However, if you have no honors and no record of having worked full time - then you slacked off. Statistically, if you slacked off and did just well enough to get the degree in college,...
A EE degree averaging 17 credit hours/semester is slacking off? Who knew?
No, we bring in H1bs because there isn't enough native talent.
At a price you are willing to pay. Start coughing up $500k/year and you'll find a lot of native talent magically appears -- and the finance people will hate you. H1bs are all about the benjamins.
Many of us were around for the long trial by fire that was needed to figure out which features of C++ to use and which to avoid. "Modern C++" gets good results from a careful set of language features and libraries, but many folks still get flashbacks from the language itself.
I don't see this as one of our own being unjustly persecuted.
I do. His moral crime was failing to turn over the password, but that is legal! If someone simply refuses their assigned employment duties, the only remedy is to fire them and write better procedures so it doesn't happen again. Incompetence at your job is not a crime. What he was convicted of was the act of setting a password that all other authorized users did not know in advance, which he did do, but that is a terrible law that should be changed.
It sounds like he knowingly lied in the course and scope of his employment, which can probably be cooked into a crime (fraud? sabotage?) by a decent lawyer. When somebody thinks they have acted immorally, they often run an illegal cover-up that can be prosecuted. Let the guilty incriminate themselves. (The lesson to the "innocent" being to never lie, profess confusion, and never talk to cops without a lawyer present.)
He's graduating now, so that means at the end of his second year he couldn't figure out why a string named string was a problem,...
If you reject based on this, you will have carefully selected, at great expense to your company, a workforce consisting entirely of people who hide all their sophomore homework assignments.
A recruiting manager who inflicted this on me would not get a favorable performance review. In fact, I would consider it career limiting. You might as well measure how well they glued macaroni to construction paper at age 8.
I agree with others who state that they only hire the best people they can find.
In which case you will select people based on reliable, major positive measures of skills (loops, pointers, recursion), and ignore unreliable, minor negative measures of problems.
The challenge is to find the 0.5% of applicants who can solve the FizzBuzz problem at all. That means 200 applicants to consider per position on average (and a pool of 600 resumes if you need a guaranteed high-quality hire). If you weed out the half of applicants that don't have a squeaky clean Google image, you'll have weeded out about half of the most skilled, which means an extra 200 applicants (1200 resumes total for guaranteed hire). Either you pay horrifically inflated costs, or you are forced to compromise on quality -- probably by self-delusion.
That seems to be the real complaint, and the nutters can't understand the difference between $1 that's promised to 9 people and $10 printed by a bank for every $1 deposited.
This is your misconception. Money is a social construct that assigns numbers to mental states. Humans are optimistic and trusting, so they consider a promise to be given an apple tomorrow to be nearly as good as stumbling across an apple today. On their mental balance sheet, a promise from a trustworthy partner is the same as the thing promised. When one person finds a windfall and puts it into this network of social trust, it can therefore create secondary trust and productive activity at a multiple of its immediate value.**
Money is just a way of assigning numbers to the activity in the social trust network, whether we account for it in oxen-equivalents or dollars. The money supply is just the sum of everyone's mental stuff-I-more-or-less-own numbers. Increasing the average trust grows more money supply from nothing. Lowering the bank reserve fraction is just a way to way to increase the trust level, which as far as human psychology is concerned is about the same as the gods sending manna from heaven. In the true context of the system, printing/destroying money really is an accurate metaphor for tinkering with the reserve ratio.
Note that it doesn't have to be this way, it simply is, as a matter of convention. The accounting conventions reflect the underlying psychology.
**Which answers your objection of why anybody would broker promises at a loss. They don't. A successful society is not a zero-sum game. They can charge interest and the borrowers can end up with more than they started.
P.S. One's ideas are often incomplete. Using those ideas to insult people makes one look childish when, as so often happens, the ideas turn out to need improving.
The RICO Act is civil law and provides for harsh punitive damages (up to three times actual losses). It also has a rather expansive definition of "conspirator", so CES exhibitors who requested or knew of any racketeering could be attached as defendants. On the other hand, RICO is a Federal law, so prosecution is expensive and time consuming.
