Well, to be fair, there are people who behave like that after being raped...but they're in abusive relationships, whereas neither of these women really appeared to be in relationships at all.
My work computer is a laptop. It's a laptop hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, though, both at home and at the office.
When I actually have to use it as a laptop, I'm horrible at it. I've got a bluetooth mouse, I'd get a keyboard except a full sized one wouldn't fit in my laptop bag. (And I need a full sized one. I could do without the numeric keypad, but I need the arrow and page up/page down keys in the right place.)
Hell, I went out and bought a 'clicky' keyboard for home, just because that's what I'm used to. Had to buy a damn 70 dollar 'gamer' keyboard, but it was worth it.
I find it absurd that people who aren't comfortable with their typing can program as efficiently as people who are. I know that anything that slows down my typing has a major effect on my productivity as I start actually dealing with the fact I'm 'typing', instead of just the words magically appearing on the screen.
You need to document why you're doing something that isn't immediately obvious.
Perhaps that's what you meant by 'unexpected', but that's not really the same thing. It's entirely possible to see what code is doing, but have no idea why on earth it would need to do that.
In fact, having 'unexpected' code is probably the bad idea. Do not document that, just don't do that. Code should not do things people do not expect that code to do, with a very very few exceptions for weird optimizations that are necessary. Don't use Duff's Device unless there's a really good reason. (Remember, premature optimization is the root of all evil.)
Or, in other words, document why, not what. When code was written, it was written for a reason. If any programmer cannot look at the code and figure out the reason that needed doing, it needs documenting. (Whereas if they can't figure out what's it's doing, or how it's doing what it's doing, it needs new code, not comments.)
Which, incidentally, means that your sum() example needs documenting, because it doesn't appear to serve any useful purpose. Is there a particular reason that someone would need a function call to add two numbers, considering it's a built-in language feature? Pretending there was a reason, and this wasn't just a silly example, you need to tell us that reason. (Perhaps you're storing a pointer to that, and bunch of other functions, and need to call one of them without knowing in advance which one?)
And, incidentally, writing a function that probably shouldn't exist because it's so short to show how much 'needless' documentation there is is stupid. There's a damn good reason to document parameters and results for function in a standard format. It's a standard place to state exactly what the function is expecting, so people don't get tripped up when they pass NULL and it blows up.
Of course, people who complain about documentation like that have probably never worked on a project where different people are responsibly for different aspects.
I've never seen the point of rectangular copy and paste. What is that, for keeping indenting yet changing the level? Just get an editor that lets you hilight multiple lines at once and Tab or Shift-Tab them.
All the programming languages I work on are line-based, not rectangle-based. I want whole lines, not whole rectangles.
OTOH, I feel the same way about the people who don't know you can click before the first character of a line and drag it down to get entire lines at once, so spend ten seconds positioning the mouse before the first character. Or miss the indent of the first line and have to fix that when done.
Shifting it from locating a key to checking that you typed what you meant to is at best a zero sum transaction.
Uh, not really. What you meant to type is presumably already taking up memory space in your head. You can hardly type stuff if you don't know what you're trying to type.
If you have 'int i=0' in memory location 1, you can think 'I need to type location 1' and then at the end of the line you glance at it and ask 'Is what I am looking at the same as location 1?'. One memory slot.
Obviously, if it's not, you've been interrupted, and the wrong text has also taken up a memory slot now, but there's not any way around that. (I've discovered that I personally am correcting a lot of errors as I type without actually noticing, and that it I need to do the compare at the end of every line while programming, and every five words or so when in typed conversations.)
Interestingly enough, not only is the 'Is the text I am looking at the same as the text I am thinking of' a very fast comparison, it's actually a pretty error-prone one. We've all stared at code and not seen problems because we 'already know what it says' and our brain doesn't notice errors. But typing slower doesn't solve that.
Meanwhile, hunting and pecking is actually looking for a letter, which requires you to think about each individual letter in the sentence and, even worse, the physical layout of the keyboard. You can't tell me that doesn't take up at least one more memory slot.
However, you're right in that people rarely need to type at 'max speed', but I think part of the problem with this conversation is that some people are talking 70 wpm vs 150, whereas others are talking about 35 wpm vs 70 wpm, or something like that. No one's saying that programmers will be superhuman typists, or they'll follow the 'typing rules', just that it's very hard to type for more than, let's say, 5000 hours without learning how to type at a reasonable speed without looking at the keyboard. If that's via the index fingers, that's fine.
Yes, we need to plan and design before we code, but when you know exactly what needs to be done, or when you have a sufficiently good idea to start prototyping (or when you are in the middle of a hack that *must happen*), bro, you better be able to get those streams of thought fluently down to your keyboard via your fingers.
Indeed. Human beings learn how to automate steps. No one thinks about how to walk, or open doors, or point their mouse at something.
Good programmers figure out what needs to happen, figure out how to make that happen, and it's on the screen.
