With a warrant they can already put whatever instrumentation they want on your car
Yes. But this law makes sure that YOU pay for that instrumentation.
Besides, the government can't install its own spy tools on all cars in the country. But this law attempts to do just that. Isn't it convenient that every driver after 30 minutes on a freeway becomes a hardened criminal?
The right to remain silent. Courts ruled (in cases of missing keys for some locks and safes - and perhaps passwords) that you don't have to tell the court anything, but the police can wreck your safe in any way they like. This certainly applies to the black box in your car. The box has no constitutional rights.
Perhaps you were thinking of the 4th Amendment - against unreasonable searches. However that had been taken care of (against you) already:
"Conversely, the Court has approved routine warrantless seizures, for example "where there is probable cause to believe that a criminal offense has been or is being committed."
In other words, if the LEO stopped you he is likely to have a probable cause. For example he can say that you were observed speeding. (Speeding may be a crime.) This will be enough to search "a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure" - the black box. Such a search today requires specialized hardware; however it is trivial to make such a connection wireless, so that the car tells the tale to the officer as he walks up to you. Certain information about cars (license plates and the VIN) is already designed to be viewed remotely and without driver's permission. Wireless access to the black box is just as likely, especially if the Congress says that "it's for the children."
You are going too far back in time. I used those and other tubes in my younger days. But what I'm talking about here is the large red 7-segment (+dot) LEDs that grace front panels of so many HP test sets. I have a bunch right here. Perhaps a modern LED like that would be OK, but as things are units made a couple decades ago are vulnerable to failures of those LEDs. Static drive is one thing, but when they are multiplexed and driven at higher pulse current then they degrade faster.
Even a standard plain vanilla green LED from 1980s is not an exception. I personally put the new one into my own project. Five years later it was yellow. And I know that I haven't overdriven it - the LED was just to indicate that the device is on.
Why is it that the authorities always want you naked, and then when you actually get naked, they charge you with a crime?
The authorities don't want you naked. What they want you to be is obedient - even when obedience requires you to break customary norms of behavior. Being naked, or walking barefoot on top of generations of fungal diseases, or removing your belt, are just methods to break your self-esteem. When they are through with you, you will be glad that your lords and masters kindly permitted you to do your thing, this time. And you will not forget who are your lords and masters.
Isn't he supposed to know? Isn't that supposedly the reason CEOs get paid the big bucks?
Knowledge of every little detail - even if that detail is a free/nonfree status of a language - is not required for a CEO. Otherwise all CEOs would be walking encyclopedias.
A CEO is expected to lead the company. This requires making decisions. Decisions are made with input data and with analysis of possibilities. This requires time and resources. You can't put a person on a witness stand and ask a philosophical question. Especially when "free" means so many different things to so many people.
We software engineers have to unionise or something, this crap has got to stop.
Didn't you just demonstrate how to stop this behavior without unionizing?
A union will only result in you paying dues to feed an MBA who will be making all the wrong decisions for you. Or, even worse, that MBA will sell your interests to the highest bidder.
Unions may make sense in industries where workers are dime a dozen, all easily replaceable. Programmers (and good engineers in general) are not easy to replace. A programmer's code base may be completely unusable to someone else, especially if the programmer left before finishing the documentation and the code cleanup.
Do you have any 20+ year old electronic equipment? Do the LEDs in that equipment still light up? (Probably.)
Not exactly. Many HP generators and other equipment was built with red 7- or 8-segment LEDs. These are burning out. Owners of such equipment make sure to turn them off once the measurement is complete - even though it is often advantageous to keep the test equipment running (it lasts longer and is instantly ready for a measurement.) But LEDs are not like that, they fail.
unless you're actually making a profit on the power you create in excess of your usage
By law, the excess energy is bought by the utility for a "generator" price which is about 12% of the "consumer" price. It's a nice racket they got there - some people consume, some people produce, the utility does not interfere but pockets 78%.
Would a cheap LED bulb be affected by a lack of a heat sink in winter as an outdoor bulb? Shouldn't the cold air be enough?
The heatsink is the interface between the board assembly and the air. So yes, it is needed. To give you an example, you can have a red hot iron in cold air, and it will be still red and hot. The cold air alone doesn't do much unless that cold air can interact with the hot part and take some of the heat away. Air is a good thermal insulator, so you need to keep it circulating.
