lusr

In there, meditation is a structured way to develop awareness (mindfulness) of your subconscious thought processes and beliefs (which determine your day-to-day activities and your overall path in life, but which few people consciously monitor).

If you are a particularly introspective person, or have worked with CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), the concepts will seem quite familiar albeit presented from a different angle.

Something that doesn't sit well with me: how sustainable is this business model? How often can you find crates of records for $2,000 that sell for $10,000? How much time does it take you to locate those crates? How long before your folks get mad about their lawn being trampled during these sales, and the neighbours get miffed having 300-odd people clogging up the streets? What are your opportunity costs?

In short, while this article clearly proves that Facebook ads are viable as profitable sources of lead generation, since this seems like such an occasional-hit scenario I'm still not totally sold on whether they are as suitable for sustainable long-term enterprise (I'm extremely curious as to how many people will attend a 2nd event? 3rd?).

This is particularly relevant if you're wondering what Facebook's long-term revenue growth will look like (how much of their present revenue can be attributed to businesses trying Facebook out? How many of these businesses will find repeat business with Facebook to be profitable?)

I'm puzzled by Feynman's attitude in those comments - he doesn't discuss the prize money at all, which one can easily see e.g. funding a number of students who might otherwise not be able to afford the type of education he received and thereby not receive the type of pleasure he speaks of.

3840x2400. I paid the equivalent of 1800 USD to buy, insure and import two IBM T221s in very good condition into South Africa about a year ago. They're pretty interesting displays and quite complex to get up and running optimally even on modern hardware.

My buddy imported 3 others along with mine. All 5 displays have a strange blue glow exactly in the centre of the screen when the screen is displaying pure black. It's completely unnoticeable except when you know what to look for. One of the displays needs a 60mm fan replaced -- each monitor comes with two such fans, and the display is rated at 150W power consumption. Seems to keep the room quite warm :)

If you want to run just one at 3840x2400 @ 48Hz you have to spend extra for another set of cables and have a graphics card with 4 DVI ports (good luck with that), or order some of the newer specialist cables that allow you to get away with a pair of dual-link DVI ports. Your graphics card needs to support a Single Large Surface mode to present the virtual panels (4x1920x1200 or 3x1280x2400) as a single high resolution panel (3840x2400).

Furthermore, if you're working with animations (video, games), whichever graphics card you get needs to support frame lock across the display ports otherwise you will experience tearing across the virtual panels. I believe NVIDIA only supports this in their higher end workstation graphics cards, or across multiple cards in SLI. For this reason I went with ATI's Eyefinity on a Radeon 6750/6770.

Working with photos from my DSLR at full resolution on these two monitors is well worth it though :) (That being said, Windows application support for high DPI is unfortunately a bit pathetic.)

But sending her away makes no sense either. Why not ask her to wait outside, ensure the rest of the class finds their way, then attempt to find somebody with suitable authority to allow her in?

There's no point arguing with a security guard past a certain point; they simply do not have authority you're seeking.

However, even if you spend the entire session trying to find somebody and don't succeed, at least the student will respect and appreciate your effort and won't feel alone in her plight.

While I personally don't see the point in spending my time learning design skills, this is because my current goal is to move away from doing the work myself to managing others doing the work.

Assuming your statement that only some people have artistic skills is correct, and even assuming the proportion is very low for the statement to be interesting, you're still making an assumption that people with artistic skills and sensibilities are always aware of them. What does e.g. a 22 year old "programmer" have to lose trying their hand at a new skill? They may discover a passion or talent they never realised they had and your advice would see them miss this opportunity.

The only conspiracy I do see in that write-up consists of sensationalist self-proclaimed experts, scientifically illiterate pundits and talking heads providing an illusion of controversy where none exists so that people like you tune in to their message and generate ad revenues and fat bonus pay-checks.

