He was with his CHILDREN you asshole. His CHILDREN likely wanted McDonalds, and wanted to practice their french with a menu they were familiar with. Children can often be picky about food, and can prefer something they already know.
You're right, he brought children into a McDonalds! He deserves TO BE PHYSICALLY ASSAULTED. (Its not like McDonalds caters to children with playgrounds or anything, oh wait...)
So it's kind of boring for me -- a hobbyist with an ardent interest in cryptography -- to bother tackling the problem, when somebody with some familiarity with Macintosh machine language is going to have a severe advantage.
Not everything in the world is meant for you. Sorry, you aren't the target audience. You also likely aren't the target audience for barbie dolls, but are you going to complain when their marketing doesn't appeal to you?
Agreed, although while patent law stays the way it is, its impossible for a major company to ignore patents. They're forced to fight fire with fire. Your competitors sure as hell are going to use patents.
IBM keeps coming out year after year saying "hey guys, we need to stop with the patents, this is getting ridiculous"
And yet, year after year, they keep breaking their own records for most patents filed.
Less sounds even better, but I'm trying to win over the people who think they have a right to a patent for life here.:)
And even a few years would be a massive improvement.
But I'm with you, lets get them as short as we can.
Is it small indie developers coming up with genius ideas and getting patents to protect themselves from the big guys?
NO. NOT AT ALL.
What we have here is a world where grad students sell their patent ideas for dirt to companies like IBM and Micorosoft because they have no money and nobody's heard of them.
Then those companies turn around and sue each other to oblivion. Its nothing to do with fairness, its just a legal war.
And that's the BEST SCENARIO. Usually, the companies with the patents are just patent trolls who HAVE NEVER EVEN RELEASED A PRODUCT, and have ZERO intention to do so. They literally just buy patents to sit on them and then sue other people who use those ideas.
That is absolutely COUNTER to progress. Patents are actually STIFLING CREATIVITY!!!
Weren't they supposed to PROTECT CREATIVITY?!?!?!?
As a software programmer, I think you're loony, and you haven't been paying attention to how dangerous these patents are.
Programmers in Europe are now refusing to sell their software in the US. Why? It would cost them LITERALLY NOTHING to distribute. Its digital. They just have to make the sales, and collect the money.
So why don't they do it? Because they're TERRIFIED of US patents. Its a goddamned nightmare. You're walking blind through a minefield! You spend years of your life on some app, and then find out that because of a tiny patent from 10 years ago that has almost nothing to do with anything, you're about to be sued into oblivion.
Patents are STATE SPONSORED MONOPOLIES. In this day and age, technological advancement is its own reward. Being first to market is enough. You don't need government sponsored monopolies to convince companies to invest in R&D, they're not stupid.
By the definition of patents, software should be un-patentable.
Math is not patent-able. Math is intrinsic, part of the world and nature around us. We do not invent math, we merely discover it.
Programs can be converted into Lambda Calculus.
Lambda Calculus is math.
Programs are math.
Programs are un-patentable. QED.
Copyright is plenty enough.
"My personal opinion is that algorithms are like mathematics, i.e. inherently non-patentable. It worries me that most patents are about simple ideas that I would expect my students to develop them as part of their homework." - DONALD FUCKING KNUTH
If you think you know more about Computer Science than Donald Knuth, you're wrong.
Selling a slightly inferior product is hardly stabbing someone in the back.
Now, creating a competing product to one of your partners and not telling them until days before you go public with it... that's stabbing someone in the back.:P
When playing Team Fortress Classic, I always felt my job as spy was complete when I'd sneak into the enemy base and see them all shooting each other out of paranoia that they were all spies.:)
The pit dragon trilogy is amazing, and very readable for young kids. Its dramatic and interesting, its got action and emotion, and its very well written. I read them when I was around 7 or 8 and I read all 3 in a shorter time than it'd take me to read most single books.
Dragon's Blood, Heart's Blood, and A Sending of Dragons. So good.
I mean, some of us, sure. I read Anne Mccaffrey when I was 7, and I read Tolkien.
But that's only if you're ALREADY a huge reader, which it does NOT sound like his kids are. If you're reading Tolkien at 7, you're reading at like a "10th grade level". This is not the kid who you're trying to introduce to books, this is a kid who already loves books. For a kid new to scifi/fantasy, Tolkien is going to turn them off, massively.
Tolkien is written in the 20th century style, everything takes forever to describe and get going. You'll put young modern children to sleep with that.
