Some of us invest significant thought and effort into finding the right home in the right area, maintaining it well, making improvements (e.g. replace the Linoleum with tile one year, build a larger deck the next, plant trees in the yard after that), getting to know the neighbors, etc. Having pride in and enjoying a home can easily outweigh an hour or more commute, and giving that up can be a very big deal for some people.
The same goes for jobs. Some people do in fact work for more than just a paycheck -- they identify with and take pride in their company and their work; they work hard not just to advance their career, but because they genuinely want to see the company improve and succeed. Here, too, giving that up can be a big deal.
Exchange for a better option? It's a matter of personal preference. If being able to ride your bike to work is important to you, changing your home or job might be the "better option." Just know that for some, the current home and job are the better option -- and the commute is an insignificant price to pay for being happy with each.
If a link between EMF and health is confirmed, their insurance company would raise rates and employees would have an excuse to sue. I don't see that happening.
Perhaps a better question to ask, then, is why opening a file which doesn't exist won't just noisily terminate the application (since all code that follows might assume that file was opened successfully, and is essentially incorrect from that point on
Well, a PHP application doesn't noisily terminate when opening a nonexistent file -- so why would the code that follows assume the file was opened successfully? Properly written, the code wouldn't assume anything that wasn't guaranteed by the language.
As far as I can see, it was about having a patentable UI element
Or perhaps it was about adding something new for the sake of adding something new. You can't sell a new version of your software without adding new functionality, but after umpteen versions of MS Office products, they pretty much had all the functionality anyone could possibly need in a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. Thus began the process of finding solutions for problems that don't exist.
There will be a point in time when all our efforts to get new energy will be exhausted. Then there will be a war for basic stuff like water. At that point our weapons will be so advanced that we will probably be starting from scratch after the war is done.
On the other hand, maybe we could have added some useful extra sensor to the Rover, reducing its lifespan to "only" 1,000 days but providing it with a means to avoid sand traps...
Neither of the rovers has been stuck in a sand trap for 1,500 days, so it seems NASA made the right choice.
You'd think they're big enough to stand up and enlighten morons about robots.txt specifically
Cars have been around for about a century and there are still morons who haven't been enlightened about changing a flat tire, so I have my doubts about robots.txt
I don't think this is because of organization, I think it is because of all the rote learning you've done. You aren't reading & reacting to the menu bar you "just know" where to go because you've done it a million times.
Menus don't require rote learning. Menu items are text descriptions organized in an aligned list. If want to accomplish a task that you aren't used to doing, you can easily look through the list of menu items to find something that seems to apply. With the ribbon, on the other hand, you DO have to learn where things are by rote. If you don't know where something is, you have to look all over the damn ribbon to find it. Once you do it enough, you'll know where that item is, but until then it's all hunting and mouse-overs.
Who was it that said books would mean the end of academics (academics consisting, at the time, entirely of lectures)? I wonder if the "which is worthless and which is right" question was pondered when books were first mass produced?
Then how come on of my local citizens, who spied a thief trying to steal his car, and hit said thief over the head with a bat to stop him, was arrested by the policy *on his own property*? Why is the thief now suing the homeowner for medical damages?
Because he hit the thief over the head with a bat to stop him from stealing a car. That is an anarchist society.
Protecting property is hardly justification for risking someone's life, thief or no thief. Civilized people know that, which is why our civilized rules say he should be arrested.
Perhaps, but what if you get on a plane instructed to go to Freedonia? The flight dispatcher tells the pilot "WTF?", and you're kicked off the plane and given set of destination options.
Telephone, internet, electricity, or water too expensive? Too bad, suck it up and pay, because by all normal metrics, these are the basic tenets of modern life.
Telephone, yes. But SMS? Hardly. I don't send SMS messages specifically because I think they are too expensive ($0.20 USD apiece). If someone sends me a text message, I respond with a phone call (and ask them not to text me again).
The only reason we have products and orgnizations like Twitter, Joomla, Dimim, Hulu, etc. are because online businesses have been naming themselves or their products after available domain names. Remove the artificial barrier of a limited set of TLDs, and organizations can find a domain that fits their name, instead of the other way around.
Of course, it will take a generation or so before the perceived authenticity of a.com or.net domain disappears from our society.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes."
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80486 with 16MB of memory, a 300MB hard disk, and a SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king had the computer scientist thrown in the moat, and they all lived happily ever after.
Agreed. Actually, lots of state agencies (in several states) and other companies have started offering this option recently to help employees save on fuel and transportation costs.
On the other hand, if you're commuting far enough for the cost savings to amount to anything, those four days that you do work are pretty much shot: 10 hour day, 2+ hour round trip, 8 hours sleep, that leaves you with four hours to yourself each day.
Perhaps because they were targeting people, not sites?
The summary refers to the FBI site as a "sting operation." Sounds to me like they were gathering evidence against the individuals buying and selling data (through the sting site), which is a completely different goal than taking down four sites that would be replaced in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone considers homes and jobs fungible.
Some of us invest significant thought and effort into finding the right home in the right area, maintaining it well, making improvements (e.g. replace the Linoleum with tile one year, build a larger deck the next, plant trees in the yard after that), getting to know the neighbors, etc. Having pride in and enjoying a home can easily outweigh an hour or more commute, and giving that up can be a very big deal for some people.
The same goes for jobs. Some people do in fact work for more than just a paycheck -- they identify with and take pride in their company and their work; they work hard not just to advance their career, but because they genuinely want to see the company improve and succeed. Here, too, giving that up can be a big deal.
