You or your employer has almost certainly spent over $40,000 in airline fees for you to get lifetime gold status. Someone who travels as much as you probably would have gotten status (though not lifetime) on multiple airlines without trying.
There's no such thing as Motel 8; you mean either Super 8 or Motel 6. I see no reason why an employee, CEO or otherwise, should not stay in such a motel if it is convenient to the venue and provides enough space to work in the evenings, if that is a concern.
If they don't make you stay in budget motels or take the cheapest flight, it's a courtesy/perk your employer is giving you. Like I said elsewhere in this thread, doing that is a cultural practice that is imo. I'd rather a monetary bonus.
Btw don't knock Motel 6. Last time I stayed there they were as clean as any motel, and they give you free wifi. Not a bad place.
If you're looking for a good non-porn book, "Matched" is good. I haven't finished it yet, but it's been good so far. It's the first pleasure reading I've done in quite a few years. In college, I'd already gotten all my literature credits out of the way through AP and was bitter because I'd just discovered how vapid the field of literary criticism is ("death of the author" my ass), and I just stopped reading books. "Matched" is really good, so far. I think I'm about 1/2 through or so.
Southwest has free checked bags and generally lower prices in any case, so the "free checked bags" argument doesn't seem that useful to me. As for employers paying for business class... it's just silly to fly business class at all, really. I'd rather fly coach and have 50% of the saved money as a bonus or something. But if you're working in a broken culture where flying business class is something people do, then okay, point taken, as far as the free upgrade with status. Still, you need to fly a LOT to get status... someone flying 3 or 4 times a year will never get status. And, again, the status thing is there to trick you into making the wrong decision when faced with a cheaper price on another airline. If you want a chance at beating them at their own game, you have to be really, really careful and actually calculate out how much obtaining or retaining status is costing you in lost savings. If you don't, well, "the house always wins" comes to mind.
I've been on 12+ hour international flights in coach, and on 24+ hour train rides in coach... it's really not that bad. Maybe when I get older it will be. But then most of the people I talk to on the train are older so maybe not lol.
I've looked at the game, and, for someone who doesn't travel maybe 10+ times a year, the only winning move is not to play. I don't take the train like I used to and I've got 15000 Amtrak miles idling. Ultimately I'm going to just take a vacation in one of their roomette's since I have a relative who likes being on a train for the sake of being on a train. Instead of having 15000 Amtrak miles I could have had maybe $100 or a little less cash back from a 1% credit card. It was probably worth having the Amtrak card for all the travel I took while I was a regular customer, but, now that my patterns changed, I have useless miles left over. The house always wins.
It pretty much does; the only exception I can think of is you can't racially/sexually/disability discriminate against people entering your property if it's "open to the general public".
And this isn't relevant to the passive blocking argument anyway: it's unambiguously legal. I wish more places would do it.
Technical aspects of init system replacement are very easy - compared to the establishment of an organizational structure of the Debian.
Ha ha ha ha ha. The best way to kill the project would be to set up the "organizational structure of Debian". Once you remove from Debian the ftp-masters political intrigues, the bureaucratic red-tape "freeze" phases, the militant feminist lobbying group, and the unnecessary and technically incompetent divergences from upstream (see "Debian openssl"), there's not much "organizational structure" to Debian left.
You'd be wrong. The FCC has repeatedly stated that passive shielding is perfectly legal, and, yes, it would block emergency communication. It's your property; why shouldn't you be able to block radio signals from entering or leaving your own property? Unlike active jamming, you're not hurting anyone else's reception.
It might be a good idea to prominently place signs saying "cell phones don't work in here!" to avoid losing a lawsuit if someone dies in your theater because they couldn't dial 911, but that would be a civil not criminal matter anyway.
