API calls.... their "structure, sequence, and organization" are copyrightable? API calls... really?
So I have a door, it has a door bell. It follows a nice standard that if someone wants to get my attention at my door, they ring the doorbell. If they want to leave a message, they put a note in my mailbox. That's a rough equivalent for my house's API. I can copyright that (baring prior art and fair use)? The contents of my house are my own of course, but the procedure I ask everyone to follow when coming into my house? I also own that?
Man, I saw that in action just last weekend. A buddy had a retro-game LAN party in place of a bachelor party. Good times.
If they were going to bring it back, I'd suggest adding the family pet as a dynamic object that generally tears the shit out of you. Or the occupants of the house going about their business. "I'm sniping behind timmy's left ear" "Lookout, Dad is coming into the kitchen and he's full of rocket whores!" "Player 3 chewed like a cheap plastic toy"
Well that's easy to explain. The phrase "intelligence is not heritable" is a simplification of "the bulk of intelligence is not heritable and (barring serious medical genetic conditions) the environment has a much larger impact than the genes you inherit." The aspect of inherited intelligence is only visible and applicable when you have a large enough sample size that the environmental "noise" is averaged out and you can observe the evolutionary trend. To a lesser extent this also applies to muscles and health. If you sit around and each cheetoes all day it doesn't matter as much how your parents look. If you work your ass off as a lumberjack all day, even if your parents were spindly little things, you're going to get some muscle. But the muscle/build/health genes have a stronger impact than the intelligence genes when compared to environmental conditions.
And that leads to some awkward questions and alarming answers about how well different cultures and groups of people perform on IQ tests. But that is a seriously dark road to go down with sociological ramifications. Science doesn't happen in a vacuum and sometimes you don't want to stir up the hornets nest. There are things I'm just content to not pry into. Because hey, if two cultures faced similar sociological factors, they'd probably be the same culture now wouldn't they? This might just be one of those things that's unmeasurable.
Sure, in a greenhouse. For twice the cost. And we can grow corn in the scrubland sandhills of western Nebraska... if we irrigate it using unsustainable practices of pumping the aquifer dry.
The western halves of Nebraska, the Dakotas and Kansas are all half-way to being deserts with rolling sand dunes and all. They need irrigation to support crops. Otherwise they're just grazing land. And not great at that either.
The Ogallala aquifer which happens to be right in that area is indeed shrinking and it's a worry. Conservationists are like "OMG WTF!? that took thousands of years to accumulate" and farmers are like "It's been making my family MONEY for decades, we aint' stoppin". It's an issue for a sizable strip of land, but it most certainly doesn't apply to the majority of the "Great Plains".
The eastern half of those states, all the way to the Appalachian mountains, are plenty wet to support crops without the need of irrigation. Iowa has a "thriving" wine industry in the northeast in a strip of land that avoided being glaicered way back when so it's "weird" by our standards. And there are plenty of apple orchards. Johnny Appleseed is still legendary around here. But certain crops simply need a different climate. You're not going to have a... uh... banana industry in Minnesota.
All in all the USA has a fantastic piece of land for agriculture use and we could grow enough food to end world hunger. But getting it from the fields to hungry mouths has some logistical issues and so we grow feed corn to feed our cattle just so it tastes better. If we every really wanted to be super-dicks to the rest of the world. We'd unleash our capabilities, flood the markets with cheap food for a decade or until everyone else's agriculture industries collapsed and then simply stop making shipments. The Arab spring started with food riots.
Yes, it's exactly that. A quick cash-grab to attract a few kids who don't know any better at the cost of diluting the franchise/brand/over-arcing story.
Seriously, the new Star Trek is a nice action flick, but it's a giant clusterfuck for people trying to make sense of the setting. You know, those fans who would one day grow up and actually produce new Star Trek material. The term "canon" is now contentious depending on what universe you're talking about. This exact sort of problem is why DC had a crisis on infinite Earths. Because it was all such a mess and none of it made sense.
Action flicks are fine. But you don't have to sacrifice the long-story to make a cheap shock for the short-story.
So where the hell is the Civil War arc? The boring old "let's fight the villain and save Earth" storyline is played out.
It's time for internal strife to rip apart our loved ones and reflect the EXACT sort of conflict going on in America right now. The two party system is tearing us apart and causing complete dysfunction. The storyline itself is just as hard hitting now as when it came out. Do we believe in individual freedom or do we clamp down on potential dangers.
And what do the good-guy super heroes do when they disagree with the other good-guy super heroes.
It's not a cheap thriller for kids. It's a mature topic. And beyond all reasonable hopes, I think the right people in Hollywood could actually pull it off.
And I think it's the next logical step. You've got the introduction. The typical story. The crossover. Now it's time to have some serious continuity. People are getting burned out by all these superhero movies. Time to mix it up.
I'm all for the 2nd amendment, but do you gun nuts flip your shit this easily over mandatory gun safeties? You know, that switch on the gun that keeps it from firing just like this watch? I know, I know, it's substantially different. But in the vast majority of the ludicrously rare scenarios that you guys keep on dreaming up, someone fumbling around with the safety would do the exact same thing.