Why didn't they use blocks of plastic COATED with a thin layer of real explosives?
Coatings are hard to do reliably. What they should have used was something like a NESTT simulant, a granular material mixed with explosives at a low enough concentration that a detonation cannot be sustained. That's what we used at an explosive detection company where I used to work.
How long before the US enacts the "me too" version of this law, potentially exposing us to criminal/civil liability just for letting this kid into our lives?
Never. "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". This was tested when the Federal courts struck down the U.S. Child Online Protection Act (COPA).
But grounding the shield at both ends creates ground loops. You might not notice them right away, but you sure will the first time the MOVs in the surge suppressors at one end or the other shunt a spike to ground, and some of that current decides that its preferred path to ground is over your STP Cat5.
Eventually, after you blow up enough switch ports, you'll stop doing it that way.
Sort of. Shielding must be contiguous to be effective. A shield with a gap is often as bad as no shield at all, and can be worse by focusing the interference on the single most sensitive point in the system, the panel. (Says the electrical design engineer who has had to design equipment that does this right.)
The issue is that much networking equipment is designed for unshielded cable only. You know, like the Ethernet standard specifies. Such equipment often lacks the provisions needed to handle shields properly.
It's generally pretty bad form to ground both ends of any shielded wire that traverses any real length.
Nope. Either the shield must be grounded at both ends (and maybe have a thick drain wire in parallel), transformers must be used to isolate the endpoints, or unshielded cable must be substituted. You know, like cable TV systems, which go to a lot of trouble to do end-to-end shielding properly.
The lesson is that Ethernet's built-in transformer isolation is a gift from the Gods. Don't spurn the Gods with your puny "shielding" unless you have made the necessary sacrifices. Which may very well involve burnt offerings.
Write simple code. Build complex behaviour from simple start points. Unless you're doing some serious mathematics (in which case it'll have an elegance of its own to those that comprehend the maths) then there's no real need for complicated code that is hard to understand.
You seem to not understand that some people can (1) bang out a big pile of work that is complete but scattered, then (2) see through it to the relationships underneath, then (3) perform a symbolic reduction to reach a state of simplicity, much like simplifying a complicated algebraic equation.
As a matter of course. On everything that falls into their hands. Often doing step #1 mentally.
They will find it painful and frustrating if the organization forces them to plod along, laboriously making every step of the work explicit to the back seat driver. The work will also tend to be of lower quality because their mind is constantly interrupted. Therefore they will tend to flee to another organization.
Which means that they will not be there to promote to system architects and other leaders. The organization will have to make do with people who have a proven lower ability for seeing the big picture and doing synthetic reasoning. Or the org will have to recruit leaders from outsiders who (1) don't know the business, and (2) who want to divorce themselves from hands-on work (because the chain gang approach would drive them crazy).
Now there may indeed be people who are more productive with pair programming. Or with whatever other scheme tickles your fancy. Their existence does not imply that the technique is generally, or even frequently, productive. There is so much variation in human cognition, not to mention personality, that any business operation scheme claiming generality is automatically suspect. There Are No Silver Bullets.
If you have a nuclear reaction that is going out of control, then you have to get it in control. Shutting the plant down would mean you don't have the ability to use things like the control rods to do this.
No, the control rods are constantly forced into the core by passive systems (hydraulic pressure, gravity, springs), and only stay withdrawn because of active systems. If the active systems lose power, a few seconds later the control rods will be fully inserted. Many reactors also have pre-pressurized tanks of neutron absorbing fluid connected to the core, a sort of liquid control rod. Provided one of the redundant valves can be opened, that will also quench the nuclear chain reaction. (And I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the valves have a ratchet that makes them stick open until some poor bastard visits them in person with a special tool.)
It's also worth pointing out that many safety systems have no self-protection features like circuit breakers, or even off switches where a well-meaning idiot might turn them off just because fire is shooting out. If a back-up cooling pump develops a short circuit or a bad bearing, it will continue to run until it destroys itself. The idea is that the protection equipment will cheerfully use itself up to protect the main plant.
The problem here is the forensic technicians. Every single one of them needs to be fired.