Staying within the same chain (in the US, they all have a broad range of properties at various prices, low to high) is very much the same as renting your car from the same franchise, using the same airline for the miles and a CC like Amex or BofA that gives you double miles and other perks (but be aware of your fees). I suppose that if you only travel once or twice a year then grabbing the lowest price you can get seems like a good idea, but when you are on the road a lot, building air miles, hotel loyalty perks (Executive floor access, free food and drinks, reserved parking, free ramp parking, etc.), access to your chosen airlines lounge with free drinks and snacks rather than sitting in seats picking up everyone's colds, picking up free/reduced/upgraded rental cars when on your *own* vacation are all part of the strategy.
It's a bad strategy unless you're essentially cooperating with the airline to embezzle money from your employer for yourself in a very inefficient way. I personally would have ethical problems with that. The airlines and other companies have those programs to encourage brand loyalty, so that you'll go with them even when they're not the cheapest. They think the cost of offering these discounts will be made up by stupid or unethical people buying tickets with them even when they're not the best choice. It works; otherwise, they'd cancel the programs.
There's no "long game" with airline perks. Sure, get an account; there's no downside. But, once you have an account, try to get rid of your miles as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don't hold onto them; the airline can and will devalue them eventually if you do that. And don't take a trip on a particular airline to keep your miles from expiring or something unless you really calculate it out: the value of your miles is, if you're following this advice, almost certainly less than the value of the difference in the ticket. We're talking about maybe $150 worth of company credit here if you have 15,000 points on Southwest.
Of course, if you're a frequent business flyer paying $3,000 in extra airline fees on your company credit card so you get to go to Hawaii once a year and eat free peanuts before your flight takes off in a private lounge, well, again, that's called embezzling, and you're a thief. But I guess it might work out for you in that case if your company never does internal audits.
Iraq was not engaged in an invasion of Kuwait or Iran prior to the 2003 invasion; we fought the first Iraq war to push him out of Kuwait, and he stayed out. The Iraq-Iran war was long, long over before the 2003 invasion. Likewise, Iraq last attacked Israel in 1991, not at any time remotely near the 2003 invasion.
I do not have time to write an essay to rebut each and every one of your highly misleading or outright false "points." Your post is bullshit and a good example of Brandolini's Law. Suffice it to say that the primary justification for the Iraq invasion of 2003 was that Iraq, due to its possession of weapons of mass destruction, was a threat to the international community, and Iraq possessed no such weapons. When this was discovered to be the case, supporters shifted to things like Iraq's human rights record and occasionally various random crap like the stuff you brought up.
You'd be an idiot to take those odds for 2 hours of entertainment. A 0.5% chance of getting killed each day would mean you'd probably be dead within the year.
Risk/reward-wise, it would be better to knowingly have unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner than to watch a movie where you have a 0.5% chance of getting killed. There's (supposedly) a 1% chance or so that AIDS gets transmitted through heterosexual unprotected sex per act. I imagine you'd get more entertainment out of the sex than the movie. And, even if you do get HIV, you'd still have a decade or so of good life left before the AIDS gets you. Blown up movie theater = dead right away.
If you're going to use statistics, make sure you know how to use them at least mostly correctly...
There's a law review article I read somewhere arguing that unless federal courts narrow the scope of that law, it will eventually be found void for vagueness. It is very poorly written.
Re:Why not ask the authors of the GPL Ver.2?
on
The GPLv2 Goes To Court
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So, it may upset you, but the foundation of the legal system is more or less until a judge rules on it, and until there is a legal precedent... you don't really know if it holds water or not.
Bullshit. The entire point of having a legal system based on written law is so that people know what the law is without having to just try things and then see if the executive arrests them. There are places in the law that are rough and where you really don't know what a judge will do -- "new areas of the law" -- but, in most cases, you do know what a judge will do, because of statute and precedent in similar cases. This certainty is what gives the law its value.
The GPL is a fairly simple document. It's pretty clear what it means, so we really don't need a judge to tell us. This court case might clear up a few corner cases about the consequences of infringement (forced relicensing or simple injunction + damages), but it is effectively impossible the entire document will be held null and void. There's enough precedent that it is possible to conditionally license a copyrighted work that the GPL's general validity is not in doubt.