Tolkien is for when they're already loving fantasy, and want to read the really good stuff. Like Dune. Dune is freaking amazing, but you don't START with Dune! You read it as a teenager.
The best, perfect example of this, is the Humble Indie Bundle / Royal Bundle.
They let you PAY WHAT YOU WANT, because they realize if you give them $1, that's $1 of profit, and is better than 0. Each person pays what they can afford, what they feel is an appropriate value.
What happened? Did everybody choose 0? Nope, they made millions. They're printing money.
Shit isn't rocket science, guys. Get over your damn egos and accept that this is the cost of doing business.
"You want us to sell the TV show our blood, sweat, and tears went into for $1?!?"
Yes, Yes I do. And you'll make millions, so shush.
Thing is, when you combine Price Elasticity with virtual goods that do not have scarcity, you end up in a situation where you almost always make more money by charging less money.
So few businesses understand this, but it is 100% the new way things work. Look at Valve, they just discovered it accidentally with the summer sale, and they've been going SALE CRAZY ever since. They realize that charging $50 for video games, especially ones that aren't gigantic blockbusters, is INSANE. Instead, if you go to (what the traditional businessmen would call insane) $5 per game, you get SALES LIKE CRAZY. People can't get enough! I buy games that I'm not even sure I want, because, fuck, $5? Take my money. They get SO many more sales, that it ends up being worth much, much, much more than selling a $50 box to a few thousand. $5 from millions of customers = millions of dollars. And with virtual goods the cost of each additional sale is next to negligible, with digital distribution anyways. It is almost always beneficial to make another sale, at ANY cost. Even if that is $1, that's $1 of profit. ALL the costs of digital goods, movies, music, games, can be considered R&D. The costs of distribution and production just keep coming down, and with digital distribution the costs per copy are completely negligible.
We're going to see something EXACTLY like Steam for movies, it is only a matter of time. We'll be able to buy Game of Thrones for $1 an episode, and HBO will make FAR, FAR more money that way then they ever have.
I just don't understand why its taking so long. The movie/tv industry is like Polaroid, trying to insist that the world keep using analog cameras when EVERY consumer so obviously is demanding digital.
I wouldn't recommend getting a Cert, probably more trouble and cost than its worth. Not as negative to have on your resume for a SysAdmin than a programmer, but still, it doesn't exactly shine, so it doesn't feel worth it.
Its going to be hard, no doubt. There's just so many people who apply for IT jobs that have NO idea what they're doing at all, hiring is a nightmare. So much of the "interview process" is just to weed out people who should never be applying in the first place.
You mentioned,
"He is doing stuff now that a lot of people I graduated with (I was a CS major) could not do when they had a bachelor's degree"
There's the answer. That's how you get a job without a degree, you do really impressive stuff that shows you know what you're doing and you care about it. Tell him to do as many personal projects as he can, and try to find everything he can do to show evidence of having done them. Set up a personal website, and make it as in-depth as possible. Write extensive notes on all the stuff he's doing that graduates couldn't even do, and include that with your resume. Take pictures, include links to live things on the web if you can, everything and anything to show that while you don't have a formal education, you still have experience. That's what counts.
Other than that, I'd just say apply everywhere imaginable. Getting your foot in the door is the hard part, once he's got a job on his resume or two, people won't care about his education at all.
One of the problems I have with movies like "Stand and Deliver" is the idea that if we just had a few more Jaime Escalantes in our classrooms, we'd have this wave of untapped Isaac Newtons just waiting to make new discoveries in math and science. And it just isn't true.
I have to disagree with you entirely. Intelligence is not an inherent statistic. You can grow your mind just as you can grow your muscles. Those who exercise their mind more, end up knowing more and being more intelligent. Its vastly complicated, there are billions of different dimensions of "intelligence", maybe one person could never catch up to where some genius is at, but you can always improve from where you are. People can always learn more, become smarter, and understand more. There is always potential.
Maybe it is naive to think all people should know physics, and chemistry, and biology, and calculus. We are a specialized society, after all. However, you need to take one of them to the extreme, and see a bit of each of them. You need to understand how complicated life can be, how much further things can go. I see so many people who get frustrated with technology (computer, car) because they don't understand it. If you explain it to them (your computer is having this problem not because its "slow", but rather because you have adware installed all over it) they'll usually lose that frustration. They realize that they are expecting the impossible, because what they wanted was more complicated than they thought. Also, such understanding gives more trust, Its not that such and such company is screwing you over, its that there are a myriad complex reasons that interact to cause a result.