Jesus....
I don't think we can let the government disarm the populace. The "personal safety" and "hunting sport" aspects of the debate fall flat with me. It's a matter of sovereignty and the fact that government needs to worry about an armed uprising. We're NOWHERE near needing that sort of conflict, despite how many preppers and tea-partiers think it is. But the potential has to be there. And so I believe in the 2nd amendment (specifically we need to be able to have powerful long-arms, secure encryption, and powerful optics. A wide-spread sniper campaign by the populace would still disrupt enough of the country that the government would be toppled. Although that might be less true in the near future with total surveillance.)
So anyway, wooo gun-rights. But the sheer retardedness of the people who also hold this idea really turns me off and makes me re-evaluate my stance.
How is that not a star? I thought Jupiter was half-way to critical mass where it all explodes into a fireball?
Searching...
Nope. I was wrong. Jupiter would need about 75 times more mass before it went nuclear, fused hydrogen at it's core and became a star. A 10-Jupiter mass planet is totally legit.
Man, fuck you. I went looking for a racial slur along the lines of vandalism about goths, moors, or some such and I lost 2 bloody hours reading about the fall of Rome and the shift from centralized power and prosperous trade to decentralized power of land-holders, serfs, and cottage economy and the destruction of antiquity middle class. You and bloody Wikipedia are devastating my productivity.
I already had "Welshed", I should have been happy with that.
So yeah, the Romans shouldn't have welshed the Vandals on the deal with the Empress because it lead to Vandalism.
First, we could start with the absurdities in every Farm Bill, ever - in which $billion$ to giant agro industries are sustained for no good reason, barriers to imports of sugar, etc are lifted/strengthened to defend US agro firms, etc.
Well I agree that the USA has a blatant and hypocritical policy of protectionism for it's agriculture. It's a matter of national security. While they might let the globalized free market fuck around with manufacturing, they are not letting our farms turn to rust. But that money and rules are helping the whole industry, not just the big FarmCo. More and more farms are consolidating due to better technology (have you seen how big and automated those new combines are?) and big business is getting in on the act and there are some vertical monopolies being established. But there are still mom&pop farms (ask my uncle in Carrol IA) and competitions between the different big farm companies.
So no, the US farm bill as an example of federal corruption is rejected.
Second, we could look at the US Schools Lunch Programs which are largely mandated by the USDA
Dude. They're feeding kids. The rules about what schools feed kids is so that they don't count ketchup as a vegetable. Regulating cheapass penny pinching principles from starving their students is not going to be a good example of corruption. Also that's a link showing that food companies have lobbyists and they want things. That's not an example of corruption. That's attempted corruption. Did you read your link?
The Department of Agriculture created a proposal that fit within its budget and pleased nutritionists, public health experts and many school lunch officials, but it didn't please the American Frozen Food Institute or the companies that provide much of the food served to kids at lunch
So.... that's actually an example of the federal regulators pissing off the group they're regulating. That's the exact opposite of corruption. That's called "doing their job". Like they're supposed to.
Your last argument is that there have been budget cuts. . . . But that's not corruption. Bad, sure, I guess. And we're probably facing lower quality food now that it's 3 years after that article came by. So you could call it mismanagement, maybe, but it's not an example of corruption. (Also, what the hell man, you're bitching about budget cuts while trying to prove that the government are idiots for spending more than they make? That's like making fun of the fat guy at the gym)
Your best angle is the farm bill. Which is certainly protectionism, but I wouldn't say it's an example of the federal corruption.
Technically a perfectly neutral network would solve the issues with HFT as everyone would have the same latency as everyone else. You know in a perfect world. But that aspect of neutrality has never really been feasible as there are real-world factors that make it bloody stupid. And so it's never really been part of the network neutrality debate.
Japan is simply farther away than Chicago. NN isn't going to fix that. UDP and TCP connections behave differently. NN is likewise agnostic. NN is vastly important but like capitalism, communism, cleanliness, security, and coding standards, they are ideals to strive rather than something you can perfectly achieve.
Anyone who thinks differently needs to go live in the real world for a little while.
"Star Trek 6, the undiscovered country" is a metaphor for the end of the cold war. Klingon have always been a Russian equivalent of a scary foreigner that we're not quite really at war with. By movie #6, the cold war was over and the movie's plot was centered around old war mongers that feared change and would commit to war just for their own desires. What do we do with our old war machines? Between the heavy topic and the Shakespeare quotes, #6 is one of the more intellectual movies of the set.
The whales are in "Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home", which had a more lighthearted approach and the moral was that we shouldn't genocide species on Earth as they may be important some day. In this case, it's because a vastly powerful alien race made first contact with whales before human were around and their efforts to re-establish contact with the now extinct species was destructive to the surface.
I hear what you're saying, but I like my sci-fi like I like my eggs. HARD.
Yeah yeah, Firefly is just a thin veneer of sci-fi over what could be a perfectly viable western. Star Wars is just a veneer of sci-fi over a story that could be set in feudal japan with kame spirits. A lot of Star Trek could be set in 1600's age of sail with minimal amounts of retrofitting teleporters into rowboats, shields into hull integrity, and scanners with sonar.
