I think it was Stroustrup (or maybe Dijkstra), speaking on the idea of making programming "easier" so more people could be programmers with far less training and education, who said something to the effect of "I wouldn't want a surgeon operating on me who only had 6 weeks of training."
Sure. But I also wouldn't want to go to the hospital and wait for an MD when I need my nails clipped.
An awful lot of development is the equivalent of nail-clipping, not surgery. Or at least it should be.
Exactly half of the places I've worked had a dress code that forbade shorts. I prefer no dress code, but looking back, I don't see a strong correlation between dress code (or lack thereof) and workplace quality of life. Some "business casual" places were great enough that I didn't mind the dress code, some "anything goes" places were terrible enough that everyone was miserable no matter how they dressed.
I've never worked anywhere, any job, where I could wear shorts. Nor would I actually want to.
So if you were forced to wear shorts, perhaps due to some small-minded one-dress-code-fits-all corporate policy, you'd find it objectionable? Perhaps it might even interfere with your work, if it's uncomfortable or annoying enough? Isn't it great when an employer doesn't do that?
Narrow band filters might be very useful for recognizing the crop plant. In fact this might offer another genetic engineering tool. Add an unusual pigment or pigments that reflect specific wavelengths which the robot can detect with filters, but won't be found in any of the weed species. Essentially adding optical tagging.
Not to ride on the coattails of your eventual Nobel or anything, but this is the best idea I've heard in a long time, and I spent five years at a crop-science company. Put together a robust trait stack to express three or four distinct narrowband fluorescent emissions, and good luck horizontal-transferring that entire stack into a neighboring weed by accident. If the robots see something that only fluoresces in one or two of the bands, it'll be as easy to pick out as a purple or cyan blot in a field of white.
I think long and hard before spending a week's salary on a single purchase. Getting that kind of cash from ATMs would take several days, given daily withdrawal limits around here.
No, classic Apple would've gotten it right. Tog would've laughed this design out of the building, with a highlight reel showing people bonking into the glass walls, and how sensible visible elements on the glass fixed the problem.
I'm having trouble understanding the significance of 25-pm distortions (0.025nm) in an optical telescope, where the light you're bouncing around has wavelengths on the order of 20000 times more than that (400nm-650nm, longer for IR). Does interferometry really let us detect phase differences that small?
He certainly doesn't crank things out quickly, but most of it is eminently worth waiting for. His last novel was a bit of a misfire, but he's talked about a couple of other things in the queue from the Zones of Thought universe, and I'd love to see something entirely new from him as well.
What if they install something that keeps mining after you leave the page?
What if they install something that keeps mining as a system service that starts up automatically whenever you boot your machine, and maybe sets up a proxy for them to communicate with other systems inside your LAN?
After all, if you've viewed their content, they're entitled to compensation, right?
I think we fundamentally agree that informed consent is the important thing, but I'm not willing to venture very far down the slippery slope of "compensate content producers by letting them run whatever they want on your machine".
If we really want to use this role-reversed metaphor, they're paying me (with their content) for my attention (to their ads). Ideally, my favorable and engaged attention, not my swearing-at-the-site-as-I-try-to-close-my-hung-browser attention.
In point of fact, I've decided that many sites offer inadequate "pay" for the resource hit they impose, whether from ads or just bad coding. Sometimes I switch to viewing them in a different browser that mitigates these resource attacks. Most often, I just stop visiting.
How do you figure the cost of losing half your battery time? From what I've directly observed, having a few badly-behaved Web pages open can take me from six hours of battery life to two or three.
I've been known to pay for ad-free access to content, and I've been willing to accept ads as a way to compensate content providers. Ads are simply getting too expensive to accept now -- the electricity cost is small, but the costs in battery life, stability, and safety are just too high.
(And that's omitting the attention costs. Static ads? Fine. Static ads for things I'm actually interested in? Heck, I'll click through them! But autoplay video, distracting animations, malware? Nope. Bad for my perceptual and cognitive health.)
"Unoccupied CPUs" were a waste back when a CPU used the same amount of power idling as working.
Today, giving my "unoccupied CPU" a task for your benefit is theft of my battery life (time until I need to recharge), battery lifetime (total number of cycles), electricity (both direct device usage and indirect cooling needs), and device lifetime (hotter devices fail sooner).
Now, if you'd like to offer me payment for these things you wish to consume, we can talk.
Most dust is skin flakes and mite poop, and therefore has DEFINITELY been part of a structure at some point.
Interplanetary dust? Citation needed, I think.
