Whereas "true" Internet voting is a phenomenally bad idea (when implemented in a way that's acceptable to the majority of voters), the Arizona system isn't really Internet voting. It's more "absentee ballots" that use the Internet as the delivery mechanism rather than the normal postal system.
Mail-in ballots are extremely common in Arizona ever since they changed the "absentee balloting" system into a more generic "everybody can use it" system. For instance, I have a ballot automatically mailed to be before every election, no matter how big or small, without me having to do anything but sign up a couple years ago. It's very slick.
The ballot is a normal paper one exactly like those found in the polling place. I fill it out by completing arrows pointing to my choice (easy and not even remotely ambiguous) then put it in a specially coded envelope that I sign and mail in. On the other end, a poll worker opens the envelope, marks that I voted (to prevent multiple votes), saves off my signature, and puts the ballot through the normal recording devices to record my vote. The voter lists in my local polling place have me marked as "mail in" so if I were to drop by on election day, they would accept my ballot but it would only be counted after all other ballots are counted and they can verify that I hadn't already voted.
It's extremely convenient and has made the difference between voting only in the major elections to voting in all of them (and learning a lot more about local candidates in the process). The drawback is that I have to trust that my vote isn't tied with my name. See, when you are at a polling station, then they record that you voted, but your actual ballot isn't in any way tied to you. With the mail-in process, it's possible that that is still the case (maybe the person/system opening the envelopes isn't the one recording the votes)... but you can't know for sure. For all I know, they may have a database mapping people with who they vote for. Honestly, that doesn't bother me at this point. I am pretty vocal about who I vote for and have even publicly posting my voting lists for the world to see before. I guess I would stop the mail-in only if I had reason to believe that my vote wasn't being counted.
Anyway, that's the mail-in system. The "Internet voting" system is effectively that but for people overseas. That option was never available for me since I'm local. The only difference is that instead of putting their ballot into an envelope and signing that, they instead scan it in and upload it to a server. Everything else is identical.
The article does make a few good points on some ways that that system could be subverted. Yeah, there are definitely a few more attack points... but they seem a little far fetched at this point. The level of effort required to implement any of the attack vectors would only be worth it if done at a bigger scale. That is, if this started being available to ALL AZ residents, then it starts to matter. For now... meh.
I gave my daughter a Firefly when she was in first grade for all of the reasons every has mentioned. They are incredibly easy to use. However, there is still one fatal flaw -- they have to be turned on.
You may not think that's a problem but it was for my daughter. See, the school absolutely insists that all cell phones are turned off during the day. I'm not talking about "mute" or "vibrate" or anything. Off. And yes, they would actually do random checks to verify. I tried to tell them that you can restrict who calls the Firefly so it won't be randomly ringing during the day but it was no good. In the end, it was up to my daughter to remember to turn it on. She almost never did.
This was a continuing problem until she hit her tweens. As soon as her friends had cell phones too and she discovered texting, then the problem solved itself. I got her a prepaid phone for texting along with a 200 message plan and she was off to the races. That phone was on the second the school bell rang.
Of course, that just opened up another problem. Did you know that a tween girl can go through 200 texts the very first hour of the very first day that the package is activated? Ah well.
This isn't the only Sun censorship going on. Tim Bray (of XML fame, now Sun's Director of Web Tech) had a very insightful post on his 'ongoing' blog comparing Sun's strengths and weaknesses with Oracle's. It was up for all of a day before the lawyers stepped in and made him take it down.
It was all in vain, of course -- caches and copies will beat redactions every time. Here's one copy:
LSU might be in the UP but it's not made up of yoopers. If it was, they would know that the four seasons in the UP are thus:
1. Early winter 2. Mid winter 3. Late winter 4. Next winter
Re:Chiropractor "camps" - not all are quacks
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He's not really a chiropractor then. He's an almost-physiotherapist who's using the name chiropractor, probably because there are lots of people who, irrationally, think going to a chiropractor is better than going to a massage therapist or physiotherapist.
Chiropractic has a specific meaning, which includes a bunch of whacky beliefs in "innate intelligence" and such. Chiropractic also specifically rejects evidence, experiment and the scientific method, preferring logical deduction from first principles dictated by unquestionable doctrine.
Yes, I know the history. It was why I was so shocked when he went to college to become one. Might as well become a faith healer, as far as I was concerned...
But no, he is a board-certified Doctor of Chiropractic (DC). As I said, there was a lot of the quackery in his degree, but intermixed was a lot of solid medical training. His practice is purely practical and he's not alone in doing so. That's exactly my point: the Chiropractic field has adherents of all sorts of philosophies... not all of them quacks.
Chiropractor "camps" - not all are quacks
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I used to "know" that chiropractors were all quacks... right up until one of my brothers became on. I was initially shocked when he went to college to become one since he was one of the most intelligent and logical people I knew. How could he reject all reason to base his career on such garbage?
Well, after several years of in-depth discussions, I've come to realize that there is more to this than meets the eye. Basically, there are several schools of thought in the chiro world. My brother went to one of the few reputable colleges whose curriculum tracks with modern medicine (particularly the orthopedic realm). Apparently there are quite a few colleges that focus mostly on the junk-science. But even in the "good" college, there were a number of instructors and students that worked more on belief than science.