For great programmers, 'what' and 'how' are the same thing, because they've done that step so much. They just figure out what needs to happen, and it's on the screen.
But key there is 'it's on the screen'. Not 'type some stuff to put that on the screen'. That just happens.
If it's not just happening, you do not have enough experience at the process. You are figuring out how to balance yourself on one foot while moving the other foot forward, or how to pull the doorknob and turn it at the same time.
This isn't even something that's particularly restricted to programmers. I suspect someone who's written a novel does the same thing. They think about what they want on the screen, and, bam, it's on the screen.
I used to think I typed worse when someone was watching me, but I've come to realize I don't type worse, I correct worse.
When no one is watching, I correct typos nearly subconsciously. I'm watching the screen and I see a wrong letter, and it's 'back and fix' instantly. If some psychologist did an experiment where I estimated the number of errors I made while typing something, and then check that, I'd be way under.
When someone is watching, for some reason, I wonder if they noticed and think I'm not typing well, and often the entire correction blows up and I don't fix it right automatically and then have to fix it manually. And now I've spent 3 seconds instead of.5, and, worse, I paused to think about it so now I have to figured out what I was typing and start going again, so that's another 2 seconds.
I do a weird hybrid. My left hand is almost always exactly right, with fingers on the home row.
My right hand, OTOH (No pun intended.), is all over the place. It has to deal with brackets, parens, arrow keys, number pad, and on top of that, the mouse. So I tend to just use the first two fingers with the pinky for Enter. When I'm actually typing blocks of text, like here, I can force myself back to the home row and do it 'right', though.
If you type a lot, you will start touch typing. It's not some debatable thing like whether you 'need' to learn or not.
You either a) can't type well, b) were taught to type in a class, or c) just typed so much you could type well. (Or some combination of b and c)
Asking if it 'matters' for programmers is just stupid. If they can't type at some reasonable level, they have no experience programming. As you pointed out, the question is the wrong direction of causation.
So, basically, Jeff Atwood is right...people who cannot type quickly (Unless they have some physical disability that slows them down) should not be taken seriously as programmers. Or as novelists, if they're claiming to be that, or as keyboard testers. Just like a guy who uses training wheels probably shouldn't be taken seriously as a bike messager. That, in and of itself, doesn't determine how well the job is done, exactly, but it sure as heck indicates how much experience they have.
Now, how much they 'follow typing rules' is interesting thing to think about. Some people are entirely self taught, some people clearly learned the rules at some time but barely follow them, and some people seem like they're giving a touch typing demonstration of how to hold your hands. I don't know if this has any bearing on the skill of the programmer, although I suspect that people who are self taught at programming are slightly more likely to be self taught at typing, too.
Just stop the idiotic grandfathering in of horribly polluting older plants.
Simply stopping that, replacing older plants with plants that actually meat the clean air standard, would reduce CO2 emissions by 40% and NOx emissions by 15%.
We're not even at the point where we need 'stricter' standards.
No, I'm talking about the pollution required to make rare earth magnets.
I have no idea how much supply there is, but that will take care of it itself. I just don't want power producers to be able to shift their cost to poisoning the commons.
The failure of T. Boone Picken was in that he was attempting a complicated theft of water under the guise of solar power, and the regulators didn't fall for it, despite the amount of time he spent trying to get the public behind him.
While, 1.1% of electricity is from petroleum, another 16.3% is from natural gas, 0.3% is from diesel, and another 3.6% is from 'Combustion Turbine Generators', which are operated using either gasoline or natural gas or jet fuel or something like that. So, depending on how much of that is 'foreign' and how much of that counts as 'oil', that's 21.3% that could be called 'foreign oil'. (Most of the natural gas is from Canada, which is foreign but probably not something to worry about.)
Regardless, I think the only workable plan is, at some point, to indeed have wind turbine and nuclear power cars. Or, rather, electric cars.
But this is an entire separate problem from the fact that our electrical production is extremely toxic and stupid, because half the power is from coal.
Get cars on electrical. Get electricity off coal. Two problems. Solving one is unrelated to solving the other.
It was the fact he wanted water rights, aka, to pump water from the ground. From dry areas. That are already at the very fringe of not having enough water. And he wanted to take that water and sell it to the cities, the exact same cities that are currently fighting with water rights over the same areas.
We can't just make more of it in areas where people need it, like we can with power, or food, or housing. We have to move it there. From somewhere else. Pickens wanted to take water from one group of people that were using it, and sell it another group of people, and thus the first group would no longer have it.
Yes, I am aware we can technically make water by burning hydrogen. However, that just turns the problem into transporting hydrogen, which is actually much harder than just transporting the water. (Hydrogen is very small so escapes very easily, and also explodes.) Likewise, I am aware that we can desalinize ocean water...but, again, unless you're actually at the ocean, you still need transport.
It's amazing how many people still think solar==electricity.
