This is ridiculous. Management is not a huge field to get into either. Management is supposed to be a small subset of the workforce. What do you do with everyone who doesn't get a job in management then? If you've got 1 manager per 10 workers, yet the number of engineers at age 50 is not ten times less than those at 25, what do you do?
This is the most important point. The population is ageing and the volume of coding needed by all branches of business is increasing. Yeah, there's the Indian coders but you can't have everyone on the Indian sub-continent be a coder. In time even the die hard managers will have to learn to accept older coders or lose deals because of not enough resources.
When I want to hire a decent programmer, I make interviews. I ask them to bring a sample of their code to talk about it, I discuss the specific technologies with them (DB, network, embedded - whatever shall be the focus of his work), I inquire about their engineering skills - do they have a specific approach to development, do they understand design. I evaluate their attitude and their asking price and then make my decision about who I should hire.
Again - why should age/experience disqualify someone?
Don't know about you, but if I found out I'd been scammed by two teenagers to the tune of a tenner for being greedy and gullible, I'd consider that a very cheap lesson and I might even have a laugh over it
I met such a 'greedy and gullible' person once. Only that he was not greedy at all. He was a 70 year old caretaker of the property I rented a room in. His wife was seriously ill, his car was breaking down, he was always looking for quick jobs - you get the picture. He asked me to help him type something in a computer and send some e-mail. Turned out he was about to jump on a scam.
I would not even call him 'gullible'. He was just desperate and dealing with something out of his experience. I explained him that any person offering free money to a man he does not know is probably a fraud. If that person requires any money upfront, it's *definitely* a scam! He got his lesson for free. Had he jumped on it, who knows how much money they would have sucked out of him before he would get the message.
Or shoot himself.
Because that's what desperate people often do after they get scammed. It's no lighthearted fun lesson you make it out to be.
Sounds even more like the Portugal government needs to start spending less *right* *now*! Or is that borrowing really helping with the debt with that 20 to 30 years time span in mind?
It's not just about the amount of money being spent it's also about the direction it's being spent towards.
Imagine your daughter would ask you for a raise in her budget. You would immediately ask what she wants to spend it for. Does she want to give out more money for clubbing? Is it for a special study program? You might also look at how much you are giving her already and what is she using it for. Is she buying a whole lot of expensive clothes? Is she flipping burgers in her spare time just to get by on her tight budget? And last but not least you would look at how much you yourself can afford to give her without putting a lot of hardship on all the other members of the family.
Now apply that line of thought on your own government. Chances are you live on planet Earth and your government is a spoiled wasteful daughter asking for more.
I don't think it's a 'less worse' option. I think it's a much better option. What happens when the government wants to spend more?
Before, they would simply get the money out of all citizen by inflation through printing an excess of money.
Now, they have these three options:
1) Borrow massively - hopefully this is not going to be as easy anymore after what happened in Greece
2) Cut the costs somewhere else - either directly cut some projects or, preferably, start operating more efficiently.
3) Ask their voters to pay for the excess expenditures which hopefully will prompt the general public to start asking why are they not focusing on the option number 2 instead.
It's just so amusing to watch the politicians sweat when they cannot simply print the money they need - they either need to cut their expenditures or ask their voters to pay more. I'm loving it!
Dude, RTFA! Here, let me give you an example of what they are really saying thre:
It all began in September 2008, when Google decided to celebrate its tenth birthday by pledging to commit $10 million in funding to the best world-saving idea.
This noble promise to better humanity resulted in glowing PR for Google, followed by two years of the following:
- Google avoiding dealing with the "overwhelming" response to the company's request for project proposals
- Google extending its own deadline for completing the project "indefinitely," giving no feedback to inquiring developers and proposal writers
- Google changing its mind on how it was going to choose winners and apply the funding
- Ultimately, a disappointing outcome
How does that work in with your farmer example? Perhaps - a farmer starting a project for deciding which tractor to buy, then running the project 1,5 years longer than planned because he's overwhelmed with the amount of possibilities on the market.
They are not saying doing R&D is wrong, they are saying Google is doing it wrong - planning poorly, starting research for the wrong reasons (PR), abandoning projects prematurely etc. I'm not sure whether they are right, but you are definitely criticizing the authors for the wrong reasons. It may very well be that they know more about running R&D projects than Google does.