Indeed. With few exceptions, every scientific instrument that uses fluids is wildly inaccurate. (Precise as hell, but inaccurate.) That means pH meters, gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, biomolecule sequencers, you name it. To get reliable measurements, you have to run an end-to-end calibration at least every few test runs. For ultra-trace detection, like DNA and high-potency drugs, often every single sample needs to be calibrated.
Failure to do this on such an epic level draws all results of all the labs into question. Even in an academic lab, getting caught at this would be a career limiting move.
This case is more like, if I ask you a question, you provide an answer, and then later I ask you the same question. You can't claim the 5th this time around, because you've already provided the answer.
Yes, you can. The 5th Amendment does not protect privacy or secrecy, it controls the actions that the government is allowed to take. The government can never compel incriminating testimony. Period. You can carve a murder admission onto a bailiff with an icepick one day, and then the next day refuse to repeat the statements and the government cannot compel you to.
If this were not the case, then any statement that merely suggested guilt would justify torture to extract all guilts. This is not melodrama. The Puritan exiles to America made this rule to prevent the system they were fleeing, a system where a minor infraction would be noted, and the defendant would be dragged before a court and asked to take an oath of total innocence. If they took the oath, the infraction was brought out and they, being guilty, were tortured to extract proof of all other guilts. Thanks to them, incriminating yourself does not grant the government one iota of power to extract further incrimination.
"No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."
The I-35 bridge collapsed because of a design flaw. (Mostly. The inspection engineers had a case of tunnel vision.)
We don't have local radio now - all programming is run by conglomerates. If that rail car in Fargo derails and leaks methylisocyanate - there is no way to warn the locals.....
You mean besides the Emergency Alert System, which is required by law to be supported by a wide variety of radio transmitters.
One of the more mind blowing things I read in 2008 was the discovery of a third type of visual receptor besides rods and cones. Essentially there's a third type of receptor that only detects sort of gross levels of light, and feeds directly into the system which regulates your circadian rhythm and is used for some other purposes.
Those are the photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. In addition to driving the circadian rhythm generators, they also control pupil size in response to light. IIRC, research in cats found that they do connect to the visual cortex, although how the signals are perceived is not yet known.
Wait, what? Who said you have to lock the sidebar to a fixed width? If you have an elastic layout, just make the sidebar elastic and it'll scale up right alongside the content.
Let me try again less carelessly. Ideally you want the browser to automatically draw the sidebar just wide enough to fit its widest contents. But with divs alone, you have to specify a defined, hard-coded (I said "fixed" before, wrongly implying units of pixels--sorry) position for the content column. Therefore the left sidebar width has to be hard-coded too, which makes it hard to plug arbitrary widgets into it, especially images. The values may be hard-coded using friendly units like ems, but they are still hard coded.
Widths can also be defined as a percentage of the parent element. That tends to blow up sidebars when the window is narrow, and make ridiculous sidebars on super-widescreen monitors.
The only real place to run into problems is in the padding and borders: people often forget that they get tacked onto the width of the element.
I want a LOLcoder picture of a CSS geek sitting at a computer using a pocket calculator with the caption "COMPUTING -- UR DOIN IT WRONG". Or maybe "SOMEWHERE A KNUTH IS CRYING".
CSS is only horrible at making block elements share horizontal space if you don't know how to make block elements share horizontal space. Fixed, elastic, and fluid two-column layouts are easy. Three-column layouts are harder, but it can be done in any of those configurations, and without sacrificing semantically correct code or scalability.
I just don't get the relevance of "semantic correctness". Everything from the template to the user output terminal is pure presentation, a collection of practical tools to create output documents. If the implementation is comprehensible and maintainable, which it will be with judicious use of the technique I recommended above, then it is Plenty Good. Not a single piece of software anywhere in the chain cares one iota about the meaning or interpretation of table contents: it's just another rendering instruction.
