And people claim "slipery slope" arguments aren't valid. This right here is a slippery slope in action. Start with MMO's where it affects other people then gradually push it to single players where there's some kind of online ranking or achievement system "because E-Peens are important" and gradaully to any software at all.
The point is to gain a general understanding. If you come out of a CS without having gained enough understanding of the material to actually apply it to any actual real world situations then there was no point to your CS course.
It's not an IT course, I wouldn't expect it to teach someone to strip CAT5 cable, configure a network card, write a complex shell script or track down a fault in a network like a marine striping a rifle.
But if you come out of the course too inept to be able to understand the general idea of what is going on or what needs to be done and too incompetent to read up on the subject and work out how to do such tasks then you should have failed your CS course.
The US doesn't stop at feeding itself. It dumps it on the market and artificially lowers the price.
It hands free money to it's own farmers who can then sell their produce ultra cheap on the international market. Farmers in other (generally poorer)countries which don't get given free money then can't compete fairly on price and go out of buisness. Thus the poorer countries become even more dependent on food imports.
which is fine when the US is doing it (from the point of view of the US) but if another country does the same it's BAAAAD.
Damn them! Damn them for wanting to know how many schoolchildren they should expect to have to deal with in different communities over the next few years. Damn them for wanting to know the living conditions of their citizens so they can make sensible decisons about dealing with poverty over the next few years. Damn them for wanting to base policy on reality rather than what good god fearing people know to be TRUE!
everyone knows the right way to make choices is to pray and listen for gods voice to tell you what to do.
So have you ever tried this? Ever? or do you just sit on your arse complaining about how it's impossible. have you tried educating yourself to the point that you don't sound like this woman : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjZY0KufWao
Ever tried taking a published paper, checking over the figures and then simply having a sensible discussion about the problems you see with their data or methods.
If you rant and rave about how it's WRONG BECAUSE GOD SAID SO or BECAUSE TIMECUBE you'll be ignored but precious few scientistists are unwilling to listen to a well researched and well thought out arguemnt.
I've contacted professors about papers they've written and so far I've always gotten a response. Most are happy to see interest in their papers even if it's people trying to poke holes in them.
If a companies board of directors is making decisions which are actively harmful to their shareholders, employees of the company become aware of this and try to inform the shareholders but are silenced by the directors because they don't want anyone to disagree with how they are running things.
In general the shareholders wouldn't be to happy about the directors doing that.
If a government tries to do the same to it's citizens how is that any better?
When their advice and evidence is ignored or misrepresented they have every right, indeed a duty to tell the electorate that the government is ignoring well informed advice in favor of whatever is politically expedient(ie whatever won't ruffle and feathers or upset anyone).
That is why we have newspapers and other media, to tell us when the politicians voted for ignore reality and instead base their decisions on the mad little voices in their heads.
the point was the massive variations in levels of competence. the hypotheses goes that if you really understood the actual computer science then you'd be able to apply it to specific situations. in reality pleanty of people get through without gaining any real understanding of computers or computer science. having a good memory is good enough for a lot of the modules.
Ya, that whole science thing is a waste of time. The "scientists" just make things up so that the "data" says whatever they want it to say. And they have an agenda! A scary agenda!...of some kind...
The very idea that it could be a good thing if policies at a national level were influenced by such nonsense as "evidence" or "data" or "reality" is absurd!
If the sceientists want to disrupt the orderly running of the country by publicly talking about how their "data" (made up of course) and "conclusions"(nefarious no doubt) contradict the decisons made by our good and godfearing leaders then they should be silenced!
This sounds overly bitter but to a great extent it's true. There are some fantastic lecturers (though every lecturer no matter how bad seems to think they themselves are part of that tiny group) and then there's the rest. The funniest one was a middleware class I took. I later spent months working as part of a middleware team at a big company and not once did I encounter anything remotely like anything the course covered. And when I mention it to engineers who work with middleware they always seem to respond with "... how they hell would you teach a course on middleware?"
its as if the university was trying to match a checklist from some HR departments so they could look at the transcript and say "yep, middleware"
I can imagine some kind of open university type setup catching on in a wiki like fashion. As it stands there can be huge variations in graduates already. A lot of the "validation" seems more like bluster.
I'm working with someone who graduated from the same CS course I did who can't even configure a wireless laptop on the network. Others from my course are currently network engineers.
Personally I'd welcome hiring practices which focused more on testing the candidates actual skill rather than glancing at the name of the university which issued their degree.
I'm not one of natures mac users, I'm happy on windows or linux but the mac interface drives me nuts and I can't explain why. It's ok once I get a console up and can tap away and pretend it's just unix.
I've pulled down half the linux games I could find on the standard repositories and I've noticed something. There's a few games decended from old commercial games which opened up the source years later which are gold (try the ur quan masters, it's basic graphics but is a surprisingly fun game.) and there's no shortage of.... potentially good games.
