Which doesn't really invalidate the point. You don't need machines with two arms and blinking reddish lights to cook noodles, arguably one of the simplest (prepared) dishes ever invented. All you'd need in order to sell it is a bowl of water, a source of heat and some way to accept payment. In this case a microwave oven with a coin slot would do just fine.
Asked and answered above. Even if the data was incomplete, the crowdsourcing effort still fingered the wrong people. If it had been a success the effort would have come up with a null answer.
Yeah, I wouldn't put too much faith into that organisation, seems to be much more of a hoax than an actual genuine attempt at a mission. a link that's not down
The Mars One project has received quite a bit of press lately. This project plans to establish a human colony on Mars in 2023 with four people. The project is the brainchild of Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch businessman. You must give him credit for creativeness. Much of the financing will come from a 24-hour television reality show that will follow every step of the project, including watching the new “Martians” as they adapt to the harsh Mars environment.
They conclude that because the colonists will be on Mars, they will have more density. This is outright wrong, density is defined as p=m/V, on Mars neither your volume nor your mass is going to change, your weight (W=m*g) will but that is not the term "m" in the equation. I can understand why they wouldn't care, since they don't plan on bringing their colonists back. However, that does not solve the problem OP pointed out. Nor does it address the fact that we don't fully know what is causing the bone loss in the first place. Lack of gravity is thought to be the main culprit, but it is not known for certain.
According to NASA it has yet to be determined what causes the bone degradation. The damage is also not "irreparable", though bone mass is not fully recovered. From the link:
The exact mechanism that causes the loss of calcium in microgravity is unknown. Many scientists believe that microgravity somehow causes bone to break down at a much faster rate than it is built up. However, the exact trigger for this rate change has not been found. Researchers are currently pursuing multiple lines of research, including hormone level, diet, and exercise, in order to determine exactly what causes -- and may control or prevent -- osteoporosis during space flight.
On Earth we see the same thing happen from time to time (my mother used to have it). Bones suddenly become weak to the point of breaking at the faintest impact. Doctor's orders were to drink lots of milk and other high-calcium foodstuffs, and it apparently went away to a degree that she was declared "cured". If (the lack of) gravity was the sole cause, we would not see this on Earth.
Strawman. Obama is not the supreme authority that attaches meaning to words or acronyms. Two extra moron points for being both offtopic and racist, and a bonus point for an opening sentence that immediately loses the audience' attention. Good job.
Not quite. If the cost to request the information is less than the cost to provide it, then ad agency1 could conceivably bankrupt ad agency2 by submitting lots of bogus info requests. The avalanche would then continue until there was only one company remaining, which would then a monopoly on the entire info collecting business. Having the law allow a modest processing fee takes care of this problem (dunno if the bill has this provision), as well as takes away the expense argument.
True but that stems from the problem of not distinguishing between "a person" and "a business", not this bill directly. There is no cost to provide the information if it is an automated solution, maintenance yes but keeping the data on hand also incurs a cost, so neglible I would imagine. They might be able to make your server take a dive for a bit, but that is called a DDoS and is in itself illegal in most places.
The fear of lawsuits part I'm guessing is because some of the info is inaccurate. This isn't an exact science. A lot of info is inferred, with some ads being switched on at rather low thresholds of certainty. If you browse a lot of sites about prenatal care, they may guess that you're expecting and start showing you ads for baby stuff. If you happen to be a teenage girl (who is not pregnant) and your parents guess this means you're pregnant and trying to hide it from them, that may be rather inconvenient for you. It's going to be interesting watching how this part unfolds because to a limited extent it's something everyone does to everything they encounter in real life - infer qualities based on other hints or clues. But take it too far with a specific individual and it is considered creepy and stalker-ish.
Inaccurate data is of no concern, if you created it from an in-exact science like data mining, anonymize it so that you, the business can't tell who is who, and a user cannot demand access to it. Keeping track of which user is behind which IP, without them having an account with you falls into the "I don't care if you have extra costs from this Bill, and if you go bancrypt, good riddance" category.
