All government is income redistribution. Doesn't matter what form it is. It's all about moving money from one pile to another. The problem with the left "more government" side is that it moves more money around, which means there are more incentives and opportunities for corruption. Consider the extreme left, pure socialism, where the only people with wealth are in government. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
It's not an indictment of the left wanting to do more to help the disadvantaged, its an indictment of doing it in ways that are very high level, instead of under local control. Doing things at a local level leads to innovation (more different programs running and comparing notes to become more effective over time), programs that are customized for different situations (the economic situation in, say, Minneapolis is far different from the one in Detroit, although in Obama's speech yesterday he conflated the two rather badly), and programs that have less money running through a single person's hands, so smaller amounts of money and less reward for skimming a few percent off the top.
Constitutionally, this country should be doing far less than it does at the federal level, the amount of money that flows through the federal government is staggering, as is the amount that ends up wasted on pork barrel projects.
Kucinich is much more liberal than Obama. The only good thing that came out of the primary process was eliminating him. Otherwise, I think the democrats picked the least electable candidate out of the bunch they had left. Obama won more delegates, but the only states he won by a large margin are traditionally democratic states anyway, and the states that Hillary won are the battleground must-win states for Democrats in the general election. You know, all the flyover states that Obama wrote off to his friends in San Francisco a few weeks back.
McCain is the MOST anti-torture candidate. THE MOST. PERIOD. He was extremely outspoken on the topic in the Senate, it's one of his areas of contention and strife between him and the current president. He has the moral high ground on this. He's literally been there, done that on the receiving end.
The differences in the primary processes really show how the parties work.
The republican primaries are about winning states--it's a winner take all for each state. It's a warmup for the election, where it's not a total popular vote that matters, but a state-by-state election. So the person who wins the most big states wins.
The democratic primaries apportion delegates from each state. Obama won the democratic nomination, but if it was done winner-take-all, as the real election is, he would have lost to Hillary, who did much better in key states like Ohio. Polling numbers also show she did better than Obama in Florida and Michigan, which weren't allowed to seat any/all (didn't follow up on how that turned out) of their delegates.
And as is typical, the Democrats picked the person who agreed most with their views. The Republicans picked the person who they thought would be the best candidate. So in essence, the Democrats picked nearly the worst possible candidate offered, while the Republicans picked someone who can actually win a general election. The republicans chose someone who, compared to the other candidates, is more of a centrist and has more of a reputation for working cross-party to get things done, while the democrats chose the most polarizing, and almost the most liberal (Kucinich was a candidate, remember) of their options.
The election itself will be about who can hold and mobilize their base support the best (something the Republicans are very good at, while the Democrats seem to suck at it) and grab the most non-affiliated voters (like me).
Let's see...I have a choice between an Ivy League lawyer, married to another Ivy League lawyer, who basically thinks I'm a depressed, oppressed, poor, and underprivileged person because I don't live on the east coast or the west coast...
Or a geniuine war hero married to a woman who owns a beer distributorship.
I've been impressed with their ability to separate their religion and science. I think it's a forward looking, intelligent, and correct view that is backed by their theology and will not drive people away.
When they figure out the "every sperm is sacred" conundrum and start advocating reasonable and responsible behavior with respect to family planning they might actually start looking like an institution I can respect on all of its merits. The Catholic Church has done a lot of good in society through Catholic charities, hospitals, and education. I really hope they manage to figure out that maybe, just maybe, really poor families in urban areas shouldn't have 5 or 10 kids, that perhaps the industrial revolution may be here to stay, and having a large family isn't a moral imperative anymore.
I have other things I can spend money on, so this'll take a back seat. It disappoints me that I won't be able to play with Spore, but not so much that I'm willing to let them know how much I play it, when, what time of day, what my shopping habits are, and how best to advertise to me.
And what happens in 5 years when I want to pull it out and play it again? I'm sure it will play right? Just like all those people who bought music from Microsoft thought "Plays for Sure" meant it played for sure.
All right. A little setup so my words have some weight.
I graduated from an engineering school (University of Missouri-Rolla) in December 1993 with a Computer Science degree. I've been in the industry for 14 years. I've done interviewing, hiring, and mentoring in addition to my normal activities (system/database admin). I've done consulting, worked in big companies, small companies, and medium-size companies. In short, I've seen just about everything.
For career development, to be able to compete over a very long term, you need to have a solid bedrock of theory in how things work. Theory provides you with the frames of reference you can hang everything else on. If you understand how compilers do what they do, learning any computer language becomes trivial, because all languages basically do the same thing. The same applies to operating systems, queuing systems, security systems, and so on. There's a lot of theory, a lot of math involved, but it's math you need, and it's math you'll use.
Back in my day (barf) we had a class called Operating Systems, it was taught by the department chair (an awesome guy) and basically the project was to write a program in C. There was no class in C offered. There was no teaching of C in the class. K&R was on the "recommended reading" list. That's it. Thrown in the pool and see if you can swim. I'm good with that, because you know, that's what it's like in the real world most of the time.
You *need* theory to survive in the workplace and do well. You will not be able to compete without learning it. Any other education you get that seems more "practical" will likely be out of date before you graduate.
