it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants."
The only way fingerprinting could possibly aid in tracking illegal immigrants is if it was used to track every single US citizen and legal alien. Then anyone caught on the street without their fingerprints in the system is by definition illegal. And even that is only useful if people are routinely fingerprinted on the street. I'm pretty sure there's a name for that kind of system.
The more likely use, down the road a (very short) way, is to make emigration illegal, or at least restricted. There's a name for places where that happens, too.
Everybody likes to talk about police states in the past tense, or in the abstract. Nobody expects the Spa... the real dictatorships. They aren't created all at once out of the blue, and they're seldom openly announced as such.
I switched careers from air-fright driver/dispatcher to C++ programmer in my late 30's, on the strength of a two-semester community college certificate program that I never even finished. The key for me was enthusiasm. I had done some futzing around programming at home, and if you haven't been (or whatever equivalent aspect of IT you are interested in - make the appropriate substitution from here on), then you are barking up the wrong tree. One thing that will help you in early attempts at getting a job is expressing that you not only want the job, but you want to be doing programming. If you really want to do programming, then you already are. If you are a good enough actor to fake the enthusiasm, go to Hollywood, you don't need to waste your time as a code monkey.
My first job was an internship, for $8.00/hr while I drove a cab at night. It wasn't even a programming job, it was a data entry job. The data entry system sucked donkey balls, so I rewrote it to be fast enough to make up the lost time and still finish the project ahead of schedule. That looks good on the resume. If that's the kind of thing you can see yourself doing just because it is fun, or because you see crap and know you can do better, you will probably do well.
My current job I got partly on the strength of a recommendation from one of the young hotshots already working there. He had gone to the same community college at the same time as I did, and noticed me helping out others in the lab, and told the boss about it after my interview. Enthusiasm again.
So the first criteria is that you really want to do programming. If you don't, your age won't matter. If you do, your age won't matter... much. You'll have some explaining to do as to why you are starting so late if this is your "life's calling", but experience, skill, and enthusiasm will overcome those doubts.
This isn't a business for young hotshots and cowboy coders anymore, its all business, and there is big money on the line. Companies want people who will produce, and not just produce "beautiful" code, but code that will sell. At our age, we have one advantage over them young whippersnappers: we have experience at providing business value to those we work for. We have experience at gaining and using experience. What we lack in drama, we might just make up for it in consistency and reliability.
But don't expect it to be easy. The first few years will suck. The pay and the hours and the working conditions will suck. And unless you've already written some kind of take-the-world-by-storm software product in your spare time, your code will suck. You're starting from scratch no better, and no worse, than a kid fresh out of college, and your position at the bottom of every totem pole will be just like it is for those 20 year olds that don't have a mortgage and car payments and kids to feed.
Keep at it and use the experience you already have and the experience you'll gain every day. If this is what you really want to do, the thrill of learning and mastering a new skill will carry you through it. You'll have to prove yourself just like anyone starting from scratch does, but don't try to do it by out hot-shotting those kids, prove yourself by being reliable and professional. It is harder to break into this kind of business at a more advanced age, but most of the difficulties come from you yourself (we have different expectations, flexibilities, stamina, and abilities at 40 than we do at 20), not from predjudice on the part of those you'll be working for.
how many of those items were NOT counterfeits, but merely real items that the trademark owner wants to illegitimately prevent from being legitimately resold?
Lots and lots. EBay, as they say, removes 100% of reported listings.
Personally, I find my left ring finger to be far more useful than my right ring finger in typing, despite being right-handed. Part of it has to do with...
All that, and because the right hand is usually busy with something else.
Hey, c'mon, I meant the mouse. Jeez, get your minds out of the gutter.
At that point, the Internet was one typo away from disaster.... Few people appreciate how fragile and unsecured the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure really is -- this is just the latest example."
At that point, the internet as a whole remained largely unaffected for the majority of users. Few people appreciate how robust the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure and its ability to dynamically reroute traffic through the remaining nodes even with the loss of a significant portion of the net really is -- this is just the latest example.
