Yes. Obama created this storm to destroy his Kenyan birth certificate that his mother secreted at an Indonesia Bank as it was foretold by a witch doctor before his birth that he would one day be president and it would be necessary to conspire to plant a fake birth certificate and an announcement in a Hawaii while securely deposited the real documents in a place far from the reach of the Fancy Haired One that would someday come searching for it. This not so farfetched. I have seen many claims that this supernatural powered president created Sandy to win the election. Two Sup(t)er Storms! How grand.
This is why I continue to use Firefox for most everything. Cookie managers, ad blockers, flash blockers, youtube downloaders. Most of this used to be baked into Camino, but, alas it is no more. Still it is easy enough to duplicate the functionality in the Firefox build.
More evidence that Google is not afraid of making life harder on the users, in the name of security of course, to protect it's revenue flow. It has gotten to the point where I am even using Bing sometimes. If I can find a replacement for Google Docs, I might even leave the Google workflow altogether, and use Dropbox instead of Google drive.
I think that advertisers are always looking to get to the 25-40 year old demographic that is approaching or in their highest spending patterns. They have money for more than beer, and are beginning to spend real money on routine household items. Twitter might provide connections that other media can't. I know I have seen young people move from Facebook to Twitter. I don't use either that much anymore, but then I am not in the demographic.
The biggest problem with MS Windows was that it required a different device driver for common devices. Every time a USB drive was put in, a new device driver, and probably malware, was installed. With a camera, PTP was not implemented for a long time so device drivers were again needed. It is not surprising that they are continuing this device specific philosophy instead of adopting the open standards.
Physical chemistry was hard for me. Did not take organic until later, at it was not easy either. What scares me is that doctors, who are supposed to be the smartest people on the planet, and therefore usually very well paid, seem to have problem with science. Here another thing that scares. Premed majors on average get the lowest score on the MCAT, yet we still have students going into premed to become a doctor. From the numbers I have seen, Physics results in the highest scores. Either the MCAT is not predictive of success in medical school, or we should be asking all doctors to major in physics.
I have been changing clocks all my life and it simply has not been the nerve racking. I don't know where all the drama is coming from.
And less so now when most clocks are set automatically, and the few that aren't have 'dst' switches. Get to work an hour earlier or an hour later. It is just one of those costs of living in society. I know some people are very compulsive, and this causes stress, but I see DST no more inconvenient than speed limits. If there is a real problem it is that instead of just going with majority rule on something that is largely trivial, some communities are boneheads and want everything their way.
That said, I think most of the reasons for DST have diminished with time. While switching is easier now, the world is different. The fact that the US is now completely linked with instant communication and many people are now no longer primarily part of one region is a factor.
At some point a rational discussion on this will be possible, and it will likely end. Some of this going to be generational. While some of the world have been using DST from the early 20th century, in the US has only been widespread for maybe 50 years. This means that some people who are very attached to it are still alive.
First, everyone who says this is like sour grapes is correct. The internet was and is MS undoing.
Second, overpopulation is the issue. We all want a better lifestyle and there is no way to avoid that. As more people live, and more people want stuff, the planet is going to have big issues. The mantra used to be that the planet cannot handle every person in China owning a refrigerator. China is dealing with that reality now. It is not pretty. The only way to deal with overpopulation is change our consumptions patterns.
And this is where Gates is full of crap
The internet is changing our consumption patterns and helping everyone. 40 years ago kids would collect large plastic dics, wrapped in two layers of paper, maybe a book, and a sheet of plastic that would be thrown away immediately. In most cases when the kids moved out of their parents house, and the entire collection went into the landfill, tons of non biodegradable plastic. This does not happen anymore and kids keep their iPods for years. Patterns are changing for the better
Yes it is true that Jimmy Carter, with the help of the Gates Foundation convinced people to filter their water before drinking it so they would not get infected with worms. It is also true that various technologies have made micro loans practical and Kiva has used the internet to efficiently fund those loans. This is helping the most venerable.
