"And Miyazaki can put warm, fuzzy messages about friendship, family, loyalty, etc. into his movies without triteness, cloying sentimentality or song-and-dance routines"
You've hit the nail on the head for a key reason why Miyazaki's film work so well - they often manage to create an emotional response in the viewers. This is no mean feat as most live action movies cannot achive this same goal. This emotional connection delivers an experience that the audience recognizes as truth without feeling that they have been manipulated - something song and dance rarely can deliver.
Is that why we're installing judges such as Janice Brown?
"She has often said that she has been guided through the challenges of her life and work by her deep Christian faith, and she has often argued that judges should look to higher authorities than precedent or manmade laws in making decisions" (NYT 6/9)
The whole "judicial activism" rhetorics is bollock. It is only invoked when a judge rules against one's interest, never otherwise.
It has the most in depth coverge of news and affairs of other nations bar none. The only serious competitor is The Economist which is a periodical. CSM has less bias than any other US publication unless you feel that any coverage of news outside of the US of A is inherently leftist or socialist.
"I don't know of a professional database programmer that would store an image in a database."
I quite agree. That shows exactly that not all data semantic is appropriately modeled by the RDB approach - my original point.
As for the article calling transaction an "illusion", it is exactly correct. All the components of the transaction do NOT occur at once. They are completed in sequence with provision for rolling back in case of failure to complete ALL of the components. I'm quite sure that you actually would agree with this description.
"the mention of Stonebraker's name as an authority on databases is generally an indicater of a content-free paper"
That is certainly a bold claim coming from an AC. In case you didn't know, he has been building relational DB probably while you were still in diapers. Heard of something call Ingres perhaps?
The relational model could be defined to be "complete" in one technical sense, but that by no means make it the most effective tool for your application. For example, graphical data is not efficiently stored in a RDB, whether they are pixels or display lists. Typically, they have to get stuffed into a BLOB if one insists on saving into a RDB. That mean the RDB simply have no way to manipulate the data semanics.
To put it another way, every computer is equivalent to a Turing machine - arguable the simplest representation of computation. Does that mean we should all do programming in Turing machine exclusively?
The article is not arguing for getting rid of the RDB. It's simply pointing out areas of limitations which may inspire development of other data manipulation approaches. A better fitting tool will enhance your life.
We do not disagree - long term for a company these days IS 4-5 years! No one thinks of 10-30 years time period for employment these days.
When you include time for interview and administrative overhead to add an employee, hiring a new professional can easily cost $5000-$10,000 + (recruiter fee if any) each time. That's that I mean by an investment. It would be probably half as much to hire a contractor.
In addition, you need to keep in mind that it's a buyer's market right now. The pay gap that makes a company indifferent to hiring as contractor vs as full time is MORE important than the pay gap that would make YOU indiffernt.
If you have a very unusual skill that is in demand (say fighting oil well fires), then indeed you could charge a lot of money. However, the vast majority of consultants these days are really 'work for hire contractors'. They could be viewed as the forerunners of the out-sourcing trend, i.e. company contract their needs to an outside agency.
As for your example, do you think that person would be hired for their math skill or C++ skils ? *=}
Someimes the most creative solution may not be the most maintainable solution.
There may be something to what you refer to though. In the rush to fill the demands in the 80's and 90's, every college up to the technical institutes on the back of matchbooks were offering CS degress. Unfortunately, many only taught programming and not the mathematics, logics, and problem solving skills that you alluded to. Thus, the quality of CS graduaates varied greatly depending on the school.
I have heard of many graduating lawyers and know many MBAs scrambling for work right now unless they are in the top ranks of the best schools. A large % of accountants I know is trying to get OUT of the field.
So do your own research and find something you'll enjoy doing!
Although the benefits from big companies these days are not what they used to be, I think a 25-30% difference is very reasonable. Years ago, when companies were more generous, the loaded cost for a professional employee was double the stated salary (+100%). This includes: payroll taxes (~8%), unemployment insurance, benefits, and other admin. overhead.
