The working class was making a living wage doing, for the most part, manual unskilled job (pull a lever on a converyor belt or making US flags.
I'd like to know where you got the idea that the working class was doing mostly manual unskilled jobs.
Because I was in the middle class doing manual unskilled work (soldering electronics) 26 years ago. Because that is what I saw predominantly everywhere I went. Yeah, you had a factory that manufactured and repaired electric motors. For each one of "you" there were a dozen of "others" truly doing unskilled jobs.
Jesus, look at all those people that used to work in the auto industry. Sure, there were truly skilled laborers, but the lot was just put thing A in mold B, yell "clear" and pull the lever. The garment industry? Unskilled by modern standards. Assembly of electronics? The bulk of it is unskilled by modern standards.
Look at the work done by FoxConn workers in China. Yeah, they are assembling your fucking awesome, newest iButtPlug electro-trinket, but those workers are unskilled. They simply pick part A and B from conveyor belt and put them together in a bucket in another conveyor belt.
Those are the type of manufacturing jobs that were predominant here, that were uber-sophisticated by the standards of the 50's and 60's when Europe and Japan were recovering from the ashes, China and India were completed fucked, Latin America was fucked and incompetent (hasn't changed much) and 2/3 of the planet was living in some weird state mixing stages from the Neolithic, Iron Age and Feudalism with a bit here and there from the Industrial Age circa 1800's.
Things changed, and those uber-sophisticated jobs no longer count as skilled. The rest of the planet did some catching up, and what counted as skilled now counts as menial.
Unemployment is created by government rules, laws, taxes, nothing else.
Unemployment is a function of capitalism in order to create fear and a willing pool of people prepared to do awful jobs for rubbish pay.
Unemployment, underployment and poverty have existed for as long as humans have developed stratified societies (7K years). I'm sure as fuck that this preceded capitalism, but don't let that stop you from posting ideological histrionics. Whatever rocks your boat, I'm not judging.
Problem is most people think they're better than that.
Americans have no interest in those jobs at the rate they are currently paying. Before the influx of illegal immigration (as well as offshoring), the working class was making a living wage. Nowadays, it's damn near impossible to survive (much less thrive) on the pittance that's being passed off as minimum wage. It's literally better to not work, get on welfare, and instead live a no-stress life - free of the abuses the lowest rung on the ladder normally take. It's not an issue of what they think - people are better than that.
OH THE LOLS!
The working class was making a living wage doing, for the most part, manual unskilled job (pull a lever on a converyor belt or making US flags. That went away with globalization, starting with the rise of Japan, and then the opening of China (and India to a degree).
Many studies have already debunked the idea that illegals have been depressing salaries. Overseas competition is what is killing jobs and depressing salaries. Not that I'm supporting illegal immigration (any country must have the right to control its borders), nor demonizing overseas competition (adapt or die motherfuckers.) But let's keep shit more or less accurate, shall we?
Nope. My argument is that it was a total war and Sherman destroyed targets of military value. He didn't directly kill civilians;
Doesn't matter, because the world doesn't work that way. Sure, Sherman may have behaved properly and ordered decent treatment of civilians that got in his way. But that doesn't matter much, because:
When you send soldiers somewhere - especially soldiers who have to fight bloody fights to gain ground, soldiers who loose comrades to enemy activity - they won't necessarily behave. Some will be nice enough, some will rape, loot, pillage, kill and burn. At least when officers aren't looking too closely. Just because they can! Because theyr'e angry, and hating. They believed the motivational speeches, now the enemy is going to pay! And any civilian dumb enough to support the enemy cause, which is anoune around . ..
This is well known, and it has always been like that. You can get your troops into "kill'em-mode", they do not come out of that all at the same time. And if you don't provide enough military police to keep them all in check at all time - then you will have senseless raping, killing and looting. Simple human nature, for some of us. People are not nice at all when they fight, and real assholes see a huge opportunity in war.
All of that would have been avoided if the South had given up on the idea of keeping humans as property as a state right and had not gone into rebellion to preserve their "Southern institutions" (including that one involving keeping humans as property.)
6 months probation is about right for what he did anyway. I can't believe they're clogging prisons with petty criminals like this then turning violent criminals out because of over crowding. A BB gun as a deadly weapon? They're turning the legal system into a farce with that kind of bullshit.
Actually a BB gun can seriously injure someone. I was hit with a BB once (accidental) mind you, hitting me on my knuckle. That dig itself in bad. I do not want to think what it could do to an eye.
== the following below are generalizations of what the law says, counting variations across different jurisdictions within and outside the US ==
By law, a "deadly weapon" is not just a weapon that can kill for certain, but that has the potential to cause a serious injury that can lead to death. A BB to the eyeball at short range can do that. So can a rock being thrown to someone's face. In some jurisdictions around the world, a professional boxer's hands can be considered deadly weapons given that, unlike other people within their respective weight classes, professional boxes can kill someone with a punch to the temple.
The fact that using a BB gun has the potential to seriously injure someone makes its use a 3rd degree assault (potential to injury + recklessness). Use it to commit a crime and that shit by default ups it up to 2nd or even 1st degree depending of the circumstance.
