You can be a brilliant programmer. Try developing a large, complex C++ project using vi. Then try it with an IDE, say, Eclipse. Your productivity skyrockets with the IDE. That's because you can stop focusing on the maintenance details and focus on the code and solving problems and adding functionality with the code. Minor spelling errors jump out at you in the IDE. You make a change, you can immediately find the functions which need updating.
With learning technology, there's always going to be effort required to learn. But if you can reduce the "aerodynamic drag" somehow - the little details that can cause headaches, like being forced to lug books and the like - that will lose less processor cycles on ancillary non-academic details and allow kids to focus more on the learning.
A better educated society benefits all of us. There will always be a strata, with the slowheads at the bottom and the smartypants at the top. But the entire strata could be lifted up, and that's only going to improve society.
Learning requires effort. It requires concentration and forcing glucose through the brain. If using a gadget can make that easier (e.g. word processing), use it. But don't expect the gadget to reduce the core effort. But that is what some wish these gadgets to be - a method to effortlessly upload knowledge.
Trying to learn without effort is like trying to build muscle without working out. For the freakishly genetically endowed, like Herschel Walker or Bo Jackson, they are freakishly strong and powerful and have massive endurance without having to do much work at all. In the intellectual arena, there are kids who are able to upload vast quantities of knowledge with little effort.
I applaud people for trying to reduce the effort required to uptake knowledge. Just like I'd applaud someone who came up with a system which could increase our strength and endurance with less effort. Computers are powerful devices. But I don't see their use reducing the effort of learning, especially in the earlier grades.
I think we should continue to look for solutions to make education easier and more accessible. We should think outside of the box to look for optimizations. But, on some level, learning will always require some effort and discipline. Just like strength or endurance training.
People have differences in their intellectual abilities as surely as they have differences in their athletic abilities. Intelligence is the result of physical processes. Intelligence is not magic. Just as speed or endurance or strength are not magic.
This is an important point. One of the biggest economic phenomena in history, the US housing bubble, was not even acknowledged by prominent economists, government or private. They solemnly intoned such a thing didn't exist and all was well. Economics remains firmly a social science. A worthwhile field of study, but not subject to scientific rigor and generally not yielding testable hypotheses.
I've been using them for several months now. Tech support is great. No downtime, at least none of which I or my users are aware. The staff is very accessible.
"The Senate trying to govern cyberspace is analogous to King George believing he could still govern the colonies even though he had never been there." -- John Perry Barlow
It is amazing that people thing businesses will just behave because it is in their best interests --/however/, we need police because private individuals cannot be trusted to behave in/[their best interest]/the best interest of others.
Brooksley Borne was just one [pbs.org] of many people who predicted the financial meltdown. She was shut down by people who really believed that regulations are bad.
There are thousands of people who predicted the financial meltdown. Many of them predict financial meltdowns every year. People who can predict ups and downs seem more worth listening to... it's just that there aren't any of them. Henry Paulson was famed for "predicting" the housing downturn and making a lot of money off it. Now he lost a lot of money with his next prediction. Doesn't that failure make you think maybe his first prediction was just luck?
You know what this entire financial crisis, US and European, is caused by? Loans going bad. Loans being defaulted on.
You have to ask yourself one question - "Why would a lender make a loan that he doesn't care about having repaid?"
Answer: Because finally, since the late 70s, lenders figured out how to separate themselves from repayment risk. They got better and better at it. Nowadays, a bank has a loan on its books for 60 days, then it's sold off. So they don't give a rip whether it gets paid off or not. It's a great system for loan originators. Write a number on a piece of paper, fill out some pro forma paperwork, sell it, and get a commission that's a percentage of the number you wrote down. It's the Dutch Tulip Bulb mania on steroids. The debt markets are completely flawed.
THAT'S the root of the problem - lenders not having repayment risk. It used to be that lenders cared about being paid back. So, very, very few bad loans.
However, there are a lot of big companies who pay a lot of money to politicians who want to keep this system going. And a lot of politicians who get that money who want to keep this system going. Because bribery is de facto legal in the US government ("The US government is the best money can buy"), the current system keeps going. This system involves loan originators making loans and then the US government, either through Fannie and Freddie, or through the Federal Reserve, taking the bad loans off the lenders/originator's hand, and giving them either face value for the loan, or just flat out buying it and generating the commission.
