Employer's have no incentive to care whether or not their employees are bored.
That may be true, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what OP was about.
What the book author seems to miss is that today, one good person with good development tools (not even necessarily an "IDE" as OP says), can do the work that 20 good people could do 16 years ago. And I know, because I am doing it now AND I was doing it then.
Example: when 2000 rolled around I worked for a programming company (and was VERY bored there, by the way, no matter how hard I worked). I wasn't a manager or receptionist; I coded all day.
Today, on a decent day, I can easily accomplish 20 times as much, because the languages and tools have improved. But that would not be possible if my tools were "dumbing me down".
Author might as well argue that typewriters were nirvana, and word processors made authors stupid.
This is not true anticonformancy. If you want to truly look different from most people it's not that difficult.
It's worse than that. Rather than (more appropriately) just giving the paper a title suggesting they were measuring "popular trends", they... well, wait for it.
It's not a "hipster" effect. While the authors may have analyzed it mathematically, this "effect" was noticed and even studies way back when hippies were the "in" group.
So the researchers apparently were not aware of how -- you got it -- "hipster" they were being, by associating their study with current hipster culture rather than other similar social trends over the years. They were conforming to hipster culture and didn't even know it.
Sounds to me like it's a statement by someone that doesn't understand...
Historically, police have ALWAYS said this. "We have to restrict people's freedoms or criminals will get away." It has been the endless chant of law enforcement, and when legislators somehow get the idea it is correct, invariably freedoms are restricted or infringed.
But of course it's nonsense. Look where that kind of attitude has brought us: not just more total people but more people per capita in prison than any other country in the civilized world (and even including places many of use would not count as civilized).
History shows very clearly that freer societies do better in every measurable way: health, longevity, economy, etc. etc. Police states have invariably led to the downfall of the culture.
Are we talking about the same Washington State that I live in? Because being the only (I believe) state in the US where you can both get a same-sex wedding and legally buy recreational (not medical) marijuana at a retail store does not scream "prudish" or "oppressive" to me.
Same-sex marriage has absolutely nothing to do with prudishness, nor does marijuana.
You're talking about a state that requires a license for nude dancers, for no apparent rational reason OTHER THAN prudishness.
"knowing that such conduct is likely to cause reasonable affront" seems likely to cover most cases of public nudity.
Again, quite the contrary, as the courts have repeatedly affirmed. Most current cases of public nudity are people sunbathing, such as at a nude beach (or not).
The fact is, in that state somebody can sunbathe in the nude in any public park if they want. As long as their purpose is sunbathing, rather than intentionally causing alarm or offense.
It may surprise you to learn that most people in the U.S. today are not "offended" by simple nudity.
which seems not to indicate that "the exception is when a person is nude for the purposes of shock or intimidation."
Quite the contrary. "Affront or alarm" IS "shock or intimidation." I probably should have written "offense" rather than intimidation, but shock and alarm are pretty much synonyms.
The last sentence should have said "public nudity is LEGAL" in Washington. The exception is when a person is nude for the purposes of shock or intimidation, or overt sex acts. Of course, a stage in an establishment with a closed door is not "public".
Washington used to be a rather "liberal" state, in the social sense of the word. But over the years, for some reason, it has become more prudish and also more oppressive. I blame the "progressives", who in fact have done pretty much the opposite.
There would be no issue here if the state didn't have a BS licensing law.
Seriously: who or what interest does the state imagine it is "protecting" with this license? It isn't there for practical purposes, it's there for the purposes of intimidation and control.
The licensing law is bad because it is the licensing law itself that led to this conflict between public's right to know and an individual's privacy. I do agree that the individual has a right to privacy away from the workplace... but it is the STATE that is violating it with this STUPID law.
The funny thing is that under most circumstances, nudity is not legal in Washington... except, I guess, when you're on stage without a license.
David Chisnall says : parallel is not the same as in series. World gasps.
