As long as an investment banker, stock trader or lawyer makes several times what an engineer or engineering teacher gets, there is a big disincentive to study engineering.
Well, there aren't many careers that pay better than engineering (especially right out of school), and you managed to name three of them. If you had said "doctor" too, you could have had a Yahtzee!
It's downright pathetic that a budding mechanical engineer is expected to take a year or two of calc in highschool, but not expected to take a shop class
I think you overestimate the utility of high school shop classes.
I took the Electricity shop class in my junior year of high school, having enjoyed playing with the spring-loaded Radio Shack 100-in-1 kits. The entire first quarter of the school year was spent working out voltage/current/resistance equations with pencil and paper.
Second quarter, we did some equations that involved power as well. And soldered about a million alligator clips to patch cables.
It wasn't until halfway through the year that the knob on the bench power supply got to go past zero.
In short, my experience with high school shop class was that you don't gain any valuable hands-on skills unless you have three years to devote to it and your ultimate goal is to install car stereos. YMMV of course.
It may make it easier to emulate a GameBoy Color and play pirated ROMs from ten years ago on your PSP, but I don't think Sony really has much to worry about from that.
Pirating PSP games isn't going to be feasible unless you own a UMD fabrication plant, or have a large supply of 1GB Memory Sticks.
Your.sig is [presidential assassin John Wilkes] "Booth was a patriot", and I'm supposed to read your thoughts on the state of politics in the United States with a straight face???
If a progressive Congressman had introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the 1780's, and it had been voted down then, wouldn't that have meant that when the country DID decide to get rid of slavery in 1865 that they COULD NOT do so? We'd still have slavery today.
If you mean that a particular law should not be tried again during the same session of Congress, that makes more sense, but it tends to work out on its own that this doesn't happen. The leadership in Congress knows there's no point to having a second vote if it's going to be exactly the same as the first, so if a bill gets re-introduced it's going to be substantially different from the original form. That's how the system works.
The conversion from VHS to DVD was needed and gave us more quality and features.
It also only got underway about 8 years ago, after VHS had been the king of the home video market for nearly 20 years. (And before that... 8mm film?)
The market in general isn't ready for another media shift, and by the time it is, I think we may be at the point where storing multimedia on discrete physical objects might be an anachronism. Who's going to care if a disc holds 15GB or 28GB, when my media center's hard drive is 10TB and I can stream the movie over the Internet faster than I can watch it?
And I don't think you're a fool at all for doing so. I mean, look at Sony's fantastic legacy of innovative proprietary technologies... BetaMax... MiniDisc... Memory Stick... ATRAC... SACD... UMD...
"Friendster" [...] These sites each have millions of active members and are running just fine.
Then why does it take 20 seconds or more for my Friendster homepage to load? And that's how it is today, nevermind how it was 2 years ago when the site was at its peak of popularity, and running as a poorly-optimized JSP app.
(Sure, not all of it can be blamed on their choice of RDBMS... their web servers for images in particular seems to be ill-prepared for the traffic it gets. But still... that's your best example?)
I cant see how their license plan could be any more friendly
That there's some debate over what MySQL's licensing actually allows demonstrates that there is room for improvement.
unless they switch to a BSD style license.
Which is what PostgreSQL is released under. Why deal with MySQL and worry about whether you've interpreted the rules correctly, when you can choose PG instead and know you're free and clear from the outset?
Looks like the sort of generic boiler plate text that many web developers use when they want text appearing to demonstrate content but want to ensure that the text has no real content
Nope, if it were intended as generic "lorem ipsum" copy, it would almost certainly contain the actual phrase "lorem ipsum". Designers typically don't consider all Latin text to be equivalent in utility.
They also wouldn't have bothered to embed placeholder text into a picture of a tree. My theory is that the original image was 'borrowed' from a source where the hidden text had significance in its own context, but nobody at the site noticed it was there until it was already up.
Ladies and Gentleman, it's Maurice LaMarche! One of our generation's most versatile and distinguished voice acting talents! I had no idea he had a Slashdot account!
