It's really irritating to still be hearing that long since debunked claim that Gore claimed to invent the internet. In the video where he supposedly claimed that he invented the internet he says nothing more than that he took initiative on the internet. Implying that it must have previously existed to take initiative on. Which for politicians of that day was somewhat remarkable considering the almost complete lack of competence in the area in general.
Doubtful, ideally the device would only be showing the word the kid was reading and a couple of the words on either side. Basically a sentence and very little more. Allows for more concentration without having to worry at that point about losing ones place in the page or superimposing other sentences into that one. In the long run one would have to learn to read properly, but in the short term it's a great way to figure out the basics.
I think what this tells us is you don't actually know what working on the line was like. I have to admit I don't either, but I'm willing to bet that it's not something people did because they liked it. Imagine spending 20 or 30 years screwing in the same fastener over and over. And I get testy after having answered the same question 50 or 60 times a day for a few months.
That's not to say that there haven't been serious consequences from phasing out those jobs and shipping them overseas, just that it's not the romantic reasons one might expect.
I'm surprised you missed the opportunity to point out that antibiotics are not generally pushed much by pharmaceutical corporations anymore because they tend to get less effective over time. Antibiotics are in essence a public service that they provide for the common good more than a method of making money. Sure they do end up making money, but it's very slim compared to the effort of bringing them to market.
Antibiotics are prescription only here, except for things like neosporin and a few others that aren't really that potent. But the implication that ads have something to do with it is grossly misleading. Seeing and ad and requesting that the doctor fill the prescription does not guarantee that the doctor will give it to you. Often times they'll either say no outright or suggest an alternate method of treatment. In all while it does probably up treatment rates, it doesn't have any measurable impact on the number of doses being used.
That's close, what you mean though is the low quality primary and secondary schooling. Once you get through that we've got the best education system in the world. The problem is that you are expected to spend so many years in pointless classes to get to that point. I remember starting college when I was 16 and I definitely could've done so a couple years earlier because things are set up for you to retake a lot of the course curriculum that you should've mastered in High School.
It's also worth pointing out that our numbers always come in somewhat depressing due to our more egalitarian collegiate system. In many other countries by the time you've made it past the 2nd year of high school you've been directed to either a vocational school or college, measure all of us against the college track kids is just not an accurate manner of assessment.
We could be tops again, however that would require a lot of measures that are not favored by corporatists. They'd have to put the copyright, patent and trademark laws back the way that they used to be. Meaning that software and business practices would no longer be subject to patent protection and that copyrights would expire in at most 3 decades, better still just make it the life of the creator. Science and education in general would have to be properly funded, and we'd have to stop signing stupid free trade agreements that don't give us the teeth to bite back at nations that are cheating via currency manipulation and similar.
We're still the most productive nation on Earth, we could also be tops in many other ways, assuming of course that people were willing to acknowledge the weak spots.
That's generally how that works. Arrogance and ignorance tend to go hand in hand and it's difficult under even the best of circumstances to stay the leader forever. But in this case with a sizable portion of the population that doesn't want to be educated it's difficult indeed to remain the leader. Coddling religious idiots need to believe in absurdities like virgin births, new Earth and ID is hardly the path to enlightenment. Not to mention more easily dispatched notions like the US as a Christian nation, God always being on our currency and how our healthcare system only beats the tar out of other systems from age 65 and up.
Re:One person's myth is another person's fact.
on
Myths About Code Comments
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· Score: 2, Insightful
OK, this topic is officially over. That's the nub of it, if a programmer could intuit what would be confusing a decade down the road or to another developer that takes over, then you can cut out on the comments. The cost of documentation does exist, but people ought to be thinking twice before putting in overly complicated, absolutely must comment code. Sure some cases require that for legitimate reasons, but most of the time you're doing it wrong, and putting in the comment gives you the opportunity to reconsider whether that complex code could be simplified.
