Christian parents freak out when their kids don't want to go to church, because a key Christian belief is that there will be a day when we are all judged by God. According to Christian theology, everyone has sinned, and so only those who accepted Jesus as their king and savior will be granted eternal life in paradise. Those who do not, at best have oblivion and at worst eternal punishment, depending on which version of Christian theology you ask.
So given those assumptions, perhaps you can see why parents would be deeply concerned as to whether or not their children are showing signs of following Jesus.
I'm pretty sure I have oblivion waiting for me, Jesus or no Jesus. I have kids, and I'm trying to teach them to act responsibly, have fun, and above all else value the life they have, because they only get one.
That's kind of the point I'm trying to make.. For anything beyond a very low power beam, we should require licensing for these plane-dropping laser pointers.
It is a very, very large jump from "Your right to shine a bright light ends at my eyeballs" to "Those who own a laser of power greater than X mw without a permission slip from the government should be locked in a cage" -- which is what "licensing" amounts to. Prior restraint is almost always government overreach.
Except that catching someone who does this is nearly impossible, especially in the case of the high-powered green lasers that have been used to blind airline pilots while flying hundreds of people thousands of feet above the ground. So you have to determine which right is more important: the right to not be blinded by some asshole trying to kill you and a few hundred of your closest friends, or the right of any asshole to have unfettered access to any sort of dangerous equipment they want.
That's kind of the point I'm trying to make.. For anything beyond a very low power beam, we should require licensing for these plane-dropping laser pointers. But hey, if we can't get people to agree to regulate guns, good luck getting them to regulate laser pointers.
They only regulate who drives one ON PUBLIC ROADS. Details, details.
So we require all laser pointer enthusiasts to have dome enclosures over their property as the solution to all this? I guess it could work, but I'm betting you'll have a hard time getting buy-in.
Given that there are pedestrians (not in a vehicle) killed crossing streets by an automobile, seemingly every day, it isn't working.
By that logic, they should ban pedestrians from walking within 20ft of any road.
Some things are dangerous and should be left dangerous. Just educate that they carry risk and responsibility.
I'm guessing there are a lot less deaths than there would be if we let 12 year olds drive. The fact that something is inherently dangerous is a reason to make it safer, not to just accept any number of casualties occurring from unrestricted use. Look at the history of industrial safety if you need further convincing.
IT unemployment is at 3.5%, for highly skilled workers (what H1B's are supposed to be) it's even lower. If you're begging for a job and making major concessions you're negotiating from a position of ignorance.
Wages have been flat or declining for a decade though, which has discouraged our 'best and brightest' from entering the field. If we didn't artificially lower the value of developers and IT, it would be a much more attractive field for Americans.
Obama knows that such a ban stands no chance of getting through Congress (the big telecommunications companies bought and paid for them long ago). He's just politically grandstanding on a popular issue. Nothing will actually come of it, and he knows it.
IIRC he is bound to respond to petitions over 25,000 signatures... It's not like he's giving an unsolicited opinion.
"Ever worked on a dev team with no manager? I have, and nothing got done until they finallt hired a manager.
Anecdotal evidence is no evidence. I've been self-managed and had the most productive time of my life, whereas right now I have a manager that keeps telling us not to work on stuff (until approved, but approval never comes). Go ahead, make a guess at how productive our team is.
Self-managed is not the same as non-managed. Much like the man who has 1 clock always knows what time is it but a man who has 2 clocks is never sure, a team of multiple developers will often have a hard time agreeing on how to solve a problem.
There were numerous issues, but it all boiled down to authority. We needed someone with the authority to reprimand and eventually fire the guy who made threats of physical violence during code reviews and went on long, loud racist tirades at least 3 times a day (seriously, this happened). We needed someone with the authority to tell the analysts that their specs were self-contradictory and filled with jargon that, upon questioning, they could not define. We needed someone with the authority to ask the users' manager to assign people to work with us and determine what it was they really needed. We needed someone with the authority to negotiate with the customer when they tried to add features without adding money. We needed someone with the authority to tell non-contributing developers to get to work. We needed someone with the authority to tell more experienced developers to work with the junior devs and help them gain experience.
Lean management is fine, but ultimately you have to report to somebody. So unless you have an autonomous commune of developers, you're going to need a manager, and you're a lot better off if you have a good one. A good manager should generally act as an advocate and mediator, and those roles are needed. That's not to say they can't do anything else -- the manager I mentioned was also one of our top coders.
