In embedded programming there's still plenty of opportunity for ground-up design. Eg. writing a new driver for custom or unsupported hardware, creating custom applications to do whatever unique thing your widget does, etc.
Yes, you tend to get into framework-hell on the GUI side, and occasionally in other areas as well. But even then I get a sense of pride knowing that I made these things work on a platform they were never designed for.
I had this discussion recently with a restaurant/bar owner, but it applies to any sort of privately-owned business. Simply put, the owners put up the money to start the company, and they ultimately reap the consequences for any mistakes. Therefore, they have the exclusive right to take risks with their company/money.
When you (an employee) take a risk, you're risking someone else's money (specifically, the owners'). So they make rules to prevent employees from taking such risks, and punish those who do. But when they take a risk, they're risking their own money; it's a very different thing from an ethical perspective. Of course, if there are multiple owners then they share the potential loss; but if they all agree about taking that risk, then it amounts to the same thing.
As other posters have noted, current social and cultural conditions in the USA not only allow hypomania to run unchecked, but in some cases actively promote it (eg. universal self-esteem campaigns).
Uhhh...huh? Where? I know in the 70s-early 90s those kinds of campaigns were common, but late 90s to the present I haven't seen much evidence of this. Are there any you can link to?
The situation is indeed improving, but plenty of schools and organizations (and individual parents) are behind the curve and still promoting self-esteem with an "awards/praise for everything" approach. And the kids who are in high-school and college today were in on the tail end of the universal self-esteem bandwagon days, so they can still be considered products of that era.
It's also important to realize that the deliberate campaigns of 20 years ago become the quiet status quo culture of today. People aren't yelling about self-esteem simply because they are already saturated in a culture of self-esteem promotion. Though the confidence-building programs have evolved over the years to reject the worst excesses, they certainly do exist in schools today; they're just a standard part of the curriculum, and are executed without much fanfare.
Here's an article that discusses both the evolution of self-esteem programs and the changes they wrought on kids hitting college in 2005 (just two years prior to last date included in the original topic study):
As other posters have noted, current social and cultural conditions in the USA not only allow hypomania to run unchecked, but in some cases actively promote it (eg. universal self-esteem campaigns). The general assumption so far seems to be that this a negative outcome, the result of decadent living and misguided parenting. But what if it's actually advantageous?
In the past, the flighty, risk-taking behavior that characterizes the condition had clear disadvantages; eg., spend all your money, and you might starve when times get bad. But it also has clear advantages; people with lots of energy, drive, and optimism tend to be more successful in modern social/business life.
The thing that's changed is that in our current society, it's almost impossible to starve to death unless you have addictions, psychosis, or other major obstacles to normal functioning. Simply put, there's always a way to get by, *especially* if you're energetic and positively motivated. Meanwhile, the advantages associated with hypomanic personality traits are as strong as ever. I would argue that things have moved to a point where the benefits of some mild degree of hypomania outweigh the risks.
Yes, the "self-esteem brigade" may be raising intolerably flighty, frivolous young adults, but in the end that may the best thing for them. (At least until TEOTWAWKI hits, and those young whipper-snappers are the first to get eaten by the zombies;-)
You've got a point about big corporations. But some of the worst office politics I've seen has been in very small, privately owned businesses. You get the same empire-building, favoritism and cronyism as in big bureaucracies, plus blatant corruption and things being run on the side to line individual managers' pockets. And compared to larger companies, there aren't nearly as many options for trying to go over or around a troublesome individual.
If a mega-corporation is like a Communist state, then many small local companies are like third-world dictatorships...
Actually, it shouldn't be too hard for vegetarians. Different plant food groups have different protein balances; for instance, beans (except soybeans) are deficient in methionine, one of the ones mentioned in the article. That's why vegetarians are encouraged to balance their protein intake by mixing different food types, eg. beans & rice (grains are deficient in a different amino acid).
All they'd have to do is restrict themselves to one plant protein source, and make sure they're eating just enough to fulfill their overall protein requirement (too much and even the deficient amino would be present in a high enough dose to wreck the effect). The rest of their diet would come from low-protein foods like oil, sugar and low-calorie-density vegetables. It wouldn't be much fun, but it ought to be doable, assuming of course that the side effects of a specific amino deficiency didn't make it infeasible.
Yep. From what I've heard, ISP field technicians in some parts of South America are afraid to carry anything that even resembles a laptop/PC, because it's likely to trigger a robbery or vehicle break-in. And these are locals on the job, not foreign tourists with no ties to the community.