Moreover, the law (as it should be) takes into consideration the state of mind of a potential victim. If the victim seriously thinks he is in physical danger, that is enough to bring a 3rd degree assault charge, even if the assault never takes place. This is more so if the person is put into a state of being scared of his well being or life while being subjected of a crime (then it goes to 2nd or 1st degree).
The person would have to know pretty well that the weapon is a BB gun and not a real gun. It is unreasonable to expect a person in a state of fright to recognize the two. If this were the case, one could argue I could attempt robbery with a fake gun (or a gun without rounds in it) and then claim in my defense that I did not use a deadly weapon. I hope I don't think I have to explain this one any further.
I disagree with you that 6 months probation was enough. This wasn't a harmless crime, and this person is a criminal.
I agree that we put petty criminals to jail too often. But armed robbery is not petty crime.
Breaking into a house when no one is there, and stealing a TV is. Cutting a bicycle chain to steal it, that is petty crime. Shoplifting is a petty crime. Selling bootlegged DVDs or dope is.
Armed robbery, subjecting a victim to a state of being afraid of his physical well being, that is not a petty crime.
What I'm really curious, and what I'm really afraid, and the real question of importance is: what the hell were the authorities so afraid to disclosed that they opted to drop charges and offer a plea. There is something absolutely wrong going on here if they have to cover that shit like that. That is the stuff we should we worried about.
He opines that "regular software writers" dwell in the realm of the semi-science-literate.
Anyone who says 'regular software writers' doesn't know shit about the subject he/she opines about. Seriously, what is a 'software writer', and what does 'regular' mean in this context? Define 'regular'.
I've always liked the 'science guy', but seriously, his use of language to describe whatever the hell he tried to describe leaves a lot to be desired and betrays a certain level of ignorance on a science/educational topic. Considering that software development, engineering and IT are some of the most important fields in the modern industry, that is ignorance of science and knowledge applicable to the current times.
Not even Bill knows everything, and he, just like everyone else, should STFU every once in a while on subjects not too familiar with.
You're paraphrasing Dijkstra, but missing his point. Astronomers, in general, know a heck of a lot about optics. His point wasn't to excuse ignorance of how computers work (he worked on the design of the STANTEC ZEBRA and wrote an incredibly scathing review of the IBM1620, for example, so clearly knew his way around the design process), it was to point out that this is a building block.
I'd consider any computer science curriculum that doesn't cover logic gates up to building adders, the basics of pipelining, the memory hierarchy and virtual memory translation at a minimum to have seriously skimped over computer architecture. The better ones will include design and simulation (on FPGA if budgets permit) of a simple pipelined processor.
I would challenge anyone to show me a CS degree that doesn't have any of what you mentioned. This meme/fad/bullshit has been running for a long time among hardware degrees, that we CS grads never see such things (and I love their faces when I show them otherwise.)
The thing is, and this is what I've personally observed, that CS detractors claim we do not know those things listed above because we do not know the basics of electrical engineering. For example, knowing the exact working of a capacitor by reciting the laws of physics (and interactions) that make its work possible. Or reciting what a Thevenin's equivalent is.
Of course we do not fucking know (nor should we need to). And then we spend most of our careers working at higher levels of abstractions, so we won't recite out of heads how to construct a digital adder with a carry bit, nor remember how we built a basic ALU in our undergrad studies 10, 15, 20+ years ago.
But that does not constitute any evidence that we never see anything regarding computer organization and architecture (a fundamental subject that all CS students must pass to graduate.) And making assumptions like that can only to "conclusions" that are not only stupid, but malevolent.
There is a degree of truth that many CS degrees have lowered the requirements and put too much emphasis on higher-level programming languages to the detriment of lower level ones. But that is not the state of the field in general, nor a characterization of all who work in the profession with that degree.
YMMV, but people who make that kind of ridiculous assumptions are just carrying a big chip on their shoulders and need to make shit out to feel good about their career choices. It is not just ignorance, but arrogance.
A fairly accurate opinion, in my opinion. CS people are better educated than the average person, but many of them are still surprisingly ignorant about scientific topics.. Many of them don't even understand how computers actually work.
And most other engineers (even EEs who write software) don't know how software works (I had an EE old timer challenging me that he could write a compiler by just using look up tables to replace high level syntax artifacts into machine instructions.) Same with Physics majors writing code in, say, Python or Fortran.
See what I just did there? Every motherfucker out there is blatantly (and sometimes inexcusably) ignorant of some other thing.
And what do we mean by "understanding". Most CS grads (myself included) do not understand how computers works down to the nitty gritty levels, where copper meets the solder, where the laws of physics dictate how transistors and shit like that do their magic.
Nor should we need to. That's what EEs and CEs are for. But we do know, in general, the architecture of things, digital logic, the basic composition of computer architecture and so on and so on. That there are CSs out there who do not know that is not an indictment of the general population.
The same applies to, say EE majors that write software in C/C++/MatLab/HDLs more often than designing stuff at the physical level. Most have no clue how a compiler works, nor how a OS works. Seriously, most might now about hardware level protection, but not many can explain how the OS mediates a user-level process' request to a kernel-level call.
And that person shouldn't know. That's what CS grads are for.
