No - the point is to learn typing. Once you learn to type you can efficiently learn the technology of the limited computers. Frankly - the only class that has any value to me from high school was my freshman year typing class taught on an old IBM Selectric typewriter. Heck - the description in the summary is begging for a typewriter.
Technology for technology sake is never the answer - old school devices still rule, there is usually never a need for fancy modern devices, they just make thinks easier and more convenient if you happen to have money (and in this case electricity)
I agree with you (wrt mechanical typewriters). I see a problems of logistics though (speaking from personal experience since I learned on a mechanical typewriter). You need paper (lots of it the better), ribbons and white-outs. It takes practice, practice and practice, with the actual output available for grading. Hammering at the keys, hitting an empty rubber drum won't tell the student whether he's making typing mistakes.
My mother, now aged 85, learned to type using a printed picture of a keyboard, and exercises very similar to "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing". Its true there is no record of what keys you actually press, etc, but she could type a lot faster than I ever could, and is using an IPad as I type this.
My point is: stop being obsessed with technology: anyone in the third world can have a photocopy of a picture of a keyboad, and probably has the motivation to try and learn with it. Once a week, use a real machine to test their progress if you have to. (Yes I have visited third world countries).
That won't work. I speak from personal experience (borned & raised in a third world country). I learned typing with a mechanical typewriter. You have to have a physical feedback from the type writer to develop the necessary muscle memory.
You also need paper to see that you are typing, and to see if you are doing it right or wrong. And when you commit errors, you need to see how often you made them and where on the keyboard layout. Finally you develop the speed to type with a high degree of correctness.
You. Will. Never. Ever. Get. That. With. A. Picture. Of. A. Keyboard.
You need an actual keyboard, mechanical or otherwise.
Err...do they not make mechanical typewriters any longer??
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I learned with a mechanical typewriter when I lived south of the border. It is still far cheaper to get mechanical typewriters than to provide computers for each student (if the goal is to teach typing.)
The entity is not a citizen, but it is a vehicle for citizens to act collectively. Why should the citizens not have the right to speak collectively in this way?
Why should they have any such rights when they have protections (such as "limited liability") that people individually do not have? A right without an accompanying liability or responsibility is pretty much an additional right.
Preemptive strike: I know that limited liability is necessary in today's world to conduct business. But that is tangential to the additional power corporations possess over the powers of individuals. In our particular case, post "Citizens United", we are talking about political power.
People and corporations should have a right to seek wealth. But that does not imply that they have a right to turn wealth into political power. Paul Graham had a good write-up about this particular idea.
The entity is not a citizen, but it is a vehicle for citizens to act collectively. Why should the citizens not have the right to speak collectively in this way?
Why should they have any such rights when they have protections (such as "limited liability") that people individually do not have? A right without an accompanying liability or responsibility is pretty much an additional right.
I mean, what the hell are you supposed to entice by that kind of remark.
That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
That people with the means should feel guilty for not living poorly like their more dispossessed citizens?
Umm, both the GP and the GGP mentioned debt. That rather implies they don't have the means.
1. That is not an implication, but a reductio ad absurdum.
2. Your dishonesty is fucking repugnant:
This is what he said:
(which is, practically speaking, about what I actually need to pay the bills, pay off debt and support my family)
See that, he didn't just say debt and debt alone. Mentioning debt =/= debt is the only factor. Maybe in your little world, but not in the real one.
Even if it was only debt, what do you know about the nature of this particular's person debt? Home loan debts? You can't buy a house unless you incur debt. Student loans? Almost no one can go to college, let alone grad school without incurring substantial amounts of it. Medical bill debts? After all, the majority of bankruptcies in this country are medical bill related. Personal business expansion, or opening a new business: guess what? You need to incur in debt to start (not to mention that you need to be on the red for the first few years until such a business becomes profitable.)
Maybe none of that applies in this case. I don't know. But neither do you, which is why it is stupid to be making generalizations and suggesting guilt trips because the majority of the population are at or under the poverty line.
The reality is that if you want to live a middle class/upper middle class life, with all the benefits that such a thing brings, you have to incur in a base, operational debt - to get an education, to own a good car (in particular if you want your spouse to drive your kids in one under guarantee), to own a home in a good (and ergo more expensive) school district, let alone in an industrialized hub where jobs are plenty (think Silicon Valley or NYC).
It is easy for a couple's to spend one of the spouses salary (if no more) solely in mortage, bills, medical coverage (or God forbids, medical bills), student loans, and children extra curricular activities, and supporting one's family (which includes savings and retirement plans.)
So no, mentioning debt does not imply that the person is beyond his means. If this person needs a salary to cover $70K of debt+bills, that's not being beyond one's means if you take the general case of middle class couples where both work. If he was the only person, being single, then you might have an argument. But this is not the case.
So again, mentioning debt does not imply being beyond one's means. You can say that till cows come home just to build a strawman to beat up, but it won't make it true.
Problem is that since you've never been through a CS program, you don't know what you're missing, literally.
Bro, I went through a CS program (undergrad and grad) as my bio states, and I've been making a living in the software/CS business (application and/or systems programming for commercial and defense sectors) for more than 17 years. I might have a clue what a CS program entails. Either that, or the CS program you went through was atrocious.