Some of the open source linux games I've tried have had a lot of potential and seem quite well made except for a lack of any kind of campaign or storyline. I'm guessing a lot of coders get to the point where they have a working engine and all the tools needed to create a campaign and then get bored.
There's some good rougelikes out there but the open source ones seem to fracture into a hundred varients (look at angband/zangband/etc) or nethack.
As for other things I'd say drives can still be an issue, it's less of a problem now-days but it still comes up now and then because companies don't want to spend the time or money making linux drivers.
It's also fascinating how they managed to entirely blame wikileaks. The new york times and the guardian mirrored a lot of the material too and took part in organizing the data before the public release yet everything was wikileaks fault. They military couldn't keep it's secrets secret but it was the fault of whoever the documents were sent to, not whoever was supposed to keep them secret.
I wonder how it would have gone had he anonymously posted a USB stick to the guardian or another big name newspaper directly rather than going through wikileaks. They might have silenced it but they might not. would we be seeing the newspapers vilified in the same way.
if the pit had been there it might have been a problem depending on the bomb design. With a Fat Man style bomb or pretty much any of the later more complex designs what you say would be true.
Something like Little Boy though could conceivably be set off if something like a fire set off the conventional explosives.
but the lack of a pit really nerfs even that scenario.
that doesn't say they're actually doing anything. merely thinking about it and watching the legislators.
GENEWIZ is fully aware that Gene Synthesis technology potentially enables the de novo reconstruction of dangerous pathogens, and of the need for an in-house mechanism to safeguard against intentional or unintentional abuse of the genes that we synthesize. We are monitoring the progress of the Screening Framework Guidance for Synthetic Double-Stranded DNA Providers, drafted by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
It strikes me that Tybee Island and Travis Air Force Base belong more on a "times safety systems stopped a disaster effectively exactly as they were designed to" list.
Fermi 1 could also fall in that catagory.
"Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule" could be replaced with "had the bomb contained a black hole or killer vampire ghost" and be about as scary. it wasn't armed for exactly that kind of situation.
If it was about helping people in their communities get better access to those books in particular they'd be keeping them on their shelves where anyone can read them for free. no. The sales are just a way to clear space and make a little money for buying new books or running the library. most of what goes on sale gets pulped or ends up in the garbage if it doesn't sell. He also drives the price down slightly for everyone else who's buying online on amazon, or do the poor people a few towns over not count?
He's not making a fortune, he earns less per hour in a good week than i earned(reliably) in a part time student job and he gets no pensions contributions from an employer or employment rights, may have to pay sales taxes, has no guarantee that his income will remain stable and in short he earns whatever money he gets from doing this.
So if a poor person did the same thing it would be ok?
So this guy works 80 hours a week.
I spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser scanner.
using an old obsolete PDA
"My scanner lies at the end of a cartridge that is fitted into a Dell PDA--a species of technology now obsolete for nearly every purpose but this one."
Making not very much money.
With diligence, someone working alone can make $1,000 per week
yes that sounds nice until you do the math. 80 hours a week. return you *can* make: 1000 In other words, a good week doing a job with no guaranteed returns when you've been working extremely hard. 12.50 an hour. I made more than that per hour working a part time job as a student.
I know if feels good to you to look down on people but this guy is working hard to make a very modest living. He's not rich.
If it helps if he was worse at his job he'd be a very poor person indeed.
More often, I find the old editions, variably handsome or yellowed and trashy, which will almost all be tumbling in the darkness of a dumpster soon after I pass on them.
And if people don't pick them up they're very likely to end up pulped or in a landfill if another such seller doesn't spot them.
And what about the poor people in other areas? Don't they count?
He drives the price down on amazon marketplace by increasing the supply. A handful of people who turn up at the library sale late don't get a chance to buy the books at a low price (though by your logic rich people shouldn't buy from second hand shops or thrift stores at all and instead buy everything new since otherwise they're depriving a poor kid of the chance to buy the same items.) and thousands who search amazon get the chance to buy slightly cheaper than they would have otherwise.
But a small benefit to a huge number of people feels worse than a slightly larger potential benefit to a handful.
A fair portion of the books being sold off probably wouldn't find any buyers and would end up pulped anyway.
Wasn't there a story a while back about how a load of nonsense orders (way way way too low for anyone to ever take) was probably HFTing bots trying to DoS each other and get an advantage?(since the other bot would have to process the offers even if they were useless to act on)
Slashdot Mirror
And people claim "slipery slope" arguments aren't valid.
This right here is a slippery slope in action.
Start with MMO's where it affects other people then gradually push it to single players where there's some kind of online ranking or achievement system "because E-Peens are important" and gradaully to any software at all.
The point is to gain a general understanding.