Honestly which do you believe is more likely - a vast global conspiracy of climatologists are swindling the public, people who have to publish models and/or data to support their claims, with all it taking is one honest scientist to expose them as frauds (withholding data as you point out does happen, but this affects the support their claims receive)... or a bunch of charismatic talking heads with zero science education or interest are hyping things up because they know, as an absolute and incontrovertible fact, that doing so generates revenue, votes, etc. from the conspiracy crowd?

I doubt all scientists are honest, but the proportion of scientists that are honest vs. the proportion of talking heads that are honest makes it pretty obvious where to look for a real conspiracy. It takes one scientist to expose a fraud definitively, but no amount of evidence seems to persuade a talking head to shut up as long as there's enough conspiracy theorists paying their salary and their master's profits.

Where is the problem? There is an implicit, and idealistic, assumption here that science is flawed because the implementation scientists have is less than perfect and new ideas are not accepted instantly - despite there being very good reasons for this, and, in the long run, all of this working perfectly well to advance human knowledge.

> Science is the scientists.

> Science has hierarchies...

No, scientists have human flaws which lead to biases, hierarchies, etc. Science, as a method for discovering the truth about our world, works very well in the big scheme of things and the reverence for it is absolutely well deserved.

Whether it's true or not that older scientists sometimes have to die off before new scientists following more fruitful paths can have proper attention is a human concern; the fact is that the scientific method is ultimately very successful and the parent is quite correct in observing that the only issue here is conflating science and scientists with unfair expectations.

We build a set of beliefs and act them out. Emotions are the feedback mechanism we use to determine whether the beliefs are serving us well enough to reach our goals. Many people stop there, I agree.

Higher-level individuals capable of greater introspection are aware that their initial belief system, as a child, was largely programmed by parents, relatives, friends, etc. These people monitor their beliefs and adjust them appropriately (e.g. getting angry about somebody not acting the way I'd like them to is pointless, so I'm going to change my belief), or they adjust the world (e.g. scientists researching medicines, engineers building things or software etc.)

EDIT To do so without taking advantage of our emotional processing subsystems would be very exhausting and tiring. I think it's also impossible to escape this characteristic of your humanity; you can learn to suppress your emotions but then you run the risk of not dealing with the cognitive dissonance that caused them in the first place, and this is very dangerous because in effect you are suppressing reality and disconnecting yourself from the world (I'm guessing this is a similar process to how people like the Unabomber create their dangerous belief systems - by ignoring reality they don't like).

I think the problem is not emotions -- the problem is the lack of awareness people have for the role emotions play in our lives, and their options for responding to the emotions (emotions are not facts because beliefs are not facts, yet the vast majority of people act on the basis of their emotions being facts about reality).

Negative emotions are fundamentally indicators of a cognitive dissonance and are absolutely invaluable in maintaining a healthy system of introspection. Your profile shows you're also a programmer so here's an analogy I use internally: negative emotions are part of a monitoring system built into our brains that inform us when an assumption in our set of operating beliefs (our personality source code) has been violated. (You get angry when your beliefs about 'fairness' are violated, you feel disappointment when your beliefs about e.g. 'relationships' are violated, etc.)

Positive emotions fulfil a similar role, in the opposite direction by reinforcing the value of the beliefs you've created, although negative emotions are more interesting because your response to the emotion can be extrospective ("I feel angry because that guy cut me off on the road and that violates my beliefs about fairness; I'm getting out my tire iron and teaching him the right way to do things") or they can be introspectively rational, controlled and empowering ("Should I revisit my beliefs about fairness to be more in tune with reality, where people make mistakes?"). People with dysfunctional belief systems and rigid attitudes towards their beliefs are prone to depression (i.e. their belief systems do not serve them well given reality, either through distortion or inadapation).

From an evolutionary perspective, I suspect extrospective analysis was more useful ("I'm angry because the other ape has stolen my lunch, and resources are scarce, so I'm going to punch him in the face"), which explains our default, instinctive "emotional" response to emotions, but as civilization develops and the rules change, introspective responses (which encourage co-operation) are more useful (but more fraught with dangers such as depression, which is a kind of reinforcement feedback loop of negative emotional states, beliefs and poor assumptions). Nevertheless, the high value of emotions remains present.