That said, for getting that first job, you need experience. Why? Because getting past the resume desk of 99% of all companies is a matter of buzzword bingo. That sounds dilbertesque, but it's unfortunately very true. The HR person at a company, even 20-30 person companies have someone who looks at resumes and filters them, has an enormous amount of power over your future, and no clue at all what all those letters mean but their boss said they all had to be there, in that order, on your resume. Which means you need to find a summer job at least (if not an internship) to provide you with enough buzzwords to get a match on that particular person's bingo card so you can talk to a real person. This sounds cynical, it sounds depressing, but it's unfortunately true: 90% of all resumes get rejected by HR because they didn't have the right buzzwords on. And the HR person reviewing the resumes has no more idea what all those words mean than your grandmother.
So the answer is, you need a great base of theory to work from, and then a string of buzzwords to surpass some barely literate art history major who opens mail for the HR department.
Oh, and the step after that is me. You have to charm my socks off. Your job in a real interview is to make me believe you can do the job and you aren't an annoying prick who's gonna cough, sneeze, snort, hum, and sing along with his iPod all day. You need to know that while your desk phone has a speaker on it, if you use the speaker phone I will hate you. Seriously, I'll hire someone a bit underqualified if I like them, but I'll skip the most supremely qualified person if I think they're an asshole who's gonna piss me off. Because ultimately I can make someone with the right attitude and foundation work in a job, but I don't want to work with assholes.
You're missing one point about games: they're rewarding. Limited save points, long raids, whatever, that's not the point. The point is they're rewarding and fun. I play games because I like playing games. I like the people I'm playing with, and I like the rewards I receive out if it. Even if I'm not the one receiving the rewards.
I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's a cabal. I think it's an unorganized collection of like-minded powerful interests. They don't have to talk to each other (as in a conspiracy) to achieve their goals. They just have to do what comes natural, even competing with and undercutting each other, and the effect on us is the same. They don't need to work together to be effective.
Mhmm. I work with many avid golfers. And when they're not talking about the latest greatest new drivers, they're talking about how expensive greens fees are.
As for fishing, what's the number one largest recreation expense in the United States? It's not golfing. It's fishing tackle.
Obviously if you play online games instead of watching TV, you're not consuming enough. You're paying $10-$30 a month for your game, but you're not seeing enough television advertisements, not buying enough golf equipment, not buying as many movie tickets, expensive SUV's to haul your crotchfruit to soccer games, and so on. You might want to buy an upgrade for your computer now and then, but that's nothing compared to gearing out for an avid golfer, or an avid fisherman, or an avid television watcher.
Basically you're not consuming enough of the crap they want to shove down your throat. So they call it an addiction so they can give you drugs so you'll behave like a nice little drone, and watch their advertisements and buy their tooth whiteners.
I've watched more people wate more time on "an addiction" to collegiate sports, celebrity gossip, cricket, football, or just shopping than online anything. And yet these folks are considered normal for spending hours every night researching their fantasy sports teams (not just online, magazines, books, go to Amazon.com and look it up) and solid hours every weekend watching games. But that's normal. They're seeing their fair share of ads for Budweiser, so it's all good. But if you spend a few hours nights and weekends online playing games with friends, well, you're not seeing your share of advertisements, so that's obviously an addiction.
I'll take these jackasses seriously when I start hearing about American Idol addicts, TV addicts, and Golf addicts, or even (timely enough) College Basketball addicts. Until then, they're all basically bought by the advertising and marking cabal.
OK, so WiMax is being sold by who right now? Nobody
Who's going to be selling it soon? Sprint. Through their Xohm company.
So it's gonna be what? A horrible offering with bad customer service, low availability, and an utterly nonsensical rollout plan.
I live in Kansas City, the home of Sprint. Guess where they rolled out their 1993-new wireless PCS Service? Was it in their hometown, you know, the town that gave them a huge number of tax breaks so they'd locate their world headquarters here and where all their employees live? Nope. It was in Washington DC. You know, DC, where nobody who can pay for a cell phone actually lives, they all live in the Burbs which had no coverage for a long time.
So guess where XOhm's rolling out? Oh wait, it's rolling out mostly in areas that ALREADY HAVE VERIZON FIOS. "let's see, I already have FIOS, the best intenret ever, so let me get this unreliable wireless thing that's less service instead". FAIL.
How'd that ION thing work out? FAIL.
The problem is we're relying on Sprint, a company that could dip into a vat of win and come up with a bucket of pure fail, to provide this service. I doubt you could find 3 people in their executive offices who could pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.
And their marketing will fail. OK, so you know what an MVNO is right? Basically it's a company that buys cell service and resells it under another name? So like Virgin Mobile here in the US actually resells Sprint service. Sprint has the lowest rated network in the US. Virgin has the highest. AND IT'S THE SAME DAMN NETWORK.
So yeah. VBA is going away. I wrote a bunch of VBA many years ago (hey, I was young and needed the money:P), now when the version of office it's running under isn't security patched anymore that code's either tossed or re-written from scratch.
And DTS, Data Transformation Services, is already gone. Doesn't work under 64-bit editions of SQL Server 2005. The upgrade tool is worthless. However I did learn something between VBA and when DTS shipped, and I didn't ever get on the DTS bandwagon. So all the bailing-wire-esque scripts I wrote using T-SQL, script files, and Perl to do file formatting that I wrote 8 years ago will keep running forever, while the DTS stuff that someone wrote last year won't work now.
Choose your tools carefully, and work as low as you can, but no lower.
I bought the first macbook sold by my apple retail store to replace my Powerbook G4 about, what, 2 years ago or something?