Faulty logic. The time you save is the time at the end of your life, not the time when you're young and can do things. In short, not all time is equal.
Double faulty logic. $30K/year extra makes up $120K extra in four years (minus taxes of course). If you are smart and save, that gives you plenty of leverage when seeking better dream jobs. That is, you don't have to take shit jobs and, with some minor caveats, you can simply walk away at any time of your choosing. I know this because I've done (and because to my eternal regret, I originally postponed it for too long.)
You don't have to defer the benefits of substantial extra cash to the end of your life.
Half the population makes $26k or less. Just something to think about when you say you have $65k in bills/debt and family..
Oh, shut the hell up. There is nothing to think about unless you are going full blown emo, proactively looking for something to be upset about (and I say this as a person who grew up in the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere). I mean, what the hell are you supposed to entice by that kind of remark. That people with the means should feel guilty for not living poorly like their more dispossessed citizens? GTFO please.
See, little secret for you. If you have an upper-middle class salary, you will live an upper-middle class life. You will want a nicer house for your family as opposed to living in the projects, run-down neighborhoods or whatever. Been there, done that, thank God I'm not there anymore.
If you have such a salary, you will get a nicer house. Not only that, you will move to a school district with better schooling ratings (which cause properties to be more expensive.) You will get better, more reliable transportation. You will have a 401K or IRA account, you will get the family health care plan with the best coverage you can afford. You will get better clothes not just for you but for your children. You'll try to feed them better food, organic food if possible.
You'll take them to Disney and feel the utmost happiness when you see their faces light up. You'll start saving on a college fund for them. And when summer break comes, you put them in summer camp. Not to mention you will put your kids in swimming classes, or music classes or whatever. You live and spend so that your kids do not go through a need (people argue that the later causes spoiled behavior, but that's just a gross generalization that does not hold true.)
Compare to that with a person of scare economics means. Having 3rd-hand shitty transportation or no transportation at all (which pretty much raises the cost of living per item). Living in run-down neighborhoods, which statistically are more prone to crime. With your kids in sub-par school districts. With no money to put them in summer camp, let alone giving them an opportunity to grow and explore extra-curricular activities. No college fund for them, not to mention subpar or nonexisting medical coverage. Poor nutrition options leading to greater risk of obesity. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Something to think about next time you see a person of means having a $65K family expense bill (unless you suggest him and his family live as if they were under the poverty line.)
I hear the sentiment, but, c'mon. Amazing that people mark this as insightful w/o thinking what this line of reasoning entails.
I'd rather have a job I like that pays 70K than a job that sucks for 100K. You spend A LOT of time there, so you might as well enjoy it.
That's a 42.86% pay increase if you go from 70K to 100K (or a 30% pay cut if you go the other way around.) For that, I would do a job that sucks. Albeit I wouldn't do it permanently (2-4 years top), for I would use it as a trampoline for something else.
We are talking $30K a year, $120K in a 4 year period. That is enough money (if you are not an idiot and live frugally) to build a security nest such that you can walk away from any bad job (giving a mental finger to any pointy hairy boss you leave behind.) It gives you the power to be choosy and picky about who you work with.
I can understand not taking/wanting a pay cut (or pay increase) in the vicinity of 10% to 15% percent. But rejecting a 40+% pay increase or engage in a 30% pay cut? Specially when we are talking about high end, upper-middle class salaries? That's just absolutely nuts.
God help your friends if you are ditching this kind of advice. Life is like boxing. Sometimes you have to take a punch to get close enough to deliver a KO'ing upper cut. You have to learn to roll with your punches.
That is, sometimes, to get to the peace of mind of working on your own terms, you have to work on shitty stuff for a couple of years if it pays well and paves the way to future peace of mind.
Provided I'm not in a dream job already, if someone were to tell me here is a job that'll pay you 50% or more, base salary, with OT (lots of it), doing COBOL or Pick BASIC (the one with numeric labels for GOTOs) surrounded by assholes, hell yeah, I'll do it for a year or two, squeezing every possible penny, saving everything. Then kthxbye, followed by a 3-5 month sabbatical while looking for my next job under my conditions.
There is nothing more satisfying than knowing you can walk away and survive up to a year while looking for the perfect job. Barring getting some inheritance, there is no way a person can get there without conceding the possibility of doing shit we don't necessarily like. It's life!
All jobs have warts, and if we are honest, many of them are subject to our interpretation (typically via the warts in our own optic lenses.)
I'm sure, no, I know that there are jobs that are so atrocious that will make anyone switch to a minimum wage job. But those are corner cases. They don't warrant such drastic salary cuts (anything over 15%) for the general case.
I don't know how many CS grads that I have worked with who are OCD about things like code being made up of a certain percentage of comments, or lines not being more than 80 characters long, or using hungarian notation for variable names.
Someone seems to be stuck with impressions from the 90's. I haven't heard any of that for over a decade. Next, on Fox News-from-the-70's-Show, people are debating the evilness of gotos, and the imperative of having one single return statement.