The internet is creating a culture in which rapid communications of research that would have been unaffordable 20 years ago is now practical. The simple act of communicating, which would have required an international phone call or fax, is not for all practical purposes, free. If you have never tried to call into the US from a foreign location, ask someone how expensive that is. Not that faxes were not themselves revolutionary for research. When I was at the university , we were able to employ several Russian researchers due to the Fax machine.
The internet provides a standard platform for dissemination and collection of information of services. Saying that it cannot help people in the greatest need is like saying verbal language, writing or cheap books does not help the venerable. Perhaps not directly, but we are no longer, for the most, shitting in the street and dying of cholera. That, my friends, is because of the ability to communicate across borders and generations.
Part of this is simple market forces. If everything operates with everything, where is the market lock in.
To put more perspective on what the parent is saying, 25 years ago I was able to write reletively simple code to control a lab full of equipment. The most difficult part of the process was that the standard PC did not natively support a large number of ports, and some equipment only had rs-232 not rs-422. Otherwise it was pretty much a case of sending text command to a controller and receives text back. If a machine was not automated to begin with, a simple DAC solved the problem.
The technical aspects to home automation has been solved for 20 years. The only thing lacking is packaging and marketing. Really, what has been lacking is a so-called killer app. Why do you need to turn off the lights or turn on the TV when no one is home? Why do you want you door locks to be as venerable as you car, or have your home key cost $300 to replace.
That what I thought. It is like hiring Hugh Laurie to be your doctor, or plan your military Armageddon, or even better, be your prince regent.
Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at
on
The Case Against Gmail
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· Score: 1
So i post for real. You did not answer the quuestion. What is the value in gmail when 1) I have to fix it every quarter, 2) I can get kicked off if I violate the google+ terms of service and 3) if I lose data I have no recourse. Other than it is a free service, of course. My presumption is that data is worth $50 a year to protect.
Re:MS shill does not like anything Google, news at
on
The Case Against Gmail
·
· Score: 0
Google shill has to defend Google, and all the other fake Google users have to mod him up.
I have been using Gmail a long time as well, and every few months something seemed to break in my third party setup. I just don't mess with it anymore. My Gmail accounts are for spam purposes anyway. We have heard enough about or losing accounts by signing up for Google+ that no one who cares about data integrity should be using it. I may be an iTool but I have not lost mail.
The question I have to ask is why should I have to setup my third party client every few months because Google wants to bork it's end users. The answer is that Google want traffic to it's site and just mining out email for data is not profitable enough. I know it is a free service, and you get what you pay for, which is why I pay for my mail.
This is certainly hyperbole. Conglomerates are not the only ones with libraries. Many doctors are affiliated with universities which also have libraries.They could hire a student part time with the explicit intent of raiding the library. When I was a student I would do this. In most cases if a library does not have the article, ILL will get it.
In any case the example used in the submission is silly. The speech pathologists is complaining that the articles to do the job costs $1000. I make less than a speech pathologist and I easily spend $1000 a year making sure that I am up to date so that I can keep my job. It is like a few percent of my income. Expenses have to be put in context. If you are billing $100 a patient to medicare, and seeing 10-15 patients a day, it is out of line to expect some of that to be used for professional development?
That is not to say that journal costs are getting out of line. If some one is doing real science, and is trying to do so on a budget, journal costs can get out of line. Preprint federally funded research should be available online for little or not cost. Everything possible should be done to reduce the costs of professional journals to libraries. There are many things that can and should be done.
But an alleged professional whining that they get charged for a valuable product when they charge large amounts for their services, that is just silly.
A better example, and real problem, are those working in less developed countries in which the resources are actually taxed, and science, even medicine, is extremely strained because in some cases journal costs do actually provide a significant road block to possible innovation.In some cases journals are given free or at greatly reduced costs to those countries. Even so, the problems is not going to fixed until we have free rapid communications of peer reviewed articles.
I have an HP MFC and use it quite a bit. It has held up very well for many years. I am approaching 100K pages. Print quality is not the biggest issue, so I pay about $20 for a cartridge that lasts at least 7,000 pages. If I were using real HP supplies, the cost would over 2 cents a page, quite unaffordable.