Still, he did get a solid medical education and when he graduated, he worked with a practice that focused on sports medicine. This field is all about results. You come in, diagnose problems, and fix the problems. If you can't do that, then the teams find somebody who can. There's no hoodoo here, just solid science.
Right now, he's with a more conventional practice that combines medical doctors with chiropractors. If the patient has an illness, then they go to the MD. If they have muscular (and related) issues, then they see my brother.
So I still tease him every now and then, but overall, I've come to respect his line of work quite a bit. Trying to compare what he does with homeopathy is patently ludicrous.
If/when you have children, you will understand just how false this is. I can't tell you how many times I am personally shocked, and my friends who are also parents are also personally shocked, at just how innately different boys and girls are. And it's not just my own kids, but it's all kids.
I call your anecdote and raise you another. I have two kids of my own (a boy and a girl) and my wife and I have made a concerted effort to be as gender-neutral as possible in raising them. That doesn't mean no gender-specific toys -- it means that we give them indiscriminately. Yes, our girl got dolls, but so does our boy.
We were mostly successful when they were young. Their personalities are wildly different so it's hard to do a one-to-one comparison, but generally speaking, each enjoyed doing activities that are stereotypically done by the other gender. I couldn't find any direct preference to any traditional gender roles.
That's not to say that other people didn't see those roles. Their grandma would coo over my girl when she wore pink... but would never notice when she played with her trucks. Likewise, her grandson is "such a typical boy" when he's climbing all over everything... but is just being funny when he's trying to walk around in mom's high heels while carrying her purse. You see what you expect to see.
In the end, though, it was all for naught. As soon as both hit the daycare circuit and were around lots of other kids their own gender, they molded right into what they were expected to be. My daughter resisted longer than my son and played with traditional "boys toys" up until she hit kindergarten. By that time, though, she was openly mocked by her friends if she didn't act "girly" enough. Now... well, she lives the girl stereotype to the max. My son didn't even last that long. He started playing with other boys at day care and that was that.
So in the end, I'm still convinced that the whole nature-vs-nuture thing is mostly nuture. Yes, their personalities are completely different and one can argue that that may be more gender specific... but overall, it's society that is shaping the gender roles more than what they will naturally be.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft is only going to be an OpenID Provider and not a Relaying Party. That is, you can use your MS ID elsewhere but you can't use your existing ID on MS Live.
This seems to be pretty typical of companies adopting OpenID. Lately, quite a few companies have trumpeted their OpenID support... yet in almost all cases, it has been as a Provider only. Yahoo is the notable exception of a large OpenID provider that is also a relaying party (consumer).
So this has resulted in a world where everybody wants to provide an ID but nobody wants to accept them. The goal is that I could create an ID on my own website (as an OpenID provider) and use that ID to log into Google and Yahoo and MS Live and the rest without having to create a separate user on all of them. The reality is that since nearly all of them are only providers, I would still have to create a ton of separate users.
I kept getting hammered by an automated call only leaving a number to call back.. A Google search turned up the number belonged to a collection agency in Chicago. They were hammering stale cases and my new number from a move just happend to be one of the numbers they had. If you don't speak english and thus unable to follow the instructions to call, there is no way to stop these calls as there is never anyone on the line to talk to.
It can be even worse than that. I was getting persistent calls from some debt collection agency about some other person with the same last name as me. I have a policy of not answering the phone unless I know who it is so all the calls went to my answering machine. Furthermore, I would delete the message off of the machine after listening to only a few seconds of it.
Well, my wife got sick of that after a few months and decided to actually listen to the full message. It was an automated one but not just a recording. About half-way through, the automated voice says:
"If you are the person in question, please stay on the line. Otherwise, hang up"
It then waits a few seconds and, thinking it now has confirmation that I am the scofflaw they are looking for since I'm still on the line, it starts up on the threats!
My wife finally called the agency to get us off their list. The first level of collector she talked to insisted that they have confirmation that so-and-so lives with us. Yes, from the freaking answering machine!
Long story short, she finally talked to a manager who promised to take us off their list. He lied and they continued calling. She called again and talked to a different manager who also promised to take us off. We haven't had a call since.
Your analogy between eBay's behavior and Obama's FISA vote is very apt but I believe you got the final conclusion exactly wrong. In both eBay's and Obama's case, the recent egregious behavior will likely have no noticeable effect on the bottom line. Why? Because in both cases, there isn't a viable alternative.
Let's look at eBay. Say you are a small business owner selling on eBay and are (justifiably) upset about eBay's current emphasis. What are you going to do about it? Go somewhere else to sell your goods online? Where? There's really nowhere else you can go with the same reach and pull that you have on eBay.
The Obama situation is identical. Say you are furious about his FISA betrayal... what of it? Your only choices are him or Bush again (in the guise of McCain).
As long as there aren't viable alternatives, the only thing the little guy can do is stomp around yelling until he feels better.
I think this is great news. By employing the CUPS developer to work on CUPS, it's ensuring that development doesn't stagnate. There's always the potential problem with any OSS project that the primary developer would get side-tracked by The Real World. This is a step towards making sure that that doesn't happen.
Plus, Apple's design sense can't hurt in this case. The CUPS web interface has got to be one of the worst I've ever seen.
That's a great answer and makes perfect sense. You say that "no known substance is anywhere close to perfectly rigid"... but does that necessarily mean that there isn't such a thing? Is it even theoretically possible that there is such a material and we just haven't discovered it?