Seriously, wtf is wrong with./ that makes this a news story? And in general, wtf is wrong with these so-called pundits who keep writing these asinine postulates?
10 years of freelance experience also is a "proper job", you know...
You learn plenty of stuff as a freelancer that you don't in a corporate environment. Chief among them, how to get things done on a shoe string budget, and how to pick your customers, contractors and occasional partners.
Not to mention, you get to travel and work outdoor year-round if your job allows it. That's absolutely priceless, considering that most people are too broke to travel at age 20 and too old to do so at age 60.
There's nothing wrong with starting as a freelancer.
Careful there. This is typically a sure way to become a shit code monkey. If the person only cares to get a job, without caring for the train wrecks left behind, then, yeah, there is nothing wrong with that.
Experience is something you don't get out of a vacuum (unless you are naturally talented, which most of us really are not.) The best thing for someone that is starting up in this business is to get a job with a good company or good team known for having some standards and a track record of putting quality systems up.
Then you learn from people more seniors than you on how to handle the what-ifs, the corner cases, the situations when shit hits the fan, the tactics to get competing group of liaisons to work together, the ability to pry away the information required to truly understand the requirements at hand.
Once you have a few years of experience (and most important, professional connections), then you can jump into freelancing with a good guarantee that you will do a good job.
The worst thing someone starting up in this business can do is to jump into freelancing directly or go work for a shitty company, project, department, whatever.
I kinda feel like it won't be long until programming is in the same position. Scientists all have a decent enough grasp of programming that they cobble together their own software/algorithms without the need for a software engineer.
Decent enough grasp of programming? Do you even know what that even means. I work, and I have worked, with scientists and EE majors who write copious amount of code (which sadly I have to deal with), code that looks like this (yes, this is the type of code I've had to deal with from such scientists and EE majors, and to be honest some CS majors, I'm not making this shit up):
do{
if (!condition1){ break; }
else{ // do some logic
if(! condition1_a}{ break; }
else{ // do some logic, and // NOW, HERE IS THE KICKER, SPRINKLED HERE AND THERE
if( error ){// do a recursive call hoping the error goes away }
}
}
if( ! condition2 ){ break; }
else{ // some other stupid logic intended to mimic a goto // statement because gotos are evil, but this shit is ok
}
//.... cue several dozen more tests like these..
if ( ! condition_I_lost_count_how_many ){ break; }
else{ // do some more logic that you cannot longer follow, // and which makes you can to commit seppuku, and // hang yourself with your own guts
}
while(0);
People who, intelligent as they might be, still don't fucking get why it is important to layer your functions, as opposed to opting for direct access to the same set of pointers spread all over the place. People who tell me they can write a compiler just with a look-up table based search/replace approach. People who tell me programming is nothing but if statements and for loops and that encapsulation and modularity are just academic shit that no one really uses.
Better yet, I've had project managers of a scientist/EE background telling me, and I quote, "we do not need a design, by the time we are in the middle of it, code is different from the design and things changes, so a design is superfluous" (this for critical systems with SLOC counts in the millions.)
It is a meme so consistent across companies it cannot easily be dismissed as a generalization.
You, sir, don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and this mentality is the root of all the evil code monkey shit that we see in the software industry.
Some idiot "researcher" will put out a study that condemns CA and/or the U.S. for not having adequate systems/procedures/etc. in place to detect and treat this even though it is not native to the U.S. and is largely brought in by immigrants.
Yes, it must be brought into places like Texas from places like Mexico which are so geographically distant that Texas was never even part of Mexico or anything. Clearly tapeworms couldn't be native to the US. It's impossible that you just made that up. Also clearly they must travel in those filthy, infected, unclean, foul immigrants and could never travel in, say, non-humans.
The thing we forget is that tapeworms are a recent species in the biological record. They recently appeared among brown-looking immigrants living exclusively south of the border just a few decades ago. Before that, tapeworms never existed at all, in any animal species anywhere in the world. Which proves that evolution is evil, and that tapeworms are aliens controlling brown looking people with the aims of conquering the northern hemispheres.
Take that James Cameron. I just have a premise for a successful sci-fi movie!!!
Teaching programming to a 6-year-old kid is a little bit too early
The art of programming is not about programming itself. It's much more than that.
The person who does the programming must first have a grasp of logic, and it's not an easy task for a 6-year-old kid to grasp the concept of NOT, OR, AND, XOR and all those shits yet
Kids as early as 3 when they are already forming complex sentences and ideas already master the concepts of AND, NOT and OR (exclusive OR). Logical disjunction is a bit harder to grasp as it does not happen in natural language as often as the other connectives.
Also, you seem to be thinking kids will be faced with full, all-balls programming assigments. Programming at that early age can be tought with a visual programming model, one that might not necessarily be turing-complete, but powerful and declarative enough to show a computational cause-and-effect kind of thing.
See little Tadeus, if you use this command (or visual gadget), you can draw a circle, and if you use it next to this command, you can make it green. See, if you put these options together you can select to create a circle or a rectangle, either green, yellow or red.
Something like that at an early age is just enough. It kindles the child's interest, and it shows that he/she can control this thing, this computer beyond the already pre-canned software recipes (games, browser, whatever) with the mouse and a keyboard. It shifts him/her from a consumer to a producer, however simple the content produced might be. They are kids after all.
