Yup. Thanks for agreeing with me.

Just because people have urges to act like animals, doesn't mean we should. In fact we have rules and laws to keep us from giving into those urges. That was part of my point.

I suspect that you drew that one phrase from the larger context because you wanted to make the point that hunting and killing animals is bad, but rather you made the point that it is unnecessary because you prefer an honest tone instead of a belligerent one. I'd agree with you on both counts actually in most situations. Personally, I don't own a hunting gun (or bow) or hunt for sport because my environment (urban) doesn't make it a useful activity. But I add the qualifier "in most situations" because it isn't always true. You added the qualifier "most" as well and I suspect for the same reason.

The featured article is about the attempt to limit the damage of a non-native invasive species. In this particular instance, the only practical method of limiting the damage is to kill as many of the invasive animals as possible. I am not arguing that it is a good thing to kill them, but rather that in order to preserve the environment we treasure, it is an unfortunate necessity. I admit that I can see the appeal of hunting even if it isn't a strong appeal to me personally and therefore I can see how appealing to hunters to participate is a useful methodology.

I did grow up in a rural environment and was and remain exposed to many hunters. For many hunters, the actual kill is more of a proof of your skill as a hunter than a necessity, but it does provide the benefit of food for many of them. In trade for investments in time, getting a hunting license, requisite training and certification, and the necessary equipment, many of them provide a year's worth of meat for their families with their skills. I can also tell you from personal experience that the challenge of planning a hunt and the process of stalking is something that appeals to most of them. I actually managed to stalk within arms reach of a deer once, and it was thrilling. I had no desire or plan to kill anything because there was no benefit for me, yet the confirmation of my prowess and being able to see them so closely in the wild is one of my fonder memories.

That's a secondary point though. My first and hopefully less subtle point was that it is absurd to draw the conclusions or make the generalities found in the post I to which I was replying.

[Checked a mirror, yup, canines.]

I didn't choose, but I am an animal. By most definitions, yes, we are in fact animals. We have all the instincts of carnivores, an urge to stalk, an urge to hunt and yes, an urge to kill prey.

Now if I stalk around the house and pounce on things, my family looks at me a little funny because of society or whatever. But if I buy a permit and a bow and go after deer, that's totally acceptable.

If I'm wandering around the savanna in my PJs and get taken out by a pride of lions, then nobody is going to be blaming the lions, calling them gutless cowards, asking them how brave they're going to be when somebody kills them. They're lions, that's what they do and we're perfectly fine with that.

If anything, it's human hunters that are on the highroad here. We have rules about when and how we're allowed to kill other animals (and each other.) We're at the top of a food chain, and rather than just killing whatever we can, we restrict ourselves. I can't think of any other predator that does that. That's kind of an intelligent thing and telling a bunch of gun toting predators that they have to do things your way kind of takes guts.

So yeah, pretty much the opposite of everything you said. Wait, were you being deliberately ironic? It'd be funny if you'd included something that actually had ... well humor in it.

There is a bit of a difference and it is a significant one. Phone books don't have the content of today's news. I can go to Google and search for "Pizzeria news" and see headlines and brief news snippits. I can't do that with the phone book. If I want to get Pizzeria News using the phone book, I have to call my local newspaper company. Google cuts out the need to make that call for a lot of people.

Now there are some things that are fairly compared to phone books and some things that aren't but the news people have a complaint that isn't fairly addressed unless Google stops showing anything but a link to the news agency. (Which might be a fair and reasonable response actually.)

Still they news agencies absolutely could have set to not have Google spider and they choose not to because they don't want Google to stop. I think that sums up the real issue right there.

Sorry to reply to myself, but I should have included this:
It's Official: Western Europeans Have More Cars Per Person Than Americans

Interesting. I was with you up until you got to "just compare the European and Asian railroads to American ones" because you don't account for any of the drastically different environments or outcomes. Without some reference, it's a completely unreasonable comparison.

The US freight rail system is widely held as the best in the world and it seems like that should make it reasonable for us to ramp up passenger rail. So I looked into it. I'm still enamored with the idea of reliable and reasonable public transport, but my hopes have been somewhat dampened by the realities after I started reading on the subject.

Wanna read a little? Here are a couple articles that each cover good and bad.
 

