20+ school kids have only been killed by a rampage killer 3 times in history.
Only three? Is that all? Hardly worth worrying about when you put it like that. How many used swords? None, again? Those swordsmen have got to get their act together if they're going to be taken seriously and get themselves Googlemapped.
Government and armies, on the other hand, kill 20 or more schoolkids at once far more often That's why we have the 2nd amendment.
So, you follow the NRA line that we should arm all the teachers and students so they can defend themselves against Obama's stormtroopers? How long do you think they'd last?
Building a strawman =/= building a logical counter-argument.
"In theory there's no difference between theory and reality....in reality it's the other way around"
Seriously, real world code is by definition 'real world' and doesn't live by the theoretical pillars of design. It has to deal with actual deadlines, finite resources and of course office politics.
True that, but none of those facts intrinsically preclude people from laying out some structure into the code they churn.
Proper indentation, sticking to the object/verb pattern of naming objects (or data types) and methods (or functions), closing the resources you open, programming defensively (instead of nillie willie happy go lucky programming), keeping your functions small. All those things good developers can use and deploy as they put out fires in the real world and all the challenges therein.
A good developer will churn code of some quality under strenuous conditions because he automatically thinks about a certain type of attributes that must be present in code. Any kludge that he/she might produced is done from a position of knowledge, as an intelligent compromise done to meet a challenge.
OTH, a shitty code monkey will crap out a fetid turd even in the presence of ample resources and fixed requirements.
So, no, real software might run in the real world, but the real world does not produce shitty code. Shitty developers do.
Personally if you have a coder using myVar and my_var for two different variables in the same code, I think you have more to worry about that coding style.
It's easy to get that when you have different people inheriting source code. Also, you are right that there are more important things to worry about in such a situation. Barring firing everyone and replacing them with the best, how do you solve that? There are many ways to solve, and some of them involve having a coding style. They are not the silver bullet people make them to be, but they have their useful place in the industry. They are just tools, that can be used or abused.
And you're missing my point when I say that just because a particular style is standardized doesn't mean it produces self-documenting code.
But that's not what you were arguing first. You were arguing that diffs can handle differences in whitespaces (and obviously, indentation is more than just that.) Maybe I'm missing the point you are trying to make. Standarization is not a necessary condition for self-documenting code, but that's not what they are for. Styles are for having a normalized structure with which to collaborate. Self-documenting code is a related, but different issue altogether.
Differences in coding standards go beyond whitespace. One thing I've liked to do when doing code reviews or when working with disparate teams (or when working with changes to legacy code where the changes are meant to do incremental improvements on the existing quality) is to take the file versions to be inspect them, run both through GNU indent (I don't give a shit about what style GNU indent pics, I just care to make sure both get indented with the same rules) and then do the diff.
Another practice has been to always run your code through an indenter prior to checking changes to source control. Developers are free to indent and reindent as they please, but the final stuff to be put on source control is under a master style. Put some aliases or scripts that do the checking in and out with an automatic re-indentation in place, and off you go.
That practice has saved me/us a lot headaches.
I mean, there is nothing worse than somone doing an accidental re-formatting during development and then submitting to source control, followed by more changes now under a new style format. Then it comes time to merge, oi vey, how joyful.
Then it is a PITA (a solvable, but still annoying and sometimes time consuming PITA) to find out what the hell actually changed.
This is even more important when you have to work with legacy code written eons ago by people who had no sense of aesthetics or even anything that remotely resembled common sense and code organization, under conditions that prevent a mass re-indentation of files.
At 377,944km2 Japan exceeds all but Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana in land mass and Japan is only about 4000km2 smaller than Montana.
So just to be clear, the US is the third largest nation, not the first or even the second, and it has four states with more land mass than Japan, and Japan isn't a small nation? Oooooookkkkkaaayyyyyyyyy. There's smaller, and the USA is massive, but that doesn't change anything I've said.
If anything, Japan's accomplishments are all the more impressive when considered in terms of its land area, especially given what percentage of it is considered usable. But it is small. Why do you think they're so damned good at miniaturization? They have every motive.