Or at least, I'm assuming it must be Maurice LaMarche. There's not many people who could be familiar enough with the voice acting business to level the kinds of criticism against CPM's talent that TuxPaper is making, and have it be worthwhile! Coming from anyone else, it would just sound like the uninformed whinings of a fanboy with an inflated sense of entitlement.
(If this is actually not LaMarche but rather Garry Chalk, I apologize for misidentifying you.)
Be has no download cap whatsoever. This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.
Depends on how likely you think it is you'll exceed Internode's download cap. An email-and-web user, for example, would probably never come close to racking up 15GB in a month. A bittorent power user, on the other hand, would easily exceed that.
Australia was derided and we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up
Is this service only available in and around the major metropolitan areas, or out in the middle of nowhere also?
One of the primary arguments I hear about the relatively slow and/or expensive rollout of broadband internet in the United States is that it's such a geographically expansive country, in particular compared to the denser populations of places like Europe or Japan. I wonder if other countries with major cities but also large sparsely-populated areas, like Australia and Canada, tend to experience the same issues.
Maybe they can sue based on "intent to violate copyright" or so, but you did not violate any copyright downloading that stuff...
Um, you DO know that BitTorrent works such that each downloader also serves as an uploader for other users, right?
If the actual content specified by the torrents is junk data and not the actual content, I'm not sure how copyright applies. Surely copyright applies to the actual content of a work, and not a mere label attached to non-content?
Accurately speeaking, "baud" does not represent "bits per second".
Colloquially, people often use "baud" as a synonym for "bps" as a result of early consumer modems having had baud rates that were equal to their bps data rates. Though this stopped being universally true somewhere around the debut of the 1200 bps modem, the term stuck anyway.
(And why, indeed, should they? Since the 1970s and 1980s, their teachers pretty much gave up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem. If self-esteem is something everybody has - that is, if it's not something earned through performance, then everybody can feel great about themselves even though they're a bunch of ignorant fuckspittles who'll be first under the water when the revolving hurricane comes.)
Yeah, sure, whatever Grandpa. Things were so much better back in YOUR day. Before ignorant fuckspittles like me and my generation came along.
Sorry, I'll get off your precious manicured lawn now.
The MBTA in Boston has instituted a search policy on the commuter rail and subway.
In my area, NJ Transit, the Port Authority, and the New York City MTA instituted similar search policies in July.
After the first week it was in effect, I haven't seen ANY passengers get subjected to searches, random or otherwise. It's as if they're hoping the existence of the policy will be enough of a deterrent, without actually enforcing it.
"If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player."
The CD drive in my Linux or Mac computer has a "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on its door. Its firmware contains full support for the Red Book specifications.
where the government forces you at gunpoint at the threat of violence.
Oh, please, tell me when and where in modern American history this has happened. Because if it has, the "Mainstream Media" in conjunction with The Government and the Rosicrucians have done a great job of covering it up.
Not to say that some distrust of government isn't healthy, but don't let it turn into paranoia, okay? "1984" wasn't a documentary!
As opposed to a for-profit corporation. They would never do something like that.
Actually, for-profit corporations have MORE leeway to censor the content they carry than a government-based organization would. Keep in mind that the First Amendment only applies to Congress's ability to make laws.
Anyone who thinks the cost of producing a product has a lot to do with what it sells for is likely clueless.
Same thing applies to anyone who DOESN'T.
Production cost doesn't set an upper limit on sale price, but it certainly does set a lower one. If you bring in less money on a product than you spend creating it, then your price is Too Low (excluding loss-leaders and other programs designed to increase revenue from OTHER streams).
Slashdot Mirror
As long as an investment banker, stock trader or lawyer makes several times what an engineer or engineering teacher gets, there is a big disincentive to study engineering.
Well, there aren't many careers that pay better than engineering (especially right out of school), and you managed to name three of them. If you had said "doctor" too, you could have had a Yahtzee!
It's downright pathetic that a budding mechanical engineer is expected to take a year or two of calc in highschool, but not expected to take a shop class
I think you overestimate the utility of high school shop classes.