Luck has always and probably always will play a strong role in science. The fact that the first blood transfusion happened to work was mostly luck, had it not worked out well it would've probably been quite some time before somebody tried again. Watson and Crick getting to the double helix first required a bit of luck as they probably wouldn't've gotten there first if they weren't lucky enough to be able to get x-ray crystallography from a different research institution.
Ultimately it does. If they're making say $20 per unit on something, they'd be better off if that thing was selling for $100 than $1000. Sure in reality the margins usually shrink somewhat as the price goes down, but generally so does the cost of production. It's unlikely indeed that Intel's making more money like this than they would be if they could produce the drives for less money.
Well then we definitely don't have enough information to choose a method. If we don't know enough to estimate the likelihood of impact, then we don't know enough about the trajectory to even consider screwing with it. The Earth has been around for billions of years and in the last several hundred million years, it's been hit by how many bodies large enough to threaten all life?
That's not to say that it couldn't happen, but it is an indication of what kind of stuff our orbit leads us through on a regular basis. And a reason to be concerned when anybody suggests that we monkey around with an asteroid, sure we might succeed in changing it's velocity, but we might very well cause it to hit us rather than narrowly avoiding us.
But, requiring greater sophistication reduces the profitability of spamming. Most spammers use non-compliant mail programs for a reason, which is why greylisting has worked so well for so long and will likely be a part of the solution for some time to come. Same thing here, requiring encryption limits the amount of work that a particular computer can do since gumming up a computer tends to draw attention and cause the owner to take it in for a repair.
But the other thing it does is increase the amount of sophistication necessary to create the tools and somewhat increase the cost of getting into the game as well as the cost of staying current.
It's often times easier to get funding from DARPA as there's a lot of idiots that refuse to pay for research that's practical for everyday use, but tons that are willing to pay for technology that blows shit up. Or is in some other way useful for destroying the world.
Which is really why the NSF should be given a reliably large sum of money each year and told to just make the best use of it.
That's what I'm wondering about, in a lot of these sorts of games you can gain lots of XP by taking on harder tasks or just by spending many, many more hours grinding. Also, if we're just going by time playing that would include chat time as well as tidying up the character.
Besides, to really be hardcore anymore you pretty much have to be taking that character out of the game and acting it out.
Eh, the problem is that parents frequently know nothing of how to actually raise a kid. Often times that need to control ends up as abuse. Establishing control is in and of itself abuse and there's a dangerously fine line that parents aren't necessarily very good at negotiating.
One of my thoughts was that it would be legitimate to pay a bounty for bugfixes or additional features that are relevant to the agency. If the choice is made well, it can both be efficient for the tax payers and of benefit to those that use the product.
This isn't really that much different than what's available presently. The same idiots that text and drive will have a new possibility. Anybody with any degree of prudence will use this at most to update directions on their GPS in real time. Well, while driving, when you're not driving it's pretty much fair game for whatever you want to use it for.
Well, that's what we do here in WA. It's the east coast bias, the same thing which makes a kitten getting stuck in a tree in the Bronx national news. There's a certain thing which seems to give them an undeserved sense of superiority. And, over time it gets really annoying because this is Washington, that is Washington D.C. We outnumber them by a huge margin, we're Washington.
The irony though is that much of what we do is superior to what they're doing over there. Remind me again who it is that has an effective measure against gerrymandering and who it is that has schools that are actually somewhat affordable?
In essence, the Roman Catholics do that on a regular basis. Rewriting the Bible as it suits them to add in bullshit like Limbo, purgatory and allow themselves to sell indulgences.
The idea of Papal supremacy isn't really that far fetched in that light.
Of course laws against murder infringe upon ones right to kill. It's just that by general agreement we've decided we're better off giving up that right so as to greatly reduce the likelihood of being murdered by somebody that's pissed off by us.
More specifically the law against murder makes the proposition of using lethal force in self defense much dicier than it would otherwise be because you then have to worry about what people are going to think in retrospect. You also lose the ability to deter others by putting the person's head on a pike.
