I don't get why ID has to be taught in schools, or why it's such an important fight to draw a line on.
I don't see evolution as a big threat. Does it really make Man any lower than the doctrine of The Fall or Original Sin does? Does it necessarily deny the existence of a creator? Does that really take away any capacity to move from a fallen state and be Spiritually born of God, which is the important part of Christianity anyway? The only thing it really seems to threaten is some specific, literal readings of the Creation account in Genesis.
See, what you're talking about would be the ethically Right Thing(TM) to do. But it may not be the profitable thing to do. And if you beleive the famous Freidman statement, whenever the two coincide, profit should and will win out.
Dude. Anything would be better than the amulet of yendor. It makes you hungry faster, sucks out your engergy, causes you to mysteriously be sucked down several levels of hell as you try to climb out, and in return, all you get is some mild clairvoyance.
"Ajax is as good a word as any, and it's better that web developers have an identifiable term for that kind of tech, so that customers can refer to that general level of interactivity easily."
Bingo. As annoying as I find it that it's another term for a basically recycled concept, I think it's brilliant as a single-term descriptor, even if it's thrown around vaguely.
The fact that it's taken such a powerful hold quickly is illustrative of how good it is.
If hiring managers were looking for specialization, you were hiring at the wrong kind of company.. i would kill for developers that could develop and not just plug crap into.net or java
Sure, *you* would, but without those specifics, your HR people would have no freakin' idea how to sort resumes.
Not that it would make a big difference from how things are now.
" it came from having an economic and legal system that placed few barriers in the paths of the talented"
Judging from the fact that we're now spending more on legal -- in part due to intellectual property insanity and increased wrangling over who "owns" what ideas -- it's just possible the legal system is becoming part of the problem.
But hey, if potential personal profit means arguing over what's already been invented a la SCO instead of actually getting out and inventing things, why should we get in the way?
"you could try something difficult like actually reading a transcript of the Presidents remarks - which answers your questions."
Except it doesn't actually answer the questions, and the question was obviously lobbed in as a softball. What it looks like is that the current administration knows exactly how inadequate the recent disasters showed them to be, and they're trying to not make the appearance of the same mistake again. Meanwhile, actual *leadership* on the issue is absent. Pondering how to deploy the military doesn't even begin to address the problems; though perhaps it's not without merit: I'm certain the actual military professionals at the Pentagon have spent orders of magnitude more thought on the matter than the political hacks currently controlling the executive branch.
"But that requires thought and work. It's easier to repeat the fear mongering of the left wing blogs than to think for oneself."
Ad hominem much? Try not so clearly marking yourself as just another partisan moron sometime. This is NOT a partisan issue, except insofar as one has staked a claim that requires them to defend the Bush administration. Many of my red-blooded Republican friends who've followed the issue or work in medicine are as concerned about it as any Bush-hating lefty.
"the "short term" course of drugs and antibiotics involves four different antibiotics used in pairs over several months"
Not sure about several months, but I was diagnosed with an H. Pylori infection last week and am currently taking 2000mg of one antibiotic and 1000mg of another daily, plus a proton-pump inhibitor style antacid. It looks like the course of treatment should only be weeks, though.
"This would assume that every test is written to perfectly reflect the material in the course. That is an absurd assumption. The fact that the article's author thinks this way explains a lot about his difficulty as an engineering major."
Um. What else *should* the test reflect, other than the course material?
I understand that it's not going to reflect perfectly. But I'd think any engineering professor would be unsatisfied with a test that didn't accurate reflect what it's supposed to measure -- outside a given tolerance for error. Say, +/- 10% worst case.
3. Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.
We're walking down the national curriculum road with No Child Left Behind. Nearly every teacher I know hates it. And there wasn't very much I hated more than the state curriculum when I was student teaching. Any individual teacher with a love for their discipline or spark of inventiveness is going to react badly to a lack of freedom in this area.
"Every one of use who's stumbled through this kind of course and walked out with a 45% average and a B+ knows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark"
Sorry about that. Every one of us might not know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark -- that's a Hamlet reference, for you humanities-deprived folks.
"You know what? Everytime I cross a bridge, ride an elevator, or fail to be crushed by a collapsing building, I'm thankful that engineering schools [pass students who apparently know less than 50% of their material]."