That is what specialization means. To make blatant generalizations about who knows what is just an exercise seeing who has the largest wiener. That is all.
Did this same one person build the Data Centre? Lay the concrete, build the walls, install the Air-con, the electrical, the plumbing? I'm pretty sure there's more than 40 hours a week worth of work in constructing one of these things.
And somehow this translates to property tax exemptions how? There are other businesses that went through the same construction costs, that created more permanent jobs and that end up (or ended up) paying more taxes during the same tax period these tax breaks occurred. From a sensible, logical point of view, how to we justify that?
Notice that I'm saying "justify", not "explain" because I can explain anything away with a barrage of cynicism. Justification, the rationale behind something, however, that is what I'm asking.
Which doesn't help the community unless those jobs are paying in tax revenue to Hillsboro to offset the tax breaks.
They don't, because Oregon has no state sales tax. So all the equipment comes in tax free.
But there are property taxes, business related purchase taxes and so on. You are just being deliberately obtuse for the sake of having an ideological argument.
you are correct there, Not living there I have no idea how bad their tax code, if its anything like NYs its just as bad as federal and should also be scrapped
But since you do not know for sure, you might as well STFU and learn about it before trying to conjoin this issue with federal taxation issues (or more to the point, stop trying to shoehorn your pet-peeve issues into every single issue you come across unless you factually know the two are related.)
that happens. also people die on surgeon's table. shit indeed does happen.
but you're missing the point. you can't _get_ a rock star CEO in today's market if you do not offer the parachute..
you and i can get all pissy about that but unless you want to put shackles on the candidate he/she simply won't work for you under different conditions.
same as Jolie or Pitt or Hanks won't work on a movie unless you cut them a sizable check regardless of how the movie does.
you have a problem with that? move to North Korea. pretty much everywhere else people figured out that worrying about CEO's paycheck is barking at the wrong tree.
What the hell is a rock start CEO? Like Leo Apotheker of HP sad fame? Eddie Lampert who ran Sears to the ground? The list of crappy CEO's can go on and on. And the list of average CEO's is even greater.
The list of rockstar CEOs is very minuscule, so your argument about needing high parachutes to attract rockstart CEOs is flawed.
The entire compensation system is flawed and it has more to do with using golden parachutes as 'hush money' to get rid of a bad CEO quickly and without issue (thus minimizing damage) than to attract rockstar talent. Thomas Sowell explains this in details in his "Basic Economics" (a deep look into the subject, a worth read.)
This type of argument only makes sense when we can objectively correlate the quality of golden parachutes to quality of performance. People can argue as much as they want that this correlation (or actual causal relation) exists. But real world (and actual managerial intention) evidence says otherwise.
and ideally someone whose background is in something other than Java. Why? Java hides way too much of how a computer works, so Java programmers often lack enough understanding of what's going on under the hood to write good code.
That is nonsense on all accounts. Glad you are not hiring.
Just some background to qualify my opinion (subjective and anecdotal to a degree, obviously). From 1994 till 1999, I worked in a variety of languages, VB, FoxPro, Delphi, and then C++. Then I switched to Java in 1999 and worked with it till 2010. Then , then went back to C/C++/Asm till recently. Some C#. Now I'm doing Java/EE and Python again.
I've seen a lot of people in different roles, and indeed, at least my experience matches what the OP is saying. A background predominantly Java (or C# or VB or PHP) does not typically translate to a good understanding of how things work.
And such people work in a fallacy that such knowledge is not essential. And that's why we have Java/EE systems that trash the GC, or that leak connections up to the wazoo. When you have never seen a segfault with nothing but a core dump, and when all you know are these high-level stack trace constructs, it creates a false sense of security where the basics of cleaning your own shit are nowhere to be seen. Algorithm basics go out of the door (with hilarious consequences), and always operating under the assumption that latency is always 0.
So I find the OP's premise to hold consistently, regardless of whether we are developing an e-commerce site or a networking tool, or an Eclipse plug-in. In my experience, it simply holds. YMMV.
Learning style...
So being an autodidact is a 'learning style'? Sorry, I had had no idea what you even refer to if you had asked me: 'what is your learning style?'
This is actually a valid question. God knows how many people I've seen constantly asking me how to use GNU sed or whether deleting keys off a java.util.HashMap is ok while iterating on it. A simple trip to google, a set of javadocs or stackoverflow would answer that shit very quickly. And that is a function of a learning style (or lack thereof.)
So there is a validity to the question. If you ask that question, and the answer doesn't contain a single reference to visiting google or stack overflow, be very afraid.
> If company goes bankrupt due to CEO's bad decisions, CEO will be able to live quite comfortably to the end of his life
if those bad decisions were in fact caused by the CEO there are plenty that can be (and is) done to punish them for poor performance. CEOs fired routinely.
... with a golden parachute so fucking big, the only punishment they get is some headlines in the news.
Failing like that == making it rich no matter what. If that is punishment, I'm going to get me into S&M!
Germany sure has a lot of State Owned Enterprise for a country that's not Socialist.
Goddammit, we have a lot illiterate people in this country.
This is the thing. Lots of state owned enterprise =/= socialism. That is barely a requirement for it, and it is in no way contradictory of capitalism.