If you want to be exact you need to do some thermal simulations in FloTherm, Cosmos FloWorks or other tools like that. Don't forget to model your fixture too, otherwise it may heat the air inside to the point that it is not cold anymore. Since hot air rises, if it can't escape you will get a hot layer that remains inside of the fixture.
I had two identical LED desk lamps. Both were completely dead within a year. First a segment starts to blink, then it goes dark forever. I should have bought CFL instead (and I did, after I threw those LED lamps out.)
I have two dimmable LED lights, and I run them at 30%. They do that just fine... but now and then they flicker to 100% and then go back to the 30%. I guess the timing of the controller and the sine wave of the AC power collide, with quite unpleasant results. Did the bulb manufacturer expect me to use a rheostat for a dimmer, instead of a common triac?
Other than that, I do have a few LED lights around. But on average they are less reliable than even a CFL. If you buy an LED light, expect it to fail soon. If it doesn't, it will be a pleasant surprise.
I have a 100W equivalent CFL as the light at the gate. It is on all night - say, about 10 hours per day, or 3,650 hours per year. The CFL costs about $2 and consumes about 20W of power (36.5 kWh per year, or $0 at my power rate.) If I install a $60 LED light instead it will drop the yearly consumption to maybe 20 kWh, but the cost of energy will be still zero.
[*] I have solar panels that produce more power than my house consumes (averaged over the year.)
If I were to pay about 11 cents per kWh (it's a typical base rate of PG&E in CA,) the CFL could cost me $3.65 per year vs. $2.00, with LED savings of $1.65/yr. The $58 difference in price would result in becoming profitable after only 35 years - assuming that the light bulb still works by then.
Soviet apologists generally claim that the state was democratic, and therefore workers were able to influence how much they were payed;
Those apologists haven't set foot inside USSR's borders, as I understand. Salaries were set at the very top, in ministries, and they never changed. You'd have to be promoted to the next rung of the career ladder to get higher salary. Unions were busy gathering membership dues, and on occasion one could buy a tour (usually to the nearest retreat, for a few days.)
but it was a sham democracy in practice with no real choices.
Very much not unlike the USA, I must add. Obama vs. Romney? You must be kidding.
So we don't really know what a "real socialism" would be like
It's a True Scotsman fallacy. There will be no "real socialism" admitted until one of the attempts happens to deliver the desired results. Which means "never." You might just as well flip the Cheops Pyramid, put it on its tip and expect it to stay like that forever.
Right wingers like to complain about welfare cases, well capitalists are essentially the biggest welfare cases in existence. The only difference is that the those living on welfare receive their money from taxes and can barely survive on it whereas the capitalist class receives theirs from ownership of capital and can live in luxury off it
Barring disability, anyone can become a worker or a capitalist. Similarly, a worker doesn't have to work for a capitalist. Do you think IBM can survive if every IBM employee suddenly quits? Since they don't quit, why is it so? Maybe, perhaps, there is a mutually beneficial arrangement somewhere?
I was a worker for many years, now I am a co-owner of a very small business. Do you know what my current windfall from the "ownership of capital" is? It's negative, "red" as they say in accounting. And it is supposed to remain so for at least a few years. Many startups fail, thus never recovering the invested money. I'm hoping for a positive return, but I'm taking large risks with my money, and I may never see it again. Are you willing to mortgage your house, for example, to invest into your own startup? If not then you are a worker.
The worker never receives the large benefits that a company owner may have. On the other hand, the worker is not sharing the risk either. The worker is guaranteed his salary, hell or high water. That's the deal. If you want you can join an existing startup - many would gladly give you a thick batch of shares (that are worthless at the moment) in exchange for your free labor (which is very valuable.)
The society gives capitalists certain incentives (fewer and fewer every day) because the society needs both workers and capitalists. Imagine what would happen to the workers if there is no business to get a job at - or what would happen to business owners if they can't get employees. Capitalist's job is riskier, so the potential benefits are larger. Worker's job is easier, but he eats every day.