Houses should be built with solar in them.
Not for the electrical, although that might be an okay idea for some stuff. But if you have to convert to 110, just no, it's not there yet. The only stuff on solar should be operating at the voltage the solar panels produce.
No, the solar that should be build in is stuff like solar heated water and solar power water pumps (To a tank in the attic) and stuff. That's what houses should be build with.
And ground-source heat pumps are so obvious I'm always amazed it took this long. Seriously, the ground ten feet down is almost always closer to 'room temperature' than the outside air, so it's almost always more efficient to use it to cool or heat with.
Also, what's a solar cooling chimney?
I always thought they should start making window AC units with solar panels that you put in the roof. Again, without voltage conversion. They work off whatever the solar panel is producing. You could install them if you had central heating and air, and just leave them there, slightly below central AC temp...when it gets hot enough, and there's sunlight to operate them, they'll try to keep things 'topped off' so the big unit doesn't have to run. Otherwise, whatever, no harm done. (People who don't have central air could get an adapter that switches them onto an AC line when there's not enough sun.)
I'm for no subsidies if, and only if, we include 'free pollution' as a subsidy.
In my universe, the fact people can buy and freely burn oil for energy counts as a 'subsidy'. People should have to pay for that. They're using up a public resource.
Same with rate earth magnets for wind and semiconductor manufacturing for solar and nuclear waste disposal. (1) Everyone should have to pay.
Once all that is leveled out, we can look around and ask ourselves if we need subsidies. Possibly we do, possibly we don't, but it's impossible to see from here, where some power production industries can trash the environment and others can't.
1) Although we've already done enough with nuclear protection...it's like, for some reason, with nuclear waste, we need a goddamn submarine door that can withstand 20,000 feet, whereas with, for example, coal ash, we have a screen door with holes in it and a broken latch. It's fucking absurdly imbalanced the lengths nuclear must go through thanks to a generation of idiots trained to jump when people say 'nuclear.
If we treated coal like we treated nuclear we'd be running coal engines in a dome of air surrounded by a dome of vacuum, with massive scrubbers operating to recycle the air in the first dome, and it'd cost about a thousand times more. That shit is the only reason nuclear isn't 'competitive', but the solution isn't to subside is, it's to recognize that we can't stop the world because a nuclear plants raises background radioactivity by 5% for a square mile or whatever. OMG, two hundred extra people might get cancer...unlike coal plants, which regularly kill tens of thousands of people each year.
That's why I said, somewhere else, that an optimization to experiment with might be a payment area.
You have one place that counts everything up and bags it and gives you a receipt, and then you walk to the doors where there's few register where you actually pay that amount. Don't even need ot move the cart there...could have a 'cart parking area' you leave it at and walk five feet, pay, walk back and get it, and leave.
You'd want the number of 'payment stands' in proportion to how much time people spend paying. At something like a dollar store, where people are buying maybe five things, you'd need as many as registers, so it wouldn't be a very useful idea.
But at something like a grocery store you'd need maybe one stand per five lines. And you need at least two of them, so it would only make sense in large stores.
But this would solve many of the problems.
Strangely, the checkout problems you described are being fix by (and the only real reason to use) the automated checkout machines, because, while you can, in theory, pay with a check, no one actually knows that.
Using their time in front of the cashier as opportunity to button their kids' coats and put their gloves on, as if they can't do that *elsewhere* before departing the store.
You know what the only thing that gets me annoyed at people I don't know? I don't mind when they slightly 'harm' me for useful purposes. Okay, they stole my parking spot, maybe they're in a hurry. Okay, they cut in line, whatever. Those people look around at the game of life and have decided to 'cheat', but it's possible they have some reason, and I'm not going to dwell on it. I don't 'cheat' normally, but unless I know their situation I'm not going to get pissed...for all I know they've ten minutes late somewhere to their second job. I can't judge them, and I'm not supposed to.
The only thing that annoys me is when they harm me for no reason whatsoever except that they are, apparently, so goddamn unobservant they don't notice other people. You want to cheat, cheat. Do not fucking waste my time for something that does not benefit you. Do not randomly stand in my way talking to people, do not sit in line after you're done doing something that could be done elsewhere. (At some point, this bleeds into the first thing, if they're wasting my time for actual trivial things, like ten cents. I just want to pay them ten cents and say 'Five minutes of your time might not be worth ten cents, but mine is.'. But it takes 'no benefit at all in any sense whatsoever' to get me really angry.)
I get annoyed at my grandmother every time I take her to the grocery store, because she feels like the correct time get out her shopping list is right after putting her purse in her cart...which is a chockpoint and no one else with a cart can get past, and there she is, spending 60 seconds rummaging in her purse to get her list and then another 60 seconds to find a pen, while people are standing behind her, and, hell, the outside door is open and cold air pouring in because people are still in the sensor area. All told, over her entire life of shopping there, she's probably wasted days of people's life from stopping there instead of walking another ten feet.
