TV networks pad the coverage out with cheap human interest crap
Then make the human interest crap part of the games.
Seriously. Make it an event. Stand all of these athletes up, have them tell their sappiest, most heartwrenching story, and give the best one a gold fucking medal. They are all trying to outdo each other anyway, so let's make this competition legit.
The medal-count weenies will love it too. The conspiracy-theorists get another judged sport to bitch about. The wannabes can sit at home telling everyone how they could do it better.
The best thing he could do right now is to put Java on hold and learn to solve the same problems in a different language. Something with sufficient study material yet with a very different history than Java would be best, like Lisp or Perl.
I don't think there is such a thing as a good monolingual programmer. The ability to compare different approaches is just too valuable, and the best time to pick up that skill is before you start seeing every problem as a nail. If the OP would rather go into project management, becoming multilingual would be less critical, but still valuable.
Sorry, I never saw (or needed) any of your charity, being in the EU
One of the most defining national characteristics of the USA is our ability, for better or worse, to very quickly forget our own past...to move on without a collective guilt or remorse for past mistakes.
The fact that you, as a EU resident, can so quickly forget the massive amounts of charity funneled into Europe through the Marshall Plan only 60 years ago means that in your haste to disdain McDonalds and KFC, you've rejected one of the most fundamental European commonalities to embrace a core American value.
Tell me, please: what is almost impossible about running a distributed mail server cluster for a few tens of thousands of users and 100% cluster uptime? This has been a common achievement implemented using VAXclusters in academia since the '80s, so I'm curious as to what's gone wrong with engineering ability since then.
The GP didn't say "uptime", he said "reliable". Those two words are not the same.
If the users aren't checking their email because the interface blows, then it's not a reliable way to get a message from A to B, no matter how many nines are in the uptime. Schools and universities have a choice right now: either offer something reasonably close to the state-of-the-art interface, or watch professors collect their students' gmail addresses at the start of the semester and having a TA create a mailing list. A five-nines mail server is great...if people use it.
"Reliable" is a people-problem. "Uptime" is a technical solution. The latter is only a small piece in the puzzle of the former.
The difficulty arises if images are shown to provoke and promote illegal behaviour.
Where's the difficulty? If the KKK wants to publish racist drivel, if NWA wants to write songs about killing cops, if the Mormons want to peddle homophobia, I'm going to stand back and be proud that I live in a country where they can.
As long as (1) nobody forces me to listen to them and (2) nobody forces them to shut up, I don't see a problem. For the people who actually engage in illegal behavior, we have system in place to handle them.
Some communities think using technology past the 1600s is "obscene", why the 1600s? Fuck if I know...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555936 "The Active Directory stores date/time values as the number of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since the 0 hour on January 1, 1601 till the date/time that is being stored."
He should go to jail. He used the special access his job gave him to steal from Nintendo. Yes, I used the s-word. Redistributing unpublished content is theft...he stole something valuable and monetizable from Nintendo (the right of first publication), and they don't have it anymore.
What he did was deliberate and premeditated. He abused a position of trust. There is no "Haha, just kidding" defense or excuse for this crap. This kind of shit severely weakens the man-years of effort expended towards fixing broken copyright laws.
Cows haven't managed to evolve into anything other than steak.
There are approximately 1.5 billion cows in the world, which is orders of magnitude more than anything else in their weight class. In terms of biomass, they are one of the most successful land animals ever to exist on earth. Cow DNA will be replicating for a very long time.
The primary reason for the success of cows is the fact that the recipe for steak is encoded in their DNA. They also spend most of their usable energy towards making more steak.
Evolutionary success does not mean being on top of the food chain. High-level predators are usually, as a species, much more vulnerable to extinction.
You know what I do like to play though? Monopoly. But then again, I don't "sit around" playing board games, they're more of a last resort kind of thing.
Did it occur to you that the OP might not able to find a job in this dismal economy?
That only works for people who are actively looking for jobs. When someone is spending thousands of hours watching movies, it's not the economy's fault they haven't found a job.
I find the idea that I have somehow stolen £50 000 from someone preposterous, since I didn't take anything from them. I find the argument that I should have paid preposterous, since I don't have any money to pay them with. And I find the idea that I should do without if I can't pay preposterous, since I'm not a socially-right-wing nutjob.
