35x nearly-0 can still be nearly-0. It's not like cities that don't have smog today will start having it (especially given the emissions are already happening, and no one seemed to notice). OTOH, if you live in one of the handful of cities that still have a smog problem, not fixing this would certainly be a dick move.
The hardware fix may well be a urea injector, like previous models used. That wouldn't have any material effect on performance or fuel economy. If the cost of adding it is paid by VW, there's no reason not to.
When the fix is mostly hardware modification, it's hard to blame the problem solely on software engineers!
This is why my only China investments are tech stocks. China's internally-focused heavy industry is mostly a sham, and the huge manufacturing base outsourced there is being replaced by in-country automation, but the tech stocks there are real companies, with P/Es that are pretty normal for tech stocks. It's the one place where a 70P/E looks good.
A common theory to explain Venus' slow and backwards rotation is that it suffered a large impact similar to the one that formed the Earth's moon, only in a direction counter to it's original rotation, so much that it put the brakes on Venus so hard that it's now slowly spinning in reverse.
Also it's thought that Venus is simply too close to the Sun, there was a time when the Sun wasn't as bright and water may have been on the surface but as the sun matured the "goldilocks" zone shifted outwards and Venus got cooked.
The rotation idea doesn't really hold water. It would have needed to happen very early in planet formation, or the whole planet would still be molten today, plus the details of the impact bringing angular momentum to 0, which requires the pieces that escaped the collision to have just precisely the right parameters post-impact, are "finely tuned", which is the polite way scientists say "BS".
Keep in mind that, at least with Earth, the surface isn't rigidly coupled to the core. While the difference in rotation is only significant in geological terms, it means that you can't stop the core spinning just by smacking the crust around, and you can't really put enough energy into the crust to counterbalance the spin of the core. A single large impact just can't transfer enough momentum with a glancing blow - too much of the transferred energy ends up thermal, liquifying, even vaporizing, crust and magma. An impact while planets were still forming, or at least before the iron catastrophe might do it, but again the odds of the numbers working out exactly right to reach near-0 angular momentum are, well, astronomical.
Venus getting cooked goes beyond the oceans boiling - the vast majority of carbon is in a planet's crust, and you don't get an atmosphere like Venus's without melting all the crust. The atmosphere is a side-effect of the real mystery under the surface. The simplest assumption is that Venus's lack of rotation and repeated crust overturning are symptoms of the same weirdness, and we're unlikely to guess what that is from studying Earth geology.
No, that's not how that works - false imprisonment is an actual crime, escaping it is not. Anyway, turns out here were fire doors the employees were told not to use. It's the fear of losing the job that keeps them there, not locking the doors. Locking the doors is just a braindead manager doing what they do best - making an ass of himself.
Apparently these are people who fear losing their jobs. Probably they have themselves and family members to support and don't think that they can easily get another job if they lose the one they have.
Oh, that is certain. Which is why the "locking them in" is pointless (I've certainly had deeply stupid managers in my life as well, but still: pointless). Telling someone he can't leave will keep anyone who cares about his job, chaining a door adds nothing at all to that.
Amazon still does stack ranking, even though MS gave it up I'd guess Zappos thus does it too, though I don't actually know. Anyone on/. actually work there?
But therein lies the catch; the bad managers take credit for the work and get themselves raises and promotions, while the good managers give their people the credit, keep their people productive and engaged, and have little to show on their "What -I- accomplished this year" list and end up demoted or fired
Only if the middle-managers are total failures. As a manger, you should get no credit for any hands-on work you do. That's actually a failure to manage. You get full credit for anything your people do. The worker gets credit for the work, the manager gets credit for managing the work, and there's no conflict.
We can realistically limit drones form flying over property too low simply by issuing hunting licenses. There'd be an instant market for drone-killer drones, and of course in rural areas they just get shot down already. (P.S. the everyday consumer has full access to firearms, perhaps moreso than lasers).
with the best leaders, when the work is done the people say "we did it ourselves"
That's really a great quote. Bad managers think management is about "telling people what to do", but really, that's the failure mode of management. If your team has good people (and that's the job: making that happen), you need only present to business goals and any broader vision, and let your people do their jobs.
