Ironically, we are only releasing carbon from fossil fuels that was once in plants, which was once in the air, which is where we are putting it. Not sure that, given the planet earth is a closed system in terms of matter conservation, we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.
Ironically, you would not be living well in a Earth habitat that existed 1,000,000s of years ago. Just because the Earth once was does not mean that Humankind once was. Humankind has not been around as long as the Earth and there were many, many environments that the Earth has had.
Home of the Brave. It's not my usual thing to spout off about people needing to leave the United States of America but gimme a break. A large amount of the federal government practice fear tactics to try and convince the people that they need to give up their freedoms to be safe. And the worst part is, most of these supposed secure measures don't do jack shit. We as a nation need to realize that we'll never be completely safe, that there's no level of TSA gadget that will prevent every single act of violence. We as a nation need to remember that we didn't become a nation by being scared pussies.
Darwin claimed the notion of survival of the fittest in evolution. He never claimed that more intelligence lead to being more fit. Now, the fact that homo sapiens have intelligence has proven to be very beneficial in our survival but if increased intelligence lead to a deficiency in physical ability then the "less intelligent" homo sapiens might have been just smart enough and more physically able to supplant those big brained people.
But this all hinges on a tenuous thread of these creatures being smarter than homo sapiens.
As it is, this seems to be a story (depending on whether the fuckup occurred on the engineering side or the buying side) either of shortsighted buyers opting for false economies, or lazy engineers failing to think through likely failure modes.
To me this seems to be the all too common fuck up of people not knowing how to drive. When I drive I don't go bombing through an intersection when I'm not sure if I've got the light. At worst I'll slow down to a yield but sometimes I'll even stop completely.
Yes, that would be a functional phone within wifi range but would not be a cell phone (in the traditional sense of the term), which is what the ggp was trying to say.
Of course that would also mean much higher phone prices, how many people would buy the iphone or Droid at $600?
Why does an unsubsidized phone have to be $600? Why not $250? I mean, the iPod touch is $199, and you can get a cheap throw away phone for $20, add in a bit for some software development and a you get an unencumbered smart phone for a reasonable price.
Because you're not setting the price of the iPhone, Apple is. Now, if it wasn't selling well enough at $600 and Apple decided to sell it at $300 then it would cost $300, but not simply because you think it should only cost $300. Also, adding in the additional hardware to make an iPod touch into a phone while keeping nearly the same form factor probably costs a lot more than that cheap $20 phone.
Do geeks really 'drive girls out of computer science
And so what if it does? Do geeks have to banned from computer science so girls will want in?
And who's to say that women can't be geeks? I mean, if they can't, then this article is arguing that men and women are different. And if something is different then it shouldn't have an equal correlation as something else. Hammers and screwdrivers are different and no one is complaining that more hammers are driving nails than screwdrivers.
2) There is no paid overtime. Salaries generally compensate for this, and frankly professionals SHOULD be expected to fix their errors on their own time (and their own dime). However, that does not work well in environments where workers are fungible: doofus A messes up, and expert B is stuck cleaning up the mess, often in "crisis mode" on his own time. YMMV depending on the shop. Good people tend to leave bad shops, though.
Most professional occupations don't have paid overtime. Maybe you don't get a pay bump for working 80 hours a few weeks out of a year, but if you do it often enough you're in your right mind to expect a raise. And if you don't get it, that's when you move onto a new company (not so workable with the current economic conditions, but that's not IT specific).
3) Academic training has given way to "trade skills". I am appalled that many undergraduate programs focus on the IDE or bloated library of the day, instead of fundamental algorithms and classic processor architecture. Add to this the fact that many non-experts can't tell the difference between the skilled and the not so skilled.
Still, I wouldn't do anything different.
As you pointed out earlier, a strong grasp of mathematical principles and multiple degrees (training of any type, really) helps tremendously. Many people come out of colleges with CS degrees and expect to be as knowledgeable as people with multiple specialties. It just doesn't work that way. Most of the programmers I work with are programmers first, then electrical engineers, mathematicians or financial people second. They're very good at taking my ideas (an electrical engineer with some background in programming) and coming up with much better algorithms than I can. I know what they need to understand what I'm working on and they have an understanding of things beyond basic textbook programming. It's very nice.
