I am a native English speaker (well Australian anyway). Members of my familiy have taught ESL (English as a Second Language) to adults and children. Friends of mine are speech therapists. For the last 15 years I have been doing business with people who have English as their second language.
English is trivial to learn well enough to communicate. The reason? You only really need to learn vocabulary. All the points raised previously about the difficulty of automatic translation are kind of true but, for English at least (and probably Spanish), irrelevant. This is because these languages are the most accepting of inappropriate use. Actually from a linguistic perspective there is a lot of variation that can at least provide syntactic correctness and hence still convey meaning. There is very little (any?) positional context in English, ie where the meaning of a word or phrase changes according to its position in the stream. Indeed even where this might be the case it is really only in quite sophisticated use in which these things exist and that can be ruled out when you are communicating with an identified non-speaker. Also most of the speakers of English language are most accepting of inappropriate use.
Further the language positively rewards inappropriate use by the nature of English art (poetry, prose, even comedy) where so much of the beauty of are is derived from pushing the edge of meaning by interesting context. It is true that many languages are the same but perhaps none so much as English (perhaps with the exception of Arabic where it seems to me [I am not a linguist] that metaphor has a large role in even basic speech).
Having lived in London for 10 years, I regularly see non-native english speakers from completely different language families (Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Germanic, Asian, Slavic) speaking to each other in English (with varying levels of brokenness) because it is easy for them to find "common" ground to refine the synonyms they are using, even those that they do not all understand. (Sure they are in London, but even at conferences outside the UK the same is true). Part of this is because of the English as Lingua Franca but part of that is because English (as a language) is so tolerant of bad grammar. It is rare for bad grammar to fundamentally alter the meaning of a dialogue. It is possible and it is easy for confusion to arise, but then so too is it easy to clarify the actual meaning intended.
Many of the "this is impossible" comments from previous posters seem to assume that the translation described is context free. Why should it be so? The translator can just as easily be fed context about environment as well as the surrounding language of the segment being actively processed. Such information would help the translation.
So automatic translation can work (even badly) and provide a good basis for an iterative approach to conveying meaning between parties that have no common language. At a basic level even if it is just "identifiers" (nouns), "doing words" (verbs) and "describing words" (adjectives, or adverbs) it will facillitate _communication_.
I think the active ingredient in Styptics is the same as the active ingredient in some (many) anti-perspirants (not deoderants, must be anti-perspirant). Aluminium Sulphate. Not being a regular mistake maker in the shaving department, I never have the sticks around but my AP does have Aluminium Sulphate as the active ingredient and it does seem to help (stings like a muthafscka as well).
Nope, I ain't confused. The issue is that everything about the price in question derives from the "regime", no regime and the thing for which the price is being asked _does not exist_ and so there is nothing to transfer via price. There is nothing inherently pricewrothy about something that is copyrightable or intellectual property or whatever you want to call it.
Don't misunderstand there is value in the process, it just ain't property and hence it has no inherent ability to be priced.
Just fire relative massive "spheres" with trailing cables (thing T-bar ski lift) that orbital vehicles could attach to at conventionally reachable altitudes and then use the turning moment of the sphere to accelerate the orbiter into orbit as the cable accelerates around the sphere turning over the apex of its ballistic flight.
The same right that anyone has to price what they sell at whatever price they like.
Except that the only reason they have anything to "sell" in the first place is because of an artificially created regime that allows them to sue people who take copies (which do not harm the voracity or nature of the original) and so one cannot talk of the issue in terms of apparently natural rights.
Well not really broken in the way that you say. The purpose of the civil system is different to the criminal one. It is designed to redress loss and so the standard of culpability is lower once the loss has been demonstrated. This is a good thing. But not the precursor to the lower standard is "once the loss has been demonstrated".
In this case (and most others that the RIAA would run) where the brokenness rears it's head is that there is no loss for the RIAA to demonstrate and the presupposition that the existence of "illegal" files as the proof of loss is the problem.
Although saying that the BBC stuff was "lost" is not really accurate/fair. It was more a case that these episodes were deleted/destroyed/taped over because they did not realise that there was any real value in them and so they cost more to store than they were worth (or maybe they needed the tape:-). Regardless, it is really only once the value off these old resources became apparent that the magnitude of the tragedy became clear. I think it really is a tragedy rather than something that is blameworthy. If everyone else was keeping everything and the BBC lost them through incompetence then I would agree, but really, no one knew how usseful this stuff would become.