Socialism, in its most general term, pushes a preference for public (social) ownership of production over private ownership. I challenge anyone to show me that this is the general trend in Germany (or even the Scandinavian countries.)
... and no, I'm not a proponent of socialism. I'm free market/private ownership all the way. I lived under socialism and it sucks, but I also know what is and what it is not. It is not what the pseudo-conservative idiot masses of this country say it is.
Perhaps you should get your facts right?
Neither in Russia nor in China socialism is considered a failure, actually both countries where not even socialistic.
In both countries however capitalism is considered to be a failure.
Or what do you think why poverty in Russia, inequality etc. is in the rise?
Same for Cuba and Venezuela. Care to explain why Cuba is a failure when health care and education are on a much higher level (and much cheaper) than in the USA albeit being under a boycott and other sanctions from the USA the last 70 years?
Finally: capitalism and socialism are two complete different dimensions. China shows clearly: you can have both. Wow, surprise.
This is a place that tens of thousands were killed in purges, and where being homosexual can get you to the firing squad, even today. This is no bullshit or lies, but actual history (and contemporary news for those found "guilty" of homosexuality.)
Not to mention the well known fallacy of its health care system (education is good, though). You might want to revisit your notions of what a "relatively successful" society is, though (if you give a shit about being intellectually honest, that is.)
Most jets are made with 11 inches of steel. Rail guns are against harden targets. Lasers are to shoot down aircraft. (Lasers kinda need a line of site to work)
ZOMG WTF? Either you are joking, this is a typo, or you simply don't know WTF you are talking about? Name one jet, or airplane, or anything that goes up with propulsion containing something with 11 inches of steel. I seriously doubt even something like an Atlas rocket would have something like that.
We are talking about something almost a full feet thick of relatively heavy metal, not aluminum or titanium or high-strength ceramics or polymers, but steel. Other than an engine block or thrusters (which are not solid pieces of metal), what the hell in a jet is made out of a piece of steel 11 inches thick?
This is why I don't like developing for Microsoft's stack. They seem to want to throw everything out every few years and start over.
Not that different from the Java FOSS cornucopia. And in many ways, it is better than the design-by-committee-slow-as-molasses thing we have with JEE and the JCP.
Then again, it seems like the web business is like that, too.
A lot of it is ego and developers OCD/fixation with trying new technical things (as opposed to solving business problems with economical, yet maintainable solutions.)
OTH, a lot of the churn is due to external pressures of competition. You put something on the web, someone is already competing with you.
Then you have catch up at worst, or out-innovate them at best, which leads to technical changes and challenges that inevitable lead to revisiting and reinventing (sometimes brilliantly, many times horrendously) the plumbing, the scaffolding and struts that puts all of it together, where it gets deployed, etc.
Damn. Doesn't anyone write non-disposable code any more?
Non-disposable technical software is not a quality you want to seek unless you are developing critical systems.
If your web stuff is not disposable, it means it cannot be replaced when the need arises (which it will.)
Disposable code is trivial if we know what the fuck we are doing.
What we do not want are Enterprise-level business logic and dependencies and fundamental architectural decisions that are trivially disposable.
You want those things to be clear and malleable, but not so easily disposable. Because then you have a clear blue print with which to create systems with disposable (ergo, loosely coupled) design/implementation-level artifacts.
Because the only "free" license options that matter are the ones you care about. Yes Comrade Commissar, we will comply with your thought police party line or whatever #fileitunderomfgurdumb
So what you're saying is for all that extra work, you got average results.
If by average you mean good results, I guess that would be a yes. I mean seriously, in what world of stupidity and cynicism did getting kids through post-graduate education became "average results"?
I'm not a fan of home-schooling in general because, at least in this country, it is generally perceived by the public as a means for Luddites to keep their kids off the sinful, Godless grid.
But here, this is obviously not the case. And for you to simply dismiss the results of their efforts as "average results" (when in this country "average results" means graduating from HS without knowing the difference between "your" and "you're"), that is just imbecile.
Whether you are just being cynically stupid or just deliberately obtuse, only you know.
Reading comprehension on Slashdot is seriously weak. I stated a personal preference between two hypothetical jobs for simple illustration of a point other than the one you're making, and nowhere did I say that those were the only choices available to myself or anyone else for that matter. The point that you and the preceding response make is irrelevant to the topic and to my point, which is that money isn't the only thing people consider when looking for a job and just waving high salaries at top-end developers ignores the possibility of soft factors playing a part in their decision-making processes.
The problem with your counter-argument (aka "simple illustration") is that you presented the hypotheticals as a dichotomy, one that is patently false in real life. It is a false dichotomy that glosses over/denies all the other possibilities in between from which people select according to their personal preferences as well.
Polish your arguments if you don't like the type of responses you get.
Slashdot Mirror
Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams?
Videconferencing + whiteboard. It's a very common combination (as it is no longer uncommon to work with remote teams.)
The working class was making a living wage doing, for the most part, manual unskilled job (pull a lever on a converyor belt or making US flags.
I'd like to know where you got the idea that the working class was doing mostly manual unskilled jobs.