Here's a radical idea: commit a fraction of the time you spend watching movies towards holding a job that could pay for your entertainment habits. You claim "I live in North London, so after rent and bills we have pretty much nothing." Bullshit. Your financial status is not North London's doing; it's yours. You chose to spend thousands of hours watching movies. You chose to spend thousands of hours not working. You chose to be in a position where you've "never have had £30 000".
Do you find it preposterous to take responsibility for your own choices?
That's right son, just obey the orders. And get that vagonload of Jews to the gas chambers.
And what of the wagonmakers? Must they stop making wagons because of how some of their wagons are used? What about the wheelwrights and axlemakers?
At some point along that line, it no longer becomes immoral to remain in business, even if you are aware that some of your products are being used in an utterly despicable manner.
This is just another step in the hollowing out of the state. Private firms already fight our wars.
And before you know it, we'll have private companies paving our roads, building our courthouses, driving our ambulances, uniforming our police, everything!
And they will be competing with each other to do this! It will be chaos!
No they aren't. Patent law has always been ugly. This is nothing new; nothing has changed. Read some history first.
I can think of no better example of how patents prevent progress
And your off-the-cuff better alternative is....?
Lawyers never invented anything but arguments and flights of fancy
A capable, predictable legal system is the foundation of any economy. With stare decisis, every time the lawyers hash out another case, it doesn't just affect the litigants, it affects how all future companies operate. More knowledge about where the line of legality lies means companies can operate closer to it, minimizing uncertainty and risk while maximizing economic efficiency.
It's certainly fun to bash lawyers, but what they do is actually important.
Do you drop your trash on the ground wherever you please? Why not? You are far more important than the janitors, both by title and salary.
Why not let the janitors follow you around and clean up after you as you constantly change their job requirements? YOUR job produces the revenue for THEIR salary, right? They should accommodate your wishes at all times.
Oh, wait, if you did that, you'd just be an asshole. The amount of extra babysitting you'd require from the cleaning staff means other coworkers aren't getting the support they need.
Your petty "IT are just janitor schmucks" attitude is self-centered, narrow-minded, and utterly detrimental to the company as a whole. All you amount to is being the jackass that never flushes toilet 'cause he's too important.
No pure ideology works on the scale of a modern country (pop > ~1,000,000)
Pure democracy doesn't work for anything larger than Ancient Athens. Democracy still has pretty good ideas that are worth implementing in a system to govern a large populace. Communism is the same thing.
Just because the US was in a 40-year penis-waving battle with a country that claimed to be communist doesn't mean anything. Open Source certainly borrows much of its core ideology from communism. Linux, Firefox, Apache, etc all seem to be working quite well for me.
You see the same thing with Socialism. "La-la-la, health care, Obama, socialism, I can't hear you!". We've had socialist fire protection service in the US for 200 years. Everybody pays, everybody is covered, and that works much better than the alternative systems of the past.
Steam works quite well as a package manager and repository. Sure, it caters specific class of packages, but so does Gentoo's repository.
Will they both expand? Eventually.
Don't be blind to the existence of competent package managers under Windows simply because they don't smell like Portage or have/etc/portage/package.* files for you to dick around with.
When I was in high school, I'd read something like this and the first thing that would pop into my head would be: "cool!" Now the first thing that comes up is: "what a bunch of assholes." Has hacking* finally lost its mystique?
No, you just grew up. Welcome to having adult sensibilities.
Other than the fact that it passingly mentions Greenpeace at all, what do you find wrong with the summary?
The fact that tritium is one of the worlds most expensive manufactured materials and sells for somewhere on the order of $50,000 / gram
The fact that tritium is relatively harmless; it is used for glow-in-the-dark effects on watch dials, exit signs, etc, cost permitting.
Are we to believe that a for-profit company that is already in the business of selling tritium runs a reactor that "sprung" a tritium "leak", and they have no incentive to do anything about it?
Anyone who knows that intertia exists and has internalized this fact enough to, say, drive a car, understands inertia.