In any case, if you have a need to keep user identifiable information on hand, then the user should have a right to see it too, and if a pregnant teenage girl is your best bid as to a victim of this bill, well then that's better than most. Also, where were her parents?
Indeed. If they're afraid of costly lawsuits then they have no business in the tech industry. Nor any other industry.
A lot of companies have discovered this, and therefore moved their business operations elsewhere. Hence this whole deal about outsourcing - too many people here are big whiners who make the legal costs associated w/ doing anything skyrocket, w/ the result that the cost of doing business in the US is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of doing it elsewhere. So they simply move operational costs offshore, fire Americans - whiners and non-whiners alike - and then everyone is left whining that outsourcing is looting US jobs.
That is a false assumption. It might partially apply to the US but the US is not the only western country to have experienced a boom in outsourceing, and that is regardless of fuckedup-ness of legal system. Outsourcing is a financial decision for the most part, and a decision about putting your fingers in your ears and hoping for the best, in the short term. The bill is a problem for the kind of business who does not wan't people to know what kind of data the business keeps on them, or does not yet have an automated solution to those requests. The former: Good riddance, hopefully the latter will wisen up and implement it. In either case, you and I are better off with the bill than without.
Who the hell is adding random people as friends they've never heard of before, then can't tell spam from actual communication?
Remember Mafia Wars? Or Farmville? Where the number of friends you had was directly linked to how "powerful" you were in the game? It would be those people.
Indeed. If they're afraid of costly lawsuits then they have no business in the tech industry. Nor any other industry.
The avalanche will be a problem at the start. Once business practices become transparent enough, people will have no need to request the information that is already available (automatically). Or they could of course bicker and whine like little kids, finally get the bill nixed and go on their merry way screwing costumers/users over in a business as usual model.
I doubt that that is the case in this situation. However that sort of "book keeping" happens all the time, and you have to wonder if these people just really are that dumb. Or maybe it's that funneling money out of a corporation simply is that easy and 10+ years in jail is worth it for some jokers (who apparently think they're immortal and have 10+ years to spend being pounded in the ass).
Of course, being pounded in the ass might also be a step up for some of them. And not every white collar criminal is sent to Sing Sing. Some get to spend it at home with a fashionable bracelet on their ankle, courtesy of the latest douche bag elected representative they bribed. In some cases the creative accountant and the elected representative is one and the same, for even more majestic levels of "what the fuck?".
Football, as in the american version of it, owns? A bunch of armored gimps charging each other, then pause for 10 minutes for bickering or looking at video? I don't get how so little action can be stretched out to take that much time. Granted that's true about soccer too, which tends to be boring unless it's a national team match or international league match. Oh, and real men don't wear armor Rugby
To bad it's AC or I would have spent a mod point on it. There is nothing more scary to a non techie than the boot/kernel puking garbage on the screen. And there is no end to the [what's-it-telling-me-now? | should-I-worry? | what-is-it-counting-up/down-for?] support [calls | yells | screams | cries | sobbing]. Pretty is step 2 of making it onto the everyday consumer's PC. Step 1 would be "just works".
Flying cars are a dead end science as long as these gimps insist on mechanical-only propulsion. If, and that's a big if, they ever get this piece of crap to do more than just hover with a doll on top, they'll still have to solve a bunch of other problems. Like designing a rotor that won't indiscriminately cut pedestrians in a billion pieces and then crash to the ground face-first. And a whole host of other malfunctions that will also make this hovering bathtub crash face-first.
Cancelling gravity with the help of a rotor has been around for almost a hundred years (wiki says 1936), scratching that and doing it all over with a car as a base is just trolling for funding.
A much better approach would be to think of a way of cancelling gravity without whirling blades or rotatable flame throwers, and would probably be much easier to swallow when the relevant agencies has to approve it for common use.
I mean, the legendary flying car is still supposed to fix the rush hour traffic problem yeah?
Click the green bar on top and the whole thread is collapsed. Stop taking life so seriously, this is/. and trolls are for poking fun at.