For color I have both HP and solid ink Xerox Phaser printers. For black and white the Phaser is less than 2 cents a copy, using Xerox supplies. Using non Xerox supplies the cost can get close to a penny for black and white, and a nickel or so for color. Of course they don't even make a solid ink MFC anymore.
For inkjet I am quite happy with my wireless Canon color inkjet/scanner. Both function work wireless on my mac and PC, something that does not happen with HP. As long as you print a ream of paper every few months, the ink supply will not dry up.
If I needed to use MS Office, 365 is not a bad value. I subscribed to it for a couple months because a friend needed to learn it for work.
What this really tells us is that many do not need any of the innovative features developed over the past 10 years, and the use of MS Office is mostly to write memos, which can be done using any software. With 365 the consumer costs are low, but it does allow MS to generate revenue even if consumers do not need new features.
Fortunately for MS people do have a lot of inertia when it comes to learning even marginally different skills, so buying MS provides a greater value than the perceived risk of OSS. I see this everyday, and not just in office suites. I see people buying data analysis suites even though competitive free software is out there. Paying money just provides a level of comfort.
I use LaTeX(beamer class) when it makes sense, which is anything that is going to be production. It does require a level of discipline, but to me, the text based input and the precise output makes it worth any limitations. I use python script to output LaTex. Given that LaTex output to PDF is routine any past issues are past.
For other things, Openoffice does everything I need. When I need a certain kind of fancy presentation I use Keynote.
This is the only justification. While HFT trading is basically profit for those who are fundamentally useless to the economy, basically a lesser modern form of arbitrage, the technology being developed may be beneficial. The question is if the technology development justifies the clear damage that HFT does. Some parasites, like the bacteria in our gut, are useful. Others, like meningitis, are not so much.
Re:Peer review stretched to its limit by money
on
How Science Goes Wrong
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Also cancer research/biotech is barely science. No one would say Thomas Edison was a scientist, he was just someone who tried a bunch of stuff until something worked, with not necessarily a great deal of understanding of the basic science. We can argue the specifics of the points, but most of these people are just highly trained technicians paid to write papers that say what they are supposed to. Remember all the paper than came out supporting tobacco?
Most of this 'research' has significant consequences if they do not play out. No one is going to rock the boat by verifying results because such knowledge will keep the product from coming to market. Pharmaceuticals has a built in buffer to pay for future deaths, but those cannot be made if the product is never on the market.
Now for real science, this is not an issue. Researches will regularly ignore bad research, but the results are not often the most critical thing. It is the methods. Even bad result can lead to innovative experiment. I recall one case where the results of a technique were bad for years, but the technique proved very useful, and the errors were eventually discovered.In fact the damaging papers are sometimes where bad techniques are promulgated.
Or, you shouldn't be going to college for a specific job. While many jobs require a degree or even a very specific degree, paying 100K to a university so one can be a code monkey may not be the best thing to do. The reason to go to college, to get a degree, other than the fiction that a piece of paper will inherently get you a better job, is to become well rounded and, well, educated. I know too many people who put those four years into building their technical skills and achieving what they really wanted to believe that college is the only path to a career. It, however, a very good path to the career you will have when the current flavor of the month loses favor and one has to find a new well paying job.
Which is why I say major in something interesting, and use the four years to become educated and leverage whatever recourse the university has to leverage your skills. It is said, Bill Gates, for instance, leveraged his access to free computer time in high school and university to develop programs. In my experience, the number of toys that can be accessible to a university student who is willing to insinuate themselves into certain positions is significant.
If, as MS is so fond of saying, your time is worth nothing.
Or you could download full tool sets that are given away by every other developer. Apple, for instance, only charges $100 to develop on the iPad, giving the tools away. Eclipse is supported by many of the major vendors.
I realize that for a MS Shop the cost of Visual Studio is insignificant, but I can't even begin to comprehend why MS feels it needs to charge for the product. Everyone says that the Express version does everything anyone could want, but that is like saying the Home version of MS Windows does everything. We know it doesn't, and that it is that intentionally, so that people will pay for the instant upgrade.
