I mean this in all seriousness and without trying to slam mud on the people you love, but
very often mental illness like schizophrenia is not an individual illness, something that some unlucky person just gets like the clap.
Rather, it can be the product of years of upbringing in a particular family environment. And, if you've grown up in a particular family, no matter how out-of-norm the behavior patters happen to be, you will be likely to see yourself and your family as "not too far away from normal".
More than a few case studies have shown how much the family environment has to do with various mental illness.
My advice?
Find a competent family counselor and make some appointments with them so you can start to see the bigger picture, where you might be harboring some misconceptions, ways of thinking that might be doing harm both to your sister and to yourself.
It takes a little courage, but it's worthwhile and you and your sister will feel a lot better in the future.
If you don't seek help, then you condemn yourself to living in the same old behavior patterns that make you and the ones around you sick.
Could the wisened Linux gurus here offer some insight as to the best package for a former Mac user to introduce him to the greater world of Linux without major headaches in setting it all up?
Well, I love and advocate Linux use all I can, but know more than a few Linux desktop users that lean hard on their MacOS X Powerbooks. They're "UNIX", they have Word, Powerpoint and the usual Mac "it just works" stuff.
But if you have some influence with Apple, mebbe you could suggest an x86 port of OS X...:)
Realistically, any modern Linux distro is reasonable, but will lack a lot of the multimedia niceties that come out of the box with your Mac.
Maybe if you get CrossOver Office or Lindows it would help ease the pain of your loss.
I'd be interested in seeing some kind of checklist or score so that I can easily work out just how less free I am as a citizen of the UK compared to a citizen of the US.
No offense taken. Likewise, I don't mean to start a flamewar or trollfest in reply.
But here are a few items for a potential checklist based on anecdotes I've heard over the years.
Video surveillance of city streets. [I've heard they're much more common in the UK.]
Time and paperwork required to buy a handgun. [A lot more in the UK. I'm not saying the US policy is better, just different and, in a sense, giving more freedom to an individual. This cuts both ways, depending on how much you trust your fellow citizens to be responsible.]
Tax load. [The more of your earned income that gets deducted from your pay means more goes to group-elected spending decisions instead of individual spending decisions. Some find the latter to be an important freedom, but it's a matter of personal opinion, depends what the government's spending money on, etc.]
Freedom to act, think, do and say things is always in a larger context. We're all free to starve if we choose.
For example, some would say that freedom in the US means very little if your choice is between working at a minimum wage job and not being able to afford medical care or health insurance, or not working and getting Medicaid. In the UK, the public choice of universal coverage eliminates that source of anxiety that people in the US must contend with. Perhaps in the UK people have elected to use their freedom to make a collective commitment to universal coverage. They have less freedom, but they gain something of value.
Freedom's a good thing overall, though, whether it's expressed in individual choice or in collective choice, even though the latter potentially endangers individual choice (say, makign it illegal to be of a different religion than some standard).
But, because we get to see some people using freedom responsibly and in new ways there's hope that, in the long run, fewer of us will live in ill-fitting, preconceived jails of our own choices. Always, though, no matter the hardships we suffer from our ill-informed, poor choices, people will often feel more comfortable in a jail of their own choosing, than they would in a set of conditions where the choice has been taken away from them.
The key struggle for grocers is to make their service convenient enough and the cost low enough -- most charge less than $10 for delivery -- to change decades of shopping habits. Online grocers also need to operate in cities with high population densities and heavy Internet use.
Delivery costs are probably what most limits this kind of service.
If delivery costs could be reduced, say by taking the human (driving a two ton gas guzzler 10 miles each way) out of the loop, then this service would really take off.
The technology is almost here for cost-effective robotic delivery vehicles. With liquid fuel costs increasing dramatically, automated delivery will be here even sooner.
There should be less and less reason to send someone in car on a Go Fetch Errand to pickup groceries, a new hard disk, etc.
You cannot trust the end user to make good decisions regarding computer security.
You are so right.
It makes me think the better overall policy is to make flexible easy upgrades scarier.
But make the initial installation as capable as possible so most users won't ever feel a need to do an insecure upgrade.
In the Mozilla and FOSS world things are still not much better than in the Windows world as far as security is concerned. A lot of the current problems with Linux security policies are masked by a 1337 userbase, but widespread deployment could lead to problems like this.
