Sure, there's always a perfectly valid excuse. That minority took our jobs, that other minority runs all the banks, that one is lazy and corrupts our youth.
The chance that any third party - YOU for instance - will be harmed by anti-vaxxers' stupid refusal to vaccinate their children is incredibly small. It's far more likely our government's unwillingness to stop corporations from poisoning our air and water will kill you, or your children, or your grandchildren. But people aren't going to do anything about that, because the government and the corporations are big and scary and they'll fight back.
Meanwhile anti-vaxxers are stupid and easily set up as punching bags, and people want someone weak to punch, someone that won't punch them back.
I'm not trying to offend you, although it probably looks that way. I'm just telling you what I see. The anger and venom directed towards anti-vaxxers is very familiar to me, I've seen people scapegoating minorities before. It's a very old story, and one that shows no sign of ending soon.
I have lived all my life with the possibility of contracting a fatal disease from some other person. The fact that I've been vaccinated, and others haven't, doesn't provide me with some magical immunity to death.
We all die. Stop being such an alarmist and live your life without this unseemly and childish fearmongering.
And stop looking for scapegoats among the foolish and weak. If you want to attack someone, show some spirit, and attack the rich and powerful who are doing more to hurt you than any stupid anti-vaxxer ever will.
And it's not "fear based on misinformation", it's fear based in real risk. When large numbers of people refuse to get vaccinated from serious infectious diseases, they're putting everyone else in the population at greater risk of infection.
If this risk ever equals the risk that our governments (and the corporations that run them) are placing on everyone in the population with their anti-humanist policies, do be sure to let me know.
Quite frankly the hysteria over anti-vaxxers hasn't got much to do with real-life health risks, it's really about a whole lot of people who want to inflict their will on somebody - anybody - while still retaining a feeling of moral righteousness. It's the same psychology that drives religious crusades - lots of people have an unreasoning urge to lash out against other people, and anti-vaxxers are a target that has been designated as acceptable in our time. In other times and other places other groups have been vilified for similar reasons. People's (very real) fears serve as an excuse and a rallying cry, a way to designate a "Them" that is opposed to "Us".
Is this one of those ego projects where you decide you're going to do a little bit of everything for no other reason than to get your name plastered on all of it?
No.
Surface is crap, according to our real world users
on
I Want a Kindle Killer
·
· Score: 2
My employers bought a couple of the Microsoft "Surface" boxes.
They got passed around, starting with the CEO, proceeding through around ten professional IT staff, and then through business middle management, then through the secretarial staff. Each of these users decided that the surface was not meeting their needs and gave it back, and we gave it to the next starry-eyed patsy.
Now they sit in a drawer in the IT support room, and every time some new hire comes in we ask them if they'd prefer a conventional laptop or the surface. Unless they've already used one, they always ask for the surface and use it for anywhere from one week to three months, then give it back and ask for a cheaper, more powerful laptop. These people come from all kinds of backgrounds but the response is always the same.
I only know of one real live person (as opposed to Internet commentators) who is productive with the Surface and loves it. She is a 20 year old art school student who also has a desktop PC and a windows phone. She proves that there is a niche for the device... but it appears that it's a very small one, and may be restricted to graphic artists.
When I used one for two months I found it to be an awkward compromise between a pad computer and a laptop, providing no real benefit over either one. Personally, I particularly hated the keyboard (although I liked the magnetic attachment schtick).
No idea how the Kindle destoryed the Nook market when you can take both devices side by side and find the Nook to be quite better (in specs and functionality).
The Kindle's lower up-front cost and much longer battery life had a lot to do with it.
But don't discount the way the cheap android pads & phones and the expensive Apple equivalents also cut into the Nook's demographic niche.
The Google Nexus 7 sitting next to me has SIX e-reader applications installed, including Nook and Kindle and FBreader apps. I am a happy Nook owner (flashed with Cyanogenmod and running Torque in my plug-in hybrid car) but for reading books the Nexus 7 was better right out of the box, no reflashing required.
The big achilles heel of Google's device is lack of SD card slot. It's a huge barrier to hackability and upgradeability, essentially they've designated it a throwaway device for its target user. I wish B&N had continued to develop the Nook, and I'd love to know where the original designers are working now.
If you think your example was more readable than the parent, I don't think you're entirely clear on what the word "readable" actually means.
Go home = Very Readable Go to the Store = Readable Go to 713 Bond Street = Readable goto label = Readable
void thing() { a && b && c; } = NOT READABLE!