See this guy? This is the fourth version of this hosts bullshit spam, that I have seen. They're clearly being generated from input here and from local content on whatever server he has hacked/commisioned for this shit. What kind of a moron does it take to sit down and actually do that kind of work in order to spam an open forum with bullshit? Doesn't that kind of put your own miserable life into perspective? At least you havn't lost it to that degree yet.
So like Anonymous, but with cowards instead of script kiddies? And we could meet in super secret IRC chatrooms and, you know, hang out and talk smack about all the drones and fanbois. Oh, and we could all post at the same time, wouldn't it be super awesome if there were 31 frits prost!'s? Oh the glory.
Much appreciated. Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. I have a preference due to experience and training, and so do you. Discounting one technology because it takes a few more lines to clearly define intent for all instances, as opposed to defining it for one instance with one line, is being a religious zealot, a troll, a retard or possibly a combination of them all.
There's a reason that business schools all talk about producing widgets - because the product doesn't matter.
Coincidentally, this is also the reason business school graduates are widely regarded as incompetent, destined to drive any business they attach themselves to into the ground.
Well, how about applying some scientific method to this thesis.
Your thesis: Business graduates are worthless and any business run by a business graduate will be run into the ground. Experimental evidence: none provided.
My thesis: 75% of all AC postings are bullshit made by shills unable to register for an account due to severe retardation Experimental evidence: Parent posting.
Running a business is a skill entirely different from engineering.
Indeed. But do you extend that to the point where the majority of the board members of the world's largest computer software company cannot actually read, write or understand software?
Yes precisely right.
There is ONE and only one skill that qualifies you to manage any kind of business, and that is business management. It really doesn't matter what other skills a board member has, they're not really relevant, since board members aren't supposed to do any coding. If you have that kind of scope creep in your organisartion, you're either very small or doing it wrong (TM).
It won't hurt to have skills in the field you're trying to run a business in, that I'll give you, but more often than not, the two skill sets are mutually exclusive. You aren't going to find very many engineers that are capable of running a business like Microsoft. Nor will you find many Microsoft executives that can comprehend the complexeties of the code monstrosity they have created. Granted you won't find many engineers that can comprehend it either, but they sure like to talk like they could.
What you would do in your imaginary situation is spectacularly irrelevant, and i suspect you know this; you don't strike me as any kind of idiot after all.
Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. Your code does not contain fewer bugs because you put it all in one line. Your code contains bugs because it was, for the most part, produced by humans. And even the best developers will have an error rate > 0. Shorter lines does not magically boost reader comprehension. The quality and clarity of the code produced will however help you, no matter how many lines you're maintaining.
You can scream and moan all you want, the OP is still comparing apples and oranges, and so are you. I don't lament the forgotten-ness of XBL, good riddance. But that little tid-bit of XBL code in the OP is actually very very clear with regards to it's intent; maybe it's just me being way too familiar with XML style syntax.
If every byte counts, don't pick a framework that serves plain XML as responses, that's just retarded. Choosing the right tool for the job, is, well, part of the job.
And yes I got fed the same statistics about code size leading to more bugs in school too, and I thought it was self-evident back then too. More lines -> possibly more features -> more bugs. It is a very simple, but apparently so hard to grasp that studies had to be performed. If you minimize your code base, you're going to have to cut out features, which in turn leads to comparing oranges and apples again because you no longer have the same product. Or are you saying that jQuery-minified.js is less buggy than jQuery.js?
Engineers don't always make for good managers, as many software professionals will be able to drone on and on about at length. You don't need engineers with management experience on the board. What you do need is executives who know how to shut the fuck up and listen when their betters are talking. Taking input from a professional and putting it to good use is what is needed, you don't need 20+ years of coding monkey experience under your belt to achieve this. It is false in the extreme to assume that because you're good at some aspect of a profession, that you somehow magically have the skills needed to run a successful business. Running a business is a skill entirely different from engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Which doesn't really invalidate the point. You don't need machines with two arms and blinking reddish lights to cook noodles, arguably one of the simplest (prepared) dishes ever invented. All you'd need in order to sell it is a bowl of water, a source of heat and some way to accept payment. In this case a microwave oven with a coin slot would do just fine.
Asked and answered above.