The USSR model artfully combines the worst aspects of communism, socialism and capitalism. The factories are not yours, so you never get any dividends on your investment - nor you can make those investments. You only get the salary; but since the state is the only capitalist in town, the state gets to dictate how much you are going to eat today. Socialism is simply capitalism with only one capitalist; one big company town from which there is no escape.
Each of those examples calls for more than just a barometer
Then you can't measure the height of the building with just a barometer. You need also to know temperature, relative humidity, and the lapse rate L that is an estimated, experimental value that varies with locale. Perhaps you could build your own L profile, though.
If I were to measure the height of the building, I would use the shadow and return the result in barometer lengths, for lack of a ruler. Air pressure is not a good replacement for an ideal unit of distance, especially when you can't measure top and bottom pressure simultaneously (the shadow method avoids this flaw if you have two hands and a few wooden pegs.) You'd do about as good if you drop the barometer from the roof and count 1001, 1002, 1003 until it hits the ground.
If everyone will only hire the top 1%, and no one will train/mentor anyone, why do you think it is so hard to find good coders, or encourage others to join the so-called "profession"?
As matter of fact, we don't want the top 1%. Those are geniuses, but they are also unmanageable loose cannons who do whatever they damn please and you can't stop them short of firing them.
We want reasonable people - those who we can work with. This excludes the topmost strata (we don't need a LKML-style flamefest every day) and the bottom strata (we don't need drooling idiots who never saw a computer in their lives.)
We don't even need people with encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms. Truth is that most coding jobs don't require any algorithms at all, and maybe a few percent need a standard Sort() method. The coder doesn't even need to know what algorithm is used there, as long as it works. There are very few pieces of software that require complex algorithms or specific sort methods. Most of labor these days goes into the I/O, into the data structures, into networking protocols, into interaction with external data stores.
All you need to get hired is to be able to code GUIs (XAML and its C# equivalent methods,) and protocols, and worker threads, and data binding (many GUI objects insist on that,) and other *typical* WPF fare. (I'm leaving Java aside, since we aren't very interested in Java anyway.) I don't think this is too much to ask - you'd be unable to do your job otherwise. You don't even need to memorize most of it; but you need to know that certain stuff exists and where to learn the details. This practically means that you have to have at least one WPF application under your belt, and that application better use ListView and Canvas and such, not just be a single button to exit. Lots of C# coding is cut and paste because not everything in WPF is entirely logical, you must know of coding patterns and be able to quickly access them. Looking for a delegate syntax every time you need one is not helpful. Having a skeleton code in a scratchpad is.
It would seem as though white males are always singled out when it comes to issues of tolerance and acceptance. I'm curious to know why that is.
Because white males are the safest group to criticize. Everyone else is a protected minority, and any perceived offense against them may be seen as racism or male shauvinism, and that will cost you your job.
I work really hard to be aware of bias and to not let it get in the way of my interactions with people.
The bias is a good survival instinct. It's a set of defaults that get applied in an unfamiliar situation or when interacting with a stranger. Those defaults are a good starting point until you know more - and that's what indeed happened. Humans apply bias to everything they see. This is a necessary method to instantly presort a large set of data according to earlier learned classification. If you see a man in a ditch near a bar, chances are that he is a drunk. If you see a young man with papers in a hall of a University, chances are good that he is a student there, and not a longshoreman. A person inside the Home Depot who is wearing Home Depot's apron is likely to be an employee there. Bias allows us to interpret the world accurately enough without explicitly inquiring about every little detail.
Being able to speak a foreign language is not an indicator of intelligence. Any hoodlum from China speaks Chinese better than the local professor of Oriental Languages. All that you learned is that the woman speaks French. If she also speaks well, in terms of the vocabulary, in terms of the subject of discussion, in terms of the knowledge and wisdom expressed, then you have something. But she could just as well be an uneducated housewife who was watching French soap operas all her life and then discussed them at length, in French, with other housewives.
On the other hand, you can have a foreign scientist who is not fluent in your language - simply because that is irrelevant to him. For example, "Einstein later became fluent in English and German though he was a horrible speller in English."
And basically ALL those hiring have adopted this attitude. (Also -most will not even interview you once you are >45 years old.
