"There's a big difference between what gets billed and what gets paid."
Assuming that insurance pays for it. (And applies various group-negotiated reductions.) The biggest problem with the inflated American system, IMO, is that you're playing Russian roulette that a claim gets denied and then the individual is on the hook for the whole inflated bill. Not being able to confirm before the service if the cost is zero or tens of thousands of dollars is truly terrifying.
"But those debates did a great deal for Mr. Sacks. After graduation, he and Mr. Thiel published 'The Diversity Myth,' a book-length critique of Stanford’s efforts. Within a few more years, he, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Rabois and others had transformed themselves into a close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs — innovators who created billion-dollar business after billion-dollar business, using the ideas, ethos and group bonds they had honed at The Stanford Review...
PayPal had a hard time hiring women, Max Levchin, another co-founder, later told a class at Stanford, 'because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?... The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,' he added. 'The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.'"
Or: There was an intentional push by right-wing technologists to keep women out of the dot-com boom.
"PayPal had a hard time hiring women, Max Levchin, another co-founder, later told a class at Stanford, 'because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?... The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,' he added. 'The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.'"
As a top-level response to all the young men saying "women just don't want to code -- the end", you should be aware that the proportion of women in software engineering used to be much higher. In 1984, 23% of U.S. computer science degree holders were women; as of 2013 it had slid down to 15%. See graph here:
There is something really regressive and ugly that's happened in the culture of software engineering in the meantime. Some of it's even intentionally manufactured by right-wing/libertarian technologists like Peter Thiel:
"If you're a genuine 'imperial zealot' then what, out of interest, is your best pro-imperial argument? I'm curious because as far as I can tell, imperial is shit. And I say that as someone who has had to deal with both systems."
Generally, imperial is a "human-scale" system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_scale). If there's any advantage, it's that it makes approximations and estimations pretty easy. A foot is about a person's foot. A league is about how far you walk in an hour. Fahrenheit temperature of 0 is really cold, 100 is really hot (outside that range is life-threatening without exotic gear). A stone mass is about how much will start to slow you down if you carry it.
The divisibility by small factors (2, 3, 4, 6) is also nice for a lot of discrete applications. For precision measurements, modern science, continuous measures, and conversions, obviously that's where it starts to break down.
The primary problem with this recurrent geek fantasy is that at best it's not really a copy; it's an emulation on different hardware. And that means a different added layer of possible breakdowns, bugs, glitches, etc. "All abstractions are leaky", per Joel Spolsky I think. Will the person feel hungry, thirsty, sleepy, horny, too cold/hot, react the same way to their favorite booze/weed/drugs, etc.? Probably not. Will there be outages due to power, networking, input/output devices? Likely so. And it's really hard to pretend that in the face of those radically changed experiences of the world that it's the same person.
This thought experiment serves as a pretty good case study that the Western attempt to cast a hard distinction between mind and body is not really tenable. You are your body, and your body is you.
Well, I got curious waiting, so I hope you'll forgive me answering my own question. As of today's date, Slashdot search shows 44 prior stories that include the word "MOOC" in the article. The first one showed up in Oct 2012; it's been 37 months since that time, so on average more than one article per month for the last 3 years.
The busiest period was Jun 2013 to Jan 2014, which had 18 MOOC articles on Slashdot in an 8-month period; that is, a MOOC article about every other week. I'll take this with a great sense of relief that the MOOC hype has indeed died down since then.
At this point, I think everyone I know has had an instance of a false positive shutting down their account at some point. I've even had it over a $5 political donation in a state I previously resided. This is not "an amazing job".
If you installed a spam blocker that just uniformly deleted all your emails, then you'd never see any spam and I guess that would also count as "an amazing job".
You're looking at this the wrong way. When lawyers think about litigating (say: civil-rights or class-action cases), they know it's strategic to look for a good "test case", that is, someone who short-cuts people's biases and generally looks above approach. This is your leverage to get the law changed for everyone; basically shaming the offenders with the most absurd abuse of their power. We should be thankful when there's a case that allows us to get any media attention to these issues.
" Often too software requires a review of business process which shed light on how a business is *actually* run, not how management *thinks* it is run. This will cause requirements shift."
That's a great line, and your anecdote [1] is awesome. Thanks for sharing.
"At some point, if we don't leave this planet, we will all die here. What if sorry ass humans are the Universe's best shot at an advanced life from?"
Then it's probably best if we just philosophically accept that. Arguably the extreme depths of space serve commendably as barrier-isolation (in the medical sense) to prevent us from screwing up anything/everything else in the universe.
Agreed that children are a major problem. Either (a) you fund them and support some religiously motivated sect to have maximum babies and bankrupt the system, or (b) you give flat-payments to families and have to digest seeing some maximal-baby-pushers barely feeding and clothing their children in rags, or (c) you need enforced population controls, which nobody wants (but many early 20th century writers assumed was in the offing). Personally, I don't see any way out of this conundrum.
Slashdot Mirror
"There's a big difference between what gets billed and what gets paid."
Assuming that insurance pays for it. (And applies various group-negotiated reductions.) The biggest problem with the inflated American system, IMO, is that you're playing Russian roulette that a claim gets denied and then the individual is on the hook for the whole inflated bill. Not being able to confirm before the service if the cost is zero or tens of thousands of dollars is truly terrifying.
"But those debates did a great deal for Mr. Sacks. After graduation, he and Mr. Thiel published 'The Diversity Myth,' a book-length critique of Stanford’s efforts. Within a few more years, he, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Rabois and others had transformed themselves into a close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs — innovators who created billion-dollar business after billion-dollar business, using the ideas, ethos and group bonds they had honed at The Stanford Review...