You don't get kids to know that a * (b + c) = (a * b) + (a * c) = (b * a) + (c * a) = (b + c) * a = (c + b) * a on day one. You begin with one apple and one apple makes up two apples. Same with programming and any other topic for that matter.
Especially for a kid who is still in a state of "blank sheet".
Kids at the age of 6 are not in a state of "blank sheet".
If you want to teach a 6-year-old programming, you just gotta hafta "pre-programmed" that kid beforehand
In my own experience, I started to teach my kids simple logic when they were age 3 - simple concept of logic, away from all the computer jargon, in every-day-life setting
First of all, if they can learn simple concepts of logic by the age of three, then that comes into conflict with your early assertion that kids of 6 years of age have problems with AND, OR, XOR and NOT. Secondly, if they can have a grasp on simple logic, then they have a leg for programming (obviously programming at their level, just in the same way there is math at their level, and math at our level of comprehension.)
By age of 4 to 5 my kids could easily grasp why this thing won't work this way, and have the ability to think of new ways to solve (simple) problems by themselves
So by age 4 and 5 they already have skills parallel to some of the skills required in programming.
Only by then I started them with the good-old LOGO language
Putting a kid at 6-year-old through the programming routine might sound nice, but I am afraid of the unintended consequences - that the kid might be psychologically scarred for life
My 2 cents
Scarred for life? You gotta be kidding. You can argue that the delivery of a course and the nature of the teacher might scar a kid, but an actual subject. Kids are far more resilient and capable of learning than you give them credit for.
Why just nuclear power? I'm not against it, but there has to be other sources (exclusively or in combination thereof). For example, molten salt power generators. These are highly effective at capturing heat for a very long time. I'm sure that by the time humanity can build such things, we would have also developed salt compounds with much higher heat retention, and ceramics for insulators much better than what we have today.
Similarly, we can think of solar powered batteries that capture immense amounts of energy during the long lunar day. There will be a point in the future where this technology will be leaps above what we have today.
Then, there is the issue of efficient energy consumption. We now have light bulbs (and other light-emitting technology) that are far more effective than what we had two decades ago (and certainly from the time the first light bulb was invented.)
So if we were to extrapolate in the increased efficiency of energy production and energy consumption, we might find that nuclear-powered LEDs are not (or will not be) the only game in town.
Aside this, we are forgetting the role of genetic engineering. Humans will need "normal" light levels if they want to avoid genetic engineering on themselves. But edibles do not have to have that restriction. Chances are we will have to engineer plants, algae and edible protists, maybe plakton, and who knows, higher-order animals, so that they can economically thrive at lower light environment.
In Larry Niven's "Known Universe" series of books, the Puppeteers genetically re-engineered their home world plakton so that it could carry photosynthesis with just the infrared band (out of necessity after they moved their world away from their dying star.)
And in a more realistic scenario (realistic as far as sci-fi is concerned) in James Corey's "Leviathan Wakes", humanity has taken to the belt and the Jovian/Saturnian moons. In one the Jovian moons (don't remember which), humans grow cattle and crops engineered to thrive under very low light (reflected and augmented by large orbital lenses). And on the Belt, settlers feed on food alternatives made out of yeasts and fungus - cheese and beans as the books tale.
It would seem to me that, at least at the early stages of Solar colonization, humans will have to depend on possibly engineered protist sources for proteins and fats rather than animals. I guess that will be a vegan's dream come true;)
Regardless of the size of your lunar farm, you will still need to provide light to the plants during the two weeks of darkness that is the lunar night. Further, if you are going underground to protect yourself, and the plants you live on, from radiation, then you will need to provide all the light all the time.
Ergo, the nuclear-powered LEDs. Or perhaps LEDs based on batteries that can capture solar energy during the long lunar day (assuming we develop the know-how for developing such batteries.)
We haven't even been able to successfully create a small, enclosed, self-sustaining biosphere environment here on earth. If we can't even do it *here*, how is there going to be any progress in doing it on the moon?
Err, by doing and exploring things here and in near orbit until we get the expertise to build them on the moon (and elsewhere)???? Just a thought.
And doctors hate patients, lawyers hate clients, engineers hate machines, programmers hate computers.
Damn, it's like you have no idea what people act like.
^^^ Exactly this. A million times this. People who engage in 'X people hate their clients or whatever' or 'people who do X sucks' (or simply 'we are better than people who do X') are just taking a crap with there asses aiming at the zenith, never thinking their own crap will eventually land on their faces, gravity and all that.
Generalizations are the root of all evil in general (no pun intended), and the root of stupid, kindergartenish fallacies in particular. Particularly so when the generalization is aimed at a different group or trade different from the ones we belong to.
Supposedly in Slashdot, the reading nerd crowd who is supposed to be highly educated, living by the rules of Occam and the scientific method, cannot raise themselves above that level. They might revel on the fact of being able to pull a few technical tricks unaware of their own spiteful idiocy.