If Fedora shipped this stuff w/o paying the licensing, they'd get their ass sued off.
An good point.
So what I'd like is for the distributions not to ship anything that would get them into licensing troubles like this.
Instead, go the gentoo route of meta-distribution and, just as you get asked whether you want to download security updates, ask the user if they'd like to cruise out and download and install potentially useful applications for mp3, go over to an existing windows partition for which you're already licensed and glom onto fonts, DLL's etc.
The useful extra stuff shouldn't be difficult to install and use even if it doesn't come on the CD per se.
a program to create nonsensical gibberish that always gets A's.
Well, in my world there are too many writers producing nonsense already.
I'd like to do my part not to contribute to that specific problem.
If this grading program were open source and freely available perhaps I could use it to self grade what I've written.
Even better would be if the program were to suggest ways to improve my writing so that I could improve my score.
Perhaps the Slashdot submissions would not only reject postings that lack a specified subject, were too frequent, too lengthy, but also bounce writing that was really bad, really ugly.
All that notwithstanding, I still have a hard time believing that an automated program can adequately gauge how well organized any piece of writing happens to be. The concepts embodied in any sentence or paragraph are several levels of abstraction above any combination of vocabulary words and grammatical constructs.
This kind of thing goes to show how much difference can be made by getting the initial trajectory right.
A few small changes at the start can lead to BIG consequences later as the inertia of the whole mess gets going.
Anyone else out there with a really great idea? Do us all a favor and think as far ahead as you can before you release it on the world. Even then, it will still eventually not be going in the optimal direction.
It also tells employers that the holder of the diploma is likely have an IQ above some threshold.
The IQ threshhold for obtaining a degree from some prestigious institutions is not necessarily as high as you guess from looking at the highest IQs of rejected applicants.
Some accepted applicants with family money and connections and just spending some time at a high quality private school can obtain entrance with a lower IQ than someone coming from left field, no money, no name, average public high school.
The degree and GPA is just a rough and crude sorting mechanism. It is not always fair, nor is it always effective, but it's easy and convenient for employers to use to do some initial screening.
A number of years ago at a fluid dynamics conference Robert T Jones was honored for his achievements. IIRC from the introductory biography, his career was more remarkable because he possessed no formal college degrees.
I suspect raw talent and self education go further in nascent fields, of which aeronautics was one in the last century and of which IT was in the last couple of decades.
Consider choosing to pay a little extra for your coffee to encourage sustainable agriculture, preserve rainforests and help out the long term social fabric of coffee growers and their families.
I'm hard pressed to come up with a situation in which this would be a real problem. Anyone?
From: joesrealname@bigcorp.com
To: janereporter@nyt.com
Reply-To: joesfakename@yahoo.com
--
Big Corp has been paying large sums of money to politician X to get those big contracts. Here's a scanned memo showing this abuse. If anyone asks, leave my name out of it.
Joe Whistleblower could lose his job if his "real identity" has to be exposed.
Poverty in the United States is "at a higher level" in a weird way.
In the U.S., poor people are frequently beset with health problems from being overweight. They eat a poor diet, (they don't buy fresh fish and fresh fruits and vegetables that have shelf life limitations and cost more per calorie): they buy high energy density foods at the corner 7-11 that is the only food store in the `hood.
In rural India (and places like east Africa) you get poverty such that food of any kind is scarce.
But there are something like a billion people worldwide that suffer from the next level problem - diets rich in sugar, obesity, diabetes. It's a growing problem and not just isolated to the United States.
Re:Let's not forget synthetics...and politics...
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
the sheep are squealing, led by the glowing pictures of news anchors. Gas prices are not that high...they've been much higher historicaly.
With enough of a sample size in an anonymous posting, you might well be able to correlate the author's style with openly-attributed works and thereby identify them.
If you want the fastest, in many cases you want the Itanium.
I would have wanted whatever would have been the current chip in the Alpha line if it had received even half the development money that the Itanic did.
when there is absolutely no reward for going into a technical, I.T. or engineering career then no one is going to go to school to learn these professions.
Yes, but you forget that the free market will automatically equilibrate and adjust!
From talking to friends starting college I understand that the most popular new choice of major is
The bottom line for why Microsoft raises prices... THEY CAN. It's the truest of corporate economic policies. Charge whatever the market can bear. No matter how agregious the fees.