Even if you're confining yourself to household dust (obviously not the topic of my comment), you're still way off base. For starters, two-thirds of it is typically stuff tracked in from outdoors.
But I suppose if you say that "supernova poop" "has been part of a structure at some point", then you're technically correct...
It is immoral to _not_ avoid AND evade your taxes as much as possible!
Spoken like a true corporation.
Say, shouldn't you be out fighting a fire, or repairing a road, or arresting an armed robber, or doing one of those other things that taxation is apparently an immoral way to fund?
At this point I can count on Wunderground to be broken more than 50% of the time. Differently on different days, at different times of day, and on different clients, but broken most of the time. (Trying to change a display preference? Scroll through times in the 10-day forecast view? Select conditions from a controlled (airport) station instead of a random PWS sitting in someone's backyard next to their dryer vent? "We'll be rolling out an update in a couple of months.")
But not to worry. They're maintaining a steady pace of innovation, and soon they'll be broken 100% of the time on all clients.
Tell us what else leans to the left from your perspective. The horizon, maybe?
I'm not sure there's a correlation between bureaucracy and "leftists", but I'm willing to concede that putting one dictator in charge is an effective way to get rid of bureaucracy. We'll probably differ on whether that's a good thing.
Plus, a terrorist could load it full of explosives and program in the target and turn it loose like a smart bomb.
Trucks are more expensive than suicide bombers. In fact, I'll wager that hijacking autonomous vehicles to deliver bombs will remain more difficult and expensive than brainwashing "martyrs" into doing the job.
So a very simple explanation is gravity from the mass of the galaxy warps space in such a way that mass around it seems sped up.
Yes, astrophysics and cosmology are very simple when you don't bother with numbers.
I'd be happy to see your personal theory peer-reviewed, but I'm afraid the reviewers will probably want to see some numbers. For bonus points, make some falsifiable quantitative predictions. ("Future scientists will laugh at today's dark-matter theories" doesn't count.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was Stroustrup (or maybe Dijkstra), speaking on the idea of making programming "easier" so more people could be programmers with far less training and education, who said something to the effect of "I wouldn't want a surgeon operating on me who only had 6 weeks of training."
Sure. But I also wouldn't want to go to the hospital and wait for an MD when I need my nails clipped.
An awful lot of development is the equivalent of nail-clipping, not surgery. Or at least it should be.
Exactly half of the places I've worked had a dress code that forbade shorts. I prefer no dress code, but looking back, I don't see a strong correlation between dress code (or lack thereof) and workplace quality of life. Some "business casual" places were great enough that I didn't mind the dress code, some "anything goes" places were terrible enough that everyone was miserable no matter how they dressed.
I've never worked anywhere, any job, where I could wear shorts. Nor would I actually want to.
So if you were forced to wear shorts, perhaps due to some small-minded one-dress-code-fits-all corporate policy, you'd find it objectionable? Perhaps it might even interfere with your work, if it's uncomfortable or annoying enough? Isn't it great when an employer doesn't do that?
Narrow band filters might be very useful for recognizing the crop plant. In fact this might offer another genetic engineering tool. Add an unusual pigment or pigments that reflect specific wavelengths which the robot can detect with filters, but won't be found in any of the weed species. Essentially adding optical tagging.
Not to ride on the coattails of your eventual Nobel or anything, but this is the best idea I've heard in a long time, and I spent five years at a crop-science company. Put together a robust trait stack to express three or four distinct narrowband fluorescent emissions, and good luck horizontal-transferring that entire stack into a neighboring weed by accident. If the robots see something that only fluoresces in one or two of the bands, it'll be as easy to pick out as a purple or cyan blot in a field of white.
From or to anybody we'd recognize from the news?
With a checkbook or card, of course.
"A year's salary" is not pocket change.
A month's salary is not pocket change.
I think long and hard before spending a week's salary on a single purchase. Getting that kind of cash from ATMs would take several days, given daily withdrawal limits around here.
I know, right? That would be like taking away Flash.
No, classic Apple would've gotten it right. Tog would've laughed this design out of the building, with a highlight reel showing people bonking into the glass walls, and how sensible visible elements on the glass fixed the problem.
I miss classic Apple.
I'm having trouble understanding the significance of 25-pm distortions (0.025nm) in an optical telescope, where the light you're bouncing around has wavelengths on the order of 20000 times more than that (400nm-650nm, longer for IR). Does interferometry really let us detect phase differences that small?
He certainly doesn't crank things out quickly, but most of it is eminently worth waiting for. His last novel was a bit of a misfire, but he's talked about a couple of other things in the queue from the Zones of Thought universe, and I'd love to see something entirely new from him as well.