The idea behind what very experienced programmers call "readability" is to reduce the highly domain-specific knowledge that the reader must study before comprehending your code. The more expertise required in a specific language's structures and idioms, the less readable the code is. Your code may be the greatest thing ever, but frankly its readability sucks.
Over the last 40 years I've frequently encountered code in languages I'd never seen before that was perfectly understandable, because the programmer wrote it with human understanding in mind rather than assuming that humans would spend hours studying abstruse syntactica before reading it.
Elegance in programming is hard. You have to balance the needs of the task, the engine, the user, and the maintenance programmer. Readability is sometimes not achievable without commentry, but truly elegant code is readable.
An example of coding for readability is to be explicit about order of operations; don't make the reader have to look up precedence of operators in your chosen language, use unnecessary parentheses instead... the compiler will not care and the code will not be less efficient, and you'll reduce opportunities for future human errors.
"Brand value is calculated on the basis of the firms' financial performance and their standing among consumers."
Let me translate that for you!
"We are positioned to take advantage of chumps believing Google is more valuable than Apple (a small consumer electronics company that we previously convinced gullible people was the world's most valuable brand). As the chumps sell off Apple and buy Google we will laugh and laugh, and light our cigars with $100 bills."
Of course value is determined by the market, and the market is dominated by the weak and foolish spawn of the ruling classes... so all Millward Brown really has to do is stampede the cattle and collect the carcasses.
If a modern corporation is going to hire someone 40 or older, they are going to hire someone with at least 20 years of experience.
Why? Simple economics.
Cost of providing healthcare, pension and similar benefits is higher for older workers. They also typically have families (or at least lives) outside of work that require some portion of their attention and enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards work. They aren't fresh college grads that will work 38 hour shifts without extra pay and brag about it.
Now, if the older worker has lots of experience, that totally justifies his higher cost. You cannot get decades of real world high tech work experience from somebody only 20 years old. Obviously the older worker also has to be good at the task - a half-assed chucklehead of a young worker might learn to do better (if not, the employer will want to get rid of him before he causes too much damage). But if a 40+ year old isn't already a recognized expert in his or her field, s/he's unlikely to become one any quicker than a younger, cheaper person would.
This is the way the system works. It's not because somebody's trying to discriminate against your age. It's because companies want to make money and they have to work within the framework that exists.
So, if you're over 40 and your heart is totally set on becoming a programmer, you'll need to look for work in fields that you have non-programming experience in. For example, if you spent the last 30 years doing fireproof construction, you can be a programmer for a concrete company or architectural engineering firm, because you can leverage your knowledge of masonry. If you have been building and racing cars for decades as a hobby, you can be a programmer for a racing or car company. But those kind of angles are the only way you'll get a decent programming job as a 40-year-old newbie. You'll have to capitalize on your experience, or some younger person will be able to do the job better for less money than you can survive on.
The "the anthropogenic global warming agenda", huh.
I suppose that's opposed by the same heroes who so valiantly oppose the "liberal agenda" and the "homosexual agenda".
It seems weird to me that only right wing pollutocrats ever get copies of these "agendas". What's a regular guy got to do to get on the mailing list? Kill a puppy?
As opposed to our plans for dealing with the waste products of other energy production systems? Or the "adequate" way we deal with say, coal mine fires?
I'm sure you know you've got a logical fallacy there; being bad at one thing doesn't rule out the possibility of being bad at lots of other things.
But the USA could have put out the Centralia coal mine fire any time we wanted to - just divert half the Susquehanna river into the mines for a year.
Nobody's going to do that, though, because the right wing likes pollution and hates bailing out farmers and non-millionaire "little folks", and the left wing is just too cowardly to do anything that necessarily entails large unforeseeable consequences. And there does not appear to be any political representation of the middle view (or middle class, for that matter) any more. So Centralia burns and we will continue to relicense America's aging nuclear plants until they fail.
The trick is that, built into your software will be some extra freebie small feature you can't escape from. Once your users start using that feature, they are hooked and can't escape.
Our users are tricked into using software with features they like and actually make their jobs easier! What a dastardly move by Microsoft in actually making a product that the end user prefers! How dare they compete so unfairly! It's like they think the quality of the product matters.
Sometimes is really is like that, although it happens just as often with non-Microsoft (or even, gasp! free) sorftware as with anything else. The reality is that quality of code and product aren't determined by brand names; IIS and WinXP are both Microsoft products despite their vast differences in quality and user experience.