Note this portion from the article:
I nearly fainted when I learned that I received a 43% on the Physics final. I nearly fainted again when I learned that the class average was 38%...Having allegedly mastered 43% of the course material, I was now deemed fit to take even harder Physics classes. I wondered: at the highest levels of physics, could you get a passing grade with a 5% score on a test? A 3% score?
Every one of use who's stumbled through this kind of course and walked out with a 45% average and a B+ knows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but we're usually so darn grateful whatever it was didn't kill our careers personally that we don't question it too closely, even if we don't know more than half the course material.
(Then again, maybe it's good ol' engineering redundancy.)
"Because it is a passion. I get to learn new things that nobody else knows yet. I get paid to do that"
Which is a fabulous way to *personally* choose field to study and work in, but if you're worried about general demographic trends surrounding such choices, you can't just encourage people to tough it out for sheer love of the subject.
But you know what? Science and engineering are hard. That's the honest truth.
Responding "tough jerky" is an educational cop-out, though.
I started as an Electrical Engineering student. I ended up in Math, and certainly didn't make that switch because techincal subjects and abstract concepts were too hard for me.
I made it because the Engineering Department at my university seemed more interested in throwing down a withering gauntlet than helping one through. Meanwhile, my math professors seemed genuinely interested in teaching and exploring their subject rather than cultivating a sense of professional pride. Especially the honors freshman calc -- I've rarely seen more work put into trying to make a curriculum and classroom *work* in the post-secondary world.
Which is why in the end, though I knew what I'd learn from a Math degree would probably be less vocationally useful, I picked that direction. If I'd wanted nothing more than a challenge, I could pick up a few Schaum's volumes and try for the PE certifaction test. Probably still could. But I wanted an education and room to enjoy the college experience. And if I had it to do over again, I think it would have been smarter to have done *more* of that, and to have worked for a math minor and liberal arts major, rather than the other way around.
"You just wait," I thought, gazing upon them like the ant regarding the grasshopper in the summer. "You party and blow off homework now, but in ten years, you'll be making merely wonderful money as investment bankers and consultants, while I'll be getting laid off from a great job at General Electric."
Business increasingly treats math & science talent as fungible and freely exchangable across borders, in an effort to cut costs, and salaries fall. And we all know how much social status and respect we afford to those skilled in math & science, right?
Add that to hit-and-miss quality of instruction, and in some cases, an intentionally withering gauntlet to run, and I agree with the author. The truly smart are looking elsewhere.
So... we're starting to outsource knowledge work, lumping science/technical skills in with manufacturing labor in the competetive race to the bottom. And Academia is increasingly competetive and less remunerative, and public funding is getting slashed.
I guess science is something you go into for love, right?
Microsoft's ostensible concern that de-integrating the browser was going to cause problems was, at best, like saying allowing commodity car batteries would harm the automotive experience (in actuality, it was a lot more like saying that swapping out the car stereo would harm the experience).
Apple's concern with hardware is a lot more like saying swapping out the engine could result in some issues. Sure, you can do it, and if you know what you're doing, you'll come out fine and right out any attendant difficulties. But if you don't...
So, yeah, we actually had these unemployment benefits once -- though they were oriented towards retirements and not layoffs, and called "Pensions". But increasingly, these are just too expensive for corporations to afford, so we're letting them declare bankruptcy and default on these obligations.
To make up for that, however, we're encouraging evil rotten deadbeat individuals who just overspent to pay for their purchases. And extending copyright law.
Actually, according to TFA, it's working. Mainstream media is more likely to pick up a blurb about 5 naked strippers protesting than 5 well dressed people.
Merits and dangers of technology aside, activists seem more and more stupid these days. Yeah, shock value gets you *attention* -- but not credibility. MLK had protestors dress up in their sunday best, looking dignified. If they'd run through the streets nude and shouting, it would have been a fine spectacle, but we'd probably still have seperate water fountains.
So yeah. Fight the man. Spark debate over nanotech, GM food, war, whatever. Just do it with some sense, OK? Protest is already in danger of becoming dead as a vector for social change. Turning it into an easy parody of itself isn't helping.
Wrong, wrong, wrong
on
A Decade of PHP
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"you can use Perl's regular expressions in PHP."
Nope. You can't. Well, you can. Well, sortof. Sometimes. With some syntactical exceptions, and lots of thinking about escape sequences, and passing parameters a different way. And that's the gotcha. You start thinking it's going to be the same -- and it's not.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get why ID has to be taught in schools, or why it's such an important fight to draw a line on.