Most countries compared to the USA (or China, Russia or Brazil for that matter) are small. But when you take into account the average country size and the smallest countries, a country with an area greater than 300K sq/km is not small. To get a measure of what is small or large (in anything), don't just use the largest samples (the outliers), use the average.
Not only that but another multi-billion dollar project that humanity already has 2 of? Isn't there something else that would benefit the scientific community in a new and different way?
Yeah, because 2 is just enough to conduct that type of scientific research </sarcasm>
Not only would it be in an earthquake zone, with a lot of obvious ramifications as to the stability/credibility of whatever data they generated,
but frankly Japan is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, and I would think that if they believed they had the room to build
this thing that they could make better use of the space for the indigenous population. I'm sure there are some people crammed into small urban
apartments who would prefer to live in something a little nicer.
Despite the typical stereotypes, Japan is not a small country. All together, it is a bit smaller than California and they have vast tracks of mostly sparsely populated land (think Hokkaido). They got forest reserves up the wazoo. Japanese are tremendously concentrated (I'd say packed like sardines) in their urban areas, leaving a lot of open space between cities. Take a 2-3 hour drive out of Tokyo and you see nothing but open ranges and mountains.
There is plenty of space there to build one of these things. It's not like we are talking about Andorra or the Vatican in terms of dimensions here.
Colliders are built underground, so hurricanes would only affect support structures. NASA seems to not have a hard time operating from Cape Canaveral, right on the ocean where hurricanes hit hardest.
You can't build underground in Florida, at least South Florida. Dig 5 feet down and you hit the water table. Cape Canaveral is hardly a model to go by since it is (mostly) not underground. Operating on a hurricane area is not a big deal (I live hear, I know.) Sucks with the flooding if you live in a flood zone, but infrastructure is typically not damaged that much. Lots of interruption in communications, but that's about it. Having lived through hurricanes and earthquakes, I take the former any time.
Anyways, I just got off the tangent here... anyways, no, Florida will suck for building a mammoth particle collider underground.
It ain't an ex-wife joke. Have you been paying attention to how the guy talks? Every other paragraph is accompanied by an "ex-wife joke". Joke's on you if you think he's joking, not that I would care one or another (nor should it prevent me, or anyone else, from pointing out the obvious emotional baggage that comes with it.)
"It was the most gracious expulsion I've ever experienced. Compared to my past two wives that expelled me this isn't a terrible trip."/quote>
Seriously, there is something fucking wrong with this dude, and in serious need of counseling (and possibly prison, for he acted like a guilty man.)
So when the invader comes you have to go get the gun out of the safe before he shoots you? I hope you remember the code under that kind of pressure!
And that is why people, even gun owners, should have more than a gun, say blunt objects that can be used as melee weapons, discretely placed across your home. I have my gun locked away (I have to, I have kids), but I also have things specifically located across home (where my kids can't reach, but that my wife or I can): a machete, a hand-ax, several rattan sticks (long enough to reach out, but short enough to use indoors), two carpet knives (plus a whole bunch of pointy-edgy tools in my home office/computer room), with exit paths always cleared out of objects before turning the lights off.
Call me paranoid, but that gives me much more peace of mind than my gun locked away on the most innaccessible corner of my master closet. That, and knowing that I live in a better neighborhood, in a fenced community with 24/7 surveillance, away from crazy crap, which makes a home invasion a rarer statistical event. It's more expensive, but it is always worth it.
By the same logic, a panic room would be much more effective.
Indeed. And barring that, a way to barricade yourself in a room. Having a gun out of fear of home invaders, but not thinking about any other counter-measures, that's a silly exercise IMO.
Cutting a rifled barrel and building a simple firearm are not exactly complicated.
Chances are the typical criminal lacks that specialized skills in general (and machinist skills in particular.) It's not tongue-in-cheek, there is a deficit of education and skills among typical criminals. That's the type of statistics that pop up in all countries.
Serious, here we go again with the same "we don't need no education" bullshit. In America, we are the land of the dumbasses looking for the miracle pill indeed.