I ask that because if there is, then it seems that that allows for the possibility of faster than light information traversal after all.
Or maybe the logic goes like so:
1. Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light 2. A perfectly rigid substance would allow information to travel faster than light 3. Therefore, it is physically impossible for a perfectly rigid substance to exist in our universe
You know that Google has an inordinate amount of pull on Slashdot when an article summary like this comes out:
"a Google employee goes on"
A "Google employee"? Really? He has a name... it's Jeremy Allison. You know, the same Jeremy Allison that was described as "The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame)" when he resigned from Novell.
Hell, he was still Jeremy Allison only a couple of months ago when he wrote an advice piece for young programmers.
The top 1% only required wealth of $500,000 which a USer making $40,000 annually should easily eclipse with a 5% 401(k) contribution (assuming you have an employer match) and an 8% return. I'd guess that almost all of the college graduates here are above the 10% level (don't forget the value of cars, computers, clothes, any retirement accounts and such). Top 10%? Maybe. Top 1%? No way. Not on the salary you are referring to, in any event.
Let's say you make $40k a year and contribute 6% (+100% employer matching) with an 8% return. It would take you 29 years to hit $500k in the 401(k). Listing your car in the asset column is correct... but don't forget to subtract how much you still owe on the loan. And if you're in the 40% of all people with "upside down" loans (owe more than the car is worth), then you actually have negative equity on the car. Computers and clothes can be considered assets as well, but they are more of a drain on wealth than anything else since we rarely , if ever, sell them once we get our use out of them.
This isn't even beginning to touch on issues like credit card debt!
Honestly, I would say that most of these USers making $40,000 annually, rather than being in the top 1% (or even 10%), would be classified by this study as being some of the poorest in the world due to the overwhelming debt to asset ratio. At least, most of the people I know making that kind of money that have been working for only 10 years or so are struggling just to pay their monthly mortgage, credit cards, and car loan payments each month, not to mention all of the utilities and food and gas.
Isn't a strategy like this good only for winning if winning is the only goal and the item's worth to you is irrelevant? It's almost as if winning auctions is some competitive sport? "Yeah, I'm up to 116 wins versus only 23 losses but I have high hopes for the future when my finger heals."
In some undefineable way, I find that a very sad thing. I'm sure that overall, people that resort to "sniping" are paying far more for whatever they are bidding on than it would normally be worth to them. What a waste of money.
I must be a stick in the mud when it comes to bidding on eBay. Here's my process:
1. I find as many examples of whatever it is I'm searching for and try to discover what the going rate is for them. This may mean searching for "completed" auctions on eBay or even checking things like craigslist or classifieds or any number of places that sell whatever I'm looking for. 2. Once I discover the "fair" price (to me), I determine how much more than that I'm willing to pay. Is it extremely common or very rare? If it's common, then my maximum price is the fair price. Otherwise, I'll go up from there. 3. Once I discover my maximum price, I set that as my bid price on the very first bid.
And that's it. If somebody snipes my price at the end of the auction and I "lose", then what of it? It would have made no difference if they did with a second to go or only two seconds after I made my bid. Over the maximum is over the maximum regardless of when the bid came in. Clearly somebody was willing to pay more than I was.
I guess I don't get the same satisfaction when winning as the snipers, though. Sure, I have the item that I wanted, but I don't have any sense of "beating the other guy"... *sigh*
We live in a nation where 45% of eligible voters believe the world is 6000 years old No, we live in a nation where people can make shit up and get modded insightful.
That "fact" may be more a specific interpretation of existing polls than an outright lie. I couldn't find any polls or surveys that specifically referred to the age of the Earth... but there are quite a few that deal with creationism v. evolution. Creationism can fall into the Young Earth or Old Earth camps so it's not fair to say that "people who believe in creationism believe that the Earth is 6000 to 10,000 years old". However, it may be fair to say that a substantial number of them do.
Surveys are also fairly consistent in their estimates of how many Americans believe in evolution or creationism. Approximately 40%-50% of the public accepts a biblical creationist account of the origins of life, while comparable numbers accept the idea that humans evolved over time. The wording of survey questions generally makes little systematic difference in this division of opinion
If one assumes that Creationism == Young Earth, then the "45% of eligible voters believe the world is 6000 years old" may (accidently) be an accurate statement!
We use Sharepoint and Twiki nearly interchangeably at work. I don't have a problem with either of them. The people complaining about Sharepoint needing a lot of ActiveX controls must be using far more advanced features than are available on our installation. I access Sharepoint using Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera (on Linux) regularly and have never had any problems. I'll admit that I resisted when "they" started pushing Sharepoint on me since past experience with MS designed web applications has shown me their zeal to lock out everything but IE on Windows (*cough*MS Project Central*cough*)... but since using it, I have no complaints at all.
Typically, we use Sharepoint for any Microsoft formatted docs (xls, doc, ppt, etc) since Office 2003 has pretty decent support for Sharepoint built-in. Click on a spreadsheet and Excel will check it out, show you who is working on the file, and check it back in when you save. Pretty slick. Gnumeric comes pretty close in that it appears to check it out, but Sharepoint doesn't seem to recognize the checked out state so checking it back in is problematic.
We then use Twiki for docs that are more static (PDFs, typically) and for pages that are heavily customized. I'm sure that Sharepoint allows for very customized pages as well but we use what we know and we know Twiki.