While there is usually no legal obligation to keep full time employee any more than there is to keep consultants (unless you have a union), companies tend to look at full time employees as a lont term investment. That is because there is an acquisition cost to hiring an employee. Too much turnover is costly (unless you're Walmart and pay below poverty level wages). In contrast, consultants are hired to do specific projects only. Since consultants are likely to have down time between contracts, they reasonably mark up their fees to cover the fallow period. This also accounts for a difference between a full time wage vs a consultant fee levels.
If your're happy being a consultant - go for it. You might even find a better paying full time job, but that is likely to involve more responsibilities so it would be like a promotion. For a lateral move to full time work, you SHOULD expect a drop a direct pay, all else being equal.
They would not need line of sight to work. Put up a detector every 5 blocks on the traffic lights and you can collate everybody's movement. Think you can wrap it in foil? They could make that illegal as well, just as it's illegal to cover up your license plate.
The point is, how much of your civil liberties have to be taken away before you will act? Could it be that it'll be too late by that time?
This is not an insult, but simply a clarification. Part of the definition of a scientific conjecture is that it be falsifiable. Darwinian evolution as a theory on the evolution of life forms IS falsifiable. For instance, hard evidences of Larmarkian evolution would disprove it.
However, ID by construction, cannot be disproved. Any contrary evidence (like Gould's quip for God's inordinate fondbess for beetles) can be parried with "that's the way it was designed" or "we are just too stupid to understand God's will". Furthermore, to fully disprove ID, one would be required to prove the nonexistence of a Designer - a logical impossibility.
THAT is the fundamental reason that ID does not belong in a science class, but would be appropriate in the humanities or religion or anthropology - it is fundamentally a way to frame phenomena.
.. unles it's implementing mathematical algorithms. That is why formal proof tools against a specificaation have been fruitless. There is no way that a static specification can contain the total description for what all the users want out of a piece of software of any complexity. People's needs and understanding changes. Sometime they are even shaped by the software as it is being used. Given that, it is at the prototyping and debugging stage that much of the shape of a piece of SW solidify. So what is to be gain by using formal methods at all?
Looks like you missed the fact that the Vorlon manipulate many races to see the Vorlon as holy beings via genetic manipulation. This shows that they are far from being purely good. Their conflict is more between order/chaos than good/evil.
For that matter, what SF show moved furthest away from this old dichotomy?
was when the laser was invited at Bell Labs. That is old news.
While it is true that research University such as MIT focus more on their grad students than undergrads, there are opportunities for motivated undergrads to get involved with cutting edge research. MIT had a Undergrad Research Opportunity Program for many years. It is up to the students how much they want to take advantage of it.
You must pick the right school for your own interests and abilities. However, one would make better choices after collecting accurate facts to support the decision.
"Few countries have remained within their respective ecological capacities--let alone within the global average--and many have far exceeded them. The United States, for instance, used up 9.7 hectares worth of resources per person in 1999--45 percent more than the 5.3 hectares available to each citizen. Even without continued population growth, if the world were to consume as much meat and use as much fossil fuels as Americans do, it would need the resources of five Earths."
Vital Sign 2003 World Watch Institute
I'm not saying that nothing can be done to manage the changing global economy. But we shouldn't assume that we're entitled to a particular standard of living just because we're 'used' to it. This is especially true when that lifestyle is unsustainable.
US employees are also consumers who already HAVE benefited from cheaper goods imported from other countries: clothing, steel, electronics, food, petroleum, etc.
Where you are unable to benefits from outsourced goods/services is where the higher level of US wages make the real impact: Real Estate, transportation, personal services (education, health care, etc.) (Check out the Paul Krugman column in the NYT on how the rising costs of health care impact both companies and individuals. Always an insightful read.) The US businesses are subject to most of these same costs unless they can PHSICALLY locate their operations offshore.
Thus, it is very interesting how the current political Powers that Be is refusing to remove tax BENEFITS to company with oversea operations. For ideological reasons, they refuse to enact changes that might somewhat recover these savings when US companies relocate offshore.