The workforce will have to move to move around the sectors again like it did before. It moved away from agriculture, it moved away from manufacturing and it will move away from traditional IT roles as well (though I think IT will simply move to new areas). There's still plenty of space for the workforce - for instance in healthcare, infrastructure or in renewable resources.
My experience is that the kids don't want to do the same kind of programming we did in the 80's and early 90's. At that time it was mind-blowing for me to just have the computer do a simple animation of a couple of lines on the screen. No kid is interested in that anymore.
Later in the late 90's and early 2000's it was all about the internet. Kids wanted to write html and then later PHP etc. They still do it to an extent now but more often then not kids now-days just want to set up and customize packages and templates with very little programming effort (like Drupal).
There is one thing though that kids like to do in the 80's that has survived and flourished to this day - hardware/robotics. Kids love to play around with Arduino, especially with sensors, actuators, LED matrices etc. With all the content available on the internet, including how-to videos this is easier than ever and I think more people do these kind of things than before.
"Republic" means "no monarchy." "Democracy" means "elections."
That's not right at all.
"Republic'' means literally 'a public affair' or 'a state where government is subjected to the control of the public'. This is not a black-or-white thing - there is of course a degree to which the public controls the governance that differs from country to country.
"Democracy" means 'the rule of the majority'. It is a principle by which decisions can be made.
A new law can only be passed by a majority vote of the parliament. That's democracy, the rule of the majority. A single citizen can then bring the law to the highest court because he/she thinks it's unconstitutional. That's republic, the public control of governance.
By this measure UK is no less a Republic than France is because their monarch does not rule the country.
The stance you are taking here is exactly what I have done myself and what I see my friends doing all too often.
It's alibism and a confirmation bias as a consequence of it.
Try to be honest with yourself and open your eyes. Do you really not know any men that are in the same financial situation as you but have a much more success with women than you? The problem is that it is much easier for your mind (well, not just yours but anyone's) to accept as a fact that there is something wrong with all women rather then to admit there's something you are doing wrong. That's the alibism. This kind of thinking is even more common in exceptionally smart people. They are used to being right while everyone around is wrong.
And that's where the confirmation bias starts. You are looking for proofs that there is something wrong with women because it makes you feel better about yourself and disregard any evidence to the contrary. Snap out of it! Where do you think the millions of low-to-average earning americans have their wives from?
None of the traits I mentioned require humongous amounts of money. Here's a couple of pointers:
Work and travel in Australia or New Zealand - you'll need $1000 for a return ticket (if you buy it half a year upfront) and some $300 for the first couple of weeks before you get your first paycheck. Cue your stories about how you herded sheep on the mountains from Lord of the Rings.
Become a member of the Peace Corps and go work as a teacher to Africa. Your expenses will be payed for.
Become a member of your local volunteer theater and start acting
Learn how to draw/paint/dance. You don't have to have an exhibition in a New York gallery to impress.
Take your date to a star party. She's probably never seen something like that before and it will cost you exactly $0.
Go to Burning Man. You'll have stories to tell for years to come.
For that matter, join a storytelling group.
The possibilities are endless. Just stop that alibistic BS.
those traits are a symptom of having raw confidence and power
Not always. There is a fair amount of cases where it's the other way around - those traits lead one to develop raw confidence over time. The fact that an inspiring artistic person gets laid a lot will lead to him having a high level of self-confidence. A lot of these things are simply a miss-identification of cause and effect.
Another issue that confuses the matter is that men often lose their naturally attractive behavior in front of women - just become more cautious around them not wanting to 'spoil' anything or 'give a bad impression' and thus become boring. You might think this is a confidence issue but the solution to that problem is actually having even less confidence.
That's what worked for me - at one point of my life (after 4 years without a relationship) I figured I would never date a young attractive girl. I stopped worrying when around such ladies because I just considered them out of my scope (or rather - me out of their scope). That's when girls started dating me without me realizing it ('Oh, I thought you just wanted a bowling buddy...')
For men, it is success, power, confidence. Not saying that all women are gold diggers only after a wallet but confidence is something you gain overtime, with success, with power, with age.