So, that being said, Microsoft's biggest wedge in corporate settings is Outlook, which incorporates such "features" as training the user to use a semicolon to separate addresses, in violation of all standards and common sense, and egregiously mangling RFC822 email addresses. Users (some of whom may well reply to this post) will insist that this is totally reasonable and desirable - because they are at least as brainwashed as your average emacs user.
Humans want to root for a team and the quality of software products has almost nothing to do with it. It's like Democrats.vs. Republicans, tastes great.vs. less filling, etc.... not evidence-based.
Nice to hear that reverse osmosis has become affordable. Most water sanitizing tech isn't significantly better than just letting it sit around in a brass jug for a day, but RO sure is! Brass only kills pathogens; it won't remove all the other contaminants RO can.
There are millions of people who aren't carrying phones. I only carry one when I'm paid to do so (and provided with the phone) and that's only happened twice in the last 20 years.
It's true that smartphones are useful to many people and desirable for even more. But lots of us don't want or need them at all; they'd just be a burden of maintenance and cost, and essentially a lifestyle downgrade.
Last I checked we all have smart phones that are constantly linked to the internet and synchronized with the most precise time sources physicists can come up with.
I personally have installed an RO filter (any monkey with a crescent wrench should be able to do the same) and we have a crapload of klean kanteen-style stainless bottles...
Seems a shame to use water from an expensive reverse osmosis filter in an inherently disease-friendly container - why not use a nice glass bottle, or a silver or copper one if you're worried about breakage?
Or does the choice of cause mean that one billionaire trying to influence politics is worse than the other billionaire trying to influence politics?
Well, pretty obviously yes. In this universe, anyway.
For example, a billionaire influencing politics so that certain ethnicities are rounded up and placed in offshore torture camps is clearly worse than a billionaire influencing politics so that charities that provide surgery for children with cleft palates are exempt from taxation.
I live in the bottom of a little valley, and I'd need a hundred foot tower to get more than two TV stations.
In my state, it's illegal to have a tower so tall that it could fall outside your property line. My property isn't two hundred feet wide, so no go.
But I ditched Comcast anyway and got Verizon instead. Verizon sucks too, but marginally less, and the FIOS technology is nice, at least, even if the provider isn't.
So yeah, Vermont Yankee going offline will change things, but we'll manage. Indeed, losing a source of subsidized power will create more opportunities for expansion of renewables.
And that is almost certainly the whole and entire real reason for opposition to the plant closing.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you driven a Ford, lately?
Because we wouldn't want you to base your expectations on any Fords you drove before quality became job one, see.
Sure, there's always a perfectly valid excuse. That minority took our jobs, that other minority runs all the banks, that one is lazy and corrupts our youth.
The chance that any third party - YOU for instance - will be harmed by anti-vaxxers' stupid refusal to vaccinate their children is incredibly small. It's far more likely our government's unwillingness to stop corporations from poisoning our air and water will kill you, or your children, or your grandchildren. But people aren't going to do anything about that, because the government and the corporations are big and scary and they'll fight back.
Meanwhile anti-vaxxers are stupid and easily set up as punching bags, and people want someone weak to punch, someone that won't punch them back.
I'm not trying to offend you, although it probably looks that way. I'm just telling you what I see. The anger and venom directed towards anti-vaxxers is very familiar to me, I've seen people scapegoating minorities before. It's a very old story, and one that shows no sign of ending soon.
Yawn.
I have lived all my life with the possibility of contracting a fatal disease from some other person. The fact that I've been vaccinated, and others haven't, doesn't provide me with some magical immunity to death.
We all die. Stop being such an alarmist and live your life without this unseemly and childish fearmongering.
And stop looking for scapegoats among the foolish and weak. If you want to attack someone, show some spirit, and attack the rich and powerful who are doing more to hurt you than any stupid anti-vaxxer ever will.
If this risk ever equals the risk that our governments (and the corporations that run them) are placing on everyone in the population with their anti-humanist policies, do be sure to let me know.
Quite frankly the hysteria over anti-vaxxers hasn't got much to do with real-life health risks, it's really about a whole lot of people who want to inflict their will on somebody - anybody - while still retaining a feeling of moral righteousness. It's the same psychology that drives religious crusades - lots of people have an unreasoning urge to lash out against other people, and anti-vaxxers are a target that has been designated as acceptable in our time. In other times and other places other groups have been vilified for similar reasons. People's (very real) fears serve as an excuse and a rallying cry, a way to designate a "Them" that is opposed to "Us".