Don't even start me on this. SMS actually costs _nothing_ for the carriers. It is all sent via the 146 byte "header" (and I am sure some SMS expert out there will correct the details) that the handset uses to connect to the base station. If the header does not have a message then the bytes are blank. Thank they charge at all is vergin on criminal. ITs like chargin for the air that you breath in a private open space. Just criminal.
Whether Linus is more practical or not is irrelevant. There is a real risk that there is a fight coming. The fight I fear is the lining up of all the big media DRM fanboys on one side and those of us that want ot be free on the other. RMS may have killed an Archduke by trying to replace proprietary Unix with the GNU project and trying to unite all the users. Or perhaps Linus made the gun and the Archduke still lives, his death due soon when TC is the only way to buy new hardware and all the end users start to accelerate the death of big media. I am not suggesting that anyone is going to die, but there is a serious risk that much of what we do now (and take for granted) will become illegal. THAT is the problem. It is deeply ironic that countries like China, India and perhaps the South Americans and Africans may become the saviour of those of us in the West that belive in being free to manage our data as we see fit, by manufacturing "free hardware" for their own use. Which, in the most dystopian vision I have, becomes illegal to import into my country, or illegal to connect to the "pipes" of the Internets 3.X...
FSF cares about this. I am ambivilant about whether Linus cares. He's done enough, none of us (well very few) are in any position to criticise. But the FSF cares about this and THAT matters, they have no real power but are vocal, have some cash, and are a bit like a hydra, so they are very tough to shut up. GPL v3 is them preparing the ground for the fight (on one front) there are other fronts (free hardware etc) but those are different discussions.
As a final point, and at the risk of invoking Godwinson's Law, being exclusively pragmatic and moaning about the overkill of GPLv3 is a bit like being grateful that the trains are running on time while society is going to shit.
Its a tough link to give because there is a fundamental aspect to the British consitution that gives a citizen the right to do anything that is not explicitly legislated against. It is one of the reasons why politically active (agitated:-) Brits tend to be against increasing legislation because4 each law takes away rights. One of the most important acts is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (known as PACE) as you might expect the BBC has some information http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/law/powersofarrest.shtm l that relates.
Look I am more for liberty than the next guy but there is a grain of salt with which the newspaper report needs to be taken. It is from the "Daily Mail" which has a definite agenda in promoting the "Brave New World" directions of the current government. They will certainly present the story as grandly as possible. I am not suggesting that the story is without merit, but it is certainly only one sided in its reporting. The Daily Mail says "remove dead branches" the police say "stripping every branch". The parents were "outraged". Ask first, what if the tree was in their garden (a) would the kids have done it (b) would they have been happy about it if they had done it.
We will never know the truth but it aint the story on which I would base the coming of the police state in Thatcher's^D^D^D^D^D^D^DBlair's Britain.
Imagine the worst thing you will see in your entire life... Police deal with that and probably worse many times every single day of their working lives. I do not believe that it is possible to remain "the same" as those of us that are spared from dealing with that crap. The "thin blue line" or "The Job" [as in work not as in "Bible book of"] mentality is pretty much a coping mechanism, much like surgeons or trauma ward professionals. One becomes detached and can lose the "reflex" towards civility/normality that most of the rest of us take for granted.
Other posters have made the point, start civil and know your actual rights (not your TV rights). It will make the interaction more likely go very smoothly. As for the problematic police, the sooner they are found out by their overreaction to civil and respectful citizens the better the force becomes.