My company will soon publish an ad for a C# / Java developer. I reviewed the text; it requires skills and some experience, but there are no numbers and anyone will be hired who is competent enough. It would be stupid to require 10 years of experience with WPF. All I will ask for is to write a few binding examples, though, and that will weed 99% of applicants out:-(
why does the government need "interrogations" when they know practically everything about anyone?
Despite the popular paranoia, the government knows very little about anyone; and what it does know is largely noise. Big Brother may know where you had been with your car, and it may know what you bought at a corner grocery store. But the government doesn't know what you are thinking, what you are planning, what - among gigabytes of miscellaneous data that your browser downloaded from the Internet is important and what is not. As an old but still good example, the government does not know which one poem out of a fairly thick book on the shelf acts as the encryption key today.
In other words, the government (or any observer) cannot know anything that a regular Joe hasn't expressed in a public or a semi-public environment. Of course if that Joe becomes a target of very close surveillance then even walls of his home are not strong enough to hide his actions. But even then the walls of his cranium remain strong - and that's when you break out the rubber hose.
Uhhh, I would have thought that scanning the original receipt was standard practice at every retail store (ok granted I've only worked at one). Why would a large retail store not do that to verify the receipt is valid?
A year ago I bought a door lock at Home Depot. It looked well packed, like new. But when I opened it and tried, the keys didn't open the lock.
When I brought it back I noticed that I took a wrong receipt with me. However the sales clerk simply scanned the item (in its original packaging) and then asked me to swipe the same credit card that was used for the purchase. That was all that I needed to get the money back. Apparently their database stores the UPC code of a purchased item and some form of a c/c ID (hopefully not in plaintext.)
If the store does not confirm that the item was sold at this store then they open themselves up to a fraud. You could buy a truckload of TVs for $199 each in store A and then return them to store B for a $299 refund.
And you would wind up with a massive quagmire of American freedom fighters
This scenario often comes up in various discussions of TEOTWAWKI. If we talk about the US Army against the US population, there are known issues (americans are unwilling to fight their own relatives and neighbors.) However in case of foreign invasion the invading forces will not be merciful. Then the freedom fighters will have to be fierce as well - but will there be enough of them to fight a large, well equipped Chinese army? China would need US lands to grow crops. There would be a strong incentive to stay.
With regard to the total war, yes, it had been attempted. Nazis eliminated whole villages on suspicion of support of partizanen. Many more were shipped to concentration camps. I don't want to say that China is likely to repeat this, but as a discussion point it is possible, technically. Nazis fell because they were exhausted, out of men and out of resources. It would take a lot of war to exhaust China.
Of course in practicality, if such a conquest is ever to happen, there will be no total elimination of locals. However the principle of usefulness - the same one that determined who lives and who dies on Nazi-occupied lands - will remain. If some US people are not willing to work the fields they will be shot right there, and their bodies will be buried on the spot as fertilizer.
In such a conquest of course a good deal of US people will gather their hunting weapons and head for the hills. From there they can annoy the invaders, just as Afghans did (and still do.) But they are not winning the land back, and they are not winning the control back. The invading forces would only need to wait them out. Guerillas need supplies - food, ammo, medicines, information, communications. In World War II that was provided by USSR by airdrops. In Afghan wars that was provided by Pakistan. Without supplies guerillas will not last long, and if the invader takes control over most of the country there will be nobody close enough to help. Guerillas will die out, of natural causes, in a few years.
All these Chinese academics coached in USA go back with a lot more culture acclimatization than the stolen grains of sand. In the end China might become America in all but name.
Yes and no. Yes because foreign students indeed learn the US culture, ideals and traditions. No because they are likely to take home only the best parts of it. Freedom of * ? Yes, please. Drugs? No. 2nd Amendment? Hopefully. Racism? No way. And so on.
In the end you may end up with many Chinese, back at home, who are somewhat US-centric. However it's important to ask "What US?" they are centered around. Chances are that this will be an idealized USA of Founding Fathers, and not the current diseased body. If those Chinese want to build the idealized USA as envisioned hundreds of years ago, more power to them.
Slashdot Mirror
With a warrant they can already put whatever instrumentation they want on your car
Yes. But this law makes sure that YOU pay for that instrumentation.