Anyway. Great machine. Reliable. Tough. Easy to upgrade (bought 2 GB of RAM and a faster/larger hard drive from NewEgg for cheap) with a #0 philips, a penny and a nice clean towel. Beautiful screen, great keyboard, good wireless reception (compared to the all-metal powerbook) and it has the built in camera thingy that I never use. I don't have a single bad thing to say about it.
The air is a joke. OMG. Can't replace the battery. 4200 RPM hard drive. Looks fragile. A complete fanboy product.
I really was hoping for a UMPC-type Mac. Looking at a Sony UX now.
This is like putting a tax on gas to pay for roads. Great, but what about hybrid cars, electric cars, and people who ride the bus?
Direct taxation works best. Tax the people who contribute to the juvenile delinquincy problem: Parents. Tax all crotchfruit. Figure out what the average child tax deduction is, double it, and apply it as a state tax to pay for the costs the state bears for the kids, schooling them, policing them, and raising them since parents don't do any of that anymore.
The state should be paying video game companies. After all, that's who's raising kids anymore, right? Parents sure as hell aren't doing it based on the screaming, obnoxious brats I see running around.
I'd highly recommend the Zero Punctuation column/movie/animation/thingy from The Escapist (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/) for game reviews. Witty, accurate, and to the point. If the game sucks, he'll tell you in a way that leaves you with no doubt as to his opinion. No careful turns of phrase to say "well, this game sucks but I don't want to piss someone off". More like "the developers should be cut with rusty knives and thrown into a shark tank".
Yup, remember that well, it automatically installed itself with no user intervention when the CD was put in. No user agreement, nothing. It just installed without any authorization.
It also replace drivers on the victim's system, and ran all the time.
Oh you didn't remember that part did you. Well, there ya go.
This has been part of the WoW package a very long time, it's covered in their TOS, the concept about what it does and how it does it is very straightforward.
Oh, and one more thing. Rootkits HIDE. Warden doesn't. It starts when you start WoW. Uninstalling wow is as simple as deleting the folder, which is how ALL applications should be. Uninstalling rootkits is "boot from the OS cd, and choose "full installation"".
Heh, figured I'd get more folks reading this if I used that subject:)
But yeah, ok, the entertainment industry, including all of the RIAA and MPAA members, gives more money to democrats than republicans by a factor of about 4:1. In addition, for the "family value" conservatives the entertainment industry is the next thing to the devil. So, why exactly does the president in particular support the RIAA? They're supporting his enemy on both the financial and ideological fronts.
Is it just me or is Apple still trying to sell me something that I can get from other sources at no cost?.Mac is nothing more than google's web apps, all bundled. It's gmail + picasa + YouTube + bookmark sync. For $99/year. Oh, and it does backup (slowly). Yay.
I'd pay $15/year for it if it wasn't ad supported. I won't pay $99/year for it, that's just silly. I don't object to paying for online services, but I think Apple's pricepoint is way to high for users who know about alternatives.
Is music about performance, or is it about technology? Look at it from Elton's prospective for a moment: he's always been all about the show. And not the pyrotechnics, but just good, classic showmanship. You don't see that kind of showmanship in much of the new pop that's out.
I went to a concert this year by a band called Mew, kind of Yes meets Modern Rock. They have a song that on one of their CDs that ends with a really nice a capella 5-part harmony. They did the same song, on stage, live, and closed the song with a really nice a capella 5-part harmony. Live. You don't see that much anymore, and that's kinda sad.
Some people listen to music for the sound, and that's fine. I do that sometimes too. But for me, the more visceral music experience is the live sound, the sound of a musician doing the various bits of magic on stage or on a CD that make you go "wow, they really did just do that". The electronic bits are necessary, because the logistics and economics of porting around a small orchestra are overwhelming, but my preference is that production and gloss be kept to a minimum. If I can tell it's there, it's too much. So many songs I hear are just overproduced, vocal-off-key-corrected, Pro Tools nightmares. For the coders out there, Pro Tools is to modern music what a code generator is for writing a GUI. It's necessary, but overuse leads to dreck.
Oh, and if you're into rock music at all, you really do owe it to yourself to look up Mew. Seriously. You'll be very angry the first time you hear it, because you'll realize how long you've been without it.
Well, what is your argument that this amount of data is insufficient to extrapolate the next 100 years? This is not just a statistical fit to data being extrapolated, either; there is actual physics involved.
OK, tell me what the weather's going to be outside tomorrow based on what the weather is right...NOW. A one-second interval. OK, so by my guess it'll be 90 degrees and about 70% humidity, calm winds. Of course, National Weather Service says 75 and raining, chance of severe thundershowers. No, that's not global warming-inspired volatility, that's typical Missouri weather.
That's what we're trying to do here. Extrapolate 100 years in the future off of 30 years of reliable global data. We don't know about any of the other cycles going on here. None of them. The last ice age was 10K years ago, maybe we're entering into another cycle. Climates are complicated, and there are many different cyclical occurances, many of which we haven't seen before.
Pretty strong words. I'm familiar with the M&M criticisms, but I'd like to see the basis of claims about outright fraud.
You've read the rebuttals and surely came to the same conclusion I did: They disregarded any data that didn't fit with their theory. More audacious than Enron accountants. With less prison time. The guys from Enron were fraudulent-they did it for money. These guys did it for grants. If they were federal grants, I'd like to see prison time. If it was private grant money, I'd like to see civil suits. THis wasn't accidental. This was purposeful exclusion-falsifying data by leaving some out.