It's worse than that. TFA's basic premise that "there is no such thing as a general-purpose processor" is just flat wrong. Of course there are. His real argument is about how to make them efficient, which is a different thing and very much contrary to his title and introduction.
Anything that can implement a Turing machine *IS* a general-purpose processor, by definition. And any general-purpose processor can do what any other general-purpose processor can do... although not necessarily fast or efficiently.
Sadly, Chisnall gets the latter part (efficiency) confused with the former part... and in the process he incorrectly attempts to re-define the entire long-accepted meaning of what a "general purpose" processor is.
They leave out the part where they're fired at 4 months...
No doubt. Because:
"3 months," explains ReskillUSA's website, is "how long it takes a dedicated beginner to learn the skills to qualify for computing and web development jobs."
No, it isn't. It's enough time to learn most of the raw coding ability. At this point it isn't a "skill", because there hasn't been time to learn any theory, or to understand the subtle nuances or infrastructure of the language(s) they are using.
And it sure as hell isn't enough time to learn office teamwork skills, or to become intimately familiar with one OS, much less several.
Please read my comment again, because you seem to have missed most of it.
I wasn't comparing this to RFID, I was just saying it was the same guy who did both.
It was proven that not only can NFC connections can be made from any arbitrary distance, credentials can be snarfed even when the phone is not making a transaction.
Distance for a transfer depends solely on the equipment used and size (or architecture) of the antenna. Anybody who knows much about RF will tell you the same thing.
Before NFC was even common in cell phones yet, a security researcher, Christopher something -- I don't remember his last name but he's the same guy who read (and copied!) passport RFIDs from his car 30 feet away in San Francisco -- showed that with a few hundred dollars worth of body-carried equipment, you could snarf NFC credentials from phones from several FEET away. And the phones only had to have NFC turned on... they didn't even have to be engaging in a transaction.
That's called "broken".
There are several fallacies here, but one is that the RF can only travel a couple of centimeters. Nonsense. The only limit to the distance at which you can read the signal is how big of an antenna you can build.
Using RF for financial transactions is stupid, and NFC in particular was cracked YEARS ago. Anybody who wants to use it for financial transactions -- I repeat -- needs to have their head examined.
When you spike consumption in response to lower prices, the prices just go back up.
*IF*, and only if, supply does not keep up with demand.
A well-designed ff tax would hold the prices steady at a level high enough to encourage conservation, but hopefully low enough to not be onerous.
There has never in the history of the U.S. been a "well-designed" fuel tax. Further, government intervention in the market has provably kept gas prices UP, while "green" energy has all the while continued to be too inefficient and expensive. Government intervention hasn't and won't change that. Not to mention corrupt (Solyndra was just the tip of the iceberg, as it were). What will change things is private innovation and investment, without the government teat to suck on.
And the difference between the target price and the actual price is money that could be put to good use - or even simply returned to the public in the form of a rebate if politics dictate that's the only way.
You have an absolutely fascinating faith in interventionist economics, even though history very much works against you. And whether money COULD be put to good use is rather irrelevant, seeing as how it never has been. Further, what do politics have to do with markets? The idea that they do or should has been part of the problem in the U.S. in recent years.
The point is to use less fossil fuels, not necessarily to make driving expensive.
People will use less fossil fuels when actual economics dictate that they should. First, while EVERYBODY agrees that we should push toward more-sustainable energy sources, it won't make a damned bit of difference to "global warming". In fact, there is good evidence that the opposite is true: cheap clean energy would contribute to an increase in direct human heat output.
So let's not even go there. Let's talk about real markets and real economics, not government policy and politically-driven "CO2" arguments that have both already failed.
Your math doesn't mean squat because it's based on invalid assumptions, as I explained earlier.
There is more information available to your GPS receiver than you are accounting for.
But since you seem so resistant to the very IDEA that you could be wrong, I'll just leave you to your preconceptions. It isn't really worth an hour of my time to draw a decent diagram.
