I have not been to the US since the introduction of its id/facist-checkpoint/visa requirements. In the past I have skied there for months, always enjoyed it there, and it is an easy stopover for me. US travel no more for me!
I have also travelled to Rio - and it is the only place I have ever been mugged - but I would still go back. Hopefully they can clean up the pestulent beaches where the sea is loaded with desease...
Spatial cognition has been shown to be culturally variable
I love the example given in Language and Cognition: Investigating the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis:
'Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms â" north, south, east, and west â" to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."'
That being said writing a performance filesystem for Windows is much less easy than for Linux.
I have often wondered why there is not an XP replacement filesystem for consumers with better performance characteristics. XP degrades over time and one of the causes appears to be file access speeds degrading over time (it happens on XP systems without viruses or cruft).
Perhaps there is too much "noise" on the internet spamming optimising systems, so a working system can't get known? But perhaps a well known brandname could do it? Or is it due to non-file-system causes like registry-cruft and patch-cruft?
Iceland is a close-knit society. The anger there is fueled by a sense of betrayal that people from big heterogeneous countries can't fully appreciate.
New Zealand is also a small country and the fact that we all know each helps keep everyone honest. Many of us are only one or two steps removed from anyone in power, so abuses of power seem to be kept under control. Rich politicians can't deny poverty, because usually there are multiple people in their extended family getting welfare support.
I think the fraudsters will be dealt with - because in Iceland people can actually personally do something to affect the fraudsters - unlike a larger country where action is usually impotent.
Me thinking well of my skill makes me incompetent.
you said it - not me.
Speed doesn't lead to greater accidents, speed differentials do.
Sounds like you work in financial markets
You most probably think you are a better driver than average: "Swenson (1981) surveyed students the US, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, almost all of the US sample (93%) put themselves in the top 50%. For safety, 88% put themselves in the top 50%."
perfectly safe
: Higher speed limit leads to deaths and declining accident rates are due to safer cars.
Although it is shame it is hard to find cost/benefit analyses of fatalities versus value of time - in the limit we should make the speed limit zero and reduce fatalities to zero... US speed limit increases fatalities
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PS: I have seen plenty of near misses caused by hurried drivers avoiding slow drivers.
PPS: I really loath slow drivers.
PPPS: I agree 100% driving is a pleasure when everyone is driving the same speed. e.g. in Queensland tight controls on speeding made my tourist driving very pleasant on single and dual carriageways since everone drove at very similar speeds close to the limit. However I despise speeding tickets personally. I found conflicting statistics about whether the tight speed controls in Oz actually saves lives though.
From page 43 (table 4b) of government Road casualties Great Britain 2007" report:
Read into that what you will, but two orders of magnitude requires some good explanations.
it's a whole lot more risk than my WRX going 10 (or 25) over
Insurance-premium divided by car value is an extremely good metric for risk. Insurance companies use various proxies to increase premiums for those who speed. WRX's have a higher premium than a small bus.
That is to say, you are wrong for the average WRX driver, or the average speeder.
Plenty of programming requires virtually no understanding of the metal. When you program SQL statements, you change your memory allocation patterns, use pointer foo, and use gdb to help?
Assembler skills do not help with Javascript DOM programming. I use tools to help detect memory leaks (in the browser) and performance issues (unpredictable shit - not simple O(n2) problems), and the techniques for avoiding or fixing problems bear no relation to machine code. I do have some basis for my opinions: I started with basic and assembler, and my first job was doing embedded development where knowledge of the internals did matter.
You are presuming that teaching shitty programmers Assembly will teach them to be good programmers. More likely you are a good Assembler programmer, so reflectively assume that "good" programmers must know assembler.
Why would you want to limit a new learner to the languages of your own time? Your learning trajectory (similar to my own) is dependent upon what was the best available to you at the time. The best languages available now, with active communities and good ecologies, are generally not languages we had available as beginners.
A new programmer should be encouraged to follow their own interests and select languages suitable for those interests e.g. PHP, Ruby or django are all fine choices for beginning web server programming. Caveat: I would be more careful about the initial language if you think the new programmer will stick with the first language they learn -- I have seen that trait in 2 out of the 3 best programmers I personally know (sticking with one language ecology and learning it backwards is at odds with the stereotypical "eclectic" guru programmer - perhaps I just haven't met the right sort of guru programmer.)
If helping someone learn a language, perhaps go with a language you do not know in a domain you are unfamiliar with e.g. helping with C on an Arduino if you are a PHP web programmer. Exploration and discovery are critical. A beginner can be motivated by learning to do something better than their teacher (constantly being told what you could improve can de-motivate).
Scientists will study your brain to learn more about your distant cousin, Man.
