https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4242593/
In section "Genetics and long-term effects of caffeine" it goes a bit into details but here is relevant excerpt:
"The finding of lower COMT activity with higher risk of myocardial infarction points to involvement of circulating catecholamines in caffeine’s effect on cardiovascular system, with the implication that slow-metabolizing individuals could be at increased risk due to decreased ability to handle the stress associated with caffeine-induced catecholamine response."
This looks interesting. I'm going to assume that you add whatever temporary buffer you use while editing the files to your gitignore? E.g. Vim will use .swp files.
Does this get annoying if you want to commit something specific? Let's say you edit an old note and save the file. Then, in the time it takes for you to write a commit about this new edit, your cron script has added your change as a 'wip'.
Also, is there a nice way to set this up with a cron script so that you can use git via ssh (rather than https) but still keep a passphrase on the key? I seem to remember having problems with cron and git regarding ssh keys.
I never do manual commits here; every single commit is always 'wip'. I'm basically not using that feature of git. I'm just using it for (dumb) history/backup and distribution.
I always setup the git repos with ssh, not https. The central (for each environment) git repo is a bare checkout on my personal account on a linode or tektonic VPS.
In short, since I can ssh from my various client machines to these central servers with no password, the git pull/push just works.
And also imagine I swear in front of a kid and he goes home and says the word I used to his Mum or worse still perhaps to a school teacher.
The Mum/teacher/whatever is potentially going to chastise the kid for using the word that I gave him but bless him, he doesn't know any better and just enjoyed making the sound.
It seems most unfair that I should place the kid in such a predicament given he doesn't understand the wider context of language and where swearing fits within language and perhaps society.
I find this an interesting statement. Would you mind providing some clear examples of a real-life situation where honesty isn't a virtue?
I often find that lying is convenient (for the person lying) in the short term but its damage can be far reaching and difficult to predict. If you want to have meaningful and effective relationships (at home or at work) straight honesty is always beneficial.
I do remember working with someone who had Alzheimer's disease. I stopped being honest with her quite quickly as I figured that repeatedly reminding her of her husband's death was wrong. But I can't think of any other examples of my life when straight honesty wasn't a virtue. What about you?
>I find this an interesting statement. Would you mind providing some clear examples of a real-life situation where honesty isn't a virtue?
Umm, certainly.
The canonical example goes something like this—
Someone knocks urgently at your door. You open it to find your best friend on the stoop, bent over and panting from exertion.
He says there is some madman chasing him and for his safety he needs to hide there at your place for a spell.
You welcome him in, of course, and he goes to the smallest upstairs bedroom to lie down.
Moments later there is another knock on the door.
You open it to find someone you've never met before, only slightly less out of breath than was your buddy.
"Hello, is <friend's name> here? I'm here to kill him, you see. My rationale is rather not your concern, but as I'm in a bit of a rush, please do tell so that I may finish the job or be on my way."
--
The remainder of the dialog is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-D
/* Philosophy major, with emphasis on Kantian ethics */
Yeah. This is the classic example and obviously is interesting to think about. Some people still defend telling the truth if you're hiding Anne Frank and the Nazis are at the door.
We might go down a rabbit hole here but your example (mad man, Anne Frank, whatever) doesn't clearly demonstrate that honesty isn't a virtue. It's a clear example of a real life situation, sure, but it doesn't show that telling the truth wouldn't be virtuous.
Years ago... I managed a 1MM retail shop in San Francisco; worked too many hours. Needed that "mental health" day off. I informed my regional manager. Within the hour, he called me back and said "next time, just lie to me. tell me your sick".
I'm not entirely sure what transpired. I assume he had to report to higher-ups(and it didn't go over well?). But, that experience has always stuck with me.
Yeah. I understand that. But by telling your boss the truth you gave him a real gift in that he could trust you. If he (or the higher-ups) thought about that a little bit they would realise that your honestly was valuable.
You could come up with similar examples where you take days off to interview at other companies. Obviously telling your boss will probably anger them (and might be seen as a breach of your contract if you do it during work hours) but the moment your boss actually thinks about it they would realise that your honesty provides them with much better evidence about what to do next. That might include finding out why you want to leave, how to keep you, ending the relationship on good terms, hiring someone else sooner than if you lied, etc etc.