I don't see evolution as a big threat. Does it really make Man any lower than the doctrine of The Fall or Original Sin does? Does it necessarily deny the existence of a creator? Does that really take away any capacity to move from a fallen state and be Spiritually born of God, which is the important part of Christianity anyway? The only thing it really seems to threaten is some specific, literal readings of the Creation account in Genesis.
It just seems like a weird bone to pick.
... the guy who finally makes it work won't have much trouble applying before you do.
... other than a return to its shareholders.
See, what you're talking about would be the ethically Right Thing(TM) to do. But it may not be the profitable thing to do. And if you beleive the famous Freidman statement, whenever the two coincide, profit should and will win out.
Dude. Anything would be better than the amulet of yendor. It makes you hungry faster, sucks out your engergy, causes you to mysteriously be sucked down several levels of hell as you try to climb out, and in return, all you get is some mild clairvoyance.
"Ajax is as good a word as any, and it's better that web developers have an identifiable term for that kind of tech, so that customers can refer to that general level of interactivity easily."
Bingo. As annoying as I find it that it's another term for a basically recycled concept, I think it's brilliant as a single-term descriptor, even if it's thrown around vaguely.
The fact that it's taken such a powerful hold quickly is illustrative of how good it is.
If hiring managers were looking for specialization, you were hiring at the wrong kind of company.. i would kill for developers that could develop and not just plug crap into .net or java
Sure, *you* would, but without those specifics, your HR people would have no freakin' idea how to sort resumes.
Not that it would make a big difference from how things are now.
If you have dreams follow them.
And make sure that you choose a career path that people with money are willing to pay you for.
i.e., not game development, not technology. At least, not working for someone else.
Guys with money like skills. Lawyering skills, creative accounting skills, business negotiation skills....
" it came from having an economic and legal system that placed few barriers in the paths of the talented"
Judging from the fact that we're now spending more on legal -- in part due to intellectual property insanity and increased wrangling over who "owns" what ideas -- it's just possible the legal system is becoming part of the problem.
But hey, if potential personal profit means arguing over what's already been invented a la SCO instead of actually getting out and inventing things, why should we get in the way?
"you could try something difficult like actually reading a transcript of the Presidents remarks - which answers your questions."
Except it doesn't actually answer the questions, and the question was obviously lobbed in as a softball. What it looks like is that the current administration knows exactly how inadequate the recent disasters showed them to be, and they're trying to not make the appearance of the same mistake again. Meanwhile, actual *leadership* on the issue is absent. Pondering how to deploy the military doesn't even begin to address the problems; though perhaps it's not without merit: I'm certain the actual military professionals at the Pentagon have spent orders of magnitude more thought on the matter than the political hacks currently controlling the executive branch.
"But that requires thought and work. It's easier to repeat the fear mongering of the left wing blogs than to think for oneself."
Ad hominem much? Try not so clearly marking yourself as just another partisan moron sometime. This is NOT a partisan issue, except insofar as one has staked a claim that requires them to defend the Bush administration. Many of my red-blooded Republican friends who've followed the issue or work in medicine are as concerned about it as any Bush-hating lefty.
"the "short term" course of drugs and antibiotics involves four different antibiotics used in pairs over several months"
Not sure about several months, but I was diagnosed with an H. Pylori infection last week and am currently taking 2000mg of one antibiotic and 1000mg of another daily, plus a proton-pump inhibitor style antacid. It looks like the course of treatment should only be weeks, though.
"This would assume that every test is written to perfectly reflect the material in the course. That is an absurd assumption. The fact that the article's author thinks this way explains a lot about his difficulty as an engineering major."
Um. What else *should* the test reflect, other than the course material?
I understand that it's not going to reflect perfectly. But I'd think any engineering professor would be unsatisfied with a test that didn't accurate reflect what it's supposed to measure -- outside a given tolerance for error. Say, +/- 10% worst case.
3. Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.
We're walking down the national curriculum road with No Child Left Behind. Nearly every teacher I know hates it. And there wasn't very much I hated more than the state curriculum when I was student teaching. Any individual teacher with a love for their discipline or spark of inventiveness is going to react badly to a lack of freedom in this area."Every one of use who's stumbled through this kind of course and walked out with a 45% average and a B+ knows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark" Sorry about that. Every one of us might not know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark -- that's a Hamlet reference, for you humanities-deprived folks.