Some people over on Apple.com forums are claiming that the hard disk that went into the iPod classic isn't being made anymore and that Apple therefore was essentially was forced to discontinue the product, because they couldn't find parts for it. Obviously they could try to find another supplier, make the hard drives themselves, etc., etc., but I guess the ROI wasn't there for them to bend over backwards to keep it going.
No it doesn't. If a trait provides a reproductive benefit, and it is monotonically marginally beneficial, then life will almost always find a way to evolve it.
You're basically asserting without evidence that there's an invisible hand of evolution. There's not. Some mutations happen much more frequently than others, and, if a trait can only be expressed with a sequence of very rare mutations, it might take a very, very long time (as in, "will never happen in a trillion trillion years") for evolution to be expected to get there. Others sort of just happen, and not for any real reason or anything, at least as far as we can tell. Evolution will only destroy a mutation if it's significantly maladaptive. If a trait is only marginally maladaptive where it's present (example: blue eyes, much more maladaptive in very sunny places than in the north), it might randomly be carried forward, at least for ~100,000 years or so.
Deer will also disproportionally abort female fetuses during harsh winters. Offspring born after hard times are likely to be stunted and inferior. Even if they are disadvantaged, a male offspring is still more likely to reproduce, because the male reproductive system is simpler and therefore less likely to be affected by fetal malnutrition. So carrying a disadvantaged daughter to term, when she is likely to be less fertile, is a waste of resources.
The implications for reasoning with just-so stories is left as an exercise for the reader.
Bullshit. VLSI code is almost always verified by finite models, and many processors are verified down to the level of mathematical axiom.
Bullshit on your bullshit, no it's not, and no they're not, not even close. Hardware companies have a fetish for formally verifying floating point stacks because, 20 years ago, the fickle and vacuous mainstream press people decided one particular piece of errata in one particular processor -- the Pentium FDIV bug from 1994 -- was important for some reason, even though every processor ever made and used has errata. AMD took advantage of Intel's bad publicity to formally verify their own FDIV instruction -- JUST the FDIV instruction, mind you -- and then doing formal verification with floating point stacks became something of a thing. There's nothing more going on than that.
Doesn't look like the "proved" that VLSI very well to me, although they doubtless subjected it to a fuckton of simulation hours. Which is what they should be doing; theorem proving software or silicon is, usually, a ton of effort for little gain. Simulation hours cost much less than developer time. Our processors would likely be 486 level today if the designers had to prove everything correct. If that.
Provably correct software code exists in small amounts, and it's emergence is inevitable.
Said the formal verification researchers, for 30 years or so now.
Impressive. But they verified about 9000 lines of C code, and, by their own admission, it's a brittle verification (meaning if they change anything substantial they have to do a lot of work to re-prove it). The specifically say, in one instance, that it took one man-year to verify a change to 5% of the code base. That's ~500 lines of code.
A year. To change 500 lines of code. imo verifying software is still more a gimmick than anything. We've been writing reliable airline software without formally proving it for over 30 years. It takes a ton of effort, but so does formal verification.
But thanks for the link, that's an interesting pig they made fly.
Look at IR in the LLVM project which has allowed an explosion of languages that can enjoy most of the same compiler optimizations that the C family enjoy using this principle.
Umm... LLVM is a fairly conventional, if well-designed, compiler, and its backends certainly do have to have a model of the processor, and know how to generate assembly from the IR, and all that. GP is right: you can't get away with no one knowing how the processor works.
What you describe isn't hypocritical. Lab B is not rewarding Lab A for doing animal testing; its consumers are not supporting Lab A's research in any way. In fact, Lab B is undermining Lab A by competing with it, reducing the rewards Company A gets from its R&D department and reducing the incentives Company A has to continue financing Lab A.
Slashdot Mirror
You or your employer has almost certainly spent over $40,000 in airline fees for you to get lifetime gold status. Someone who travels as much as you probably would have gotten status (though not lifetime) on multiple airlines without trying.