Now, it's very difficult to tell the truth in these situations and people aren't expected to do so. But honesty is still a virtue, perhaps even more so, in these situations.
> Would you mind providing some clear examples of a real-life situation where honesty isn't a virtue?
In most negotiations, you are usually at an advantage if you have more information than other parties. Lying/lack of transparency tend to work to your advantage in such situations. Of course, it depends on what, and there's context to that...
1. An acquaintance on facebook recently posted about how he thinks obesity is a disease and he finds obese people gross. This cost him some friends and the esteem of some other friends. Being honest that you hold positions which are repugnant to other people can generate needless conflict. There's also the moral question of being an asshole towards a large class of people needlessly, but I'll leave exploring that as an exercise to the reader.
2. Recently I ran into abberant behavior with our database that freaked me the fuck out (it shut down saying it recieved a ctl+c, but none was given), and disclosed this to my superior. It freaked him the fuck out. Now I'm being provided pressure in a way that doesn't help, and somewhat hinders, my ability to do effective work. Omitting this when giving a status report until I had more information would have been better.
3. I recently spent a lot of time with an ex, a relationship which has longstanding fractures. I made a passing comment that made her hoppin' mad, and she brought it up with me pretty maturely (+/-), but then devolved into a lot of "you always _____ and I hate it, who even does that!" statements. I saw very clearly that I could respond: "this is a bullshit way to talk to me, you haven't seen me in three years and you have no idea what i always do or don't do, and fuck you and your high horse." That would've been the really authentic, honest response. Instead I bit my tongue, managed the conversation back to the specific thing I had done and how I could avoid doing it again moving forward. The next day I was able to say (also honestly) that I appreciated that she'd gotten better at articulating ways in which I hurt her, but I really didn't appreciate the way she did it. By not disclosing how I felt in a timely manner, I saved my vacation.
These are all examples of when substantially less disclosure either did or could have improved outcomes.
Outright lies I tell on a regular basis:
"Hey, it's good to see you!" (read: I want you to find this interaction pleasant.)
"Yeah, things are going well." (read: Things are objectively terrible right now I'm not interested in talking about it)
"I'm really excited about this sprint, I think we're gonna get a lot of good work done." (read: I'm getting yelled at because our work isn't done yet but stress doesn't effectively motivate good intellectual work.)
"If you need help, please feel free to ask me questions at any time, I don't mind at all." (read: It stresses me the fuck out being interrupted all the time but it facilitates my team being able to do their job, so I'll deal with it, and lying about it keeps other people from being responsible for my feelings.)
As a so called 'European', I'm kind of shocked/dubious that this would also be acceptable in American culture.
My guess is most people would agree that if you put your feet on the table and take credit where it isn't due then you're probably an ahole. But this is a stereotype of the typical 'jerk'.
It's the jerks that 'play the game' and aren't necessarily blatant that do (perhaps unfairly) well.
As an American who has spend a good amount of time in Europe, I've noticed a cultural difference that may be relevant.
Almost universally, Europeans take their shoes off when entering a home. As a guest, it is expected, and failing to do so unless specifically instructed not to is rude. A majority of Americans I know do not take their shoes off at home and guests are not expected to unless specifically asked or given some cue.
Feet on a desk in an office would be considered rude in both Europe and the US, however, I have a suspicion it's considerably more rude in Europe.
> Almost universally, Europeans take their shoes off when entering a home.
Utter bullshit.
I'm sorry, but I have no more subtle response to such clueless arrogant pontificating prefaced with the typical "as an American who has spend a good amount of time in Europe".
If you had bothered to even superficially explore a single small country on the continent, you wouldn't have such a naive uninformed notion of European cultural diversity.
For you information: any such very, very, specific cultural habit, from taking of your shoes to how you have dinner, is almost certainly nowhere near "universally" true within any given European country (which historically tend to contain multiple cultures), let alone the entire continent.