I mean, really. Postscript is an entire Turing-complete language. People can and have written application software in it. (Maybe they shouldn't have, but they did!) Yet we all blithely crank out whatever garbage Postscript it takes to render our documents without a microscopic thought for the internal semantics. When's the last time you upbraided the secretary for not generating semantic Postscript? LaTeX lets you define your own semantics on the fly, but nobody gets too grumpy when you use unorthodox markup to make an interesting layout. So why the sudden semantic HTML religion? As far as I can tell, it's just a bad case of Silver Bullet Syndrome.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you have zero expectation of privacy in your driveway. What you have is an expectation of non-trespass and non-vandalism.
It's the last mobile phone ever made that reaches from your ear to your mouth, ...
Plenty of current flip phones do that just fine.
However, if you have no honors and no record of having worked full time - then you slacked off. Statistically, if you slacked off and did just well enough to get the degree in college, ...
A EE degree averaging 17 credit hours/semester is slacking off? Who knew?
No, we bring in H1bs because there isn't enough native talent.
At a price you are willing to pay. Start coughing up $500k/year and you'll find a lot of native talent magically appears -- and the finance people will hate you. H1bs are all about the benjamins.
I never understood the animosity against C++.
Many of us were around for the long trial by fire that was needed to figure out which features of C++ to use and which to avoid. "Modern C++" gets good results from a careful set of language features and libraries, but many folks still get flashbacks from the language itself.
I don't see this as one of our own being unjustly persecuted.
I do. His moral crime was failing to turn over the password, but that is legal! If someone simply refuses their assigned employment duties, the only remedy is to fire them and write better procedures so it doesn't happen again. Incompetence at your job is not a crime. What he was convicted of was the act of setting a password that all other authorized users did not know in advance, which he did do, but that is a terrible law that should be changed.
It sounds like he knowingly lied in the course and scope of his employment, which can probably be cooked into a crime (fraud? sabotage?) by a decent lawyer. When somebody thinks they have acted immorally, they often run an illegal cover-up that can be prosecuted. Let the guilty incriminate themselves. (The lesson to the "innocent" being to never lie, profess confusion, and never talk to cops without a lawyer present.)
He's graduating now, so that means at the end of his second year he couldn't figure out why a string named string was a problem, ...
If you reject based on this, you will have carefully selected, at great expense to your company, a workforce consisting entirely of people who hide all their sophomore homework assignments.
A recruiting manager who inflicted this on me would not get a favorable performance review. In fact, I would consider it career limiting. You might as well measure how well they glued macaroni to construction paper at age 8.
I agree with others who state that they only hire the best people they can find.
In which case you will select people based on reliable, major positive measures of skills (loops, pointers, recursion), and ignore unreliable, minor negative measures of problems.
The challenge is to find the 0.5% of applicants who can solve the FizzBuzz problem at all. That means 200 applicants to consider per position on average (and a pool of 600 resumes if you need a guaranteed high-quality hire). If you weed out the half of applicants that don't have a squeaky clean Google image, you'll have weeded out about half of the most skilled, which means an extra 200 applicants (1200 resumes total for guaranteed hire). Either you pay horrifically inflated costs, or you are forced to compromise on quality -- probably by self-delusion.
That seems to be the real complaint, and the nutters can't understand the difference between $1 that's promised to 9 people and $10 printed by a bank for every $1 deposited.
This is your misconception. Money is a social construct that assigns numbers to mental states. Humans are optimistic and trusting, so they consider a promise to be given an apple tomorrow to be nearly as good as stumbling across an apple today. On their mental balance sheet, a promise from a trustworthy partner is the same as the thing promised. When one person finds a windfall and puts it into this network of social trust, it can therefore create secondary trust and productive activity at a multiple of its immediate value.**
Money is just a way of assigning numbers to the activity in the social trust network, whether we account for it in oxen-equivalents or dollars. The money supply is just the sum of everyone's mental stuff-I-more-or-less-own numbers. Increasing the average trust grows more money supply from nothing. Lowering the bank reserve fraction is just a way to way to increase the trust level, which as far as human psychology is concerned is about the same as the gods sending manna from heaven. In the true context of the system, printing/destroying money really is an accurate metaphor for tinkering with the reserve ratio.
Note that it doesn't have to be this way, it simply is, as a matter of convention. The accounting conventions reflect the underlying psychology.