I wonder where they are getting the "$100K per sailor per year" figure. I found a page on the US Navy pay grades here: Navy Benefits. According to that page, after four years in the Navy, an enlisted sailor makes all of $25,000 a year. An officer at four years makes about $70,000. In general, you need to be an O-6 officer with 20 years on the job to be making $100K. I don't imagine the ships are overrun with them.
Now obviously the sailor's pay isn't the only form of compensation they are counting when saying how much a sailor costs. They have to factor in insurances (health and life) plus possible GI Bill and then the physical realities of housing (or whatever that's called on a ship), food, clothes, and the like. But still, if most of the grunts on the ship are making $30K or less, that's on awful lot of food to make up the extra $70K a year!
Maybe the UK and France just pay their soldiers a lot better...
I tend to cringe at the sight of emoticons, largely due to their gross misuse. It's hard to keep your lunch down when seemingly every other message you see has "omg:o, u r hte suxxors!!:P:):D". Still, they do have their place when used sparingly.
Stupid example: I recently joined a new web (woodworking) forum where I discovered an odd tradition. Somebody would get an incredible deal on, say, a new band saw and "gloat" about it. The customary response to that is "You suck!". Now the first time I saw that, I thought that the author had an unfortunate way of dealing with his problem of envy... but the:grin: that followed it at least told me that he wasn't totally serious. Okay, so I did say it's a stupid example. I could just as easily figured out the non-seriousness of the statement by the scores of "Wow, great find. Oh, and You Suck!" messages that followed.. but still.
Personally, I use them in one of two cases: 1. If it's likely that my meaning could be misinterpreted (i.e., the recipient doesn't know me very well or my writing is clearly ambiguous) 2. I am writing in a forum that encourages their use
Don't think it's not tempting! The main sticking point is this: where do we go? All comparable houses in a reasonable distance have similar ludicrous prices. My commute to work is currently 30 miles. I would have to move a minimum of 20 more miles out (probably more) to sell our house, buy a new house, and make a profit. The profit I'd make wouldn't be worth the 100 mile round-trip every day.
Plus, kid in school that she can walk to, beautiful neighborhood, finally got the house decorated like we wanted, finally got a pool put in, etc...
I agree, to a point. This is just an example of some bad software design. There's no real excuse that it should even be possible for something like this to happen. Typing 'R-E-R' instead of 'R-E-D' causes it? Yeesh.
Anyway, I'll disagree that x1.3 the house price automatically means that something is wrong. In our neighborhood, house prices shot up over 130% (x2.3) in some cases. The house across the street was valued at $218,000 last year but got an offer for $500,000 just a few months ago (they turned it down because they were asking $540,000). Yes, I know that "appraisal != home price" but still...
A new manager is hired to bring an underproducing office up to speed. He decides that he must fire somebody on the first day to show that he means business. While walking through the office, he spots a man leaning against the wall, not doing anything. He is in a room full of workers and so decides that this is the perfect way to start.
"You! How much do you make a week?", he bellowed at the slacker. "About $300," came the reply.
The manager pulls out his wallet, peels off three hundred dollar bills, and throws them at the man.
"Here's your money. Now get out and don't come back!"
Feeling pretty good about the firing, he glared around room. "What was this man's job?", he asked.
From the back of the room came the reply: "Pizza delivery man"
This looks like a pretty useful service. We tend to give away the stuff we don't use anymore to Goodwill. While we like that from a tax perspective, something like Freecycle might be better in the sense that the recipient might appreciate the donation more. If I give a $60 pair of children jeans (which lasted 6 months... never again!) to Goodwill and they sell them for $0.25, would the jeans be as appreciated as if we gave them to somebody who knew just how much our daughter loved those jeans until she grew out of them? I don't think so.
Looks like my local community one is pretty active. I just subscribed. We'll see how it goes.
One thing I already see, though, is that Services are forbidden. That's a shame. Well, not the service advertisements themselves but rather the advice on which services to go with.
I worked for a large corporation for a few years and hated nearly everything about it... except for the internal newsgroups. They were very active and just perfect for advice on services. Say you want recommendations on a pediatrician or family doctor or dentist or cleaning service or lawn service or any number of things like that. Those newsgroups were the perfect mix of a lot of local people with strong opinions on the services they had received. They never once steered me wrong.
I've tried to find something similar ever since I left and have failed miserably. Weblogs are too one-sided and far too distributed. Citysearch (and the like) are too anonymous and rarely have good opinions anyway. USENET is pretty much dead for things like that. Places like/. have very active (and opinionated) communities but they tend to be far too geek-oriented and global in scope.
So now I'm in a situation where I want recommendations on a good, trustworthy, local woodworking shop that can custom make some furniture... but I don't know of any place where I can find these recommendations.
Hmm... maybe I can try doing a "WANTED: Advice on Services" on Freecycle and see how fast I'm kicked from it:-)
One of the reasons that Ender is ultimately chosen is that when he has to, he strikes without mercy and utterly destroys his opponent. There is no way to portray the character of Ender properly by having him pull a half assed beating on Bonzo, or that first bully, that lets them live.
I agree that Ender has to beat the kids to death in the movie to stay true to the book. But if the movie stays true to the book, then it likely won't show anything beyond a PG-13 style beating.
The key, here, is that when you read the book for the first time, you don't know for some time that Ender has killed those bullies. The book describes Ender beating on the bullies until after they stopped moving, but in each case, he's brought away and neither he nor the reader sees the aftermath of what he did. Ender himself doesn't find out until quite late in the book, if my memory is correct.