Non-tree ring proxies, borehole temperature reconstructions, and the direct instrumental record all support late 20th century warming.
And recent studies in Iceland show that the there used to be deciduous forests there. Studies from pre-industrial economics show that farm output increased, likely leading to the industrial revolution, because the growing seasons were slightly longer and the weather was warmer. We have a few written records from that time that show crops we'd consider untenable growing in very far northern locations. It's been warmer in the past. It's been colder. The indirect data is very fungible. I'm not saying I don't or do trust any of it, I'm saying that it's not as consistent as you've bought into it being.
Very few scientists have actually received physical threats to their security.
How many would it take to get a physical threat before some of them decided that their wife and kids were pretty important, they liked living and maybe, just maybe, it wasn't worth it to publish, and that they should start researching microclimatology.
They can't publish science anymore, everything they publish is a religious tract, hoping to sway one camp or the other to provide them protection and cash so they can continue their work.
M&M comes to mind. Many peer reviewed journals are refusing to publish any work that doesn't toe their line. If the Catholic church publishes something in one of their peer reviewed journals (and yes, they do have them), is it going to be friendly and cogent with druidic values? No. Religion matters. Environmental science is now religion.
The arguments here are simply political, and not even that. Trying to take a countervailing position with someone is like talking abortion with someone. There's no point. It's religion, not science, not even politics.
I don't think anybody's really debating global warming, they're discussing where it comes from. Just like...where does gravity come from. Mars is heating at a similar rate to the earth right now, and I doubt a couple of rovers and some crashed stuff is causing that. Maybe, perhaps, possibly, the sun is getting hotter too? Is the earth getting warmer because of a temporally local phenomenon or is this part of a longer-timed cycle? Don't know. Not enough data. You can say it's gotten warmer in the last 30 years, maybe, but trying to find out all of the cycles of a 4 billion year old planet and a however-many year old sun is a bit out of scope for 30 years worth of data.
Don't get me wrong, I think continued use of fossil fuels is ridiculous. But not for the same reasons of greenhouse gases. I've been much more convinced by arguments relating to the long-term health and environmental damage of SOx, NOx, and, in the case of coal, radioactivity (yea, best kept secret of the coal industry is that you'll get more radiation exposure standing downwind from a coal plant than you will working at a nuke plant). Coal wins right now, just because they have a better Senator. Who, by the way is a Democrat. Like that matters, they're all crooks anyway.
Nuclear reactors can be made such that the cost to refine the spent fuel into bomb material is higher than bomb material. They can be made safely, the fuels can be transported safely, and the chances of environmental damage are lower than the certainty of environmental damage from creating solar cells or burning coal. Yes, it's possible to still create a dirty bomb with that stuff, but how many people die of cancer, asthma, and other stuff every year because of the other crap we put in the air. Balance.
Unfortunately the science loses, and the journalists win. Every time.
I think you have a valid point but you need to look at why this happened.
Among the general public, basically they've had the "global warming" concept beat into their heads, but they're watching the people doing it fly around the world in private jets and live in houses with 4K/month electricity bills.
Among the geek skeptics, like myself, what I see is not science, it's religion. It's "we've solved this problem, we know it's happening, so NO MORE DEBATE ABOUT IT!!!!". That's not science. We're still debating gravity, we're still debating inertia, we're debating light as a particle or wave. That's science. The "no more debate, no more discussion, this is happening and anyone who doesn't believe must be shunned" vibe from most environmentalists is simply religion, not science. Not that the other side's better, buying off scientists and spinning science to meet a political agenda funded by energy companies. But therein lies the problem: this is a political issue, not a scientific one.
My main problem is that we're extrapolating a 4 billion year old climate with about 150 years of directly observed but partial data and 30 years of directly observed global data. The tree ring studies originally done were riddled with accounting problems and were, very likely, fraudulent, and the remaining indirect methods seem to point in many different directions. Further complicating the issue is the ad hominem attacks every time a study comes out that supports either side. If I was an environmental scientist at this point, and no matter what I published I risked physical threats to my security, I'd probably find another line of work. That's the position we've put these people in. They can't publish science anymore, everything they publish is a religious tract, hoping to sway one camp or the other to provide them protection and cash so they can continue their work.
Back on topic: Solar cells are nice, but once you factor in the environmental cost of production they're not efficient. Greenhouse gases are not the only pollutants, they're just the fashionable ones to bitch about right now. Arsenic, volatile and carcinogenic organics, acids, and heavy metals are created/liberated as a byproduct of solar cell production. The problems of these pollutants haven't been solved, they've just taken a back seat to greenhouse gases. When you consider the immediate problem of groundwater pollution against a backdrop of a possible global warming problem, solar cells seem to sell out the immediate problem in favor of the long term one. We've got the technologies to solve both problems with a minimum in absolute terms of toxic byproducts, but ironically the environmental movement hates it.
go nukes.
We have the solution to the problem, we just need the environmental movement in this western world to actually go through the enlightenment and discover that maybe, just maybe, science might fix this problem instead of religion.
Thanks to PC World for not making this a 10-page article with 10 items on each page, with gloriously large ads for each of the 10 products.
While we can argue on the merits of individual items on the list (which, arguably, is part of the reason to post such a list) the presentation format is top notch.