Inspired by role models like the billionaire drop-outs who founded Microsoft, Facebook, Dell, Twitter, Tumblr, and Apple,
Those drop-outs as we call them had a combination of several of the following:
- They typically got accepted, attendend and then dropped out of Ivy Leage collegues (meaning they were academic achievers already)
- They typically completed most of their college course work (so finishing was just a formality)
- They had accumulated an obscene amount of software development experience before "dropping out".
- They never intended to become billionares, but to build something they had a vision of (becoming a billionare was a consequence of it.)
- They had substantial financial backing to pick up and go after a false start.
That is, for these successful folks, dropping out is just a near irrelevant factor in their success.
By comparison, the typical schmuck who thinks college is typically not necessary is the type of person that is severely lacking many (if not all) of the factors above. It is simply a law of numbers kind of thing.
To think that college is not necessary in the general sense is either wishful thinking for the lazy, or self-selecting bias for the ones who had the opportunity to make it without one. Those successes are not the rule, they are the exception. Ergo, it stands to reason that one cannot make a general rule ("say no to college") out of exceptional circumstances.
That is not rocket science, except for those dumb enough to indulge in such silly wishful thinking games.
For every successful drop-out, there are thousands of drop-outs squeezing a meek existance that falls short of what they could have made had they maintained a steady course in education.
MOST IMPORTANTLY for every successful entepreneur drop-out, I can point you to far more college-grad entepreneours (Sergey Brin, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, etc.).
Simply put, there are more successfull college-graduate businessmen than drop-out businessmen. Logically, what should that tell you?
Their country's drug war is financed by American dollars and American mafia through American banks, aided by American prohibition and official corruption on both sides. America's war business is a big source of many problems everywhere south of the Rio Grande. Don't even try to deny it.
People might have flagged the post above as a troll, but there is a truth to that. There is a lot of blame in Mexico, with a music culture that for decades glamorized the drug cartels (and now the whole society is paying the price.) But there is no mistake that US drug consumption and the war on drugs are significant variables in this equation of death.
Both sides of the fence try to deny their own responsibility in this mess, and they are both equally stupid in doing so. Mexico has to come to grips with the cultural monster it created, and the US must come to grips with our failed war on drugs and our appetite for sugar candy and ruffies.
I'm confused - What "exciting new techniques" did the candidates came up with?
Massive data analysis and machine learning (I pressume some form of data clustering/unsupervised learning system) combined with the use of behavioral scientists. It's never been done before in this manner AAAAAND in this context. If that doesn't qualify as exciting new techniques, then ${DEITY:-FSM} help you.
I know that in slashdot trying to sound l33t hax0r is the avant garde thing to do, but c'mon.
In other news, hybrid and electric cars are not exciting new technologies because the gear was known to the Greeks around the 3rd century BC, and the wheel was invented around 5,000 BC.
I believe hardware is done by an electrical engineer.
Depends on the type of hardware. A transistor might be hardware, but building one would hardly be within the realm of a CE major. Similarly, a CE major will do more works towards computing than a EE major. All in all, there is a large overlap between EE and CE majors (and between CE and CS, and between CS and MIS ad IT).
SE (not the discipline, but the role) is found across all three. It's going to be interesting how SE pans out as a distinct discipline considering that SE is seen by the majority of people as application-centric. When you have CS/CE/EE people working on large SoC or software-defined radios, the need for SE with great intimacy of hardware increases.
IMO, I think a SE degree at a master level is a better alternative than as an undergrad level. Then EE and CE folks can opt for a SE track to supplement their CE/EE skills. An undergrad SE degree only benefits those working with application and non-embedded system-level development.
It's fine if you're writing code in.net targeted at a Microsoft platform. If you're trying to do something cross platform, or use a different language, or use a Makefile, or Maven, it's not so great.
Good tool =/= universal tool.
Why would someone use VS for cross-platform development? Why bring that as a tool characteristic? That's a little bit red-herringnish. For.NET development, it is an awesome tool. For cross-platform development, then one should use something else (I prefer flopping back and forth Eclipse CDT and vim/ctags in such cases.)
Saying that a hammer is not a good tool for not being good at smearing cream cheese on delicate whole-wheat crackers is equally kind of weird.
Like any tool, it has advantages and drawbacks
And that is implicit of all tools, good or bad. If the tool (MSVS) is good for what it is intended for (.NET dev), then to mention it's lack of cross-platform capabilities doesn't really yield much valid information.