I dunno, there's a good moral argument for giving a fairly mild ration of shit to somebody who insists on using a little experience to draw sweeping conclusions. It happens so commonly and so persistently that I do think a little bit of applied loss of face might be helpful. Hot stoves and all that.
I understand the sentiment but isn't the web confrontational enough already? I always think of the people on the sidelines who might be lurkers, interested in engaging the community, contributing, whatever and who read those kinds of comments, thinking: "There's no room for error, those people are really aggressive". It's just computers, nothing life-threatening so I like it when we keep it as civil as possible.
I lived for a substantial amount of time in Ireland and France, and absolutely no indication that this is the case, at all. More prevalent in SF than Dublin or Paris.
Con: all the BSDs and Linux are now owned by whoever most recently picked up the POSIX APIs. ReactOS and WINE are now illegal. SQL is the private property of IBM.
Pro: I guess if you hate Google because you love Steve Jobs or something it looks like a win.
None of that has happened. An amicus brief has been filed, that is all. An amicus brief is not law and the Supreme Court has not yet ruled one way or another.
The current holding comes from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and is in Oracle's favor. Unlike other regional Courts of Appeal, the Fed Circuit's decisions are binding nationwide because the court has subject-matter jurisdiction rather than geographic jurisdiction. The Solicitor General's amicus is in full support of the Fed Circuit's decision, and the Supreme Court has historically taken an SG amicus hugely into account when the SG is not a party to the case. Should they choose to do so here, they will not grant cert, let the decision stand, and it will be binding nationwide due to stare decisis.
So, while your statement is true, the situation is more dire than you suggest.
Quick question - do you feel the need to associate this to Apple because of your deep personal hatred for that company, or for your deep abiding love for Google?
Or was it neither, and you just like using rhetorical devices to bolster your weak points?
You're reading far too much subtext there. He's "pro" was just a flippant way of saying "there isn't any positive to come from this aside the super shallow brand-loyalty reasons"
The key distinction is, of course, you can't infringe copyright by accident. If you build your platform on someone else's proprietary API, without their permission, then can you really complain when you get sued?
In the context of the parent comment: if you build a business cloning Microsoft's Win32 API, I don't think you can complain if you get sued in the same way you can for a patent troll.
And yes, I think Microsoft should get to decide whether it wants clones of Win32, and also that it's a waste of time for open source developers to implement non-open source APIs.
Taking that further, the following things would be illegal:
- The HTML parsing specification (created by reverse engineering IE6 without Microsoft's cooperation), and by extension all non-IE Web browsers.
- Except IE is also illegal, because JScript was a hostile clone of JavaScript, down to the APIs.
- The x86-64 ISA, for two reasons: first, because AMD cloned x86 to start with, and second because Intel cloned AMD's work after seeing its success.
- All versions of Unix in common use; thus, by extension, 95% of smartphones by market share.
- VMware, by providing implementations of the proprietary x86 supervisor instructions in user mode.
Reverse engineering of proprietary APIs for the purposes of interoperability has been responsible for a lot of technologies that we use all the time. I understand the argument about IP protection, but I think an absolutist position in the other direction is a bit too far. In all of the cases above, there is a specific reason why the dominant player responsible for the proprietary API was failing to capture a market need, and the legality of API cloning was what allowed a smaller player to come in, address that need, and achieve a better economic outcome. I'm having a lot of trouble imagining how a world in which all of the above things were illegal would be a better one--you could argue that the dominant player could have done each of those things, but the fact is that they didn't.
It's not my position that you can copyright APIs per se. In my view, the protection in the Oracle case is a coincidence, stemming from the fact that you can't clone a Java API in Java without effectively copying the textual description of the API. So I don't think there would be a problem with reverse-engineering the operation of IE or x86 and describing it in an independently-written specification or implementing the same method of operation in another browser or CPU or in VMWare.
You're right about UNIX, but I don't think not being able to clone UNIX would've been any great loss to the world. iOS and Windows Phone would still exist, and I'm sure someone would have developed a cheap open source OS for the rest of the market.
> There's an outstanding PR that does preciesly that
Just to be clear, I believe that PR will fill the newly-opened Vim buffer with text from the clipboard - not selected text.