That's why, as I explained, a GPS receiver with an atomic clock could constrain its position to lie on the 2D surface of a sphere around a single satellite. If the GPS receiver didn't know the satellite's position, it wouldn't know where that sphere was centered.
Holy crap. Still with this, really?
Do you need me to draw you a DIAGRAM of how the geometry works? Then maybe it will sink in.
Yes, I know you can do that, I even mentioned it:) But the person I was repying to claimed "3 satellites are sufficient to find your basic location and elevation" (emphasis mine) - i.e. they were claiming you could find the distance from the centre of the Earth, without assuming it.
No. You are finding your distance from the satellites. Not from the center of the Earth. But since the 3-D positions of the satellites are known to a fine degree of accuracy, that's all you need.
And yes, 3 points and 3 distances is all you need to find a point in 3D space. It actually defines 2 points, but as mentioned before one is out in space so it obviously doesn't count. The other one is on the surface of the Earth (or in a plane, or whatever).
You still need to think about probability, because the elevation model only tells you where the ground is - not where you are in relation to it. That said, the asumption "you're probably very close to the surface" is often very good, at least for most people:-)
No. Again, the orbits (and therefore positions) of the GPS satellites are known very precisely. As long as you can receive the signals from them, you could be above the ground, or below the ground, or even at the center of the Earth (at least theoretically), and still get your position and "elevation", even though it may be negative. Probability is not a factor at all, though accuracy certainly is. There are errors that have to be accounted for.
Slashdot Mirror
The license is to verify age etc...indemnifies the club owner if dancer has license.
That's what driver's licenses and State IDs are for.
Point taken. Intentional and knowing are 2 different things.
The fact remains, however, that a person at most beaches (at least the ones I know) is not going to cause affront or alarm by being nude.
along with the large number of new niches for symbiotes and parasites that this created
It isn't just "symbiotes and parasites". When virtually everything is a new niche with little competition, you're going to see explosion.
Employer's have no incentive to care whether or not their employees are bored.
That may be true, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what OP was about.
What the book author seems to miss is that today, one good person with good development tools (not even necessarily an "IDE" as OP says), can do the work that 20 good people could do 16 years ago. And I know, because I am doing it now AND I was doing it then.
Example: when 2000 rolled around I worked for a programming company (and was VERY bored there, by the way, no matter how hard I worked). I wasn't a manager or receptionist; I coded all day.
Today, on a decent day, I can easily accomplish 20 times as much, because the languages and tools have improved. But that would not be possible if my tools were "dumbing me down".
Author might as well argue that typewriters were nirvana, and word processors made authors stupid.
This is not true anticonformancy. If you want to truly look different from most people it's not that difficult.
It's worse than that. Rather than (more appropriately) just giving the paper a title suggesting they were measuring "popular trends", they... well, wait for it.
It's not a "hipster" effect. While the authors may have analyzed it mathematically, this "effect" was noticed and even studies way back when hippies were the "in" group.
So the researchers apparently were not aware of how -- you got it -- "hipster" they were being, by associating their study with current hipster culture rather than other similar social trends over the years. They were conforming to hipster culture and didn't even know it.
Sounds to me like it's a statement by someone that doesn't understand...
Historically, police have ALWAYS said this. "We have to restrict people's freedoms or criminals will get away." It has been the endless chant of law enforcement, and when legislators somehow get the idea it is correct, invariably freedoms are restricted or infringed.
But of course it's nonsense. Look where that kind of attitude has brought us: not just more total people but more people per capita in prison than any other country in the civilized world (and even including places many of use would not count as civilized).
History shows very clearly that freer societies do better in every measurable way: health, longevity, economy, etc. etc. Police states have invariably led to the downfall of the culture.
Pretty much the same as the dictionary:
http://dictionary.reference.co...
Are we talking about the same Washington State that I live in? Because being the only (I believe) state in the US where you can both get a same-sex wedding and legally buy recreational (not medical) marijuana at a retail store does not scream "prudish" or "oppressive" to me.