Anyone who can't see the drawbacks is a blind fanboy.
Saying that a tool is awesome =/= not looking at the drawbacks. Not knowing the difference is also a sign of fanboyish. Even more so when a person attributes the same flaw to another. Nice strawman, though.
I work in IT and understanding that you work in computing for a defense contractor that specializes in computing, I think your view might be a little bit skewed. I have worked in IT for 5 years and I'm only this year completing my cycle for 200 computers. I upgrade 40 machines a year, so without increasing my budget, I would have at this point 80 computers with Windows XP due to be upgraded next year and the year after and 20 more machines due to be upgraded before the end of the year. Virtually half of my systems at this point aren't even feasible candidates for default encryption. So, if our policy were to encrypt systems where encryption was available in the OS I would still only have 50% coverage. Now I'm sure NASA has better resources and is generally a better environment than what I've got to deal with, but I don't think it's at all surprising to think they might have an XP or few Vista machines floating around without encryption.
But herein lies the problem. It is not about having a few systems floating around. It is the fact that, apparently, they had no coherent encryption policy/program in place (and now they have to rush in to make sure to lock things down.)
What if, for example, they let staff purchase their own laptops and support them themselves?
No excuse. Every company I've worked for has a policy regarding privately own laptops connecting to an internal network. For a group like NASA to either not have one such policy, or having an ineffectual one, or having an effective one but without enforcement, it is a fuck-up no matter how you cut it.
This is NASA we are talking about, not some small shop or a plain-vanilla lab at a university. If a doctor's private practice has rules concerning who connects to their networks, you can bet your IT ass than NASA can or should have. It's a fuck-up no matter how we cut it.
The problem here currently is with contractors at NASA. Lockheed Martin controls ALL of the enterprise equipment at Goddard and NASA HQ. If Lockheed doesnt care, or rather, the contract requirement isnt written with encryption as a requirement, then you can bet your sweet ass that it's gonna either take the moving of a mountain or an awesomely expensive contract mod to get it done.
NASA doesn't own their own IT. Their vendor doesnt give a shit.
So there we have it, a double IA-fuck up, by NASA and LM (and if some of the information being handled has some type of security classification, explicit contract or not, their mutual fuck-ups are even greater, borderlining in federal offenses.)
This is not a new policy. The implementation of full disk encryption has been underway for some time. We are doing laptops first, then desktops. The current fire drill is because a laptop with PII was stolen at NASA HQ and it was one that had not yet had full disk encryption installed.
NASA IT staff are as overworked and under appreciated as anywhere. If NASA had wanted full disk encryption done sooner, they could have added the resources to make it happen. And that would have taken resources from missions, like Curiosity and the James Webb telescope. It's all about priorities.
But therein lies the problem. It should not be underway for some time. It should have been in place as an iron-fist de-factor rule a long time ago.
I sympathize with you and the other IT folks. Underfunded and under appreciated IT and dev folks alike. It is shitty, and I know what it's like (been there, don't that.) But, to not have laptops encrypted? To furnish unencrypted laptops? There is some serious break-ups there man. Why? Because, however overworked your team might be, I have a hard time believing that IT will furnish an un-imaged laptop, as-is from the vendor/supplier, to the user. I'm sure IT images the laptops, so it stands to reason that the imaging will include encryption.
If the laptops are being furnished as-is from the vendors, that's a fuck-up.
If the laptops do get imaged, but do not get encryption, that's also a fuck-up.
Any government agency has some type of security and information assurance program and guidelines. And in them, encryption of laptops must be there somewhere. If that is the case, then it is a IT fuck-up. If it is not, then it is a IA fuck-up.
I'm not necessarily blaming you or any specific IT person, but this is a serious crap-o-lah that goes against what is pretty much standard practice with any agency or defense contractor (I work for one), or even for commercial companies. It's simply crazy.
were already apparent back in the dot-com days. I guess people never quite learn. Other than that, what we are seeing here is a company doing what is natural; adapting and changing its business model to stay afloat. Move along, nothing to be seen here.
Slashdot Mirror
20+ school kids have only been killed by a rampage killer 3 times in history.