Slashdot Mirror
All government is income redistribution. Doesn't matter what form it is. It's all about moving money from one pile to another. The problem with the left "more government" side is that it moves more money around, which means there are more incentives and opportunities for corruption. Consider the extreme left, pure socialism, where the only people with wealth are in government. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
It's not an indictment of the left wanting to do more to help the disadvantaged, its an indictment of doing it in ways that are very high level, instead of under local control. Doing things at a local level leads to innovation (more different programs running and comparing notes to become more effective over time), programs that are customized for different situations (the economic situation in, say, Minneapolis is far different from the one in Detroit, although in Obama's speech yesterday he conflated the two rather badly), and programs that have less money running through a single person's hands, so smaller amounts of money and less reward for skimming a few percent off the top.
Constitutionally, this country should be doing far less than it does at the federal level, the amount of money that flows through the federal government is staggering, as is the amount that ends up wasted on pork barrel projects.
Kucinich is much more liberal than Obama. The only good thing that came out of the primary process was eliminating him. Otherwise, I think the democrats picked the least electable candidate out of the bunch they had left. Obama won more delegates, but the only states he won by a large margin are traditionally democratic states anyway, and the states that Hillary won are the battleground must-win states for Democrats in the general election. You know, all the flyover states that Obama wrote off to his friends in San Francisco a few weeks back.
Um..WRONG.
McCain is the MOST anti-torture candidate. THE MOST. PERIOD. He was extremely outspoken on the topic in the Senate, it's one of his areas of contention and strife between him and the current president. He has the moral high ground on this. He's literally been there, done that on the receiving end.
The differences in the primary processes really show how the parties work.
The republican primaries are about winning states--it's a winner take all for each state. It's a warmup for the election, where it's not a total popular vote that matters, but a state-by-state election. So the person who wins the most big states wins.
The democratic primaries apportion delegates from each state. Obama won the democratic nomination, but if it was done winner-take-all, as the real election is, he would have lost to Hillary, who did much better in key states like Ohio. Polling numbers also show she did better than Obama in Florida and Michigan, which weren't allowed to seat any/all (didn't follow up on how that turned out) of their delegates.
And as is typical, the Democrats picked the person who agreed most with their views. The Republicans picked the person who they thought would be the best candidate. So in essence, the Democrats picked nearly the worst possible candidate offered, while the Republicans picked someone who can actually win a general election. The republicans chose someone who, compared to the other candidates, is more of a centrist and has more of a reputation for working cross-party to get things done, while the democrats chose the most polarizing, and almost the most liberal (Kucinich was a candidate, remember) of their options.
The election itself will be about who can hold and mobilize their base support the best (something the Republicans are very good at, while the Democrats seem to suck at it) and grab the most non-affiliated voters (like me).
Let's see...I have a choice between an Ivy League lawyer, married to another Ivy League lawyer, who basically thinks I'm a depressed, oppressed, poor, and underprivileged person because I don't live on the east coast or the west coast...
Or a geniuine war hero married to a woman who owns a beer distributorship.
Hrm. Yeah.
It should just be "Greenpeace Complains".
"Greenpeace complains video consoles aren't green enough"
"Greenpeace complains apple isn't green enough"
"Greenpeace complains that some people smell bad"
"Greenpeace complains that when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie that's amore"
Srsly. Quit complaining. Start fixing.
"OH manufacturer X doesn't have a recycling program WAH WAH WAH!"
How about...starting one? Or at least designing one? You're not leading, you're not following, so just get out of the way already.
I've been impressed with their ability to separate their religion and science. I think it's a forward looking, intelligent, and correct view that is backed by their theology and will not drive people away.
When they figure out the "every sperm is sacred" conundrum and start advocating reasonable and responsible behavior with respect to family planning they might actually start looking like an institution I can respect on all of its merits. The Catholic Church has done a lot of good in society through Catholic charities, hospitals, and education. I really hope they manage to figure out that maybe, just maybe, really poor families in urban areas shouldn't have 5 or 10 kids, that perhaps the industrial revolution may be here to stay, and having a large family isn't a moral imperative anymore.
I have other things I can spend money on, so this'll take a back seat. It disappoints me that I won't be able to play with Spore, but not so much that I'm willing to let them know how much I play it, when, what time of day, what my shopping habits are, and how best to advertise to me.
And what happens in 5 years when I want to pull it out and play it again? I'm sure it will play right? Just like all those people who bought music from Microsoft thought "Plays for Sure" meant it played for sure.
All right. A little setup so my words have some weight.
I graduated from an engineering school (University of Missouri-Rolla) in December 1993 with a Computer Science degree. I've been in the industry for 14 years. I've done interviewing, hiring, and mentoring in addition to my normal activities (system/database admin). I've done consulting, worked in big companies, small companies, and medium-size companies. In short, I've seen just about everything.
For career development, to be able to compete over a very long term, you need to have a solid bedrock of theory in how things work. Theory provides you with the frames of reference you can hang everything else on. If you understand how compilers do what they do, learning any computer language becomes trivial, because all languages basically do the same thing. The same applies to operating systems, queuing systems, security systems, and so on. There's a lot of theory, a lot of math involved, but it's math you need, and it's math you'll use.
Back in my day (barf) we had a class called Operating Systems, it was taught by the department chair (an awesome guy) and basically the project was to write a program in C. There was no class in C offered. There was no teaching of C in the class. K&R was on the "recommended reading" list. That's it. Thrown in the pool and see if you can swim. I'm good with that, because you know, that's what it's like in the real world most of the time.