Not that it isn't an overall worthwhile trade off, but you are having your rights infringed by the arrangement.
Re:Horrifyingly poor management
on
A Requiem For Saab
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's a load of bullshit you've got right there. The mortgaging of the assets before the credit freeze was a bit of extremely good luck, but there's far more going on than just that. The quality of the vehicles has been going up significantly in recent times. They've cut the number of possible options down markedly, for a while there was something like 4,000 different tauruses available when you factored in options. They've spent a lot of time and money on making cars that are more likely to sell well on the coasts rather than focusing tunnel vision on middle America.
And they've been getting a lot of very positive press coverage for it as well as positive reviews on their new models. Not to mention that JD Power has given them similar marks to Toyota for quality.
Bottom line though is that sales have been picking up and they've been managing to eat other car companies lunch in the last year or so, something that wouldn't have happened in the recent years. Sure they've going to be a smaller company than previously, but they've realized that producing large volumes of vehicles then having to deep discount them to get them sold isn't a viable strategy for making solid profits.
Re:Horrifyingly poor management
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're going to have to cite sources on that. The UAW workers get a lot of crap from conservative hatchet men that are basically opposed to any sort of union because workers shouldn't have any rights. GM was brought down by it's own incompetence. Saturn is a good example, people loved Saturn's quirky way of doing business and the cars themselves weren't exactly crap either, they were affordable and people loved them. 4 or 5 years of no refreshes or any signs of meaningful development work and it had to be sold off. Fortunately Penske has the foresight and understanding to bring it back into profits, but without the mismanagement of GM it wouldn't need to be.
That's not the UAW's fault, that's better blamed on anti-environment conservatives and incompetent managers at GM. It's not at all in the UAW's best interest for GM or really any of the automakers to go under. There's very little sense in making concessions when management makes no hint of actually reforming the way that they do business to become more productive and profitable again. If the company's going to be run into the ground, then at least the retirees get their share of the pie rather than the fat cat execs that did this to themselves.
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It's really irritating to still be hearing that long since debunked claim that Gore claimed to invent the internet. In the video where he supposedly claimed that he invented the internet he says nothing more than that he took initiative on the internet. Implying that it must have previously existed to take initiative on. Which for politicians of that day was somewhat remarkable considering the almost complete lack of competence in the area in general.
Doubtful, ideally the device would only be showing the word the kid was reading and a couple of the words on either side. Basically a sentence and very little more. Allows for more concentration without having to worry at that point about losing ones place in the page or superimposing other sentences into that one. In the long run one would have to learn to read properly, but in the short term it's a great way to figure out the basics.
I think what this tells us is you don't actually know what working on the line was like. I have to admit I don't either, but I'm willing to bet that it's not something people did because they liked it. Imagine spending 20 or 30 years screwing in the same fastener over and over. And I get testy after having answered the same question 50 or 60 times a day for a few months.
That's not to say that there haven't been serious consequences from phasing out those jobs and shipping them overseas, just that it's not the romantic reasons one might expect.
I'm surprised you missed the opportunity to point out that antibiotics are not generally pushed much by pharmaceutical corporations anymore because they tend to get less effective over time. Antibiotics are in essence a public service that they provide for the common good more than a method of making money. Sure they do end up making money, but it's very slim compared to the effort of bringing them to market.
Antibiotics are prescription only here, except for things like neosporin and a few others that aren't really that potent. But the implication that ads have something to do with it is grossly misleading. Seeing and ad and requesting that the doctor fill the prescription does not guarantee that the doctor will give it to you. Often times they'll either say no outright or suggest an alternate method of treatment. In all while it does probably up treatment rates, it doesn't have any measurable impact on the number of doses being used.
That's close, what you mean though is the low quality primary and secondary schooling. Once you get through that we've got the best education system in the world. The problem is that you are expected to spend so many years in pointless classes to get to that point. I remember starting college when I was 16 and I definitely could've done so a couple years earlier because things are set up for you to retake a lot of the course curriculum that you should've mastered in High School.