Because I was in the middle class doing manual unskilled work (soldering electronics) 26 years ago. Because that is what I saw predominantly everywhere I went. Yeah, you had a factory that manufactured and repaired electric motors. For each one of "you" there were a dozen of "others" truly doing unskilled jobs.
Jesus, look at all those people that used to work in the auto industry. Sure, there were truly skilled laborers, but the lot was just put thing A in mold B, yell "clear" and pull the lever. The garment industry? Unskilled by modern standards. Assembly of electronics? The bulk of it is unskilled by modern standards.
Look at the work done by FoxConn workers in China. Yeah, they are assembling your fucking awesome, newest iButtPlug electro-trinket, but those workers are unskilled. They simply pick part A and B from conveyor belt and put them together in a bucket in another conveyor belt.
Those are the type of manufacturing jobs that were predominant here, that were uber-sophisticated by the standards of the 50's and 60's when Europe and Japan were recovering from the ashes, China and India were completed fucked, Latin America was fucked and incompetent (hasn't changed much) and 2/3 of the planet was living in some weird state mixing stages from the Neolithic, Iron Age and Feudalism with a bit here and there from the Industrial Age circa 1800's.
Things changed, and those uber-sophisticated jobs no longer count as skilled. The rest of the planet did some catching up, and what counted as skilled now counts as menial.
Time to deal with it.
Unemployment is created by government rules, laws, taxes, nothing else.
Unemployment is a function of capitalism in order to create fear and a willing pool of people prepared to do awful jobs for rubbish pay.
Unemployment, underployment and poverty have existed for as long as humans have developed stratified societies (7K years). I'm sure as fuck that this preceded capitalism, but don't let that stop you from posting ideological histrionics. Whatever rocks your boat, I'm not judging.
Problem is most people think they're better than that.
Americans have no interest in those jobs at the rate they are currently paying. Before the influx of illegal immigration (as well as offshoring), the working class was making a living wage. Nowadays, it's damn near impossible to survive (much less thrive) on the pittance that's being passed off as minimum wage. It's literally better to not work, get on welfare, and instead live a no-stress life - free of the abuses the lowest rung on the ladder normally take. It's not an issue of what they think - people are better than that.
OH THE LOLS!
The working class was making a living wage doing, for the most part, manual unskilled job (pull a lever on a converyor belt or making US flags. That went away with globalization, starting with the rise of Japan, and then the opening of China (and India to a degree).
Many studies have already debunked the idea that illegals have been depressing salaries. Overseas competition is what is killing jobs and depressing salaries. Not that I'm supporting illegal immigration (any country must have the right to control its borders), nor demonizing overseas competition (adapt or die motherfuckers.) But let's keep shit more or less accurate, shall we?
Nope. My argument is that it was a total war and Sherman destroyed targets of military value. He didn't directly kill civilians;
Doesn't matter, because the world doesn't work that way. Sure, Sherman may have behaved properly and ordered decent treatment of civilians that got in his way. But that doesn't matter much, because:
When you send soldiers somewhere - especially soldiers who have to fight bloody fights to gain ground, soldiers who loose comrades to enemy activity - they won't necessarily behave. Some will be nice enough, some will rape, loot, pillage, kill and burn. At least when officers aren't looking too closely. Just because they can! Because theyr'e angry, and hating. They believed the motivational speeches, now the enemy is going to pay! And any civilian dumb enough to support the enemy cause, which is anoune around . . .
This is well known, and it has always been like that. You can get your troops into "kill'em-mode", they do not come out of that all at the same time. And if you don't provide enough military police to keep them all in check at all time - then you will have senseless raping, killing and looting. Simple human nature, for some of us. People are not nice at all when they fight, and real assholes see a huge opportunity in war.
All of that would have been avoided if the South had given up on the idea of keeping humans as property as a state right and had not gone into rebellion to preserve their "Southern institutions" (including that one involving keeping humans as property.)
One of the inventors was executed in 1946 for knowingly providing the substance to a certain evil state actor.
Godwin's Law doesn't mean that you can't ever refer to Hitler by name at all, you know.
Probably he omitted the name for literary effect, not to circumvent Godwin's.
6 months probation is about right for what he did anyway. I can't believe they're clogging prisons with petty criminals like this then turning violent criminals out because of over crowding. A BB gun as a deadly weapon? They're turning the legal system into a farce with that kind of bullshit.
Actually a BB gun can seriously injure someone. I was hit with a BB once (accidental) mind you, hitting me on my knuckle. That dig itself in bad. I do not want to think what it could do to an eye.
== the following below are generalizations of what the law says, counting variations across different jurisdictions within and outside the US ==
By law, a "deadly weapon" is not just a weapon that can kill for certain, but that has the potential to cause a serious injury that can lead to death. A BB to the eyeball at short range can do that. So can a rock being thrown to someone's face. In some jurisdictions around the world, a professional boxer's hands can be considered deadly weapons given that, unlike other people within their respective weight classes, professional boxes can kill someone with a punch to the temple.
The fact that using a BB gun has the potential to seriously injure someone makes its use a 3rd degree assault (potential to injury + recklessness). Use it to commit a crime and that shit by default ups it up to 2nd or even 1st degree depending of the circumstance.