If you scroll toward the right (or east), you can see other grid patterns, although not as striking.
Those are the suburbs within the Greater Atlantis Metropolitan Area: East Atlantis, Canary Heights, Waterville, and Pacific Vista. If you look closely at the picture, I think I see some broken faux Spanish tile and and old Yard Sale sign thats probably weeks old by now so don't bother stopping.
I bet the whole "city disappearing into the ocean and civilization being relegated to the dim mythology of ancient history" thing had something to do with sub-prime mortgages.
MS's yearly net profits exceed the entire gross revenues of either the recording or movie industries.
Aha! Proof that you damn kids with your pirating and your torrenting of bits and your, your, your... downloading... are costing them googles of money. Once Microsoft implements their perfect plan to keep you kids off the RIAA's lawn for good, their revenues will triple, or quadruple, or gazoople... or something.
Nothing would get the attention of the state of New York quite like every out-of-state online retailer refusing to sell to any NY resident or to ship items to a NY address.
Where did you get the stupid idea that you deserve the job just because you're technically capable of it? That's like saying you deserve a girlfriend just because you have a hardon.
Based on what you wrote here, it's no surprise if you have neither. There's more to being productive than being technically qualified, and there's more to a job (and a girlfriend) than being able to punch the right buttons. I wouldn't hire you, and not because you're "unique", but because you're miserable to be around, and would surely sue me if I ever fired you, or if your cubicle was 2 inches too small, or if you didn't get the day off for your grandmother's best friend's dog's funeral.
There's an obscure old book by Edward DeBono (now a creativity and problem-solving guru) called "Mechanism of Mind" that I found fascinating. It's very much non-academic and non-computer oriented, but it has an interesting take on pattern recognition and decision making in the human mind (as opposed to the human brain). If you liked "On Intelligence", this is a similar kind of thing, but at a much more abstract level, and without, well... any real academic basis. I think it is out of print now, but maybe it can be found online somewhere.
If you are interested in very general epistemological ideas, I would also recommend Ayn Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" as an outside the box choice for exploring a theory of concept formation that rings true, at least to me, and that I suspect has some application to AI in a way that I don't think has been explored very much.
if the trucking companies were happy with their pay and arrangements. [...] they could have ramped up to where they were stealing 3% or 4% of every broker's business, they'd have been able to live very comfortably.
At that point, the only thing they'd really be stealing is the franchise fee they aren't paying to the company whose name they are doing business under. On the other hand, 3-4% smaller piece of the pie might be a worthwhile commission for them improving the real company's reputation like that, if it makes a bigger pie.
Maybe I'll set up a company with a business model that consists of getting its name hijacked by forward-thinking Russian scammers, and monetizing the resulting reputation by selling franchise rights to everyone else.
Wouldn't it be better to have every check-in be stable?... It's pretty rare that people mind waiting a few days.
If you didn't have a five-digit ID, I'd tell you to get back to us once you actually graduate and get a job. Instead, I'll just assume I've dreamed the last ten years of my career.
Thanks for waking me up, lemme tell you about the nightmare I've been having...
"the whole basis of capitalism is based on scarcity, "
No, the whole basis of capitalism is trading something of lesser value for something of greater value. Physical scarcity is based on materials and labor, product scarcity is based on ideas, materials, and labor. This will severely diminish the labor from mass produced items, but there will still be things that require human labor (like repairing these printers, for instance). It will also make the artificial scarcity of reproduceable ideas moot, but the value of knowledge that can't be reproduced, such as a live concert by Coldplay or a conversation with Cory Doctorow, won't see any diminishment of scarcity. The material scarcity will remain, although the limiting factor will be increasingly raw materials rather than manufactured materials.
Capitalism will still function just fine. People will still value the products as much as they ever do, but the manufacturers will value them less - because they can make more of them with the same value of resources - so the price will go down.
Or were you referring to the bastard stepchild that Bush and Paulson and Bernanke and the MAFIAA refer to as "capitalism"?