I started off in Fortran, and of course it was the language developed for science and maths. I know that it is still used in some places, but the people I know who have been in the technical industry for a very long time seem to be porting away from it.
Here is what I see. Clock cycles are very cheap, and programmers, and scientists, are not. The advantages of using relatively low level constructs are just not present with computers that basically waste cycles and memory on eye candy.
So I would have to say that C or Fortran might be justified if one is going to write really intensive simulations or the like, but otherwise everyone seems to be using Python for casual computing, and from what I do with it is seems to work fine. There are even very good books that teach how to write good scientific code in Python.
I have written extensive over the years in C, Fortran, Assembly among other languages, and right now pretty much just use Python.
I think the problem here is not that meetings are virtual, but that large gatherings are being held with virtual meeting.
There is a benefit to large meetings. But clearly the limitations that mandate large concise time intense meetings do not exist in the virtual world. There is no reason to hold 50 presentations in a day and then have attendees select their favorite 5 which means the get to attend 15-20 over the week. Rather 200 presentations can be held over a month, and one can drop in for an hour when they are interesting.
This would also free up conferences for what they are best. Provided unstructured interaction between professionals. Honestly, too many conferences are so structured that I feel like they are made for elementary school students, or laborers who bill by the hour.
If the value of a conference is the interaction, then lets pay people to go to Hawaii for a week and interact, and not cover the real purpose with these fake structured meetings.
I have seen these rooms on tours of universities. About the size of big walk in closets, or a good size bathroom. Close doors, most radio signals are attenuated to zero. For certain experiments we built a Faraday cage out of a grounded metal box.
Yes, it is simple. Don't do illegal stuff. For most people when the do illegal stuff it stays on their record. Write a bad check when you are 20 and there is a potential misdemenor, if not a felony, on your record all you life. Get caught in a situation where you commit a felony when you 18 and you can't vote.
The stories in the NYT, were, for the most part kids who cut a sweet heart deal and got away with stuff that the many people would not. Honestly, i don't believe in the drug laws, but I do think following laws, at least enough to not get caught is a sign of discipline and intelligence, characteristics that employers want. I suspect that the vast majority of us do not end up in booking.
So yes, these sites are going to cause a problem because it puts these people at competitive disadvantage. Just like a degree, or one's weight, or one's decision to wear a t-shirt and jeans instead of a suit. But at some point one decides to transport 9 pills across sate lines because one thinks one is better than everyone else and the laws do not apply, or because there has alwsys been protection from the laws applying to you. Until they do, then one starts whining on how unfair life is. All while some less fortunate kid is spending 10 years in jail for a single hit of crack.
Here is what I compare this to. The online sexual predator list. When it was first created I argued against it because it was going to do more harm than good, and at some point it would put pressure on prosecutors to not charge people who were sexual predators because they would be on the list. Fast forward to today. Parents are whining because their son, who did nothing more than have sex with a drunk girl, video it, and post it online, are being put on the list as a sexual predator. Defense attorney's are using it in the defense of sexual predators.
But in both cases it is what society has decided are practical consequences to punish convicted criminals. We want to know if we have sexual predator next door. Employers want to know if they are hiring a criminals. In both cases we are safe if we don't do the crime.
If we do the crime, then I guess we are conditioned by our upbringing to complain the life is unfair.
But really, i try not do crime. That is my simple solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Obama created this storm to destroy his Kenyan birth certificate that his mother secreted at an Indonesia Bank as it was foretold by a witch doctor before his birth that he would one day be president and it would be necessary to conspire to plant a fake birth certificate and an announcement in a Hawaii while securely deposited the real documents in a place far from the reach of the Fancy Haired One that would someday come searching for it. This not so farfetched. I have seen many claims that this supernatural powered president created Sandy to win the election. Two Sup(t)er Storms! How grand.
More evidence that Google is not afraid of making life harder on the users, in the name of security of course, to protect it's revenue flow. It has gotten to the point where I am even using Bing sometimes. If I can find a replacement for Google Docs, I might even leave the Google workflow altogether, and use Dropbox instead of Google drive.