I have since been promoted to a project management role, and I'm only able to handle it because my team is highly motivated, competent, and composed mostly of current or former consumers of the project I manage (a collection of code libraries and dev tools shared throughout the organization). If I was stuck with a bunch of junior devs, vague specs, and a customer that went out of its way to make itself unavailable, I'm pretty sure I'd be fucked, so I tip my hat to the managers who can handle that.
Heh, a Dev team that accomplished nothing without a manager is a dev team I'd never want to manage.
Perhaps you don't have the skill for it then. It took a good manager to come in, put a couple people in their place, and give us actual goals to work toward (prior to that we were just told about the project in vague terms, and started coding a bunch of stuff that we *might* use, since we had no idea what the customer wanted).
The CxOs are nothing without the engineers who design their products, and the engineers are nothing without workers to build the products they design. And managers generally function to keep everybody on track. Ever worked on a dev team with no manager? I have, and nothing got done until they finallt hired a manager.
Looks very cool, but what exactly is their business model? It looks to me like this
Step 1: build a cool microkernel
Step 2: Port GNU tools
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
To my knowledge there were no laws and in most cases not even organizational requirements for using the TI-83. It just happened to be the most commonly used calculator, and thus the most commonly purchased. Much like Windows.
For this price you can get a 7" Android tablet and buy a graphing calculator program for $5 or so. Hell, Wolfram Alpha will even show you calculus solutions step by step. TI really does not deserve to be in business at this point.
Outlaw inheritance? And what happens to the businesses owned by someone who dies? Are they shut down and demolished?
How about we agree to tax inheritance at a reasonable rate, instead of penalizing people for being successful by destroying their entire life's work the moment they die?
It's pretty hard to penalize someone after they're dead. You might mean that you're penalizing their dependents, and I would agree; however, if you want to take an extremist view of self-reliance, as is the claim from most of the Tea Party (anti-welfare, anti-minimum wage, etc.), then the only logical conclusion is that everyone must pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and that any sort of inheritance is merely "private welfare".
Now, that said, you and I probably agree that there's a reasonable rate of taxation that could and should be applied to inheritance. But reasonable people aren't allowed to make political decisions in this country.
I was a hard-core conservative a few years ago, now I'm a hard-core liberal.
Did my brain rewire itself?
If you're anything like me, it was just a little bit of logic that finally went through your head. I was a card-carrying Libertarian until I really thought about the goals I would set for society. For instance, socialized medicine sounds restrictive, but the result is that for most people it means greater economic freedom, not less. How? Because if you are not forced to worry about health care coverage when switching between jobs or starting your own business, you are much more able to do so. Similarly, if you tax the rich heavily and require employers to provide a living wage, you have a healthy middle class and a flowing economy where more people are more free to pursue their goals. Conservatives might talk about "freedom" a lot, but it's only a theoretical freedom -- without the means to pursue your goals, the "freedom" to do so is meaningless.
But a (personal) meritocracy is also opposed by the right. They don't want people to have the same standard of healthcare, education, environment regardless of who their parents were. They want a meritocracy that keeps running through the generations. So if you parents were lazy slobs you need to work 10 times harder to even reach the same level a child of wealth parents will start at.
Businesses should be subsidized according to how many of their friends own them everyone and every business should pay exactly the same, as long as they pay less then what their business is paying at the moment.
Yep. I'd take the right's claim about self-reliance and meritocracy a lot more seriously if they tried to outlaw inheritance.
I once had an English professor tell me that using "one" as a pronoun was not proper and should be avoided.
That's OK. It's hardly your fault that your English professor was wrong.
She explained it in terms that it was still valid, but something analogous to a deprecated feature of the language. I continue to use it because none of the alternatives are gender-neutral.
It's very normal for the brain to substitute homophones. It isn't some horrible indictment of the person's intelligence. I'm willing to bet this guy knows the difference between waist and waste. It's the equivalent of a typo.
Still, one would expect a person claiming to be a university professor would understand the importance of proofreading.
I once had an English professor tell me that using "one" as a pronoun was not proper and should be avoided.
Obviously, Boeing should simply have specified that all the contractors deliver components that accept and output plaintext, and then used pipes and awk to cobble the pieces together into a working system! What could possibly go wrong?
Battery fire.
Nah, just add a battery fire error message. We've been doing that with printers for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Christian parents freak out when their kids don't want to go to church, because a key Christian belief is that there will be a day when we are all judged by God. According to Christian theology, everyone has sinned, and so only those who accepted Jesus as their king and savior will be granted eternal life in paradise. Those who do not, at best have oblivion and at worst eternal punishment, depending on which version of Christian theology you ask.