You want hard sci-fi. This is soft sci-fi.
Hard sci-fi is about how people deal with changes. The change caused by scientific progress is the topic being explored. Soft sci-fi is everything else, but set in the future.
I would also like more hard sci-fi shows/movies/games. But I'm ok with soft sci-fi too.
But what has been abundantly proven over and over from the food industry to the car industry to the power industry to the cable tv industry is that larger scales of government are ever-more corrupted/corruptable
Ok, I've heard this anti-government rant before. But... The food industry? Do you have beef with USDA for some reason? Does it really irk you that they need to post the nutritional facts on packaged foods? This one I just don't understand at all.
I mean, sure, there's signs of corruption in the car industry. Hell, we bought GM for a while. And the car dealerships are bloody leeches. (But they've got their hooks into the local level, not federal)
And the power industry had it bad back when Enron captured the regulators and was set to buy up everything (and then imploded). But in general you don't really hear about Federal power regulators really screwing anything up. Our power grid (while worryingly fragile) is doing well. Nerc and Ferc are ok. And they're still on the path to deregulation despite the colossal fuckup with Enron. The feds are letting go.
But I'm at a loss as to the corruption of the food industry regulators at the federal level. Care to enlighten?
Huh. Apparently slashdot has a lot of grandparents.
I get what you're saying, but think you could have stated that better. Here we go:
Wow, if my parents tried to tell me how to raise my kids in such an abusive manner like Lumpy did they wouldn't have much access to their grandchildren after that. You must have very understanding children.
My parents are great. My wife's parents have been pretty good so far. But if they ever tried to "give me an earful" for something that isn't even wrong, called me a "horrible parent", and swore at me about it, I wouldn't want that sort of negative abusive attitude around my child.
Historically, this would be siblings, cousins, and nephews. Family units had lots of kids and the older children would help raise the younger. If you go back further, family units stuck together like clans and everyone raised everyone.
These days you're lucky if one of your immediate parents are in the same town and can watch the kid. Times change. Nature's slow on the uptake. That motherfucker still thinks we should be screwing our brains out at 13 so we can raise the kids before we die at 30.
Yeah man, I REALLY didn't understand the term "staying close to family" until I had a kid. It's a loaded statement. It means free babysitting.
They're not losers, tech support is just a shit-job that nobody wants to do. I don't think you're going to be able to white-wash it as anything else.
I'm not sure that sysadmins, network engineers, and the other better IT jobs have to start out at the bottom rung.
Well maybe for you, but I graduated with a computer engineering degree and my first job out of school was developing software for embedded systems.
Yeah, well that doesn't sound fun to me.
It's ok. Like you said, to each his own. That was the oil&gas industry. Now I'm in military defense. Life support systems. OBOGS, if you're familiar with that stuff. It's still embedded software development, just with more paperwork. DO178 pretty much dictates the waterfall process, which... I have to say is indeed a little dull. But the bloody legacy systems are always on fire in some way so there's a lot of maintenance. And the codeshop needs overhauling (and a few people axed). But large corporations have such big bloody inertia.
But yeah, if that sounds like stroking the ego, it probably is. Sorry about that. But as someone who went down the college path, I've got to say it worked out pretty well for me. And I really didn't have to go through any periods of shit-work. I guess I had a stint as a SQL guy making reports at one point, but that was because I moved cities following my wife's career after the graduated at the bottom of the econopocalypse in 2009. Wasn't that bad except for the sexist boss.
I would say more to the point: there are lots of career paths where, regardless of education, you tend to start at the bottom and work your way up
Yes. That is true. And if you DO have an education, you typically start at a higher point in said path, end at a higher point, and have vastly greater chances of reaching the upper echelons than if you do not have an education. Depends on the career.
Because it's sounding more and more like you're just on a deranged ego trip to prove that you're better than helpdesk techs.
Just to explain your modding into oblivion, lemme spell it out with you.
This is a flat tax. Everyone is taxed at 10%. (Yes, it's a percentage, and not, say $200 flat, but it's what it's called). It is not progressive (taxing the rich a higher percent) nor is it regressive (taxing the poor a higher percent). It's flat.
This has been shown to be a ludicrously bad idea. Not as bad as a regressive tax, but still pretty bad. It turns out that economies usually aren't fair and balanced and the gini coefficient isn't ever going to be zero. It's hard being poor. Consequently, it's easy being rich. Not only are they more powerful, they systematically control the game to favor themselves.
To offset that sort of imbalance, they are taxed in a progressive fashion that most of the world now employs.
Even the "fairtax" people don't want a flat tax.
10% of small income equals very small tax. What's the problem?
Because when your income is small, a small tax isn't so small. Indeed it's about the exactly the same proportion that the rich would pay. Now, who would you say is more financially stable, you know typically: The rich, or the poor? Who can better withstand that sort of impact? Who is less likely to crumble and break due to the financial pressure of the taxation?
Sure, it's fair between the rich and poor, but only if you pretend the poor are just as powerful as the rich.