What if they install something that keeps mining after you leave the page?
What if they install something that keeps mining as a system service that starts up automatically whenever you boot your machine, and maybe sets up a proxy for them to communicate with other systems inside your LAN?
After all, if you've viewed their content, they're entitled to compensation, right?
I think we fundamentally agree that informed consent is the important thing, but I'm not willing to venture very far down the slippery slope of "compensate content producers by letting them run whatever they want on your machine".
If we really want to use this role-reversed metaphor, they're paying me (with their content) for my attention (to their ads). Ideally, my favorable and engaged attention, not my swearing-at-the-site-as-I-try-to-close-my-hung-browser attention.
In point of fact, I've decided that many sites offer inadequate "pay" for the resource hit they impose, whether from ads or just bad coding. Sometimes I switch to viewing them in a different browser that mitigates these resource attacks. Most often, I just stop visiting.
How do you figure the cost of losing half your battery time? From what I've directly observed, having a few badly-behaved Web pages open can take me from six hours of battery life to two or three.
I've been known to pay for ad-free access to content, and I've been willing to accept ads as a way to compensate content providers. Ads are simply getting too expensive to accept now -- the electricity cost is small, but the costs in battery life, stability, and safety are just too high.
(And that's omitting the attention costs. Static ads? Fine. Static ads for things I'm actually interested in? Heck, I'll click through them! But autoplay video, distracting animations, malware? Nope. Bad for my perceptual and cognitive health.)
"Unoccupied CPUs" were a waste back when a CPU used the same amount of power idling as working.
Today, giving my "unoccupied CPU" a task for your benefit is theft of my battery life (time until I need to recharge), battery lifetime (total number of cycles), electricity (both direct device usage and indirect cooling needs), and device lifetime (hotter devices fail sooner).
Now, if you'd like to offer me payment for these things you wish to consume, we can talk.
Pretty sure you'd need to take them off outdoors to avoid getting the outdoor stuff into the house...
Most dust is skin flakes and mite poop, and therefore has DEFINITELY been part of a structure at some point.
Interplanetary dust? Citation needed, I think.
Even if you're confining yourself to household dust (obviously not the topic of my comment), you're still way off base. For starters, two-thirds of it is typically stuff tracked in from outdoors.
But I suppose if you say that "supernova poop" "has been part of a structure at some point", then you're technically correct...
All OUR structures were once dust, too, and will one day be dust again.
But most dust has never been part of a structure, and probably never will be.
It is immoral to _not_ avoid AND evade your taxes as much as possible!
Spoken like a true corporation.
Say, shouldn't you be out fighting a fire, or repairing a road, or arresting an armed robber, or doing one of those other things that taxation is apparently an immoral way to fund?
The statement on the bill was so that no-one could refuse it during the "Great Rebellion", as the American Revolution was called at the time.
You meant, of course, the Civil War.
Thanks for this link -- fascinating reading!
At this point I can count on Wunderground to be broken more than 50% of the time. Differently on different days, at different times of day, and on different clients, but broken most of the time. (Trying to change a display preference? Scroll through times in the 10-day forecast view? Select conditions from a controlled (airport) station instead of a random PWS sitting in someone's backyard next to their dryer vent? "We'll be rolling out an update in a couple of months.")
But not to worry. They're maintaining a steady pace of innovation, and soon they'll be broken 100% of the time on all clients.
It's not puritanical in any way. Nudity objectively implies availability for sex.
Wow. Just wow.
There are only certain occasions when clothes are taken off. Traditionally the most important one if not the most common is for mating.
Not very big on bathing, then, are we?
Tell us what else leans to the left from your perspective. The horizon, maybe?
I'm not sure there's a correlation between bureaucracy and "leftists", but I'm willing to concede that putting one dictator in charge is an effective way to get rid of bureaucracy. We'll probably differ on whether that's a good thing.
Plus, a terrorist could load it full of explosives and program in the target and turn it loose like a smart bomb.
Trucks are more expensive than suicide bombers. In fact, I'll wager that hijacking autonomous vehicles to deliver bombs will remain more difficult and expensive than brainwashing "martyrs" into doing the job.
So a very simple explanation is gravity from the mass of the galaxy warps space in such a way that mass around it seems sped up.
Yes, astrophysics and cosmology are very simple when you don't bother with numbers.
I'd be happy to see your personal theory peer-reviewed, but I'm afraid the reviewers will probably want to see some numbers. For bonus points, make some falsifiable quantitative predictions. ("Future scientists will laugh at today's dark-matter theories" doesn't count.)