• 
     
• What America can learn from Europe's high speed rail
     
• High speed rail great fro Europe but less so for the US
   

In the end, I actually find myself rooting against rail but not because I don't believe it could work. I root against it because the history I see of US pork barrel politics.

That code reminds me of... well mine. Sorry about that. Odds are it isn't actually mine, but there have been a few coding sessions where I was a little heavy on the Merlot and %s/originalvariable/whatimeannow/g. Once it runs and looks like the output is good, you sleep. When you revisit your code, generally much later, to fix something minor, you discover that the worst coder in the world has apparently been going through your elegant programs with a randomizer and a blindfold. Touch one thing and suddenly you're cursing that freak with a passion.

I've got one such project going right now and I think I'm in the third or fourth rewrite attempt since I gave up on fixing past-me's functional but fragile apparent attempt to win an obfuscated coding contest. I mean it looks like it makes sense but I keep running into these functions that don't look like they should be where they are and I have a fuzzy memory of putting them there and why, but when I try to do things the right way I get locked out of my firewall, kill my VPN or crash browsers. (Yes, you guessed it, manipulating iptables dynamically and I am indeed over my head sometimes.) Thankfully it is in what I'd call pre-pre-release state. If I had to maintain this stuff for a client right now, I'd be having a very bad week.

Budget! I can do it cheap too. It'll only cost about 40 million, 1 million for research and development to make a very realistic looking stargate, another 1 million to get the right magician involved and pay for his silence, a few thousand for a pig, a grinder and high powered pneumatic cannon, a couple million to ensure that 'davidwr' can be depended on to stay gone after the demo and the remainder to pay for my plastic surgery, new identity and personal lifetime vacation.

Talk about a challenge. I love these requests because you can pretty much talk about what it would take to develop solutions that are beyond current technology. (Some extravagant requests are doable with just an insane rather than the impossible budget this one will take.)

the time for getting messages between widely separated places on the planet.

You need to do it faster than 299,792,458 m/s? Okay, but we'll have to invest in some serious R&D. In 1998 Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever worked out a possible solution, but to have a good chance of solving it in our lifetime as a practical application will require a budget in the quadrillion range or at least a team of research engineers who are going to cost our company trillions to finance. Now's a good time too, because we can pick up the SSC as an exploratory tool at a discount. Can you get me that budget to work with, because I'd love to manage the project!

Thanks man.

If a few more people were interested in actually presenting facts, there might not be controversy in the first place.

Honestly I've been very reluctant to accept AGW. There are plenty of people of people I respect who are sure that it is exaggerated or completely false. I hear them recount their points over and over and each article or soundbite in favor of their perspective gets discussed with enthusiasm.

I've done my own research and found that most people who write in favor of AGW do so without actually checking the science. They tend to be an abusive and dismissive group. That doesn't actually persuade me that AGW is bogus, I'm willing to accept that truth can be supported by assholes, but it does make it hard to find information. It is a lot easier to find deniers using facts and referencing studies. Again, that doesn't convince me since plenty of whackjobs think they have reliable sources.

I've heard the Mars talking point plenty of times and recall some doubt after looking it up myself, but it would have been nice to see a link to information rather than abuse.

Would you take a mop out of the closet and scrub a floor at the office if you noticed it dirty?

Yes. If it needed done.

Do what needs done. Use your time wisely. If you manage both of those things, then you're doing more than most people.

On my first day, my boss, who is past retirement age and still keeps up with current technology, stopped to pick up trash from the floor. I noticed. It impressed the hell out of me and the lesson stuck. Here is a guy at the top of a company who still takes time to do what he can in any capacity to make sure that what needs done gets done, no matter how menial. Today he set up a workstation, not because it needed his personal time but because he likes to know how things are being done. He has staff that he depends on to manage setting up the workstations (and servers and manage contracts and interact with vendors and develop in house applications.) Still, he wants to learn how our images are working, what we build them with and what we have to set up on individual machines. He carries tremendous responsibility in the company and makes decisions that account for a large portion of the company budget. His mistakes cost us tremendous amounts of money and time and his good decisions save us tremendous time and money. This same guy takes time to fix a printer when he is at hand and it needs someone with only the most rudimentary mechanical skill. I've seen him study the bios on a PC when he has staff that he could assign to become experts. He makes it obvious that no task is too small or too menial to do if it needs doing.