Besides, the government can't install its own spy tools on all cars in the country. But this law attempts to do just that. Isn't it convenient that every driver after 30 minutes on a freeway becomes a hardened criminal?
your 5th Ammendment rights
The right to remain silent. Courts ruled (in cases of missing keys for some locks and safes - and perhaps passwords) that you don't have to tell the court anything, but the police can wreck your safe in any way they like. This certainly applies to the black box in your car. The box has no constitutional rights.
Perhaps you were thinking of the 4th Amendment - against unreasonable searches. However that had been taken care of (against you) already:
"Conversely, the Court has approved routine warrantless seizures, for example "where there is probable cause to believe that a criminal offense has been or is being committed."
In other words, if the LEO stopped you he is likely to have a probable cause. For example he can say that you were observed speeding. (Speeding may be a crime.) This will be enough to search "a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure" - the black box. Such a search today requires specialized hardware; however it is trivial to make such a connection wireless, so that the car tells the tale to the officer as he walks up to you. Certain information about cars (license plates and the VIN) is already designed to be viewed remotely and without driver's permission. Wireless access to the black box is just as likely, especially if the Congress says that "it's for the children."
You are going too far back in time. I used those and other tubes in my younger days. But what I'm talking about here is the large red 7-segment (+dot) LEDs that grace front panels of so many HP test sets. I have a bunch right here. Perhaps a modern LED like that would be OK, but as things are units made a couple decades ago are vulnerable to failures of those LEDs. Static drive is one thing, but when they are multiplexed and driven at higher pulse current then they degrade faster.
Even a standard plain vanilla green LED from 1980s is not an exception. I personally put the new one into my own project. Five years later it was yellow. And I know that I haven't overdriven it - the LED was just to indicate that the device is on.
Why is it that the authorities always want you naked, and then when you actually get naked, they charge you with a crime?
The authorities don't want you naked. What they want you to be is obedient - even when obedience requires you to break customary norms of behavior. Being naked, or walking barefoot on top of generations of fungal diseases, or removing your belt, are just methods to break your self-esteem. When they are through with you, you will be glad that your lords and masters kindly permitted you to do your thing, this time. And you will not forget who are your lords and masters.
Isn't he supposed to know? Isn't that supposedly the reason CEOs get paid the big bucks?
Knowledge of every little detail - even if that detail is a free/nonfree status of a language - is not required for a CEO. Otherwise all CEOs would be walking encyclopedias.
A CEO is expected to lead the company. This requires making decisions. Decisions are made with input data and with analysis of possibilities. This requires time and resources. You can't put a person on a witness stand and ask a philosophical question. Especially when "free" means so many different things to so many people.
We software engineers have to unionise or something, this crap has got to stop.
Didn't you just demonstrate how to stop this behavior without unionizing?
A union will only result in you paying dues to feed an MBA who will be making all the wrong decisions for you. Or, even worse, that MBA will sell your interests to the highest bidder.
Unions may make sense in industries where workers are dime a dozen, all easily replaceable. Programmers (and good engineers in general) are not easy to replace. A programmer's code base may be completely unusable to someone else, especially if the programmer left before finishing the documentation and the code cleanup.
Do you have any 20+ year old electronic equipment? Do the LEDs in that equipment still light up? (Probably.)
Not exactly. Many HP generators and other equipment was built with red 7- or 8-segment LEDs. These are burning out. Owners of such equipment make sure to turn them off once the measurement is complete - even though it is often advantageous to keep the test equipment running (it lasts longer and is instantly ready for a measurement.) But LEDs are not like that, they fail.
unless you're actually making a profit on the power you create in excess of your usage
By law, the excess energy is bought by the utility for a "generator" price which is about 12% of the "consumer" price. It's a nice racket they got there - some people consume, some people produce, the utility does not interfere but pockets 78%.
Would a cheap LED bulb be affected by a lack of a heat sink in winter as an outdoor bulb? Shouldn't the cold air be enough?
The heatsink is the interface between the board assembly and the air. So yes, it is needed. To give you an example, you can have a red hot iron in cold air, and it will be still red and hot. The cold air alone doesn't do much unless that cold air can interact with the hot part and take some of the heat away. Air is a good thermal insulator, so you need to keep it circulating.