It's also worth pointing out that our numbers always come in somewhat depressing due to our more egalitarian collegiate system. In many other countries by the time you've made it past the 2nd year of high school you've been directed to either a vocational school or college, measure all of us against the college track kids is just not an accurate manner of assessment.
We could be tops again, however that would require a lot of measures that are not favored by corporatists. They'd have to put the copyright, patent and trademark laws back the way that they used to be. Meaning that software and business practices would no longer be subject to patent protection and that copyrights would expire in at most 3 decades, better still just make it the life of the creator. Science and education in general would have to be properly funded, and we'd have to stop signing stupid free trade agreements that don't give us the teeth to bite back at nations that are cheating via currency manipulation and similar.
We're still the most productive nation on Earth, we could also be tops in many other ways, assuming of course that people were willing to acknowledge the weak spots.
That's generally how that works. Arrogance and ignorance tend to go hand in hand and it's difficult under even the best of circumstances to stay the leader forever. But in this case with a sizable portion of the population that doesn't want to be educated it's difficult indeed to remain the leader. Coddling religious idiots need to believe in absurdities like virgin births, new Earth and ID is hardly the path to enlightenment. Not to mention more easily dispatched notions like the US as a Christian nation, God always being on our currency and how our healthcare system only beats the tar out of other systems from age 65 and up.
OK, this topic is officially over. That's the nub of it, if a programmer could intuit what would be confusing a decade down the road or to another developer that takes over, then you can cut out on the comments. The cost of documentation does exist, but people ought to be thinking twice before putting in overly complicated, absolutely must comment code. Sure some cases require that for legitimate reasons, but most of the time you're doing it wrong, and putting in the comment gives you the opportunity to reconsider whether that complex code could be simplified.
Luck has always and probably always will play a strong role in science. The fact that the first blood transfusion happened to work was mostly luck, had it not worked out well it would've probably been quite some time before somebody tried again. Watson and Crick getting to the double helix first required a bit of luck as they probably wouldn't've gotten there first if they weren't lucky enough to be able to get x-ray crystallography from a different research institution.
So, that makes you 9 inches tall?
Ultimately it does. If they're making say $20 per unit on something, they'd be better off if that thing was selling for $100 than $1000. Sure in reality the margins usually shrink somewhat as the price goes down, but generally so does the cost of production. It's unlikely indeed that Intel's making more money like this than they would be if they could produce the drives for less money.
Well then we definitely don't have enough information to choose a method. If we don't know enough to estimate the likelihood of impact, then we don't know enough about the trajectory to even consider screwing with it. The Earth has been around for billions of years and in the last several hundred million years, it's been hit by how many bodies large enough to threaten all life?
That's not to say that it couldn't happen, but it is an indication of what kind of stuff our orbit leads us through on a regular basis. And a reason to be concerned when anybody suggests that we monkey around with an asteroid, sure we might succeed in changing it's velocity, but we might very well cause it to hit us rather than narrowly avoiding us.
But, requiring greater sophistication reduces the profitability of spamming. Most spammers use non-compliant mail programs for a reason, which is why greylisting has worked so well for so long and will likely be a part of the solution for some time to come. Same thing here, requiring encryption limits the amount of work that a particular computer can do since gumming up a computer tends to draw attention and cause the owner to take it in for a repair.
But the other thing it does is increase the amount of sophistication necessary to create the tools and somewhat increase the cost of getting into the game as well as the cost of staying current.
It's often times easier to get funding from DARPA as there's a lot of idiots that refuse to pay for research that's practical for everyday use, but tons that are willing to pay for technology that blows shit up. Or is in some other way useful for destroying the world.
Which is really why the NSF should be given a reliably large sum of money each year and told to just make the best use of it.