If you have 2 masses, they exhibit an attractive force upon each other. We call this phenomenon "gravity", and we are experienced in predicting it and comfortable with our models of it.
If you have a mass and try to accelerate it, it exerts a reaction force upon you. We call this phenomenon "inertia", and we are also experienced in predicting it and comfortable with our models of it.
What nobody has satisfactorily explained is this: why are these two related? Why can't you increase inertia without increasing gravitation? What is the connection between the two? Why do gravitational mass and inertial mass always measure to be the exact same value?
Granted, the anthropic principle is at work here. As the Earth orbits the Sun, it experiences two primary forces: one is a gravitational force directed towards the Sun, the other is an inertial force directed away from the Sun. It's good that these are identical, even if the Earth gains or loses mass. If they weren't always identical, we wouldn't be here to wonder why.
Don't mix these two concepts, a model can be 100% accurate even if we are incapable of measuring fully, and vice versa.
No, it can't.
If you are claiming your model is better than your measurements of reality, how do you prove this? What is your model an accurate representation of? Your expectations of reality?
Hell, pi to eleven places will calculate Earth's circumference to within a millimeter, which is "accurate enough" for pretty much all everyday uses.
And also completely useless. "Earth's circumference" is not a measurable physical quantity like "the circumference of the geodesic at the equator" is. "Earth's circumference" refers to a spherical abstraction of Earth. To calculate that to within a millimeter is to calculate what you think Earth should be, not what it is. Accurate within furlongs is "good enough" here. Anything more is just wanking, because the model sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
TV networks pad the coverage out with cheap human interest crap
Then make the human interest crap part of the games.
Seriously. Make it an event. Stand all of these athletes up, have them tell their sappiest, most heartwrenching story, and give the best one a gold fucking medal. They are all trying to outdo each other anyway, so let's make this competition legit.
The medal-count weenies will love it too. The conspiracy-theorists get another judged sport to bitch about. The wannabes can sit at home telling everyone how they could do it better.
Everybody wins!
That or you could become a project manager.
The best thing he could do right now is to put Java on hold and learn to solve the same problems in a different language. Something with sufficient study material yet with a very different history than Java would be best, like Lisp or Perl.
I don't think there is such a thing as a good monolingual programmer. The ability to compare different approaches is just too valuable, and the best time to pick up that skill is before you start seeing every problem as a nail. If the OP would rather go into project management, becoming multilingual would be less critical, but still valuable.
Do you have examples that make Switzerland stand out of the crowd of European countries?
Yeah, you waited until 1971 to let women vote. WTF took so long?
Aaaaah Switzerland, this famous dictatorship
If less than half the country can vote, it is closer to a dictatorship than an democracy.
Sorry, I never saw (or needed) any of your charity, being in the EU
One of the most defining national characteristics of the USA is our ability, for better or worse, to very quickly forget our own past...to move on without a collective guilt or remorse for past mistakes.
The fact that you, as a EU resident, can so quickly forget the massive amounts of charity funneled into Europe through the Marshall Plan only 60 years ago means that in your haste to disdain McDonalds and KFC, you've rejected one of the most fundamental European commonalities to embrace a core American value.
Personally, I find this most amusing.
Tell me, please: what is almost impossible about running a distributed mail server cluster for a few tens of thousands of users and 100% cluster uptime? This has been a common achievement implemented using VAXclusters in academia since the '80s, so I'm curious as to what's gone wrong with engineering ability since then.
The GP didn't say "uptime", he said "reliable". Those two words are not the same.
If the users aren't checking their email because the interface blows, then it's not a reliable way to get a message from A to B, no matter how many nines are in the uptime. Schools and universities have a choice right now: either offer something reasonably close to the state-of-the-art interface, or watch professors collect their students' gmail addresses at the start of the semester and having a TA create a mailing list. A five-nines mail server is great...if people use it.
"Reliable" is a people-problem. "Uptime" is a technical solution. The latter is only a small piece in the puzzle of the former.
That's not to say we shoudln't pro-actively target those who want to rape children and post pictures of it.
No matter how heinous and vile any particular crime may be, pro-actively targeting someone for merely wanting to do something is far, far more evil.
The difficulty arises if images are shown to provoke and promote illegal behaviour.
