Comment Re:Only a metaphor, but... (Score 1) 392
Sometimes, the Tao can be found through its absence.
Sometimes, the Tao can be found through its absence.
Shock and confusion caused by roundabouts is great, because it means people will actually pay attention to what the other cars are doing when they go through, for a change.
Oh look, it's the "language evolves" horse shit again.
Language also devolves. People using the language incorrectly is detrimental the core purpose of the language (communication), and thus detrimental to the language itself.
Yes, because 20,000 years ago we all spoke the one pure language that perfectly described everything and since that fell apart the world has gone to shit.
You can thank the NSA for stopping this wanton criminal before he can enter the US.
Traffic stops are one of the most dangerous activities that the police engage in on a regular basis. It's very easy to get hit by traffic, and you don't know who the person in the car is. They might just as well decide to pull a gun on you and when you try to put a little distance between you, you get hit by the truck in the next lane.
Why do you assume people won't take care of their basic needs on their own? Requiring that a certain amount of money be dedicated to those needs just means that there's no incentive for thrift, because savings mean wasted money.
Package routing is just the same as network package routing. I can't directly send a packet to the office next door just because they're nearby... it has to follow the various routing paths I have available, and the physical packages are routed similarly. Also, you don't expect the truck delivering a bunch of packages to dallas to stop at your house just for a sec to deliver your package, do you?
It also requires that you live someplace suitably dense for it to be cost effective. Policy aside, this is easier in Europe because the continent is much more densely populated than the US.
The problem with this argument is that most of these are really just one example, because they are already known to be descended from a common source. In order to determine a true relationship, you have to go back to the earliest form of a word known, and you have to demonstrate that the relationship is not a coincidence. Namely, that you can see other examples of the same sound change in the two languages, and that neither language borrowed the word from the other or a third source.
The problem with going back earlier than proto indo-european is that PIE is a reconstructed language based on the earliest attestations we have from various Indo-European languages, like Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Hittite, and Latin. This means that any PIE word you are using to build a relation to another linguistic group is a reconstruction which 1) we may not know how to pronounce correctly in the first place and 2) may not have been reconstructed correctly.
Another issue with Chomsky's work is that his universals are based on the assumption that children can't possibly hear enough language and enough varied forms to reconstruct the language in their mind without access to linguistic universals. This is the 'poverty of stimulus' argument. The only problem is that it's been demonstrated to be false, now that children can be recorded 24/7.
To continue the analogy, it's saying that every processor performs several functions, and that it can excel in some and be deficient in others. Kind of like adding the math co-processor to your 386.
That's because Apple has already gotten all the lemmings on board.
Anyone who buys a futures contract using bitcoin is an idiot or a scam artist. No one who is actually hedging risk is going to use bitcoin to do it so all that is left is speculators. Speculating in futures contracts is highly risky even without adding an additional level of exchange rate risk in using bitcoins. Furthermore, I'm rather doubtful that if you purchased a futures contract through this "market" that you could actually take delivery of the products that underlie the contract.
I must respecfully disagree. This futures market is a great thing, because it allows you to hedge against wild fluctutation in the value of bitcoins with a known commodity, which is probably the only reason you'd want to invest in it.
A lot of the original migration to Appalachia and westward from there came out of Scotland, apparently, so it's not suprising that a Scottish regional dialect attribute would carry over into the local speech in areas which they settled.
It's from the '80s, but David Hackett Fisher's book Albion's Seed is a fascinating examination of waves of early immigration to America and the regional variation that sprung from it.
This sort of thing looks crazy when you are not part of the desicion making process, for example I knew an executive who got hauled over the coals for saving the company $4.5M, his problem was that the original estimate was $9M so he had "unecassarlily tied up" half of that money for a year. I still don't fully understand why this pissed off the bean-counters but it did. The wisdom in these situations is to accept most people are NOT idiots in their own job and that there is a valid reason for their behaviour that you are simply unaware of. In other words don't run around telling people how to suck eggs (unless it's your job to train egg suckers), just ask them (in a non-critical manner) why they took the desicion they did, at least one of you will learn something.
In this particular example, the bean counters are pissed because they have a certain funds to allocate over the coming year, and they want to see a return on investment on all those funds. By being 50% under budget, that means that $4.5 million which could have been allocated to another project, business development, or some other investment instead sat in the bank or other short-term market and did effectively nothing for the company over that time.
The answer to this is not to then spend the rest of the funds to make up the difference, but to budget more accurately in the first place. Unfortunately, that's not the lesson that gets taken away from it, resulting in massive spending sprees to match the budget near the end of the fiscal year in far too many situations.
MESSAGE ACKNOWLEDGED -- The Pershing II missiles have been launched.