Even if the data was incomplete, the crowdsourcing effort still fingered the wrong people. If it had been a success the effort would have come up with a null answer.
You forgot
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Yeah, I wouldn't put too much faith into that organisation, seems to be much more of a hoax than an actual genuine attempt at a mission. a link that's not down
The Mars One project has received quite a bit of press lately. This project plans to establish a human colony on Mars in 2023 with four people. The project is the brainchild of Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch businessman. You must give him credit for creativeness. Much of the financing will come from a 24-hour television reality show that will follow every step of the project, including watching the new “Martians” as they adapt to the harsh Mars environment.
They conclude that because the colonists will be on Mars, they will have more density. This is outright wrong, density is defined as p=m/V, on Mars neither your volume nor your mass is going to change, your weight (W=m*g) will but that is not the term "m" in the equation.
I can understand why they wouldn't care, since they don't plan on bringing their colonists back. However, that does not solve the problem OP pointed out. Nor does it address the fact that we don't fully know what is causing the bone loss in the first place. Lack of gravity is thought to be the main culprit, but it is not known for certain.
According to NASA it has yet to be determined what causes the bone degradation. The damage is also not "irreparable", though bone mass is not fully recovered. From the link:
The exact mechanism that causes the loss of calcium in microgravity is unknown. Many scientists believe that microgravity somehow causes bone to break down at a much faster rate than it is built up. However, the exact trigger for this rate change has not been found. Researchers are currently pursuing multiple lines of research, including hormone level, diet, and exercise, in order to determine exactly what causes -- and may control or prevent -- osteoporosis during space flight.
On Earth we see the same thing happen from time to time (my mother used to have it). Bones suddenly become weak to the point of breaking at the faintest impact. Doctor's orders were to drink lots of milk and other high-calcium foodstuffs, and it apparently went away to a degree that she was declared "cured". If (the lack of) gravity was the sole cause, we would not see this on Earth.
Strawman. Obama is not the supreme authority that attaches meaning to words or acronyms. Two extra moron points for being both offtopic and racist, and a bonus point for an opening sentence that immediately loses the audience' attention. Good job.
Not quite. If the cost to request the information is less than the cost to provide it, then ad agency1 could conceivably bankrupt ad agency2 by submitting lots of bogus info requests. The avalanche would then continue until there was only one company remaining, which would then a monopoly on the entire info collecting business. Having the law allow a modest processing fee takes care of this problem (dunno if the bill has this provision), as well as takes away the expense argument.
True but that stems from the problem of not distinguishing between "a person" and "a business", not this bill directly. There is no cost to provide the information if it is an automated solution, maintenance yes but keeping the data on hand also incurs a cost, so neglible I would imagine. They might be able to make your server take a dive for a bit, but that is called a DDoS and is in itself illegal in most places.
The fear of lawsuits part I'm guessing is because some of the info is inaccurate. This isn't an exact science. A lot of info is inferred, with some ads being switched on at rather low thresholds of certainty. If you browse a lot of sites about prenatal care, they may guess that you're expecting and start showing you ads for baby stuff. If you happen to be a teenage girl (who is not pregnant) and your parents guess this means you're pregnant and trying to hide it from them, that may be rather inconvenient for you. It's going to be interesting watching how this part unfolds because to a limited extent it's something everyone does to everything they encounter in real life - infer qualities based on other hints or clues. But take it too far with a specific individual and it is considered creepy and stalker-ish.
Inaccurate data is of no concern, if you created it from an in-exact science like data mining, anonymize it so that you, the business can't tell who is who, and a user cannot demand access to it. Keeping track of which user is behind which IP, without them having an account with you falls into the "I don't care if you have extra costs from this Bill, and if you go bancrypt, good riddance" category.
In any case, if you have a need to keep user identifiable information on hand, then the user should have a right to see it too, and if a pregnant teenage girl is your best bid as to a victim of this bill, well then that's better than most. Also, where were her parents?
Indeed. If they're afraid of costly lawsuits then they have no business in the tech industry. Nor any other industry.