I took the Electricity shop class in my junior year of high school, having enjoyed playing with the spring-loaded Radio Shack 100-in-1 kits. The entire first quarter of the school year was spent working out voltage/current/resistance equations with pencil and paper.
Second quarter, we did some equations that involved power as well. And soldered about a million alligator clips to patch cables.
It wasn't until halfway through the year that the knob on the bench power supply got to go past zero.
In short, my experience with high school shop class was that you don't gain any valuable hands-on skills unless you have three years to devote to it and your ultimate goal is to install car stereos. YMMV of course.
It may make it easier to emulate a GameBoy Color and play pirated ROMs from ten years ago on your PSP, but I don't think Sony really has much to worry about from that.
Pirating PSP games isn't going to be feasible unless you own a UMD fabrication plant, or have a large supply of 1GB Memory Sticks.
Can we have more of these content-free statements of the blindingly obvious, please?
Sure. Just visit any blog!
(a joke from a guy who doesn't 'get' the anti-blog backlash)
Your .sig is [presidential assassin John Wilkes] "Booth was a patriot", and I'm supposed to read your thoughts on the state of politics in the United States with a straight face???
Alternatively you could just enforce the Constitution: then 99% of laws would be thrown out immediately... including this one.
What a great sentiment! Simple, agreeable (who DOESN'T like the Constitution?), and ultimately meaningless.
Why is it legally allowed to try again?
Why shouldn't it be?
If a progressive Congressman had introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the 1780's, and it had been voted down then, wouldn't that have meant that when the country DID decide to get rid of slavery in 1865 that they COULD NOT do so? We'd still have slavery today.
If you mean that a particular law should not be tried again during the same session of Congress, that makes more sense, but it tends to work out on its own that this doesn't happen. The leadership in Congress knows there's no point to having a second vote if it's going to be exactly the same as the first, so if a bill gets re-introduced it's going to be substantially different from the original form. That's how the system works.
The conversion from VHS to DVD was needed and gave us more quality and features.
It also only got underway about 8 years ago, after VHS had been the king of the home video market for nearly 20 years. (And before that... 8mm film?)
The market in general isn't ready for another media shift, and by the time it is, I think we may be at the point where storing multimedia on discrete physical objects might be an anachronism. Who's going to care if a disc holds 15GB or 28GB, when my media center's hard drive is 10TB and I can stream the movie over the Internet faster than I can watch it?
Nevermind, I still put my money on Blue Ray.
And I don't think you're a fool at all for doing so. I mean, look at Sony's fantastic legacy of innovative proprietary technologies... BetaMax... MiniDisc... Memory Stick... ATRAC... SACD... UMD...
"Friendster" [...] These sites each have millions of active members and are running just fine.
Then why does it take 20 seconds or more for my Friendster homepage to load? And that's how it is today, nevermind how it was 2 years ago when the site was at its peak of popularity, and running as a poorly-optimized JSP app.
(Sure, not all of it can be blamed on their choice of RDBMS... their web servers for images in particular seems to be ill-prepared for the traffic it gets. But still... that's your best example?)
I cant see how their license plan could be any more friendly
That there's some debate over what MySQL's licensing actually allows demonstrates that there is room for improvement.
unless they switch to a BSD style license.
Which is what PostgreSQL is released under. Why deal with MySQL and worry about whether you've interpreted the rules correctly, when you can choose PG instead and know you're free and clear from the outset?
Looks like the sort of generic boiler plate text that many web developers use when they want text appearing to demonstrate content but want to ensure that the text has no real content
Nope, if it were intended as generic "lorem ipsum" copy, it would almost certainly contain the actual phrase "lorem ipsum". Designers typically don't consider all Latin text to be equivalent in utility.
They also wouldn't have bothered to embed placeholder text into a picture of a tree. My theory is that the original image was 'borrowed' from a source where the hidden text had significance in its own context, but nobody at the site noticed it was there until it was already up.
Somebody better send Jeff Goldblum an Apple mac, quickly.
I don't have an Apple Mac, I only have the other kind of Mac. Should I send it to him anyway?
Ladies and Gentleman, it's Maurice LaMarche! One of our generation's most versatile and distinguished voice acting talents! I had no idea he had a Slashdot account!