This is a really good point, actually. They seem to have tested everything except what this type of multitasker would actually be practiced at: monitoring multiple information streams at once.
I think the last test was intended to check for this, but the researchers failed to understand the way media-multitaskers work. I think that media-multitaskers generally let their attention flop around between streams on its own, relying on intuition and instinct to draw them to the most interesting and memorable bits of each stream. Asking them to consciously switch their attention between tasks screwed that up completely.
Note that this is different from the sort of multitasking required to actually perform two active tasks. The researchers obviously failed to make the distinction between true multi-tasking vs. media multi-consumption.
Actually, I think this study suggests that multitaskers try to get around this problem by not formally context-switching, but rather just reacting to everything as it comes in and attracts attention. Ideally this would be like an interrupt-driven system, where rather than trying to monitor and decide when to switch tasks, you simply service interrupts as they come in using a minimal context. The problem is that the people who do this regularly have no way to "disable interrupts"; they're always distracted by other information flows regardless of the importance of the primary task.
Lightsabers
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.
Just because the light-blade doesn't extend out to protect the hand doesn't mean that the EM(?) force-bottle doesn't. There could very well be an invisible hand-guard-field there, designed just to prevent this kind of move. Maybe such a swelling in the containment-field is even a natural and necessary feature to properly contain the light-beam near the base of the "blade".
I think that the entire point of the stormtrooper uniform is to emphasize the mechanistic, monolithic nature of stormtroopers. It also makes sense in the context of stormtroopers all being clones.
If you accept the prequels as canon (a big 'if'), then this makes even more sense. Up until Ep. II, most ground battles were fought by droid armies. In that context, it seems obvious that the Camino-ans dressed up the clones in droid-like armor in order to make their use (and deaths) more palatable. The uniforms de-humanize the clones and thus allow the buyers to 'forget' that they're actually sentient beings.
The fact that it also makes them more intimidating doesn't hurt either, especially from Palpatine's perspective.
Someone with a high BMI might be overweight - or they might be in really good shape and have lots of muscle.
Just something to think about.
I was thinking that too, until I noticed that they claimed to control for physical activity. So unless those people throwing off the curve are all genetic freaks who grow muscle sitting around on their couch, that shouldn't be it.
Of course there's no way of knowing if they controlled for physical activitty *correctly* or adequately...
A rather cynical way to put it, but somewhat true. But it's usually not a coldly rational gold-digging impulse; rather, women are attracted to high-status and good-provider indicators *on an instinctive level*.
Most women are smart enough to see through the more obvious displays intellectually, but that doesn't change the way it makes them feel... Hence the apparent disconnect between what they say and what they do in the dating arena.
I would guess that it's not so much the relative security of the two browsers, as it is the IT group's ability/willingness to vet another browser for security purposes.
They don't understand FF, and they don't want to take the time to learn all its ins & outs. So they declare it a "security risk" simply because they don't *know* what security holes might lurk there. In that sense it *is* a security risk for them, since it has not been tested for secure interaction with their site.
They undoubtedly know that IE has security holes, but they know what most of them are and feel comfortable with the countermeasures they've taken for those specific flaws. Whether their confidence is justified is another matter, of course...
Which is simpler? One man having an accident, or several, perhaps dozens of people conspiring to fake said accident? Strictly speaking, an accident is still the 'simpler' theory by Occam's definition.
"UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan images thousands of blood cells instantly by placing them on an off-the-shelf camera sensor and lighting them with a filtered-light source (coherent light, for you science buffs)."
So instead of Occam's Razor, this is Ozcan's RAZR?
I agree that CS students need to learn the underlying hardware/CPU architecture at some point early on. I don't think I *really* understood C/C++ pointers until I studied Computer Architecture.
However, I don't think CS 101 is the place to do that (beyond a basic overview), and certainly not by forcing students to write assembler. If nothing else, you'll scare away a lot of students who are on the fence regarding their major, and waste the time of others who just want to learn how to write a simple program for a webpage or script or whatever.
Remember, this is not just the first course for committed CS majors, it's also the introductory course for the casually curious. You want to give them some basic skills with commonly used programming languages/paradigms so that even if they never take another CS course, they'll still have learned something useful. You also want to give them an overview of what CS majors and professional programmers actually do on a regular basis, and for most of us that's NOT assembler programming.