There's no such thing as Motel 8; you mean either Super 8 or Motel 6. I see no reason why an employee, CEO or otherwise, should not stay in such a motel if it is convenient to the venue and provides enough space to work in the evenings, if that is a concern.
If they don't make you stay in budget motels or take the cheapest flight, it's a courtesy/perk your employer is giving you. Like I said elsewhere in this thread, doing that is a cultural practice that is imo. I'd rather a monetary bonus.
Btw don't knock Motel 6. Last time I stayed there they were as clean as any motel, and they give you free wifi. Not a bad place.
If you're looking for a good non-porn book, "Matched" is good. I haven't finished it yet, but it's been good so far. It's the first pleasure reading I've done in quite a few years. In college, I'd already gotten all my literature credits out of the way through AP and was bitter because I'd just discovered how vapid the field of literary criticism is ("death of the author" my ass), and I just stopped reading books. "Matched" is really good, so far. I think I'm about 1/2 through or so.
Southwest has free checked bags and generally lower prices in any case, so the "free checked bags" argument doesn't seem that useful to me. As for employers paying for business class ... it's just silly to fly business class at all, really. I'd rather fly coach and have 50% of the saved money as a bonus or something. But if you're working in a broken culture where flying business class is something people do, then okay, point taken, as far as the free upgrade with status. Still, you need to fly a LOT to get status ... someone flying 3 or 4 times a year will never get status. And, again, the status thing is there to trick you into making the wrong decision when faced with a cheaper price on another airline. If you want a chance at beating them at their own game, you have to be really, really careful and actually calculate out how much obtaining or retaining status is costing you in lost savings. If you don't, well, "the house always wins" comes to mind.
I've been on 12+ hour international flights in coach, and on 24+ hour train rides in coach ... it's really not that bad. Maybe when I get older it will be. But then most of the people I talk to on the train are older so maybe not lol.
I've looked at the game, and, for someone who doesn't travel maybe 10+ times a year, the only winning move is not to play. I don't take the train like I used to and I've got 15000 Amtrak miles idling. Ultimately I'm going to just take a vacation in one of their roomette's since I have a relative who likes being on a train for the sake of being on a train. Instead of having 15000 Amtrak miles I could have had maybe $100 or a little less cash back from a 1% credit card. It was probably worth having the Amtrak card for all the travel I took while I was a regular customer, but, now that my patterns changed, I have useless miles left over. The house always wins.
It pretty much does; the only exception I can think of is you can't racially/sexually/disability discriminate against people entering your property if it's "open to the general public".
And this isn't relevant to the passive blocking argument anyway: it's unambiguously legal. I wish more places would do it.
Technical aspects of init system replacement are very easy - compared to the establishment of an organizational structure of the Debian.
Ha ha ha ha ha. The best way to kill the project would be to set up the "organizational structure of Debian". Once you remove from Debian the ftp-masters political intrigues, the bureaucratic red-tape "freeze" phases, the militant feminist lobbying group, and the unnecessary and technically incompetent divergences from upstream (see "Debian openssl"), there's not much "organizational structure" to Debian left.
I have a powerline networking setup, and a home WiFi router, and both of them work just fine and don't interfere with each other.
While I agree you should be able to bring your own snacks inside a theater, I think bringing dangerous live animals with you is crossing a line.
You'd be wrong. The FCC has repeatedly stated that passive shielding is perfectly legal, and, yes, it would block emergency communication. It's your property; why shouldn't you be able to block radio signals from entering or leaving your own property? Unlike active jamming, you're not hurting anyone else's reception.
It might be a good idea to prominently place signs saying "cell phones don't work in here!" to avoid losing a lawsuit if someone dies in your theater because they couldn't dial 911, but that would be a civil not criminal matter anyway.
Staying within the same chain (in the US, they all have a broad range of properties at various prices, low to high) is very much the same as renting your car from the same franchise, using the same airline for the miles and a CC like Amex or BofA that gives you double miles and other perks (but be aware of your fees). I suppose that if you only travel once or twice a year then grabbing the lowest price you can get seems like a good idea, but when you are on the road a lot, building air miles, hotel loyalty perks (Executive floor access, free food and drinks, reserved parking, free ramp parking, etc.), access to your chosen airlines lounge with free drinks and snacks rather than sitting in seats picking up everyone's colds, picking up free/reduced/upgraded rental cars when on your *own* vacation are all part of the strategy.