The number of ad hominem and cum hoc ergo propter hoc (attacks on character, correlation/causation inequality) fallacies I see in our society daily are quite alarming. People just don't know very, very basic things, and it causes so much struggle and conflict in society. If you don't know how to think logically, how to attack a problem analytically, you're going to make mistakes and misunderstandings your whole life. What is a human if not one who can learn from his failure? Without understanding logic, one mistakenly learns things which are not so, and fails to make connections that are there.
I'll agree that we shouldn't expect every student to master every class. But I think every student should be expected to have a basic understanding of every subject, and should try to master at least one subject.
I thought the exact same thing reading Oracle's comments. Its like, wow guys, you really just don't understand what's at stake here, do you? They're arguing apples to oranges.
Like when the judge had to call their defense lawyer out in court, like "uh, are you sure you want to do that?". It just looks so bad.
I'm sorry Oracle, but you're really getting what you deserve here. You should know better.
This is doubly great when you think about how many millions Google was willing to settle for.
This is quadruply great when you think about how many millions Oracle spent on their legal team.
Right, but the case he was so OBVIOUSLY talking about was Citizens United, which was in 2010, the case which interpreted the first amendment's freedom of speech in a new way.
Grow up.
Besides, that doesn't contradict his argument that judges in this country are fallible. He didn't say it was a recent trend, only that modern events were rife with examples of poor judgement.
Absolutely. I want to buy him a beer. When he made it clear that he knew how to program, and was studying java, I knew the case was over. That was what we needed.
Slashdot Mirror
You're extremely small minded, and you're a jerk.
He was with his CHILDREN you asshole. His CHILDREN likely wanted McDonalds, and wanted to practice their french with a menu they were familiar with. Children can often be picky about food, and can prefer something they already know.
You're right, he brought children into a McDonalds! He deserves TO BE PHYSICALLY ASSAULTED. (Its not like McDonalds caters to children with playgrounds or anything, oh wait...)
Who the hell do you think you are?
Acid Burn, Crash Override, Cereal Killer
Oh the lulz
So it's kind of boring for me -- a hobbyist with an ardent interest in cryptography -- to bother tackling the problem, when somebody with some familiarity with Macintosh machine language is going to have a severe advantage.
Not everything in the world is meant for you. Sorry, you aren't the target audience. You also likely aren't the target audience for barbie dolls, but are you going to complain when their marketing doesn't appeal to you?
Agreed, although while patent law stays the way it is, its impossible for a major company to ignore patents. They're forced to fight fire with fire. Your competitors sure as hell are going to use patents.
IBM keeps coming out year after year saying "hey guys, we need to stop with the patents, this is getting ridiculous"
And yet, year after year, they keep breaking their own records for most patents filed.
Less sounds even better, but I'm trying to win over the people who think they have a right to a patent for life here. :)
And even a few years would be a massive improvement.
But I'm with you, lets get them as short as we can.
I hate software patents and I think they're entirely unnecessary. As he said, being first to market is enough.
But I absolutely agree, if we're going to stick with them, a term limit of like 4 years on software patents would go a LONG way.
And if a judge wants to consider that several patents are overreaching the patent law, or wants to consider the interpretation of the law, he can.
You don't know the first thing about the law system, don't go telling judges what to do. Seriously.
IANAL, and neither are you. Come back when you get a law degree, and then tell me what judges can and can't do.
Just look at the situation with patents.
Is it small indie developers coming up with genius ideas and getting patents to protect themselves from the big guys?
NO. NOT AT ALL.
What we have here is a world where grad students sell their patent ideas for dirt to companies like IBM and Micorosoft because they have no money and nobody's heard of them.
Then those companies turn around and sue each other to oblivion. Its nothing to do with fairness, its just a legal war.
And that's the BEST SCENARIO. Usually, the companies with the patents are just patent trolls who HAVE NEVER EVEN RELEASED A PRODUCT, and have ZERO intention to do so. They literally just buy patents to sit on them and then sue other people who use those ideas.
That is absolutely COUNTER to progress. Patents are actually STIFLING CREATIVITY!!!
Weren't they supposed to PROTECT CREATIVITY?!?!?!?
As a software programmer, I think you're loony, and you haven't been paying attention to how dangerous these patents are.