My guess? They're looking for someone gullible. If you sound gullible they'll talk to you; if you sound annoyed or skeptical, they hang up. Not sure about hanging up as soon as he presses a button, though; maybe they get few enough hits that they're not always ready to take the call when it comes? Or maybe they're listening and hear him quietly curse them out before pressing the button...
This is exactly what the studios want. Those who can afford it will buy BD, those who can't will buy DVD. And people in the middle will buy their favorites on BD, but still be tempted to make impulse buys in the cheaper DVD format.
This is called price discrimination or product differentiation, depending how it's achieved, and it's a proven method of maximizing profits. Get the most out of those who are willing to pay more, without pricing the casual buyer out of the market...
Of course Sony would like to see Blu-Ray win marketshare and become dominant, but I think the (other) studios would be perfectly happy keeping it as a niche format.
Very true. However, one point you seem to be missing is that the DRM turns off a large chunk of the minority that *does* care about HD resolution and other technical advancements of Blu-Ray. Granted, the more-money-than-sense videophiles don't care, they'll pay for anything; but the geek faction of the early-adopter market avoids Blu-Ray discs because they can't be as easily ripped for viewing on the go, as well as philosophical reasons.
"Shadow appears to have been mostly confined to the Netherlands, as the messages and phishing hooks were all sent in Dutch, but had apparently infected some US systems as well, as the FBI is credited for assisting on the case."
...
"Once Shadow was secured, the police contacted Kaspersky Labs about providing a means to neutralize the malware."
But one of the gap hypotheses was that girls are better at basic computation, while boys (either on average or at the extremes of ability) are better at complex theoretical math. If you eliminate the harder problems, you're largely eliminating the complex mental gymnastics that the hypothesis proposes to be male-favoring. What you're left with is proportionally more computation (number crunching), which would favor the female skill-set. So the decline in difficult questions could very well explain the reduction in the gap at higher grade levels, where those harder questions used to be introduced...
It's only vigilantism if there's a real justice system that's being subverted. In Fable the Heroes' Guild, while essentially mercenary, seemed to be the closest thing they had to a real police force out in the countryside. So taking out bandits was part of the job description...
Slashdot Mirror
In embedded programming there's still plenty of opportunity for ground-up design. Eg. writing a new driver for custom or unsupported hardware, creating custom applications to do whatever unique thing your widget does, etc.
Yes, you tend to get into framework-hell on the GUI side, and occasionally in other areas as well. But even then I get a sense of pride knowing that I made these things work on a platform they were never designed for.
I had this discussion recently with a restaurant/bar owner, but it applies to any sort of privately-owned business. Simply put, the owners put up the money to start the company, and they ultimately reap the consequences for any mistakes. Therefore, they have the exclusive right to take risks with their company/money.
When you (an employee) take a risk, you're risking someone else's money (specifically, the owners'). So they make rules to prevent employees from taking such risks, and punish those who do. But when they take a risk, they're risking their own money; it's a very different thing from an ethical perspective. Of course, if there are multiple owners then they share the potential loss; but if they all agree about taking that risk, then it amounts to the same thing.
As other posters have noted, current social and cultural conditions in the USA not only allow hypomania to run unchecked, but in some cases actively promote it (eg. universal self-esteem campaigns).
Uhhh...huh? Where? I know in the 70s-early 90s those kinds of campaigns were common, but late 90s to the present I haven't seen much evidence of this. Are there any you can link to?
The situation is indeed improving, but plenty of schools and organizations (and individual parents) are behind the curve and still promoting self-esteem with an "awards/praise for everything" approach. And the kids who are in high-school and college today were in on the tail end of the universal self-esteem bandwagon days, so they can still be considered products of that era.
It's also important to realize that the deliberate campaigns of 20 years ago become the quiet status quo culture of today. People aren't yelling about self-esteem simply because they are already saturated in a culture of self-esteem promotion. Though the confidence-building programs have evolved over the years to reject the worst excesses, they certainly do exist in schools today; they're just a standard part of the curriculum, and are executed without much fanfare.
Here's an article that discusses both the evolution of self-esteem programs and the changes they wrought on kids hitting college in 2005 (just two years prior to last date included in the original topic study):
http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2005-02-15-self-esteem_x.htm
As other posters have noted, current social and cultural conditions in the USA not only allow hypomania to run unchecked, but in some cases actively promote it (eg. universal self-esteem campaigns). The general assumption so far seems to be that this a negative outcome, the result of decadent living and misguided parenting. But what if it's actually advantageous?