So given those assumptions, perhaps you can see why parents would be deeply concerned as to whether or not their children are showing signs of following Jesus.
I'm pretty sure I have oblivion waiting for me, Jesus or no Jesus. I have kids, and I'm trying to teach them to act responsibly, have fun, and above all else value the life they have, because they only get one.
It is a very, very large jump from "Your right to shine a bright light ends at my eyeballs" to "Those who own a laser of power greater than X mw without a permission slip from the government should be locked in a cage" -- which is what "licensing" amounts to. Prior restraint is almost always government overreach.
Except that catching someone who does this is nearly impossible, especially in the case of the high-powered green lasers that have been used to blind airline pilots while flying hundreds of people thousands of feet above the ground. So you have to determine which right is more important: the right to not be blinded by some asshole trying to kill you and a few hundred of your closest friends, or the right of any asshole to have unfettered access to any sort of dangerous equipment they want.
That's kind of the point I'm trying to make.. For anything beyond a very low power beam, we should require licensing for these plane-dropping laser pointers. But hey, if we can't get people to agree to regulate guns, good luck getting them to regulate laser pointers.
They only regulate who drives one ON PUBLIC ROADS. Details, details.
So we require all laser pointer enthusiasts to have dome enclosures over their property as the solution to all this? I guess it could work, but I'm betting you'll have a hard time getting buy-in.
Given that there are pedestrians (not in a vehicle) killed crossing streets by an automobile, seemingly every day, it isn't working. By that logic, they should ban pedestrians from walking within 20ft of any road.
Some things are dangerous and should be left dangerous. Just educate that they carry risk and responsibility.
I'm guessing there are a lot less deaths than there would be if we let 12 year olds drive. The fact that something is inherently dangerous is a reason to make it safer, not to just accept any number of casualties occurring from unrestricted use. Look at the history of industrial safety if you need further convincing.
In other news, a report reports that automobiles produce too much energy and poses risks, including death, for the careless.
Maybe that's why we regulate who gets to drive one?
IT unemployment is at 3.5%, for highly skilled workers (what H1B's are supposed to be) it's even lower. If you're begging for a job and making major concessions you're negotiating from a position of ignorance.
Wages have been flat or declining for a decade though, which has discouraged our 'best and brightest' from entering the field. If we didn't artificially lower the value of developers and IT, it would be a much more attractive field for Americans.
Obama knows that such a ban stands no chance of getting through Congress (the big telecommunications companies bought and paid for them long ago). He's just politically grandstanding on a popular issue. Nothing will actually come of it, and he knows it.
IIRC he is bound to respond to petitions over 25,000 signatures... It's not like he's giving an unsolicited opinion.
Anecdotal evidence is no evidence. I've been self-managed and had the most productive time of my life, whereas right now I have a manager that keeps telling us not to work on stuff (until approved, but approval never comes). Go ahead, make a guess at how productive our team is.
Self-managed is not the same as non-managed. Much like the man who has 1 clock always knows what time is it but a man who has 2 clocks is never sure, a team of multiple developers will often have a hard time agreeing on how to solve a problem.
There were numerous issues, but it all boiled down to authority. We needed someone with the authority to reprimand and eventually fire the guy who made threats of physical violence during code reviews and went on long, loud racist tirades at least 3 times a day (seriously, this happened). We needed someone with the authority to tell the analysts that their specs were self-contradictory and filled with jargon that, upon questioning, they could not define. We needed someone with the authority to ask the users' manager to assign people to work with us and determine what it was they really needed. We needed someone with the authority to negotiate with the customer when they tried to add features without adding money. We needed someone with the authority to tell non-contributing developers to get to work. We needed someone with the authority to tell more experienced developers to work with the junior devs and help them gain experience.
Lean management is fine, but ultimately you have to report to somebody. So unless you have an autonomous commune of developers, you're going to need a manager, and you're a lot better off if you have a good one. A good manager should generally act as an advocate and mediator, and those roles are needed. That's not to say they can't do anything else -- the manager I mentioned was also one of our top coders.
I have since been promoted to a project management role, and I'm only able to handle it because my team is highly motivated, competent, and composed mostly of current or former consumers of the project I manage (a collection of code libraries and dev tools shared throughout the organization). If I was stuck with a bunch of junior devs, vague specs, and a customer that went out of its way to make itself unavailable, I'm pretty sure I'd be fucked, so I tip my hat to the managers who can handle that.