FLAME ON! PURGE THE INFIDELS IN THE HOLY FIRE! But before we really get into it, this isn't really a measurement of the language somuchas how people use the language. For example: while VB6 was an abomination, VB.NET really isn't all that bad. But since the people who use VB.NET are the amateur noobs who make stupid mistakes. Hey, we all started somewhere. But it means I really wouldn't trust a project that's written in VB.NET for certain tasks.
These are sociological factors. Politics. Culture. And they matter, but they're not technical aspects. The size of the community. The maturing of the developers. How open the overlord megacorp is to people making tools that interface with their toys. How many developers got the hype-bug and wrote libraries for said language. How good those developers were at their job. It all matters, but it's not an aspect of the language itself.
Any Turing complete language CAN do the job. You've got to avoid Turing tarpits, but mostly the right tool for the job is a matter of fashion.
Why the flames? Why is this something that causes so much strife? Because we all want to bet on the right horse, and who wins is largely a popularity contest. It really DOES matter what the community does. You can't just go off into the woods and code away in TurboPascel and hope to have a lucrative career. It's an inverse tragedy of the commons. Using the tools of your neighbor SHARPENS said tools. So everyone wants you to use their tools. Because their tools are the best.
Oh, sorry if that wasn't clear in the first one. Here we go:
The article is bullshit because it doesn't matter if you get "tech job". It seems to be treating tech jobs as a magical place that's simply better and they're trying to tear down the myth that you need a college degree to get those jobs. They go on to show that you can get all these tech jobs without a degree.
Except those jobs aren't the sort that are simply better. They're conflating the good tech jobs for which a degree is helpful, with the shit tech jobs which do not need a degree. That false presumption turns the thrust of their argument from "you don't need a degree to get a tech job" to "you don't need a degree to get a shitty tech job". Which doesn't quite have the same inspiring message.
Not to be a class-ist asshole. For some people tech support would be a big step up. It's a good gig compared to breaking your back in a salt mine. But it's the bottom end of the tech industry.
It's worth pointing out that a lot of jobs, when you're starting out right after college, aren't very fun or lucrative.
Well maybe for you, but I graduated with a computer engineering degree and my first job out of school was developing software for embedded systems.
At the point, it's still something that you can make a decent career out of. You could end up being the Director of Technology or CIO of a business, or running your own consulting or MSP business.
Really? Are you sure you're not buying your own bullshit salespitch that you feed to new hires? Everyone I've known with the job has been desperate to get out, move up into managing others, or more commonly move "sideways" into development or sysadmin work.
Let's look at all the directors and CIO and techy business owners. Obviously since they're "at the top" there's going to be less of them then the workers. That's how heirarchies work. So the odds of getting there are slim already. But of the people that go there, what percentage have a degree? Do you think the ones with bigger paychecks in bigger companies are more common or less common to have a degree? (Also, the director/CIO positions can be mostly management. They're about as technical as cable-pullers)
Now take your typical help-desk worker. Are you going to tell them that if they stay in this job they'll eventually get to be the director? That tech support is a career? No. At best it's a stepping stone to something better.
I wouldn't say that a PhD is exactly overqualified, either, but there's a qualification mismatch
Whoahoho! That there's some mighty-fine management bullshit. I see what you're saying about different skillsets, but overqualified is overqualified. Call a spade a spade. A comSci PhD can be overqualified AND not have the skills for the job. "Qualifications" it's a word that means something.
I think I would sooner say that when you're fresh out of school, you're not qualified for much of anything at all.
That sounds like a pretty shitty school. Man, that reminds me of this poor technician. He was feeding money to (non-acredited) Kaplan University, trying to learn SQL. The teacher had to learn the topic right alongside the students. Tried to interview for a DBA position in IT to get out of tech support. Couldn't even join two tables. Damn shame.
All in all, I think the article is detrimental to society as college and education is still very much worth it, as long as you get a meaningful degree from a good school (and you're smart enough to be able to get it). There is a shocking amount of college grads with bullshit liberal arts degree that are working help-desks or coffee shops when they graduate. But I don't see any such under-employment for STEM grads.
Sorry to be blunt about this, but tech support is the shit end of the tech industry. "computer user support specialist" It's that one. Don't ask me why they gave it a funny name. They also call cable-pullers something weird. Maybe it's like "janitor" and has connotations.
Dealing with users, especially the typical sort that call tech support, is a horrible experience. You know, the PEBCAK sort. The ones which make for humors commentary if you didn't have to live it every day. Not something that people with options choose to do because they enjoy it.
If I were in your shoes, I'd avoid college (STEM) degrees, and stay the hell away from PHDs, as they'd probably just get bored/bitter. For as much shit as they shovel, I'd imagine most fortune 500 CEOs would do a pretty poor job of spreading manure. As much as the term "overqualified" stings, this is exactly the sort of situation it applies to.
So when you say that, as a guy hiring tech support workers, you don't look at education... that just kinda lends weight to my point.
Slashdot Mirror
No no no, SEQUENCE.
Ring, then knock, then just leave it on the curb.
That sequence of events as the proper interface to my house is now copyrighted.
API calls.... their "structure, sequence, and organization" are copyrightable? API calls... really?