A lot of companies have discovered this, and therefore moved their business operations elsewhere. Hence this whole deal about outsourcing - too many people here are big whiners who make the legal costs associated w/ doing anything skyrocket, w/ the result that the cost of doing business in the US is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of doing it elsewhere. So they simply move operational costs offshore, fire Americans - whiners and non-whiners alike - and then everyone is left whining that outsourcing is looting US jobs.
That is a false assumption. It might partially apply to the US but the US is not the only western country to have experienced a boom in outsourceing, and that is regardless of fuckedup-ness of legal system. Outsourcing is a financial decision for the most part, and a decision about putting your fingers in your ears and hoping for the best, in the short term.
The bill is a problem for the kind of business who does not wan't people to know what kind of data the business keeps on them, or does not yet have an automated solution to those requests. The former: Good riddance, hopefully the latter will wisen up and implement it. In either case, you and I are better off with the bill than without.
Who the hell is adding random people as friends they've never heard of before, then can't tell spam from actual communication?
Remember Mafia Wars? Or Farmville? Where the number of friends you had was directly linked to how "powerful" you were in the game? It would be those people.
Indeed. If they're afraid of costly lawsuits then they have no business in the tech industry. Nor any other industry.
The avalanche will be a problem at the start. Once business practices become transparent enough, people will have no need to request the information that is already available (automatically).
Or they could of course bicker and whine like little kids, finally get the bill nixed and go on their merry way screwing costumers/users over in a business as usual model.
I doubt that that is the case in this situation. However that sort of "book keeping" happens all the time, and you have to wonder if these people just really are that dumb. Or maybe it's that funneling money out of a corporation simply is that easy and 10+ years in jail is worth it for some jokers (who apparently think they're immortal and have 10+ years to spend being pounded in the ass).
Of course, being pounded in the ass might also be a step up for some of them. And not every white collar criminal is sent to Sing Sing. Some get to spend it at home with a fashionable bracelet on their ankle, courtesy of the latest douche bag elected representative they bribed. In some cases the creative accountant and the elected representative is one and the same, for even more majestic levels of "what the fuck?".
Football, as in the american version of it, owns? A bunch of armored gimps charging each other, then pause for 10 minutes for bickering or looking at video?
I don't get how so little action can be stretched out to take that much time. Granted that's true about soccer too, which tends to be boring unless it's a national team match or international league match.
Oh, and real men don't wear armor Rugby
This
To bad it's AC or I would have spent a mod point on it. There is nothing more scary to a non techie than the boot/kernel puking garbage on the screen. And there is no end to the [what's-it-telling-me-now? | should-I-worry? | what-is-it-counting-up/down-for?] support [calls | yells | screams | cries | sobbing].
Pretty is step 2 of making it onto the everyday consumer's PC. Step 1 would be "just works".
Flying cars are a dead end science as long as these gimps insist on mechanical-only propulsion. If, and that's a big if, they ever get this piece of crap to do more than just hover with a doll on top, they'll still have to solve a bunch of other problems.
Like designing a rotor that won't indiscriminately cut pedestrians in a billion pieces and then crash to the ground face-first. And a whole host of other malfunctions that will also make this hovering bathtub crash face-first.
Cancelling gravity with the help of a rotor has been around for almost a hundred years (wiki says 1936), scratching that and doing it all over with a car as a base is just trolling for funding.
A much better approach would be to think of a way of cancelling gravity without whirling blades or rotatable flame throwers, and would probably be much easier to swallow when the relevant agencies has to approve it for common use.
I mean, the legendary flying car is still supposed to fix the rush hour traffic problem yeah?
by Cenan (1892902) on 16:53 16 April 2013 (#43461767)
by sfcat (872532) on 7:16 21 April 2013 (#43507833)
Seriously? Not funny, not insightful, not on topic of the off-topic thread, not even on time? I'm sure you'rea brilliant stock trader...
Let's hope so, we wouldn't want this particular fucktard procreating.
Posted by timothy on 23:53 20 April 2013
by Anonymous Coward on 23:56 20 April 2013
I guess with that kind of haste, he blows his wad too soon for that happening anyways.
Click the green bar on top and the whole thread is collapsed. /. and trolls are for poking fun at.