It's intriguing. Microsoft does enjoy a great deal of inelasticity in their product, that is, they can change the price substantially and it will have little impact on sales.
There should still be an optimum price point, though, where the number of sales times the price per sale gives the maximum revenue.
A weird twist on this is the market in developing countries. To some extent MS can tolerate "piracy" for a while, or offer Thai language Windows for a substantially reduced price compared to what English language users pay for Windows.
But with market price/demand inelasticity, MS doesn't get the same feedback that other companies in other industries do. It's easier to make a mistake setting your price point. Especially a strategic mistake.
Seriously, I'd be happy to pay a premium if the movie or restaurant I was thinking of going to advertised itself as using jamming gear
Instead of active jamming and further polluting the electromagnetic spectrum, I'd advocate the concept of
"Faraday Cage Bar `n Grill."
Another service that would be nice in some restaurants is creating acoustic cancellation dead zones so that particularly loud and obnoxious peoples' voices could be subject to noise cancelation outside, say, a 2 meter radius.
Actually, with sufficiently good acoustic cancellation technology, you could place a cone of silence around people in movies theatres that could be free to blab at 85 db on their cell phones!
The best thing that MS could do, from a competitive viewpoint, would be to GPL a bunch of their products. They would increase their workforce by such an order of magnitude (and for little to no cost) so as to make *nix's head spin.
This would be a Good Thing.
It would improve the quality of Windows but in a public development environment.
Everyone using those Windows tools would benefit.
Everyone would have much better access to the APIs that would make things tick. They'd find ambiguities, gripe about `em, and they'd leave if MS didn't fix `em.
That would be a welcome change in a strategy that has worked well for MS over the past couple decades for keeping competitors at bay; reverse engineering in an ambiguous and constantly morphing API is tantamount to impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean this in all seriousness and without trying to slam mud on the people you love, but
very often mental illness like schizophrenia is not an individual illness, something that some unlucky person just gets like the clap.
Rather, it can be the product of years of upbringing in a particular family environment. And, if you've grown up in a particular family, no matter how out-of-norm the behavior patters happen to be, you will be likely to see yourself and your family as "not too far away from normal".
More than a few case studies have shown how much the family environment has to do with various mental illness.
My advice?
Find a competent family counselor and make some appointments with them so you can start to see the bigger picture, where you might be harboring some misconceptions, ways of thinking that might be doing harm both to your sister and to yourself.
It takes a little courage, but it's worthwhile and you and your sister will feel a lot better in the future.
If you don't seek help, then you condemn yourself to living in the same old behavior patterns that make you and the ones around you sick.
Could the wisened Linux gurus here offer some insight as to the best package for a former Mac user to introduce him to the greater world of Linux without major headaches in setting it all up?
Well, I love and advocate Linux use all I can, but know more than a few Linux desktop users that lean hard on their MacOS X Powerbooks. They're "UNIX", they have Word, Powerpoint and the usual Mac "it just works" stuff.
But if you have some influence with Apple, mebbe you could suggest an x86 port of OS X...:)
Realistically, any modern Linux distro is reasonable, but will lack a lot of the multimedia niceties that come out of the box with your Mac.
Maybe if you get CrossOver Office or Lindows it would help ease the pain of your loss.
I'd be interested in seeing some kind of checklist or score so that I can easily work out just how less free I am as a citizen of the UK compared to a citizen of the US.
No offense taken. Likewise, I don't mean to start a flamewar or trollfest in reply.
But here are a few items for a potential checklist based on anecdotes I've heard over the years.
Freedom to act, think, do and say things is always in a larger context. We're all free to starve if we choose.
For example, some would say that freedom in the US means very little if your choice is between working at a minimum wage job and not being able to afford medical care or health insurance, or not working and getting Medicaid. In the UK, the public choice of universal coverage eliminates that source of anxiety that people in the US must contend with. Perhaps in the UK people have elected to use their freedom to make a collective commitment to universal coverage. They have less freedom, but they gain something of value.
Freedom's a good thing overall, though, whether it's expressed in individual choice or in collective choice, even though the latter potentially endangers individual choice (say, makign it illegal to be of a different religion than some standard).
But, because we get to see some people using freedom responsibly and in new ways there's hope that, in the long run, fewer of us will live in ill-fitting, preconceived jails of our own choices. Always, though, no matter the hardships we suffer from our ill-informed, poor choices, people will often feel more comfortable in a jail of their own choosing, than they would in a set of conditions where the choice has been taken away from them.