Surprised to see that many opinions of this kind modded up here.
First of all - there is a lot of traits that women find attractive besides raw confidence or power. Here's a little list of them:
humorous/ witty
creative
adventurous
artistic
mysterious
classy
original
social
entertaining
inspiring
charismatic
There is also another way to put it:
Anything but boring and predictable!
Of course, the problem is that the 'not boring and not predictable' group has a high ratio of older (successful) men and jerks in it. But that's not women's fault.
That is not the right perspective. It's like putting a one time murderer "into perspective" by saying he managed not to kill anyone in the previous 50 Yyears of his life and therefore he must be doing something right.
Killings have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. perpetrators need to be punished and lessons need to be learned.
Customer purchased product from store.
Customer owns product from store.
Customer after some period of time sells product used to somebody else.
Store already got paid, so they have no legal interest, much less moral or ethical interest, in the second sale.
First Sale Doctrine covers this. Everywhere else in the physical world you cannot pull this fucking shit for two seconds without being called crazy greedy retarded sons of bitches.
No, it's even simpler than that:
You get whatever you agreed to pay for. If you agreed to buy a product under the conditions that you can't resell it and then whine about it then you are a moron.
If there is a general impression that the product should be resellable but it isn't and the producer didn't make a reasonable effort to communicate it to the customers then you can sue them
If you really are a biologist, I'm stunned you are making that tired old fire-is-alive analogy.
Let me break it down for you criterium by criterium:
1) Homeostasis - the ability to maintain internal conditions (acidity, temperature etc). No such thing in a fire.
2) Organization - life should consist of building blocks (such as organs) each having some specific functions. Fire? No way.
3) Growth - ok this works for fire.
4) Metabolism - transformation of chemical compounds and use of energy sources (light, thermal energy etc.) in such a way as to develop and support other life functions - the ones in this list. At best fire does that in a half-assed way.
5) Reproduction - the ability to produce (offspring) copies of itself. You could semantically argue whether fire grows or whether it reproduces itself. In any case - it does not do both. I.e. there should be a different mechanism for growth and reproduction - fire only does one type of chemical reaction when it spreads.
6) Adaptation - the ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Fire does not do that - it has a very specific set of conditions under which it works.
7) Reaction to stimuli - I'm not going to go into details here of what exactly a 'reaction' and a 'stimulus' is from a biological standpoint. Let's just say that fire does not react to stimuli the way bacteria do. Fire just obeys very basic physical laws. Picture a rock falling apart after being hit by a hammer - that's not what a reaction to a stimulus is meant in the biological context.
All in all fire fulfills one of these seven criteria for life quite well and another two in an half-assed manner requiring some serious mind bending. Yeah, a virus does not fulfill them all either (although it fulfills them much better than fire). That does not mean we don't know what life is. That means we're not sure wheather a virus can be considered alive - that it's half way between a non-living compound and a living organism.
The point was they went with the wrong number because they didn't know any better. That's amusing. If they actually bumped up the number because they thought pashmina shawls with only 30% silk wouldn't sell as well, that would be hilarious.
I think the case with Monsanto and spreading of modified genes is a problem completely opposite to entertainment and DRM.
First of all (to get this out of the way) - the Roundup Ready gene patent is different from software patents in that it really serves the original purpose of patents. Monsanto spend a lot of resources to develop something functional and want to produce it and sell it, but what they produced is too easy to copy. If something like this cannot be protected by patent law, companies will just not bother to develop new technologies in the field.
Second - there is a sort of DRM-like think in GM food. The plants can be modified to be infertile. You can grow a plant from the seed, but the seed the plant produces does not work anymore. This mechanism protects the manufacturer in that you always have to buy from him and it also removes the threat of unwanted spread of the gene.
Slashdot Mirror
Next week we'll examine the outdated gestures like the handshake and the military salute.
Jeesh, do kids born after 1500 even know what these things mean?!
This is ridiculous. Management is not a huge field to get into either. Management is supposed to be a small subset of the workforce. What do you do with everyone who doesn't get a job in management then? If you've got 1 manager per 10 workers, yet the number of engineers at age 50 is not ten times less than those at 25, what do you do?