Or at least, I'm assuming it must be Maurice LaMarche. There's not many people who could be familiar enough with the voice acting business to level the kinds of criticism against CPM's talent that TuxPaper is making, and have it be worthwhile! Coming from anyone else, it would just sound like the uninformed whinings of a fanboy with an inflated sense of entitlement.
(If this is actually not LaMarche but rather Garry Chalk, I apologize for misidentifying you.)
Be has no download cap whatsoever. This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.
Depends on how likely you think it is you'll exceed Internode's download cap. An email-and-web user, for example, would probably never come close to racking up 15GB in a month. A bittorent power user, on the other hand, would easily exceed that.
Australia was derided and we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up
Is this service only available in and around the major metropolitan areas, or out in the middle of nowhere also?
One of the primary arguments I hear about the relatively slow and/or expensive rollout of broadband internet in the United States is that it's such a geographically expansive country, in particular compared to the denser populations of places like Europe or Japan. I wonder if other countries with major cities but also large sparsely-populated areas, like Australia and Canada, tend to experience the same issues.
1) Templates. A template for a large article wouldn't be usable for shorter (1-page) articles.
Whatever. A well-designed, liquid web template will be usable whether there's 1 paragraph of content or 100 paragraphs.
2) Pageviews. Equals money in pocket.
Not when the server rolls over because it's getting more page requests than it's capable of delivering, it doesn't.
Maybe they can sue based on "intent to violate copyright" or so, but you did not violate any copyright downloading that stuff...
Um, you DO know that BitTorrent works such that each downloader also serves as an uploader for other users, right?
If the actual content specified by the torrents is junk data and not the actual content, I'm not sure how copyright applies. Surely copyright applies to the actual content of a work, and not a mere label attached to non-content?
baud (bits per second)
Accurately speeaking, "baud" does not represent "bits per second".
Colloquially, people often use "baud" as a synonym for "bps" as a result of early consumer modems having had baud rates that were equal to their bps data rates. Though this stopped being universally true somewhere around the debut of the 1200 bps modem, the term stuck anyway.
The Wikipedia entry has some good basic information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud/
(And why, indeed, should they? Since the 1970s and 1980s, their teachers pretty much gave up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem. If self-esteem is something everybody has - that is, if it's not something earned through performance, then everybody can feel great about themselves even though they're a bunch of ignorant fuckspittles who'll be first under the water when the revolving hurricane comes.)
Yeah, sure, whatever Grandpa. Things were so much better back in YOUR day. Before ignorant fuckspittles like me and my generation came along.
Sorry, I'll get off your precious manicured lawn now.
The MBTA in Boston has instituted a search policy on the commuter rail and subway.
In my area, NJ Transit, the Port Authority, and the New York City MTA instituted similar search policies in July.
After the first week it was in effect, I haven't seen ANY passengers get subjected to searches, random or otherwise. It's as if they're hoping the existence of the policy will be enough of a deterrent, without actually enforcing it.
"If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player."
The CD drive in my Linux or Mac computer has a "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on its door. Its firmware contains full support for the Red Book specifications.
MY COMPUTER IS A REGULAR CD PLAYER.
where the government forces you at gunpoint at the threat of violence.
Oh, please, tell me when and where in modern American history this has happened. Because if it has, the "Mainstream Media" in conjunction with The Government and the Rosicrucians have done a great job of covering it up.
Not to say that some distrust of government isn't healthy, but don't let it turn into paranoia, okay? "1984" wasn't a documentary!
As opposed to a for-profit corporation. They would never do something like that.
Actually, for-profit corporations have MORE leeway to censor the content they carry than a government-based organization would. Keep in mind that the First Amendment only applies to Congress's ability to make laws.
Anyone who thinks the cost of producing a product has a lot to do with what it sells for is likely clueless.
Same thing applies to anyone who DOESN'T.
Production cost doesn't set an upper limit on sale price, but it certainly does set a lower one. If you bring in less money on a product than you spend creating it, then your price is Too Low (excluding loss-leaders and other programs designed to increase revenue from OTHER streams).