From the article:
The key struggle for grocers is to make their service convenient enough and the cost low enough -- most charge less than $10 for delivery -- to change decades of shopping habits. Online grocers also need to operate in cities with high population densities and heavy Internet use.
Delivery costs are probably what most limits this kind of service.
If delivery costs could be reduced, say by taking the human (driving a two ton gas guzzler 10 miles each way) out of the loop, then this service would really take off.
The technology is almost here for cost-effective robotic delivery vehicles. With liquid fuel costs increasing dramatically, automated delivery will be here even sooner.
There should be less and less reason to send someone in car on a Go Fetch Errand to pickup groceries, a new hard disk, etc.
You cannot trust the end user to make good decisions regarding computer security.
You are so right.
It makes me think the better overall policy is to make flexible easy upgrades scarier.
But make the initial installation as capable as possible so most users won't ever feel a need to do an insecure upgrade.
In the Mozilla and FOSS world things are still not much better than in the Windows world as far as security is concerned. A lot of the current problems with Linux security policies are masked by a 1337 userbase, but widespread deployment could lead to problems like this.
If Fedora shipped this stuff w/o paying the licensing, they'd get their ass sued off.
An good point.
So what I'd like is for the distributions not to ship anything that would get them into licensing troubles like this.
Instead, go the gentoo route of meta-distribution and, just as you get asked whether you want to download security updates, ask the user if they'd like to cruise out and download and install potentially useful applications for mp3, go over to an existing windows partition for which you're already licensed and glom onto fonts, DLL's etc.
The useful extra stuff shouldn't be difficult to install and use even if it doesn't come on the CD per se.
a program to create nonsensical gibberish that always gets A's.
Well, in my world there are too many writers producing nonsense already.
I'd like to do my part not to contribute to that specific problem.
If this grading program were open source and freely available perhaps I could use it to self grade what I've written.
Even better would be if the program were to suggest ways to improve my writing so that I could improve my score.
Perhaps the Slashdot submissions would not only reject postings that lack a specified subject, were too frequent, too lengthy, but also bounce writing that was really bad, really ugly.
All that notwithstanding, I still have a hard time believing that an automated program can adequately gauge how well organized any piece of writing happens to be. The concepts embodied in any sentence or paragraph are several levels of abstraction above any combination of vocabulary words and grammatical constructs.
This kind of thing goes to show how much difference can be made by getting the initial trajectory right.
A few small changes at the start can lead to BIG consequences later as the inertia of the whole mess gets going.
Anyone else out there with a really great idea? Do us all a favor and think as far ahead as you can before you release it on the world. Even then, it will still eventually not be going in the optimal direction.
Ah, but wouldn't it be nice if there were such a clear distinction that could be made between commerce and politics.
Separation of church and state took some time, but has been beneficial for both, IMHO.
Separation of money and state will take some doing.
search is one of the top priority features that microsoft is going to integrate directly into the operating system
Hey, why not? If an HTML renderer, video and audio encoders can be called an innovation for operating systems, why not search technology?
Why not any feature having anything remotely to do with computers that involves a lot of money?
If we don't have alternative fuel sources when the shit hits the fan, I predict the suburbs/exurbs will become 21st century ghost towns.
I'll bet the nice houses and property tax base in the burbs will motivate more public transportation links to these areas.
Bus lines, light rail. People won't want to drive any further than they can help.
Thinking ahead about this, you could probably make some really good real estate purchases for the long term. And some bad ones, too.
It also tells employers that the holder of the diploma is likely have an IQ above some threshold.
The IQ threshhold for obtaining a degree from some prestigious institutions is not necessarily as high as you guess from looking at the highest IQs of rejected applicants.
Some accepted applicants with family money and connections and just spending some time at a high quality private school can obtain entrance with a lower IQ than someone coming from left field, no money, no name, average public high school.
The degree and GPA is just a rough and crude sorting mechanism. It is not always fair, nor is it always effective, but it's easy and convenient for employers to use to do some initial screening.
A number of years ago at a fluid dynamics conference Robert T Jones was honored for his achievements. IIRC from the introductory biography, his career was more remarkable because he possessed no formal college degrees.