Stop taking life so seriously, this is
See this guy? This is the fourth version of this hosts bullshit spam, that I have seen. They're clearly being generated from input here and from local content on whatever server he has hacked/commisioned for this shit. What kind of a moron does it take to sit down and actually do that kind of work in order to spam an open forum with bullshit? Doesn't that kind of put your own miserable life into perspective? At least you havn't lost it to that degree yet.
That all assumes that knowledge can only ever flow downwards in the org chart.
Me too. And Weston sounds like a gun that didn't quite kill enough people to achieve legendary status.
So like Anonymous, but with cowards instead of script kiddies? And we could meet in super secret IRC chatrooms and, you know, hang out and talk smack about all the drones and fanbois. Oh, and we could all post at the same time, wouldn't it be super awesome if there were 31 frits prost!'s? Oh the glory.
Much appreciated.
Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. I have a preference due to experience and training, and so do you. Discounting one technology because it takes a few more lines to clearly define intent for all instances, as opposed to defining it for one instance with one line, is being a religious zealot, a troll, a retard or possibly a combination of them all.
There's a reason that business schools all talk about producing widgets - because the product doesn't matter.
Coincidentally, this is also the reason business school graduates are widely regarded as incompetent, destined to drive any business they attach themselves to into the ground.
Well, how about applying some scientific method to this thesis.
Your thesis: Business graduates are worthless and any business run by a business graduate will be run into the ground.
Experimental evidence: none provided.
My thesis: 75% of all AC postings are bullshit made by shills unable to register for an account due to severe retardation
Experimental evidence: Parent posting.
Go go gadget peer review:
Indeed. But do you extend that to the point where the majority of the board members of the world's largest computer software company cannot actually read, write or understand software?
Yes precisely right.
There is ONE and only one skill that qualifies you to manage any kind of business, and that is business management. It really doesn't matter what other skills a board member has, they're not really relevant, since board members aren't supposed to do any coding. If you have that kind of scope creep in your organisartion, you're either very small or doing it wrong (TM).
It won't hurt to have skills in the field you're trying to run a business in, that I'll give you, but more often than not, the two skill sets are mutually exclusive. You aren't going to find very many engineers that are capable of running a business like Microsoft. Nor will you find many Microsoft executives that can comprehend the complexeties of the code monstrosity they have created. Granted you won't find many engineers that can comprehend it either, but they sure like to talk like they could.
What you would do in your imaginary situation is spectacularly irrelevant, and i suspect you know this; you don't strike me as any kind of idiot after all.
Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder.
Your code does not contain fewer bugs because you put it all in one line. Your code contains bugs because it was, for the most part, produced by humans. And even the best developers will have an error rate > 0. Shorter lines does not magically boost reader comprehension. The quality and clarity of the code produced will however help you, no matter how many lines you're maintaining.
You can scream and moan all you want, the OP is still comparing apples and oranges, and so are you. I don't lament the forgotten-ness of XBL, good riddance. But that little tid-bit of XBL code in the OP is actually very very clear with regards to it's intent; maybe it's just me being way too familiar with XML style syntax.
If every byte counts, don't pick a framework that serves plain XML as responses, that's just retarded. Choosing the right tool for the job, is, well, part of the job.
And yes I got fed the same statistics about code size leading to more bugs in school too, and I thought it was self-evident back then too. More lines -> possibly more features -> more bugs. It is a very simple, but apparently so hard to grasp that studies had to be performed.
If you minimize your code base, you're going to have to cut out features, which in turn leads to comparing oranges and apples again because you no longer have the same product. Or are you saying that jQuery-minified.js is less buggy than jQuery.js?
Engineers don't always make for good managers, as many software professionals will be able to drone on and on about at length.
You don't need engineers with management experience on the board. What you do need is executives who know how to shut the fuck up and listen when their betters are talking. Taking input from a professional and putting it to good use is what is needed, you don't need 20+ years of coding monkey experience under your belt to achieve this.
It is false in the extreme to assume that because you're good at some aspect of a profession, that you somehow magically have the skills needed to run a successful business. Running a business is a skill entirely different from engineering.