Slashdot Mirror
No - the point is to learn typing. Once you learn to type you can efficiently learn the technology of the limited computers. Frankly - the only class that has any value to me from high school was my freshman year typing class taught on an old IBM Selectric typewriter. Heck - the description in the summary is begging for a typewriter.
Technology for technology sake is never the answer - old school devices still rule, there is usually never a need for fancy modern devices, they just make thinks easier and more convenient if you happen to have money (and in this case electricity)
I agree with you (wrt mechanical typewriters). I see a problems of logistics though (speaking from personal experience since I learned on a mechanical typewriter). You need paper (lots of it the better), ribbons and white-outs. It takes practice, practice and practice, with the actual output available for grading. Hammering at the keys, hitting an empty rubber drum won't tell the student whether he's making typing mistakes.
My mother, now aged 85, learned to type using a printed picture of a keyboard, and exercises very similar to "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing". Its true there is no record of what keys you actually press, etc, but she could type a lot faster than I ever could, and is using an IPad as I type this.
My point is: stop being obsessed with technology: anyone in the third world can have a photocopy of a picture of a keyboad, and probably has the motivation to try and learn with it. Once a week, use a real machine to test their progress if you have to. (Yes I have visited third world countries).
That won't work. I speak from personal experience (borned & raised in a third world country). I learned typing with a mechanical typewriter. You have to have a physical feedback from the type writer to develop the necessary muscle memory.
You also need paper to see that you are typing, and to see if you are doing it right or wrong. And when you commit errors, you need to see how often you made them and where on the keyboard layout. Finally you develop the speed to type with a high degree of correctness.
You. Will. Never. Ever. Get. That. With. A. Picture. Of. A. Keyboard.
You need an actual keyboard, mechanical or otherwise.
Err...do they not make mechanical typewriters any longer??
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I learned with a mechanical typewriter when I lived south of the border. It is still far cheaper to get mechanical typewriters than to provide computers for each student (if the goal is to teach typing.)
The entity is not a citizen, but it is a vehicle for citizens to act collectively. Why should the citizens not have the right to speak collectively in this way?
Why should they have any such rights when they have protections (such as "limited liability") that people individually do not have? A right without an accompanying liability or responsibility is pretty much an additional right.
Preemptive strike: I know that limited liability is necessary in today's world to conduct business. But that is tangential to the additional power corporations possess over the powers of individuals. In our particular case, post "Citizens United", we are talking about political power.
People and corporations should have a right to seek wealth. But that does not imply that they have a right to turn wealth into political power. Paul Graham had a good write-up about this particular idea.
The entity is not a citizen, but it is a vehicle for citizens to act collectively. Why should the citizens not have the right to speak collectively in this way?
Why should they have any such rights when they have protections (such as "limited liability") that people individually do not have? A right without an accompanying liability or responsibility is pretty much an additional right.
Because business and commerce never existed before the concept of "limited liability" was created, right?
Non sequitur.
That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
Umm, both the GP and the GGP mentioned debt. That rather implies they don't have the means.
1. That is not an implication, but a reductio ad absurdum.
2. Your dishonesty is fucking repugnant: This is what he said:
(which is, practically speaking, about what I actually need to pay the bills, pay off debt and support my family)
See that, he didn't just say debt and debt alone. Mentioning debt =/= debt is the only factor. Maybe in your little world, but not in the real one.
Even if it was only debt, what do you know about the nature of this particular's person debt? Home loan debts? You can't buy a house unless you incur debt. Student loans? Almost no one can go to college, let alone grad school without incurring substantial amounts of it. Medical bill debts? After all, the majority of bankruptcies in this country are medical bill related. Personal business expansion, or opening a new business: guess what? You need to incur in debt to start (not to mention that you need to be on the red for the first few years until such a business becomes profitable.)
Maybe none of that applies in this case. I don't know. But neither do you, which is why it is stupid to be making generalizations and suggesting guilt trips because the majority of the population are at or under the poverty line.
The reality is that if you want to live a middle class/upper middle class life, with all the benefits that such a thing brings, you have to incur in a base, operational debt - to get an education, to own a good car (in particular if you want your spouse to drive your kids in one under guarantee), to own a home in a good (and ergo more expensive) school district, let alone in an industrialized hub where jobs are plenty (think Silicon Valley or NYC).
It is easy for a couple's to spend one of the spouses salary (if no more) solely in mortage, bills, medical coverage (or God forbids, medical bills), student loans, and children extra curricular activities, and supporting one's family (which includes savings and retirement plans.)
So no, mentioning debt does not imply that the person is beyond his means. If this person needs a salary to cover $70K of debt+bills, that's not being beyond one's means if you take the general case of middle class couples where both work. If he was the only person, being single, then you might have an argument. But this is not the case.
So again, mentioning debt does not imply being beyond one's means. You can say that till cows come home just to build a strawman to beat up, but it won't make it true.
Problem is that since you've never been through a CS program, you don't know what you're missing, literally.
Bro, I went through a CS program (undergrad and grad) as my bio states, and I've been making a living in the software/CS business (application and/or systems programming for commercial and defense sectors) for more than 17 years. I might have a clue what a CS program entails. Either that, or the CS program you went through was atrocious.
Faulty logic. The time you save is the time at the end of your life, not the time when you're young and can do things. In short, not all time is equal.
