mattw
I've been roasting coffee stovetop for about a year. Takes me about 10 minutes to roast 12 ounces, the result is great, and it only ends up costing about $1/lb more than what I used to pay for roasted beans at Costco. If you like coffee at all, I highly recommend giving it a try!
In fairness, after manually resolving the problem with removing gitosis and cleaning up a couple of other half-upgraded things, the upgrade process did recover and finish successfully, but it certainly wasn't painless.
I've heard that a lot of rules have changed as well, but I don't know how much changed after I got the last one. Some changes definitely affected me at that time, but the hassle in my case was related to the fact that I was buying another house before selling the current one so I need to hold two mortgages simultaneously. Required more documentation of cash in the bank due to debt/income ratio.
Ironically, once around 2007 while trying to take advantage of a 10% off deal from a home improvement store on a big purchase, I got turned down for their line of credit due to lack of history. (Glad it happened that way in retrospect.) But mortgage companies have never given me trouble.
Maybe I'm lucky. (I'm not independently wealthy.) Mortgage companies are inscrutable. :)
Maybe I'm just lucky, but in my opinion, wanting a good credit score is a pretty bad reason to get a credit card.
Not being a moral relativist, I naturally disagree with the idea that such a society is desirable or that ethics in that case are even meaningful at all. :) Which is one of the things that disturbs me about the idea of an action being ethical just because it's defined in a contract.
This is one of the arguments I've seen that doesn't sit well with me. How is this different from saying that it's ethical to steal money from a convenience store, because I'm willing to go to prison for it? After all, jail time is the pre-negotiated outcome for thieves, and I might decide I'd rather have the money and do the jail time rather than refraining from stealing in the first place.
Apart from one being in the criminal realm and the other in the civil, what's the difference? Or is that the difference that justifies the one and not the other? (Why?)
Regarding speeding: that's a good example. Yes, it seems they're held to a lower standard. However, it's not that clear-cut. The problem with handing out a speeding ticket is that you're introducing an awkward dynamic into the relationship you have with a person who may literally be responsible for your life on an upcoming shift. The counterpoint is that they started the awkwardness by speeding in the first place and should be held accountable. I see both sides - in many cases when you have a close relationship like that a talk is more effective than a ticket anyway. I agree that they should follow the speed limit just like everyone else, but I can understand why an officer would hesitate to hand out a ticket over it. It's the "would you give a speeding ticket to your mother" dilemma. Maybe you would, but probably a talk would be more effective ("You're putting me in a bad position here"), and if someone has no compunction about it at all about handing out tickets to their mother, maybe they've got a messed-up relationship with her in the first place.
Regarding stops: in Washington, at least, an officer can't stop you without "reasonable suspicion", which is a legal term with a specific definition, or actually witnessing a violation. If he does stop you for "no reason", it's grounds for throwing out any ticket or conviction that arises from the stop. (Incidentally, this is where a lot of drug cases get challenged - based on the grounds of the traffic stop where the drugs were discovered.)
Regarding the rest: you have to understand, these people work in an entirely different world. Every person they come into contact with is a potential threat to their life, because you never know whether this guy you just pulled over is actually a felon having a bad day wanting to take it out on you, or whether the cell phone is actually a zipgun (indistinguishable from the outside), or whether this guy with a cell phone is calling some gang buddies to come help him out, or warning off somebody, etc. This does not excuse actual abuses of authority in any way. However, of course we have to be more accommodating to them than they are to us. If they were as accommodating to all the people they deal with day in and day out, they'd either be ineffective or dead.
(Note that, going back to the original topic, I still agree that recording officers should certainly not be an offense in and of itself. That's an "accommodation" that should be made whenever possible.)
As for the higher standard, I've seen a state trooper fired because of photos on his Facebook account of him laughing with friends while waiting for a taxi after drinking (off-duty, not in uniform!) at a bar. Somebody saw the photo, apparently found the idea of a trooper drinking offensive, reported him to his supervisor, and he lost his job, even though he was doing the responsible thing in waiting for a taxi. Are you telling me that's not a higher standard than your job?
Or another example: an officer in this area was fired because of domestic abuse issues he had at home, which amounted to him grabbing his wife's arm during an argument and leaving a bruise. Would you be fired from your job if that happened to you? Probably not.
Even laws treat officers differently. Offhand, IIRC the statute of limitations for most felonies in Washington is 3 years - unless you're an officer, in which case it's 10. Likewise, as a civilian you can defend your home and family with lethal force, but as an officer you'll stand against far more scrutiny if you ever have to because the standards are higher due to "experience and training".
I could go on, but this is way too long already. The bottom line is it's not a perfect system. You can easily find cases of abuse of power and authority. But I think that by and large these are decent people who are sacrificing a lot and doing a tough job as best they can. The vast majority of them are not doing it for the power trip or because they're totalitarian. And they certainly are held to tougher standards than the average civilian.
There's zero punishment to them for abusing authority - I mean they can even shoot/kill someone and often get away with it, including receiving pay while not working or being on trial.
This is an absurd statement. Officers are held to a much higher standard of conduct than you or I. They're also placed into situations demanding much greater responsibility than you or I, and under far greater pressures than you or I face. They make bad calls and mistakes just like anyone else, but by and large they are held accountable for these mistakes. Departments vary, but in my area the bar is very high.
Citizen review boards with full authority to punish/fire cops are the only answer.
These exist. They're called, broadly, "the judicial branch", or in practice, "courts". They're not run by the police.
Actually, he says the opposite. Docs was his "clear example" of SaaS:
Which online services are SaaS? Google Docs is a clear example. Its basic activity is editing, and Google encourages people to use it for their own editing; this is SaaS.