If anybody reading this finds this personal philosophy interesting, I highly recommend reading David Burns' "Feeling Good" for an exhaustive listing/discussion of emotional states and responses, and constructive ways of dealing with these experiences.

The article states that, according to the Secret Service, 78% of these school shooters are NOT cold, empty, detached (which would describe socio/psychopaths). Instead, they are severely depressed individuals.

If you haven't ever been severely depressed (I have) it's probably quite difficult to understand, but these are people whose minds are completely, utterly, passionately and absolutely wound up inside, anxious and stressed about perceived incurable flaws in their character and the apparently unresolvable frustration, despair, resentment and anger those beliefs generate towards themselves - and in these very sad cases, towards others.

On the outside they can appear completely normal and even happy (I went to great lengths to hide my inner turmoil during my depression); don't mistake that for what is going on on the inside. "Depression", sadly, is a dirty word in society.

Unfortunately this feeds into and reinforces the exact set of dysfunctional beliefs that drive the severely depressed individual towards, and sometimes over, the edge. Imagine feeling like a broken human, only to have society reinforce that depression means you're broken; it creates a secondary, even more powerful disturbance in your mind. This causes the depressed to withdraw even further, which is even worse for a depressed individual (notice how all of these people withdraw from normal activities before the shootings), and pretty much guarantees a horrible end.

Are there DBMSs where this doesn't happen?

I just did a SELECT COUNT(*) on a table here in our QA environment; 20.5 seconds to count 42385875 records from one table and 68.8 seconds to count 191906711 records from another table (Oracle 10g 64-bit).

Ultimately the original poster is objectively correct in stating that anybody who, in a position of absolute and complete financial independence, chooses not to spend more time with their children makes a very public statement about their priorities. You only have a fixed amount of time in life, and a fixed amount of time to spend with your children. It simply is not possible to be CEO of Yahoo without compromising on the time you spend with your children.

Whether or not it will have a measurable effect on the development of her relationship with her children, or their future personalities, is a matter for personal opinion.

In the .NET world, for all the database adapters I've used (MSSQL, SQLCE, Oracle, MDB), individual statements are implicitly wrapped in transactions when no explicit transaction has been specified - not sessions/connections.

I agree the "implicit transaction per session/connection" design is confusing and likely to result in bugs. While the standard .NET approach limits bugs, the downside is poorer performance when an unaware developer uses numerous implicit transactions for multiple statements where a single explicit transaction would suffice.

Experts in the area appear to recommend always using explicitly managing transactions (e.g. http://ayende.com/blog/3775/nh-prof-alerts-use-of-implicit-t... ), and this is the approach I follow in my own work now.

In other words, nobody can enforce a clause preventing a programmer from programming for company B after leaving company A purely on the basis of restricting competition.

They may have a case if e.g. company B contracted company A to do some work and then bought out company A's programmer (e.g. to save money), but only if the contract between company A and the programmer in question has a restraint specifically penalizing this scenario.

(Even then, it doesn't mean companies will choose to enforce the contract. I've worked for companies where the restraint was between the companies A and B, and in the interest of preserving business relationships, company A decided not to pursue their legal right to recourse when company B poached an employee from A; the employee did not break conditions of their employment with A as the restraint was between their companies.)

Can you give any good reason why you need to leave transactions open for extended periods? In my experience, it only happens when the developer in question does not understand the semantics of the DBMS and therefore hasn't suitably designed their solution, in which case it's hardly the DBMS's fault when things go wrong.

I've rewritten plenty of code that "needed" a transaction to be open for a long time into code requiring a transaction for a few milliseconds (e.g. in a bulk import, parsing, caching lookups and reference data outside the transaction, building an XML document to supply into a SP as a parameter which only used a transaction for a single INSERT from the XML).

Consider opening up flight itineraries to the public for certain contests if you're trying to gain as much as possible from this sort of public exposure? (Even if that means paying the original contest creator back their $500, that's nothing given the future business you'll generate. Right now this link simply can't spread until more information is visible.)