I've managed, at this point, to get her to move another ten feet before doing this, but it's absurd...people should check if they're blocking people before they stop moving. Period. It should be some automatic ingrained thing, like not standing in the middle of the road. Apparently it's not. It's a wonder humans managed to evolve at all, what with stopping in front of panthers and stampeding elephants.
She doesn't 'waste time' at the checkout, though, although she moves so slow it's indistinguishable from 'wasting time'. She'll start writing the check at the start of the checkout...and not be finished 40 items later at the end. (Although luckily has started using a debit card.)
If it takes, for example, an hour to walk into place and unload a cart onto the belt, which people could do while behind another person, and it only takes ten minutes to checkout, then a single line feeding all checkouts only when they are empty is obviously not the most efficient.
The question is at which point does it become more efficient to feed people singly vs. doubly.
You would already know this if you had read a few other posts in this thread.
The article doesn't talk about that except in regard to show what line you're in is not the fastest (Which is, um, stupid, we all knew that.), and there are exactly two mentions of 'simulation' and one of 'modeling' in the comments, and neither are even slightly relevant to what I asked.
You could probably do that with automation, in fact, and not need a person sending people to lines. Something on the register that indicated the next person should come forward when the end total is rung up.
There could still be delays, I've seen people who seem to take several minutes paying, but that can't really be helped.
The question is how you do something like that when there is no obvious 'about to end' item in the transaction. Like at a bank or the DMV or whatever.
OTOH, those don't have people having to maneuver carts and put things on conveyor belts. All those people have to do is walk five feet.
Of course, if we're talking about way to speed up stores, an obvious thing to do is to have a payment place. You have someone count up everything you have, put everything back in the cart, and then you walk over and pay somewhere else.
The problem is that you only need one of those per five checkout people, and really need two of them, so it really only makes sense if the store is massive and people are buying huge carts.
I'm sure there are some idiots that think the fact the UK hasn't captured and detained, without charge, Assange, to turn him over to the US, does mean we should invade the UK.
Of course, those idiots probably don't realize, as I pointed out, that the UK is part of NATO, and hence invading it would a) kick us out of NATO, and b) cause us to go to war with, essentially, half the countries in the entire world that we consider 'allies'.
Even Canada, which is going to, um, suck, as all of Europe starts moving troops there.
Like I said, some people live in crazy land. Where the US can do whatever it wants.
You know, people like the last three Republican presidents.
You realize that, if you interpret the espionage act that way, where 'documents' mean 'information', that every single person who read the New York Times, and doesn't attempt to turn their copy over to the government is in violation of the law, right?
That is why the courts don't interpret it that way. That would be an absurd law.
There is plenty of reason to believe that the investigation against Assange is motivated by his behavior, not by some government conspiracy.
Really? Why were the details leaked in violation of Swedish law? Why were the charges brought forth, then withdrawn? Why was he allowed to leave Sweden? Why have they actually refused to question him? Why have they still refused to question him while he's in England on bail?
Contrary to some people's ideas, Interpol does get involved in rape cases.
Contrary to normal behavior, countries do not normally put up Interpol notices for people they still have not charged with actual crimes, but merely wish to interview. (It's worth pointing out that the UK denied the original extradition order exactly because no one would figure out an actual crime they intend to charge him with, and while Sweden did make a new order with an actual crime they intend to charge him with, they still have not actually charged him with it.)
The CIA has its own Inspector General, and no doubt other investigators. There are plenty of circumstances that might call for investigations when national security is involved in a large organization like the CIA.
Inspector Generals do not do anything like you apparently think they do. The CIA's IG is in charge of investigating the CIA's behavior. Inspector Generals are oversight.
There are plenty of circumstances that might call for investigations when national security is involved in a large organization like the CIA.
No, the military police would investigate leaks by the military. The CIA would, presumably, help with that, but only by providing data.
There's no reason the CIA would be investigating the recipient of the leak. The CIA cannot actually prosecute people, it doesn't even have the ability to detain people. It does not have any investigators. The CIA can no more investigate crimes than the Bureau of Engraving.
The Department of Justice are the people who investigate crimes, this one probably via the FBI. And will presumably find whatever evidence the CIA manages to plant while they are, somehow, involved in all this.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect it's probably the gays doing that, trying to make you gay with ads alone.
<spooky voice>GaaaaaaaAAAAaaaaaAAAAaaay. Become gaaaaAAAAaaay.</spooky voice>
Don't fall for it.
Well, to be fair, there are people who behave like that after being raped...but they're in abusive relationships, whereas neither of these women really appeared to be in relationships at all.
It is pretty weird in these circumstances.
I'll second the laptop thing.
My work computer is a laptop. It's a laptop hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, though, both at home and at the office.