It's a bad strategy unless you're essentially cooperating with the airline to embezzle money from your employer for yourself in a very inefficient way. I personally would have ethical problems with that. The airlines and other companies have those programs to encourage brand loyalty, so that you'll go with them even when they're not the cheapest. They think the cost of offering these discounts will be made up by stupid or unethical people buying tickets with them even when they're not the best choice. It works; otherwise, they'd cancel the programs.
There's no "long game" with airline perks. Sure, get an account; there's no downside. But, once you have an account, try to get rid of your miles as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don't hold onto them; the airline can and will devalue them eventually if you do that. And don't take a trip on a particular airline to keep your miles from expiring or something unless you really calculate it out: the value of your miles is, if you're following this advice, almost certainly less than the value of the difference in the ticket. We're talking about maybe $150 worth of company credit here if you have 15,000 points on Southwest.
Of course, if you're a frequent business flyer paying $3,000 in extra airline fees on your company credit card so you get to go to Hawaii once a year and eat free peanuts before your flight takes off in a private lounge, well, again, that's called embezzling, and you're a thief. But I guess it might work out for you in that case if your company never does internal audits.
---linuxrocks123
Iraq was not engaged in an invasion of Kuwait or Iran prior to the 2003 invasion; we fought the first Iraq war to push him out of Kuwait, and he stayed out. The Iraq-Iran war was long, long over before the 2003 invasion. Likewise, Iraq last attacked Israel in 1991, not at any time remotely near the 2003 invasion.
I do not have time to write an essay to rebut each and every one of your highly misleading or outright false "points." Your post is bullshit and a good example of Brandolini's Law. Suffice it to say that the primary justification for the Iraq invasion of 2003 was that Iraq, due to its possession of weapons of mass destruction, was a threat to the international community, and Iraq possessed no such weapons. When this was discovered to be the case, supporters shifted to things like Iraq's human rights record and occasionally various random crap like the stuff you brought up.
Depressing view. Not saying you're wrong, of course, just that it would be a social good to solve these problems somehow.
This is a good start toward solving the problem: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/onl...
I'd take those odds.
You'd be an idiot to take those odds for 2 hours of entertainment. A 0.5% chance of getting killed each day would mean you'd probably be dead within the year.
Risk/reward-wise, it would be better to knowingly have unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner than to watch a movie where you have a 0.5% chance of getting killed. There's (supposedly) a 1% chance or so that AIDS gets transmitted through heterosexual unprotected sex per act. I imagine you'd get more entertainment out of the sex than the movie. And, even if you do get HIV, you'd still have a decade or so of good life left before the AIDS gets you. Blown up movie theater = dead right away.
If you're going to use statistics, make sure you know how to use them at least mostly correctly...
There's a law review article I read somewhere arguing that unless federal courts narrow the scope of that law, it will eventually be found void for vagueness. It is very poorly written.
So, it may upset you, but the foundation of the legal system is more or less until a judge rules on it, and until there is a legal precedent ... you don't really know if it holds water or not.
Bullshit. The entire point of having a legal system based on written law is so that people know what the law is without having to just try things and then see if the executive arrests them. There are places in the law that are rough and where you really don't know what a judge will do -- "new areas of the law" -- but, in most cases, you do know what a judge will do, because of statute and precedent in similar cases. This certainty is what gives the law its value.