I saw a fairly reputable television demonstration (http://fifthgear.five.tv/jsp/5gmain.jsp?lnk=601&f eatureid=301&pageid=-1) of a "rigid" vs "rigid passenger + crumple" offset head on impact. The two cars were a Land Rover Discovery and a Renault Espace MPV. The results were pretty spectacular and the Espace wins clearly. I also recommend the earlier test of "Old Espace" vs "New Espace" if you can track it down on the same site. (Found the video at Renaults web site http://www.renaulttv.co.uk/main.php?loadedSection= safety&loadedItem=safety_1&scrollPosY=8&uniq=)
Actually in Australia voting is compulsory. No vote, you get fined. Pretty trivial amount, maybe a couple of tens of dollars, but a fine nonetheless. So every four years or so about 95% of the electorate show up and fill in a number of ballot papers for the national government (about the same frequency for state and local government although IIRC local is not compulsory) http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/What/voting/turnout /index.htm and between 3 and 6 percent of votes are informal. Some discussion of informal voting http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/How/research/papers /paper1/index.htm
I think I have to call bullshit. I have filled out numerous I-94W forms and I have a recollection that it is only "convictions" that mattered and my brief research confirms this "http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/ineligibili ties/ineligibilities_1364.html"
There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.
Many of the reply posts to this jumped all over the statment as wrong but I think they miss the point. I think the poster would have been better to avoid the statement about religion. I characterise this debate by saying that it cannot be resolved by a discussion about "rights". The rights of the mother, the rights of the father, the rights of the foetus and the rightness of society and/or the state to say that a conceived foetus deserves its protection.
There is no way to reconcile these competing rights At best one can just place them in a hierarchy and allow the competition to be decided by the one with the highest rank. Great. That works, but it leaves as many issues as it solves and the answer may not always be the same which creates even more conflict and resentment. But the fundamental nature of the problem remains; this debate cannot be couched in terms of rights because rights are a "qualified absoute" (lest they not be rights) and when competing absolutes conflict there can be no "logical" right answer.
Where does that leave us? Weell I think it leaves the whole issue in the too hard basket. Personally, I am for stem cell research, embryonic, cloned, extracting whatever. If people are so horrible opposed they can vote by not using any of the products of this research (and good luck to them I say:-). But I don't think that those of us that are more open to these ideas should be quite so dismissive of people who believe otherwise. If they believe that society is made worse by every one of these embryoes that does not become a life and that promoting the use of leftovers for research even creates the temptation to fertilize a few more than would otherwise be necessary then they are right to use their "power" to restrict the funding of the work. That is the way popular democracy (technical term, not that the current government is popular) works. Those of us that belive otherwise just need to make the idea more popular first.
Where I work, two of the best programmers we have do not have formal qualifications (ie degrees) yet alone CS degrees. They are excellent resources, really world class, but they came to us having established their track record and _real_ experience already so they could prove their worth the moment they hit the interview.
In my job, I hire people from time to time. When scanning dozens of resumes to find the dozen or so I will read carefully, no degree is almost a disqualifier. Why? Well mostly we hire young people, and if they cannot stick it out for three years to "achieve" a degree then that sets off all kinds of warning bells about their ability to work on a project that will take two years to complete (the way our business works) and that will have times where you just want to throw all the toys out of the pram.
Further, it takes something pretty special to make the list if there is not a good degree (CS, Financy, "first class honours", Mathematics etc) and unless the Psychology had something pretty specific in terms of cognitive modelling or NLP then it would not be enough to automatically survive the first cull.
What does that mean? Well it means find the something special to make your resume stand out. It is not the font or the colour of the paper but some aspect of the content that makes you different from all the other "non directly relevant" degree holders so you get into the second round of resume reading. I am not sure that any number of "non-degree" courses would help but it is more likely to catch my eye if it were something unusual like "Logic programming", "Haskell" or "Lisp" rather than "C# for recent graduates".
Just some thoughts that might help understand the mentality of the kind of person you at whom you are targetting your resume.
I think I must be the only person left on this planet who thinks that BSG is massively overrated. That's not to say it's not good, but I just really can't see why everyone sees it as some kind of Sci-fi messiah.
Nope. You are not alone. I can't even watch it. It is just drivel.
I loved Babylon 5, it was just such a great universe into which I could descend every week or so (travelling kills the "sequencing" of regular shows!!) to try and catch the next element of the overall plot. I can imagine so many stories in that universe. Galactica, just doesn't work for me, I have no joy in the universe it has created.
Interesting is the Dr Who comparison. Very, Very different animal. Some of the writing in Dr Who is actually fantastic and critically, the target audience is the whole family (7pm, Saturday night target) and so there is a very different approach required. I think that it has much more to offer than BG. And the sets don't wobble much either!
