VladRussian2

> Whether or not non-human animals can "talk" depends,

there is at least one animal that we know is able to talk, at least in our definition of "talk" - this animal is humans, so the Evolution did produce a talking animal.

>I don't see why it's a paradox. Lots of things would offer fitness - why can't all animals talk? Why can't plants move? Surely these things would offer greater Darwinian fitness.

this is why we have live organisms that able to move - it is called animals, and we have animals that can talk, and we'll possibly have [some milleniums later] animals that are able to efficiently transfer memory through DNA (possibly after these animals become able to calculate and select what memories they'd like to encode into their own DNAs and what of these memories they want to transfer to the offsprings)... Evolution isn't finished as of today, it is possibly only starting :)

employees working harder/better is just like an engine running more powerful/faster. It is not necessarily translates into business/project success, ie. the question is what this engine attached to, where the car (if it is a car) is being driven to or may be it is just a snowplow moving snow from one place to another and back, until sun shines and snow melts away :)

yes, segregation-by-law doesn't exist anymore in the USA (personal preferences of police officers in LA aside), yet there is a phenomenon of poor black and hispanic kids in Oakland going to school which is predominantly attended only by other poor black and hispanic kids. Segregation-by-de-facto-conditions-of-life?

>Yes, this is a "map of America's racial distribution". Calling it a "map of America's racial segregation" means someone is pushing a political agenda.

isn't racial segregation is a very significantly skewed racial distribution?

>This doesn't mean that there is no race-based component in deciding where to live. It just means that, as the Schelling model demonstrates, you can't tell how much there is by looking at how much clustering there is on a map.

you very well described why race may be not a direct (or a reliably traceable at all) cause of observed segregation. And i'd agree that claiming strong causation here would require more strong arguments than just a map which to me clearly shows correlation.

>This will not let you install privileged apps though since they have to be reviewed.

so even Firefox OS is a walled garden? Telcos controlled what can be on your phone, Apple was able to wrestle them and overtake that control - control means money. Google follows the suit, forcing their in-app billing etc... Why would Mozilla support that ugly ancient "tradition"?

>It seems to consist mostly of accusations of guilt by association

your TL;DR doesn't match the article, seems you didn't read to the point there Stratfor docs mentioned.

In Polygraph we trust.

Btw, "spying on love interest", pardon my English, isn't it just a PC expression for "stalking"?

q: How to tell when politician is lying?

a: His lips are moving.

Btw, "Financier" is a fascinating read and should be just used a main textbook for "Civics" class in schools on how the system works. I like this double-whammy :

"... Grund had been about, years before, purchasing through one or two brokers large amounts of the various kinds of Texas debt certificates and bonds. The Republic of Texas, in its struggle for independence from Mexico, had issued bonds and certificates in great variety, amounting in value to ten or fifteen million dollars. Later, in connection with the scheme to make Texas a State of the Union, a bill was passed providing a contribution on the part of the United States of five million dollars, to be applied to the extinguishment of this old debt. Grund knew of this, and also of the fact that some of this debt, owing to the peculiar conditions of issue, was to be paid in full, while other portions were to be scaled down, and there was to be a false or pre-arranged failure to pass the bill at one session in order to frighten off the outsiders who might have heard and begun to buy the old certificates for profit. ..."

i think there is a whole big unexplored story with the "black" ... err ..."Special Source Operations" money what NSA pays to Google/FB/etc... for their services in secret programs like PRISM - for example how the companies "launder" the money so they can be reported [to SEC, etc...] as part of the "white" revenue. Or may be this money not reported? Special secret exception in special secret GAAP/SEC rules? "excluding special one-time non-GAAP items and secret revenue from NSA our earnings is ..." :)

For example, government agencies buying "likes" from FB - seems like a perfect way to pay for PRISM participation using kosher looking transactions.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/02/omg_state...

>very, very impressive, but it does make one wonder a little about the person who has done it.

it has deep roots in the psyche of my old country:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Cross-eyed_Lefty_fr...

>One can only imagine what he could have done with a modern computer.

The historical anecdote my thesis advisor was telling about origins of his (i mean founded by him) branch of the science was along the lines "Americans had computers and could get good numerical solutions, while we didn't have computers and thus were forced to work on analytical solution". Well, that analytical solution he produced happened to be a great insight into the problem space and still continues to be the key tool for the research in that area almost 60 years later.

putting second heart into a dog may look like some transplant experimentation. Butchering and sewing 2 dogs together - nope, it is 1959, it is for the "wow" effect in the show of "the Soviet science under the wise leadership of the Communist Party is the most advanced science in the world". No wonder that they freely let the LIFE journalists in.

this ability of humans to perpetrate horrendous things under the guise and in the name of the greater good.

it is called gravitational wave. The GGP strangely didn't mention it. The gravitational wave is a strange creature as it is a disturbance of space-time, thus question of its speed, distance by time, becomes a bit murky - like what distance? what time? - depending on how you answer the questions (and don't forget, talking about astronomical scales we start to face astronomical factors like noticeable spacetime expansion) - you get corresponding result.