**Which answers your objection of why anybody would broker promises at a loss. They don't. A successful society is not a zero-sum game. They can charge interest and the borrowers can end up with more than they started.
P.S. One's ideas are often incomplete. Using those ideas to insult people makes one look childish when, as so often happens, the ideas turn out to need improving.
The RICO Act is civil law and provides for harsh punitive damages (up to three times actual losses). It also has a rather expansive definition of "conspirator", so CES exhibitors who requested or knew of any racketeering could be attached as defendants. On the other hand, RICO is a Federal law, so prosecution is expensive and time consuming.
Why didn't they use blocks of plastic COATED with a thin layer of real explosives?
Coatings are hard to do reliably. What they should have used was something like a NESTT simulant, a granular material mixed with explosives at a low enough concentration that a detonation cannot be sustained. That's what we used at an explosive detection company where I used to work.
How long before the US enacts the "me too" version of this law, potentially exposing us to criminal/civil liability just for letting this kid into our lives?
Never. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". This was tested when the Federal courts struck down the U.S. Child Online Protection Act (COPA).
Try to find a middle ground between being a pussy and being a dick.
Plain or ribbed?
Part of the reason is that Verilog, being much like C, is inherently procedural.
Huh? Verilog directly provides declarative and event-triggered logic.
How could you forget swine flu?
Sort of. Shielding must be contiguous to be effective. A shield with a gap is often as bad as no shield at all, and can be worse by focusing the interference on the single most sensitive point in the system, the panel. (Says the electrical design engineer who has had to design equipment that does this right.)
The issue is that much networking equipment is designed for unshielded cable only. You know, like the Ethernet standard specifies. Such equipment often lacks the provisions needed to handle shields properly.
Nope. Either the shield must be grounded at both ends (and maybe have a thick drain wire in parallel), transformers must be used to isolate the endpoints, or unshielded cable must be substituted. You know, like cable TV systems, which go to a lot of trouble to do end-to-end shielding properly.
The lesson is that Ethernet's built-in transformer isolation is a gift from the Gods. Don't spurn the Gods with your puny "shielding" unless you have made the necessary sacrifices. Which may very well involve burnt offerings.
You seem to not understand that some people can (1) bang out a big pile of work that is complete but scattered, then (2) see through it to the relationships underneath, then (3) perform a symbolic reduction to reach a state of simplicity, much like simplifying a complicated algebraic equation.
As a matter of course. On everything that falls into their hands. Often doing step #1 mentally.
They will find it painful and frustrating if the organization forces them to plod along, laboriously making every step of the work explicit to the back seat driver. The work will also tend to be of lower quality because their mind is constantly interrupted. Therefore they will tend to flee to another organization.
Which means that they will not be there to promote to system architects and other leaders. The organization will have to make do with people who have a proven lower ability for seeing the big picture and doing synthetic reasoning. Or the org will have to recruit leaders from outsiders who (1) don't know the business, and (2) who want to divorce themselves from hands-on work (because the chain gang approach would drive them crazy).
Now there may indeed be people who are more productive with pair programming. Or with whatever other scheme tickles your fancy. Their existence does not imply that the technique is generally, or even frequently, productive. There is so much variation in human cognition, not to mention personality, that any business operation scheme claiming generality is automatically suspect. There Are No Silver Bullets.
No, the control rods are constantly forced into the core by passive systems (hydraulic pressure, gravity, springs), and only stay withdrawn because of active systems. If the active systems lose power, a few seconds later the control rods will be fully inserted. Many reactors also have pre-pressurized tanks of neutron absorbing fluid connected to the core, a sort of liquid control rod. Provided one of the redundant valves can be opened, that will also quench the nuclear chain reaction. (And I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the valves have a ratchet that makes them stick open until some poor bastard visits them in person with a special tool.)
It's also worth pointing out that many safety systems have no self-protection features like circuit breakers, or even off switches where a well-meaning idiot might turn them off just because fire is shooting out. If a back-up cooling pump develops a short circuit or a bad bearing, it will continue to run until it destroys itself. The idea is that the protection equipment will cheerfully use itself up to protect the main plant.