I suspect raw talent and self education go further in nascent fields, of which aeronautics was one in the last century and of which IT was in the last couple of decades.
All good, but they let the coffee stale before they use it. We have a local chain where everything is used within three or four days of roasting.
I've often noticed how I like dark roasted coffee, but not if it's been left on the hot plate for very long.
My theory is that the essential oils from the brewed coffee can become over oxidized at temperature.
Perhaps a coffee pot with an inert oxygen-free argon atmosphere would keep it fresher longer....
SCO wants their name changed to Sourceforgery.
That won't do much good because SCO will too easily become confused with alternative labels such as SoreForce or SoreFarce.
for Fair Trade Certified Coffee
Consider choosing to pay a little extra for your coffee to encourage sustainable agriculture, preserve rainforests and help out the long term social fabric of coffee growers and their families.
I'm hard pressed to come up with a situation in which this would be a real problem. Anyone?
Joe Whistleblower could lose his job if his "real identity" has to be exposed.
Poverty in the United States is "at a higher level" in a weird way.
In the U.S., poor people are frequently beset with health problems from being overweight. They eat a poor diet, (they don't buy fresh fish and fresh fruits and vegetables that have shelf life limitations and cost more per calorie): they buy high energy density foods at the corner 7-11 that is the only food store in the `hood.
In rural India (and places like east Africa) you get poverty such that food of any kind is scarce.
But there are something like a billion people worldwide that suffer from the next level problem - diets rich in sugar, obesity, diabetes. It's a growing problem and not just isolated to the United States.
the sheep are squealing, led by the glowing pictures of news anchors. Gas prices are not that high...they've been much higher historicaly.
Yeah, I heard that same news report, too!
I'd say than 10% of slashdotters post with personally-idenfiable information.
[Here's my chance to get modded down as a troll by bringing up an old story that I submitted and got rejected.]
Basically, compression algorithms can be used as a means for identifying the characteristics of a given author.
With enough of a sample size in an anonymous posting, you might well be able to correlate the author's style with openly-attributed works and thereby identify them.
If you want the fastest, in many cases you want the Itanium.
I would have wanted whatever would have been the current chip in the Alpha line if it had received even half the development money that the Itanic did.
when there is absolutely no reward for going into a technical, I.T. or engineering career then no one is going to go to school to learn these professions.
Yes, but you forget that the free market will automatically equilibrate and adjust!
From talking to friends starting college I understand that the most popular new choice of major is
.The bottom line for why Microsoft raises prices
It's intriguing. Microsoft does enjoy a great deal of inelasticity in their product, that is, they can change the price substantially and it will have little impact on sales.
There should still be an optimum price point, though, where the number of sales times the price per sale gives the maximum revenue.
A weird twist on this is the market in developing countries. To some extent MS can tolerate "piracy" for a while, or offer Thai language Windows for a substantially reduced price compared to what English language users pay for Windows.
But with market price/demand inelasticity, MS doesn't get the same feedback that other companies in other industries do. It's easier to make a mistake setting your price point. Especially a strategic mistake.
Seriously, I'd be happy to pay a premium if the movie or restaurant I was thinking of going to advertised itself as using jamming gear
Instead of active jamming and further polluting the electromagnetic spectrum, I'd advocate the concept of
Another service that would be nice in some restaurants is creating acoustic cancellation dead zones so that particularly loud and obnoxious peoples' voices could be subject to noise cancelation outside, say, a 2 meter radius.
Actually, with sufficiently good acoustic cancellation technology, you could place a cone of silence around people in movies theatres that could be free to blab at 85 db on their cell phones!
The best thing that MS could do, from a competitive viewpoint, would be to GPL a bunch of their products. They would increase their workforce by such an order of magnitude (and for little to no cost) so as to make *nix's head spin.
This would be a Good Thing.
It would improve the quality of Windows but in a public development environment.
Everyone using those Windows tools would benefit.
Everyone would have much better access to the APIs that would make things tick. They'd find ambiguities, gripe about `em, and they'd leave if MS didn't fix `em.
That would be a welcome change in a strategy that has worked well for MS over the past couple decades for keeping competitors at bay; reverse engineering in an ambiguous and constantly morphing API is tantamount to impossible.
and the public will think it is a proffesional job.
And the professionals will think it is a public job.
And MS wonders why it has to work so damn hard to promote mindshare and get a positive spin from developers...