You *need* theory to survive in the workplace and do well. You will not be able to compete without learning it. Any other education you get that seems more "practical" will likely be out of date before you graduate.
That said, for getting that first job, you need experience. Why? Because getting past the resume desk of 99% of all companies is a matter of buzzword bingo. That sounds dilbertesque, but it's unfortunately very true. The HR person at a company, even 20-30 person companies have someone who looks at resumes and filters them, has an enormous amount of power over your future, and no clue at all what all those letters mean but their boss said they all had to be there, in that order, on your resume. Which means you need to find a summer job at least (if not an internship) to provide you with enough buzzwords to get a match on that particular person's bingo card so you can talk to a real person. This sounds cynical, it sounds depressing, but it's unfortunately true: 90% of all resumes get rejected by HR because they didn't have the right buzzwords on. And the HR person reviewing the resumes has no more idea what all those words mean than your grandmother.
So the answer is, you need a great base of theory to work from, and then a string of buzzwords to surpass some barely literate art history major who opens mail for the HR department.
Oh, and the step after that is me. You have to charm my socks off. Your job in a real interview is to make me believe you can do the job and you aren't an annoying prick who's gonna cough, sneeze, snort, hum, and sing along with his iPod all day. You need to know that while your desk phone has a speaker on it, if you use the speaker phone I will hate you. Seriously, I'll hire someone a bit underqualified if I like them, but I'll skip the most supremely qualified person if I think they're an asshole who's gonna piss me off. Because ultimately I can make someone with the right attitude and foundation work in a job, but I don't want to work with assholes.
You're missing one point about games: they're rewarding. Limited save points, long raids, whatever, that's not the point. The point is they're rewarding and fun. I play games because I like playing games. I like the people I'm playing with, and I like the rewards I receive out if it. Even if I'm not the one receiving the rewards.
I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's a cabal. I think it's an unorganized collection of like-minded powerful interests. They don't have to talk to each other (as in a conspiracy) to achieve their goals. They just have to do what comes natural, even competing with and undercutting each other, and the effect on us is the same. They don't need to work together to be effective.
Mhmm. I work with many avid golfers. And when they're not talking about the latest greatest new drivers, they're talking about how expensive greens fees are.
As for fishing, what's the number one largest recreation expense in the United States? It's not golfing. It's fishing tackle.
Obviously if you play online games instead of watching TV, you're not consuming enough. You're paying $10-$30 a month for your game, but you're not seeing enough television advertisements, not buying enough golf equipment, not buying as many movie tickets, expensive SUV's to haul your crotchfruit to soccer games, and so on. You might want to buy an upgrade for your computer now and then, but that's nothing compared to gearing out for an avid golfer, or an avid fisherman, or an avid television watcher.
Basically you're not consuming enough of the crap they want to shove down your throat. So they call it an addiction so they can give you drugs so you'll behave like a nice little drone, and watch their advertisements and buy their tooth whiteners.
I've watched more people wate more time on "an addiction" to collegiate sports, celebrity gossip, cricket, football, or just shopping than online anything. And yet these folks are considered normal for spending hours every night researching their fantasy sports teams (not just online, magazines, books, go to Amazon.com and look it up) and solid hours every weekend watching games. But that's normal. They're seeing their fair share of ads for Budweiser, so it's all good. But if you spend a few hours nights and weekends online playing games with friends, well, you're not seeing your share of advertisements, so that's obviously an addiction.
I'll take these jackasses seriously when I start hearing about American Idol addicts, TV addicts, and Golf addicts, or even (timely enough) College Basketball addicts. Until then, they're all basically bought by the advertising and marking cabal.
OK, so WiMax is being sold by who right now?
Nobody
Who's going to be selling it soon?
Sprint. Through their Xohm company.
So it's gonna be what?
A horrible offering with bad customer service, low availability, and an utterly nonsensical rollout plan.
I live in Kansas City, the home of Sprint. Guess where they rolled out their 1993-new wireless PCS Service? Was it in their hometown, you know, the town that gave them a huge number of tax breaks so they'd locate their world headquarters here and where all their employees live? Nope. It was in Washington DC. You know, DC, where nobody who can pay for a cell phone actually lives, they all live in the Burbs which had no coverage for a long time.
So guess where XOhm's rolling out? Oh wait, it's rolling out mostly in areas that ALREADY HAVE VERIZON FIOS. "let's see, I already have FIOS, the best intenret ever, so let me get this unreliable wireless thing that's less service instead". FAIL.
How'd that ION thing work out? FAIL.
The problem is we're relying on Sprint, a company that could dip into a vat of win and come up with a bucket of pure fail, to provide this service. I doubt you could find 3 people in their executive offices who could pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.
And their marketing will fail. OK, so you know what an MVNO is right? Basically it's a company that buys cell service and resells it under another name? So like Virgin Mobile here in the US actually resells Sprint service. Sprint has the lowest rated network in the US. Virgin has the highest. AND IT'S THE SAME DAMN NETWORK.
Sprint = Fail.
So yeah. VBA is going away. I wrote a bunch of VBA many years ago (hey, I was young and needed the money :P), now when the version of office it's running under isn't security patched anymore that code's either tossed or re-written from scratch.