Only three? Is that all? Hardly worth worrying about when you put it like that. How many used swords? None, again? Those swordsmen have got to get their act together if they're going to be taken seriously and get themselves Googlemapped.
Government and armies, on the other hand, kill 20 or more schoolkids at once far more often That's why we have the 2nd amendment.
So, you follow the NRA line that we should arm all the teachers and students so they can defend themselves against Obama's stormtroopers? How long do you think they'd last?
Building a strawman =/= building a logical counter-argument.
Summarized as follows:
"In theory there's no difference between theory and reality....in reality it's the other way around"
Seriously, real world code is by definition 'real world' and doesn't live by the theoretical pillars of design. It has to deal with actual deadlines, finite resources and of course office politics.
True that, but none of those facts intrinsically preclude people from laying out some structure into the code they churn.
Proper indentation, sticking to the object/verb pattern of naming objects (or data types) and methods (or functions), closing the resources you open, programming defensively (instead of nillie willie happy go lucky programming), keeping your functions small. All those things good developers can use and deploy as they put out fires in the real world and all the challenges therein.
A good developer will churn code of some quality under strenuous conditions because he automatically thinks about a certain type of attributes that must be present in code. Any kludge that he/she might produced is done from a position of knowledge, as an intelligent compromise done to meet a challenge.
OTH, a shitty code monkey will crap out a fetid turd even in the presence of ample resources and fixed requirements.
So, no, real software might run in the real world, but the real world does not produce shitty code. Shitty developers do.
Personally if you have a coder using myVar and my_var for two different variables in the same code, I think you have more to worry about that coding style.
It's easy to get that when you have different people inheriting source code. Also, you are right that there are more important things to worry about in such a situation. Barring firing everyone and replacing them with the best, how do you solve that? There are many ways to solve, and some of them involve having a coding style. They are not the silver bullet people make them to be, but they have their useful place in the industry. They are just tools, that can be used or abused.
And you're missing my point when I say that just because a particular style is standardized doesn't mean it produces self-documenting code.
But that's not what you were arguing first. You were arguing that diffs can handle differences in whitespaces (and obviously, indentation is more than just that.) Maybe I'm missing the point you are trying to make. Standarization is not a necessary condition for self-documenting code, but that's not what they are for. Styles are for having a normalized structure with which to collaborate. Self-documenting code is a related, but different issue altogether.
Most diffs can ignore whitespace...
I don't understand your second point.
Differences in coding standards go beyond whitespace. One thing I've liked to do when doing code reviews or when working with disparate teams (or when working with changes to legacy code where the changes are meant to do incremental improvements on the existing quality) is to take the file versions to be inspect them, run both through GNU indent (I don't give a shit about what style GNU indent pics, I just care to make sure both get indented with the same rules) and then do the diff.
Another practice has been to always run your code through an indenter prior to checking changes to source control. Developers are free to indent and reindent as they please, but the final stuff to be put on source control is under a master style. Put some aliases or scripts that do the checking in and out with an automatic re-indentation in place, and off you go. That practice has saved me/us a lot headaches.
I mean, there is nothing worse than somone doing an accidental re-formatting during development and then submitting to source control, followed by more changes now under a new style format. Then it comes time to merge, oi vey, how joyful.
Then it is a PITA (a solvable, but still annoying and sometimes time consuming PITA) to find out what the hell actually changed.
This is even more important when you have to work with legacy code written eons ago by people who had no sense of aesthetics or even anything that remotely resembled common sense and code organization, under conditions that prevent a mass re-indentation of files.
At 377,944km2 Japan exceeds all but Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana in land mass and Japan is only about 4000km2 smaller than Montana.
So just to be clear, the US is the third largest nation, not the first or even the second, and it has four states with more land mass than Japan, and Japan isn't a small nation? Oooooookkkkkaaayyyyyyyyy. There's smaller, and the USA is massive, but that doesn't change anything I've said.
If anything, Japan's accomplishments are all the more impressive when considered in terms of its land area, especially given what percentage of it is considered usable. But it is small. Why do you think they're so damned good at miniaturization? They have every motive.