My favorite quote is "you have a good leader when the people are doing what they should. He might be telling them to do that, he might be telling them nothing, he might be telling them the opposite so they'll do it just to spite him, that's all implementation details." But really that's only half the picture: you job is to balance discipline (people doing what they should) with morale. Any idiot can make a trade-off between those two in either direction, but it's the product of both that's the long-term productivity of the team, and raising both at once is the real trick.
Microsoft though this was a clever idea once as well, firing all the low-mid level managers in engineering (senior management was safe of course) and keeping just the engineering team leads. Today, first-level managers have the job title "Lead", and nothing else has changed. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Zappos is part of Amazon, of course, so this could be a contained experiment to see how it goes before a larger scale move. I suspect it will go the same way as MS. First level people managers serve a vital role (whether the individuals in that role are competent is a different question) in preventing "drama", and hiring, training, and retaining the best. Mid-level managers may be mostly useless overhead promoted out of harm's way, but someone needs to decide what projects are worth funding, and what projects aren't worth continuing, from a business perspective. Those roles will be filled again eventually. "And their beards have all grown longer overnight."
I do occasionally see web ads - hard to escape that without turning off JS entirely (though/. lets me disable them) - but I'd hardly count that as using a Google product. I don't listen to commercial radio; good public radio where I live, and I mostly listen to audiobooks anyhow. I don't have cable, haven't for 20 years. Netflix is fine for keeping something on my TV. I certainly don't watch any broadcast news, where my choices are the propaganda arm of the Democratic party, or Fox. No thanks. I seriously dislike commercials, as you may have gathered.
The one place Google still gets me from time to time is YouTube. I wish there was a better alternative there, but there's educational content on YouTube that just doesn't exists anywhere else. Fortunately the interstitial ads are pretty rare for the non-pop-culture stuff (and I'm sure I could block those too, if I got more active about it).
I don't use Google products, because fuck being the product. I went elsewhere. Most people simply aren't aware of what Google does, just as most people think they're the customers for commercial TV.
Google still makes almost all of their money selling ad impressions. You are product. (Facebook too, of course.)
It gets better, in addition to "comefrom" (OK, "react"), the only branching construct worse than goto, you can change operator precedence. How'd you like to maintain that code?
This step forward makes "quantum computing" real to me. Up till now, it's all been so experimental that it was divorced from engineering, and for me the target of much skepticism. Now that it's being done in silicon, however, it's on its way to being a product. Finally we might get past the hype and see what can actually be delivered!
This work was huge, because it showed that neutrinos move slower than light. The "flip" was an inspired solution to the missing neutrino problem, as it required a string of assumptions that moved away from the "consensus": that neutrinos move slower than light, that they can "spontaneously" change flavor, and do so frequently, which meant assuming that there was some mechanism to allow the flip without the neutrinos interacting with something. Really quite a reach theoretically, but fully justified by the data.
This is common for the great physics breakthroughs: the evidence that the current model is wring is obvious, often for years, before someone has the inspiration of just how to accommodate the new data cleanly - often by moving far indeed from the current model. This wasn't relativity or QM, but it was still an impressive leap.
"Your code is a piece of shit" is a perfectly apt comment. If the code is a steaming pile, it's a steaming pile, and you can't polish a turd. But you shouldn't take that as a personal attack - you are not your code. Especially outside the Open Source world, we're often rushed to produce code to some arbitrary deadline, and it's often crap code as a result. Acknowledging that straight-away "yup, it's total crap, I hope to be allowed the time to do it right" is very effective, and might actually get you that time!
The personal attack, beyond the code, that's different. But I've seen that from people I respect when someone has a pattern of writing bad code, and just can't seem to learn. That's the thing about this industry: the compiler gives 0 fucks about your feelings. Customer support gives 0 fucks about your feelings. The guys stuck maintaining your code years from now give 0 fucks about your feelings. Fuck your feelings. Learn to write good code when given the time to do so, and learn to mark crappy hacks as such with comments when you're rushed by management, so others can see right off that the code isn't supposed to make sense, but is instead a hack job that should be replace at the earliest opportunity.
And if you think any of that is harsh and uncaring, try being an artist sometime. You have no idea.
Meh, we found so many holes in the Law of Conversation of Energy 100 years or so ago, we had to completely redefine it to include "mass" as a kind of energy. I bet we do that again, one day - broaden the definition to maintain something being conserved. (Also, did you know there is no conservation of energy in General Relativity? Strange but true.)