So I have a door, it has a door bell. It follows a nice standard that if someone wants to get my attention at my door, they ring the doorbell. If they want to leave a message, they put a note in my mailbox. That's a rough equivalent for my house's API. I can copyright that (baring prior art and fair use)?
The contents of my house are my own of course, but the procedure I ask everyone to follow when coming into my house? I also own that?
Really guys?
Man, I saw that in action just last weekend. A buddy had a retro-game LAN party in place of a bachelor party. Good times.
If they were going to bring it back, I'd suggest adding the family pet as a dynamic object that generally tears the shit out of you. Or the occupants of the house going about their business. "I'm sniping behind timmy's left ear" "Lookout, Dad is coming into the kitchen and he's full of rocket whores!" "Player 3 chewed like a cheap plastic toy"
Well that's easy to explain. The phrase "intelligence is not heritable" is a simplification of "the bulk of intelligence is not heritable and (barring serious medical genetic conditions) the environment has a much larger impact than the genes you inherit." The aspect of inherited intelligence is only visible and applicable when you have a large enough sample size that the environmental "noise" is averaged out and you can observe the evolutionary trend. To a lesser extent this also applies to muscles and health. If you sit around and each cheetoes all day it doesn't matter as much how your parents look. If you work your ass off as a lumberjack all day, even if your parents were spindly little things, you're going to get some muscle. But the muscle/build/health genes have a stronger impact than the intelligence genes when compared to environmental conditions.
And that leads to some awkward questions and alarming answers about how well different cultures and groups of people perform on IQ tests. But that is a seriously dark road to go down with sociological ramifications. Science doesn't happen in a vacuum and sometimes you don't want to stir up the hornets nest. There are things I'm just content to not pry into. Because hey, if two cultures faced similar sociological factors, they'd probably be the same culture now wouldn't they? This might just be one of those things that's unmeasurable.
Sure, in a greenhouse. For twice the cost. And we can grow corn in the scrubland sandhills of western Nebraska... if we irrigate it using unsustainable practices of pumping the aquifer dry.
eehhhhhhh. Sorta.
The western halves of Nebraska, the Dakotas and Kansas are all half-way to being deserts with rolling sand dunes and all. They need irrigation to support crops. Otherwise they're just grazing land. And not great at that either.
The Ogallala aquifer which happens to be right in that area is indeed shrinking and it's a worry. Conservationists are like "OMG WTF!? that took thousands of years to accumulate" and farmers are like "It's been making my family MONEY for decades, we aint' stoppin". It's an issue for a sizable strip of land, but it most certainly doesn't apply to the majority of the "Great Plains".
The eastern half of those states, all the way to the Appalachian mountains, are plenty wet to support crops without the need of irrigation. Iowa has a "thriving" wine industry in the northeast in a strip of land that avoided being glaicered way back when so it's "weird" by our standards. And there are plenty of apple orchards. Johnny Appleseed is still legendary around here. But certain crops simply need a different climate. You're not going to have a... uh... banana industry in Minnesota.
All in all the USA has a fantastic piece of land for agriculture use and we could grow enough food to end world hunger. But getting it from the fields to hungry mouths has some logistical issues and so we grow feed corn to feed our cattle just so it tastes better. If we every really wanted to be super-dicks to the rest of the world. We'd unleash our capabilities, flood the markets with cheap food for a decade or until everyone else's agriculture industries collapsed and then simply stop making shipments. The Arab spring started with food riots.
Yes, it's exactly that.
A quick cash-grab to attract a few kids who don't know any better at the cost of diluting the franchise/brand/over-arcing story.
Seriously, the new Star Trek is a nice action flick, but it's a giant clusterfuck for people trying to make sense of the setting. You know, those fans who would one day grow up and actually produce new Star Trek material. The term "canon" is now contentious depending on what universe you're talking about. This exact sort of problem is why DC had a crisis on infinite Earths. Because it was all such a mess and none of it made sense.
Action flicks are fine. But you don't have to sacrifice the long-story to make a cheap shock for the short-story.
So where the hell is the Civil War arc? The boring old "let's fight the villain and save Earth" storyline is played out.
It's time for internal strife to rip apart our loved ones and reflect the EXACT sort of conflict going on in America right now. The two party system is tearing us apart and causing complete dysfunction. The storyline itself is just as hard hitting now as when it came out. Do we believe in individual freedom or do we clamp down on potential dangers.
And what do the good-guy super heroes do when they disagree with the other good-guy super heroes.
It's not a cheap thriller for kids. It's a mature topic. And beyond all reasonable hopes, I think the right people in Hollywood could actually pull it off.
And I think it's the next logical step. You've got the introduction. The typical story. The crossover. Now it's time to have some serious continuity. People are getting burned out by all these superhero movies. Time to mix it up.
I'm all for the 2nd amendment, but do you gun nuts flip your shit this easily over mandatory gun safeties? You know, that switch on the gun that keeps it from firing just like this watch? I know, I know, it's substantially different. But in the vast majority of the ludicrously rare scenarios that you guys keep on dreaming up, someone fumbling around with the safety would do the exact same thing.
Jesus....