Computers are not evolving to fill any ecological niche. At best, they are co-evolving with humans who alter computers toward the directions humans want to go.
While our brain are evolving slowly in comparison, the population of humans with brains are replicating exponentially. Since we are connected with language and writing, human as a species is growing its processing power exponentially. It's kinda like that race between high clock spped super computers vs massively parallel small computing processors. It's not at all clear who will have more effective computing power over time.
Of course, if all the humans are devoting their energy to American Idols, spectator sports, and talk radio, we may not get too far!
until at least 1988-89 era. Very few people (in the tens of thousands) even knew about Arpanet in 1976. Please don't make up history that you have no knowledge of.
I accept a certain amount of artistic license and reinterpretation. So most of the film did not bother me. There are a few changes that I don't approve of as it changes drastically the nature of the tale.
1. The Trojan war took almost 10 YEARS !
That explains why the Greeks were so eager to conclude it one way or another. When you watch the film, you might have thought all the events took place over 2-3 weeks.
2. Achilles was sulking because King Agamennon took his spoil of war (a not too famous woman). Achilles loved Patricles, but was not particularly chilvarous. Hollywood had to stick a romance in there.
As for Aeneas, I conside it really a pastiche. Vergil was clearly doing the same as many ancient poets: trying to elevate his patron's cultural lineage by linking it to an ancient tale. Aeneas was molded to be a virtuous version of Oddyseus and a warrior founder of the Roman lineage. But this is scarcely supported by history and other accounts. It's the poetic skills of Vergil and the obsequious nature of the tale which quaranteed its survival.
Slashdot Mirror
"And Miyazaki can put warm, fuzzy messages about friendship, family, loyalty, etc. into his movies without triteness, cloying sentimentality or song-and-dance routines"
You've hit the nail on the head for a key reason why Miyazaki's film work so well - they often manage to create an emotional response in the viewers. This is no mean feat as most live action movies cannot achive this same goal. This emotional connection delivers an experience that the audience recognizes as truth without feeling that they have been manipulated - something song and dance rarely can deliver.
Is that why we're installing judges such as Janice Brown?
"She has often said that she has been guided through the challenges of her life and work by her deep Christian faith, and she has often argued that judges should look to higher authorities than precedent or manmade laws in making decisions" (NYT 6/9)
The whole "judicial activism" rhetorics is bollock. It is only invoked when a judge rules against one's interest, never otherwise.
Where is a comparable enclave in the US?
Geek universities don't count! (Cal, MIT, etc.)
many otakus are already doing this!
It has the most in depth coverge of news and affairs of other nations bar none. The only serious competitor is The Economist which is a periodical. CSM has less bias than any other US publication unless you feel that any coverage of news outside of the US of A is inherently leftist or socialist.
Read it and decide for yourself.
"I don't know of a professional database programmer that would store an image in a database."
I quite agree. That shows exactly that not all data semantic is appropriately modeled by the RDB approach - my original point.
As for the article calling transaction an "illusion", it is exactly correct. All the components of the transaction do NOT occur at once. They are completed in sequence with provision for rolling back in case of failure to complete ALL of the components. I'm quite sure that you actually would agree with this description.
"the mention of Stonebraker's name as an authority on databases is generally an indicater of a content-free paper"
That is certainly a bold claim coming from an AC. In case you didn't know, he has been building relational DB probably while you were still in diapers. Heard of something call Ingres perhaps?
The relational model could be defined to be "complete" in one technical sense, but that by no means make it the most effective tool for your application. For example, graphical data is not efficiently stored in a RDB, whether they are pixels or display lists. Typically, they have to get stuffed into a BLOB if one insists on saving into a RDB. That mean the RDB simply have no way to manipulate the data semanics.
To put it another way, every computer is equivalent to a Turing machine - arguable the simplest representation of computation. Does that mean we should all do programming in Turing machine exclusively?
The article is not arguing for getting rid of the RDB. It's simply pointing out areas of limitations which may inspire development of other data manipulation approaches. A better fitting tool will enhance your life.