More fun: an act of divine intervention could conserve energy; it would just require a statistically unlikely sequence of events. Plenty of energy coming from the Sun to power all sorts of wild effects, and the Sun itself is a chaotic system that sometimes bursts energy in amazing ways.
Because if you want me to 'act professional,' I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what 'acting professionally' results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.
Odds are zero as there is no proof or reason to think that there is a god. Asteroids? Yes we have proof of those.
We had no proof or reason to think that there was dark matter, until a few decades ago. Turns out it's most of the matter in the universe. Funny how things turn out. That's the point of Pascal's wager after all: even if the odds are "nearly 0 - as sure as we can really be of anything that it's 0", when you multiply that by infinity you still get infinity.
The flaw in Pascal's wager is more subtle than that - think a bit more about it.
But everyone should not be treated equally in the eyes of the law - the guilty should be treated differently than the innocent - that's rather the point, after all. There are many totally impartial and unbiased systems one could contrive (like flipping a coin) that would in no way serve justice, but would be perfectly fair.
And justice is hardly the ideal goal anyhow. The ideal goal is to do the right thing. Hard to get much agreement on what that is, of course, but for particularly egregious mismatches between the law and the Good we have jury nullification, for example.
Good luck with your Utopia where no one does productive work (but everyone has jobs). Why you'd make people do needless busywork instead of just giving them money is unclear, but hey, it's your Utopia. I'm sure it will work out as well all all the other Utopias man has tried.
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Divine intervention is not a legal worry, as there is no god
You seem very sure of yourself, but what if He's just hiding? Sure, the odds of that seem small - quite small. But are they higher or lower than the chance of an asteroid strike? Even if the odds are "infinitesimal" we're multiplying by infinity here, right? Ahh, Pascal's wager - everything old is new again.
Slashdot Mirror
35x nearly-0 can still be nearly-0. It's not like cities that don't have smog today will start having it (especially given the emissions are already happening, and no one seemed to notice). OTOH, if you live in one of the handful of cities that still have a smog problem, not fixing this would certainly be a dick move.
The hardware fix may well be a urea injector, like previous models used. That wouldn't have any material effect on performance or fuel economy. If the cost of adding it is paid by VW, there's no reason not to.
When the fix is mostly hardware modification, it's hard to blame the problem solely on software engineers!
This is why my only China investments are tech stocks. China's internally-focused heavy industry is mostly a sham, and the huge manufacturing base outsourced there is being replaced by in-country automation, but the tech stocks there are real companies, with P/Es that are pretty normal for tech stocks. It's the one place where a 70P/E looks good.
A common theory to explain Venus' slow and backwards rotation is that it suffered a large impact similar to the one that formed the Earth's moon, only in a direction counter to it's original rotation, so much that it put the brakes on Venus so hard that it's now slowly spinning in reverse.
Also it's thought that Venus is simply too close to the Sun, there was a time when the Sun wasn't as bright and water may have been on the surface but as the sun matured the "goldilocks" zone shifted outwards and Venus got cooked.
The rotation idea doesn't really hold water. It would have needed to happen very early in planet formation, or the whole planet would still be molten today, plus the details of the impact bringing angular momentum to 0, which requires the pieces that escaped the collision to have just precisely the right parameters post-impact, are "finely tuned", which is the polite way scientists say "BS".
Keep in mind that, at least with Earth, the surface isn't rigidly coupled to the core. While the difference in rotation is only significant in geological terms, it means that you can't stop the core spinning just by smacking the crust around, and you can't really put enough energy into the crust to counterbalance the spin of the core. A single large impact just can't transfer enough momentum with a glancing blow - too much of the transferred energy ends up thermal, liquifying, even vaporizing, crust and magma. An impact while planets were still forming, or at least before the iron catastrophe might do it, but again the odds of the numbers working out exactly right to reach near-0 angular momentum are, well, astronomical.
Venus getting cooked goes beyond the oceans boiling - the vast majority of carbon is in a planet's crust, and you don't get an atmosphere like Venus's without melting all the crust. The atmosphere is a side-effect of the real mystery under the surface. The simplest assumption is that Venus's lack of rotation and repeated crust overturning are symptoms of the same weirdness, and we're unlikely to guess what that is from studying Earth geology.