I don't think we can let the government disarm the populace. The "personal safety" and "hunting sport" aspects of the debate fall flat with me. It's a matter of sovereignty and the fact that government needs to worry about an armed uprising. We're NOWHERE near needing that sort of conflict, despite how many preppers and tea-partiers think it is. But the potential has to be there. And so I believe in the 2nd amendment (specifically we need to be able to have powerful long-arms, secure encryption, and powerful optics. A wide-spread sniper campaign by the populace would still disrupt enough of the country that the government would be toppled. Although that might be less true in the near future with total surveillance.)
So anyway, wooo gun-rights. But the sheer retardedness of the people who also hold this idea really turns me off and makes me re-evaluate my stance.
Beta Pic b — a 10-Jupiter-mass world
How is that not a star?
I thought Jupiter was half-way to critical mass where it all explodes into a fireball?
Searching...
Nope. I was wrong. Jupiter would need about 75 times more mass before it went nuclear, fused hydrogen at it's core and became a star. A 10-Jupiter mass planet is totally legit.
Man, fuck you. I went looking for a racial slur along the lines of vandalism about goths, moors, or some such and I lost 2 bloody hours reading about the fall of Rome and the shift from centralized power and prosperous trade to decentralized power of land-holders, serfs, and cottage economy and the destruction of antiquity middle class. You and bloody Wikipedia are devastating my productivity.
I already had "Welshed", I should have been happy with that.
So yeah, the Romans shouldn't have welshed the Vandals on the deal with the Empress because it lead to Vandalism.
First, we could start with the absurdities in every Farm Bill, ever - in which $billion$ to giant agro industries are sustained for no good reason, barriers to imports of sugar, etc are lifted/strengthened to defend US agro firms, etc.
Well I agree that the USA has a blatant and hypocritical policy of protectionism for it's agriculture. It's a matter of national security. While they might let the globalized free market fuck around with manufacturing, they are not letting our farms turn to rust.
But that money and rules are helping the whole industry, not just the big FarmCo. More and more farms are consolidating due to better technology (have you seen how big and automated those new combines are?) and big business is getting in on the act and there are some vertical monopolies being established. But there are still mom&pop farms (ask my uncle in Carrol IA) and competitions between the different big farm companies.
So no, the US farm bill as an example of federal corruption is rejected.
Second, we could look at the US Schools Lunch Programs which are largely mandated by the USDA
Dude. They're feeding kids.
The rules about what schools feed kids is so that they don't count ketchup as a vegetable. Regulating cheapass penny pinching principles from starving their students is not going to be a good example of corruption.
Also that's a link showing that food companies have lobbyists and they want things. That's not an example of corruption. That's attempted corruption. Did you read your link?
The Department of Agriculture created a proposal that fit within its budget and pleased nutritionists, public health experts and many school lunch officials, but it didn't please the American Frozen Food Institute or the companies that provide much of the food served to kids at lunch
So.... that's actually an example of the federal regulators pissing off the group they're regulating. That's the exact opposite of corruption. That's called "doing their job". Like they're supposed to.
Your last argument is that there have been budget cuts. . . . But that's not corruption. Bad, sure, I guess. And we're probably facing lower quality food now that it's 3 years after that article came by. So you could call it mismanagement, maybe, but it's not an example of corruption.
(Also, what the hell man, you're bitching about budget cuts while trying to prove that the government are idiots for spending more than they make? That's like making fun of the fat guy at the gym)
Your best angle is the farm bill. Which is certainly protectionism, but I wouldn't say it's an example of the federal corruption.
Technically a perfectly neutral network would solve the issues with HFT as everyone would have the same latency as everyone else. You know in a perfect world. But that aspect of neutrality has never really been feasible as there are real-world factors that make it bloody stupid. And so it's never really been part of the network neutrality debate.
Japan is simply farther away than Chicago. NN isn't going to fix that. UDP and TCP connections behave differently. NN is likewise agnostic. NN is vastly important but like capitalism, communism, cleanliness, security, and coding standards, they are ideals to strive rather than something you can perfectly achieve.
Anyone who thinks differently needs to go live in the real world for a little while.
"Star Trek 6, the undiscovered country" is a metaphor for the end of the cold war. Klingon have always been a Russian equivalent of a scary foreigner that we're not quite really at war with. By movie #6, the cold war was over and the movie's plot was centered around old war mongers that feared change and would commit to war just for their own desires. What do we do with our old war machines? Between the heavy topic and the Shakespeare quotes, #6 is one of the more intellectual movies of the set.
The whales are in "Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home", which had a more lighthearted approach and the moral was that we shouldn't genocide species on Earth as they may be important some day. In this case, it's because a vastly powerful alien race made first contact with whales before human were around and their efforts to re-establish contact with the now extinct species was destructive to the surface.
I hear what you're saying, but I like my sci-fi like I like my eggs. HARD.
Yeah yeah,
Firefly is just a thin veneer of sci-fi over what could be a perfectly viable western.
Star Wars is just a veneer of sci-fi over a story that could be set in feudal japan with kame spirits.