Don't you think it is vaguely insulting to women to say they steer away from a career field is because they don't like the decorating? What was that you were saying about stereotypes?
Gosh, you know, I wanted to go into nursing, but I changed my mind once I saw how horribly those blue-green scrubs smocks clash with the beige walls.
Fair point. The only real decorating (if you can call it that) I care about at my office is whether or not I can see a window. My last job had me in the middle of a cubicle farm where the best window was a cheap MS Paint printout of a window with a tree and a sun that we covered up with a gray blob when it was raining outside. Now I've got a window and it's definitely much better.
Because they won't have a direct part in IT decision making.
Because it reinforces stereotypes of the geek that are in no way helpful in the workplace.
Management.
Take pity on the guy who has to referee conflicts between a thousand-strong [female] clerical staff and IT.
The geek - again stereotypically - tends to be a top-down, my-way-or-the-highway kind of thinker.
Who can be very surprised when he meets resistance at ground level.
You know what, flip every gender in that situation around and you've got the same problem. Even better, take out all gender and just use neutral pronouns. You still get the same problem. What you argue against is the type of personality that is drawn to IT and the type of personality that is drawn to clerical staff. One has a requirement to be somewhat sociable, the other does not and tends to draw the opposite (broad strokes, broad strokes, sorry). Not everything is a men vs. women thing. More often than not it's a personality type A versus a personality type B. Now, what if we find out that men are more inclined to B than A and women the opposite, do we have a sexism thing or a nature thing.
If the professor has reason to believe that the woman might snap and kill somebody then he should be allowed to voice that opinion.
True. And this opinion should carry no more or less weight than the myriad of things he is also unqualified to opine about.
I think if you take this path of logic you end up with nobody being qualified to judge the mental state of another person. While objective understanding of another person's state of mind is impossible I do not believe that subjective estimation is impossible. Depending on the relationship between the student and the professor (and this could range from next to nothing to very significant, depending on the situation) I would say that the professor is more qualified to estimate the woman's state of mind than most people (assuming they have a relationship above exchanging homework assignments, a variable that neither of us can determine).
Well, maybe it's just me, but I have been noticing less and less flash ads lately. Less annoying and intrusive ads as well...
I think it's just you. I turned off my ad-blocker one day to see what the wild was like and I nearly threw my computer out the window.
I would say that the worst form of advertising is putting a 10 paragraph story across ten pages to up ad exposure. Nothing annoys me more than that (and ad blocker can't do anything about those).
Tell that to the people that get told they cant have a domain name that says 'Disney', even if their name IS Disney.. Its not always cut and dry like one would expect.
Could that be that the domain name Disney is already spoken for. Just because your name is Steve doesn't mean you get to have the website www.steve.com. Now, what wouldn't be fair would be if Disney could sue you for being named Disney.
Her Facebook post is no different than if she had said it in the hallways of a classroom building. Sure, the person she's talking to might know she's joking / venting / whatever, but the professor in the classroom across the hall might not. And depending on the tone of voice the professor might feel obligated to call the police.
Unless the professor WAS the boyfriend, his opinion isn't exactly relevant to her state of mind. His authority over her wellbeing ends at the evaluation of her assignments and tests.
This is not a question of the woman's well being, it's a question of the professor's well being. If the professor has reason to believe that the woman might snap and kill somebody then he should be allowed to voice that opinion.
Yes. Because I would have taken an idle threat seriously. Besides if protection is warranted, why not punishment? When thinking is the same as doing, you in your example deserve the death penalty. Except you don't, because it isn't. There's a wide gulf between them.
Guess what, if I did return with a gun in this hypothetical situation, and cops were there to pat me down, I would be in a whole lot of trouble. Most likely something along the lines of attempted assault. So punishment is not warranted if I don't actually go back and get a weapon, but if I did there'd be plenty of places for punishment.
Basically, what you consider an idle threat, others might consider a plausible threat. If it really was an idle threat I would be inconvenienced by the police patting me down and asking me a few questions. Other than that, not too much of my liberty is being harassed. Freedom of speech is there to keep the government from suppressing our thoughts, but that doesn't mean that I can spout out with whatever nonsense I feel like and get away with zero consequences.
Where did it say her college career was ruined. The article was a total of three paragraphs. Probably less than 200 words. She was banned from campus, maybe forever, maybe for a week, who knows. Banned is not the same as expelled. Otherwise, your post is very cogent.