In the past, the flighty, risk-taking behavior that characterizes the condition had clear disadvantages; eg., spend all your money, and you might starve when times get bad. But it also has clear advantages; people with lots of energy, drive, and optimism tend to be more successful in modern social/business life.
The thing that's changed is that in our current society, it's almost impossible to starve to death unless you have addictions, psychosis, or other major obstacles to normal functioning. Simply put, there's always a way to get by, *especially* if you're energetic and positively motivated. Meanwhile, the advantages associated with hypomanic personality traits are as strong as ever. I would argue that things have moved to a point where the benefits of some mild degree of hypomania outweigh the risks.
Yes, the "self-esteem brigade" may be raising intolerably flighty, frivolous young adults, but in the end that may the best thing for them. (At least until TEOTWAWKI hits, and those young whipper-snappers are the first to get eaten by the zombies ;-)
You've got a point about big corporations. But some of the worst office politics I've seen has been in very small, privately owned businesses. You get the same empire-building, favoritism and cronyism as in big bureaucracies, plus blatant corruption and things being run on the side to line individual managers' pockets. And compared to larger companies, there aren't nearly as many options for trying to go over or around a troublesome individual.
If a mega-corporation is like a Communist state, then many small local companies are like third-world dictatorships...
Actually, it shouldn't be too hard for vegetarians. Different plant food groups have different protein balances; for instance, beans (except soybeans) are deficient in methionine, one of the ones mentioned in the article. That's why vegetarians are encouraged to balance their protein intake by mixing different food types, eg. beans & rice (grains are deficient in a different amino acid).
All they'd have to do is restrict themselves to one plant protein source, and make sure they're eating just enough to fulfill their overall protein requirement (too much and even the deficient amino would be present in a high enough dose to wreck the effect). The rest of their diet would come from low-protein foods like oil, sugar and low-calorie-density vegetables. It wouldn't be much fun, but it ought to be doable, assuming of course that the side effects of a specific amino deficiency didn't make it infeasible.
Yep. From what I've heard, ISP field technicians in some parts of South America are afraid to carry anything that even resembles a laptop/PC, because it's likely to trigger a robbery or vehicle break-in. And these are locals on the job, not foreign tourists with no ties to the community.
I'm waiting for one of those cool lounge chairs from Wall-E...
I think the last test was intended to check for this, but the researchers failed to understand the way media-multitaskers work. I think that media-multitaskers generally let their attention flop around between streams on its own, relying on intuition and instinct to draw them to the most interesting and memorable bits of each stream. Asking them to consciously switch their attention between tasks screwed that up completely.
Note that this is different from the sort of multitasking required to actually perform two active tasks. The researchers obviously failed to make the distinction between true multi-tasking vs. media multi-consumption.
Actually, I think this study suggests that multitaskers try to get around this problem by not formally context-switching, but rather just reacting to everything as it comes in and attracts attention. Ideally this would be like an interrupt-driven system, where rather than trying to monitor and decide when to switch tasks, you simply service interrupts as they come in using a minimal context. The problem is that the people who do this regularly have no way to "disable interrupts"; they're always distracted by other information flows regardless of the importance of the primary task.
Lightsabers Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.
Just because the light-blade doesn't extend out to protect the hand doesn't mean that the EM(?) force-bottle doesn't. There could very well be an invisible hand-guard-field there, designed just to prevent this kind of move. Maybe such a swelling in the containment-field is even a natural and necessary feature to properly contain the light-beam near the base of the "blade".
I think that the entire point of the stormtrooper uniform is to emphasize the mechanistic, monolithic nature of stormtroopers. It also makes sense in the context of stormtroopers all being clones.
If you accept the prequels as canon (a big 'if'), then this makes even more sense. Up until Ep. II, most ground battles were fought by droid armies. In that context, it seems obvious that the Camino-ans dressed up the clones in droid-like armor in order to make their use (and deaths) more palatable. The uniforms de-humanize the clones and thus allow the buyers to 'forget' that they're actually sentient beings. The fact that it also makes them more intimidating doesn't hurt either, especially from Palpatine's perspective.
Someone with a high BMI might be overweight - or they might be in really good shape and have lots of muscle. Just something to think about.
I was thinking that too, until I noticed that they claimed to control for physical activity. So unless those people throwing off the curve are all genetic freaks who grow muscle sitting around on their couch, that shouldn't be it.