If you want to be exact you need to do some thermal simulations in FloTherm, Cosmos FloWorks or other tools like that. Don't forget to model your fixture too, otherwise it may heat the air inside to the point that it is not cold anymore. Since hot air rises, if it can't escape you will get a hot layer that remains inside of the fixture.
I had two identical LED desk lamps. Both were completely dead within a year. First a segment starts to blink, then it goes dark forever. I should have bought CFL instead (and I did, after I threw those LED lamps out.)
I have two dimmable LED lights, and I run them at 30%. They do that just fine ... but now and then they flicker to 100% and then go back to the 30%. I guess the timing of the controller and the sine wave of the AC power collide, with quite unpleasant results. Did the bulb manufacturer expect me to use a rheostat for a dimmer, instead of a common triac?
Other than that, I do have a few LED lights around. But on average they are less reliable than even a CFL. If you buy an LED light, expect it to fail soon. If it doesn't, it will be a pleasant surprise.
I have a 100W equivalent CFL as the light at the gate. It is on all night - say, about 10 hours per day, or 3,650 hours per year. The CFL costs about $2 and consumes about 20W of power (36.5 kWh per year, or $0 at my power rate.) If I install a $60 LED light instead it will drop the yearly consumption to maybe 20 kWh, but the cost of energy will be still zero.
[*] I have solar panels that produce more power than my house consumes (averaged over the year.)
If I were to pay about 11 cents per kWh (it's a typical base rate of PG&E in CA,) the CFL could cost me $3.65 per year vs. $2.00, with LED savings of $1.65/yr. The $58 difference in price would result in becoming profitable after only 35 years - assuming that the light bulb still works by then.
Soviet apologists generally claim that the state was democratic, and therefore workers were able to influence how much they were payed;
Those apologists haven't set foot inside USSR's borders, as I understand. Salaries were set at the very top, in ministries, and they never changed. You'd have to be promoted to the next rung of the career ladder to get higher salary. Unions were busy gathering membership dues, and on occasion one could buy a tour (usually to the nearest retreat, for a few days.)
but it was a sham democracy in practice with no real choices.
Very much not unlike the USA, I must add. Obama vs. Romney? You must be kidding.
So we don't really know what a "real socialism" would be like
It's a True Scotsman fallacy. There will be no "real socialism" admitted until one of the attempts happens to deliver the desired results. Which means "never." You might just as well flip the Cheops Pyramid, put it on its tip and expect it to stay like that forever.
Right wingers like to complain about welfare cases, well capitalists are essentially the biggest welfare cases in existence. The only difference is that the those living on welfare receive their money from taxes and can barely survive on it whereas the capitalist class receives theirs from ownership of capital and can live in luxury off it
Barring disability, anyone can become a worker or a capitalist. Similarly, a worker doesn't have to work for a capitalist. Do you think IBM can survive if every IBM employee suddenly quits? Since they don't quit, why is it so? Maybe, perhaps, there is a mutually beneficial arrangement somewhere?
I was a worker for many years, now I am a co-owner of a very small business. Do you know what my current windfall from the "ownership of capital" is? It's negative, "red" as they say in accounting. And it is supposed to remain so for at least a few years. Many startups fail, thus never recovering the invested money. I'm hoping for a positive return, but I'm taking large risks with my money, and I may never see it again. Are you willing to mortgage your house, for example, to invest into your own startup? If not then you are a worker.
The worker never receives the large benefits that a company owner may have. On the other hand, the worker is not sharing the risk either. The worker is guaranteed his salary, hell or high water. That's the deal. If you want you can join an existing startup - many would gladly give you a thick batch of shares (that are worthless at the moment) in exchange for your free labor (which is very valuable.)
The society gives capitalists certain incentives (fewer and fewer every day) because the society needs both workers and capitalists. Imagine what would happen to the workers if there is no business to get a job at - or what would happen to business owners if they can't get employees. Capitalist's job is riskier, so the potential benefits are larger. Worker's job is easier, but he eats every day.
The USSR model artfully combines the worst aspects of communism, socialism and capitalism. The factories are not yours, so you never get any dividends on your investment - nor you can make those investments. You only get the salary; but since the state is the only capitalist in town, the state gets to dictate how much you are going to eat today. Socialism is simply capitalism with only one capitalist; one big company town from which there is no escape.