I think that advertisers are always looking to get to the 25-40 year old demographic that is approaching or in their highest spending patterns. They have money for more than beer, and are beginning to spend real money on routine household items. Twitter might provide connections that other media can't. I know I have seen young people move from Facebook to Twitter. I don't use either that much anymore, but then I am not in the demographic.
The biggest problem with MS Windows was that it required a different device driver for common devices. Every time a USB drive was put in, a new device driver, and probably malware, was installed. With a camera, PTP was not implemented for a long time so device drivers were again needed. It is not surprising that they are continuing this device specific philosophy instead of adopting the open standards.
Physical chemistry was hard for me. Did not take organic until later, at it was not easy either. What scares me is that doctors, who are supposed to be the smartest people on the planet, and therefore usually very well paid, seem to have problem with science. Here another thing that scares. Premed majors on average get the lowest score on the MCAT, yet we still have students going into premed to become a doctor. From the numbers I have seen, Physics results in the highest scores. Either the MCAT is not predictive of success in medical school, or we should be asking all doctors to major in physics.
And less so now when most clocks are set automatically, and the few that aren't have 'dst' switches. Get to work an hour earlier or an hour later. It is just one of those costs of living in society. I know some people are very compulsive, and this causes stress, but I see DST no more inconvenient than speed limits. If there is a real problem it is that instead of just going with majority rule on something that is largely trivial, some communities are boneheads and want everything their way.
That said, I think most of the reasons for DST have diminished with time. While switching is easier now, the world is different. The fact that the US is now completely linked with instant communication and many people are now no longer primarily part of one region is a factor.
At some point a rational discussion on this will be possible, and it will likely end. Some of this going to be generational. While some of the world have been using DST from the early 20th century, in the US has only been widespread for maybe 50 years. This means that some people who are very attached to it are still alive.
Second, overpopulation is the issue. We all want a better lifestyle and there is no way to avoid that. As more people live, and more people want stuff, the planet is going to have big issues. The mantra used to be that the planet cannot handle every person in China owning a refrigerator. China is dealing with that reality now. It is not pretty. The only way to deal with overpopulation is change our consumptions patterns.
And this is where Gates is full of crap
The internet is changing our consumption patterns and helping everyone. 40 years ago kids would collect large plastic dics, wrapped in two layers of paper, maybe a book, and a sheet of plastic that would be thrown away immediately. In most cases when the kids moved out of their parents house, and the entire collection went into the landfill, tons of non biodegradable plastic. This does not happen anymore and kids keep their iPods for years. Patterns are changing for the better
Yes it is true that Jimmy Carter, with the help of the Gates Foundation convinced people to filter their water before drinking it so they would not get infected with worms. It is also true that various technologies have made micro loans practical and Kiva has used the internet to efficiently fund those loans. This is helping the most venerable.
The internet is creating a culture in which rapid communications of research that would have been unaffordable 20 years ago is now practical. The simple act of communicating, which would have required an international phone call or fax, is not for all practical purposes, free. If you have never tried to call into the US from a foreign location, ask someone how expensive that is. Not that faxes were not themselves revolutionary for research. When I was at the university , we were able to employ several Russian researchers due to the Fax machine.
The internet provides a standard platform for dissemination and collection of information of services. Saying that it cannot help people in the greatest need is like saying verbal language, writing or cheap books does not help the venerable. Perhaps not directly, but we are no longer, for the most, shitting in the street and dying of cholera. That, my friends, is because of the ability to communicate across borders and generations.
To put more perspective on what the parent is saying, 25 years ago I was able to write reletively simple code to control a lab full of equipment. The most difficult part of the process was that the standard PC did not natively support a large number of ports, and some equipment only had rs-232 not rs-422. Otherwise it was pretty much a case of sending text command to a controller and receives text back. If a machine was not automated to begin with, a simple DAC solved the problem.
The technical aspects to home automation has been solved for 20 years. The only thing lacking is packaging and marketing. Really, what has been lacking is a so-called killer app. Why do you need to turn off the lights or turn on the TV when no one is home? Why do you want you door locks to be as venerable as you car, or have your home key cost $300 to replace.