Most countries compared to the USA (or China, Russia or Brazil for that matter) are small. But when you take into account the average country size and the smallest countries, a country with an area greater than 300K sq/km is not small. To get a measure of what is small or large (in anything), don't just use the largest samples (the outliers), use the average.
Not only that but another multi-billion dollar project that humanity already has 2 of? Isn't there something else that would benefit the scientific community in a new and different way?
Yeah, because 2 is just enough to conduct that type of scientific research </sarcasm>
Not only would it be in an earthquake zone, with a lot of obvious ramifications as to the stability/credibility of whatever data they generated, but frankly Japan is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, and I would think that if they believed they had the room to build this thing that they could make better use of the space for the indigenous population. I'm sure there are some people crammed into small urban apartments who would prefer to live in something a little nicer.
Despite the typical stereotypes, Japan is not a small country. All together, it is a bit smaller than California and they have vast tracks of mostly sparsely populated land (think Hokkaido). They got forest reserves up the wazoo. Japanese are tremendously concentrated (I'd say packed like sardines) in their urban areas, leaving a lot of open space between cities. Take a 2-3 hour drive out of Tokyo and you see nothing but open ranges and mountains.
There is plenty of space there to build one of these things. It's not like we are talking about Andorra or the Vatican in terms of dimensions here.
Colliders are built underground, so hurricanes would only affect support structures. NASA seems to not have a hard time operating from Cape Canaveral, right on the ocean where hurricanes hit hardest.
You can't build underground in Florida, at least South Florida. Dig 5 feet down and you hit the water table. Cape Canaveral is hardly a model to go by since it is (mostly) not underground. Operating on a hurricane area is not a big deal (I live hear, I know.) Sucks with the flooding if you live in a flood zone, but infrastructure is typically not damaged that much. Lots of interruption in communications, but that's about it. Having lived through hurricanes and earthquakes, I take the former any time.
Anyways, I just got off the tangent here... anyways, no, Florida will suck for building a mammoth particle collider underground.
I hate it you don't have a sense of humor.
Seriously, it was an ex wife joke, lighten up.
It ain't an ex-wife joke. Have you been paying attention to how the guy talks? Every other paragraph is accompanied by an "ex-wife joke". Joke's on you if you think he's joking, not that I would care one or another (nor should it prevent me, or anyone else, from pointing out the obvious emotional baggage that comes with it.)
"It was the most gracious expulsion I've ever experienced. Compared to my past two wives that expelled me this isn't a terrible trip."
Seriously, there is something fucking wrong with this dude, and in serious need of counseling (and possibly prison, for he acted like a guilty man.)
I hate it when I get a quote tag wrong.
"It was the most gracious expulsion I've ever experienced. Compared to my past two wives that expelled me this isn't a terrible trip."/quote> Seriously, there is something fucking wrong with this dude, and in serious need of counseling (and possibly prison, for he acted like a guilty man.)
New SARS-Like Virus Infects Both Human and Animal Cells
So what the fuck are we? Vegetables?
So when the invader comes you have to go get the gun out of the safe before he shoots you? I hope you remember the code under that kind of pressure!
And that is why people, even gun owners, should have more than a gun, say blunt objects that can be used as melee weapons, discretely placed across your home. I have my gun locked away (I have to, I have kids), but I also have things specifically located across home (where my kids can't reach, but that my wife or I can): a machete, a hand-ax, several rattan sticks (long enough to reach out, but short enough to use indoors), two carpet knives (plus a whole bunch of pointy-edgy tools in my home office/computer room), with exit paths always cleared out of objects before turning the lights off.
Call me paranoid, but that gives me much more peace of mind than my gun locked away on the most innaccessible corner of my master closet. That, and knowing that I live in a better neighborhood, in a fenced community with 24/7 surveillance, away from crazy crap, which makes a home invasion a rarer statistical event. It's more expensive, but it is always worth it.
By the same logic, a panic room would be much more effective.
Indeed. And barring that, a way to barricade yourself in a room. Having a gun out of fear of home invaders, but not thinking about any other counter-measures, that's a silly exercise IMO.
Are there no machinists?
Cutting a rifled barrel and building a simple firearm are not exactly complicated.