"Because it is a passion. I get to learn new things that nobody else knows yet. I get paid to do that"
Which is a fabulous way to *personally* choose field to study and work in, but if you're worried about general demographic trends surrounding such choices, you can't just encourage people to tough it out for sheer love of the subject.
But you know what? Science and engineering are hard. That's the honest truth.
Responding "tough jerky" is an educational cop-out, though.
I started as an Electrical Engineering student. I ended up in Math, and certainly didn't make that switch because techincal subjects and abstract concepts were too hard for me.
I made it because the Engineering Department at my university seemed more interested in throwing down a withering gauntlet than helping one through. Meanwhile, my math professors seemed genuinely interested in teaching and exploring their subject rather than cultivating a sense of professional pride. Especially the honors freshman calc -- I've rarely seen more work put into trying to make a curriculum and classroom *work* in the post-secondary world.
Which is why in the end, though I knew what I'd learn from a Math degree would probably be less vocationally useful, I picked that direction. If I'd wanted nothing more than a challenge, I could pick up a few Schaum's volumes and try for the PE certifaction test. Probably still could. But I wanted an education and room to enjoy the college experience. And if I had it to do over again, I think it would have been smarter to have done *more* of that, and to have worked for a math minor and liberal arts major, rather than the other way around.
"You just wait," I thought, gazing upon them like the ant regarding the grasshopper in the summer. "You party and blow off homework now, but in ten years, you'll be making merely wonderful money as investment bankers and consultants, while I'll be getting laid off from a great job at General Electric."
Business increasingly treats math & science talent as fungible and freely exchangable across borders, in an effort to cut costs, and salaries fall. And we all know how much social status and respect we afford to those skilled in math & science, right?
Add that to hit-and-miss quality of instruction, and in some cases, an intentionally withering gauntlet to run, and I agree with the author. The truly smart are looking elsewhere.
Me, I studied Mathematics.
"In ~10 years of trying to find scientific evidence of just a single god the ID people haven't published a single paper."
It depends on which journals you're reading.
are rising wildly, right? NOT!
So... we're starting to outsource knowledge work, lumping science/technical skills in with manufacturing labor in the competetive race to the bottom. And Academia is increasingly competetive and less remunerative, and public funding is getting slashed.
I guess science is something you go into for love, right?
Microsoft's ostensible concern that de-integrating the browser was going to cause problems was, at best, like saying allowing commodity car batteries would harm the automotive experience (in actuality, it was a lot more like saying that swapping out the car stereo would harm the experience).
Apple's concern with hardware is a lot more like saying swapping out the engine could result in some issues. Sure, you can do it, and if you know what you're doing, you'll come out fine and right out any attendant difficulties. But if you don't...
So, yeah, we actually had these unemployment benefits once -- though they were oriented towards retirements and not layoffs, and called "Pensions". But increasingly, these are just too expensive for corporations to afford, so we're letting them declare bankruptcy and default on these obligations.
To make up for that, however, we're encouraging evil rotten deadbeat individuals who just overspent to pay for their purchases. And extending copyright law.
Actually, according to TFA, it's working. Mainstream media is more likely to pick up a blurb about 5 naked strippers protesting than 5 well dressed people.
Right, that's the attention part I mentioned.
Where's the credibility part?
Merits and dangers of technology aside, activists seem more and more stupid these days. Yeah, shock value gets you *attention* -- but not credibility. MLK had protestors dress up in their sunday best, looking dignified. If they'd run through the streets nude and shouting, it would have been a fine spectacle, but we'd probably still have seperate water fountains.
So yeah. Fight the man. Spark debate over nanotech, GM food, war, whatever. Just do it with some sense, OK? Protest is already in danger of becoming dead as a vector for social change. Turning it into an easy parody of itself isn't helping.
"you can use Perl's regular expressions in PHP."
Nope. You can't. Well, you can. Well, sortof. Sometimes. With some syntactical exceptions, and lots of thinking about escape sequences, and passing parameters a different way. And that's the gotcha. You start thinking it's going to be the same -- and it's not.
And doggone it, if the shuttle was fine with O-Rings the *last* 5 times it launched, it'll be fine with 'em this time too!