The GPL is a fairly simple document. It's pretty clear what it means, so we really don't need a judge to tell us. This court case might clear up a few corner cases about the consequences of infringement (forced relicensing or simple injunction + damages), but it is effectively impossible the entire document will be held null and void. There's enough precedent that it is possible to conditionally license a copyrighted work that the GPL's general validity is not in doubt.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Some people over on Apple.com forums are claiming that the hard disk that went into the iPod classic isn't being made anymore and that Apple therefore was essentially was forced to discontinue the product, because they couldn't find parts for it. Obviously they could try to find another supplier, make the hard drives themselves, etc., etc., but I guess the ROI wasn't there for them to bend over backwards to keep it going.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
No it doesn't. If a trait provides a reproductive benefit, and it is monotonically marginally beneficial, then life will almost always find a way to evolve it.
You're basically asserting without evidence that there's an invisible hand of evolution. There's not. Some mutations happen much more frequently than others, and, if a trait can only be expressed with a sequence of very rare mutations, it might take a very, very long time (as in, "will never happen in a trillion trillion years") for evolution to be expected to get there. Others sort of just happen, and not for any real reason or anything, at least as far as we can tell. Evolution will only destroy a mutation if it's significantly maladaptive. If a trait is only marginally maladaptive where it's present (example: blue eyes, much more maladaptive in very sunny places than in the north), it might randomly be carried forward, at least for ~100,000 years or so.
I've got another just-so story:
Deer will also disproportionally abort female fetuses during harsh winters. Offspring born after hard times are likely to be stunted and inferior. Even if they are disadvantaged, a male offspring is still more likely to reproduce, because the male reproductive system is simpler and therefore less likely to be affected by fetal malnutrition. So carrying a disadvantaged daughter to term, when she is likely to be less fertile, is a waste of resources.
The implications for reasoning with just-so stories is left as an exercise for the reader.
You can search and browse torrents and it will look like it's working, but if you actually try to download anything, it'll ask for money.
Those are fakes.
Bullshit. VLSI code is almost always verified by finite models, and many processors are verified down to the level of mathematical axiom.
Bullshit on your bullshit, no it's not, and no they're not, not even close. Hardware companies have a fetish for formally verifying floating point stacks because, 20 years ago, the fickle and vacuous mainstream press people decided one particular piece of errata in one particular processor -- the Pentium FDIV bug from 1994 -- was important for some reason, even though every processor ever made and used has errata. AMD took advantage of Intel's bad publicity to formally verify their own FDIV instruction -- JUST the FDIV instruction, mind you -- and then doing formal verification with floating point stacks became something of a thing. There's nothing more going on than that.
Take a look here, in the section "Errata": http://download.intel.com/desi...
Doesn't look like the "proved" that VLSI very well to me, although they doubtless subjected it to a fuckton of simulation hours. Which is what they should be doing; theorem proving software or silicon is, usually, a ton of effort for little gain. Simulation hours cost much less than developer time. Our processors would likely be 486 level today if the designers had to prove everything correct. If that.
Provably correct software code exists in small amounts, and it's emergence is inevitable.
Said the formal verification researchers, for 30 years or so now.
Impressive. But they verified about 9000 lines of C code, and, by their own admission, it's a brittle verification (meaning if they change anything substantial they have to do a lot of work to re-prove it). The specifically say, in one instance, that it took one man-year to verify a change to 5% of the code base. That's ~500 lines of code.
A year. To change 500 lines of code. imo verifying software is still more a gimmick than anything. We've been writing reliable airline software without formally proving it for over 30 years. It takes a ton of effort, but so does formal verification.
But thanks for the link, that's an interesting pig they made fly.
Look at IR in the LLVM project which has allowed an explosion of languages that can enjoy most of the same compiler optimizations that the C family enjoy using this principle.
Umm ... LLVM is a fairly conventional, if well-designed, compiler, and its backends certainly do have to have a model of the processor, and know how to generate assembly from the IR, and all that. GP is right: you can't get away with no one knowing how the processor works.
And provably correct code is still a pipe dream.
What you describe isn't hypocritical. Lab B is not rewarding Lab A for doing animal testing; its consumers are not supporting Lab A's research in any way. In fact, Lab B is undermining Lab A by competing with it, reducing the rewards Company A gets from its R&D department and reducing the incentives Company A has to continue financing Lab A.