Chances are the typical criminal lacks that specialized skills in general (and machinist skills in particular.) It's not tongue-in-cheek, there is a deficit of education and skills among typical criminals. That's the type of statistics that pop up in all countries.
Inspired by role models like the billionaire drop-outs who founded Microsoft, Facebook, Dell, Twitter, Tumblr, and Apple,
Those drop-outs as we call them had a combination of several of the following:
That is, for these successful folks, dropping out is just a near irrelevant factor in their success.
By comparison, the typical schmuck who thinks college is typically not necessary is the type of person that is severely lacking many (if not all) of the factors above. It is simply a law of numbers kind of thing.
To think that college is not necessary in the general sense is either wishful thinking for the lazy, or self-selecting bias for the ones who had the opportunity to make it without one. Those successes are not the rule, they are the exception. Ergo, it stands to reason that one cannot make a general rule ("say no to college") out of exceptional circumstances.
That is not rocket science, except for those dumb enough to indulge in such silly wishful thinking games.
For every successful drop-out, there are thousands of drop-outs squeezing a meek existance that falls short of what they could have made had they maintained a steady course in education.
MOST IMPORTANTLY for every successful entepreneur drop-out, I can point you to far more college-grad entepreneours (Sergey Brin, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, etc.).
Simply put, there are more successfull college-graduate businessmen than drop-out businessmen. Logically, what should that tell you?
Their country's drug war is financed by American dollars and American mafia through American banks, aided by American prohibition and official corruption on both sides. America's war business is a big source of many problems everywhere south of the Rio Grande. Don't even try to deny it.
People might have flagged the post above as a troll, but there is a truth to that. There is a lot of blame in Mexico, with a music culture that for decades glamorized the drug cartels (and now the whole society is paying the price.) But there is no mistake that US drug consumption and the war on drugs are significant variables in this equation of death.
Both sides of the fence try to deny their own responsibility in this mess, and they are both equally stupid in doing so. Mexico has to come to grips with the cultural monster it created, and the US must come to grips with our failed war on drugs and our appetite for sugar candy and ruffies.
I'm confused - What "exciting new techniques" did the candidates came up with?
Massive data analysis and machine learning (I pressume some form of data clustering/unsupervised learning system) combined with the use of behavioral scientists. It's never been done before in this manner AAAAAND in this context. If that doesn't qualify as exciting new techniques, then ${DEITY:-FSM} help you.
I know that in slashdot trying to sound l33t hax0r is the avant garde thing to do, but c'mon.
In other news, hybrid and electric cars are not exciting new technologies because the gear was known to the Greeks around the 3rd century BC, and the wheel was invented around 5,000 BC.
I believe hardware is done by an electrical engineer.
Depends on the type of hardware. A transistor might be hardware, but building one would hardly be within the realm of a CE major. Similarly, a CE major will do more works towards computing than a EE major. All in all, there is a large overlap between EE and CE majors (and between CE and CS, and between CS and MIS ad IT).
SE (not the discipline, but the role) is found across all three. It's going to be interesting how SE pans out as a distinct discipline considering that SE is seen by the majority of people as application-centric. When you have CS/CE/EE people working on large SoC or software-defined radios, the need for SE with great intimacy of hardware increases.
IMO, I think a SE degree at a master level is a better alternative than as an undergrad level. Then EE and CE folks can opt for a SE track to supplement their CE/EE skills. An undergrad SE degree only benefits those working with application and non-embedded system-level development.
VS is a fantastic development environment.
It's fine if you're writing code in .net targeted at a Microsoft platform. If you're trying to do something cross platform, or use a different language, or use a Makefile, or Maven, it's not so great.
Good tool =/= universal tool.
Why would someone use VS for cross-platform development? Why bring that as a tool characteristic? That's a little bit red-herringnish. For .NET development, it is an awesome tool. For cross-platform development, then one should use something else (I prefer flopping back and forth Eclipse CDT and vim/ctags in such cases.)
Saying that a hammer is not a good tool for not being good at smearing cream cheese on delicate whole-wheat crackers is equally kind of weird.
