large cash stockpile has its own risks, keep in mind that there are limits on FDIC protection of your bank accounts and investing the money somewhere else is also not always wise.
They're better off not giving you a reason. "We are firing you simply because we can" is pretty safe. "We are firing you because you are lazy and look at disgusting pornography all day at work" might open them up to a being sued for firing you on a false pretense if you can prove the porn wasn't really disgusting.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you realize what this means? Ken Jennings versus robots. They could make an entire new show out of this and I'd watch it religiously.
I'd watch it, too. Especially if the competition had nothing to do with trivia.
You really think there's no risk in turning down $180,000 in your pocket for a chance to owe your lawyers "a thousand or two"? (By the way, that's an insanely low estimate on what it costs to try a case like this. Even if your lawyers are working on a contingency fee basis and you only pay for the costs, the expert witnesses are going to cost you on the order of $50,000 to try that case.) Most people would consider that a pretty significant risk. The subjective question is whether the chance of a better payout justifies the risk, and these plaintiffs obviously decided it did not.
You can opt out of a class action. The biggest expense in pursuing a class action lawsuit is often the task of informing the class members of their right to opt out.
But your point and mine are not the same. I wasn't a member of the classes in question in the cases I was talking about. You left out an entire group of people in your breakdown between the defendant, the plaintiffs, and the lawyers. Specifically, you left out the general public who benefit from the defendant incurring too much risk and/or too much expense in its bad behavior to make it profitable to continue.
Here's an example of what the ledow is talking about with point #1. Or at least a corollary of his point in action. About a decade ago, I wanted to play with XML files in C++. There were no good, small libraries to do that. There were a couple of ridiculously large, complicated libraries that would handle XML files, but you'd lose more time learning the library than you would ever put into your actual code. So I created libxml++, to scratch my own personal itch. It was, at the time, a small but useful wrapper around libxml. Very basic, and demonstrated mostly that I knew less about either C++ or XML than I thought I did.
But people used it. (They also used my CLI Yahoo Messenger client, but that became defunct after I handed it off to other developers, due to the then-rapidly changing Yahoo protocol. The single most touching e-mail I have ever received was from a user of that client.) One of them submitted some patches, and eventually in 2002 I passed off ownership of the libxml++ project to him. I don't code in C++ much anymore, so I don't use my own library, but I do check in on it every so often. There are regular commits, including one last week, and an active mailing list, with several thousand messages. It's in Debian's main package repository and a number of diverse other packages depend on it.
All of this is the result of an itch I had ten years ago. Don't let anyone tell you that this kind of thing never happens and that there are just a billion useless libraries and programs half-written out there. There are a billion of those, but if you have a need for something that nothing on the market seems to fill, the chances are good that you're not alone in that unfilled need. Fill it and make it easy for others to use it and contribute to it, and see where it ends up in 2020.
I don't know about that. I'm pretty happy about some of the class action lawsuits that have resulted in a lower likelihood of banks and pharmaceutical companies screwing me over, even though I never got a dime from them being settled or tried.
It may not be a poor decision. We don't have enough information to decide that. (We also don't have enough information to decide if the lawyer was overpaid, underpaid, or appropriately paid. But, O Slashdot, don't let lack of knowledge get in the way of your prejudices about other vocations.) In settling a lawsuit, both sides have the same decision to make: What is the marginal risk of holding out for that next dollar? If you don't take the current offer, do the odds of getting more tomorrow weigh favorably against the odds of getting less tomorrow?
I actually wish Facebook had a Dislike button exclusively because it would reduce (but of course not eliminate due to human stupidity) the number of "Dislike button, really works, click here for a free iPad while you're at it!" apps that too many of my moron ex-friends-to-be keep clicking on.
Yeah, but Han Solo also used the parsec as a measure of time.
Oops. Perihelion/aphelion reversed, but of course the time between them is the same in either direction. :)
The Helios probes didn't exactly take 3 months to travel 8 light minutes. I'm not sure where you're getting the numbers, but most likely they mean that the probes took 3 months to get from perihelion to aphelion. The article you linked to on Wikipedia claims their speed record to be 0.000234c, which is over 1/5000th the speed of light, around 3 times the speed you quoted. That's only 100,000 years to go 20 light years. Still impractical.
The real question is the delta-v required to make the trip, including navigation along the way and corrections that must be made due to the impossibility of accurately calculating everything ahead of time. The minimal delta-v solution may indeed be around 180,000 years in duration, although other solutions may become practical with time to reduce that figure. Reducing it to only a few human generations in duration, though, will almost certainly require more than incremental improvements in technology.
For now, I think we're definitely better off pointing a radio telescope in that direction and trying to see what the early years of MTV were like for the Gliese 581g-icans.