You know more than you think you do, but usually you know less than you think you do.
Your co-workers know a lot less than you think they do, but sometimes know a lot more than you think they do
Your boss knows less about programming than you could ever believe possible, it's not his job
Take chances, the standards you think your code will be held to are far lower than you've been led to believe
The standards of correct, well-designed, well-documented, and easily maintainable code are not the standards your customers and your competition hold your product to - software is more than code.
Hold your own code to higher standards than your boss does, but get it done within the business constraints he sets.
Be nice to the guy who is maintaining your code.
Seeking the perfect design is a recipe for disaster.
Interfaces should be inherited, implementations should be aggregated. Do it the other way around and you're digging a hole you'll never dig out of. Nor will that guy who is maintaining your code.
Objects do not represent real-world objects, no matter what the books say. Objects either manage state or behavior, not both.
Code flexibly those aspects likely to change, code rigidly those aspects unlikely to change. Novice programmers get that wrong more often than any other principle.
Never write code that "you're gonna need someday". That day is likely never come, and when it does, nobody, including you, will remember what you already coded for it. And even if you or they do, it won't be the right approach.
No principle, including all the ones here, is always true. Never violate them, except when you should.
Slashdot Mirror
One begins to wonder what our own Iron Curtain or Berlin Wall will look like...
One word: TSA.
Airports are about 80% there already.
it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants."
The only way fingerprinting could possibly aid in tracking illegal immigrants is if it was used to track every single US citizen and legal alien. Then anyone caught on the street without their fingerprints in the system is by definition illegal. And even that is only useful if people are routinely fingerprinted on the street. I'm pretty sure there's a name for that kind of system.
The more likely use, down the road a (very short) way, is to make emigration illegal, or at least restricted. There's a name for places where that happens, too.
Everybody likes to talk about police states in the past tense, or in the abstract. Nobody expects the Spa... the real dictatorships. They aren't created all at once out of the blue, and they're seldom openly announced as such.
Agreed. There was no need for it in the first place.
Yeah, cause if there was a need for it, it would've been just fine. No censorship without a pretty good reason, that's what I always say.
"People learning a fictional language?!? WTF?!?
If people are learning it, is it still fictional?
Really boss, I'm just becoming more productive fer ya.
I switched careers from air-fright driver/dispatcher to C++ programmer in my late 30's, on the strength of a two-semester community college certificate program that I never even finished. The key for me was enthusiasm. I had done some futzing around programming at home, and if you haven't been (or whatever equivalent aspect of IT you are interested in - make the appropriate substitution from here on), then you are barking up the wrong tree. One thing that will help you in early attempts at getting a job is expressing that you not only want the job, but you want to be doing programming. If you really want to do programming, then you already are. If you are a good enough actor to fake the enthusiasm, go to Hollywood, you don't need to waste your time as a code monkey.
My first job was an internship, for $8.00/hr while I drove a cab at night. It wasn't even a programming job, it was a data entry job. The data entry system sucked donkey balls, so I rewrote it to be fast enough to make up the lost time and still finish the project ahead of schedule. That looks good on the resume. If that's the kind of thing you can see yourself doing just because it is fun, or because you see crap and know you can do better, you will probably do well.
My current job I got partly on the strength of a recommendation from one of the young hotshots already working there. He had gone to the same community college at the same time as I did, and noticed me helping out others in the lab, and told the boss about it after my interview. Enthusiasm again.
So the first criteria is that you really want to do programming. If you don't, your age won't matter. If you do, your age won't matter... much. You'll have some explaining to do as to why you are starting so late if this is your "life's calling", but experience, skill, and enthusiasm will overcome those doubts.
This isn't a business for young hotshots and cowboy coders anymore, its all business, and there is big money on the line. Companies want people who will produce, and not just produce "beautiful" code, but code that will sell. At our age, we have one advantage over them young whippersnappers: we have experience at providing business value to those we work for. We have experience at gaining and using experience. What we lack in drama, we might just make up for it in consistency and reliability.