Perhaps the most salient point of the chemeng professor's post is the one about cost. If the hydrocarbon stocks are finite then the sooner we burn them up that happier we will all be because by doing so the cheapest energy solution will be something other than oil as soon as possible. It is not until the hydrocarbon _at the bowser_ price reaches more than "alternative" that this problem will go away.
Now this presents an interesting question. Government could make this cost ratio tke place _today_ via the use of taxes. Put a 50$ a gallon (helping out you americans:-) tax on petrol would drive the consumer to demand the alternatives. However, I am no big fan of this solution because all this extra tax revenue will have to be managed by the government and I don't trust them to use it to fix the environmental/infrastructure issues for which it is a proxy. As such lets let "dumb" consumers drive that process by consuming all the cheap oil at "natural" prices.
(There are lots of implicit microeconomic issues in what is said above. The principal argument remains regardless of how one addresses those questions so don't worry too much about finding specific defects inthe detail of the argument above:-)
The coming election will see any realistic choice who might dare to challenge the forming dictatorship having his character assassinated by this NSA data.
Crap. Character assassination only matters when the character is willing to let it embarass him. Owning up to past (or even current) indiscretion has a long tradition of acceptance in public life. Sometimes it doesn't work but those occasions are normally due to the actual nature of the incident or specific hypocracy... Child rights activists and "inappropriate" child oriented activity, Anticorruption crusaders taking a bribe...
The sooner the "crypto military industrialist cadre" or whatever evil conspiriacy vehicle you belive is forming the dicatorship tries this crap the better since it will result in a seachange in the public perception between public and private life that can only improve things
e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0 Now if that ain't natural I don't know what is. It is about 4 aspects of the "unit" combined into one relationship. That is, the "unit logarithm" raised to power of the "first root" of the "negative unit" times the ratio of the locus about a point and the unit of [the "unit circle"] plus the "unit" equals nothing. There are no "man made" constructs and it is definitely mathematics.
Amen. IT Hinderance would be a better description than IT Support in most of the places I have dealt with.
I would make one proviso. The "Production" Network should be physically isolated. Maybe VLAN would work but I still reckon that production networks belong on different wire and different routers etc. Rogue applications, even when not malicious, should not be able to flood the production network under any ciscumstance.
Oh the irony. I get the impression that you are not a marxist and yet your entire argument could just as easily describe slavery to "capital". Where, so the argument goes, every hour that you work in excess of the amount required to pay for your salary is "free labour" that you are giving to "the man" (so to speak:-) and the man is "capital". Now don't get me wrong I am a fan of having labour working for capital since I have quite a nice little surplus going, but Taxes ain't the issue. There are a lot of arguments to suggest that taxes are an efficient way to pay for the services that we all require, particularly if you believe that being a citizen carries some entitlement. If you don't believe that then fair enough you should withhold your taxes. But if otherwise, and for me the entitlement pretty much comes to "food, shelter, education and healthcare", yeah I know its a bit socialist of me, but hey, I am Australian, we have enough to make that stuff work for us.
Many excellent points by many posters about the "life" left in native code. Let me add my $0.02. We have a system that has a fundamentally non-parallel* execution profile where it is hard to determine the "full" scope of the objects that will be touched by a given transaction. We keep all our data in memory and so we are starting to care about the organisation of a data structures so that we can keep more and more of them on the L1/L2 cache to avoid having to go to memory to get records that we just looked at (its just too slow). From a singe processor (obviously a multi processor machine but one of them used to 100% by the system) we seem to be seing around 40K transactions per second.
With that as background, native code to us means that we are able to control, influence and ensure the code path that each transaction is executing and thus squeeze as much as possible out of the single transaction path that we are constrained to use. It also means that we can truly _find_ the sluggish parts of the most commonly executed code and make them X% faster thus making the system almost X% faster itself.
*Whether our problem is parallelisable or not is an interesting question but since it is like that the most popular objects will be involved in the vast majority of transactions then it is very hard to think of a way that paralleising the process will give us any real benefit since we woul have to handle the locking/deadlocking and race conditions for a fractional increase in performance, all of which is probably going to cost more than that fraction for all the other transactions as well.