Programmers in Europe are now refusing to sell their software in the US. Why? It would cost them LITERALLY NOTHING to distribute. Its digital. They just have to make the sales, and collect the money.
So why don't they do it? Because they're TERRIFIED of US patents. Its a goddamned nightmare. You're walking blind through a minefield! You spend years of your life on some app, and then find out that because of a tiny patent from 10 years ago that has almost nothing to do with anything, you're about to be sued into oblivion.
Patents are STATE SPONSORED MONOPOLIES. In this day and age, technological advancement is its own reward. Being first to market is enough. You don't need government sponsored monopolies to convince companies to invest in R&D, they're not stupid.
Except if he finds that software shouldn't have been patentable in the first place by the patent law.
Software = Math. And the original patent law states very clearly you cannot patent math.
Judges ARE supposed to consider how laws should be interpreted.
By the definition of patents, software should be un-patentable.
Math is not patent-able. Math is intrinsic, part of the world and nature around us. We do not invent math, we merely discover it.
Programs can be converted into Lambda Calculus.
Lambda Calculus is math.
Programs are math.
Programs are un-patentable. QED.
Copyright is plenty enough.
"My personal opinion is that algorithms are like mathematics, i.e. inherently non-patentable. It worries me that most patents are about simple ideas that I would expect my students to develop them as part of their homework." - DONALD FUCKING KNUTH
If you think you know more about Computer Science than Donald Knuth, you're wrong.
Selling a slightly inferior product is hardly stabbing someone in the back.
:P
Now, creating a competing product to one of your partners and not telling them until days before you go public with it... that's stabbing someone in the back.
When playing Team Fortress Classic, I always felt my job as spy was complete when I'd sneak into the enemy base and see them all shooting each other out of paranoia that they were all spies. :)
The pit dragon trilogy is amazing, and very readable for young kids. Its dramatic and interesting, its got action and emotion, and its very well written. I read them when I was around 7 or 8 and I read all 3 in a shorter time than it'd take me to read most single books. Dragon's Blood, Heart's Blood, and A Sending of Dragons. So good.
I mean, some of us, sure. I read Anne Mccaffrey when I was 7, and I read Tolkien.
But that's only if you're ALREADY a huge reader, which it does NOT sound like his kids are. If you're reading Tolkien at 7, you're reading at like a "10th grade level". This is not the kid who you're trying to introduce to books, this is a kid who already loves books. For a kid new to scifi/fantasy, Tolkien is going to turn them off, massively.
Tolkien is written in the 20th century style, everything takes forever to describe and get going. You'll put young modern children to sleep with that.
Tolkien is for when they're already loving fantasy, and want to read the really good stuff. Like Dune. Dune is freaking amazing, but you don't START with Dune! You read it as a teenager.
I came here to say this. You beat me to it. Read those as a kid, LOVED them.
The best, perfect example of this, is the Humble Indie Bundle / Royal Bundle.
They let you PAY WHAT YOU WANT, because they realize if you give them $1, that's $1 of profit, and is better than 0. Each person pays what they can afford, what they feel is an appropriate value.
What happened? Did everybody choose 0? Nope, they made millions. They're printing money.
Shit isn't rocket science, guys. Get over your damn egos and accept that this is the cost of doing business.
"You want us to sell the TV show our blood, sweat, and tears went into for $1?!?"
Yes, Yes I do. And you'll make millions, so shush.
Shooting themselves in the foot right now.
Thing is, when you combine Price Elasticity with virtual goods that do not have scarcity, you end up in a situation where you almost always make more money by charging less money.
So few businesses understand this, but it is 100% the new way things work. Look at Valve, they just discovered it accidentally with the summer sale, and they've been going SALE CRAZY ever since. They realize that charging $50 for video games, especially ones that aren't gigantic blockbusters, is INSANE. Instead, if you go to (what the traditional businessmen would call insane) $5 per game, you get SALES LIKE CRAZY. People can't get enough! I buy games that I'm not even sure I want, because, fuck, $5? Take my money. They get SO many more sales, that it ends up being worth much, much, much more than selling a $50 box to a few thousand. $5 from millions of customers = millions of dollars. And with virtual goods the cost of each additional sale is next to negligible, with digital distribution anyways. It is almost always beneficial to make another sale, at ANY cost. Even if that is $1, that's $1 of profit. ALL the costs of digital goods, movies, music, games, can be considered R&D. The costs of distribution and production just keep coming down, and with digital distribution the costs per copy are completely negligible.