We do not disagree - long term for a company these days IS 4-5 years! No one thinks of 10-30 years time period for employment these days.
When you include time for interview and administrative overhead to add an employee, hiring a new professional can easily cost $5000-$10,000 + (recruiter fee if any) each time. That's that I mean by an investment. It would be probably half as much to hire a contractor.
In addition, you need to keep in mind that it's a buyer's market right now. The pay gap that makes a company indifferent to hiring as contractor vs as full time is MORE important than the pay gap that would make YOU indiffernt.
If you have a very unusual skill that is in demand (say fighting oil well fires), then indeed you could charge a lot of money. However, the vast majority of consultants these days are really 'work for hire contractors'. They could be viewed as the forerunners of the out-sourcing trend, i.e. company contract their needs to an outside agency.
As for your example, do you think that person would be hired for their math skill or C++ skils ? *=}
write-only programs?
Someimes the most creative solution may not be the most maintainable solution.
There may be something to what you refer to though. In the rush to fill the demands in the 80's and 90's, every college up to the technical institutes on the back of matchbooks were offering CS degress. Unfortunately, many only taught programming and not the mathematics, logics, and problem solving skills that you alluded to. Thus, the quality of CS graduaates varied greatly depending on the school.
I have heard of many graduating lawyers and know many MBAs scrambling for work right now unless they are in the top ranks of the best schools.
A large % of accountants I know is trying to get OUT of the field.
So do your own research and find something you'll enjoy doing!
Although the benefits from big companies these days are not what they used to be, I think a 25-30% difference is very reasonable. Years ago, when companies were more generous, the loaded cost for a professional employee was double the stated salary (+100%). This includes: payroll taxes (~8%), unemployment insurance, benefits, and other admin. overhead.
While there is usually no legal obligation to keep full time employee any more than there is to keep consultants (unless you have a union), companies tend to look at full time employees as a lont term investment. That is because there is an acquisition cost to hiring an employee. Too much turnover is costly (unless you're Walmart and pay below poverty level wages). In contrast, consultants are hired to do specific projects only. Since consultants are likely to have down time between contracts, they reasonably mark up their fees to cover the fallow period. This also accounts for a difference between a full time wage vs a consultant fee levels.
If your're happy being a consultant - go for it. You might even find a better paying full time job, but that is likely to involve more responsibilities so it would be like a promotion. For a lateral move to full time work, you SHOULD expect a drop a direct pay, all else being equal.
If 2 jedis can both see into the future and one tried to shoot the other, will the other be able to block it using his light saber?
......
Jedi A seeing that Jedi B will block high would shoot lower. Jedi B sees that A changed his mind and will block lower. Jedi A sees that B sees A
Check out Pickover's book "The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience" for similarly intriguing paradoxes.
They would not need line of sight to work.
Put up a detector every 5 blocks on the traffic lights and you can collate everybody's movement. Think you can wrap it in foil? They could make that illegal as well, just as it's illegal to cover up your license plate.
The point is, how much of your civil liberties have to be taken away before you will act? Could it be that it'll be too late by that time?
http://www.aila.org/contentViewer.aspx?bc=10,3080, 5940,9298
This is not an insult, but simply a clarification. Part of the definition of a scientific conjecture is that it be falsifiable. Darwinian evolution as a theory on the evolution of life forms IS falsifiable. For instance, hard evidences of Larmarkian evolution would disprove it.
However, ID by construction, cannot be disproved. Any contrary evidence (like Gould's quip for God's inordinate fondbess for beetles) can be parried with "that's the way it was designed" or "we are just too stupid to understand God's will". Furthermore, to fully disprove ID, one would be required to prove the nonexistence of a Designer - a logical impossibility.
THAT is the fundamental reason that ID does not belong in a science class, but would be appropriate in the humanities or religion or anthropology - it is fundamentally a way to frame phenomena.