PayPal had a hard time hiring women, Max Levchin, another co-founder, later told a class at Stanford, 'because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?... The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,' he added. 'The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.'"
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/gender-gaps-stanford-94.html
Or: There was an intentional push by right-wing technologists to keep women out of the dot-com boom.
"PayPal had a hard time hiring women, Max Levchin, another co-founder, later told a class at Stanford, 'because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?... The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,' he added. 'The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.'"
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/gender-gaps-stanford-94.html
But apparently never enough Social Injustice Warrior crap to satisfy.
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ207478
As a top-level response to all the young men saying "women just don't want to code -- the end", you should be aware that the proportion of women in software engineering used to be much higher. In 1984, 23% of U.S. computer science degree holders were women; as of 2013 it had slid down to 15%. See graph here:
http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/03/10/getting-more-women-in-stem-our-partnership-with-mentornet/
There is something really regressive and ugly that's happened in the culture of software engineering in the meantime. Some of it's even intentionally manufactured by right-wing/libertarian technologists like Peter Thiel:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/gender-gaps-stanford-94.html
"Their length unit is based on a physical cylinder of metal."
Not since 1960: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre
"If you're a genuine 'imperial zealot' then what, out of interest, is your best pro-imperial argument? I'm curious because as far as I can tell, imperial is shit. And I say that as someone who has had to deal with both systems."
Generally, imperial is a "human-scale" system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_scale). If there's any advantage, it's that it makes approximations and estimations pretty easy. A foot is about a person's foot. A league is about how far you walk in an hour. Fahrenheit temperature of 0 is really cold, 100 is really hot (outside that range is life-threatening without exotic gear). A stone mass is about how much will start to slow you down if you carry it.
The divisibility by small factors (2, 3, 4, 6) is also nice for a lot of discrete applications. For precision measurements, modern science, continuous measures, and conversions, obviously that's where it starts to break down.
"when you can't tell the difference"
Hey, on this toggle I don't feel hungry, thirsty, horny, or short of breath anymore, and the weed I smoked before surgery seems to have lost its kick.
Alan Turing said in 1936 that it's impossible to construct an algorithm that generally solves the halting problem.
So who's wrong: Clarke or Turing?
The primary problem with this recurrent geek fantasy is that at best it's not really a copy; it's an emulation on different hardware. And that means a different added layer of possible breakdowns, bugs, glitches, etc. "All abstractions are leaky", per Joel Spolsky I think. Will the person feel hungry, thirsty, sleepy, horny, too cold/hot, react the same way to their favorite booze/weed/drugs, etc.? Probably not. Will there be outages due to power, networking, input/output devices? Likely so. And it's really hard to pretend that in the face of those radically changed experiences of the world that it's the same person.
This thought experiment serves as a pretty good case study that the Western attempt to cast a hard distinction between mind and body is not really tenable. You are your body, and your body is you.
Well, I got curious waiting, so I hope you'll forgive me answering my own question. As of today's date, Slashdot search shows 44 prior stories that include the word "MOOC" in the article. The first one showed up in Oct 2012; it's been 37 months since that time, so on average more than one article per month for the last 3 years.
The busiest period was Jun 2013 to Jan 2014, which had 18 MOOC articles on Slashdot in an 8-month period; that is, a MOOC article about every other week. I'll take this with a great sense of relief that the MOOC hype has indeed died down since then.
Use the search bar here to and tell me how many older Slashdot stories have the word "MOOC" in them.
At this point, I think everyone I know has had an instance of a false positive shutting down their account at some point. I've even had it over a $5 political donation in a state I previously resided. This is not "an amazing job".
If you installed a spam blocker that just uniformly deleted all your emails, then you'd never see any spam and I guess that would also count as "an amazing job".
Edit: "above approach" -> "above reproach"
You're looking at this the wrong way. When lawyers think about litigating (say: civil-rights or class-action cases), they know it's strategic to look for a good "test case", that is, someone who short-cuts people's biases and generally looks above approach. This is your leverage to get the law changed for everyone; basically shaming the offenders with the most absurd abuse of their power. We should be thankful when there's a case that allows us to get any media attention to these issues.
One wonders how anyone ever established any image format in the first place.
Like the annual budget?
The War Nerd: More proof the US defense industry has nothing to do with defending America
"... there is nothing that the US can do about it!"
Said a large cohort of now-dead and imprisoned people from everywhere.
Result would be large "omnibus" packages of laws as a single bills which would make them even more difficult to disentangle over time.
It already happens and it's already impossible to legislatively define what counts as a "clean" or single-topic bill.
" Often too software requires a review of business process which shed light on how a business is *actually* run, not how management *thinks* it is run. This will cause requirements shift."
That's a great line, and your anecdote [1] is awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Said all the winners of Darwin awards.
"At some point, if we don't leave this planet, we will all die here. What if sorry ass humans are the Universe's best shot at an advanced life from?"
Then it's probably best if we just philosophically accept that. Arguably the extreme depths of space serve commendably as barrier-isolation (in the medical sense) to prevent us from screwing up anything/everything else in the universe.
Agreed that children are a major problem. Either (a) you fund them and support some religiously motivated sect to have maximum babies and bankrupt the system, or (b) you give flat-payments to families and have to digest seeing some maximal-baby-pushers barely feeding and clothing their children in rags, or (c) you need enforced population controls, which nobody wants (but many early 20th century writers assumed was in the offing). Personally, I don't see any way out of this conundrum.