No, that's not how that works - false imprisonment is an actual crime, escaping it is not. Anyway, turns out here were fire doors the employees were told not to use. It's the fear of losing the job that keeps them there, not locking the doors. Locking the doors is just a braindead manager doing what they do best - making an ass of himself.
Apparently these are people who fear losing their jobs. Probably they have themselves and family members to support and don't think that they can easily get another job if they lose the one they have.
Oh, that is certain. Which is why the "locking them in" is pointless (I've certainly had deeply stupid managers in my life as well, but still: pointless). Telling someone he can't leave will keep anyone who cares about his job, chaining a door adds nothing at all to that.
Please note that counting Wal-Mart as a prison is not as ridiculous as it might sound--they have been known to lock workers inside the store:
Pretty sure Wal-Mart sells bolt cutters. Just sayin'
Amazon still does stack ranking, even though MS gave it up I'd guess Zappos thus does it too, though I don't actually know. Anyone on /. actually work there?
But therein lies the catch; the bad managers take credit for the work and get themselves raises and promotions, while the good managers give their people the credit, keep their people productive and engaged, and have little to show on their "What -I- accomplished this year" list and end up demoted or fired
Only if the middle-managers are total failures. As a manger, you should get no credit for any hands-on work you do. That's actually a failure to manage. You get full credit for anything your people do. The worker gets credit for the work, the manager gets credit for managing the work, and there's no conflict.
If only fewer middle managers were useless tools.
We can realistically limit drones form flying over property too low simply by issuing hunting licenses. There'd be an instant market for drone-killer drones, and of course in rural areas they just get shot down already. (P.S. the everyday consumer has full access to firearms, perhaps moreso than lasers).
with the best leaders, when the work is done the people say "we did it ourselves"
That's really a great quote. Bad managers think management is about "telling people what to do", but really, that's the failure mode of management. If your team has good people (and that's the job: making that happen), you need only present to business goals and any broader vision, and let your people do their jobs.
My favorite quote is "you have a good leader when the people are doing what they should. He might be telling them to do that, he might be telling them nothing, he might be telling them the opposite so they'll do it just to spite him, that's all implementation details." But really that's only half the picture: you job is to balance discipline (people doing what they should) with morale. Any idiot can make a trade-off between those two in either direction, but it's the product of both that's the long-term productivity of the team, and raising both at once is the real trick.
Microsoft though this was a clever idea once as well, firing all the low-mid level managers in engineering (senior management was safe of course) and keeping just the engineering team leads. Today, first-level managers have the job title "Lead", and nothing else has changed. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Zappos is part of Amazon, of course, so this could be a contained experiment to see how it goes before a larger scale move. I suspect it will go the same way as MS. First level people managers serve a vital role (whether the individuals in that role are competent is a different question) in preventing "drama", and hiring, training, and retaining the best. Mid-level managers may be mostly useless overhead promoted out of harm's way, but someone needs to decide what projects are worth funding, and what projects aren't worth continuing, from a business perspective. Those roles will be filled again eventually. "And their beards have all grown longer overnight."
I do occasionally see web ads - hard to escape that without turning off JS entirely (though /. lets me disable them) - but I'd hardly count that as using a Google product. I don't listen to commercial radio; good public radio where I live, and I mostly listen to audiobooks anyhow. I don't have cable, haven't for 20 years. Netflix is fine for keeping something on my TV. I certainly don't watch any broadcast news, where my choices are the propaganda arm of the Democratic party, or Fox. No thanks. I seriously dislike commercials, as you may have gathered.
The one place Google still gets me from time to time is YouTube. I wish there was a better alternative there, but there's educational content on YouTube that just doesn't exists anywhere else. Fortunately the interstitial ads are pretty rare for the non-pop-culture stuff (and I'm sure I could block those too, if I got more active about it).
Larry certainly one-upped C++ operator overloading!
But of course, you could enforce just what you suggest with code reviews and a grep or two just to be sure.
I don't use Google products, because fuck being the product. I went elsewhere. Most people simply aren't aware of what Google does, just as most people think they're the customers for commercial TV.