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I am a native English speaker (well Australian anyway). Members of my familiy have taught ESL (English as a Second Language) to adults and children. Friends of mine are speech therapists. For the last 15 years I have been doing business with people who have English as their second language.
English is trivial to learn well enough to communicate. The reason? You only really need to learn vocabulary. All the points raised previously about the difficulty of automatic translation are kind of true but, for English at least (and probably Spanish), irrelevant. This is because these languages are the most accepting of inappropriate use. Actually from a linguistic perspective there is a lot of variation that can at least provide syntactic correctness and hence still convey meaning. There is very little (any?) positional context in English, ie where the meaning of a word or phrase changes according to its position in the stream. Indeed even where this might be the case it is really only in quite sophisticated use in which these things exist and that can be ruled out when you are communicating with an identified non-speaker. Also most of the speakers of English language are most accepting of inappropriate use.
Further the language positively rewards inappropriate use by the nature of English art (poetry, prose, even comedy) where so much of the beauty of are is derived from pushing the edge of meaning by interesting context. It is true that many languages are the same but perhaps none so much as English (perhaps with the exception of Arabic where it seems to me [I am not a linguist] that metaphor has a large role in even basic speech).
Having lived in London for 10 years, I regularly see non-native english speakers from completely different language families (Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Germanic, Asian, Slavic) speaking to each other in English (with varying levels of brokenness) because it is easy for them to find "common" ground to refine the synonyms they are using, even those that they do not all understand. (Sure they are in London, but even at conferences outside the UK the same is true). Part of this is because of the English as Lingua Franca but part of that is because English (as a language) is so tolerant of bad grammar. It is rare for bad grammar to fundamentally alter the meaning of a dialogue. It is possible and it is easy for confusion to arise, but then so too is it easy to clarify the actual meaning intended.
Many of the "this is impossible" comments from previous posters seem to assume that the translation described is context free. Why should it be so? The translator can just as easily be fed context about environment as well as the surrounding language of the segment being actively processed. Such information would help the translation.
So automatic translation can work (even badly) and provide a good basis for an iterative approach to conveying meaning between parties that have no common language. At a basic level even if it is just "identifiers" (nouns), "doing words" (verbs) and "describing words" (adjectives, or adverbs) it will facillitate _communication_.
I think the active ingredient in Styptics is the same as the active ingredient in some (many) anti-perspirants (not deoderants, must be anti-perspirant). Aluminium Sulphate. Not being a regular mistake maker in the shaving department, I never have the sticks around but my AP does have Aluminium Sulphate as the active ingredient and it does seem to help (stings like a muthafscka as well).
Nope, I ain't confused. The issue is that everything about the price in question derives from the "regime", no regime and the thing for which the price is being asked _does not exist_ and so there is nothing to transfer via price. There is nothing inherently pricewrothy about something that is copyrightable or intellectual property or whatever you want to call it.
Don't misunderstand there is value in the process, it just ain't property and hence it has no inherent ability to be priced.
Just fire relative massive "spheres" with trailing cables (thing T-bar ski lift) that orbital vehicles could attach to at conventionally reachable altitudes and then use the turning moment of the sphere to accelerate the orbiter into orbit as the cable accelerates around the sphere turning over the apex of its ballistic flight.
The same right that anyone has to price what they sell at whatever price they like.
Except that the only reason they have anything to "sell" in the first place is because of an artificially created regime that allows them to sue people who take copies (which do not harm the voracity or nature of the original) and so one cannot talk of the issue in terms of apparently natural rights.
Well not really broken in the way that you say. The purpose of the civil system is different to the criminal one. It is designed to redress loss and so the standard of culpability is lower once the loss has been demonstrated. This is a good thing. But not the precursor to the lower standard is "once the loss has been demonstrated".
In this case (and most others that the RIAA would run) where the brokenness rears it's head is that there is no loss for the RIAA to demonstrate and the presupposition that the existence of "illegal" files as the proof of loss is the problem.
Although saying that the BBC stuff was "lost" is not really accurate/fair. It was more a case that these episodes were deleted/destroyed/taped over because they did not realise that there was any real value in them and so they cost more to store than they were worth (or maybe they needed the tape :-). Regardless, it is really only once the value off these old resources became apparent that the magnitude of the tragedy became clear. I think it really is a tragedy rather than something that is blameworthy. If everyone else was keeping everything and the BBC lost them through incompetence then I would agree, but really, no one knew how usseful this stuff would become.