No.
My employers bought a couple of the Microsoft "Surface" boxes.
They got passed around, starting with the CEO, proceeding through around ten professional IT staff, and then through business middle management, then through the secretarial staff. Each of these users decided that the surface was not meeting their needs and gave it back, and we gave it to the next starry-eyed patsy.
Now they sit in a drawer in the IT support room, and every time some new hire comes in we ask them if they'd prefer a conventional laptop or the surface. Unless they've already used one, they always ask for the surface and use it for anywhere from one week to three months, then give it back and ask for a cheaper, more powerful laptop. These people come from all kinds of backgrounds but the response is always the same.
I only know of one real live person (as opposed to Internet commentators) who is productive with the Surface and loves it. She is a 20 year old art school student who also has a desktop PC and a windows phone. She proves that there is a niche for the device... but it appears that it's a very small one, and may be restricted to graphic artists.
When I used one for two months I found it to be an awkward compromise between a pad computer and a laptop, providing no real benefit over either one. Personally, I particularly hated the keyboard (although I liked the magnetic attachment schtick).
The Kindle's lower up-front cost and much longer battery life had a lot to do with it.
But don't discount the way the cheap android pads & phones and the expensive Apple equivalents also cut into the Nook's demographic niche.
The Google Nexus 7 sitting next to me has SIX e-reader applications installed, including Nook and Kindle and FBreader apps. I am a happy Nook owner (flashed with Cyanogenmod and running Torque in my plug-in hybrid car) but for reading books the Nexus 7 was better right out of the box, no reflashing required.
The big achilles heel of Google's device is lack of SD card slot. It's a huge barrier to hackability and upgradeability, essentially they've designated it a throwaway device for its target user. I wish B&N had continued to develop the Nook, and I'd love to know where the original designers are working now.
If you think your example was more readable than the parent, I don't think you're entirely clear on what the word "readable" actually means.
Go home = Very Readable
Go to the Store = Readable
Go to 713 Bond Street = Readable
goto label = Readable
void thing() { a && b && c; } = NOT READABLE!
The idea behind what very experienced programmers call "readability" is to reduce the highly domain-specific knowledge that the reader must study before comprehending your code. The more expertise required in a specific language's structures and idioms, the less readable the code is. Your code may be the greatest thing ever, but frankly its readability sucks.
Over the last 40 years I've frequently encountered code in languages I'd never seen before that was perfectly understandable, because the programmer wrote it with human understanding in mind rather than assuming that humans would spend hours studying abstruse syntactica before reading it.
Elegance in programming is hard. You have to balance the needs of the task, the engine, the user, and the maintenance programmer. Readability is sometimes not achievable without commentry, but truly elegant code is readable.
An example of coding for readability is to be explicit about order of operations; don't make the reader have to look up precedence of operators in your chosen language, use unnecessary parentheses instead... the compiler will not care and the code will not be less efficient, and you'll reduce opportunities for future human errors.
"Brand value is calculated on the basis of the firms' financial performance and their standing among consumers."
Let me translate that for you!
"We are positioned to take advantage of chumps believing Google is more valuable than Apple (a small consumer electronics company that we previously convinced gullible people was the world's most valuable brand). As the chumps sell off Apple and buy Google we will laugh and laugh, and light our cigars with $100 bills."
Of course value is determined by the market, and the market is dominated by the weak and foolish spawn of the ruling classes... so all Millward Brown really has to do is stampede the cattle and collect the carcasses.
Excellent advice! Check out the racial disparity in outcomes of "zero tolerance" school policies, a.k.a. the school-to-prison pipeline. Students of color who commit the exact same infractions of discipline as white students are disproportionately punished starting in pre-school.
KALI WORSHIPPERS!
They want the sacrificial ring, for Swami Clang.
If a modern corporation is going to hire someone 40 or older, they are going to hire someone with at least 20 years of experience.
Why? Simple economics.
Cost of providing healthcare, pension and similar benefits is higher for older workers. They also typically have families (or at least lives) outside of work that require some portion of their attention and enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards work. They aren't fresh college grads that will work 38 hour shifts without extra pay and brag about it.
Now, if the older worker has lots of experience, that totally justifies his higher cost. You cannot get decades of real world high tech work experience from somebody only 20 years old. Obviously the older worker also has to be good at the task - a half-assed chucklehead of a young worker might learn to do better (if not, the employer will want to get rid of him before he causes too much damage). But if a 40+ year old isn't already a recognized expert in his or her field, s/he's unlikely to become one any quicker than a younger, cheaper person would.