A lot of Star Trek could be set in 1600's age of sail with minimal amounts of retrofitting teleporters into rowboats, shields into hull integrity, and scanners with sonar.
You want hard sci-fi. This is soft sci-fi.
Hard sci-fi is about how people deal with changes. The change caused by scientific progress is the topic being explored. Soft sci-fi is everything else, but set in the future.
I would also like more hard sci-fi shows/movies/games. But I'm ok with soft sci-fi too.
But what has been abundantly proven over and over from the food industry to the car industry to the power industry to the cable tv industry is that larger scales of government are ever-more corrupted/corruptable
Ok, I've heard this anti-government rant before. But... The food industry?
Do you have beef with USDA for some reason? Does it really irk you that they need to post the nutritional facts on packaged foods? This one I just don't understand at all.
I mean, sure, there's signs of corruption in the car industry. Hell, we bought GM for a while. And the car dealerships are bloody leeches. (But they've got their hooks into the local level, not federal)
And the power industry had it bad back when Enron captured the regulators and was set to buy up everything (and then imploded). But in general you don't really hear about Federal power regulators really screwing anything up. Our power grid (while worryingly fragile) is doing well. Nerc and Ferc are ok. And they're still on the path to deregulation despite the colossal fuckup with Enron. The feds are letting go.
But I'm at a loss as to the corruption of the food industry regulators at the federal level. Care to enlighten?
WIND!
(Not linking geothermal? Come on Kwame, get it together!)
huh. What does thinner skin feel like?
Huh. Apparently slashdot has a lot of grandparents.
I get what you're saying, but think you could have stated that better. Here we go:
Wow, if my parents tried to tell me how to raise my kids in such an abusive manner like Lumpy did they wouldn't have much access to their grandchildren after that. You must have very understanding children.
My parents are great. My wife's parents have been pretty good so far. But if they ever tried to "give me an earful" for something that isn't even wrong, called me a "horrible parent", and swore at me about it, I wouldn't want that sort of negative abusive attitude around my child.
Historically, this would be siblings, cousins, and nephews. Family units had lots of kids and the older children would help raise the younger. If you go back further, family units stuck together like clans and everyone raised everyone.
These days you're lucky if one of your immediate parents are in the same town and can watch the kid. Times change. Nature's slow on the uptake. That motherfucker still thinks we should be screwing our brains out at 13 so we can raise the kids before we die at 30.
Yeah man, I REALLY didn't understand the term "staying close to family" until I had a kid. It's a loaded statement. It means free babysitting.
They're not losers, tech support is just a shit-job that nobody wants to do. I don't think you're going to be able to white-wash it as anything else.
I'm not sure that sysadmins, network engineers, and the other better IT jobs have to start out at the bottom rung.
Well maybe for you, but I graduated with a computer engineering degree and my first job out of school was developing software for embedded systems.
Yeah, well that doesn't sound fun to me.
It's ok. Like you said, to each his own. That was the oil&gas industry. Now I'm in military defense. Life support systems. OBOGS, if you're familiar with that stuff. It's still embedded software development, just with more paperwork. DO178 pretty much dictates the waterfall process, which... I have to say is indeed a little dull. But the bloody legacy systems are always on fire in some way so there's a lot of maintenance. And the codeshop needs overhauling (and a few people axed). But large corporations have such big bloody inertia.
But yeah, if that sounds like stroking the ego, it probably is. Sorry about that. But as someone who went down the college path, I've got to say it worked out pretty well for me. And I really didn't have to go through any periods of shit-work. I guess I had a stint as a SQL guy making reports at one point, but that was because I moved cities following my wife's career after the graduated at the bottom of the econopocalypse in 2009. Wasn't that bad except for the sexist boss.
I would say more to the point: there are lots of career paths where, regardless of education, you tend to start at the bottom and work your way up
Yes. That is true. And if you DO have an education, you typically start at a higher point in said path, end at a higher point, and have vastly greater chances of reaching the upper echelons than if you do not have an education. Depends on the career.
Because it's sounding more and more like you're just on a deranged ego trip to prove that you're better than helpdesk techs.
HAH that's adorable.
Just to explain your modding into oblivion, lemme spell it out with you.
This is a flat tax. Everyone is taxed at 10%. (Yes, it's a percentage, and not, say $200 flat, but it's what it's called). It is not progressive (taxing the rich a higher percent) nor is it regressive (taxing the poor a higher percent). It's flat.
This has been shown to be a ludicrously bad idea. Not as bad as a regressive tax, but still pretty bad. It turns out that economies usually aren't fair and balanced and the gini coefficient isn't ever going to be zero. It's hard being poor. Consequently, it's easy being rich. Not only are they more powerful, they systematically control the game to favor themselves.
To offset that sort of imbalance, they are taxed in a progressive fashion that most of the world now employs.
Even the "fairtax" people don't want a flat tax.
10% of small income equals very small tax. What's the problem?
Because when your income is small, a small tax isn't so small. Indeed it's about the exactly the same proportion that the rich would pay.
Now, who would you say is more financially stable, you know typically: The rich, or the poor? Who can better withstand that sort of impact? Who is less likely to crumble and break due to the financial pressure of the taxation?