When I actually have to use it as a laptop, I'm horrible at it. I've got a bluetooth mouse, I'd get a keyboard except a full sized one wouldn't fit in my laptop bag. (And I need a full sized one. I could do without the numeric keypad, but I need the arrow and page up/page down keys in the right place.)
Hell, I went out and bought a 'clicky' keyboard for home, just because that's what I'm used to. Had to buy a damn 70 dollar 'gamer' keyboard, but it was worth it.
I find it absurd that people who aren't comfortable with their typing can program as efficiently as people who are. I know that anything that slows down my typing has a major effect on my productivity as I start actually dealing with the fact I'm 'typing', instead of just the words magically appearing on the screen.
What most programmers uses is a text editor.
Now I'm imagining a picture someone at a computer writing in C in OpenOffice Writer, with a caption of 'PROGRAMMING: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG'
good code documents itself.
Uh, no. Obvious code documents itself.
You need to document why you're doing something that isn't immediately obvious.
Perhaps that's what you meant by 'unexpected', but that's not really the same thing. It's entirely possible to see what code is doing, but have no idea why on earth it would need to do that.
In fact, having 'unexpected' code is probably the bad idea. Do not document that, just don't do that. Code should not do things people do not expect that code to do, with a very very few exceptions for weird optimizations that are necessary. Don't use Duff's Device unless there's a really good reason. (Remember, premature optimization is the root of all evil.)
Or, in other words, document why, not what. When code was written, it was written for a reason. If any programmer cannot look at the code and figure out the reason that needed doing, it needs documenting. (Whereas if they can't figure out what's it's doing, or how it's doing what it's doing, it needs new code, not comments.)
Which, incidentally, means that your sum() example needs documenting, because it doesn't appear to serve any useful purpose. Is there a particular reason that someone would need a function call to add two numbers, considering it's a built-in language feature? Pretending there was a reason, and this wasn't just a silly example, you need to tell us that reason. (Perhaps you're storing a pointer to that, and bunch of other functions, and need to call one of them without knowing in advance which one?)
And, incidentally, writing a function that probably shouldn't exist because it's so short to show how much 'needless' documentation there is is stupid. There's a damn good reason to document parameters and results for function in a standard format. It's a standard place to state exactly what the function is expecting, so people don't get tripped up when they pass NULL and it blows up.
Of course, people who complain about documentation like that have probably never worked on a project where different people are responsibly for different aspects.
I've never seen the point of rectangular copy and paste. What is that, for keeping indenting yet changing the level? Just get an editor that lets you hilight multiple lines at once and Tab or Shift-Tab them.
All the programming languages I work on are line-based, not rectangle-based. I want whole lines, not whole rectangles.
OTOH, I feel the same way about the people who don't know you can click before the first character of a line and drag it down to get entire lines at once, so spend ten seconds positioning the mouse before the first character. Or miss the indent of the first line and have to fix that when done.
Shifting it from locating a key to checking that you typed what you meant to is at best a zero sum transaction.
Uh, not really. What you meant to type is presumably already taking up memory space in your head. You can hardly type stuff if you don't know what you're trying to type.
If you have 'int i=0' in memory location 1, you can think 'I need to type location 1' and then at the end of the line you glance at it and ask 'Is what I am looking at the same as location 1?'. One memory slot.
Obviously, if it's not, you've been interrupted, and the wrong text has also taken up a memory slot now, but there's not any way around that. (I've discovered that I personally am correcting a lot of errors as I type without actually noticing, and that it I need to do the compare at the end of every line while programming, and every five words or so when in typed conversations.)
Interestingly enough, not only is the 'Is the text I am looking at the same as the text I am thinking of' a very fast comparison, it's actually a pretty error-prone one. We've all stared at code and not seen problems because we 'already know what it says' and our brain doesn't notice errors. But typing slower doesn't solve that.
Meanwhile, hunting and pecking is actually looking for a letter, which requires you to think about each individual letter in the sentence and, even worse, the physical layout of the keyboard. You can't tell me that doesn't take up at least one more memory slot.
However, you're right in that people rarely need to type at 'max speed', but I think part of the problem with this conversation is that some people are talking 70 wpm vs 150, whereas others are talking about 35 wpm vs 70 wpm, or something like that. No one's saying that programmers will be superhuman typists, or they'll follow the 'typing rules', just that it's very hard to type for more than, let's say, 5000 hours without learning how to type at a reasonable speed without looking at the keyboard. If that's via the index fingers, that's fine.
Yes, we need to plan and design before we code, but when you know exactly what needs to be done, or when you have a sufficiently good idea to start prototyping (or when you are in the middle of a hack that *must happen*), bro, you better be able to get those streams of thought fluently down to your keyboard via your fingers.
Indeed. Human beings learn how to automate steps. No one thinks about how to walk, or open doors, or point their mouse at something.
Good programmers figure out what needs to happen, figure out how to make that happen, and it's on the screen.