Where's the difficulty? If the KKK wants to publish racist drivel, if NWA wants to write songs about killing cops, if the Mormons want to peddle homophobia, I'm going to stand back and be proud that I live in a country where they can.
As long as (1) nobody forces me to listen to them and (2) nobody forces them to shut up, I don't see a problem. For the people who actually engage in illegal behavior, we have system in place to handle them.
Some communities think using technology past the 1600s is "obscene", why the 1600s? Fuck if I know...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555936
"The Active Directory stores date/time values as the number of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since the 0 hour on January 1, 1601 till the date/time that is being stored."
Coincidence? I think not...
There's nothing wrong with them suing him.
He should go to jail. He used the special access his job gave him to steal from Nintendo. Yes, I used the s-word. Redistributing unpublished content is theft...he stole something valuable and monetizable from Nintendo (the right of first publication), and they don't have it anymore.
What he did was deliberate and premeditated. He abused a position of trust. There is no "Haha, just kidding" defense or excuse for this crap. This kind of shit severely weakens the man-years of effort expended towards fixing broken copyright laws.
He's not cute. He's not funny. He's a criminal.
I'm even thinking about writing a book about it once I get paroled.
Too bad you never played Breakout.
Cows haven't managed to evolve into anything other than steak.
There are approximately 1.5 billion cows in the world, which is orders of magnitude more than anything else in their weight class. In terms of biomass, they are one of the most successful land animals ever to exist on earth. Cow DNA will be replicating for a very long time.
The primary reason for the success of cows is the fact that the recipe for steak is encoded in their DNA. They also spend most of their usable energy towards making more steak.
Evolutionary success does not mean being on top of the food chain. High-level predators are usually, as a species, much more vulnerable to extinction.
You know what I do like to play though? Monopoly. But then again, I don't "sit around" playing board games, they're more of a last resort kind of thing.
I think you have your causality reversed.
Did it occur to you that the OP might not able to find a job in this dismal economy?
That only works for people who are actively looking for jobs. When someone is spending thousands of hours watching movies, it's not the economy's fault they haven't found a job.
That's not antipathy, that's reality.
I find the idea that I have somehow stolen £50 000 from someone preposterous, since I didn't take anything from them. I find the argument that I should have paid preposterous, since I don't have any money to pay them with. And I find the idea that I should do without if I can't pay preposterous, since I'm not a socially-right-wing nutjob.
Here's a radical idea: commit a fraction of the time you spend watching movies towards holding a job that could pay for your entertainment habits. You claim "I live in North London, so after rent and bills we have pretty much nothing." Bullshit. Your financial status is not North London's doing; it's yours. You chose to spend thousands of hours watching movies. You chose to spend thousands of hours not working. You chose to be in a position where you've "never have had £30 000".
Do you find it preposterous to take responsibility for your own choices?
That's right son, just obey the orders. And get that vagonload of Jews to the gas chambers.
And what of the wagonmakers? Must they stop making wagons because of how some of their wagons are used? What about the wheelwrights and axlemakers?
At some point along that line, it no longer becomes immoral to remain in business, even if you are aware that some of your products are being used in an utterly despicable manner.
What about a PDF that describes itself?
http://dblaz.beevomit.org/quine.pdf
Solves your "recursion" problem quite neatly.
This is just another step in the hollowing out of the state. Private firms already fight our wars.
And before you know it, we'll have private companies paving our roads, building our courthouses, driving our ambulances, uniforming our police, everything!
And they will be competing with each other to do this! It will be chaos!
The patent wars are about to get really ugly.
No they aren't. Patent law has always been ugly. This is nothing new; nothing has changed. Read some history first.
I can think of no better example of how patents prevent progress
And your off-the-cuff better alternative is....?
Lawyers never invented anything but arguments and flights of fancy
A capable, predictable legal system is the foundation of any economy. With stare decisis, every time the lawyers hash out another case, it doesn't just affect the litigants, it affects how all future companies operate. More knowledge about where the line of legality lies means companies can operate closer to it, minimizing uncertainty and risk while maximizing economic efficiency.
It's certainly fun to bash lawyers, but what they do is actually important.