And DTS, Data Transformation Services, is already gone. Doesn't work under 64-bit editions of SQL Server 2005. The upgrade tool is worthless. However I did learn something between VBA and when DTS shipped, and I didn't ever get on the DTS bandwagon. So all the bailing-wire-esque scripts I wrote using T-SQL, script files, and Perl to do file formatting that I wrote 8 years ago will keep running forever, while the DTS stuff that someone wrote last year won't work now.
Choose your tools carefully, and work as low as you can, but no lower.
I bought the first macbook sold by my apple retail store to replace my Powerbook G4 about, what, 2 years ago or something?
Anyway. Great machine. Reliable. Tough. Easy to upgrade (bought 2 GB of RAM and a faster/larger hard drive from NewEgg for cheap) with a #0 philips, a penny and a nice clean towel. Beautiful screen, great keyboard, good wireless reception (compared to the all-metal powerbook) and it has the built in camera thingy that I never use. I don't have a single bad thing to say about it.
The air is a joke. OMG. Can't replace the battery. 4200 RPM hard drive. Looks fragile. A complete fanboy product.
I really was hoping for a UMPC-type Mac. Looking at a Sony UX now.
Still have to send them to school, build kiddie pools for them and so on.
Plus the environmental impact. Let's start assessing the environmental impact of children into the mix also.
This is like putting a tax on gas to pay for roads. Great, but what about hybrid cars, electric cars, and people who ride the bus?
Direct taxation works best. Tax the people who contribute to the juvenile delinquincy problem: Parents. Tax all crotchfruit. Figure out what the average child tax deduction is, double it, and apply it as a state tax to pay for the costs the state bears for the kids, schooling them, policing them, and raising them since parents don't do any of that anymore.
The state should be paying video game companies. After all, that's who's raising kids anymore, right? Parents sure as hell aren't doing it based on the screaming, obnoxious brats I see running around.
I'd highly recommend the Zero Punctuation column/movie/animation/thingy from The Escapist (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/) for game reviews. Witty, accurate, and to the point. If the game sucks, he'll tell you in a way that leaves you with no doubt as to his opinion. No careful turns of phrase to say "well, this game sucks but I don't want to piss someone off". More like "the developers should be cut with rusty knives and thrown into a shark tank".
Yup, remember that well, it automatically installed itself with no user intervention when the CD was put in. No user agreement, nothing. It just installed without any authorization.
It also replace drivers on the victim's system, and ran all the time.
Oh you didn't remember that part did you. Well, there ya go.
This has been part of the WoW package a very long time, it's covered in their TOS, the concept about what it does and how it does it is very straightforward.
Oh, and one more thing. Rootkits HIDE. Warden doesn't. It starts when you start WoW. Uninstalling wow is as simple as deleting the folder, which is how ALL applications should be. Uninstalling rootkits is "boot from the OS cd, and choose "full installation"".
Not a rootkit. Not even close.
Heh, figured I'd get more folks reading this if I used that subject :)
But yeah, ok, the entertainment industry, including all of the RIAA and MPAA members, gives more money to democrats than republicans by a factor of about 4:1. In addition, for the "family value" conservatives the entertainment industry is the next thing to the devil. So, why exactly does the president in particular support the RIAA? They're supporting his enemy on both the financial and ideological fronts.
morons.
Is it just me or is Apple still trying to sell me something that I can get from other sources at no cost? .Mac is nothing more than google's web apps, all bundled. It's gmail + picasa + YouTube + bookmark sync. For $99/year. Oh, and it does backup (slowly). Yay.
I'd pay $15/year for it if it wasn't ad supported. I won't pay $99/year for it, that's just silly. I don't object to paying for online services, but I think Apple's pricepoint is way to high for users who know about alternatives.
Is music about performance, or is it about technology? Look at it from Elton's prospective for a moment: he's always been all about the show. And not the pyrotechnics, but just good, classic showmanship. You don't see that kind of showmanship in much of the new pop that's out.
I went to a concert this year by a band called Mew, kind of Yes meets Modern Rock. They have a song that on one of their CDs that ends with a really nice a capella 5-part harmony. They did the same song, on stage, live, and closed the song with a really nice a capella 5-part harmony. Live. You don't see that much anymore, and that's kinda sad.
Some people listen to music for the sound, and that's fine. I do that sometimes too. But for me, the more visceral music experience is the live sound, the sound of a musician doing the various bits of magic on stage or on a CD that make you go "wow, they really did just do that". The electronic bits are necessary, because the logistics and economics of porting around a small orchestra are overwhelming, but my preference is that production and gloss be kept to a minimum. If I can tell it's there, it's too much. So many songs I hear are just overproduced, vocal-off-key-corrected, Pro Tools nightmares. For the coders out there, Pro Tools is to modern music what a code generator is for writing a GUI. It's necessary, but overuse leads to dreck.
Oh, and if you're into rock music at all, you really do owe it to yourself to look up Mew. Seriously. You'll be very angry the first time you hear it, because you'll realize how long you've been without it.
OK, tell me what the weather's going to be outside tomorrow based on what the weather is right...NOW. A one-second interval. OK, so by my guess it'll be 90 degrees and about 70% humidity, calm winds. Of course, National Weather Service says 75 and raining, chance of severe thundershowers. No, that's not global warming-inspired volatility, that's typical Missouri weather.
That's what we're trying to do here. Extrapolate 100 years in the future off of 30 years of reliable global data. We don't know about any of the other cycles going on here. None of them. The last ice age was 10K years ago, maybe we're entering into another cycle. Climates are complicated, and there are many different cyclical occurances, many of which we haven't seen before.