If you come out of a CS without having gained enough understanding of the material to actually apply it to any actual real world situations then there was no point to your CS course.
It's not an IT course, I wouldn't expect it to teach someone to strip CAT5 cable, configure a network card, write a complex shell script or track down a fault in a network like a marine striping a rifle.
But if you come out of the course too inept to be able to understand the general idea of what is going on or what needs to be done and too incompetent to read up on the subject and work out how to do such tasks then you should have failed your CS course.
The US doesn't stop at feeding itself.
It dumps it on the market and artificially lowers the price.
It hands free money to it's own farmers who can then sell their produce ultra cheap on the international market.
Farmers in other (generally poorer)countries which don't get given free money then can't compete fairly on price and go out of buisness.
Thus the poorer countries become even more dependent on food imports.
which is fine when the US is doing it (from the point of view of the US)
but if another country does the same it's BAAAAD.
Damn them!
Damn them for wanting to know how many schoolchildren they should expect to have to deal with in different communities over the next few years.
Damn them for wanting to know the living conditions of their citizens so they can make sensible decisons about dealing with poverty over the next few years.
Damn them for wanting to base policy on reality rather than what good god fearing people know to be TRUE!
everyone knows the right way to make choices is to pray and listen for gods voice to tell you what to do.
So have you ever tried this?
Ever?
or do you just sit on your arse complaining about how it's impossible.
have you tried educating yourself to the point that you don't sound like this woman : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjZY0KufWao
Ever tried taking a published paper, checking over the figures and then simply having a sensible discussion about the problems you see with their data or methods.
If you rant and rave about how it's WRONG BECAUSE GOD SAID SO or BECAUSE TIMECUBE you'll be ignored but precious few scientistists are unwilling to listen to a well researched and well thought out arguemnt.
I've contacted professors about papers they've written and so far I've always gotten a response.
Most are happy to see interest in their papers even if it's people trying to poke holes in them.
If a companies board of directors is making decisions which are actively harmful to their shareholders, employees of the company become aware of this and try to inform the shareholders but are silenced by the directors because they don't want anyone to disagree with how they are running things.
In general the shareholders wouldn't be to happy about the directors doing that.
If a government tries to do the same to it's citizens how is that any better?
When their advice and evidence is ignored or misrepresented they have every right, indeed a duty to tell the electorate that the government is ignoring well informed advice in favor of whatever is politically expedient(ie whatever won't ruffle and feathers or upset anyone).
That is why we have newspapers and other media, to tell us when the politicians voted for ignore reality and instead base their decisions on the mad little voices in their heads.
the point was the massive variations in levels of competence.
the hypotheses goes that if you really understood the actual computer science then you'd be able to apply it to specific situations.
in reality pleanty of people get through without gaining any real understanding of computers or computer science.
having a good memory is good enough for a lot of the modules.
Ya, that whole science thing is a waste of time. ...of some kind...
The "scientists" just make things up so that the "data" says whatever they want it to say.
And they have an agenda!
A scary agenda!
The very idea that it could be a good thing if policies at a national level were influenced by such nonsense as "evidence" or "data" or "reality" is absurd!
If the sceientists want to disrupt the orderly running of the country by publicly talking about how their "data" (made up of course) and "conclusions"(nefarious no doubt) contradict the decisons made by our good and godfearing leaders then they should be silenced!
This sounds overly bitter but to a great extent it's true.
There are some fantastic lecturers (though every lecturer no matter how bad seems to think they themselves are part of that tiny group) and then there's the rest.
The funniest one was a middleware class I took.
I later spent months working as part of a middleware team at a big company and not once did I encounter anything remotely like anything the course covered.
And when I mention it to engineers who work with middleware they always seem to respond with "... how they hell would you teach a course on middleware?"
its as if the university was trying to match a checklist from some HR departments so they could look at the transcript and say "yep, middleware"
Also: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1830262
I can imagine some kind of open university type setup catching on in a wiki like fashion.
As it stands there can be huge variations in graduates already.
A lot of the "validation" seems more like bluster.
I'm working with someone who graduated from the same CS course I did who can't even configure a wireless laptop on the network.
Others from my course are currently network engineers.
Personally I'd welcome hiring practices which focused more on testing the candidates actual skill rather than glancing at the name of the university which issued their degree.
I'm not one of natures mac users, I'm happy on windows or linux but the mac interface drives me nuts and I can't explain why.
It's ok once I get a console up and can tap away and pretend it's just unix.
I've pulled down half the linux games I could find on the standard repositories and I've noticed something. .... potentially good games.
There's a few games decended from old commercial games which opened up the source years later which are gold (try the ur quan masters, it's basic graphics but is a surprisingly fun game.) and there's no shortage of
Some of the open source linux games I've tried have had a lot of potential and seem quite well made except for a lack of any kind of campaign or storyline.