Heh, a Dev team that accomplished nothing without a manager is a dev team I'd never want to manage.
Perhaps you don't have the skill for it then. It took a good manager to come in, put a couple people in their place, and give us actual goals to work toward (prior to that we were just told about the project in vague terms, and started coding a bunch of stuff that we *might* use, since we had no idea what the customer wanted).
The CxOs are nothing without the engineers who design their products, and the engineers are nothing without workers to build the products they design. And managers generally function to keep everybody on track. Ever worked on a dev team with no manager? I have, and nothing got done until they finallt hired a manager.
Looks very cool, but what exactly is their business model? It looks to me like this Step 1: build a cool microkernel Step 2: Port GNU tools Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit!
What was Linux's business model?
Graduate student thesis?
Looks very cool, but what exactly is their business model? It looks to me like this
Step 1: build a cool microkernel
Step 2: Port GNU tools
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
To my knowledge there were no laws and in most cases not even organizational requirements for using the TI-83. It just happened to be the most commonly used calculator, and thus the most commonly purchased. Much like Windows.
Thus at 14, I learned that school was not necessarily about learning.
That's a little late to learn that lesson, don't you think?
For this price you can get a 7" Android tablet and buy a graphing calculator program for $5 or so. Hell, Wolfram Alpha will even show you calculus solutions step by step. TI really does not deserve to be in business at this point.
Outlaw inheritance? And what happens to the businesses owned by someone who dies? Are they shut down and demolished?
How about we agree to tax inheritance at a reasonable rate, instead of penalizing people for being successful by destroying their entire life's work the moment they die?
It's pretty hard to penalize someone after they're dead. You might mean that you're penalizing their dependents, and I would agree; however, if you want to take an extremist view of self-reliance, as is the claim from most of the Tea Party (anti-welfare, anti-minimum wage, etc.), then the only logical conclusion is that everyone must pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and that any sort of inheritance is merely "private welfare".
Now, that said, you and I probably agree that there's a reasonable rate of taxation that could and should be applied to inheritance. But reasonable people aren't allowed to make political decisions in this country.
I was a hard-core conservative a few years ago, now I'm a hard-core liberal.
Did my brain rewire itself?
If you're anything like me, it was just a little bit of logic that finally went through your head. I was a card-carrying Libertarian until I really thought about the goals I would set for society. For instance, socialized medicine sounds restrictive, but the result is that for most people it means greater economic freedom, not less. How? Because if you are not forced to worry about health care coverage when switching between jobs or starting your own business, you are much more able to do so. Similarly, if you tax the rich heavily and require employers to provide a living wage, you have a healthy middle class and a flowing economy where more people are more free to pursue their goals. Conservatives might talk about "freedom" a lot, but it's only a theoretical freedom -- without the means to pursue your goals, the "freedom" to do so is meaningless.
But a (personal) meritocracy is also opposed by the right. They don't want people to have the same standard of healthcare, education, environment regardless of who their parents were. They want a meritocracy that keeps running through the generations. So if you parents were lazy slobs you need to work 10 times harder to even reach the same level a child of wealth parents will start at. Businesses should be subsidized according to how many of their friends own them everyone and every business should pay exactly the same, as long as they pay less then what their business is paying at the moment.
Yep. I'd take the right's claim about self-reliance and meritocracy a lot more seriously if they tried to outlaw inheritance.
I once had an English professor tell me that using "one" as a pronoun was not proper and should be avoided.
That's OK. It's hardly your fault that your English professor was wrong.
She explained it in terms that it was still valid, but something analogous to a deprecated feature of the language. I continue to use it because none of the alternatives are gender-neutral.
It's very normal for the brain to substitute homophones. It isn't some horrible indictment of the person's intelligence. I'm willing to bet this guy knows the difference between waist and waste. It's the equivalent of a typo.
Still, one would expect a person claiming to be a university professor would understand the importance of proofreading.
I once had an English professor tell me that using "one" as a pronoun was not proper and should be avoided.
This + Project Euler == Profit!
returns false
Obviously, Boeing should simply have specified that all the contractors deliver components that accept and output plaintext, and then used pipes and awk to cobble the pieces together into a working system! What could possibly go wrong?
Battery fire.
Nah, just add a battery fire error message. We've been doing that with printers for decades.
order of magnitude faster than C, that is. The difference between it and assembly was negligible.