But don't expect it to be easy. The first few years will suck. The pay and the hours and the working conditions will suck. And unless you've already written some kind of take-the-world-by-storm software product in your spare time, your code will suck. You're starting from scratch no better, and no worse, than a kid fresh out of college, and your position at the bottom of every totem pole will be just like it is for those 20 year olds that don't have a mortgage and car payments and kids to feed.
Keep at it and use the experience you already have and the experience you'll gain every day. If this is what you really want to do, the thrill of learning and mastering a new skill will carry you through it. You'll have to prove yourself just like anyone starting from scratch does, but don't try to do it by out hot-shotting those kids, prove yourself by being reliable and professional. It is harder to break into this kind of business at a more advanced age, but most of the difficulties come from you yourself (we have different expectations, flexibilities, stamina, and abilities at 40 than we do at 20), not from predjudice on the part of those you'll be working for.
Little blue quarks give you teh hadron.
how many of those items were NOT counterfeits, but merely real items that the trademark owner wants to illegitimately prevent from being legitimately resold?
Lots and lots. EBay, as they say, removes 100% of reported listings.
A hall of shame from someone who likes to countersue... or is it just sue.... or... take these companies to court, and win: http://www.tabberone.com/Trademarks/HallOfShame/HallOfShame.shtml
Personally, I find my left ring finger to be far more useful than my right ring finger in typing, despite being right-handed. Part of it has to do with...
All that, and because the right hand is usually busy with something else.
Hey, c'mon, I meant the mouse. Jeez, get your minds out of the gutter.
The first rule of darknet is: we don't talk about darknet.
Which is why invite-only P2P systems won't take off among the general public the way the original Napster, Kazaa, eMule, and The Pirate Bay have.
That's the whole point of "invite-only".
But maybe you know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone who has the files you want?
But how would I find out whether or not this is the case? I don't even know anybody who uses the existing darknet software.
The first rule of darknet is: we don't talk about darknet.
At that point, the Internet was one typo away from disaster. ... Few people appreciate how fragile and unsecured the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure really is -- this is just the latest example."
At that point, the internet as a whole remained largely unaffected for the majority of users. Few people appreciate how robust the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure and its ability to dynamically reroute traffic through the remaining nodes even with the loss of a significant portion of the net really is -- this is just the latest example.
If you scroll toward the right (or east), you can see other grid patterns, although not as striking.
Those are the suburbs within the Greater Atlantis Metropolitan Area: East Atlantis, Canary Heights, Waterville, and Pacific Vista. If you look closely at the picture, I think I see some broken faux Spanish tile and and old Yard Sale sign thats probably weeks old by now so don't bother stopping. I bet the whole "city disappearing into the ocean and civilization being relegated to the dim mythology of ancient history" thing had something to do with sub-prime mortgages.
MS's yearly net profits exceed the entire gross revenues of either the recording or movie industries.
Aha! Proof that you damn kids with your pirating and your torrenting of bits and your, your, your... downloading... are costing them googles of money. Once Microsoft implements their perfect plan to keep you kids off the RIAA's lawn for good, their revenues will triple, or quadruple, or gazoople... or something.
Nothing would get the attention of the state of New York quite like every out-of-state online retailer refusing to sell to any NY resident or to ship items to a NY address.
*shrug*
I tested both illusions on the link provided in the summary and neither one had the effect on me that was claimed.
If at first you don't saccade...
Am I the only one who shuddered a bit when I read this and thought about how it would feel to have a small object glued to the eyeball?
Anybody who wore contact lenses back in the 80's knows just how it feels. Especially if you were lazy, in college, and/or drank alot...
Where did you get the stupid idea that you deserve the job just because you're technically capable of it? That's like saying you deserve a girlfriend just because you have a hardon. Based on what you wrote here, it's no surprise if you have neither. There's more to being productive than being technically qualified, and there's more to a job (and a girlfriend) than being able to punch the right buttons. I wouldn't hire you, and not because you're "unique", but because you're miserable to be around, and would surely sue me if I ever fired you, or if your cubicle was 2 inches too small, or if you didn't get the day off for your grandmother's best friend's dog's funeral.