>>"fall if you are dropped" is just being continuously emitted by the Earth, including before the object was dropped.

it is gravitational field of Earth. If Earth were to move with acceleration (as any movement without acceleration is as good as not moving at all by suitable choice of coordinates) the object would start to fall toward previous "retarded" location of the Earth, until the gravitational wave caused by the accelerated move of Earth "updates" the gravitational field at the position of the object.

>The question becomes what if the object moves - how long does it take to notice the new location of the gravity.

a moving object gets instantaneous value of gravitational field at its new position (while this value may be already "obsolete" like in the above mentioned accelerated movement of Earth)

from your descriptions it sounds pretty much like my situation.

>I actually find that I work quite well under high-stress and high-stakes work environments

not getting the stress and being able to manage it is 2 different things. Couple jobs ago we had real clients with real problems, and it happened pretty naturally that i became the top "firefighter" that is brought in when support, escalated support, services/solutions, related development, etc.. exhausted their options and various executives on both sides are having sparks out their tailpipes - one may call this a high-stress and high-stakes environment, yet i just wasn't getting any stress, to me it was a simple 2 step algorithm : 1. forward me your AWR report (and this is instructions on getting it) 2. this is your root cause, config changes, emergency patch, etc... Simple, familiar, no stress (which i can't manage as i just get paralized/stuporred by it, like, in particular, in many interview situations)

droning at a BigCo. with guys we go some way back.

>I realize that it can be hard to understand without having experienced interview anxiety yourself, but it is an entirely different environment.

my point isn't about denying interview anxiety existence (i suffer from it myself), and it has solid science foundation - speed of dopamine removal once your system is flushed with it. Some people have it faster, some slower. The former ones are great performers in acute short-term stress, while the latter ones are better at long/deep concentration on a task.

My point is about interview situation being preview to a lot [not all, yet a lot and many of them will be key ones] of future situations.

>Programming interviews seem incredibly confrontational compared to my current profession. Interviewers seem to be out to trick you at something, or else to prove how much smarter they are than you.

well, welcome to software engineering. The interviews are for the reason, they let you peek into your future job. If you can't manage that environment for 4 hours of the interviews, how you're expecting to manage it for many years if/when you get into software engineering?

I'm not trying to be mean, i'm just warning that something like having a fresh out-of-college arrogant Millenial reviewing your code means - well suffice it to say that at my previous job it drove 6 out of 8 person team in 1 year, all from mid to senior engineers, me being 7th, to either change the team (3) or leave the company (4). The guy is a pest, smart, driven, high GPA from top University...

>filtering out a portion of the highest quality candidates

if you're not able to easily spot such a candidate without attempting to make him/her to jump through the gimmicks (brainteasers, contract-to-hire, etc..) - well, it indicates the issue with your company and hiring practices in particular are deeper than just what gimmicks to apply.

>No, this is the Armed Forces code of conduct.

now that you mentioned it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_United_States_Fight...

....

b. Your obligations as a U.S. citizen and a member of the armed forces result from the traditional values that underlie the American experience as a nation. These values are best expressed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which you have sworn to uphold and defend. You would have these obligations—our country, your service and unit and your fellow Americans—even if the Code of Conduct had never been formulated as a high standard of general behavior.

...

> three different hiring committees.

Hiring by committee :)

They wield and apply real force [in the wide sense - from crude violence to making citizens pay taxes, etc..] to the real people outside. The only known practical approach here the human race has so far come up with is to have their application of force be a subject to the strictest formal control possible. Unfortunately, we see erosion of such control, and unfortunately there is no reversal of the trend on the horizon...

Watching "Battlestar Galactica", 3rd season beginning. Cylons trying to live peacefully with humans they occupied on New Caprica. "Either we increase control or we lose control" ...

one can only guess what Airbus sales reps talk about in private with their potential clients :)

>I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs.

just look at the recent 100 years of human history - good and smart people can perpetrate awful things if they suitably organized and informed. "Just doing my job", "just carrying out the orders", etc... In 21st century in the world's most progressive country, government employees and contractors were torturing other people just because some government lawyer wrote a memo saying it is a good thing.

in some way it is the key to understanding the situation - the government people live in another world, and things look differently from their perspective. Like it is not a useful reporting and public debate about government's abuse of power, it is a fun some pests have at the government expense. It is a reality distortion field of Power.

>Seemly the merging of a traditional patriarchal culture

which wasn't a piece of cake either, reminded me about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoolan_Devi

>"Salary and equity are non-negotiable" ...

>You should be allowed to negotiate as a savvy prospective employee.

that was the negotiation. The author took "being a part of that revolution" in lieu of money.

>By the same accord, without titles, buzzwords, etc as an engineer I won't be able to differentiate between resumes of a regular graduate level physics educator and one who is capable of nobel prize level research.

if you're in the position to make a hiring decision and can't make such differentiation - well, yep, that is what we have in software engineering. In physics the situation seems to be a bit (though not much) better, in part because of CVs, in part because the network is smaller.

>Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the decline of Sun Microsystems?

all the wood led by deadwood behind one arrow ... this arrow ... now this arrow ... no, this arrow that has just been renamed to the name of that arrow ... of course it is an arrow, it just looks like a deadwood onshore washed tree trunk and weights like it, and flies like it, well, that of course if somebody can make it fly ...