There is a problem with your comment. By saying, "Slashdot is working as it's supposed to. You can relax now," you imply that there is a logical connection between these two things. Experience has shown that relaxation and Slashdot mix nearly as well as oil and water.
Actually, it can't, unless you give it a bit of a push. Assuming no air resistance, after 2 seconds from a stationary start it will be falling at 19.6m/s, which is about 44mph. I don't post to be a pedant, but to point out that 0-60 in 2.6 seconds is better than 1G of forward acceleration, which is pretty cool.
A Lamborghini can run the quarter mile in 10 seconds, but the full mile takes 9 weeks because you have to hire a team of specialists to replace the clutch halfway through and, let's face it, they're Italian so they're not going to work too fast on the job.
I actually took your original wording to mean that third-graders would have done a better job.
Those two possibilities are not logical foundations of my point. They were suggested as reasons you may hold onto a misconception. I don't care about you. I care about your argument. Your argument explicitly said the quote I've now repeated more than once. You refuse to explain it or give any reason why you believe it to be true. Your argument requires it to be true as it is the foundational premise upon which the argument is built. It is quite clear that you have no interest in a rational discourse on the subject, and I will happily oblige.
I do not see where I am making any assumptions that you have demonstrated to be wrong. You start from the premise that "being bored with guns is a core activity of [hunters]." That premise is shaky on the face of it and you have presented no support for it whatsoever. On what do you base this premise? Without it, the argument you presented lacks any foundation, so presumably you have some strong reason for believing in this point. I happen to disagree with it as any kind of general statement, based on a lifetime of experience both being a hunter and being around other hunters. However, I invite you to tell me exactly what it is that makes you right and me wrong on this one point.
If there was an MD present at the majority of deaths, but they represent only 0.001% of all MDs in the world, is it still a fair statement to you?
The fact that you think "being bored with guns is a core activity of" hunters fairly well demonstrates that one of two things is true. Either you have no idea what hunting is about other than through a biased viewpoint or, more likely, you have had experience with people who were bored with guns who called themselves "hunters" - the visible minority, as happens with many groups (Muslims, for instance).
I am a lifelong hunter and know many others. I have found that the irresponsible variety is relatively scarce. Of the people I've met or heard of in my area who have done property damage while carrying a weapon with any intention of taking game, I can't think of any who have shot at others' property - it's always damage to gates in attempting to trespass on others' land to hunt. I don't tolerate that nonsense, either, and in fact will not hunt with anyone I do not personally witness using safe weapon handling routines, etc. The people I've known who have shot at stop signs and the like have invariably done so when they were not looking for game (these are the "bored, with guns" type - and are not hunting at the time). I don't put up with their company, either, for obvious reasons.
But since you do think that being bored with guns is a core activity of all hunters, of course the logic that flows from that is irrefutable. It's that belief that I would ask you to reconsider, just as I would ask you to reconsider a belief that plotting to destroy America is a core activity of all Muslims, that bombing abortion clinics is a core activity of all Christians, or that molesting young boys is a core activity of all Boy Scout scoutmasters.
I consider the terms orthogonal in this context and the headline to be no more fair than "Medical Doctors Murder Millions" would be in reference to the Holocaust. They may be both hunters and vandals, but hunting is hardly the operative part of their existence or their real activity at the time they commit the vandalism.
I have to disagree. I have seen more responsible hunters than irresponsible. However, the irresponsible types are always most visible. I would not call the people who shoot at other people's property "hunters" at all. At least for the time that they are shooting at fiber optic lines or the like, they are not hunting and are in fact vandals.
Because the actual DSM costs money.
Judge Kozinski is beyond awesome, in so many ways.
Consider the difficult but efficient solution to be a tool in the box. Having that tool available will come in handy. Most of the time, you can use higher-level solutions that are easier to debug, easier to modify, etc. But when you do come across the procedure that takes 0.1 seconds and needs to take 0.01, you will have a tool at your disposal to fix it.
But, in those other fields, you need to understand how the underlying system works in order fully to benefit from the modern technology. You can't just hook a modern IV pump up to someone and expect them to stop feeling ill. The abstractions and conveniences you mentioned do not demand of most programmers that they understand the underlying hardware interfaces, but they do demand that of some programmers. In addition, the rest of the world's programmers do benefit from a basic understanding of what goes on under the hood.
There are reasons not to trust banks regardless of the source of the gains. While a large cash stockpile has its own risks, keep in mind that there are limits on FDIC protection of your bank accounts and investing the money somewhere else is also not always wise.
They're better off not giving you a reason. "We are firing you simply because we can" is pretty safe. "We are firing you because you are lazy and look at disgusting pornography all day at work" might open them up to a being sued for firing you on a false pretense if you can prove the porn wasn't really disgusting.