Moreover, the law (as it should be) takes into consideration the state of mind of a potential victim. If the victim seriously thinks he is in physical danger, that is enough to bring a 3rd degree assault charge, even if the assault never takes place. This is more so if the person is put into a state of being scared of his well being or life while being subjected of a crime (then it goes to 2nd or 1st degree).
The person would have to know pretty well that the weapon is a BB gun and not a real gun. It is unreasonable to expect a person in a state of fright to recognize the two. If this were the case, one could argue I could attempt robbery with a fake gun (or a gun without rounds in it) and then claim in my defense that I did not use a deadly weapon. I hope I don't think I have to explain this one any further.
I disagree with you that 6 months probation was enough. This wasn't a harmless crime, and this person is a criminal.
I agree that we put petty criminals to jail too often. But armed robbery is not petty crime.
Breaking into a house when no one is there, and stealing a TV is. Cutting a bicycle chain to steal it, that is petty crime. Shoplifting is a petty crime. Selling bootlegged DVDs or dope is.
Armed robbery, subjecting a victim to a state of being afraid of his physical well being, that is not a petty crime.
What I'm really curious, and what I'm really afraid, and the real question of importance is: what the hell were the authorities so afraid to disclosed that they opted to drop charges and offer a plea. There is something absolutely wrong going on here if they have to cover that shit like that. That is the stuff we should we worried about.
He opines that "regular software writers" dwell in the realm of the semi-science-literate.
Anyone who says 'regular software writers' doesn't know shit about the subject he/she opines about. Seriously, what is a 'software writer', and what does 'regular' mean in this context? Define 'regular'.
I've always liked the 'science guy', but seriously, his use of language to describe whatever the hell he tried to describe leaves a lot to be desired and betrays a certain level of ignorance on a science/educational topic. Considering that software development, engineering and IT are some of the most important fields in the modern industry, that is ignorance of science and knowledge applicable to the current times.
Not even Bill knows everything, and he, just like everyone else, should STFU every once in a while on subjects not too familiar with.
You're paraphrasing Dijkstra, but missing his point. Astronomers, in general, know a heck of a lot about optics. His point wasn't to excuse ignorance of how computers work (he worked on the design of the STANTEC ZEBRA and wrote an incredibly scathing review of the IBM1620, for example, so clearly knew his way around the design process), it was to point out that this is a building block.
I'd consider any computer science curriculum that doesn't cover logic gates up to building adders, the basics of pipelining, the memory hierarchy and virtual memory translation at a minimum to have seriously skimped over computer architecture. The better ones will include design and simulation (on FPGA if budgets permit) of a simple pipelined processor.
I would challenge anyone to show me a CS degree that doesn't have any of what you mentioned. This meme/fad/bullshit has been running for a long time among hardware degrees, that we CS grads never see such things (and I love their faces when I show them otherwise.)
The thing is, and this is what I've personally observed, that CS detractors claim we do not know those things listed above because we do not know the basics of electrical engineering. For example, knowing the exact working of a capacitor by reciting the laws of physics (and interactions) that make its work possible. Or reciting what a Thevenin's equivalent is.
Of course we do not fucking know (nor should we need to). And then we spend most of our careers working at higher levels of abstractions, so we won't recite out of heads how to construct a digital adder with a carry bit, nor remember how we built a basic ALU in our undergrad studies 10, 15, 20+ years ago.
But that does not constitute any evidence that we never see anything regarding computer organization and architecture (a fundamental subject that all CS students must pass to graduate.) And making assumptions like that can only to "conclusions" that are not only stupid, but malevolent.
There is a degree of truth that many CS degrees have lowered the requirements and put too much emphasis on higher-level programming languages to the detriment of lower level ones. But that is not the state of the field in general, nor a characterization of all who work in the profession with that degree.
YMMV, but people who make that kind of ridiculous assumptions are just carrying a big chip on their shoulders and need to make shit out to feel good about their career choices. It is not just ignorance, but arrogance.
Someone asked him his opinion, and he gave it.
A fairly accurate opinion, in my opinion. CS people are better educated than the average person, but many of them are still surprisingly ignorant about scientific topics.. Many of them don't even understand how computers actually work.
And most other engineers (even EEs who write software) don't know how software works (I had an EE old timer challenging me that he could write a compiler by just using look up tables to replace high level syntax artifacts into machine instructions.) Same with Physics majors writing code in, say, Python or Fortran.
See what I just did there? Every motherfucker out there is blatantly (and sometimes inexcusably) ignorant of some other thing.
And what do we mean by "understanding". Most CS grads (myself included) do not understand how computers works down to the nitty gritty levels, where copper meets the solder, where the laws of physics dictate how transistors and shit like that do their magic.
Nor should we need to. That's what EEs and CEs are for. But we do know, in general, the architecture of things, digital logic, the basic composition of computer architecture and so on and so on. That there are CSs out there who do not know that is not an indictment of the general population.
The same applies to, say EE majors that write software in C/C++/MatLab/HDLs more often than designing stuff at the physical level. Most have no clue how a compiler works, nor how a OS works. Seriously, most might now about hardware level protection, but not many can explain how the OS mediates a user-level process' request to a kernel-level call.