Same-sex marriage has absolutely nothing to do with prudishness, nor does marijuana.
You're talking about a state that requires a license for nude dancers, for no apparent rational reason OTHER THAN prudishness.
"knowing that such conduct is likely to cause reasonable affront" seems likely to cover most cases of public nudity.
Again, quite the contrary, as the courts have repeatedly affirmed. Most current cases of public nudity are people sunbathing, such as at a nude beach (or not).
The fact is, in that state somebody can sunbathe in the nude in any public park if they want. As long as their purpose is sunbathing, rather than intentionally causing alarm or offense.
It may surprise you to learn that most people in the U.S. today are not "offended" by simple nudity.
which seems not to indicate that "the exception is when a person is nude for the purposes of shock or intimidation."
Quite the contrary. "Affront or alarm" IS "shock or intimidation." I probably should have written "offense" rather than intimidation, but shock and alarm are pretty much synonyms.
It isn't a local license, it's a state license, and if its purpose is to raise money I daresay it probably isn't doing very well.
Correction: editing error.
The last sentence should have said "public nudity is LEGAL" in Washington. The exception is when a person is nude for the purposes of shock or intimidation, or overt sex acts. Of course, a stage in an establishment with a closed door is not "public".
Washington used to be a rather "liberal" state, in the social sense of the word. But over the years, for some reason, it has become more prudish and also more oppressive. I blame the "progressives", who in fact have done pretty much the opposite.
There would be no issue here if the state didn't have a BS licensing law.
Seriously: who or what interest does the state imagine it is "protecting" with this license? It isn't there for practical purposes, it's there for the purposes of intimidation and control.
The licensing law is bad because it is the licensing law itself that led to this conflict between public's right to know and an individual's privacy. I do agree that the individual has a right to privacy away from the workplace... but it is the STATE that is violating it with this STUPID law.
The funny thing is that under most circumstances, nudity is not legal in Washington... except, I guess, when you're on stage without a license.
Well, hell. We've been fighting imaginary threats to democracy for 13-14 years now; why not another one?
David Chisnall says : parallel is not the same as in series. World gasps.
It's worse than that. TFA's basic premise that "there is no such thing as a general-purpose processor" is just flat wrong. Of course there are. His real argument is about how to make them efficient, which is a different thing and very much contrary to his title and introduction.
Anything that can implement a Turing machine *IS* a general-purpose processor, by definition. And any general-purpose processor can do what any other general-purpose processor can do... although not necessarily fast or efficiently.
Sadly, Chisnall gets the latter part (efficiency) confused with the former part... and in the process he incorrectly attempts to re-define the entire long-accepted meaning of what a "general purpose" processor is.
Just no. He's not qualified to do that.
They leave out the part where they're fired at 4 months...
No doubt. Because:
"3 months," explains ReskillUSA's website, is "how long it takes a dedicated beginner to learn the skills to qualify for computing and web development jobs."
No, it isn't. It's enough time to learn most of the raw coding ability. At this point it isn't a "skill", because there hasn't been time to learn any theory, or to understand the subtle nuances or infrastructure of the language(s) they are using.
And it sure as hell isn't enough time to learn office teamwork skills, or to become intimately familiar with one OS, much less several.
Etc.
Please read my comment again, because you seem to have missed most of it.
I wasn't comparing this to RFID, I was just saying it was the same guy who did both.
It was proven that not only can NFC connections can be made from any arbitrary distance, credentials can be snarfed even when the phone is not making a transaction.
Distance for a transfer depends solely on the equipment used and size (or architecture) of the antenna. Anybody who knows much about RF will tell you the same thing.
Before NFC was even common in cell phones yet, a security researcher, Christopher something -- I don't remember his last name but he's the same guy who read (and copied!) passport RFIDs from his car 30 feet away in San Francisco -- showed that with a few hundred dollars worth of body-carried equipment, you could snarf NFC credentials from phones from several FEET away. And the phones only had to have NFC turned on... they didn't even have to be engaging in a transaction.