Of course there's no way of knowing if they controlled for physical activitty *correctly* or adequately...
A rather cynical way to put it, but somewhat true. But it's usually not a coldly rational gold-digging impulse; rather, women are attracted to high-status and good-provider indicators *on an instinctive level*.
Most women are smart enough to see through the more obvious displays intellectually, but that doesn't change the way it makes them feel... Hence the apparent disconnect between what they say and what they do in the dating arena.
I would guess that it's not so much the relative security of the two browsers, as it is the IT group's ability/willingness to vet another browser for security purposes.
They don't understand FF, and they don't want to take the time to learn all its ins & outs. So they declare it a "security risk" simply because they don't *know* what security holes might lurk there. In that sense it *is* a security risk for them, since it has not been tested for secure interaction with their site.
They undoubtedly know that IE has security holes, but they know what most of them are and feel comfortable with the countermeasures they've taken for those specific flaws. Whether their confidence is justified is another matter, of course...
Which is simpler? One man having an accident, or several, perhaps dozens of people conspiring to fake said accident? Strictly speaking, an accident is still the 'simpler' theory by Occam's definition.
"UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan images thousands of blood cells instantly by placing them on an off-the-shelf camera sensor and lighting them with a filtered-light source (coherent light, for you science buffs)."
So instead of Occam's Razor, this is Ozcan's RAZR?
I agree that CS students need to learn the underlying hardware/CPU architecture at some point early on. I don't think I *really* understood C/C++ pointers until I studied Computer Architecture.
However, I don't think CS 101 is the place to do that (beyond a basic overview), and certainly not by forcing students to write assembler. If nothing else, you'll scare away a lot of students who are on the fence regarding their major, and waste the time of others who just want to learn how to write a simple program for a webpage or script or whatever.
Remember, this is not just the first course for committed CS majors, it's also the introductory course for the casually curious. You want to give them some basic skills with commonly used programming languages/paradigms so that even if they never take another CS course, they'll still have learned something useful. You also want to give them an overview of what CS majors and professional programmers actually do on a regular basis, and for most of us that's NOT assembler programming.
My guess? They're looking for someone gullible. If you sound gullible they'll talk to you; if you sound annoyed or skeptical, they hang up. Not sure about hanging up as soon as he presses a button, though; maybe they get few enough hits that they're not always ready to take the call when it comes? Or maybe they're listening and hear him quietly curse them out before pressing the button...
This is exactly what the studios want. Those who can afford it will buy BD, those who can't will buy DVD. And people in the middle will buy their favorites on BD, but still be tempted to make impulse buys in the cheaper DVD format.
This is called price discrimination or product differentiation, depending how it's achieved, and it's a proven method of maximizing profits. Get the most out of those who are willing to pay more, without pricing the casual buyer out of the market...
Of course Sony would like to see Blu-Ray win marketshare and become dominant, but I think the (other) studios would be perfectly happy keeping it as a niche format.
Very true. However, one point you seem to be missing is that the DRM turns off a large chunk of the minority that *does* care about HD resolution and other technical advancements of Blu-Ray. Granted, the more-money-than-sense videophiles don't care, they'll pay for anything; but the geek faction of the early-adopter market avoids Blu-Ray discs because they can't be as easily ripped for viewing on the go, as well as philosophical reasons.
they need the botnet resources for ddosing georgia
The sad thing is, you might be right...
Were the missing spam-mails mostly in Dutch?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080814-police-nab-shadow-creators-force-botnet-to-commit-suicide.html
"Shadow appears to have been mostly confined to the Netherlands, as the messages and phishing hooks were all sent in Dutch, but had apparently infected some US systems as well, as the FBI is credited for assisting on the case."
...
"Once Shadow was secured, the police contacted Kaspersky Labs about providing a means to neutralize the malware."
But one of the gap hypotheses was that girls are better at basic computation, while boys (either on average or at the extremes of ability) are better at complex theoretical math. If you eliminate the harder problems, you're largely eliminating the complex mental gymnastics that the hypothesis proposes to be male-favoring. What you're left with is proportionally more computation (number crunching), which would favor the female skill-set. So the decline in difficult questions could very well explain the reduction in the gap at higher grade levels, where those harder questions used to be introduced...
It's only vigilantism if there's a real justice system that's being subverted. In Fable the Heroes' Guild, while essentially mercenary, seemed to be the closest thing they had to a real police force out in the countryside. So taking out bandits was part of the job description...