That what I thought. It is like hiring Hugh Laurie to be your doctor, or plan your military Armageddon, or even better, be your prince regent.
So i post for real. You did not answer the quuestion. What is the value in gmail when 1) I have to fix it every quarter, 2) I can get kicked off if I violate the google+ terms of service and 3) if I lose data I have no recourse. Other than it is a free service, of course. My presumption is that data is worth $50 a year to protect.
I have been using Gmail a long time as well, and every few months something seemed to break in my third party setup. I just don't mess with it anymore. My Gmail accounts are for spam purposes anyway. We have heard enough about or losing accounts by signing up for Google+ that no one who cares about data integrity should be using it. I may be an iTool but I have not lost mail.
The question I have to ask is why should I have to setup my third party client every few months because Google wants to bork it's end users. The answer is that Google want traffic to it's site and just mining out email for data is not profitable enough. I know it is a free service, and you get what you pay for, which is why I pay for my mail.
In any case the example used in the submission is silly. The speech pathologists is complaining that the articles to do the job costs $1000. I make less than a speech pathologist and I easily spend $1000 a year making sure that I am up to date so that I can keep my job. It is like a few percent of my income. Expenses have to be put in context. If you are billing $100 a patient to medicare, and seeing 10-15 patients a day, it is out of line to expect some of that to be used for professional development?
That is not to say that journal costs are getting out of line. If some one is doing real science, and is trying to do so on a budget, journal costs can get out of line. Preprint federally funded research should be available online for little or not cost. Everything possible should be done to reduce the costs of professional journals to libraries. There are many things that can and should be done.
But an alleged professional whining that they get charged for a valuable product when they charge large amounts for their services, that is just silly.
A better example, and real problem, are those working in less developed countries in which the resources are actually taxed, and science, even medicine, is extremely strained because in some cases journal costs do actually provide a significant road block to possible innovation.In some cases journals are given free or at greatly reduced costs to those countries. Even so, the problems is not going to fixed until we have free rapid communications of peer reviewed articles.
I have an HP MFC and use it quite a bit. It has held up very well for many years. I am approaching 100K pages. Print quality is not the biggest issue, so I pay about $20 for a cartridge that lasts at least 7,000 pages. If I were using real HP supplies, the cost would over 2 cents a page, quite unaffordable. For color I have both HP and solid ink Xerox Phaser printers. For black and white the Phaser is less than 2 cents a copy, using Xerox supplies. Using non Xerox supplies the cost can get close to a penny for black and white, and a nickel or so for color. Of course they don't even make a solid ink MFC anymore. For inkjet I am quite happy with my wireless Canon color inkjet/scanner. Both function work wireless on my mac and PC, something that does not happen with HP. As long as you print a ream of paper every few months, the ink supply will not dry up.
Just a data point. All seems to be going well on my machine. About an hour to update, rebooting fine.
About the only thing I would complain about was the need to register my iCloud. I wish they would have kept the online password manager.
If anyone is going to collect data it is going to be us! After all we are the only ones who can properly monetize it.
What this really tells us is that many do not need any of the innovative features developed over the past 10 years, and the use of MS Office is mostly to write memos, which can be done using any software. With 365 the consumer costs are low, but it does allow MS to generate revenue even if consumers do not need new features.
Fortunately for MS people do have a lot of inertia when it comes to learning even marginally different skills, so buying MS provides a greater value than the perceived risk of OSS. I see this everyday, and not just in office suites. I see people buying data analysis suites even though competitive free software is out there. Paying money just provides a level of comfort.
For other things, Openoffice does everything I need. When I need a certain kind of fancy presentation I use Keynote.
This is the only justification. While HFT trading is basically profit for those who are fundamentally useless to the economy, basically a lesser modern form of arbitrage, the technology being developed may be beneficial. The question is if the technology development justifies the clear damage that HFT does. Some parasites, like the bacteria in our gut, are useful. Others, like meningitis, are not so much.