There's an obscure old book by Edward DeBono (now a creativity and problem-solving guru) called "Mechanism of Mind" that I found fascinating. It's very much non-academic and non-computer oriented, but it has an interesting take on pattern recognition and decision making in the human mind (as opposed to the human brain). If you liked "On Intelligence", this is a similar kind of thing, but at a much more abstract level, and without, well... any real academic basis. I think it is out of print now, but maybe it can be found online somewhere.
If you are interested in very general epistemological ideas, I would also recommend Ayn Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" as an outside the box choice for exploring a theory of concept formation that rings true, at least to me, and that I suspect has some application to AI in a way that I don't think has been explored very much.
if the trucking companies were happy with their pay and arrangements. [...] they could have ramped up to where they were stealing 3% or 4% of every broker's business, they'd have been able to live very comfortably.
At that point, the only thing they'd really be stealing is the franchise fee they aren't paying to the company whose name they are doing business under. On the other hand, 3-4% smaller piece of the pie might be a worthwhile commission for them improving the real company's reputation like that, if it makes a bigger pie.
Maybe I'll set up a company with a business model that consists of getting its name hijacked by forward-thinking Russian scammers, and monetizing the resulting reputation by selling franchise rights to everyone else.
Wouldn't it be better to have every check-in be stable? ... It's pretty rare that people mind waiting a few days.
If you didn't have a five-digit ID, I'd tell you to get back to us once you actually graduate and get a job. Instead, I'll just assume I've dreamed the last ten years of my career. Thanks for waking me up, lemme tell you about the nightmare I've been having...
corporations will lie, cheat, and steal to increase their profits.
Yes, well, there's always people trying to find ways to oppose capitalism, and governments to help them do it.
No, the whole basis of capitalism is trading something of lesser value for something of greater value. Physical scarcity is based on materials and labor, product scarcity is based on ideas, materials, and labor. This will severely diminish the labor from mass produced items, but there will still be things that require human labor (like repairing these printers, for instance). It will also make the artificial scarcity of reproduceable ideas moot, but the value of knowledge that can't be reproduced, such as a live concert by Coldplay or a conversation with Cory Doctorow, won't see any diminishment of scarcity. The material scarcity will remain, although the limiting factor will be increasingly raw materials rather than manufactured materials.
Capitalism will still function just fine. People will still value the products as much as they ever do, but the manufacturers will value them less - because they can make more of them with the same value of resources - so the price will go down.
Or were you referring to the bastard stepchild that Bush and Paulson and Bernanke and the MAFIAA refer to as "capitalism"?
nTripsToSpace++; would have said the same thing more succinctly.
Your co-workers know a lot less than you think they do, but sometimes know a lot more than you think they do
Your boss knows less about programming than you could ever believe possible, it's not his job
Take chances, the standards you think your code will be held to are far lower than you've been led to believe
The standards of correct, well-designed, well-documented, and easily maintainable code are not the standards your customers and your competition hold your product to - software is more than code.
Hold your own code to higher standards than your boss does, but get it done within the business constraints he sets.
Be nice to the guy who is maintaining your code.
Seeking the perfect design is a recipe for disaster.
Interfaces should be inherited, implementations should be aggregated. Do it the other way around and you're digging a hole you'll never dig out of. Nor will that guy who is maintaining your code.
Objects do not represent real-world objects, no matter what the books say. Objects either manage state or behavior, not both.
Code flexibly those aspects likely to change, code rigidly those aspects unlikely to change. Novice programmers get that wrong more often than any other principle.
Never write code that "you're gonna need someday". That day is likely never come, and when it does, nobody, including you, will remember what you already coded for it. And even if you or they do, it won't be the right approach.
No principle, including all the ones here, is always true. Never violate them, except when you should.