This is the way the system works. It's not because somebody's trying to discriminate against your age. It's because companies want to make money and they have to work within the framework that exists.
So, if you're over 40 and your heart is totally set on becoming a programmer, you'll need to look for work in fields that you have non-programming experience in. For example, if you spent the last 30 years doing fireproof construction, you can be a programmer for a concrete company or architectural engineering firm, because you can leverage your knowledge of masonry. If you have been building and racing cars for decades as a hobby, you can be a programmer for a racing or car company. But those kind of angles are the only way you'll get a decent programming job as a 40-year-old newbie. You'll have to capitalize on your experience, or some younger person will be able to do the job better for less money than you can survive on.
The correct link for the FSF's high priority project list is
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/
The chorus of criticism for Richard's willingness to repeat his point of view here is far more repetitive and tiresome than RMS has ever been.
I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Free Software, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
The "the anthropogenic global warming agenda", huh.
I suppose that's opposed by the same heroes who so valiantly oppose the "liberal agenda" and the "homosexual agenda".
It seems weird to me that only right wing pollutocrats ever get copies of these "agendas". What's a regular guy got to do to get on the mailing list? Kill a puppy?
I'm sure you know you've got a logical fallacy there; being bad at one thing doesn't rule out the possibility of being bad at lots of other things.
But the USA could have put out the Centralia coal mine fire any time we wanted to - just divert half the Susquehanna river into the mines for a year.
Nobody's going to do that, though, because the right wing likes pollution and hates bailing out farmers and non-millionaire "little folks", and the left wing is just too cowardly to do anything that necessarily entails large unforeseeable consequences. And there does not appear to be any political representation of the middle view (or middle class, for that matter) any more. So Centralia burns and we will continue to relicense America's aging nuclear plants until they fail.
Sometimes is really is like that, although it happens just as often with non-Microsoft (or even, gasp! free) sorftware as with anything else. The reality is that quality of code and product aren't determined by brand names; IIS and WinXP are both Microsoft products despite their vast differences in quality and user experience.
So, that being said, Microsoft's biggest wedge in corporate settings is Outlook, which incorporates such "features" as training the user to use a semicolon to separate addresses, in violation of all standards and common sense, and egregiously mangling RFC822 email addresses. Users (some of whom may well reply to this post) will insist that this is totally reasonable and desirable - because they are at least as brainwashed as your average emacs user.
Humans want to root for a team and the quality of software products has almost nothing to do with it. It's like Democrats .vs. Republicans, tastes great .vs. less filling, etc.... not evidence-based.
Nice to hear that reverse osmosis has become affordable. Most water sanitizing tech isn't significantly better than just letting it sit around in a brass jug for a day, but RO sure is! Brass only kills pathogens; it won't remove all the other contaminants RO can.
Nope.
There are millions of people who aren't carrying phones. I only carry one when I'm paid to do so (and provided with the phone) and that's only happened twice in the last 20 years.
It's true that smartphones are useful to many people and desirable for even more. But lots of us don't want or need them at all; they'd just be a burden of maintenance and cost, and essentially a lifestyle downgrade.
Uh, nope. Check again.
Stainless steel is a filthy metal unless you're using the newer silver-coated stuff.
Seems a shame to use water from an expensive reverse osmosis filter in an inherently disease-friendly container - why not use a nice glass bottle, or a silver or copper one if you're worried about breakage?
Well, pretty obviously yes. In this universe, anyway.
For example, a billionaire influencing politics so that certain ethnicities are rounded up and placed in offshore torture camps is clearly worse than a billionaire influencing politics so that charities that provide surgery for children with cleft palates are exempt from taxation.
Jebus, I hope you were trolling.
I live in the bottom of a little valley, and I'd need a hundred foot tower to get more than two TV stations.
In my state, it's illegal to have a tower so tall that it could fall outside your property line. My property isn't two hundred feet wide, so no go.
But I ditched Comcast anyway and got Verizon instead. Verizon sucks too, but marginally less, and the FIOS technology is nice, at least, even if the provider isn't.
Uh... difficult to read regardless of your milk tongue?
And that is almost certainly the whole and entire real reason for opposition to the plant closing.
Remember, Green is the New Red.
And the sun is radioactive! Oh double noes!