That's what I'm wondering about, in a lot of these sorts of games you can gain lots of XP by taking on harder tasks or just by spending many, many more hours grinding. Also, if we're just going by time playing that would include chat time as well as tidying up the character.
Besides, to really be hardcore anymore you pretty much have to be taking that character out of the game and acting it out.
It's supposed to be spelled 'irregardless. As in disirregardless as in disirregarding something.
Eh, the problem is that parents frequently know nothing of how to actually raise a kid. Often times that need to control ends up as abuse. Establishing control is in and of itself abuse and there's a dangerously fine line that parents aren't necessarily very good at negotiating.
One of my thoughts was that it would be legitimate to pay a bounty for bugfixes or additional features that are relevant to the agency. If the choice is made well, it can both be efficient for the tax payers and of benefit to those that use the product.
This isn't really that much different than what's available presently. The same idiots that text and drive will have a new possibility. Anybody with any degree of prudence will use this at most to update directions on their GPS in real time. Well, while driving, when you're not driving it's pretty much fair game for whatever you want to use it for.
Well, that's what we do here in WA. It's the east coast bias, the same thing which makes a kitten getting stuck in a tree in the Bronx national news. There's a certain thing which seems to give them an undeserved sense of superiority. And, over time it gets really annoying because this is Washington, that is Washington D.C. We outnumber them by a huge margin, we're Washington.
The irony though is that much of what we do is superior to what they're doing over there. Remind me again who it is that has an effective measure against gerrymandering and who it is that has schools that are actually somewhat affordable?
In essence, the Roman Catholics do that on a regular basis. Rewriting the Bible as it suits them to add in bullshit like Limbo, purgatory and allow themselves to sell indulgences.
The idea of Papal supremacy isn't really that far fetched in that light.
Of course laws against murder infringe upon ones right to kill. It's just that by general agreement we've decided we're better off giving up that right so as to greatly reduce the likelihood of being murdered by somebody that's pissed off by us.
More specifically the law against murder makes the proposition of using lethal force in self defense much dicier than it would otherwise be because you then have to worry about what people are going to think in retrospect. You also lose the ability to deter others by putting the person's head on a pike.
Not that it isn't an overall worthwhile trade off, but you are having your rights infringed by the arrangement.
That's a load of bullshit you've got right there. The mortgaging of the assets before the credit freeze was a bit of extremely good luck, but there's far more going on than just that. The quality of the vehicles has been going up significantly in recent times. They've cut the number of possible options down markedly, for a while there was something like 4,000 different tauruses available when you factored in options. They've spent a lot of time and money on making cars that are more likely to sell well on the coasts rather than focusing tunnel vision on middle America.
And they've been getting a lot of very positive press coverage for it as well as positive reviews on their new models. Not to mention that JD Power has given them similar marks to Toyota for quality.
Bottom line though is that sales have been picking up and they've been managing to eat other car companies lunch in the last year or so, something that wouldn't have happened in the recent years. Sure they've going to be a smaller company than previously, but they've realized that producing large volumes of vehicles then having to deep discount them to get them sold isn't a viable strategy for making solid profits.
You're going to have to cite sources on that. The UAW workers get a lot of crap from conservative hatchet men that are basically opposed to any sort of union because workers shouldn't have any rights. GM was brought down by it's own incompetence. Saturn is a good example, people loved Saturn's quirky way of doing business and the cars themselves weren't exactly crap either, they were affordable and people loved them. 4 or 5 years of no refreshes or any signs of meaningful development work and it had to be sold off. Fortunately Penske has the foresight and understanding to bring it back into profits, but without the mismanagement of GM it wouldn't need to be.
That's not the UAW's fault, that's better blamed on anti-environment conservatives and incompetent managers at GM. It's not at all in the UAW's best interest for GM or really any of the automakers to go under. There's very little sense in making concessions when management makes no hint of actually reforming the way that they do business to become more productive and profitable again. If the company's going to be run into the ground, then at least the retirees get their share of the pie rather than the fat cat execs that did this to themselves.