The distinction between the sinner (who God loves) and the sin (that is unacceptable to God) is made quite clear in the New Testament.
This concept of separating sin from sinner - act from actor - is incoherent nonsense. An act does not exist without an actor. There's no noun or object that is out there that is slapping a woman or breaking a rock, and then somehow the act latches on to an actor.
This nonsense is an effort of supreme self-delusion. The act cannot exist independently of the actor. The act and the actor - the sin and the sinner - are one in the same. One cannot exist independently of the other.
Mysticism, mystical thinking and practical realities generally do not mix well.
Oh, and by the way, via Google, I couldn't find any reference to the line "hate the sin, love the sinner" as actually being anywhere in the Bible, Old or New Testament.
1. regulators are bought and paid for, besides they are not the brightest of the pack - if they were they would be farming gold on wallstreet themselves
2. regulations are always looking backwards at the last crisis, never predict origins of the next one
3. when everything is leveraged 30-50x there is nothing you can do to provide stability that is not make-believe
4. you don't need fancy regulation to crack down on good ol' fraud, you just make it harder for small players to comply
When things are going great, no one wants to change ANYTHING, no matter how outrageous, for fear of upsetting the apple cart and ending the party.
When things go bad, only then are people willing to change. Except of course, those still engaging in outrageous practices, as they are still making money.
As far as regulators being dim, sometimes that's true, sometimes not. IMHO, the far greater problem is the muzzling and influencing of regulators by the industries they are tasked to regulate via the politicians owned by those industries.
I've got to second this comment. I came out of a rigorous C++ shop and it was startling how similar PHP was to C++ in general structure. I adhere to the basic tenets of code hygiene and I've got reliable, easily maintainable code. Yes, PHP is very loosely typed but the compiler manages it just fine.
I use classes for all of my queries. If I want to adhere to the Model-View-Controller pattern, I write functions which are solely to display HTML, based on logic from my code (although I have to say sometimes that creates a kludge, so I don't always do it - but that's my option).
One can write utter crap in PHP. PHP lets you. One can write total crap in C++ too. It depends on the programmer. Good code hygiene and robust planning leads to reliable, easily maintainable code in any language, just as bad code hygiene and "let's just start coding and see what happens" leads to buggy, indecipherable code in any language.
Keynesian economics dictates deficit spending in bad times and paying down the debt in good times. Problem is, politicians never think times are good enough to pay down the debt.
I'm an individual retail investor, and I've done quite well in the market, thanks. In fact, it's lifted my middle class family well into the "one percent" (net worth).
Remember: You don't actually make any money till you cash out your stocks.
A printout of the electronic brokerage account screen and 99 cents will get you a cup of coffee.
I have to second this. I once took a photography course and it was exceptionally useful. I'm the farthest thing from a professional photographer. But the average person knows next to jack and squat about how to take pictures. And I know much more than the average person, from my experience.
I think it's probably the Casio Exilim series. I have an EX-V8, it's very small, fits on my belt. I'm quite satisified with it. I bought one a few years ago. I have an SLR but I never carried it except when I specifically went somewhere to shoot photos. And I didn't want to take an SLR to a party lest I look like a paid photographer. But everyone would recognize me so I'd just look like a dweeb.
Some notes:
1) Ignore "digital magnification" - that's software based, like zooming in on a bitmap. Get high optical magnification. That's actual lens-based magnification. My Exilim has 7x optical magnification.
2) Shutter speed plus aperture size = amount of light reaching the sensor and creates the image.
3) Low light conditions: A large image sensor plus slow shutter speed plus large aperture = good low light ability. But, expect to use a tripod for these shots. Or at least resting the camera on a fixed object.
4) Big images - scenic vistas - what's necessary for this? Don't know.
5) Megapixels - more is better, but optimal amount? Dunno. I've got 8 megapixels. Never felt constrained by it.
Some unanswered questions but I wanted to raise some points that you might want to consider.
No. Government workers have lost their job at a far higher rate than private workers for years.
Citation needed. Especially for software developer types.
Government workers compete for promotions just as private workers do.
Agreed.
Government workers also know that their job is for the benefit of their country, which is more likely to motivate them than the good of the corporation motivates private workers.