This is the most important point. The population is ageing and the volume of coding needed by all branches of business is increasing. Yeah, there's the Indian coders but you can't have everyone on the Indian sub-continent be a coder. In time even the die hard managers will have to learn to accept older coders or lose deals because of not enough resources.
I don't see why age should matter at all here.
When I want to hire a decent programmer, I make interviews. I ask them to bring a sample of their code to talk about it, I discuss the specific technologies with them (DB, network, embedded - whatever shall be the focus of his work), I inquire about their engineering skills - do they have a specific approach to development, do they understand design. I evaluate their attitude and their asking price and then make my decision about who I should hire.
Again - why should age/experience disqualify someone?
The OP forgets all the money the targets lost buying inflated stock.
Don't know about you, but if I found out I'd been scammed by two teenagers to the tune of a tenner for being greedy and gullible, I'd consider that a very cheap lesson and I might even have a laugh over it
I met such a 'greedy and gullible' person once. Only that he was not greedy at all. He was a 70 year old caretaker of the property I rented a room in. His wife was seriously ill, his car was breaking down, he was always looking for quick jobs - you get the picture. He asked me to help him type something in a computer and send some e-mail. Turned out he was about to jump on a scam.
I would not even call him 'gullible'. He was just desperate and dealing with something out of his experience. I explained him that any person offering free money to a man he does not know is probably a fraud. If that person requires any money upfront, it's *definitely* a scam! He got his lesson for free. Had he jumped on it, who knows how much money they would have sucked out of him before he would get the message.
Or shoot himself.
Because that's what desperate people often do after they get scammed. It's no lighthearted fun lesson you make it out to be.
Sounds even more like the Portugal government needs to start spending less *right* *now*! Or is that borrowing really helping with the debt with that 20 to 30 years time span in mind?
It's not just about the amount of money being spent it's also about the direction it's being spent towards.
Imagine your daughter would ask you for a raise in her budget. You would immediately ask what she wants to spend it for. Does she want to give out more money for clubbing? Is it for a special study program? You might also look at how much you are giving her already and what is she using it for. Is she buying a whole lot of expensive clothes? Is she flipping burgers in her spare time just to get by on her tight budget? And last but not least you would look at how much you yourself can afford to give her without putting a lot of hardship on all the other members of the family.
Now apply that line of thought on your own government. Chances are you live on planet Earth and your government is a spoiled wasteful daughter asking for more.
I don't think it's a 'less worse' option. I think it's a much better option. What happens when the government wants to spend more?
Before, they would simply get the money out of all citizen by inflation through printing an excess of money.
Now, they have these three options:
1) Borrow massively - hopefully this is not going to be as easy anymore after what happened in Greece
2) Cut the costs somewhere else - either directly cut some projects or, preferably, start operating more efficiently.
3) Ask their voters to pay for the excess expenditures which hopefully will prompt the general public to start asking why are they not focusing on the option number 2 instead.
It's just so amusing to watch the politicians sweat when they cannot simply print the money they need - they either need to cut their expenditures or ask their voters to pay more. I'm loving it!
Or any music played with actual instruments, for that matter.
Did you even bother to look?
Exhibit 1 - Paris Combo
Exhibit 2 - Nouvelle Vague
Dude, RTFA! Here, let me give you an example of what they are really saying thre:
It all began in September 2008, when Google decided to celebrate its tenth birthday by pledging to commit $10 million in funding to the best world-saving idea. This noble promise to better humanity resulted in glowing PR for Google, followed by two years of the following:
- Google avoiding dealing with the "overwhelming" response to the company's request for project proposals
- Google extending its own deadline for completing the project "indefinitely," giving no feedback to inquiring developers and proposal writers
- Google changing its mind on how it was going to choose winners and apply the funding
- Ultimately, a disappointing outcome
How does that work in with your farmer example? Perhaps - a farmer starting a project for deciding which tractor to buy, then running the project 1,5 years longer than planned because he's overwhelmed with the amount of possibilities on the market.
They are not saying doing R&D is wrong, they are saying Google is doing it wrong - planning poorly, starting research for the wrong reasons (PR), abandoning projects prematurely etc. I'm not sure whether they are right, but you are definitely criticizing the authors for the wrong reasons. It may very well be that they know more about running R&D projects than Google does.