.. unles it's implementing mathematical algorithms. That is why formal proof tools against a specificaation have been fruitless. There is no way that a static specification can contain the total description for what all the users want out of a piece of software of any complexity. People's needs and understanding changes. Sometime they are even shaped by the software as it is being used. Given that, it is at the prototyping and debugging stage that much of the shape of a piece of SW solidify. So what is to be gain by using formal methods at all?
Looks like you missed the fact that the Vorlon manipulate many races to see the Vorlon as holy beings via genetic manipulation. This shows that they are far from being purely good.
Their conflict is more between order/chaos than good/evil.
For that matter, what SF show moved furthest away from this old dichotomy?
Blake's 7 ! Seek it out.
was when the laser was invited at Bell Labs. That is old news.
While it is true that research University such as MIT focus more on their grad students than undergrads, there are opportunities for motivated undergrads to get involved with cutting edge research. MIT had a Undergrad Research Opportunity Program for many years. It is up to the students how much they want to take advantage of it.
You must pick the right school for your own interests and abilities. However, one would make better choices after collecting accurate facts to support the decision.
or the Marcos of Philllines, Shah of Iran ... the list is just too long to enter here...
Study a little history please.
Hey, they'll be running open source Linux. Our worries are over....
"Few countries have remained within their
respective ecological capacities--let alone
within the global average--and many have far
exceeded them. The United States, for instance,
used up 9.7 hectares worth of resources per
person in 1999--45 percent more than the 5.3
hectares available to each citizen. Even without
continued population growth, if the world
were to consume as much meat and use as
much fossil fuels as Americans do, it would
need the resources of five Earths."
Vital Sign 2003 World Watch Institute
I'm not saying that nothing can be done to manage the changing global economy. But we shouldn't assume that we're entitled to a particular standard of living just because we're 'used' to it. This is especially true when that lifestyle is unsustainable.
US employees are also consumers who already HAVE benefited from cheaper goods imported from other countries: clothing, steel, electronics, food, petroleum, etc.
Where you are unable to benefits from outsourced goods/services is where the higher level of US wages make the real impact: Real Estate, transportation, personal services (education, health care, etc.) (Check out the Paul Krugman column in the NYT on how the rising costs of health care impact both companies and individuals. Always an insightful read.) The US businesses are subject to most of these same costs unless they can PHSICALLY locate their operations offshore.
Thus, it is very interesting how the current political Powers that Be is refusing to remove tax BENEFITS to company with oversea operations. For ideological reasons, they refuse to enact changes that might somewhat recover these savings when US companies relocate offshore.
Computers are not evolving to fill any ecological niche. At best, they are co-evolving with humans who alter computers toward the directions humans want to go.
While our brain are evolving slowly in comparison, the population of humans with brains are replicating exponentially. Since we are connected with language and writing, human as a species is growing its processing power exponentially. It's kinda like that race between high clock spped super computers vs massively parallel small computing processors. It's not at all clear who will have more effective computing power over time.
Of course, if all the humans are devoting their energy to American Idols, spectator sports, and talk radio, we may not get too far!
until at least 1988-89 era. Very few people (in the tens of thousands) even knew about Arpanet in 1976. Please don't make up history that you have no knowledge of.
I accept a certain amount of artistic license and reinterpretation. So most of the film did not bother me. There are a few changes that I don't approve of as it changes drastically the nature of the tale.
1. The Trojan war took almost 10 YEARS !
That explains why the Greeks were so eager to conclude it one way or another. When you watch the film, you might have thought all the events took place over 2-3 weeks.
2. Achilles was sulking because King Agamennon took his spoil of war (a not too famous woman). Achilles loved Patricles, but was not particularly chilvarous. Hollywood had to stick a romance in there.
As for Aeneas, I conside it really a pastiche. Vergil was clearly doing the same as many ancient poets: trying to elevate his patron's cultural lineage by linking it to an ancient tale. Aeneas was molded to be a virtuous version of Oddyseus and a warrior founder of the Roman lineage. But this is scarcely supported by history and other accounts. It's the poetic skills of Vergil and the obsequious nature of the tale which quaranteed its survival.