Don't even start me on this. SMS actually costs _nothing_ for the carriers. It is all sent via the 146 byte "header" (and I am sure some SMS expert out there will correct the details) that the handset uses to connect to the base station. If the header does not have a message then the bytes are blank. Thank they charge at all is vergin on criminal. ITs like chargin for the air that you breath in a private open space. Just criminal.
Whether Linus is more practical or not is irrelevant. There is a real risk that there is a fight coming. The fight I fear is the lining up of all the big media DRM fanboys on one side and those of us that want ot be free on the other. RMS may have killed an Archduke by trying to replace proprietary Unix with the GNU project and trying to unite all the users. Or perhaps Linus made the gun and the Archduke still lives, his death due soon when TC is the only way to buy new hardware and all the end users start to accelerate the death of big media. I am not suggesting that anyone is going to die, but there is a serious risk that much of what we do now (and take for granted) will become illegal. THAT is the problem. It is deeply ironic that countries like China, India and perhaps the South Americans and Africans may become the saviour of those of us in the West that belive in being free to manage our data as we see fit, by manufacturing "free hardware" for their own use. Which, in the most dystopian vision I have, becomes illegal to import into my country, or illegal to connect to the "pipes" of the Internets 3.X...
FSF cares about this. I am ambivilant about whether Linus cares. He's done enough, none of us (well very few) are in any position to criticise. But the FSF cares about this and THAT matters, they have no real power but are vocal, have some cash, and are a bit like a hydra, so they are very tough to shut up. GPL v3 is them preparing the ground for the fight (on one front) there are other fronts (free hardware etc) but those are different discussions.
As a final point, and at the risk of invoking Godwinson's Law, being exclusively pragmatic and moaning about the overkill of GPLv3 is a bit like being grateful that the trains are running on time while society is going to shit.
Its a tough link to give because there is a fundamental aspect to the British consitution that gives a citizen the right to do anything that is not explicitly legislated against. It is one of the reasons why politically active (agitated :-) Brits tend to be against increasing legislation because4 each law takes away rights. One of the most important acts is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (known as PACE) as you might expect the BBC has some information http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/law/powersofarrest.shtm l that relates.
Look I am more for liberty than the next guy but there is a grain of salt with which the newspaper report needs to be taken. It is from the "Daily Mail" which has a definite agenda in promoting the "Brave New World" directions of the current government. They will certainly present the story as grandly as possible. I am not suggesting that the story is without merit, but it is certainly only one sided in its reporting. The Daily Mail says "remove dead branches" the police say "stripping every branch". The parents were "outraged". Ask first, what if the tree was in their garden (a) would the kids have done it (b) would they have been happy about it if they had done it.
We will never know the truth but it aint the story on which I would base the coming of the police state in Thatcher's^D^D^D^D^D^D^DBlair's Britain.
Imagine the worst thing you will see in your entire life... Police deal with that and probably worse many times every single day of their working lives. I do not believe that it is possible to remain "the same" as those of us that are spared from dealing with that crap. The "thin blue line" or "The Job" [as in work not as in "Bible book of"] mentality is pretty much a coping mechanism, much like surgeons or trauma ward professionals. One becomes detached and can lose the "reflex" towards civility/normality that most of the rest of us take for granted.
Other posters have made the point, start civil and know your actual rights (not your TV rights). It will make the interaction more likely go very smoothly. As for the problematic police, the sooner they are found out by their overreaction to civil and respectful citizens the better the force becomes.