You draw the line at the moment that student picks up a dangerous instrument and makes a threatening movement in the direction of the professor...and NOT EVER before.
Let's look at what we know. This woman posted a comment about using morticians equipment to stab somebody in the neck on her Facebook profile. The woman was banned from campus. The woman was patted down and questioned by police. That's about all we know from this story.
Let's look at what we don't know. This woman's professor might know her better than we do. This professor might have reason to believe that she is unstable. This professor might have real cause to feel threatened by her statements.
Simply put, we don't know the circumstances that well and we don't know how credible her posting can be construed as a threat. Let's say I work at the same office as you. You spill your coffee on me in the morning and I tell you I'm going home to get my gun and shoot you. Do you really think you're out of your right to request some sort of protection / restraint from me. From what I can read the university did not arrest her, they simply told her that she was not allowed on campus. This is within the university's purview to act as guardians of the campus. If she was sent to jail for her actions you'd have an argument for overstepping of police powers. But it is the police forces job to enforce the desires of property owners to restrict whom can and cannot be on their property. It is not a violation of your rights if I tell the cops to stop you from coming onto my property.
... or more like a journal where you'd just write for yourself.
Then get a damned journal. No matter how much people want Facebook to be their own personal and private journal, it is not and never will be. You can expect to have a fairly high degree of privacy with a paper journal (keep it in your nightstand, lock it away in your desk). Facebook (and the internet as a whole) is a public place and expecting your violent venting not to be seen when you post it on Facebook is simply delusional. Even writings in a private journal can come back to bite you if the police have a warrant for your house and find it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, we are only releasing carbon from fossil fuels that was once in plants, which was once in the air, which is where we are putting it. Not sure that, given the planet earth is a closed system in terms of matter conservation, we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.
Ironically, you would not be living well in a Earth habitat that existed 1,000,000s of years ago. Just because the Earth once was does not mean that Humankind once was. Humankind has not been around as long as the Earth and there were many, many environments that the Earth has had.
Home of the Brave. It's not my usual thing to spout off about people needing to leave the United States of America but gimme a break. A large amount of the federal government practice fear tactics to try and convince the people that they need to give up their freedoms to be safe. And the worst part is, most of these supposed secure measures don't do jack shit. We as a nation need to realize that we'll never be completely safe, that there's no level of TSA gadget that will prevent every single act of violence. We as a nation need to remember that we didn't become a nation by being scared pussies.
If that's the case, then Darwinism is wrong.
Darwin claimed the notion of survival of the fittest in evolution. He never claimed that more intelligence lead to being more fit. Now, the fact that homo sapiens have intelligence has proven to be very beneficial in our survival but if increased intelligence lead to a deficiency in physical ability then the "less intelligent" homo sapiens might have been just smart enough and more physically able to supplant those big brained people.
But this all hinges on a tenuous thread of these creatures being smarter than homo sapiens.
in principal, if simple common sense is also followed.
In principle common sense is common. In practice you'll find it's quite rare.
As it is, this seems to be a story (depending on whether the fuckup occurred on the engineering side or the buying side) either of shortsighted buyers opting for false economies, or lazy engineers failing to think through likely failure modes.
To me this seems to be the all too common fuck up of people not knowing how to drive. When I drive I don't go bombing through an intersection when I'm not sure if I've got the light. At worst I'll slow down to a yield but sometimes I'll even stop completely.
You mean a fifty-cent microphone?
It already has WiFi.
Yes, that would be a functional phone within wifi range but would not be a cell phone (in the traditional sense of the term), which is what the ggp was trying to say.
Of course that would also mean much higher phone prices, how many people would buy the iphone or Droid at $600?
Why does an unsubsidized phone have to be $600? Why not $250? I mean, the iPod touch is $199, and you can get a cheap throw away phone for $20, add in a bit for some software development and a you get an unencumbered smart phone for a reasonable price.
Because you're not setting the price of the iPhone, Apple is. Now, if it wasn't selling well enough at $600 and Apple decided to sell it at $300 then it would cost $300, but not simply because you think it should only cost $300. Also, adding in the additional hardware to make an iPod touch into a phone while keeping nearly the same form factor probably costs a lot more than that cheap $20 phone.