[Serenity] did alright at the box office, but nothing spectacular. It certainly did well enough so that Whedon can get funding for another if he is so inclined.
I'm interested to know where you got this idea. Did Whedon say it somewhere? Or some other figure that would be in the position to know?
By all accounts that I've heard and read, Serenity was a bit of a bomb. According to Box Office Mojo, Serenity had a production budget of 39 million and hasn't even broken even yet. That counts world-wide sales and it's effectively done with its theater run. Marketing costs aren't factored in at all. Not breaking even doesn't sound like "doing alright" to me!
It's coming out on DVD very soon and it historically does very well in that market. I don't know enough about the movie industry to know if that counts when they decide on financing new movies, though. I'm crossing my fingers...
I am as much a Serenity fan as any other non-Browncoat Firefly fan, but until somebody in the know tells otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude the the movie was a flop.
Slashdot Mirror
Whereas "true" Internet voting is a phenomenally bad idea (when implemented in a way that's acceptable to the majority of voters), the Arizona system isn't really Internet voting. It's more "absentee ballots" that use the Internet as the delivery mechanism rather than the normal postal system.
Mail-in ballots are extremely common in Arizona ever since they changed the "absentee balloting" system into a more generic "everybody can use it" system. For instance, I have a ballot automatically mailed to be before every election, no matter how big or small, without me having to do anything but sign up a couple years ago. It's very slick.
The ballot is a normal paper one exactly like those found in the polling place. I fill it out by completing arrows pointing to my choice (easy and not even remotely ambiguous) then put it in a specially coded envelope that I sign and mail in. On the other end, a poll worker opens the envelope, marks that I voted (to prevent multiple votes), saves off my signature, and puts the ballot through the normal recording devices to record my vote. The voter lists in my local polling place have me marked as "mail in" so if I were to drop by on election day, they would accept my ballot but it would only be counted after all other ballots are counted and they can verify that I hadn't already voted.
It's extremely convenient and has made the difference between voting only in the major elections to voting in all of them (and learning a lot more about local candidates in the process). The drawback is that I have to trust that my vote isn't tied with my name. See, when you are at a polling station, then they record that you voted, but your actual ballot isn't in any way tied to you. With the mail-in process, it's possible that that is still the case (maybe the person/system opening the envelopes isn't the one recording the votes)... but you can't know for sure. For all I know, they may have a database mapping people with who they vote for. Honestly, that doesn't bother me at this point. I am pretty vocal about who I vote for and have even publicly posting my voting lists for the world to see before. I guess I would stop the mail-in only if I had reason to believe that my vote wasn't being counted.
Anyway, that's the mail-in system. The "Internet voting" system is effectively that but for people overseas. That option was never available for me since I'm local. The only difference is that instead of putting their ballot into an envelope and signing that, they instead scan it in and upload it to a server. Everything else is identical.
The article does make a few good points on some ways that that system could be subverted. Yeah, there are definitely a few more attack points... but they seem a little far fetched at this point. The level of effort required to implement any of the attack vectors would only be worth it if done at a bigger scale. That is, if this started being available to ALL AZ residents, then it starts to matter. For now... meh.
I gave my daughter a Firefly when she was in first grade for all of the reasons every has mentioned. They are incredibly easy to use. However, there is still one fatal flaw -- they have to be turned on.
You may not think that's a problem but it was for my daughter. See, the school absolutely insists that all cell phones are turned off during the day. I'm not talking about "mute" or "vibrate" or anything. Off. And yes, they would actually do random checks to verify. I tried to tell them that you can restrict who calls the Firefly so it won't be randomly ringing during the day but it was no good. In the end, it was up to my daughter to remember to turn it on. She almost never did.
This was a continuing problem until she hit her tweens. As soon as her friends had cell phones too and she discovered texting, then the problem solved itself. I got her a prepaid phone for texting along with a 200 message plan and she was off to the races. That phone was on the second the school bell rang.
Of course, that just opened up another problem. Did you know that a tween girl can go through 200 texts the very first hour of the very first day that the package is activated? Ah well.
This isn't the only Sun censorship going on. Tim Bray (of XML fame, now Sun's Director of Web Tech) had a very insightful post on his 'ongoing' blog comparing Sun's strengths and weaknesses with Oracle's. It was up for all of a day before the lawyers stepped in and made him take it down.
It was all in vain, of course -- caches and copies will beat redactions every time. Here's one copy:
Us and Them
Interesting stuff!
LSU might be in the UP but it's not made up of yoopers. If it was, they would know that the four seasons in the UP are thus:
1. Early winter
2. Mid winter
3. Late winter
4. Next winter
He's not really a chiropractor then. He's an almost-physiotherapist who's using the name chiropractor, probably because there are lots of people who, irrationally, think going to a chiropractor is better than going to a massage therapist or physiotherapist.
Chiropractic has a specific meaning, which includes a bunch of whacky beliefs in "innate intelligence" and such. Chiropractic also specifically rejects evidence, experiment and the scientific method, preferring logical deduction from first principles dictated by unquestionable doctrine.
Yes, I know the history. It was why I was so shocked when he went to college to become one. Might as well become a faith healer, as far as I was concerned...