Sure, it's fair between the rich and poor, but only if you pretend the poor are just as powerful as the rich.
FLAME ON! PURGE THE INFIDELS IN THE HOLY FIRE!
But before we really get into it, this isn't really a measurement of the language somuchas how people use the language. For example: while VB6 was an abomination, VB.NET really isn't all that bad. But since the people who use VB.NET are the amateur noobs who make stupid mistakes. Hey, we all started somewhere. But it means I really wouldn't trust a project that's written in VB.NET for certain tasks.
These are sociological factors. Politics. Culture. And they matter, but they're not technical aspects. The size of the community. The maturing of the developers. How open the overlord megacorp is to people making tools that interface with their toys. How many developers got the hype-bug and wrote libraries for said language. How good those developers were at their job. It all matters, but it's not an aspect of the language itself.
Any Turing complete language CAN do the job. You've got to avoid Turing tarpits, but mostly the right tool for the job is a matter of fashion.
Why the flames? Why is this something that causes so much strife?
Because we all want to bet on the right horse, and who wins is largely a popularity contest. It really DOES matter what the community does. You can't just go off into the woods and code away in TurboPascel and hope to have a lucrative career. It's an inverse tragedy of the commons. Using the tools of your neighbor SHARPENS said tools. So everyone wants you to use their tools. Because their tools are the best.
And so the flame wars rage on.
I'm not sure what your point is.
Oh, sorry if that wasn't clear in the first one. Here we go:
The article is bullshit because it doesn't matter if you get "tech job". It seems to be treating tech jobs as a magical place that's simply better and they're trying to tear down the myth that you need a college degree to get those jobs.
They go on to show that you can get all these tech jobs without a degree.
Except those jobs aren't the sort that are simply better. They're conflating the good tech jobs for which a degree is helpful, with the shit tech jobs which do not need a degree. That false presumption turns the thrust of their argument from "you don't need a degree to get a tech job" to "you don't need a degree to get a shitty tech job". Which doesn't quite have the same inspiring message.
Not to be a class-ist asshole. For some people tech support would be a big step up. It's a good gig compared to breaking your back in a salt mine. But it's the bottom end of the tech industry.
It's worth pointing out that a lot of jobs, when you're starting out right after college, aren't very fun or lucrative.
Well maybe for you, but I graduated with a computer engineering degree and my first job out of school was developing software for embedded systems.
At the point, it's still something that you can make a decent career out of. You could end up being the Director of Technology or CIO of a business, or running your own consulting or MSP business.
Really? Are you sure you're not buying your own bullshit salespitch that you feed to new hires? Everyone I've known with the job has been desperate to get out, move up into managing others, or more commonly move "sideways" into development or sysadmin work.
Let's look at all the directors and CIO and techy business owners. Obviously since they're "at the top" there's going to be less of them then the workers. That's how heirarchies work. So the odds of getting there are slim already. But of the people that go there, what percentage have a degree? Do you think the ones with bigger paychecks in bigger companies are more common or less common to have a degree?
(Also, the director/CIO positions can be mostly management. They're about as technical as cable-pullers)
Now take your typical help-desk worker. Are you going to tell them that if they stay in this job they'll eventually get to be the director? That tech support is a career?
No. At best it's a stepping stone to something better.
I wouldn't say that a PhD is exactly overqualified, either, but there's a qualification mismatch
Whoahoho! That there's some mighty-fine management bullshit. I see what you're saying about different skillsets, but overqualified is overqualified. Call a spade a spade. A comSci PhD can be overqualified AND not have the skills for the job. "Qualifications" it's a word that means something.
I think I would sooner say that when you're fresh out of school, you're not qualified for much of anything at all.
That sounds like a pretty shitty school. Man, that reminds me of this poor technician. He was feeding money to (non-acredited) Kaplan University, trying to learn SQL. The teacher had to learn the topic right alongside the students. Tried to interview for a DBA position in IT to get out of tech support. Couldn't even join two tables. Damn shame.
All in all, I think the article is detrimental to society as college and education is still very much worth it, as long as you get a meaningful degree from a good school (and you're smart enough to be able to get it).
There is a shocking amount of college grads with bullshit liberal arts degree that are working help-desks or coffee shops when they graduate. But I don't see any such under-employment for STEM grads.
Sorry to be blunt about this, but tech support is the shit end of the tech industry.
"computer user support specialist" It's that one. Don't ask me why they gave it a funny name. They also call cable-pullers something weird. Maybe it's like "janitor" and has connotations.
Dealing with users, especially the typical sort that call tech support, is a horrible experience. You know, the PEBCAK sort. The ones which make for humors commentary if you didn't have to live it every day. Not something that people with options choose to do because they enjoy it.
If I were in your shoes, I'd avoid college (STEM) degrees, and stay the hell away from PHDs, as they'd probably just get bored/bitter. For as much shit as they shovel, I'd imagine most fortune 500 CEOs would do a pretty poor job of spreading manure. As much as the term "overqualified" stings, this is exactly the sort of situation it applies to.
So when you say that, as a guy hiring tech support workers, you don't look at education... that just kinda lends weight to my point.