We're going to see something EXACTLY like Steam for movies, it is only a matter of time. We'll be able to buy Game of Thrones for $1 an episode, and HBO will make FAR, FAR more money that way then they ever have.
I just don't understand why its taking so long. The movie/tv industry is like Polaroid, trying to insist that the world keep using analog cameras when EVERY consumer so obviously is demanding digital.
I wouldn't recommend getting a Cert, probably more trouble and cost than its worth. Not as negative to have on your resume for a SysAdmin than a programmer, but still, it doesn't exactly shine, so it doesn't feel worth it. Its going to be hard, no doubt. There's just so many people who apply for IT jobs that have NO idea what they're doing at all, hiring is a nightmare. So much of the "interview process" is just to weed out people who should never be applying in the first place. You mentioned, "He is doing stuff now that a lot of people I graduated with (I was a CS major) could not do when they had a bachelor's degree" There's the answer. That's how you get a job without a degree, you do really impressive stuff that shows you know what you're doing and you care about it. Tell him to do as many personal projects as he can, and try to find everything he can do to show evidence of having done them. Set up a personal website, and make it as in-depth as possible. Write extensive notes on all the stuff he's doing that graduates couldn't even do, and include that with your resume. Take pictures, include links to live things on the web if you can, everything and anything to show that while you don't have a formal education, you still have experience. That's what counts. Other than that, I'd just say apply everywhere imaginable. Getting your foot in the door is the hard part, once he's got a job on his resume or two, people won't care about his education at all.
One of the problems I have with movies like "Stand and Deliver" is the idea that if we just had a few more Jaime Escalantes in our classrooms, we'd have this wave of untapped Isaac Newtons just waiting to make new discoveries in math and science. And it just isn't true.
I have to disagree with you entirely. Intelligence is not an inherent statistic. You can grow your mind just as you can grow your muscles. Those who exercise their mind more, end up knowing more and being more intelligent. Its vastly complicated, there are billions of different dimensions of "intelligence", maybe one person could never catch up to where some genius is at, but you can always improve from where you are. People can always learn more, become smarter, and understand more. There is always potential.
Maybe it is naive to think all people should know physics, and chemistry, and biology, and calculus. We are a specialized society, after all. However, you need to take one of them to the extreme, and see a bit of each of them. You need to understand how complicated life can be, how much further things can go. I see so many people who get frustrated with technology (computer, car) because they don't understand it. If you explain it to them (your computer is having this problem not because its "slow", but rather because you have adware installed all over it) they'll usually lose that frustration. They realize that they are expecting the impossible, because what they wanted was more complicated than they thought. Also, such understanding gives more trust, Its not that such and such company is screwing you over, its that there are a myriad complex reasons that interact to cause a result.
The number of ad hominem and cum hoc ergo propter hoc (attacks on character, correlation/causation inequality) fallacies I see in our society daily are quite alarming. People just don't know very, very basic things, and it causes so much struggle and conflict in society. If you don't know how to think logically, how to attack a problem analytically, you're going to make mistakes and misunderstandings your whole life. What is a human if not one who can learn from his failure? Without understanding logic, one mistakenly learns things which are not so, and fails to make connections that are there.
I'll agree that we shouldn't expect every student to master every class. But I think every student should be expected to have a basic understanding of every subject, and should try to master at least one subject.
The case isn't entirely over yet, but pretty much, Google won, Oracle lost, Google won't have to do diddly and Oracle gets nothing.
YOU LOSE, SIR! GOOD DAY!
I thought the exact same thing reading Oracle's comments. Its like, wow guys, you really just don't understand what's at stake here, do you? They're arguing apples to oranges.
Like when the judge had to call their defense lawyer out in court, like "uh, are you sure you want to do that?". It just looks so bad.
I'm sorry Oracle, but you're really getting what you deserve here. You should know better.
This is doubly great when you think about how many millions Google was willing to settle for.
This is quadruply great when you think about how many millions Oracle spent on their legal team.
Ah, Schadenfreude.
Right, but the case he was so OBVIOUSLY talking about was Citizens United, which was in 2010, the case which interpreted the first amendment's freedom of speech in a new way.
Grow up.
Besides, that doesn't contradict his argument that judges in this country are fallible. He didn't say it was a recent trend, only that modern events were rife with examples of poor judgement.
Absolutely. I want to buy him a beer. When he made it clear that he knew how to program, and was studying java, I knew the case was over. That was what we needed.
Excellent... judge..manship ?