Each of those examples calls for more than just a barometer
Then you can't measure the height of the building with just a barometer. You need also to know temperature, relative humidity, and the lapse rate L that is an estimated, experimental value that varies with locale. Perhaps you could build your own L profile, though.
The model also has other imperfections.
If I were to measure the height of the building, I would use the shadow and return the result in barometer lengths, for lack of a ruler. Air pressure is not a good replacement for an ideal unit of distance, especially when you can't measure top and bottom pressure simultaneously (the shadow method avoids this flaw if you have two hands and a few wooden pegs.) You'd do about as good if you drop the barometer from the roof and count 1001, 1002, 1003 until it hits the ground.
What would you expect the teacher to do, go into a long dialogue about an inconsequential error?
A wise teacher would have offered the student to prepare, at his convenience, a 5-minute lecture to the class on construction of the statue.
Can even do it scientifically, if you're using an fMRI
Or a measuring tape.
If everyone will only hire the top 1%, and no one will train/mentor anyone, why do you think it is so hard to find good coders, or encourage others to join the so-called "profession"?
As matter of fact, we don't want the top 1%. Those are geniuses, but they are also unmanageable loose cannons who do whatever they damn please and you can't stop them short of firing them.
We want reasonable people - those who we can work with. This excludes the topmost strata (we don't need a LKML-style flamefest every day) and the bottom strata (we don't need drooling idiots who never saw a computer in their lives.)
We don't even need people with encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms. Truth is that most coding jobs don't require any algorithms at all, and maybe a few percent need a standard Sort() method. The coder doesn't even need to know what algorithm is used there, as long as it works. There are very few pieces of software that require complex algorithms or specific sort methods. Most of labor these days goes into the I/O, into the data structures, into networking protocols, into interaction with external data stores.
All you need to get hired is to be able to code GUIs (XAML and its C# equivalent methods,) and protocols, and worker threads, and data binding (many GUI objects insist on that,) and other *typical* WPF fare. (I'm leaving Java aside, since we aren't very interested in Java anyway.) I don't think this is too much to ask - you'd be unable to do your job otherwise. You don't even need to memorize most of it; but you need to know that certain stuff exists and where to learn the details. This practically means that you have to have at least one WPF application under your belt, and that application better use ListView and Canvas and such, not just be a single button to exit. Lots of C# coding is cut and paste because not everything in WPF is entirely logical, you must know of coding patterns and be able to quickly access them. Looking for a delegate syntax every time you need one is not helpful. Having a skeleton code in a scratchpad is.
It would seem as though white males are always singled out when it comes to issues of tolerance and acceptance. I'm curious to know why that is.
Because white males are the safest group to criticize. Everyone else is a protected minority, and any perceived offense against them may be seen as racism or male shauvinism, and that will cost you your job.
I work really hard to be aware of bias and to not let it get in the way of my interactions with people.
The bias is a good survival instinct. It's a set of defaults that get applied in an unfamiliar situation or when interacting with a stranger. Those defaults are a good starting point until you know more - and that's what indeed happened. Humans apply bias to everything they see. This is a necessary method to instantly presort a large set of data according to earlier learned classification. If you see a man in a ditch near a bar, chances are that he is a drunk. If you see a young man with papers in a hall of a University, chances are good that he is a student there, and not a longshoreman. A person inside the Home Depot who is wearing Home Depot's apron is likely to be an employee there. Bias allows us to interpret the world accurately enough without explicitly inquiring about every little detail.
Being able to speak a foreign language is not an indicator of intelligence. Any hoodlum from China speaks Chinese better than the local professor of Oriental Languages. All that you learned is that the woman speaks French. If she also speaks well, in terms of the vocabulary, in terms of the subject of discussion, in terms of the knowledge and wisdom expressed, then you have something. But she could just as well be an uneducated housewife who was watching French soap operas all her life and then discussed them at length, in French, with other housewives.
On the other hand, you can have a foreign scientist who is not fluent in your language - simply because that is irrelevant to him. For example, "Einstein later became fluent in English and German though he was a horrible speller in English."
And basically ALL those hiring have adopted this attitude. (Also -most will not even interview you once you are >45 years old.