Benefit of their country? It really depends on what they're doing. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the job. Can't make a blanket statement, especially not in software development.
Meanwhile private workers are even more likely to be contractors working for both their contracting company and the client company.
I mentioned this.
You are speaking entirely from ideology. Any actual reference to reality would pop your entire bubble. The great tragedy is that the less constrained by reality, the more people like you go on and on as if you know what could work in reality.
It would have been nice if you actually addressed any point I raised. You wrote all that off topic non sequitur just to get to this line. I think it is you who needs to step back and think about who is speaking from ideology. I actually do want government to work well.
Government employees make solid money and have job security and fabulous benefits. But there's nothing to drive them, to motivate them. With private companies, there's the profit motive and management holding the threat of firing or reassignment over employees heads to make them produce.
The 64,000 dollar question is, and has been for some time - how to motivate government employees? How to reward success and punish failure without the existence of a profit motive?
I think this concept of government outsourcing to contractors makes the workers worship two gods - burn as many hours as possible and build a good product. It's extremely inefficient in most cases, IMHO. If they only had to worry about building a good product, and were motivated to do so, government could have divisions that produced excellent goods.
But does this beast exist anywhere in the US government or the world? Has it ever?
But with anything involving government, and thus politics, you have to figure out what politicians believe works for them. Until politicians are motivated to tackle this issue rather than just have theater about it, the current system will continue.
He's got nothing to lose. Bowing to the corporate masters for the past three years has gotten him a reputation as a milquetoast steward of the entrenched interests. And 9% unemployment. He's a good politician. I think he can smell the winds changing. Licking the boots of the 1% works during prosperous times. But now, it's time to stop being the representative of the highest bidder, and start being the representative of the people.
You know, perhaps the only thing to do is just start a anti-idiot revolution. We could get a pack of nerds together and start executing anyone who couldn't explain that correlation != causality [...]
Here's the limitation of statistics: It can only tell you about correlation. Statistics cannot ever tell you if one thing causes another. All you can ever get is a correlation coefficient which can only tell you how closely certain variables are correlated. That's it. Either something is perfectly not correlated (-1), correlated somewhere in between, or perfectly correlated(1), based on how that coefficient is calculated.
That's it.
From there, you must put together a case about whether something does in fact cause another. "A lit stove burner leads to energy transfer to pot leads to energy transfer to water, leads to water boiling."
Slashdot Mirror
You can be a brilliant programmer. Try developing a large, complex C++ project using vi. Then try it with an IDE, say, Eclipse. Your productivity skyrockets with the IDE. That's because you can stop focusing on the maintenance details and focus on the code and solving problems and adding functionality with the code. Minor spelling errors jump out at you in the IDE. You make a change, you can immediately find the functions which need updating.
With learning technology, there's always going to be effort required to learn. But if you can reduce the "aerodynamic drag" somehow - the little details that can cause headaches, like being forced to lug books and the like - that will lose less processor cycles on ancillary non-academic details and allow kids to focus more on the learning.
A better educated society benefits all of us. There will always be a strata, with the slowheads at the bottom and the smartypants at the top. But the entire strata could be lifted up, and that's only going to improve society.
Learning requires effort. It requires concentration and forcing glucose through the brain. If using a gadget can make that easier (e.g. word processing), use it. But don't expect the gadget to reduce the core effort. But that is what some wish these gadgets to be - a method to effortlessly upload knowledge.
Trying to learn without effort is like trying to build muscle without working out. For the freakishly genetically endowed, like Herschel Walker or Bo Jackson, they are freakishly strong and powerful and have massive endurance without having to do much work at all. In the intellectual arena, there are kids who are able to upload vast quantities of knowledge with little effort.
I applaud people for trying to reduce the effort required to uptake knowledge. Just like I'd applaud someone who came up with a system which could increase our strength and endurance with less effort. Computers are powerful devices. But I don't see their use reducing the effort of learning, especially in the earlier grades.
An Encyclopedia Britannica subscription will make it much easier for an interested child to access that knowledge, than requiring a parent to take him to the library. A math game could speed up a child's uptake of multiplication tables. Perhaps electronic games could be used to motivate children. The Economist had a fascinating special report a couple of weeks ago on the "game-ification" of the world.