Exchange for a better option? It's a matter of personal preference. If being able to ride your bike to work is important to you, changing your home or job might be the "better option." Just know that for some, the current home and job are the better option -- and the commute is an insignificant price to pay for being happy with each.
If a link between EMF and health is confirmed, their insurance company would raise rates and employees would have an excuse to sue. I don't see that happening.
Perhaps a better question to ask, then, is why opening a file which doesn't exist won't just noisily terminate the application (since all code that follows might assume that file was opened successfully, and is essentially incorrect from that point on
Well, a PHP application doesn't noisily terminate when opening a nonexistent file -- so why would the code that follows assume the file was opened successfully? Properly written, the code wouldn't assume anything that wasn't guaranteed by the language.
As far as I can see, it was about having a patentable UI element
Or perhaps it was about adding something new for the sake of adding something new. You can't sell a new version of your software without adding new functionality, but after umpteen versions of MS Office products, they pretty much had all the functionality anyone could possibly need in a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. Thus began the process of finding solutions for problems that don't exist.
i'd rather pull my own fingernails out with a wrench
A wrench? Good luck with that.
There will be a point in time when all our efforts to get new energy will be exhausted. Then there will be a war for basic stuff like water. At that point our weapons will be so advanced that we will probably be starting from scratch after the war is done.
You answered your own question.
On the other hand, maybe we could have added some useful extra sensor to the Rover, reducing its lifespan to "only" 1,000 days but providing it with a means to avoid sand traps...
Neither of the rovers has been stuck in a sand trap for 1,500 days, so it seems NASA made the right choice.
She also said during a radio interview this morning that "laptops should not be used on your lap" because the wifi signals can cause cancer.
The problem is that enough caffeine can keep you up and mobile well past the point when you should have passed out from alcohol
Somehow I think passing out from alcohol is a problem in and of itself.
You'd think they're big enough to stand up and enlighten morons about robots.txt specifically
Cars have been around for about a century and there are still morons who haven't been enlightened about changing a flat tire, so I have my doubts about robots.txt
I don't think this is because of organization, I think it is because of all the rote learning you've done. You aren't reading & reacting to the menu bar you "just know" where to go because you've done it a million times.
Menus don't require rote learning. Menu items are text descriptions organized in an aligned list. If want to accomplish a task that you aren't used to doing, you can easily look through the list of menu items to find something that seems to apply. With the ribbon, on the other hand, you DO have to learn where things are by rote. If you don't know where something is, you have to look all over the damn ribbon to find it. Once you do it enough, you'll know where that item is, but until then it's all hunting and mouse-overs.
Why would you have to be financially independent to do that? Plenty of government contractors pay a fair wage...
EMP wasn't necessarily the whole reason for creating the Internet in the first place either.
Nukes were not a motivation for creating the Internet; they motivated the development of packet switching: http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#rand See footnote 5, and note the authors.
Who was it that said books would mean the end of academics (academics consisting, at the time, entirely of lectures)? I wonder if the "which is worthless and which is right" question was pondered when books were first mass produced?
Then how come on of my local citizens, who spied a thief trying to steal his car, and hit said thief over the head with a bat to stop him, was arrested by the policy *on his own property*? Why is the thief now suing the homeowner for medical damages?
Because he hit the thief over the head with a bat to stop him from stealing a car. That is an anarchist society.
Protecting property is hardly justification for risking someone's life, thief or no thief. Civilized people know that, which is why our civilized rules say he should be arrested.
Perhaps, but what if you get on a plane instructed to go to Freedonia? The flight dispatcher tells the pilot "WTF?", and you're kicked off the plane and given set of destination options.
Telephone, internet, electricity, or water too expensive? Too bad, suck it up and pay, because by all normal metrics, these are the basic tenets of modern life.
Telephone, yes. But SMS? Hardly. I don't send SMS messages specifically because I think they are too expensive ($0.20 USD apiece). If someone sends me a text message, I respond with a phone call (and ask them not to text me again).
touche
I can just imagine what my wife would think... (She'd let me, she's great that way...).
She'd let you? And that's a virtue? Damn, man.
It's not on the ground - look closer. It appears to be in a glass case with a white wall behind it. You can see the phone's reflection in the glass.
The only reason we have products and orgnizations like Twitter, Joomla, Dimim, Hulu, etc. are because online businesses have been naming themselves or their products after available domain names. Remove the artificial barrier of a limited set of TLDs, and organizations can find a domain that fits their name, instead of the other way around. Of course, it will take a generation or so before the perceived authenticity of a .com or .net domain disappears from our society.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes."
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80486 with 16MB of memory, a 300MB hard disk, and a SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king had the computer scientist thrown in the moat, and they all lived happily ever after.
Those guys were only lucky no one got wind of their plans.
Right. Because dying in a fiery plane crash is so much luckier than prison time.
Agreed. Actually, lots of state agencies (in several states) and other companies have started offering this option recently to help employees save on fuel and transportation costs.
On the other hand, if you're commuting far enough for the cost savings to amount to anything, those four days that you do work are pretty much shot: 10 hour day, 2+ hour round trip, 8 hours sleep, that leaves you with four hours to yourself each day.
Perhaps because they were targeting people, not sites? The summary refers to the FBI site as a "sting operation." Sounds to me like they were gathering evidence against the individuals buying and selling data (through the sting site), which is a completely different goal than taking down four sites that would be replaced in short order.