I saw a fairly reputable television demonstration (http://fifthgear.five.tv/jsp/5gmain.jsp?lnk=601&f eatureid=301&pageid=-1) of a "rigid" vs "rigid passenger + crumple" offset head on impact. The two cars were a Land Rover Discovery and a Renault Espace MPV. The results were pretty spectacular and the Espace wins clearly. I also recommend the earlier test of "Old Espace" vs "New Espace" if you can track it down on the same site. (Found the video at Renaults web site http://www.renaulttv.co.uk/main.php?loadedSection= safety&loadedItem=safety_1&scrollPosY=8&uniq=)
Actually in Australia voting is compulsory. No vote, you get fined. Pretty trivial amount, maybe a couple of tens of dollars, but a fine nonetheless. So every four years or so about 95% of the electorate show up and fill in a number of ballot papers for the national government (about the same frequency for state and local government although IIRC local is not compulsory) http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/What/voting/turnout /index.htm and between 3 and 6 percent of votes are informal. Some discussion of informal voting http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/How/research/papers /paper1/index.htm
I think I have to call bullshit. I have filled out numerous I-94W forms and I have a recollection that it is only "convictions" that mattered and my brief research confirms this "http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/ineligibili ties/ineligibilities_1364.html"
There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.
Many of the reply posts to this jumped all over the statment as wrong but I think they miss the point. I think the poster would have been better to avoid the statement about religion. I characterise this debate by saying that it cannot be resolved by a discussion about "rights". The rights of the mother, the rights of the father, the rights of the foetus and the rightness of society and/or the state to say that a conceived foetus deserves its protection.
There is no way to reconcile these competing rights At best one can just place them in a hierarchy and allow the competition to be decided by the one with the highest rank. Great. That works, but it leaves as many issues as it solves and the answer may not always be the same which creates even more conflict and resentment. But the fundamental nature of the problem remains; this debate cannot be couched in terms of rights because rights are a "qualified absoute" (lest they not be rights) and when competing absolutes conflict there can be no "logical" right answer.
Where does that leave us? Weell I think it leaves the whole issue in the too hard basket. Personally, I am for stem cell research, embryonic, cloned, extracting whatever. If people are so horrible opposed they can vote by not using any of the products of this research (and good luck to them I say :-). But I don't think that those of us that are more open to these ideas should be quite so dismissive of people who believe otherwise. If they believe that society is made worse by every one of these embryoes that does not become a life and that promoting the use of leftovers for research even creates the temptation to fertilize a few more than would otherwise be necessary then they are right to use their "power" to restrict the funding of the work. That is the way popular democracy (technical term, not that the current government is popular) works. Those of us that belive otherwise just need to make the idea more popular first.
Where I work, two of the best programmers we have do not have formal qualifications (ie degrees) yet alone CS degrees. They are excellent resources, really world class, but they came to us having established their track record and _real_ experience already so they could prove their worth the moment they hit the interview.
In my job, I hire people from time to time. When scanning dozens of resumes to find the dozen or so I will read carefully, no degree is almost a disqualifier. Why? Well mostly we hire young people, and if they cannot stick it out for three years to "achieve" a degree then that sets off all kinds of warning bells about their ability to work on a project that will take two years to complete (the way our business works) and that will have times where you just want to throw all the toys out of the pram.
Further, it takes something pretty special to make the list if there is not a good degree (CS, Financy, "first class honours", Mathematics etc) and unless the Psychology had something pretty specific in terms of cognitive modelling or NLP then it would not be enough to automatically survive the first cull.
What does that mean? Well it means find the something special to make your resume stand out. It is not the font or the colour of the paper but some aspect of the content that makes you different from all the other "non directly relevant" degree holders so you get into the second round of resume reading. I am not sure that any number of "non-degree" courses would help but it is more likely to catch my eye if it were something unusual like "Logic programming", "Haskell" or "Lisp" rather than "C# for recent graduates".
Just some thoughts that might help understand the mentality of the kind of person you at whom you are targetting your resume.
He's Finnish, they look like that all the time :-) He may actually be ecstatic, you just can't tell with the Fins, quite inscruitable!!
I think I must be the only person left on this planet who thinks that BSG is massively overrated. That's not to say it's not good, but I just really can't see why everyone sees it as some kind of Sci-fi messiah.
Nope. You are not alone. I can't even watch it. It is just drivel.
I loved Babylon 5, it was just such a great universe into which I could descend every week or so (travelling kills the "sequencing" of regular shows!!) to try and catch the next element of the overall plot. I can imagine so many stories in that universe. Galactica, just doesn't work for me, I have no joy in the universe it has created.
Interesting is the Dr Who comparison. Very, Very different animal. Some of the writing in Dr Who is actually fantastic and critically, the target audience is the whole family (7pm, Saturday night target) and so there is a very different approach required. I think that it has much more to offer than BG. And the sets don't wobble much either!