Most of this 'research' has significant consequences if they do not play out. No one is going to rock the boat by verifying results because such knowledge will keep the product from coming to market. Pharmaceuticals has a built in buffer to pay for future deaths, but those cannot be made if the product is never on the market.
Now for real science, this is not an issue. Researches will regularly ignore bad research, but the results are not often the most critical thing. It is the methods. Even bad result can lead to innovative experiment. I recall one case where the results of a technique were bad for years, but the technique proved very useful, and the errors were eventually discovered.In fact the damaging papers are sometimes where bad techniques are promulgated.
Which is why I say major in something interesting, and use the four years to become educated and leverage whatever recourse the university has to leverage your skills. It is said, Bill Gates, for instance, leveraged his access to free computer time in high school and university to develop programs. In my experience, the number of toys that can be accessible to a university student who is willing to insinuate themselves into certain positions is significant.
Or you could download full tool sets that are given away by every other developer. Apple, for instance, only charges $100 to develop on the iPad, giving the tools away. Eclipse is supported by many of the major vendors.
I realize that for a MS Shop the cost of Visual Studio is insignificant, but I can't even begin to comprehend why MS feels it needs to charge for the product. Everyone says that the Express version does everything anyone could want, but that is like saying the Home version of MS Windows does everything. We know it doesn't, and that it is that intentionally, so that people will pay for the instant upgrade.
Here is what I see. Clock cycles are very cheap, and programmers, and scientists, are not. The advantages of using relatively low level constructs are just not present with computers that basically waste cycles and memory on eye candy.
So I would have to say that C or Fortran might be justified if one is going to write really intensive simulations or the like, but otherwise everyone seems to be using Python for casual computing, and from what I do with it is seems to work fine. There are even very good books that teach how to write good scientific code in Python.
I have written extensive over the years in C, Fortran, Assembly among other languages, and right now pretty much just use Python.
There is a benefit to large meetings. But clearly the limitations that mandate large concise time intense meetings do not exist in the virtual world. There is no reason to hold 50 presentations in a day and then have attendees select their favorite 5 which means the get to attend 15-20 over the week. Rather 200 presentations can be held over a month, and one can drop in for an hour when they are interesting.
This would also free up conferences for what they are best. Provided unstructured interaction between professionals. Honestly, too many conferences are so structured that I feel like they are made for elementary school students, or laborers who bill by the hour.
If the value of a conference is the interaction, then lets pay people to go to Hawaii for a week and interact, and not cover the real purpose with these fake structured meetings.
I have seen these rooms on tours of universities. About the size of big walk in closets, or a good size bathroom. Close doors, most radio signals are attenuated to zero. For certain experiments we built a Faraday cage out of a grounded metal box.
The stories in the NYT, were, for the most part kids who cut a sweet heart deal and got away with stuff that the many people would not. Honestly, i don't believe in the drug laws, but I do think following laws, at least enough to not get caught is a sign of discipline and intelligence, characteristics that employers want. I suspect that the vast majority of us do not end up in booking.
So yes, these sites are going to cause a problem because it puts these people at competitive disadvantage. Just like a degree, or one's weight, or one's decision to wear a t-shirt and jeans instead of a suit. But at some point one decides to transport 9 pills across sate lines because one thinks one is better than everyone else and the laws do not apply, or because there has alwsys been protection from the laws applying to you. Until they do, then one starts whining on how unfair life is. All while some less fortunate kid is spending 10 years in jail for a single hit of crack.
Here is what I compare this to. The online sexual predator list. When it was first created I argued against it because it was going to do more harm than good, and at some point it would put pressure on prosecutors to not charge people who were sexual predators because they would be on the list. Fast forward to today. Parents are whining because their son, who did nothing more than have sex with a drunk girl, video it, and post it online, are being put on the list as a sexual predator. Defense attorney's are using it in the defense of sexual predators.
But in both cases it is what society has decided are practical consequences to punish convicted criminals. We want to know if we have sexual predator next door. Employers want to know if they are hiring a criminals. In both cases we are safe if we don't do the crime.
If we do the crime, then I guess we are conditioned by our upbringing to complain the life is unfair.
But really, i try not do crime. That is my simple solution.