Double faulty logic. $30K/year extra makes up $120K extra in four years (minus taxes of course). If you are smart and save, that gives you plenty of leverage when seeking better dream jobs. That is, you don't have to take shit jobs and, with some minor caveats, you can simply walk away at any time of your choosing. I know this because I've done (and because to my eternal regret, I originally postponed it for too long.)
You don't have to defer the benefits of substantial extra cash to the end of your life.
Half the population makes $26k or less. Just something to think about when you say you have $65k in bills/debt and family..
Oh, shut the hell up. There is nothing to think about unless you are going full blown emo, proactively looking for something to be upset about (and I say this as a person who grew up in the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere). I mean, what the hell are you supposed to entice by that kind of remark. That people with the means should feel guilty for not living poorly like their more dispossessed citizens? GTFO please.
See, little secret for you. If you have an upper-middle class salary, you will live an upper-middle class life. You will want a nicer house for your family as opposed to living in the projects, run-down neighborhoods or whatever. Been there, done that, thank God I'm not there anymore.
If you have such a salary, you will get a nicer house. Not only that, you will move to a school district with better schooling ratings (which cause properties to be more expensive.) You will get better, more reliable transportation. You will have a 401K or IRA account, you will get the family health care plan with the best coverage you can afford. You will get better clothes not just for you but for your children. You'll try to feed them better food, organic food if possible.
You'll take them to Disney and feel the utmost happiness when you see their faces light up. You'll start saving on a college fund for them. And when summer break comes, you put them in summer camp. Not to mention you will put your kids in swimming classes, or music classes or whatever. You live and spend so that your kids do not go through a need (people argue that the later causes spoiled behavior, but that's just a gross generalization that does not hold true.)
Compare to that with a person of scare economics means. Having 3rd-hand shitty transportation or no transportation at all (which pretty much raises the cost of living per item). Living in run-down neighborhoods, which statistically are more prone to crime. With your kids in sub-par school districts. With no money to put them in summer camp, let alone giving them an opportunity to grow and explore extra-curricular activities. No college fund for them, not to mention subpar or nonexisting medical coverage. Poor nutrition options leading to greater risk of obesity. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Something to think about next time you see a person of means having a $65K family expense bill (unless you suggest him and his family live as if they were under the poverty line.)
I'd rather have a job I like that pays 70K than a job that sucks for 100K. You spend A LOT of time there, so you might as well enjoy it.
That's a 42.86% pay increase if you go from 70K to 100K (or a 30% pay cut if you go the other way around.) For that, I would do a job that sucks. Albeit I wouldn't do it permanently (2-4 years top), for I would use it as a trampoline for something else.
We are talking $30K a year, $120K in a 4 year period. That is enough money (if you are not an idiot and live frugally) to build a security nest such that you can walk away from any bad job (giving a mental finger to any pointy hairy boss you leave behind.) It gives you the power to be choosy and picky about who you work with.
I can understand not taking/wanting a pay cut (or pay increase) in the vicinity of 10% to 15% percent. But rejecting a 40+% pay increase or engage in a 30% pay cut? Specially when we are talking about high end, upper-middle class salaries? That's just absolutely nuts.
God help your friends if you are ditching this kind of advice. Life is like boxing. Sometimes you have to take a punch to get close enough to deliver a KO'ing upper cut. You have to learn to roll with your punches.
That is, sometimes, to get to the peace of mind of working on your own terms, you have to work on shitty stuff for a couple of years if it pays well and paves the way to future peace of mind.
Provided I'm not in a dream job already, if someone were to tell me here is a job that'll pay you 50% or more, base salary, with OT (lots of it), doing COBOL or Pick BASIC (the one with numeric labels for GOTOs) surrounded by assholes, hell yeah, I'll do it for a year or two, squeezing every possible penny, saving everything. Then kthxbye, followed by a 3-5 month sabbatical while looking for my next job under my conditions.
There is nothing more satisfying than knowing you can walk away and survive up to a year while looking for the perfect job. Barring getting some inheritance, there is no way a person can get there without conceding the possibility of doing shit we don't necessarily like. It's life!
All jobs have warts, and if we are honest, many of them are subject to our interpretation (typically via the warts in our own optic lenses.)
I'm sure, no, I know that there are jobs that are so atrocious that will make anyone switch to a minimum wage job. But those are corner cases. They don't warrant such drastic salary cuts (anything over 15%) for the general case.
I don't know how many CS grads that I have worked with who are OCD about things like code being made up of a certain percentage of comments, or lines not being more than 80 characters long, or using hungarian notation for variable names.
Someone seems to be stuck with impressions from the 90's. I haven't heard any of that for over a decade. Next, on Fox News-from-the-70's-Show, people are debating the evilness of gotos, and the imperative of having one single return statement.
Seriously, wtf is wrong with ./ that makes this a news story? And in general, wtf is wrong with these so-called pundits who keep writing these asinine postulates?
I really don't think GP "missed the point entirely." Your comment does not contradict his. You are just the farting noise you're making.
Because hurling a vulgarity illustrates the logic of your point and proves you are right. Bravo sir, bravo.