Perhaps the most salient point of the chemeng professor's post is the one about cost. If the hydrocarbon stocks are finite then the sooner we burn them up that happier we will all be because by doing so the cheapest energy solution will be something other than oil as soon as possible. It is not until the hydrocarbon _at the bowser_ price reaches more than "alternative" that this problem will go away.
:-) tax on petrol would drive the consumer to demand the alternatives. However, I am no big fan of this solution because all this extra tax revenue will have to be managed by the government and I don't trust them to use it to fix the environmental/infrastructure issues for which it is a proxy. As such lets let "dumb" consumers drive that process by consuming all the cheap oil at "natural" prices.
:-)
Now this presents an interesting question. Government could make this cost ratio tke place _today_ via the use of taxes. Put a 50$ a gallon (helping out you americans
(There are lots of implicit microeconomic issues in what is said above. The principal argument remains regardless of how one addresses those questions so don't worry too much about finding specific defects inthe detail of the argument above
The coming election will see any realistic choice who might dare to challenge the forming dictatorship having his character assassinated by this NSA data.
Crap. Character assassination only matters when the character is willing to let it embarass him. Owning up to past (or even current) indiscretion has a long tradition of acceptance in public life. Sometimes it doesn't work but those occasions are normally due to the actual nature of the incident or specific hypocracy... Child rights activists and "inappropriate" child oriented activity, Anticorruption crusaders taking a bribe...
The sooner the "crypto military industrialist cadre" or whatever evil conspiriacy vehicle you belive is forming the dicatorship tries this crap the better since it will result in a seachange in the public perception between public and private life that can only improve things
e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0
Now if that ain't natural I don't know what is. It is about 4 aspects of the "unit" combined into one relationship. That is, the "unit logarithm" raised to power of the "first root" of the "negative unit" times the ratio of the locus about a point and the unit of [the "unit circle"] plus the "unit" equals nothing. There are no "man made" constructs and it is definitely mathematics.
Amen. IT Hinderance would be a better description than IT Support in most of the places I have dealt with.
I would make one proviso. The "Production" Network should be physically isolated. Maybe VLAN would work but I still reckon that production networks belong on different wire and different routers etc. Rogue applications, even when not malicious, should not be able to flood the production network under any ciscumstance.
Oh the irony. I get the impression that you are not a marxist and yet your entire argument could just as easily describe slavery to "capital". Where, so the argument goes, every hour that you work in excess of the amount required to pay for your salary is "free labour" that you are giving to "the man" (so to speak :-) and the man is "capital". Now don't get me wrong I am a fan of having labour working for capital since I have quite a nice little surplus going, but Taxes ain't the issue. There are a lot of arguments to suggest that taxes are an efficient way to pay for the services that we all require, particularly if you believe that being a citizen carries some entitlement. If you don't believe that then fair enough you should withhold your taxes. But if otherwise, and for me the entitlement pretty much comes to "food, shelter, education and healthcare", yeah I know its a bit socialist of me, but hey, I am Australian, we have enough to make that stuff work for us.
Many excellent points by many posters about the "life" left in native code. Let me add my $0.02. We have a system that has a fundamentally non-parallel* execution profile where it is hard to determine the "full" scope of the objects that will be touched by a given transaction. We keep all our data in memory and so we are starting to care about the organisation of a data structures so that we can keep more and more of them on the L1/L2 cache to avoid having to go to memory to get records that we just looked at (its just too slow). From a singe processor (obviously a multi processor machine but one of them used to 100% by the system) we seem to be seing around 40K transactions per second.
With that as background, native code to us means that we are able to control, influence and ensure the code path that each transaction is executing and thus squeeze as much as possible out of the single transaction path that we are constrained to use. It also means that we can truly _find_ the sluggish parts of the most commonly executed code and make them X% faster thus making the system almost X% faster itself.
*Whether our problem is parallelisable or not is an interesting question but since it is like that the most popular objects will be involved in the vast majority of transactions then it is very hard to think of a way that paralleising the process will give us any real benefit since we woul have to handle the locking/deadlocking and race conditions for a fractional increase in performance, all of which is probably going to cost more than that fraction for all the other transactions as well.