But no, he is a board-certified Doctor of Chiropractic (DC). As I said, there was a lot of the quackery in his degree, but intermixed was a lot of solid medical training. His practice is purely practical and he's not alone in doing so. That's exactly my point: the Chiropractic field has adherents of all sorts of philosophies... not all of them quacks.
I used to "know" that chiropractors were all quacks... right up until one of my brothers became on. I was initially shocked when he went to college to become one since he was one of the most intelligent and logical people I knew. How could he reject all reason to base his career on such garbage?
Well, after several years of in-depth discussions, I've come to realize that there is more to this than meets the eye. Basically, there are several schools of thought in the chiro world. My brother went to one of the few reputable colleges whose curriculum tracks with modern medicine (particularly the orthopedic realm). Apparently there are quite a few colleges that focus mostly on the junk-science. But even in the "good" college, there were a number of instructors and students that worked more on belief than science.
Still, he did get a solid medical education and when he graduated, he worked with a practice that focused on sports medicine. This field is all about results. You come in, diagnose problems, and fix the problems. If you can't do that, then the teams find somebody who can. There's no hoodoo here, just solid science.
Right now, he's with a more conventional practice that combines medical doctors with chiropractors. If the patient has an illness, then they go to the MD. If they have muscular (and related) issues, then they see my brother.
So I still tease him every now and then, but overall, I've come to respect his line of work quite a bit. Trying to compare what he does with homeopathy is patently ludicrous.
If/when you have children, you will understand just how false this is. I can't tell you how many times I am personally shocked, and my friends who are also parents are also personally shocked, at just how innately different boys and girls are. And it's not just my own kids, but it's all kids.
I call your anecdote and raise you another. I have two kids of my own (a boy and a girl) and my wife and I have made a concerted effort to be as gender-neutral as possible in raising them. That doesn't mean no gender-specific toys -- it means that we give them indiscriminately. Yes, our girl got dolls, but so does our boy.
We were mostly successful when they were young. Their personalities are wildly different so it's hard to do a one-to-one comparison, but generally speaking, each enjoyed doing activities that are stereotypically done by the other gender. I couldn't find any direct preference to any traditional gender roles.
That's not to say that other people didn't see those roles. Their grandma would coo over my girl when she wore pink... but would never notice when she played with her trucks. Likewise, her grandson is "such a typical boy" when he's climbing all over everything... but is just being funny when he's trying to walk around in mom's high heels while carrying her purse. You see what you expect to see.
In the end, though, it was all for naught. As soon as both hit the daycare circuit and were around lots of other kids their own gender, they molded right into what they were expected to be. My daughter resisted longer than my son and played with traditional "boys toys" up until she hit kindergarten. By that time, though, she was openly mocked by her friends if she didn't act "girly" enough. Now... well, she lives the girl stereotype to the max. My son didn't even last that long. He started playing with other boys at day care and that was that.
So in the end, I'm still convinced that the whole nature-vs-nuture thing is mostly nuture. Yes, their personalities are completely different and one can argue that that may be more gender specific... but overall, it's society that is shaping the gender roles more than what they will naturally be.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft is only going to be an OpenID Provider and not a Relaying Party. That is, you can use your MS ID elsewhere but you can't use your existing ID on MS Live.
This seems to be pretty typical of companies adopting OpenID. Lately, quite a few companies have trumpeted their OpenID support... yet in almost all cases, it has been as a Provider only. Yahoo is the notable exception of a large OpenID provider that is also a relaying party (consumer).
So this has resulted in a world where everybody wants to provide an ID but nobody wants to accept them. The goal is that I could create an ID on my own website (as an OpenID provider) and use that ID to log into Google and Yahoo and MS Live and the rest without having to create a separate user on all of them. The reality is that since nearly all of them are only providers, I would still have to create a ton of separate users.
I kept getting hammered by an automated call only leaving a number to call back.. A Google search turned up the number belonged to a collection agency in Chicago. They were hammering stale cases and my new number from a move just happend to be one of the numbers they had. If you don't speak english and thus unable to follow the instructions to call, there is no way to stop these calls as there is never anyone on the line to talk to.
It can be even worse than that. I was getting persistent calls from some debt collection agency about some other person with the same last name as me. I have a policy of not answering the phone unless I know who it is so all the calls went to my answering machine. Furthermore, I would delete the message off of the machine after listening to only a few seconds of it.
Well, my wife got sick of that after a few months and decided to actually listen to the full message. It was an automated one but not just a recording. About half-way through, the automated voice says:
"If you are the person in question, please stay on the line. Otherwise, hang up"
It then waits a few seconds and, thinking it now has confirmation that I am the scofflaw they are looking for since I'm still on the line, it starts up on the threats!
My wife finally called the agency to get us off their list. The first level of collector she talked to insisted that they have confirmation that so-and-so lives with us. Yes, from the freaking answering machine!
Long story short, she finally talked to a manager who promised to take us off their list. He lied and they continued calling. She called again and talked to a different manager who also promised to take us off. We haven't had a call since.
Let's look at eBay. Say you are a small business owner selling on eBay and are (justifiably) upset about eBay's current emphasis. What are you going to do about it? Go somewhere else to sell your goods online? Where? There's really nowhere else you can go with the same reach and pull that you have on eBay.
The Obama situation is identical. Say you are furious about his FISA betrayal... what of it? Your only choices are him or Bush again (in the guise of McCain).