10 years of freelance experience also is a "proper job", you know...
You learn plenty of stuff as a freelancer that you don't in a corporate environment. Chief among them, how to get things done on a shoe string budget, and how to pick your customers, contractors and occasional partners.
Not to mention, you get to travel and work outdoor year-round if your job allows it. That's absolutely priceless, considering that most people are too broke to travel at age 20 and too old to do so at age 60.
There's nothing wrong with starting as a freelancer.
Careful there. This is typically a sure way to become a shit code monkey. If the person only cares to get a job, without caring for the train wrecks left behind, then, yeah, there is nothing wrong with that.
Experience is something you don't get out of a vacuum (unless you are naturally talented, which most of us really are not.) The best thing for someone that is starting up in this business is to get a job with a good company or good team known for having some standards and a track record of putting quality systems up.
Then you learn from people more seniors than you on how to handle the what-ifs, the corner cases, the situations when shit hits the fan, the tactics to get competing group of liaisons to work together, the ability to pry away the information required to truly understand the requirements at hand.
Once you have a few years of experience (and most important, professional connections), then you can jump into freelancing with a good guarantee that you will do a good job.
The worst thing someone starting up in this business can do is to jump into freelancing directly or go work for a shitty company, project, department, whatever.
I kinda feel like it won't be long until programming is in the same position. Scientists all have a decent enough grasp of programming that they cobble together their own software/algorithms without the need for a software engineer.
Decent enough grasp of programming? Do you even know what that even means. I work, and I have worked, with scientists and EE majors who write copious amount of code (which sadly I have to deal with), code that looks like this (yes, this is the type of code I've had to deal with from such scientists and EE majors, and to be honest some CS majors, I'm not making this shit up):
do{
if (!condition1){ break; }
else{
if(! condition1_a}{ break; }
else{
}
}
if( ! condition2 ){ break; }
else{
}
if ( ! condition_I_lost_count_how_many ){ break; }
else{
}
while(0);
People who, intelligent as they might be, still don't fucking get why it is important to layer your functions, as opposed to opting for direct access to the same set of pointers spread all over the place. People who tell me they can write a compiler just with a look-up table based search/replace approach. People who tell me programming is nothing but if statements and for loops and that encapsulation and modularity are just academic shit that no one really uses.
Better yet, I've had project managers of a scientist/EE background telling me, and I quote, "we do not need a design, by the time we are in the middle of it, code is different from the design and things changes, so a design is superfluous" (this for critical systems with SLOC counts in the millions.)
It is a meme so consistent across companies it cannot easily be dismissed as a generalization.
You, sir, don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and this mentality is the root of all the evil code monkey shit that we see in the software industry.
Thanks. We needed an opinion from an affirmative action hire.
Keep telling that to yourself buddy if gives you comfort. Now go flip some burgers.
Some idiot "researcher" will put out a study that condemns CA and/or the U.S. for not having adequate systems/procedures/etc. in place to detect and treat this even though it is not native to the U.S. and is largely brought in by immigrants.
Yes, it must be brought into places like Texas from places like Mexico which are so geographically distant that Texas was never even part of Mexico or anything. Clearly tapeworms couldn't be native to the US. It's impossible that you just made that up. Also clearly they must travel in those filthy, infected, unclean, foul immigrants and could never travel in, say, non-humans.
The thing we forget is that tapeworms are a recent species in the biological record. They recently appeared among brown-looking immigrants living exclusively south of the border just a few decades ago. Before that, tapeworms never existed at all, in any animal species anywhere in the world. Which proves that evolution is evil, and that tapeworms are aliens controlling brown looking people with the aims of conquering the northern hemispheres.
Take that James Cameron. I just have a premise for a successful sci-fi movie!!!
Teaching programming to a 6-year-old kid is a little bit too early
The art of programming is not about programming itself. It's much more than that.
The person who does the programming must first have a grasp of logic, and it's not an easy task for a 6-year-old kid to grasp the concept of NOT, OR, AND, XOR and all those shits yet
Kids as early as 3 when they are already forming complex sentences and ideas already master the concepts of AND, NOT and OR (exclusive OR). Logical disjunction is a bit harder to grasp as it does not happen in natural language as often as the other connectives.
Also, you seem to be thinking kids will be faced with full, all-balls programming assigments. Programming at that early age can be tought with a visual programming model, one that might not necessarily be turing-complete, but powerful and declarative enough to show a computational cause-and-effect kind of thing.
See little Tadeus, if you use this command (or visual gadget), you can draw a circle, and if you use it next to this command, you can make it green. See, if you put these options together you can select to create a circle or a rectangle, either green, yellow or red.
Something like that at an early age is just enough. It kindles the child's interest, and it shows that he/she can control this thing, this computer beyond the already pre-canned software recipes (games, browser, whatever) with the mouse and a keyboard. It shifts him/her from a consumer to a producer, however simple the content produced might be. They are kids after all.
You don't get kids to know that a * (b + c) = (a * b) + (a * c) = (b * a) + (c * a) = (b + c) * a = (c + b) * a on day one. You begin with one apple and one apple makes up two apples. Same with programming and any other topic for that matter.