For great programmers, 'what' and 'how' are the same thing, because they've done that step so much. They just figure out what needs to happen, and it's on the screen.
But key there is 'it's on the screen'. Not 'type some stuff to put that on the screen'. That just happens.
If it's not just happening, you do not have enough experience at the process. You are figuring out how to balance yourself on one foot while moving the other foot forward, or how to pull the doorknob and turn it at the same time.
This isn't even something that's particularly restricted to programmers. I suspect someone who's written a novel does the same thing. They think about what they want on the screen, and, bam, it's on the screen.
I used to think I typed worse when someone was watching me, but I've come to realize I don't type worse, I correct worse.
When no one is watching, I correct typos nearly subconsciously. I'm watching the screen and I see a wrong letter, and it's 'back and fix' instantly. If some psychologist did an experiment where I estimated the number of errors I made while typing something, and then check that, I'd be way under.
When someone is watching, for some reason, I wonder if they noticed and think I'm not typing well, and often the entire correction blows up and I don't fix it right automatically and then have to fix it manually. And now I've spent 3 seconds instead of .5, and, worse, I paused to think about it so now I have to figured out what I was typing and start going again, so that's another 2 seconds.
I do a weird hybrid. My left hand is almost always exactly right, with fingers on the home row.
My right hand, OTOH (No pun intended.), is all over the place. It has to deal with brackets, parens, arrow keys, number pad, and on top of that, the mouse. So I tend to just use the first two fingers with the pinky for Enter. When I'm actually typing blocks of text, like here, I can force myself back to the home row and do it 'right', though.
Indeed, I'm confused by this debate.
If you type a lot, you will start touch typing. It's not some debatable thing like whether you 'need' to learn or not.
You either a) can't type well, b) were taught to type in a class, or c) just typed so much you could type well. (Or some combination of b and c)
Asking if it 'matters' for programmers is just stupid. If they can't type at some reasonable level, they have no experience programming. As you pointed out, the question is the wrong direction of causation.
So, basically, Jeff Atwood is right...people who cannot type quickly (Unless they have some physical disability that slows them down) should not be taken seriously as programmers. Or as novelists, if they're claiming to be that, or as keyboard testers. Just like a guy who uses training wheels probably shouldn't be taken seriously as a bike messager. That, in and of itself, doesn't determine how well the job is done, exactly, but it sure as heck indicates how much experience they have.
Now, how much they 'follow typing rules' is interesting thing to think about. Some people are entirely self taught, some people clearly learned the rules at some time but barely follow them, and some people seem like they're giving a touch typing demonstration of how to hold your hands. I don't know if this has any bearing on the skill of the programmer, although I suspect that people who are self taught at programming are slightly more likely to be self taught at typing, too.
Hell, forget 'increasing rate'.
Just stop the idiotic grandfathering in of horribly polluting older plants.
Simply stopping that, replacing older plants with plants that actually meat the clean air standard, would reduce CO2 emissions by 40% and NOx emissions by 15%.
We're not even at the point where we need 'stricter' standards.
Wow, everyone seems to misunderstand what I was saying.
I apparently needed a big banner at the top of my post saying I AM TALKING ABOUT POLLUTION COSTS NOT THE PURCHASING OF THE RESOURCES.
Burning oil uses a public resources. Namely, it places CO2 in the air, which then causes problems.
No, I'm talking about the pollution required to make rare earth magnets.
I have no idea how much supply there is, but that will take care of it itself. I just don't want power producers to be able to shift their cost to poisoning the commons.
Um, they are the people who make air conditioners.
I am not doing it because I don't have a air conditioning plant.
The failure of T. Boone Picken was in that he was attempting a complicated theft of water under the guise of solar power, and the regulators didn't fall for it, despite the amount of time he spent trying to get the public behind him.
While, 1.1% of electricity is from petroleum, another 16.3% is from natural gas, 0.3% is from diesel, and another 3.6% is from 'Combustion Turbine Generators', which are operated using either gasoline or natural gas or jet fuel or something like that. So, depending on how much of that is 'foreign' and how much of that counts as 'oil', that's 21.3% that could be called 'foreign oil'. (Most of the natural gas is from Canada, which is foreign but probably not something to worry about.)
Regardless, I think the only workable plan is, at some point, to indeed have wind turbine and nuclear power cars. Or, rather, electric cars.
But this is an entire separate problem from the fact that our electrical production is extremely toxic and stupid, because half the power is from coal.
Get cars on electrical. Get electricity off coal. Two problems. Solving one is unrelated to solving the other.
It wasn't the moving water that was complex.
It was the fact he wanted water rights, aka, to pump water from the ground. From dry areas. That are already at the very fringe of not having enough water. And he wanted to take that water and sell it to the cities, the exact same cities that are currently fighting with water rights over the same areas.
The regulators, quite sanely, said 'Uh, no'.
Because we can't make water, you loon.