Like any tool, it has advantages and drawbacks
And that is implicit of all tools, good or bad. If the tool (MSVS) is good for what it is intended for (.NET dev), then to mention it's lack of cross-platform capabilities doesn't really yield much valid information.
Anyone who can't see the drawbacks is a blind fanboy.
Saying that a tool is awesome =/= not looking at the drawbacks. Not knowing the difference is also a sign of fanboyish. Even more so when a person attributes the same flaw to another. Nice strawman, though.
I work in IT and understanding that you work in computing for a defense contractor that specializes in computing, I think your view might be a little bit skewed. I have worked in IT for 5 years and I'm only this year completing my cycle for 200 computers. I upgrade 40 machines a year, so without increasing my budget, I would have at this point 80 computers with Windows XP due to be upgraded next year and the year after and 20 more machines due to be upgraded before the end of the year. Virtually half of my systems at this point aren't even feasible candidates for default encryption. So, if our policy were to encrypt systems where encryption was available in the OS I would still only have 50% coverage. Now I'm sure NASA has better resources and is generally a better environment than what I've got to deal with, but I don't think it's at all surprising to think they might have an XP or few Vista machines floating around without encryption.
But herein lies the problem. It is not about having a few systems floating around. It is the fact that, apparently, they had no coherent encryption policy/program in place (and now they have to rush in to make sure to lock things down.)
What if, for example, they let staff purchase their own laptops and support them themselves?
No excuse. Every company I've worked for has a policy regarding privately own laptops connecting to an internal network. For a group like NASA to either not have one such policy, or having an ineffectual one, or having an effective one but without enforcement, it is a fuck-up no matter how you cut it.
This is NASA we are talking about, not some small shop or a plain-vanilla lab at a university. If a doctor's private practice has rules concerning who connects to their networks, you can bet your IT ass than NASA can or should have. It's a fuck-up no matter how we cut it.
The problem here currently is with contractors at NASA. Lockheed Martin controls ALL of the enterprise equipment at Goddard and NASA HQ. If Lockheed doesnt care, or rather, the contract requirement isnt written with encryption as a requirement, then you can bet your sweet ass that it's gonna either take the moving of a mountain or an awesomely expensive contract mod to get it done.
NASA doesn't own their own IT. Their vendor doesnt give a shit.
So there we have it, a double IA-fuck up, by NASA and LM (and if some of the information being handled has some type of security classification, explicit contract or not, their mutual fuck-ups are even greater, borderlining in federal offenses.)
This is not a new policy. The implementation of full disk encryption has been underway for some time. We are doing laptops first, then desktops. The current fire drill is because a laptop with PII was stolen at NASA HQ and it was one that had not yet had full disk encryption installed.
NASA IT staff are as overworked and under appreciated as anywhere. If NASA had wanted full disk encryption done sooner, they could have added the resources to make it happen. And that would have taken resources from missions, like Curiosity and the James Webb telescope. It's all about priorities.
But therein lies the problem. It should not be underway for some time. It should have been in place as an iron-fist de-factor rule a long time ago.
I sympathize with you and the other IT folks. Underfunded and under appreciated IT and dev folks alike. It is shitty, and I know what it's like (been there, don't that.) But, to not have laptops encrypted? To furnish unencrypted laptops? There is some serious break-ups there man. Why? Because, however overworked your team might be, I have a hard time believing that IT will furnish an un-imaged laptop, as-is from the vendor/supplier, to the user. I'm sure IT images the laptops, so it stands to reason that the imaging will include encryption.
If the laptops are being furnished as-is from the vendors, that's a fuck-up.
If the laptops do get imaged, but do not get encryption, that's also a fuck-up.
Any government agency has some type of security and information assurance program and guidelines. And in them, encryption of laptops must be there somewhere. If that is the case, then it is a IT fuck-up. If it is not, then it is a IA fuck-up.
I'm not necessarily blaming you or any specific IT person, but this is a serious crap-o-lah that goes against what is pretty much standard practice with any agency or defense contractor (I work for one), or even for commercial companies. It's simply crazy.
were already apparent back in the dot-com days. I guess people never quite learn. Other than that, what we are seeing here is a company doing what is natural; adapting and changing its business model to stay afloat. Move along, nothing to be seen here.