Especially for a kid who is still in a state of "blank sheet".
Kids at the age of 6 are not in a state of "blank sheet".
If you want to teach a 6-year-old programming, you just gotta hafta "pre-programmed" that kid beforehand
In my own experience, I started to teach my kids simple logic when they were age 3 - simple concept of logic, away from all the computer jargon, in every-day-life setting
First of all, if they can learn simple concepts of logic by the age of three, then that comes into conflict with your early assertion that kids of 6 years of age have problems with AND, OR, XOR and NOT. Secondly, if they can have a grasp on simple logic, then they have a leg for programming (obviously programming at their level, just in the same way there is math at their level, and math at our level of comprehension.)
By age of 4 to 5 my kids could easily grasp why this thing won't work this way, and have the ability to think of new ways to solve (simple) problems by themselves
So by age 4 and 5 they already have skills parallel to some of the skills required in programming.
Only by then I started them with the good-old LOGO language
Putting a kid at 6-year-old through the programming routine might sound nice, but I am afraid of the unintended consequences - that the kid might be psychologically scarred for life
My 2 cents
Scarred for life? You gotta be kidding. You can argue that the delivery of a course and the nature of the teacher might scar a kid, but an actual subject. Kids are far more resilient and capable of learning than you give them credit for.
You don't need to cut down trees from this. You can make it out of twigs or old furniture or any other kind of wood left-overs.
Or just grow the trees like the paper industry does.
But if they do, then they would rob /.ers the opportunity to yell "tree killerssss!!!11".
Nuclear Powered LEDs For Space Farming
Why just nuclear power? I'm not against it, but there has to be other sources (exclusively or in combination thereof). For example, molten salt power generators. These are highly effective at capturing heat for a very long time. I'm sure that by the time humanity can build such things, we would have also developed salt compounds with much higher heat retention, and ceramics for insulators much better than what we have today.
Similarly, we can think of solar powered batteries that capture immense amounts of energy during the long lunar day. There will be a point in the future where this technology will be leaps above what we have today.
Then, there is the issue of efficient energy consumption. We now have light bulbs (and other light-emitting technology) that are far more effective than what we had two decades ago (and certainly from the time the first light bulb was invented.)
So if we were to extrapolate in the increased efficiency of energy production and energy consumption, we might find that nuclear-powered LEDs are not (or will not be) the only game in town.
Aside this, we are forgetting the role of genetic engineering. Humans will need "normal" light levels if they want to avoid genetic engineering on themselves. But edibles do not have to have that restriction. Chances are we will have to engineer plants, algae and edible protists, maybe plakton, and who knows, higher-order animals, so that they can economically thrive at lower light environment.
In Larry Niven's "Known Universe" series of books, the Puppeteers genetically re-engineered their home world plakton so that it could carry photosynthesis with just the infrared band (out of necessity after they moved their world away from their dying star.)
And in a more realistic scenario (realistic as far as sci-fi is concerned) in James Corey's "Leviathan Wakes", humanity has taken to the belt and the Jovian/Saturnian moons. In one the Jovian moons (don't remember which), humans grow cattle and crops engineered to thrive under very low light (reflected and augmented by large orbital lenses). And on the Belt, settlers feed on food alternatives made out of yeasts and fungus - cheese and beans as the books tale.
It would seem to me that, at least at the early stages of Solar colonization, humans will have to depend on possibly engineered protist sources for proteins and fats rather than animals. I guess that will be a vegan's dream come true ;)
Regardless of the size of your lunar farm, you will still need to provide light to the plants during the two weeks of darkness that is the lunar night. Further, if you are going underground to protect yourself, and the plants you live on, from radiation, then you will need to provide all the light all the time.
Ergo, the nuclear-powered LEDs. Or perhaps LEDs based on batteries that can capture solar energy during the long lunar day (assuming we develop the know-how for developing such batteries.)
We haven't even been able to successfully create a small, enclosed, self-sustaining biosphere environment here on earth. If we can't even do it *here*, how is there going to be any progress in doing it on the moon?
Err, by doing and exploring things here and in near orbit until we get the expertise to build them on the moon (and elsewhere)???? Just a thought.
...which was even mentioned in the summary!
I hope they have learned to put all the important information in the title now!
Why stop there? Let's use the whole summary as the title. If it turns out to be too big, we can always zip it ;)
And doctors hate patients, lawyers hate clients, engineers hate machines, programmers hate computers.
Damn, it's like you have no idea what people act like.
^^^ Exactly this. A million times this. People who engage in 'X people hate their clients or whatever' or 'people who do X sucks' (or simply 'we are better than people who do X') are just taking a crap with there asses aiming at the zenith, never thinking their own crap will eventually land on their faces, gravity and all that.
Generalizations are the root of all evil in general (no pun intended), and the root of stupid, kindergartenish fallacies in particular. Particularly so when the generalization is aimed at a different group or trade different from the ones we belong to.
Supposedly in Slashdot, the reading nerd crowd who is supposed to be highly educated, living by the rules of Occam and the scientific method, cannot raise themselves above that level. They might revel on the fact of being able to pull a few technical tricks unaware of their own spiteful idiocy.