As long as there aren't viable alternatives, the only thing the little guy can do is stomp around yelling until he feels better.
sigh
I think this is great news. By employing the CUPS developer to work on CUPS, it's ensuring that development doesn't stagnate. There's always the potential problem with any OSS project that the primary developer would get side-tracked by The Real World. This is a step towards making sure that that doesn't happen.
Plus, Apple's design sense can't hurt in this case. The CUPS web interface has got to be one of the worst I've ever seen.
That's a great answer and makes perfect sense. You say that "no known substance is anywhere close to perfectly rigid"... but does that necessarily mean that there isn't such a thing? Is it even theoretically possible that there is such a material and we just haven't discovered it?
I ask that because if there is, then it seems that that allows for the possibility of faster than light information traversal after all.
Or maybe the logic goes like so:
1. Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light
2. A perfectly rigid substance would allow information to travel faster than light
3. Therefore, it is physically impossible for a perfectly rigid substance to exist in our universe
Does that sound about right?
You know that Google has an inordinate amount of pull on Slashdot when an article summary like this comes out:
"a Google employee goes on"
A "Google employee"? Really? He has a name... it's Jeremy Allison. You know, the same Jeremy Allison that was described as "The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame)" when he resigned from Novell.
Hell, he was still Jeremy Allison only a couple of months ago when he wrote an advice piece for young programmers.
Now? He's a Google employee.
Yeesh.
Let's say you make $40k a year and contribute 6% (+100% employer matching) with an 8% return. It would take you 29 years to hit $500k in the 401(k). Listing your car in the asset column is correct... but don't forget to subtract how much you still owe on the loan. And if you're in the 40% of all people with "upside down" loans (owe more than the car is worth), then you actually have negative equity on the car. Computers and clothes can be considered assets as well, but they are more of a drain on wealth than anything else since we rarely , if ever, sell them once we get our use out of them.
This isn't even beginning to touch on issues like credit card debt!
Honestly, I would say that most of these USers making $40,000 annually, rather than being in the top 1% (or even 10%), would be classified by this study as being some of the poorest in the world due to the overwhelming debt to asset ratio. At least, most of the people I know making that kind of money that have been working for only 10 years or so are struggling just to pay their monthly mortgage, credit cards, and car loan payments each month, not to mention all of the utilities and food and gas.
Isn't a strategy like this good only for winning if winning is the only goal and the item's worth to you is irrelevant? It's almost as if winning auctions is some competitive sport? "Yeah, I'm up to 116 wins versus only 23 losses but I have high hopes for the future when my finger heals."
In some undefineable way, I find that a very sad thing. I'm sure that overall, people that resort to "sniping" are paying far more for whatever they are bidding on than it would normally be worth to them. What a waste of money.
I must be a stick in the mud when it comes to bidding on eBay. Here's my process:
1. I find as many examples of whatever it is I'm searching for and try to discover what the going rate is for them. This may mean searching for "completed" auctions on eBay or even checking things like craigslist or classifieds or any number of places that sell whatever I'm looking for.
2. Once I discover the "fair" price (to me), I determine how much more than that I'm willing to pay. Is it extremely common or very rare? If it's common, then my maximum price is the fair price. Otherwise, I'll go up from there.
3. Once I discover my maximum price, I set that as my bid price on the very first bid.
And that's it. If somebody snipes my price at the end of the auction and I "lose", then what of it? It would have made no difference if they did with a second to go or only two seconds after I made my bid. Over the maximum is over the maximum regardless of when the bid came in. Clearly somebody was willing to pay more than I was.
I guess I don't get the same satisfaction when winning as the snipers, though. Sure, I have the item that I wanted, but I don't have any sense of "beating the other guy"... *sigh*
This page has a pretty good analysis of quite a few polls surrounding this issue: Reading the Polls on Evolution and Creationism. A choice quote:
If one assumes that Creationism == Young Earth, then the "45% of eligible voters believe the world is 6000 years old" may (accidently) be an accurate statement!We use Sharepoint and Twiki nearly interchangeably at work. I don't have a problem with either of them. The people complaining about Sharepoint needing a lot of ActiveX controls must be using far more advanced features than are available on our installation. I access Sharepoint using Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera (on Linux) regularly and have never had any problems. I'll admit that I resisted when "they" started pushing Sharepoint on me since past experience with MS designed web applications has shown me their zeal to lock out everything but IE on Windows (*cough*MS Project Central*cough*)... but since using it, I have no complaints at all.
Typically, we use Sharepoint for any Microsoft formatted docs (xls, doc, ppt, etc) since Office 2003 has pretty decent support for Sharepoint built-in. Click on a spreadsheet and Excel will check it out, show you who is working on the file, and check it back in when you save. Pretty slick. Gnumeric comes pretty close in that it appears to check it out, but Sharepoint doesn't seem to recognize the checked out state so checking it back in is problematic.
We then use Twiki for docs that are more static (PDFs, typically) and for pages that are heavily customized. I'm sure that Sharepoint allows for very customized pages as well but we use what we know and we know Twiki.
Now obviously the sailor's pay isn't the only form of compensation they are counting when saying how much a sailor costs. They have to factor in insurances (health and life) plus possible GI Bill and then the physical realities of housing (or whatever that's called on a ship), food, clothes, and the like. But still, if most of the grunts on the ship are making $30K or less, that's on awful lot of food to make up the extra $70K a year!