My company will soon publish an ad for a C# / Java developer. I reviewed the text; it requires skills and some experience, but there are no numbers and anyone will be hired who is competent enough. It would be stupid to require 10 years of experience with WPF. All I will ask for is to write a few binding examples, though, and that will weed 99% of applicants out :-(
why does the government need "interrogations" when they know practically everything about anyone?
Despite the popular paranoia, the government knows very little about anyone; and what it does know is largely noise. Big Brother may know where you had been with your car, and it may know what you bought at a corner grocery store. But the government doesn't know what you are thinking, what you are planning, what - among gigabytes of miscellaneous data that your browser downloaded from the Internet is important and what is not. As an old but still good example, the government does not know which one poem out of a fairly thick book on the shelf acts as the encryption key today.
In other words, the government (or any observer) cannot know anything that a regular Joe hasn't expressed in a public or a semi-public environment. Of course if that Joe becomes a target of very close surveillance then even walls of his home are not strong enough to hide his actions. But even then the walls of his cranium remain strong - and that's when you break out the rubber hose.
Of course it's too much to ask from SlashCode to interpret HTML, modulo 18 allowed tags, as a literal string.
Uhhh, I would have thought that scanning the original receipt was standard practice at every retail store (ok granted I've only worked at one). Why would a large retail store not do that to verify the receipt is valid?
A year ago I bought a door lock at Home Depot. It looked well packed, like new. But when I opened it and tried, the keys didn't open the lock.
When I brought it back I noticed that I took a wrong receipt with me. However the sales clerk simply scanned the item (in its original packaging) and then asked me to swipe the same credit card that was used for the purchase. That was all that I needed to get the money back. Apparently their database stores the UPC code of a purchased item and some form of a c/c ID (hopefully not in plaintext.)
If the store does not confirm that the item was sold at this store then they open themselves up to a fraud. You could buy a truckload of TVs for $199 each in store A and then return them to store B for a $299 refund.
And you would wind up with a massive quagmire of American freedom fighters
This scenario often comes up in various discussions of TEOTWAWKI. If we talk about the US Army against the US population, there are known issues (americans are unwilling to fight their own relatives and neighbors.) However in case of foreign invasion the invading forces will not be merciful. Then the freedom fighters will have to be fierce as well - but will there be enough of them to fight a large, well equipped Chinese army? China would need US lands to grow crops. There would be a strong incentive to stay.
With regard to the total war, yes, it had been attempted. Nazis eliminated whole villages on suspicion of support of partizanen. Many more were shipped to concentration camps. I don't want to say that China is likely to repeat this, but as a discussion point it is possible, technically. Nazis fell because they were exhausted, out of men and out of resources. It would take a lot of war to exhaust China.
Of course in practicality, if such a conquest is ever to happen, there will be no total elimination of locals. However the principle of usefulness - the same one that determined who lives and who dies on Nazi-occupied lands - will remain. If some US people are not willing to work the fields they will be shot right there, and their bodies will be buried on the spot as fertilizer.
In such a conquest of course a good deal of US people will gather their hunting weapons and head for the hills. From there they can annoy the invaders, just as Afghans did (and still do.) But they are not winning the land back, and they are not winning the control back. The invading forces would only need to wait them out. Guerillas need supplies - food, ammo, medicines, information, communications. In World War II that was provided by USSR by airdrops. In Afghan wars that was provided by Pakistan. Without supplies guerillas will not last long, and if the invader takes control over most of the country there will be nobody close enough to help. Guerillas will die out, of natural causes, in a few years.
All these Chinese academics coached in USA go back with a lot more culture acclimatization than the stolen grains of sand. In the end China might become America in all but name.
Yes and no. Yes because foreign students indeed learn the US culture, ideals and traditions. No because they are likely to take home only the best parts of it. Freedom of * ? Yes, please. Drugs? No. 2nd Amendment? Hopefully. Racism? No way. And so on.
In the end you may end up with many Chinese, back at home, who are somewhat US-centric. However it's important to ask "What US?" they are centered around. Chances are that this will be an idealized USA of Founding Fathers, and not the current diseased body. If those Chinese want to build the idealized USA as envisioned hundreds of years ago, more power to them.