The workforce will have to move to move around the sectors again like it did before. It moved away from agriculture, it moved away from manufacturing and it will move away from traditional IT roles as well (though I think IT will simply move to new areas). There's still plenty of space for the workforce - for instance in healthcare, infrastructure or in renewable resources.
My experience is that the kids don't want to do the same kind of programming we did in the 80's and early 90's. At that time it was mind-blowing for me to just have the computer do a simple animation of a couple of lines on the screen. No kid is interested in that anymore.
Later in the late 90's and early 2000's it was all about the internet. Kids wanted to write html and then later PHP etc. They still do it to an extent now but more often then not kids now-days just want to set up and customize packages and templates with very little programming effort (like Drupal).
There is one thing though that kids like to do in the 80's that has survived and flourished to this day - hardware/robotics. Kids love to play around with Arduino, especially with sensors, actuators, LED matrices etc. With all the content available on the internet, including how-to videos this is easier than ever and I think more people do these kind of things than before.
"Republic" means "no monarchy." "Democracy" means "elections."
That's not right at all.
"Republic'' means literally 'a public affair' or 'a state where government is subjected to the control of the public'. This is not a black-or-white thing - there is of course a degree to which the public controls the governance that differs from country to country.
"Democracy" means 'the rule of the majority'. It is a principle by which decisions can be made.
A new law can only be passed by a majority vote of the parliament. That's democracy, the rule of the majority. A single citizen can then bring the law to the highest court because he/she thinks it's unconstitutional. That's republic, the public control of governance.
By this measure UK is no less a Republic than France is because their monarch does not rule the country.
That does not really address the question of food scarcity - unless they ate 10 000 to 100 000 times more food than a peasant.
The stance you are taking here is exactly what I have done myself and what I see my friends doing all too often.
It's alibism and a confirmation bias as a consequence of it.
Try to be honest with yourself and open your eyes. Do you really not know any men that are in the same financial situation as you but have a much more success with women than you? The problem is that it is much easier for your mind (well, not just yours but anyone's) to accept as a fact that there is something wrong with all women rather then to admit there's something you are doing wrong. That's the alibism. This kind of thinking is even more common in exceptionally smart people. They are used to being right while everyone around is wrong.
And that's where the confirmation bias starts. You are looking for proofs that there is something wrong with women because it makes you feel better about yourself and disregard any evidence to the contrary. Snap out of it! Where do you think the millions of low-to-average earning americans have their wives from?
None of the traits I mentioned require humongous amounts of money. Here's a couple of pointers:
Work and travel in Australia or New Zealand - you'll need $1000 for a return ticket (if you buy it half a year upfront) and some $300 for the first couple of weeks before you get your first paycheck. Cue your stories about how you herded sheep on the mountains from Lord of the Rings.
Become a member of the Peace Corps and go work as a teacher to Africa. Your expenses will be payed for.
Become a member of your local volunteer theater and start acting
Learn how to draw/paint/dance. You don't have to have an exhibition in a New York gallery to impress.
Take your date to a star party. She's probably never seen something like that before and it will cost you exactly $0.
Go to Burning Man. You'll have stories to tell for years to come.
For that matter, join a storytelling group.
The possibilities are endless. Just stop that alibistic BS.
those traits are a symptom of having raw confidence and power
Not always. There is a fair amount of cases where it's the other way around - those traits lead one to develop raw confidence over time. The fact that an inspiring artistic person gets laid a lot will lead to him having a high level of self-confidence. A lot of these things are simply a miss-identification of cause and effect.
Another issue that confuses the matter is that men often lose their naturally attractive behavior in front of women - just become more cautious around them not wanting to 'spoil' anything or 'give a bad impression' and thus become boring. You might think this is a confidence issue but the solution to that problem is actually having even less confidence.
That's what worked for me - at one point of my life (after 4 years without a relationship) I figured I would never date a young attractive girl. I stopped worrying when around such ladies because I just considered them out of my scope (or rather - me out of their scope). That's when girls started dating me without me realizing it ('Oh, I thought you just wanted a bowling buddy...')