Maybe the UK and France just pay their soldiers a lot better...
I tend to cringe at the sight of emoticons, largely due to their gross misuse. It's hard to keep your lunch down when seemingly every other message you see has "omg :o, u r hte suxxors!! :P :) :D". Still, they do have their place when used sparingly.
:grin: that followed it at least told me that he wasn't totally serious. Okay, so I did say it's a stupid example. I could just as easily figured out the non-seriousness of the statement by the scores of "Wow, great find. Oh, and You Suck!" messages that followed.. but still.
Stupid example: I recently joined a new web (woodworking) forum where I discovered an odd tradition. Somebody would get an incredible deal on, say, a new band saw and "gloat" about it. The customary response to that is "You suck!". Now the first time I saw that, I thought that the author had an unfortunate way of dealing with his problem of envy... but the
Personally, I use them in one of two cases:
1. If it's likely that my meaning could be misinterpreted (i.e., the recipient doesn't know me very well or my writing is clearly ambiguous)
2. I am writing in a forum that encourages their use
Don't think it's not tempting! The main sticking point is this: where do we go? All comparable houses in a reasonable distance have similar ludicrous prices. My commute to work is currently 30 miles. I would have to move a minimum of 20 more miles out (probably more) to sell our house, buy a new house, and make a profit. The profit I'd make wouldn't be worth the 100 mile round-trip every day.
Plus, kid in school that she can walk to, beautiful neighborhood, finally got the house decorated like we wanted, finally got a pool put in, etc...
I agree, to a point. This is just an example of some bad software design. There's no real excuse that it should even be possible for something like this to happen. Typing 'R-E-R' instead of 'R-E-D' causes it? Yeesh.
Anyway, I'll disagree that x1.3 the house price automatically means that something is wrong. In our neighborhood, house prices shot up over 130% (x2.3) in some cases. The house across the street was valued at $218,000 last year but got an offer for $500,000 just a few months ago (they turned it down because they were asking $540,000). Yes, I know that "appraisal != home price" but still...
That sounds like a variant of a similar joke:
A new manager is hired to bring an underproducing office up to speed. He decides that he must fire somebody on the first day to show that he means business. While walking through the office, he spots a man leaning against the wall, not doing anything. He is in a room full of workers and so decides that this is the perfect way to start.
"You! How much do you make a week?", he bellowed at the slacker.
"About $300," came the reply.
The manager pulls out his wallet, peels off three hundred dollar bills, and throws them at the man.
"Here's your money. Now get out and don't come back!"
Feeling pretty good about the firing, he glared around room. "What was this man's job?", he asked.
From the back of the room came the reply: "Pizza delivery man"
This looks like a pretty useful service. We tend to give away the stuff we don't use anymore to Goodwill. While we like that from a tax perspective, something like Freecycle might be better in the sense that the recipient might appreciate the donation more. If I give a $60 pair of children jeans (which lasted 6 months... never again!) to Goodwill and they sell them for $0.25, would the jeans be as appreciated as if we gave them to somebody who knew just how much our daughter loved those jeans until she grew out of them? I don't think so.
/. have very active (and opinionated) communities but they tend to be far too geek-oriented and global in scope.
:-)
Looks like my local community one is pretty active. I just subscribed. We'll see how it goes.
One thing I already see, though, is that Services are forbidden. That's a shame. Well, not the service advertisements themselves but rather the advice on which services to go with.
I worked for a large corporation for a few years and hated nearly everything about it... except for the internal newsgroups. They were very active and just perfect for advice on services. Say you want recommendations on a pediatrician or family doctor or dentist or cleaning service or lawn service or any number of things like that. Those newsgroups were the perfect mix of a lot of local people with strong opinions on the services they had received. They never once steered me wrong.
I've tried to find something similar ever since I left and have failed miserably. Weblogs are too one-sided and far too distributed. Citysearch (and the like) are too anonymous and rarely have good opinions anyway. USENET is pretty much dead for things like that. Places like
So now I'm in a situation where I want recommendations on a good, trustworthy, local woodworking shop that can custom make some furniture... but I don't know of any place where I can find these recommendations.
Hmm... maybe I can try doing a "WANTED: Advice on Services" on Freecycle and see how fast I'm kicked from it
I agree that Ender has to beat the kids to death in the movie to stay true to the book. But if the movie stays true to the book, then it likely won't show anything beyond a PG-13 style beating.
The key, here, is that when you read the book for the first time, you don't know for some time that Ender has killed those bullies. The book describes Ender beating on the bullies until after they stopped moving, but in each case, he's brought away and neither he nor the reader sees the aftermath of what he did. Ender himself doesn't find out until quite late in the book, if my memory is correct.
I'm interested to know where you got this idea. Did Whedon say it somewhere? Or some other figure that would be in the position to know?
By all accounts that I've heard and read, Serenity was a bit of a bomb. According to Box Office Mojo, Serenity had a production budget of 39 million and hasn't even broken even yet. That counts world-wide sales and it's effectively done with its theater run. Marketing costs aren't factored in at all. Not breaking even doesn't sound like "doing alright" to me!
It's coming out on DVD very soon and it historically does very well in that market. I don't know enough about the movie industry to know if that counts when they decide on financing new movies, though. I'm crossing my fingers...
I am as much a Serenity fan as any other non-Browncoat Firefly fan, but until somebody in the know tells otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude the the movie was a flop.