You've read the rebuttals and surely came to the same conclusion I did: They disregarded any data that didn't fit with their theory. More audacious than Enron accountants. With less prison time. The guys from Enron were fraudulent-they did it for money. These guys did it for grants. If they were federal grants, I'd like to see prison time. If it was private grant money, I'd like to see civil suits. THis wasn't accidental. This was purposeful exclusion-falsifying data by leaving some out.
And recent studies in Iceland show that the there used to be deciduous forests there. Studies from pre-industrial economics show that farm output increased, likely leading to the industrial revolution, because the growing seasons were slightly longer and the weather was warmer. We have a few written records from that time that show crops we'd consider untenable growing in very far northern locations. It's been warmer in the past. It's been colder. The indirect data is very fungible. I'm not saying I don't or do trust any of it, I'm saying that it's not as consistent as you've bought into it being.
How many would it take to get a physical threat before some of them decided that their wife and kids were pretty important, they liked living and maybe, just maybe, it wasn't worth it to publish, and that they should start researching microclimatology.
M&M comes to mind. Many peer reviewed journals are refusing to publish any work that doesn't toe their line. If the Catholic church publishes something in one of their peer reviewed journals (and yes, they do have them), is it going to be friendly and cogent with druidic values? No. Religion matters. Environmental science is now religion.
The arguments here are simply political, and not even that. Trying to take a countervailing position with someone is like talking abortion with someone. There's no point. It's religion, not science, not even politics.
I don't think anybody's really debating global warming, they're discussing where it comes from. Just like...where does gravity come from. Mars is heating at a similar rate to the earth right now, and I doubt a couple of rovers and some crashed stuff is causing that. Maybe, perhaps, possibly, the sun is getting hotter too? Is the earth getting warmer because of a temporally local phenomenon or is this part of a longer-timed cycle? Don't know. Not enough data. You can say it's gotten warmer in the last 30 years, maybe, but trying to find out all of the cycles of a 4 billion year old planet and a however-many year old sun is a bit out of scope for 30 years worth of data.
Don't get me wrong, I think continued use of fossil fuels is ridiculous. But not for the same reasons of greenhouse gases. I've been much more convinced by arguments relating to the long-term health and environmental damage of SOx, NOx, and, in the case of coal, radioactivity (yea, best kept secret of the coal industry is that you'll get more radiation exposure standing downwind from a coal plant than you will working at a nuke plant). Coal wins right now, just because they have a better Senator. Who, by the way is a Democrat. Like that matters, they're all crooks anyway.
Nuclear reactors can be made such that the cost to refine the spent fuel into bomb material is higher than bomb material. They can be made safely, the fuels can be transported safely, and the chances of environmental damage are lower than the certainty of environmental damage from creating solar cells or burning coal. Yes, it's possible to still create a dirty bomb with that stuff, but how many people die of cancer, asthma, and other stuff every year because of the other crap we put in the air. Balance.
Unfortunately the science loses, and the journalists win. Every time.
I think you have a valid point but you need to look at why this happened.
Among the general public, basically they've had the "global warming" concept beat into their heads, but they're watching the people doing it fly around the world in private jets and live in houses with 4K/month electricity bills.
Among the geek skeptics, like myself, what I see is not science, it's religion. It's "we've solved this problem, we know it's happening, so NO MORE DEBATE ABOUT IT!!!!". That's not science. We're still debating gravity, we're still debating inertia, we're debating light as a particle or wave. That's science. The "no more debate, no more discussion, this is happening and anyone who doesn't believe must be shunned" vibe from most environmentalists is simply religion, not science. Not that the other side's better, buying off scientists and spinning science to meet a political agenda funded by energy companies. But therein lies the problem: this is a political issue, not a scientific one.
My main problem is that we're extrapolating a 4 billion year old climate with about 150 years of directly observed but partial data and 30 years of directly observed global data. The tree ring studies originally done were riddled with accounting problems and were, very likely, fraudulent, and the remaining indirect methods seem to point in many different directions. Further complicating the issue is the ad hominem attacks every time a study comes out that supports either side. If I was an environmental scientist at this point, and no matter what I published I risked physical threats to my security, I'd probably find another line of work. That's the position we've put these people in. They can't publish science anymore, everything they publish is a religious tract, hoping to sway one camp or the other to provide them protection and cash so they can continue their work.
Back on topic: Solar cells are nice, but once you factor in the environmental cost of production they're not efficient. Greenhouse gases are not the only pollutants, they're just the fashionable ones to bitch about right now. Arsenic, volatile and carcinogenic organics, acids, and heavy metals are created/liberated as a byproduct of solar cell production. The problems of these pollutants haven't been solved, they've just taken a back seat to greenhouse gases. When you consider the immediate problem of groundwater pollution against a backdrop of a possible global warming problem, solar cells seem to sell out the immediate problem in favor of the long term one. We've got the technologies to solve both problems with a minimum in absolute terms of toxic byproducts, but ironically the environmental movement hates it.
go nukes.
We have the solution to the problem, we just need the environmental movement in this western world to actually go through the enlightenment and discover that maybe, just maybe, science might fix this problem instead of religion.
Thanks to PC World for not making this a 10-page article with 10 items on each page, with gloriously large ads for each of the 10 products.
While we can argue on the merits of individual items on the list (which, arguably, is part of the reason to post such a list) the presentation format is top notch.