And that person shouldn't know. That's what CS grads are for.
That is what specialization means. To make blatant generalizations about who knows what is just an exercise seeing who has the largest wiener. That is all.
Did this same one person build the Data Centre? Lay the concrete, build the walls, install the Air-con, the electrical, the plumbing? I'm pretty sure there's more than 40 hours a week worth of work in constructing one of these things.
And somehow this translates to property tax exemptions how? There are other businesses that went through the same construction costs, that created more permanent jobs and that end up (or ended up) paying more taxes during the same tax period these tax breaks occurred. From a sensible, logical point of view, how to we justify that?
Notice that I'm saying "justify", not "explain" because I can explain anything away with a barrage of cynicism. Justification, the rationale behind something, however, that is what I'm asking.
I know, right? I mean, look at all the young people that moved to SoCal during the glory years of the dotcom boom.http://i.imgur.com/Hwpiv6W.jpg
Where are the big arrows coming into California from Mexico, China, and Russia, among other countries? That map seems incomplete.
And where are the arrows coming into the rest of the country from Mexico, China and Russia, among other countries? Yes, the map is incomplete.
Which doesn't help the community unless those jobs are paying in tax revenue to Hillsboro to offset the tax breaks.
They don't, because Oregon has no state sales tax. So all the equipment comes in tax free.
But there are property taxes, business related purchase taxes and so on. You are just being deliberately obtuse for the sake of having an ideological argument.
you are correct there, Not living there I have no idea how bad their tax code, if its anything like NYs its just as bad as federal and should also be scrapped
But since you do not know for sure, you might as well STFU and learn about it before trying to conjoin this issue with federal taxation issues (or more to the point, stop trying to shoehorn your pet-peeve issues into every single issue you come across unless you factually know the two are related.)
that happens. also people die on surgeon's table. shit indeed does happen.
but you're missing the point. you can't _get_ a rock star CEO in today's market if you do not offer the parachute..
you and i can get all pissy about that but unless you want to put shackles on the candidate he/she simply won't work for you under different conditions.
same as Jolie or Pitt or Hanks won't work on a movie unless you cut them a sizable check regardless of how the movie does.
you have a problem with that? move to North Korea. pretty much everywhere else people figured out that worrying about CEO's paycheck is barking at the wrong tree.
What the hell is a rock start CEO? Like Leo Apotheker of HP sad fame? Eddie Lampert who ran Sears to the ground? The list of crappy CEO's can go on and on. And the list of average CEO's is even greater.
The list of rockstar CEOs is very minuscule, so your argument about needing high parachutes to attract rockstart CEOs is flawed.
The entire compensation system is flawed and it has more to do with using golden parachutes as 'hush money' to get rid of a bad CEO quickly and without issue (thus minimizing damage) than to attract rockstar talent. Thomas Sowell explains this in details in his "Basic Economics" (a deep look into the subject, a worth read.)
This type of argument only makes sense when we can objectively correlate the quality of golden parachutes to quality of performance. People can argue as much as they want that this correlation (or actual causal relation) exists. But real world (and actual managerial intention) evidence says otherwise.
and ideally someone whose background is in something other than Java. Why? Java hides way too much of how a computer works, so Java programmers often lack enough understanding of what's going on under the hood to write good code. That is nonsense on all accounts. Glad you are not hiring.
Just some background to qualify my opinion (subjective and anecdotal to a degree, obviously). From 1994 till 1999, I worked in a variety of languages, VB, FoxPro, Delphi, and then C++. Then I switched to Java in 1999 and worked with it till 2010. Then , then went back to C/C++/Asm till recently. Some C#. Now I'm doing Java/EE and Python again.
I've seen a lot of people in different roles, and indeed, at least my experience matches what the OP is saying. A background predominantly Java (or C# or VB or PHP) does not typically translate to a good understanding of how things work.
And such people work in a fallacy that such knowledge is not essential. And that's why we have Java/EE systems that trash the GC, or that leak connections up to the wazoo. When you have never seen a segfault with nothing but a core dump, and when all you know are these high-level stack trace constructs, it creates a false sense of security where the basics of cleaning your own shit are nowhere to be seen. Algorithm basics go out of the door (with hilarious consequences), and always operating under the assumption that latency is always 0.
So I find the OP's premise to hold consistently, regardless of whether we are developing an e-commerce site or a networking tool, or an Eclipse plug-in. In my experience, it simply holds. YMMV.
Learning style ...
So being an autodidact is a 'learning style'? Sorry, I had had no idea what you even refer to if you had asked me: 'what is your learning style?'
This is actually a valid question. God knows how many people I've seen constantly asking me how to use GNU sed or whether deleting keys off a java.util.HashMap is ok while iterating on it. A simple trip to google, a set of javadocs or stackoverflow would answer that shit very quickly. And that is a function of a learning style (or lack thereof.)
So there is a validity to the question. If you ask that question, and the answer doesn't contain a single reference to visiting google or stack overflow, be very afraid.
> If company goes bankrupt due to CEO's bad decisions, CEO will be able to live quite comfortably to the end of his life
if those bad decisions were in fact caused by the CEO there are plenty that can be (and is) done to punish them for poor performance. CEOs fired routinely.