Google still makes almost all of their money selling ad impressions. You are product. (Facebook too, of course.)
It gets better, in addition to "comefrom" (OK, "react"), the only branching construct worse than goto, you can change operator precedence. How'd you like to maintain that code?
This step forward makes "quantum computing" real to me. Up till now, it's all been so experimental that it was divorced from engineering, and for me the target of much skepticism. Now that it's being done in silicon, however, it's on its way to being a product. Finally we might get past the hype and see what can actually be delivered!
This work was huge, because it showed that neutrinos move slower than light. The "flip" was an inspired solution to the missing neutrino problem, as it required a string of assumptions that moved away from the "consensus": that neutrinos move slower than light, that they can "spontaneously" change flavor, and do so frequently, which meant assuming that there was some mechanism to allow the flip without the neutrinos interacting with something. Really quite a reach theoretically, but fully justified by the data.
This is common for the great physics breakthroughs: the evidence that the current model is wring is obvious, often for years, before someone has the inspiration of just how to accommodate the new data cleanly - often by moving far indeed from the current model. This wasn't relativity or QM, but it was still an impressive leap.
"Your code is a piece of shit" is a perfectly apt comment. If the code is a steaming pile, it's a steaming pile, and you can't polish a turd. But you shouldn't take that as a personal attack - you are not your code. Especially outside the Open Source world, we're often rushed to produce code to some arbitrary deadline, and it's often crap code as a result. Acknowledging that straight-away "yup, it's total crap, I hope to be allowed the time to do it right" is very effective, and might actually get you that time!
The personal attack, beyond the code, that's different. But I've seen that from people I respect when someone has a pattern of writing bad code, and just can't seem to learn. That's the thing about this industry: the compiler gives 0 fucks about your feelings. Customer support gives 0 fucks about your feelings. The guys stuck maintaining your code years from now give 0 fucks about your feelings. Fuck your feelings. Learn to write good code when given the time to do so, and learn to mark crappy hacks as such with comments when you're rushed by management, so others can see right off that the code isn't supposed to make sense, but is instead a hack job that should be replace at the earliest opportunity.
And if you think any of that is harsh and uncaring, try being an artist sometime. You have no idea.
Meh, we found so many holes in the Law of Conversation of Energy 100 years or so ago, we had to completely redefine it to include "mass" as a kind of energy. I bet we do that again, one day - broaden the definition to maintain something being conserved. (Also, did you know there is no conservation of energy in General Relativity? Strange but true.)
More fun: an act of divine intervention could conserve energy; it would just require a statistically unlikely sequence of events. Plenty of energy coming from the Sun to power all sorts of wild effects, and the Sun itself is a chaotic system that sometimes bursts energy in amazing ways.
To quote Linus about "professional"
Because if you want me to 'act professional,' I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what 'acting professionally' results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.
Odds are zero as there is no proof or reason to think that there is a god. Asteroids? Yes we have proof of those.
We had no proof or reason to think that there was dark matter, until a few decades ago. Turns out it's most of the matter in the universe. Funny how things turn out. That's the point of Pascal's wager after all: even if the odds are "nearly 0 - as sure as we can really be of anything that it's 0", when you multiply that by infinity you still get infinity.
The flaw in Pascal's wager is more subtle than that - think a bit more about it.
But everyone should not be treated equally in the eyes of the law - the guilty should be treated differently than the innocent - that's rather the point, after all. There are many totally impartial and unbiased systems one could contrive (like flipping a coin) that would in no way serve justice, but would be perfectly fair.
And justice is hardly the ideal goal anyhow. The ideal goal is to do the right thing. Hard to get much agreement on what that is, of course, but for particularly egregious mismatches between the law and the Good we have jury nullification, for example.
Good luck with your Utopia where no one does productive work (but everyone has jobs). Why you'd make people do needless busywork instead of just giving them money is unclear, but hey, it's your Utopia. I'm sure it will work out as well all all the other Utopias man has tried.
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Divine intervention is not a legal worry, as there is no god
You seem very sure of yourself, but what if He's just hiding? Sure, the odds of that seem small - quite small. But are they higher or lower than the chance of an asteroid strike? Even if the odds are "infinitesimal" we're multiplying by infinity here, right? Ahh, Pascal's wager - everything old is new again.