Also, I believe some of those states right next to the great lakes, (Jersey, Michigan) also have bagged milk.
I wouldn't say that Jersey is right next to any of the great lakes, unless you're counting the Atlantic.
Do geeks really 'drive girls out of computer science
And so what if it does? Do geeks have to banned from computer science so girls will want in?
And who's to say that women can't be geeks? I mean, if they can't, then this article is arguing that men and women are different. And if something is different then it shouldn't have an equal correlation as something else. Hammers and screwdrivers are different and no one is complaining that more hammers are driving nails than screwdrivers.
2) There is no paid overtime. Salaries generally compensate for this, and frankly professionals SHOULD be expected to fix their errors on their own time (and their own dime). However, that does not work well in environments where workers are fungible: doofus A messes up, and expert B is stuck cleaning up the mess, often in "crisis mode" on his own time. YMMV depending on the shop. Good people tend to leave bad shops, though.
Most professional occupations don't have paid overtime. Maybe you don't get a pay bump for working 80 hours a few weeks out of a year, but if you do it often enough you're in your right mind to expect a raise. And if you don't get it, that's when you move onto a new company (not so workable with the current economic conditions, but that's not IT specific).
3) Academic training has given way to "trade skills". I am appalled that many undergraduate programs focus on the IDE or bloated library of the day, instead of fundamental algorithms and classic processor architecture. Add to this the fact that many non-experts can't tell the difference between the skilled and the not so skilled.
Still, I wouldn't do anything different.
As you pointed out earlier, a strong grasp of mathematical principles and multiple degrees (training of any type, really) helps tremendously. Many people come out of colleges with CS degrees and expect to be as knowledgeable as people with multiple specialties. It just doesn't work that way. Most of the programmers I work with are programmers first, then electrical engineers, mathematicians or financial people second. They're very good at taking my ideas (an electrical engineer with some background in programming) and coming up with much better algorithms than I can. I know what they need to understand what I'm working on and they have an understanding of things beyond basic textbook programming. It's very nice.
Don't you think it is vaguely insulting to women to say they steer away from a career field is because they don't like the decorating? What was that you were saying about stereotypes?
Gosh, you know, I wanted to go into nursing, but I changed my mind once I saw how horribly those blue-green scrubs smocks clash with the beige walls.
Fair point. The only real decorating (if you can call it that) I care about at my office is whether or not I can see a window. My last job had me in the middle of a cubicle farm where the best window was a cheap MS Paint printout of a window with a tree and a sun that we covered up with a gray blob when it was raining outside. Now I've got a window and it's definitely much better.
Who gives a damn if women don't work in IT?
Women.
Because they won't have a direct part in IT decision making.
Because it reinforces stereotypes of the geek that are in no way helpful in the workplace.
Management.
Take pity on the guy who has to referee conflicts between a thousand-strong [female] clerical staff and IT.
The geek - again stereotypically - tends to be a top-down, my-way-or-the-highway kind of thinker.
Who can be very surprised when he meets resistance at ground level.
You know what, flip every gender in that situation around and you've got the same problem. Even better, take out all gender and just use neutral pronouns. You still get the same problem. What you argue against is the type of personality that is drawn to IT and the type of personality that is drawn to clerical staff. One has a requirement to be somewhat sociable, the other does not and tends to draw the opposite (broad strokes, broad strokes, sorry). Not everything is a men vs. women thing. More often than not it's a personality type A versus a personality type B. Now, what if we find out that men are more inclined to B than A and women the opposite, do we have a sexism thing or a nature thing.
It’s almost like men and women are... well, different!
How dare you? Take it back!
"Automobile" is correct. "Car" is the popular reduction.
I'm not so sure that car would be incorrect. I believe they both are correct, car is a subset of automobile.
If the professor has reason to believe that the woman might snap and kill somebody then he should be allowed to voice that opinion.
True. And this opinion should carry no more or less weight than the myriad of things he is also unqualified to opine about.
I think if you take this path of logic you end up with nobody being qualified to judge the mental state of another person. While objective understanding of another person's state of mind is impossible I do not believe that subjective estimation is impossible. Depending on the relationship between the student and the professor (and this could range from next to nothing to very significant, depending on the situation) I would say that the professor is more qualified to estimate the woman's state of mind than most people (assuming they have a relationship above exchanging homework assignments, a variable that neither of us can determine).