I think we should continue to look for solutions to make education easier and more accessible. We should think outside of the box to look for optimizations. But, on some level, learning will always require some effort and discipline. Just like strength or endurance training.
People have differences in their intellectual abilities as surely as they have differences in their athletic abilities. Intelligence is the result of physical processes. Intelligence is not magic. Just as speed or endurance or strength are not magic.
Gatekeepers who control the information, so we only see accurate, to-the-point data. You know, like they have in North Korea.
This is an important point. One of the biggest economic phenomena in history, the US housing bubble, was not even acknowledged by prominent economists, government or private. They solemnly intoned such a thing didn't exist and all was well. Economics remains firmly a social science. A worthwhile field of study, but not subject to scientific rigor and generally not yielding testable hypotheses.
Many say the massive stimulus (deficit spending) saved the world economy. It's an unfalsifiable assertion.
The Economist magazine had a most interesting discussion on the similarities between the 1930s and today, with a discussion of the responses.
I host a few virtual servers with Panix.com.
I've been using them for several months now. Tech support is great. No downtime, at least none of which I or my users are aware. The staff is very accessible.
"The Senate trying to govern cyberspace is analogous to King George believing he could still govern the colonies even though he had never been there." -- John Perry Barlow
FTFY.
You know what this entire financial crisis, US and European, is caused by? Loans going bad. Loans being defaulted on.
You have to ask yourself one question - "Why would a lender make a loan that he doesn't care about having repaid?"
Answer: Because finally, since the late 70s, lenders figured out how to separate themselves from repayment risk. They got better and better at it. Nowadays, a bank has a loan on its books for 60 days, then it's sold off. So they don't give a rip whether it gets paid off or not. It's a great system for loan originators. Write a number on a piece of paper, fill out some pro forma paperwork, sell it, and get a commission that's a percentage of the number you wrote down. It's the Dutch Tulip Bulb mania on steroids. The debt markets are completely flawed.
THAT'S the root of the problem - lenders not having repayment risk. It used to be that lenders cared about being paid back. So, very, very few bad loans.
However, there are a lot of big companies who pay a lot of money to politicians who want to keep this system going. And a lot of politicians who get that money who want to keep this system going. Because bribery is de facto legal in the US government ("The US government is the best money can buy"), the current system keeps going. This system involves loan originators making loans and then the US government, either through Fannie and Freddie, or through the Federal Reserve, taking the bad loans off the lenders/originator's hand, and giving them either face value for the loan, or just flat out buying it and generating the commission.
The Economist magazine was talking about all of this in 2003. I remember reading a cover story on the global real estate bubble in the early mid 2000s in The Economist. So much of this was foreseen by disinterested observers. But, as I've noted previously, when things are going great, no one wants to change anything because no one wants to stop the party. Especially those who are making money off of it. And it especially doesn't change when those benefiting from it are big companies and the politicians they own.
This concept of separating sin from sinner - act from actor - is incoherent nonsense. An act does not exist without an actor. There's no noun or object that is out there that is slapping a woman or breaking a rock, and then somehow the act latches on to an actor.
This nonsense is an effort of supreme self-delusion. The act cannot exist independently of the actor. The act and the actor - the sin and the sinner - are one in the same. One cannot exist independently of the other.
Mysticism, mystical thinking and practical realities generally do not mix well.
Oh, and by the way, via Google, I couldn't find any reference to the line "hate the sin, love the sinner" as actually being anywhere in the Bible, Old or New Testament.
When things are going great, no one wants to change ANYTHING, no matter how outrageous, for fear of upsetting the apple cart and ending the party.
When things go bad, only then are people willing to change. Except of course, those still engaging in outrageous practices, as they are still making money.
As far as regulators being dim, sometimes that's true, sometimes not. IMHO, the far greater problem is the muzzling and influencing of regulators by the industries they are tasked to regulate via the politicians owned by those industries.
Bait. And Switch.
It's well known in the retail world, where you can get successfully sued for it. Remains to be seen if a judge or jury can discern it in this case.
I've got to second this comment. I came out of a rigorous C++ shop and it was startling how similar PHP was to C++ in general structure. I adhere to the basic tenets of code hygiene and I've got reliable, easily maintainable code. Yes, PHP is very loosely typed but the compiler manages it just fine.