That's called "broken".
There are several fallacies here, but one is that the RF can only travel a couple of centimeters. Nonsense. The only limit to the distance at which you can read the signal is how big of an antenna you can build.
Using RF for financial transactions is stupid, and NFC in particular was cracked YEARS ago. Anybody who wants to use it for financial transactions -- I repeat -- needs to have their head examined.
When you spike consumption in response to lower prices, the prices just go back up.
*IF*, and only if, supply does not keep up with demand.
A well-designed ff tax would hold the prices steady at a level high enough to encourage conservation, but hopefully low enough to not be onerous.
There has never in the history of the U.S. been a "well-designed" fuel tax. Further, government intervention in the market has provably kept gas prices UP, while "green" energy has all the while continued to be too inefficient and expensive. Government intervention hasn't and won't change that. Not to mention corrupt (Solyndra was just the tip of the iceberg, as it were). What will change things is private innovation and investment, without the government teat to suck on.
And the difference between the target price and the actual price is money that could be put to good use - or even simply returned to the public in the form of a rebate if politics dictate that's the only way.
You have an absolutely fascinating faith in interventionist economics, even though history very much works against you. And whether money COULD be put to good use is rather irrelevant, seeing as how it never has been. Further, what do politics have to do with markets? The idea that they do or should has been part of the problem in the U.S. in recent years.
The point is to use less fossil fuels, not necessarily to make driving expensive.
People will use less fossil fuels when actual economics dictate that they should. First, while EVERYBODY agrees that we should push toward more-sustainable energy sources, it won't make a damned bit of difference to "global warming". In fact, there is good evidence that the opposite is true: cheap clean energy would contribute to an increase in direct human heat output.
So let's not even go there. Let's talk about real markets and real economics, not government policy and politically-driven "CO2" arguments that have both already failed.
Amateur rocketeers routinely get approval for their launches.
Anybody who wants to perform financial transactions via an RF protocol should have their head examined.
Your math doesn't mean squat because it's based on invalid assumptions, as I explained earlier.
There is more information available to your GPS receiver than you are accounting for.
But since you seem so resistant to the very IDEA that you could be wrong, I'll just leave you to your preconceptions. It isn't really worth an hour of my time to draw a decent diagram.
Isn't that how normal vision works anyway?
This same problem with artificial 3-D vision was announced a LONG time ago. Like 7-8 years ago.
That's why, as I explained, a GPS receiver with an atomic clock could constrain its position to lie on the 2D surface of a sphere around a single satellite. If the GPS receiver didn't know the satellite's position, it wouldn't know where that sphere was centered.
Holy crap. Still with this, really?
Do you need me to draw you a DIAGRAM of how the geometry works? Then maybe it will sink in.
Yes, I know you can do that, I even mentioned it :) But the person I was repying to claimed "3 satellites are sufficient to find your basic location and elevation" (emphasis mine) - i.e. they were claiming you could find the distance from the centre of the Earth, without assuming it.
No. You are finding your distance from the satellites. Not from the center of the Earth. But since the 3-D positions of the satellites are known to a fine degree of accuracy, that's all you need.
And yes, 3 points and 3 distances is all you need to find a point in 3D space. It actually defines 2 points, but as mentioned before one is out in space so it obviously doesn't count. The other one is on the surface of the Earth (or in a plane, or whatever).
You still need to think about probability, because the elevation model only tells you where the ground is - not where you are in relation to it. That said, the asumption "you're probably very close to the surface" is often very good, at least for most people :-)
No. Again, the orbits (and therefore positions) of the GPS satellites are known very precisely. As long as you can receive the signals from them, you could be above the ground, or below the ground, or even at the center of the Earth (at least theoretically), and still get your position and "elevation", even though it may be negative. Probability is not a factor at all, though accuracy certainly is. There are errors that have to be accounted for.