For men, it is success, power, confidence. Not saying that all women are gold diggers only after a wallet but confidence is something you gain overtime, with success, with power, with age.
Surprised to see that many opinions of this kind modded up here.
First of all - there is a lot of traits that women find attractive besides raw confidence or power. Here's a little list of them:
humorous/ witty
creative
adventurous
artistic
mysterious
classy
original
social
entertaining
inspiring
charismatic
There is also another way to put it:
Anything but boring and predictable!
Of course, the problem is that the 'not boring and not predictable' group has a high ratio of older (successful) men and jerks in it. But that's not women's fault.
has been effectively immortalized in engineering ethics classes
Herein lies the problem. The lesson needs to be taught in Management 101 classes.
That is not the right perspective. It's like putting a one time murderer "into perspective" by saying he managed not to kill anyone in the previous 50 Yyears of his life and therefore he must be doing something right.
Killings have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. perpetrators need to be punished and lessons need to be learned.
However, it is really this fucking simple:
Customer purchased product from store. Customer owns product from store. Customer after some period of time sells product used to somebody else. Store already got paid, so they have no legal interest, much less moral or ethical interest, in the second sale.
First Sale Doctrine covers this. Everywhere else in the physical world you cannot pull this fucking shit for two seconds without being called crazy greedy retarded sons of bitches.
No, it's even simpler than that:
You get whatever you agreed to pay for. If you agreed to buy a product under the conditions that you can't resell it and then whine about it then you are a moron.
If there is a general impression that the product should be resellable but it isn't and the producer didn't make a reasonable effort to communicate it to the customers then you can sue them
To boot, Dr Rev MLK Jr would have made the speech without pecuniary incentive...
I wonder why he sued Twentieth Century Fox for spreading his speech then.
If you really are a biologist, I'm stunned you are making that tired old fire-is-alive analogy.
Let me break it down for you criterium by criterium:
1) Homeostasis - the ability to maintain internal conditions (acidity, temperature etc). No such thing in a fire.
2) Organization - life should consist of building blocks (such as organs) each having some specific functions. Fire? No way.
3) Growth - ok this works for fire.
4) Metabolism - transformation of chemical compounds and use of energy sources (light, thermal energy etc.) in such a way as to develop and support other life functions - the ones in this list. At best fire does that in a half-assed way.
5) Reproduction - the ability to produce (offspring) copies of itself. You could semantically argue whether fire grows or whether it reproduces itself. In any case - it does not do both. I.e. there should be a different mechanism for growth and reproduction - fire only does one type of chemical reaction when it spreads.
6) Adaptation - the ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Fire does not do that - it has a very specific set of conditions under which it works.
7) Reaction to stimuli - I'm not going to go into details here of what exactly a 'reaction' and a 'stimulus' is from a biological standpoint. Let's just say that fire does not react to stimuli the way bacteria do. Fire just obeys very basic physical laws. Picture a rock falling apart after being hit by a hammer - that's not what a reaction to a stimulus is meant in the biological context.
All in all fire fulfills one of these seven criteria for life quite well and another two in an half-assed manner requiring some serious mind bending. Yeah, a virus does not fulfill them all either (although it fulfills them much better than fire). That does not mean we don't know what life is. That means we're not sure wheather a virus can be considered alive - that it's half way between a non-living compound and a living organism.
But fire? Oh, please...
The point was they went with the wrong number because they didn't know any better. That's amusing. If they actually bumped up the number because they thought pashmina shawls with only 30% silk wouldn't sell as well, that would be hilarious.
I think the case with Monsanto and spreading of modified genes is a problem completely opposite to entertainment and DRM.
First of all (to get this out of the way) - the Roundup Ready gene patent is different from software patents in that it really serves the original purpose of patents. Monsanto spend a lot of resources to develop something functional and want to produce it and sell it, but what they produced is too easy to copy. If something like this cannot be protected by patent law, companies will just not bother to develop new technologies in the field.
Second - there is a sort of DRM-like think in GM food. The plants can be modified to be infertile. You can grow a plant from the seed, but the seed the plant produces does not work anymore. This mechanism protects the manufacturer in that you always have to buy from him and it also removes the threat of unwanted spread of the gene.
In other words - in this case DRM is a win-win