I use classes for all of my queries. If I want to adhere to the Model-View-Controller pattern, I write functions which are solely to display HTML, based on logic from my code (although I have to say sometimes that creates a kludge, so I don't always do it - but that's my option).
One can write utter crap in PHP. PHP lets you. One can write total crap in C++ too. It depends on the programmer. Good code hygiene and robust planning leads to reliable, easily maintainable code in any language, just as bad code hygiene and "let's just start coding and see what happens" leads to buggy, indecipherable code in any language.
That's because the technology has advanced, reducing the price, not because wages are rising dramatically.
Keynesian economics dictates deficit spending in bad times and paying down the debt in good times. Problem is, politicians never think times are good enough to pay down the debt.
Remember: You don't actually make any money till you cash out your stocks.
A printout of the electronic brokerage account screen and 99 cents will get you a cup of coffee.
There once was a time when the Congress actually had to VOTE on whether or not to go to war. Now the US military is the president's private toy.
Even paranoids have enemies.
If you want to understand why the do what they do, check out who contributes to them: http://www.opensecrets.org/index.php
I have to second this. I once took a photography course and it was exceptionally useful. I'm the farthest thing from a professional photographer. But the average person knows next to jack and squat about how to take pictures. And I know much more than the average person, from my experience.
I think it's probably the Casio Exilim series. I have an EX-V8, it's very small, fits on my belt. I'm quite satisified with it. I bought one a few years ago. I have an SLR but I never carried it except when I specifically went somewhere to shoot photos. And I didn't want to take an SLR to a party lest I look like a paid photographer. But everyone would recognize me so I'd just look like a dweeb.
Some notes:
1) Ignore "digital magnification" - that's software based, like zooming in on a bitmap. Get high optical magnification. That's actual lens-based magnification. My Exilim has 7x optical magnification.
2) Shutter speed plus aperture size = amount of light reaching the sensor and creates the image.
3) Low light conditions: A large image sensor plus slow shutter speed plus large aperture = good low light ability. But, expect to use a tripod for these shots. Or at least resting the camera on a fixed object.
4) Big images - scenic vistas - what's necessary for this? Don't know.
5) Megapixels - more is better, but optimal amount? Dunno. I've got 8 megapixels. Never felt constrained by it.
Some unanswered questions but I wanted to raise some points that you might want to consider.
Citation needed. Especially for software developer types.
Agreed.
Benefit of their country? It really depends on what they're doing. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the job. Can't make a blanket statement, especially not in software development.
I mentioned this.
It would have been nice if you actually addressed any point I raised. You wrote all that off topic non sequitur just to get to this line. I think it is you who needs to step back and think about who is speaking from ideology. I actually do want government to work well.
Government employees make solid money and have job security and fabulous benefits. But there's nothing to drive them, to motivate them. With private companies, there's the profit motive and management holding the threat of firing or reassignment over employees heads to make them produce.
The 64,000 dollar question is, and has been for some time - how to motivate government employees? How to reward success and punish failure without the existence of a profit motive?
I think this concept of government outsourcing to contractors makes the workers worship two gods - burn as many hours as possible and build a good product. It's extremely inefficient in most cases, IMHO. If they only had to worry about building a good product, and were motivated to do so, government could have divisions that produced excellent goods.
But does this beast exist anywhere in the US government or the world? Has it ever?
But with anything involving government, and thus politics, you have to figure out what politicians believe works for them. Until politicians are motivated to tackle this issue rather than just have theater about it, the current system will continue.
He's got nothing to lose. Bowing to the corporate masters for the past three years has gotten him a reputation as a milquetoast steward of the entrenched interests. And 9% unemployment. He's a good politician. I think he can smell the winds changing. Licking the boots of the 1% works during prosperous times. But now, it's time to stop being the representative of the highest bidder, and start being the representative of the people.
Here's the limitation of statistics: It can only tell you about correlation. Statistics cannot ever tell you if one thing causes another. All you can ever get is a correlation coefficient which can only tell you how closely certain variables are correlated. That's it. Either something is perfectly not correlated (-1), correlated somewhere in between, or perfectly correlated(1), based on how that coefficient is calculated.
That's it.
From there, you must put together a case about whether something does in fact cause another. "A lit stove burner leads to energy transfer to pot leads to energy transfer to water, leads to water boiling."