Indeed. With few exceptions, every scientific instrument that uses fluids is wildly inaccurate. (Precise as hell, but inaccurate.) That means pH meters, gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, biomolecule sequencers, you name it. To get reliable measurements, you have to run an end-to-end calibration at least every few test runs. For ultra-trace detection, like DNA and high-potency drugs, often every single sample needs to be calibrated.
Failure to do this on such an epic level draws all results of all the labs into question. Even in an academic lab, getting caught at this would be a career limiting move.
Don't do it! You'll catch a case of the clams!
Yes, you can. The 5th Amendment does not protect privacy or secrecy, it controls the actions that the government is allowed to take. The government can never compel incriminating testimony. Period. You can carve a murder admission onto a bailiff with an icepick one day, and then the next day refuse to repeat the statements and the government cannot compel you to.
If this were not the case, then any statement that merely suggested guilt would justify torture to extract all guilts. This is not melodrama. The Puritan exiles to America made this rule to prevent the system they were fleeing, a system where a minor infraction would be noted, and the defendant would be dragged before a court and asked to take an oath of total innocence. If they took the oath, the infraction was brought out and they, being guilty, were tortured to extract proof of all other guilts. Thanks to them, incriminating yourself does not grant the government one iota of power to extract further incrimination.
"No person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself ..."
Heavy? What is this obsession with mass?
Nah, his brains aren't in his ass.
... so the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapses ...
The I-35 bridge collapsed because of a design flaw. (Mostly. The inspection engineers had a case of tunnel vision.)
We don't have local radio now - all programming is run by conglomerates. If that rail car in Fargo derails and leaks methylisocyanate - there is no way to warn the locals.....
You mean besides the Emergency Alert System, which is required by law to be supported by a wide variety of radio transmitters.
Those are the photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. In addition to driving the circadian rhythm generators, they also control pupil size in response to light. IIRC, research in cats found that they do connect to the visual cortex, although how the signals are perceived is not yet known.
Margaret Thatcher.
Wait, what? Who said you have to lock the sidebar to a fixed width? If you have an elastic layout, just make the sidebar elastic and it'll scale up right alongside the content.
Let me try again less carelessly. Ideally you want the browser to automatically draw the sidebar just wide enough to fit its widest contents. But with divs alone, you have to specify a defined, hard-coded (I said "fixed" before, wrongly implying units of pixels--sorry) position for the content column. Therefore the left sidebar width has to be hard-coded too, which makes it hard to plug arbitrary widgets into it, especially images. The values may be hard-coded using friendly units like ems, but they are still hard coded.
Widths can also be defined as a percentage of the parent element. That tends to blow up sidebars when the window is narrow, and make ridiculous sidebars on super-widescreen monitors.
The only real place to run into problems is in the padding and borders: people often forget that they get tacked onto the width of the element.
I want a LOLcoder picture of a CSS geek sitting at a computer using a pocket calculator with the caption "COMPUTING -- UR DOIN IT WRONG". Or maybe "SOMEWHERE A KNUTH IS CRYING".
CSS is only horrible at making block elements share horizontal space if you don't know how to make block elements share horizontal space. Fixed, elastic, and fluid two-column layouts are easy. Three-column layouts are harder, but it can be done in any of those configurations, and without sacrificing semantically correct code or scalability.
I just don't get the relevance of "semantic correctness". Everything from the template to the user output terminal is pure presentation, a collection of practical tools to create output documents. If the implementation is comprehensible and maintainable, which it will be with judicious use of the technique I recommended above, then it is Plenty Good. Not a single piece of software anywhere in the chain cares one iota about the meaning or interpretation of table contents: it's just another rendering instruction.
I mean, really. Postscript is an entire Turing-complete language. People can and have written application software in it. (Maybe they shouldn't have, but they did!) Yet we all blithely crank out whatever garbage Postscript it takes to render our documents without a microscopic thought for the internal semantics. When's the last time you upbraided the secretary for not generating semantic Postscript? LaTeX lets you define your own semantics on the fly, but nobody gets too grumpy when you use unorthodox markup to make an interesting layout. So why the sudden semantic HTML religion? As far as I can tell, it's just a bad case of Silver Bullet Syndrome.