... with a golden parachute so fucking big, the only punishment they get is some headlines in the news.
Failing like that == making it rich no matter what. If that is punishment, I'm going to get me into S&M!
Germany sure has a lot of State Owned Enterprise for a country that's not Socialist.
Goddammit, we have a lot illiterate people in this country.
This is the thing. Lots of state owned enterprise =/= socialism. That is barely a requirement for it, and it is in no way contradictory of capitalism.
Socialism, in its most general term, pushes a preference for public (social) ownership of production over private ownership. I challenge anyone to show me that this is the general trend in Germany (or even the Scandinavian countries.)
Perhaps you should get your facts right? Neither in Russia nor in China socialism is considered a failure, actually both countries where not even socialistic. In both countries however capitalism is considered to be a failure. Or what do you think why poverty in Russia, inequality etc. is in the rise?
Same for Cuba and Venezuela. Care to explain why Cuba is a failure when health care and education are on a much higher level (and much cheaper) than in the USA albeit being under a boycott and other sanctions from the USA the last 70 years?
Finally: capitalism and socialism are two complete different dimensions. China shows clearly: you can have both. Wow, surprise.
This is a place that tens of thousands were killed in purges, and where being homosexual can get you to the firing squad, even today. This is no bullshit or lies, but actual history (and contemporary news for those found "guilty" of homosexuality.)
Not to mention the well known fallacy of its health care system (education is good, though). You might want to revisit your notions of what a "relatively successful" society is, though (if you give a shit about being intellectually honest, that is.)
Most jets are made with 11 inches of steel. Rail guns are against harden targets. Lasers are to shoot down aircraft. (Lasers kinda need a line of site to work)
ZOMG WTF? Either you are joking, this is a typo, or you simply don't know WTF you are talking about? Name one jet, or airplane, or anything that goes up with propulsion containing something with 11 inches of steel. I seriously doubt even something like an Atlas rocket would have something like that.
We are talking about something almost a full feet thick of relatively heavy metal, not aluminum or titanium or high-strength ceramics or polymers, but steel. Other than an engine block or thrusters (which are not solid pieces of metal), what the hell in a jet is made out of a piece of steel 11 inches thick?
This is why I don't like developing for Microsoft's stack. They seem to want to throw everything out every few years and start over.
Not that different from the Java FOSS cornucopia. And in many ways, it is better than the design-by-committee-slow-as-molasses thing we have with JEE and the JCP.
Then again, it seems like the web business is like that, too.
A lot of it is ego and developers OCD/fixation with trying new technical things (as opposed to solving business problems with economical, yet maintainable solutions.)
OTH, a lot of the churn is due to external pressures of competition. You put something on the web, someone is already competing with you.
Then you have catch up at worst, or out-innovate them at best, which leads to technical changes and challenges that inevitable lead to revisiting and reinventing (sometimes brilliantly, many times horrendously) the plumbing, the scaffolding and struts that puts all of it together, where it gets deployed, etc.
Damn. Doesn't anyone write non-disposable code any more?
Non-disposable technical software is not a quality you want to seek unless you are developing critical systems.
If your web stuff is not disposable, it means it cannot be replaced when the need arises (which it will.)
Disposable code is trivial if we know what the fuck we are doing. What we do not want are Enterprise-level business logic and dependencies and fundamental architectural decisions that are trivially disposable.
You want those things to be clear and malleable, but not so easily disposable. Because then you have a clear blue print with which to create systems with disposable (ergo, loosely coupled) design/implementation-level artifacts.
If it had been GPL i might have cared.
Because the only "free" license options that matter are the ones you care about. Yes Comrade Commissar, we will comply with your thought police party line or whatever #fileitunderomfgurdumb
So what you're saying is for all that extra work, you got average results.
If by average you mean good results, I guess that would be a yes. I mean seriously, in what world of stupidity and cynicism did getting kids through post-graduate education became "average results"?
I'm not a fan of home-schooling in general because, at least in this country, it is generally perceived by the public as a means for Luddites to keep their kids off the sinful, Godless grid.
But here, this is obviously not the case. And for you to simply dismiss the results of their efforts as "average results" (when in this country "average results" means graduating from HS without knowing the difference between "your" and "you're"), that is just imbecile.
Whether you are just being cynically stupid or just deliberately obtuse, only you know.
New Jersey Gov. Christie: Parents Should Have Choice In Vaccinations
In other words, vaccines against tuberculosis and polio should be optional. File it under #inevitablelogicalconclusion
Reading comprehension on Slashdot is seriously weak. I stated a personal preference between two hypothetical jobs for simple illustration of a point other than the one you're making, and nowhere did I say that those were the only choices available to myself or anyone else for that matter. The point that you and the preceding response make is irrelevant to the topic and to my point, which is that money isn't the only thing people consider when looking for a job and just waving high salaries at top-end developers ignores the possibility of soft factors playing a part in their decision-making processes.
The problem with your counter-argument (aka "simple illustration") is that you presented the hypotheticals as a dichotomy, one that is patently false in real life. It is a false dichotomy that glosses over/denies all the other possibilities in between from which people select according to their personal preferences as well.
Polish your arguments if you don't like the type of responses you get.