We can't just make more of it in areas where people need it, like we can with power, or food, or housing. We have to move it there. From somewhere else. Pickens wanted to take water from one group of people that were using it, and sell it another group of people, and thus the first group would no longer have it.
Yes, I am aware we can technically make water by burning hydrogen. However, that just turns the problem into transporting hydrogen, which is actually much harder than just transporting the water. (Hydrogen is very small so escapes very easily, and also explodes.) Likewise, I am aware that we can desalinize ocean water...but, again, unless you're actually at the ocean, you still need transport.
It's amazing how many people still think solar==electricity.
Houses should be built with solar in them.
Not for the electrical, although that might be an okay idea for some stuff. But if you have to convert to 110, just no, it's not there yet. The only stuff on solar should be operating at the voltage the solar panels produce.
No, the solar that should be build in is stuff like solar heated water and solar power water pumps (To a tank in the attic) and stuff. That's what houses should be build with.
And ground-source heat pumps are so obvious I'm always amazed it took this long. Seriously, the ground ten feet down is almost always closer to 'room temperature' than the outside air, so it's almost always more efficient to use it to cool or heat with.
Also, what's a solar cooling chimney?
I always thought they should start making window AC units with solar panels that you put in the roof. Again, without voltage conversion. They work off whatever the solar panel is producing. You could install them if you had central heating and air, and just leave them there, slightly below central AC temp...when it gets hot enough, and there's sunlight to operate them, they'll try to keep things 'topped off' so the big unit doesn't have to run. Otherwise, whatever, no harm done. (People who don't have central air could get an adapter that switches them onto an AC line when there's not enough sun.)
I'm for no subsidies if, and only if, we include 'free pollution' as a subsidy.
In my universe, the fact people can buy and freely burn oil for energy counts as a 'subsidy'. People should have to pay for that. They're using up a public resource.
Same with rate earth magnets for wind and semiconductor manufacturing for solar and nuclear waste disposal. (1) Everyone should have to pay.
Once all that is leveled out, we can look around and ask ourselves if we need subsidies. Possibly we do, possibly we don't, but it's impossible to see from here, where some power production industries can trash the environment and others can't.
1) Although we've already done enough with nuclear protection...it's like, for some reason, with nuclear waste, we need a goddamn submarine door that can withstand 20,000 feet, whereas with, for example, coal ash, we have a screen door with holes in it and a broken latch. It's fucking absurdly imbalanced the lengths nuclear must go through thanks to a generation of idiots trained to jump when people say 'nuclear.
If we treated coal like we treated nuclear we'd be running coal engines in a dome of air surrounded by a dome of vacuum, with massive scrubbers operating to recycle the air in the first dome, and it'd cost about a thousand times more. That shit is the only reason nuclear isn't 'competitive', but the solution isn't to subside is, it's to recognize that we can't stop the world because a nuclear plants raises background radioactivity by 5% for a square mile or whatever. OMG, two hundred extra people might get cancer...unlike coal plants, which regularly kill tens of thousands of people each year.
That's why I said, somewhere else, that an optimization to experiment with might be a payment area.
You have one place that counts everything up and bags it and gives you a receipt, and then you walk to the doors where there's few register where you actually pay that amount. Don't even need ot move the cart there...could have a 'cart parking area' you leave it at and walk five feet, pay, walk back and get it, and leave.
You'd want the number of 'payment stands' in proportion to how much time people spend paying. At something like a dollar store, where people are buying maybe five things, you'd need as many as registers, so it wouldn't be a very useful idea.
But at something like a grocery store you'd need maybe one stand per five lines. And you need at least two of them, so it would only make sense in large stores.
But this would solve many of the problems.
Strangely, the checkout problems you described are being fix by (and the only real reason to use) the automated checkout machines, because, while you can, in theory, pay with a check, no one actually knows that.
Using their time in front of the cashier as opportunity to button their kids' coats and put their gloves on, as if they can't do that *elsewhere* before departing the store.
You know what the only thing that gets me annoyed at people I don't know? I don't mind when they slightly 'harm' me for useful purposes. Okay, they stole my parking spot, maybe they're in a hurry. Okay, they cut in line, whatever. Those people look around at the game of life and have decided to 'cheat', but it's possible they have some reason, and I'm not going to dwell on it. I don't 'cheat' normally, but unless I know their situation I'm not going to get pissed...for all I know they've ten minutes late somewhere to their second job. I can't judge them, and I'm not supposed to.
The only thing that annoys me is when they harm me for no reason whatsoever except that they are, apparently, so goddamn unobservant they don't notice other people. You want to cheat, cheat. Do not fucking waste my time for something that does not benefit you. Do not randomly stand in my way talking to people, do not sit in line after you're done doing something that could be done elsewhere. (At some point, this bleeds into the first thing, if they're wasting my time for actual trivial things, like ten cents. I just want to pay them ten cents and say 'Five minutes of your time might not be worth ten cents, but mine is.'. But it takes 'no benefit at all in any sense whatsoever' to get me really angry.)
