Posts by Tom 13

Re: unintended f*c*i*g consequences.

I hear in NYC, that bottle of Diet Coke alone will get you 5 years.

@AC

Keep reveling in your hatred of the rich and stay poor.

Even if the money all went back to the shareholders, the shareholders are the ones who put the money at risk, and the execs are the ones who took the chance on the business plan. Eventually they spend the money on something, and that powers the economy. Even if they just stick it in CDs at the bank, that makes money available to other businesses through bank loans. The rich don't get that wy by sitting on their asses.

Re: Only 35% in taxes ?

Yes, but that's the 35% the government gets before you have to pay your more than 35% on it. Assuming of course you own iStock.

Re: so no risk attached to the bonds as far as I can see

That's exactly what all those poor schlubs hawking and buying mortgage backed securities said before the bubble collapsed.

Re: Seperate windows are inefficent

Depends on your working style. I frequently have multiple windows of the same app open, comparing information for one screen with something in another. I also prefer to have menus where I can see what is what as opposed to hidden context sensitive crap.

Choice is what is critical for this. The skin on the app should be configurable so either you or I can work efficiently with the application.

Re: Brain functionality fail

No reason to assume Opera is lying and he is telling the truth. Logically speaking either, neither, or both could be lying. We all need more facts before jumping to ANY conclusions.

Re: Climate Modelling

You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly complicated it is. I mean, you may think it's difficult to do calculus differential equations, but that's just peanuts to the climate.

There, fixed it for you.

Re: Ongoing Modelling

You need to dissect the word 'assume' more closely and run it through an SMS to English converter.

Re: Fossil fuels are being used faster than they are being discovered

Except fossil fuel resources are being verified as quickly as we are using them. Thirty years ago we had 20 years of oil left and we still do.

Re: lets see a similar campaign to get men (back) into teaching.

By all means we should. Society could do with a good deal less of that touchy-feelie liberal/progressive/commie crap and a good dose more logical thinking.

Re: using them isn't quite as straight forward

It is quite straight forward. The difficulty lies in remembering how stupid the average person is, and then remembering that half the population is dumber than that. Or bloodied minded about their stupidity.

If I have a bunch of stuff I normally go to a person manned aisle. If only a few I will take the self-checkout lane. The self-checkout is slow because the computer has to check each step of the process before allowing you to continue. So you can't throw an item in the bag and scan the next one before the system has had time to register the weight of the processed item. Clerks can do that because they are the check against theft. The other day I was at the store with my female roommate. She kept trying to scan things faster than the system would register the weight and got all flustered when the "unexpected item in bagging area" alarm went off. She just couldn't cope with being faster than the computer. She is mind you, a pretty good mechanical engineer and makes more at it than I do as a help desk tech.

Re: .. and so the stereotype continues. Sigh.

And how exactly do you know the previous AC was male? I've known some women who would openly make just that statement.

Re: no sex-related difference in the quality of engineering or design work among my colleagues

You wouldn't because you're already past the selector. The question isn't if there's a difference between them within the group of people who do the work, the question is whether they are being drawn from the original pool with equal probability.

The problem comes when you attempt to define "original pool" for purposes of the experiment. I would define the original pool as "those with the ability to do the work who also have an interest in doing it." If that population is 50/50 male female, the number of workers would be 50/50. If for some reason that breakdown was 20/80 in a fair worker selection the worker breakdown would also be 20/80. At this point the question becomes what is the "some reason" the population moves to 20/80? If the reason has to do with sexual discrimination, there is a problem. If the reason has nothing to do with sexual discrimination there isn't a problem. But the assumption whenever this issue arises is that there cannot be non-sexual discrimination reasons for a 20/80 split.

Apologies to the Alan Parsons Project...

And they think it will make their lives easier

For God knows up till now it's been hard

But the game never ends when your whole world depends

On the turn of a friendly tort

No the game never ends when your whole world depends

On the turn of a friendly tort

Re: bad idea, but nothing new

None of the three examples presented in this article have clear benefits to the USA. Which is a perfectly good reason to require precisely the sort of reporting being required by the proposal. NSF is already politicized, this is just an attempt to weed out some of the leftwing loons.

Re: kind of rigour that might impress policy makes

Guess you missed the bit where it said it was for EPI. Which means its the sort of dredges even the National Inquirer wouldn't see fit to print on this side of the pond. If you aren't familiar with the National Inquirer if you think of EPI as the equivalent of the Tobacco Institute, you'll be on the right wavelength.

Re: Better left to the authorities

right, like they were for Fast and Furious, or Waco, or Ruby Ridge, or that poor family in northeastern Pennsylvania that served years in prison for child sexual abuse before it turned out the kids had been coached by the DA.

In fact, in recent memory the only official I can think of who has been held accountable for his vigilante style rush to judgement was the DA in the Duke lacrosse case.

Re: Better left to the authorities

He wasn't killed as a result of this. Sadly he was dead long before the bombs went off. So there's no reason to go off on a similarly misguided vendetta.

That doesn't mean people shouldn't take caution after reading about this. Had he been alive he very well could have been killed over it. Or assuming he was clinically depressed, it might have been enough to cause him to commit suicide.

Re: dental records are your first port of call,

No, photographs are the first port of call, particularly given an active missing person investigation. Dental records need somewhere from which records can be pulled. Maybe the UK has a central db for dental records (although I doubt it), the US does not. That they had to go to the records means the body probably was badly decayed.

Re: don't think suicide would be considered foul play.

That was going to be my minor nit with his post.

Also, given what the family has been through, leaving it at "no foul play is suspected" would be showing a modicum of respect to his family if suicide were suspected. Their wounds have been rolled in enough salt already this week.

Re: There's a reason why we've set up institutions to handle this

In this day those institutions are as likely to engage in witch hunts as the crowd sourcers are. I'll take the crowd sourcers over the official institutions if for no other reason than the crowd sourcers are subject to public criticism and possible legal reprisals.

Re: I'm guessing a bug got in the way

That was my assumption as well. And I'll take it a step further. I'll bet the bug is with the bank code, not the Virgin processing. Because what we have here is one person making a huge hoopla about something that is bound to happen from time to time. If the bug were on the Virgin side, they'd be flooded with the issue.