There is no tone with text (unless you take the time to put in line).
print view. problem solved.
True. I've gotten to the point where if I can't find the print view link in 5 seconds then I'm not going to bother with the site.
Well, maybe it's just me, but I have been noticing less and less flash ads lately. Less annoying and intrusive ads as well...
I think it's just you. I turned off my ad-blocker one day to see what the wild was like and I nearly threw my computer out the window.
I would say that the worst form of advertising is putting a 10 paragraph story across ten pages to up ad exposure. Nothing annoys me more than that (and ad blocker can't do anything about those).
Tell that to the people that get told they cant have a domain name that says 'Disney', even if their name IS Disney.. Its not always cut and dry like one would expect.
Could that be that the domain name Disney is already spoken for. Just because your name is Steve doesn't mean you get to have the website www.steve.com. Now, what wouldn't be fair would be if Disney could sue you for being named Disney.
Her Facebook post is no different than if she had said it in the hallways of a classroom building. Sure, the person she's talking to might know she's joking / venting / whatever, but the professor in the classroom across the hall might not. And depending on the tone of voice the professor might feel obligated to call the police.
Unless the professor WAS the boyfriend, his opinion isn't exactly relevant to her state of mind. His authority over her wellbeing ends at the evaluation of her assignments and tests.
This is not a question of the woman's well being, it's a question of the professor's well being. If the professor has reason to believe that the woman might snap and kill somebody then he should be allowed to voice that opinion.
Yes. Because I would have taken an idle threat seriously. Besides if protection is warranted, why not punishment? When thinking is the same as doing, you in your example deserve the death penalty. Except you don't, because it isn't. There's a wide gulf between them.
Guess what, if I did return with a gun in this hypothetical situation, and cops were there to pat me down, I would be in a whole lot of trouble. Most likely something along the lines of attempted assault. So punishment is not warranted if I don't actually go back and get a weapon, but if I did there'd be plenty of places for punishment.
Basically, what you consider an idle threat, others might consider a plausible threat. If it really was an idle threat I would be inconvenienced by the police patting me down and asking me a few questions. Other than that, not too much of my liberty is being harassed. Freedom of speech is there to keep the government from suppressing our thoughts, but that doesn't mean that I can spout out with whatever nonsense I feel like and get away with zero consequences.
Would you say "I want to kill him..." If there were 3 police officers right beside you?
Thank you. I'd mod you up if I could.
... not have her entire college career ruined.
Where did it say her college career was ruined. The article was a total of three paragraphs. Probably less than 200 words. She was banned from campus, maybe forever, maybe for a week, who knows. Banned is not the same as expelled. Otherwise, your post is very cogent.
You draw the line at the moment that student picks up a dangerous instrument and makes a threatening movement in the direction of the professor...and NOT EVER before.
Let's look at what we know. This woman posted a comment about using morticians equipment to stab somebody in the neck on her Facebook profile. The woman was banned from campus. The woman was patted down and questioned by police. That's about all we know from this story.
Let's look at what we don't know. This woman's professor might know her better than we do. This professor might have reason to believe that she is unstable. This professor might have real cause to feel threatened by her statements.
Simply put, we don't know the circumstances that well and we don't know how credible her posting can be construed as a threat. Let's say I work at the same office as you. You spill your coffee on me in the morning and I tell you I'm going home to get my gun and shoot you. Do you really think you're out of your right to request some sort of protection / restraint from me. From what I can read the university did not arrest her, they simply told her that she was not allowed on campus. This is within the university's purview to act as guardians of the campus. If she was sent to jail for her actions you'd have an argument for overstepping of police powers. But it is the police forces job to enforce the desires of property owners to restrict whom can and cannot be on their property. It is not a violation of your rights if I tell the cops to stop you from coming onto my property.
... or more like a journal where you'd just write for yourself.
Then get a damned journal. No matter how much people want Facebook to be their own personal and private journal, it is not and never will be. You can expect to have a fairly high degree of privacy with a paper journal (keep it in your nightstand, lock it away in your desk). Facebook (and the internet as a whole) is a public place and expecting your violent venting not to be seen when you post it on Facebook is simply delusional. Even writings in a private journal can come back to bite you if the police have a warrant for your house and find it.