And, of course: "don't yield; don't use SaaS". So Google Docs is out, regardless of what goes on it.
> Could you explain why it violates "essential freedoms"?
Because according to him you should never do "your" computing on anyone else's machine. Since he says it's okay to set up thin clients if they're using your server, I guess he must have meant you can set up a bunch of thin clients for yourself to use, since if anyone else used them they'd be using someone else's (your) server to do their computing.
Of course, he also says it can be okay if you sufficiently trust the person running the server (provided it's a person and not a company)...which again is not consistent, because even if you trust the operator you don't have the ability "to study and change the source code so it does what you wish", which is one of his "essential freedoms".
The whole essay left me with the impression that Stallman was just trying to avoid being completely written off by sane people (in the unlikely event that hasn't already happened). This was actually a surprise, because it previously seemed abundantly clear to me that Stallman didn't care at all what other people think. But since SaaS so obviously provides vast benefits in some cases, and people naturally want to take advantage of those benefits, he has to find loopholes in his philosophy instead of taking the hard line of consistency. This inevitably results in contradictions, because his premises were not reasonable to begin with.
> Multiplayer games are a group activity carried out on someone else's server, which makes them SaaS. But where the data involved is just the state of play and the score, the worst wrong the operator might commit is favoritism. You might well ignore that risk, since it seems unlikely and very little is at stake. On the other hand, when the game becomes more than just a game, the issue changes.
So, SaaS is okay so long as the "risks" are sufficiently small? Who defines that risk, me? So that makes it okay for me to use Google Docs, since I deem the risk of Google doing something evil with my documents to be small? (Well, no, because Stallman explicitly calls out Docs as unacceptable. So I guess I better not use that.)
Or from the conclusion:
> Don't buy or install “thin clients”, which are simply computers so weak they make you do the real work on a server, unless you're going to use them with your server.
...thus violating the "essential freedoms" of anyone who uses your thin clients?
This is (one of the reasons) why it's so hard to take Stallman and his "four essential freedoms" seriously.
I just meant exactly what you're doing, but without the extra parent categories so that once you get down to a "leaf" category it only shows one line: "Parent > Child > Grandchild". Sounds like your other idea will essentially accomplish the same thing.
> *AHHH. The money. Yes. I should make that more clear on the "About Us" page. However as you probably guessed we make money off the banner advertising, I know, it's going to be a long hard slog to the top of this one! :)
Oops, that's what I get for browsing with AdBlock all the time; forgot I even had it on. :)
* Drilling down into categories was a little confusing at first. It might be better if the columns were clearly defined (maybe different backgrounds or vertical borders or something). Initially when drilling down into Vintage -> Men's Clothing I completely missed the "Handmade" category, so when I got down to "Pants & Trousers" I suddenly noticed "Handmade" on the left, at which point it wasn't clear whether it was a separate top-level category (as it is) or whether it was a strange word-wrapping problem (like "Pants & Trousers Handmade").
* Related to this, once I arrived at "Pants & Trousers", it wasn't immediately apparent that there were no items in the category. (Until I actually read "Be the first to post...", I thought maybe I hadn't yet arrived at the leaf-level category, so I ended up clicking "Handmade" thinking it was maybe the word-wrap thing.) Three suggestions that might help: 1) Make the category selector variable-height so that it collapses into a single-line breadcrumb trail once I arrive at the bottom-level category; 2) Show the number of items in each category in parenthesis after the name, e.g. "Pants & Trousers (0)"; 3) Clearly mark the items for sale (maybe "Items for Sale in Pants & Trousers:" or something).
* One question that immediately popped into my mind as a hypothetical vendor with a large dose of cynicism was: How do you guys make any money? After digging (and of course your post here) I found a statement that "This website was made with love to provide a free venue for artists and vendors to sell their wares", but maybe you want to consider proactively answering the question "If you don't take any fees, how do you make money?" Else I'm left wondering whether there's some kind of hidden scheme going on, or whether your venue is going to survive (and thus make it worthwhile for me to set up a store). Maybe that's just my over-healthy cynicism talking, though. :)
Keep up the good work!
I wrote a medium-sized online game for a guy who wanted to do it in Mono/MySQL. True, Mono does implement a lot of ASP.NET, and a lot of things work fine, but there are still rough edges that drove us crazy to the point that I finally convinced him to switch over to a Windows server (from Linux/Apache). Some examples:
* Deployment: Mono was very touchy about deploying changes. If you drop in app_offline.htm and then replace every part of the site with new files, it usually worked. When it didn't, it would hang Apache and/or just start returning 500 errors until the web server was restarted. (Whereas with ASP.NET, you can drop in individual files and/or updated DLLs and the site will smoothly recompile as needed.) This was somewhat okay on dev, but got very old very fast in production.
* Strange memory errors: I'm still not sure what was going on, but we had some strange behavior going on where the application would get itself into states that should not have been possible. In one instance I was able to track it down to a particular variable assignment that simply would not happen, despite the code clearly being executed. (E.g., "int x = 42; x++; Trace.Write(x);" would write 42. More complex than that, but that type of thing.) My wild guess is some kind of memory allocation in Mono, but I don't know. Could have been my code somehow, but I have never seen the problem since switching to a Windows server.
* Feature lag: By its very nature, Mono lags behind .NET and it got old being able to use cool 3.5 features (such as LINQ) on other projects and be stuck with 2.0 in Mono.
I think Mono's an impressive project, and my hat's off to the folks to have worked so hard on it, but after some experience with it I decided that if I'm going to write stuff in C# I'm doing it on the Microsoft stack.
And for the keystroke-obsessed, Ctrl+K clears the location bar and puts in the question mark for you. :)