We have different IT philosophies in some significant areas and he drives me absolutely crazy sometimes. Still, I respect somebody that does what needs done. Everybody respects the guy that does what needs done when it needs done. The majority of his time is spent managing, researching and reporting, but he makes time to learn new things and spends time on tasks he could assign somebody to assign somebody to do because he cares to know what is going on and why.

xTrashcat:

1. What is the average age of your workplace?
   We range from 18 to late 60s, average is probably 45.
2. How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology?
   I'd guess maybe 5% jump on learning new tech, 70% learn it with mild reluctance and 25% actively hate having to deal with it.
3. Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?
   I've worked in five IT environments. Every instance had some people who hated new tech and a rare few who embraced learning about it.

Your group doesn't sound special, it just sounds like the mentality is one of entrenchment against dealing with unnecessary new skills. It probably stems from a lack of reward in the past, but such views can be slowly won over with patience.

Do what needs doing. Learn about the new BIOS settings if that's what is called for. When you're of age to be "that old guy in IT" you can be like my boss, the guy who does what needs to be done.

Your explanation was good, but it didn't use a car metaphor so it kinda confused me. Now I feel obligated to offer one:

• I accept the premise that practically everyone needs transport sometimes
• The luxury sedan part of the Everyone Transported act sounds good
• The heated seats provision sounds good
• The GPS for all is great
• All car payments come with free gas is good
• I do NOT LIKE that my car payment tripled

Humm...

I'm against the act, but not because of the mandate/tax. I'm not against the provisions. The idea that health insurance and health care could use some legislative improvement is acceptable to me. I am against the idea that the only way to solve the problems is to force an entire nation to use one idea instead of letting 50 governments try solutions.

"I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
- Thomas Jefferson

"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."
- Thomas Jefferson

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and fearful master."
- George Washington

Really? Like Bing? (explicit.bing.net).

Where is it illegal to not block it?

Maybe the default should be what most people seem to prefer, or perhaps the one that causes the least customer loss. You know, instead of turning the default to the setting that gets you banned in schools?

Maybe you should split off potentially offensive content to a different sub-domain so it can be easily blocked by people want to block it and ignored by people who don't care.... like Bing does.

Ha! Ha. ... no wait, that makes more sense than I expected.

Why do we need an OS that is installed? I've used Ubuntu, CentOS, Slax and other live CDs and been impressed with how well they do what I want. With Novell Suse Studio I could build my own Customized OS which isn't ever installed on the computer. I already store all my important data on a pair of external USB drives, but I'd rather have my main hard drive handle the job. If I didn't have to worry about installing the OS, I could boot every time to the same system until I wanted an update and just burn a new CD or update the usb stick I boot from.

I heard a Staples guy talk about how he was doing exactly that sort of thing and it bugs me. I've never been able to get an OS on a stick to meet my demands, but I should be able to. In the future, I'd love to see computers sold with "and here is your OS stick, it comes with Window 9, Ubuntu, PC-BSD and Mac Alleycat but you can update those or come back and get an updated version anytime you like for $99."

I thought of that flaw and as an experienced programmer, I would have prompted the user to re-enter and then verify again the entered password. I didn't add that to my comment because it was already suffering from "too long, didn't read" syndrome.

Your solution of expiring the password immediately could be bad, very bad. Instead of having a few callers per day complaining about the problem, you would instantly have hundreds and maybe thousands of additional callers.

That is a simplification though, If you were my boss and said "no, I don't like it, I want them to have to enter a new password" then I would have done it differently. I would have built in a graduated delay so that on day 1, all usernames beginning with the letter 'A' were prompted for a new password, with 'B' on day 2 and so on. If I felt like a month of higher call volume would exceed the metrics of the call center, I would have switched it to 'A[A-M]' and so on.

Your concern is valid, but you are showing exactly the limited foresight that young and inexpensive programmers are dangerous for. Granted, had I been willing to add a few more words to my explanation, you might not have made that error, but a wise programmer wouldn't have made it in the first place.

Don't think that my criticism of your solution is a critique of your intelligence however. I consider myself to be an intelligent person and ten years ago, I would have made the same mistake.