I'm guessing a lot of coders get to the point where they have a working engine and all the tools needed to create a campaign and then get bored.
There's some good rougelikes out there but the open source ones seem to fracture into a hundred varients (look at angband/zangband/etc) or nethack.
As for other things I'd say drives can still be an issue, it's less of a problem now-days but it still comes up now and then because companies don't want to spend the time or money making linux drivers.
It's also fascinating how they managed to entirely blame wikileaks.
The new york times and the guardian mirrored a lot of the material too and took part in organizing the data before the public release yet everything was wikileaks fault.
They military couldn't keep it's secrets secret but it was the fault of whoever the documents were sent to, not whoever was supposed to keep them secret.
I wonder how it would have gone had he anonymously posted a USB stick to the guardian or another big name newspaper directly rather than going through wikileaks.
They might have silenced it but they might not.
would we be seeing the newspapers vilified in the same way.
that was a camera tripod watch it more carefully.
don't bother. he wants to believe.
if the pit had been there it might have been a problem depending on the bomb design.
With a Fat Man style bomb or pretty much any of the later more complex designs what you say would be true.
Something like Little Boy though could conceivably be set off if something like a fire set off the conventional explosives.
but the lack of a pit really nerfs even that scenario.
Well the NORAD one was valid.
but then there's certainly a lot about that they're leaving out to make it more dramatic.
The big difference: you actually have to write a good book for this to work.
If you can get a big company behind you mediocre is good enough.
Or people could try to get a big music corp to take them on and promote them.
Yeah. And you could win the lottery, too.
Seriously: how many people try to break into the big music industry? How many become megastars because of it? a handful a year?
that doesn't say they're actually doing anything. merely thinking about it and watching the legislators.
GENEWIZ is fully aware that Gene Synthesis technology potentially enables the de novo reconstruction of dangerous pathogens, and of the need for an in-house mechanism to safeguard against intentional or unintentional abuse of the genes that we synthesize. We are monitoring the progress of the Screening Framework Guidance for Synthetic Double-Stranded DNA Providers, drafted by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
It strikes me that Tybee Island and Travis Air Force Base belong more on a "times safety systems stopped a disaster effectively exactly as they were designed to" list.
Fermi 1 could also fall in that catagory.
"Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule" could be replaced with "had the bomb contained a black hole or killer vampire ghost" and be about as scary. it wasn't armed for exactly that kind of situation.
Tybee Island strikes me in a similar manner.
If it was about helping people in their communities get better access to those books in particular they'd be keeping them on their shelves where anyone can read them for free.
no.
The sales are just a way to clear space and make a little money for buying new books or running the library.
most of what goes on sale gets pulped or ends up in the garbage if it doesn't sell.
He also drives the price down slightly for everyone else who's buying online on amazon, or do the poor people a few towns over not count?
He's not making a fortune, he earns less per hour in a good week than i earned(reliably) in a part time student job and he gets no pensions contributions from an employer or employment rights, may have to pay sales taxes, has no guarantee that his income will remain stable and in short he earns whatever money he gets from doing this.
So if a poor person did the same thing it would be ok?
So this guy works 80 hours a week.
I spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser scanner.
using an old obsolete PDA
"My scanner lies at the end of a cartridge that is fitted into a Dell PDA--a species of technology now obsolete for nearly every purpose but this one."
Making not very much money.
With diligence, someone working alone can make $1,000 per week
yes that sounds nice until you do the math.
80 hours a week.
return you *can* make: 1000
In other words, a good week doing a job with no guaranteed returns when you've been working extremely hard.
12.50 an hour.
I made more than that per hour working a part time job as a student.
I know if feels good to you to look down on people but this guy is working hard to make a very modest living.
He's not rich.
If it helps if he was worse at his job he'd be a very poor person indeed.
More often, I find the old editions, variably handsome or yellowed and trashy, which will almost all be tumbling in the darkness of a dumpster soon after I pass on them.
And if people don't pick them up they're very likely to end up pulped or in a landfill if another such seller doesn't spot them.
And what about the poor people in other areas?
Don't they count?
He drives the price down on amazon marketplace by increasing the supply.
A handful of people who turn up at the library sale late don't get a chance to buy the books at a low price (though by your logic rich people shouldn't buy from second hand shops or thrift stores at all and instead buy everything new since otherwise they're depriving a poor kid of the chance to buy the same items.) and thousands who search amazon get the chance to buy slightly cheaper than they would have otherwise.
But a small benefit to a huge number of people feels worse than a slightly larger potential benefit to a handful.
A fair portion of the books being sold off probably wouldn't find any buyers and would end up pulped anyway.
Wasn't there a story a while back about how a load of nonsense orders (way way way too low for anyone to ever take) was probably HFTing bots trying to DoS each other and get an advantage?(since the other bot would have to process the offers even if they were useless to act on)