I get annoyed at my grandmother every time I take her to the grocery store, because she feels like the correct time get out her shopping list is right after putting her purse in her cart...which is a chockpoint and no one else with a cart can get past, and there she is, spending 60 seconds rummaging in her purse to get her list and then another 60 seconds to find a pen, while people are standing behind her, and, hell, the outside door is open and cold air pouring in because people are still in the sensor area. All told, over her entire life of shopping there, she's probably wasted days of people's life from stopping there instead of walking another ten feet.
I've managed, at this point, to get her to move another ten feet before doing this, but it's absurd...people should check if they're blocking people before they stop moving. Period. It should be some automatic ingrained thing, like not standing in the middle of the road. Apparently it's not. It's a wonder humans managed to evolve at all, what with stopping in front of panthers and stampeding elephants.
She doesn't 'waste time' at the checkout, though, although she moves so slow it's indistinguishable from 'wasting time'. She'll start writing the check at the start of the checkout...and not be finished 40 items later at the end. (Although luckily has started using a debit card.)
Except I see nowhere talking about startup costs.
If it takes, for example, an hour to walk into place and unload a cart onto the belt, which people could do while behind another person, and it only takes ten minutes to checkout, then a single line feeding all checkouts only when they are empty is obviously not the most efficient.
The question is at which point does it become more efficient to feed people singly vs. doubly.
You would already know this if you had read a few other posts in this thread.
The article doesn't talk about that except in regard to show what line you're in is not the fastest (Which is, um, stupid, we all knew that.), and there are exactly two mentions of 'simulation' and one of 'modeling' in the comments, and neither are even slightly relevant to what I asked.
You could probably do that with automation, in fact, and not need a person sending people to lines. Something on the register that indicated the next person should come forward when the end total is rung up.
There could still be delays, I've seen people who seem to take several minutes paying, but that can't really be helped.
The question is how you do something like that when there is no obvious 'about to end' item in the transaction. Like at a bank or the DMV or whatever.
OTOH, those don't have people having to maneuver carts and put things on conveyor belts. All those people have to do is walk five feet.
Of course, if we're talking about way to speed up stores, an obvious thing to do is to have a payment place. You have someone count up everything you have, put everything back in the cart, and then you walk over and pay somewhere else.
The problem is that you only need one of those per five checkout people, and really need two of them, so it really only makes sense if the store is massive and people are buying huge carts.
Ha, I'd forgotten about that.
I'm sure there are some idiots that think the fact the UK hasn't captured and detained, without charge, Assange, to turn him over to the US, does mean we should invade the UK.
Of course, those idiots probably don't realize, as I pointed out, that the UK is part of NATO, and hence invading it would a) kick us out of NATO, and b) cause us to go to war with, essentially, half the countries in the entire world that we consider 'allies'.
Even Canada, which is going to, um, suck, as all of Europe starts moving troops there.
Like I said, some people live in crazy land. Where the US can do whatever it wants.
You know, people like the last three Republican presidents.
Jesus Christ
You realize that, if you interpret the espionage act that way, where 'documents' mean 'information', that every single person who read the New York Times, and doesn't attempt to turn their copy over to the government is in violation of the law, right?
That is why the courts don't interpret it that way. That would be an absurd law.
There is plenty of reason to believe that the investigation against Assange is motivated by his behavior, not by some government conspiracy.
Really? Why were the details leaked in violation of Swedish law? Why were the charges brought forth, then withdrawn? Why was he allowed to leave Sweden? Why have they actually refused to question him? Why have they still refused to question him while he's in England on bail?
Contrary to some people's ideas, Interpol does get involved in rape cases.
Contrary to normal behavior, countries do not normally put up Interpol notices for people they still have not charged with actual crimes, but merely wish to interview. (It's worth pointing out that the UK denied the original extradition order exactly because no one would figure out an actual crime they intend to charge him with, and while Sweden did make a new order with an actual crime they intend to charge him with, they still have not actually charged him with it.)
The CIA has its own Inspector General, and no doubt other investigators. There are plenty of circumstances that might call for investigations when national security is involved in a large organization like the CIA.
Inspector Generals do not do anything like you apparently think they do. The CIA's IG is in charge of investigating the CIA's behavior. Inspector Generals are oversight.
There are plenty of circumstances that might call for investigations when national security is involved in a large organization like the CIA.
No, the military police would investigate leaks by the military. The CIA would, presumably, help with that, but only by providing data.
There's no reason the CIA would be investigating the recipient of the leak. The CIA cannot actually prosecute people, it doesn't even have the ability to detain people. It does not have any investigators. The CIA can no more investigate crimes than the Bureau of Engraving.
The Department of Justice are the people who investigate crimes, this one probably via the FBI. And will presumably find whatever evidence the CIA manages to plant while they are, somehow, involved in all this.