Do you drop your trash on the ground wherever you please? Why not? You are far more important than the janitors, both by title and salary.
Why not let the janitors follow you around and clean up after you as you constantly change their job requirements? YOUR job produces the revenue for THEIR salary, right? They should accommodate your wishes at all times.
Oh, wait, if you did that, you'd just be an asshole. The amount of extra babysitting you'd require from the cleaning staff means other coworkers aren't getting the support they need.
Your petty "IT are just janitor schmucks" attitude is self-centered, narrow-minded, and utterly detrimental to the company as a whole. All you amount to is being the jackass that never flushes toilet 'cause he's too important.
not that it can work on the scale of a country...
No pure ideology works on the scale of a modern country (pop > ~1,000,000)
Pure democracy doesn't work for anything larger than Ancient Athens. Democracy still has pretty good ideas that are worth implementing in a system to govern a large populace. Communism is the same thing.
Just because the US was in a 40-year penis-waving battle with a country that claimed to be communist doesn't mean anything. Open Source certainly borrows much of its core ideology from communism. Linux, Firefox, Apache, etc all seem to be working quite well for me.
You see the same thing with Socialism. "La-la-la, health care, Obama, socialism, I can't hear you!". We've had socialist fire protection service in the US for 200 years. Everybody pays, everybody is covered, and that works much better than the alternative systems of the past.
Communist. Democratic. Socialist. Capitalist. Fascist. Republican. Anarchist.
Why worry about the labels? Take the best ideas from all of them and mix them to make a system that works.
The lack of a package manager and a repository.
Steam works quite well as a package manager and repository. Sure, it caters specific class of packages, but so does Gentoo's repository.
Will they both expand? Eventually.
Don't be blind to the existence of competent package managers under Windows simply because they don't smell like Portage or have /etc/portage/package.* files for you to dick around with.
When I was in high school, I'd read something like this and the first thing that would pop into my head would be: "cool!" Now the first thing that comes up is: "what a bunch of assholes." Has hacking* finally lost its mystique?
No, you just grew up. Welcome to having adult sensibilities.
Other than the fact that it passingly mentions Greenpeace at all, what do you find wrong with the summary?
The fact that tritium is one of the worlds most expensive manufactured materials and sells for somewhere on the order of $50,000 / gram
The fact that tritium is relatively harmless; it is used for glow-in-the-dark effects on watch dials, exit signs, etc, cost permitting.
Are we to believe that a for-profit company that is already in the business of selling tritium runs a reactor that "sprung" a tritium "leak", and they have no incentive to do anything about it?
Anyone who knows that intertia exists and has internalized this fact enough to, say, drive a car, understands inertia.
If you have 2 masses, they exhibit an attractive force upon each other. We call this phenomenon "gravity", and we are experienced in predicting it and comfortable with our models of it.
If you have a mass and try to accelerate it, it exerts a reaction force upon you. We call this phenomenon "inertia", and we are also experienced in predicting it and comfortable with our models of it.
What nobody has satisfactorily explained is this: why are these two related? Why can't you increase inertia without increasing gravitation? What is the connection between the two? Why do gravitational mass and inertial mass always measure to be the exact same value?
Granted, the anthropic principle is at work here. As the Earth orbits the Sun, it experiences two primary forces: one is a gravitational force directed towards the Sun, the other is an inertial force directed away from the Sun. It's good that these are identical, even if the Earth gains or loses mass. If they weren't always identical, we wouldn't be here to wonder why.
Don't mix these two concepts, a model can be 100% accurate even if we are incapable of measuring fully, and vice versa.
No, it can't.
If you are claiming your model is better than your measurements of reality, how do you prove this? What is your model an accurate representation of? Your expectations of reality?
Hell, pi to eleven places will calculate Earth's circumference to within a millimeter, which is "accurate enough" for pretty much all everyday uses.
And also completely useless. "Earth's circumference" is not a measurable physical quantity like "the circumference of the geodesic at the equator" is. "Earth's circumference" refers to a spherical abstraction of Earth. To calculate that to within a millimeter is to calculate what you think Earth should be, not what it is. Accurate within furlongs is "good enough" here. Anything more is just wanking, because the model sucks.