It is trivially easy to think of an example where the intent is the fundamental point of dispute: the ACLU vs. the NRA's interpretation of the second amendment.
Ultimately, BOTH sides choose interpretations to further their agendas. Very few people earnestly go to a document to see what it says, and in truth, the set of laws that are laid out in our founding documents are not complete without the centuries of precedent and supreme court interpretation clarifying their intent and application.
I would say you are viewing the intent in the Hobby Lobby case to suit your agenda. An absurd amount of activity has been justified under free speech, Citizens United being a prime example, where the supreme court ruled that corporations, first of all, are people, and secondly, are entitled to use money to influence political processes, which means that money is considered speech. In what universe is this the intention of "no law shall be made abridging the freedom of speech"!? Hobby Lobby was more of this (IMO) dubious first amendment interpretation, where the rights of a corporation to make religious choices for their employees overruled the rights of those individual employees to make their own religious choices.
It is easy to sit on a high horse and believe you are the one who respects the constitution while your enemies ignores it, but that world only exists in the mind of blind partisans. It is less easy to be sure of yourself when you admit that you interpret the constitution one way while others interpret it another way, but that world is the one we live in. Stop demonizing liberals, or at least if you insist on doing it, stop whining when they demonize you right back. Everybody is trying to do the best thing for the country, the only difference is the approach.
The argument as I see it isn't whether we should follow original intent or not, it is what the original intent IS. And even then, on some level, original intent isn't (and can't be) meaningful or known. From the wiki:
In the case of US Federal Law, law is made by majority vote in two chambers, and is then signed by the President. 536 people are therefore potentially involved in this process, and not one of them needs to share the same intentions as any other of them in order to play their part in ratifying the bill. They need only vote; their vote will count the same if they share the same intent as their colleagues, if they do not share the intent of their colleagues, and indeed, if they have no particular intention, and are voting solely because their party whip handed them a note saying "be on the Senate floor at 9:36pm and say 'Aye'." Their vote will count even if they are falling-down drunk or if they have not even read the bill under consideration.[7] All of which is to say that giving effect to the intent of the legislature not only presumes that there is a singular intent – no less dubious an assertion where statutes are concerned than where the Constitution is – but, worse yet, the very diversity of these bodies may permit a judge to corrupt his inquiry by finding a floor statement or committee report which suggests an intent that the Judge thinks would be a good result.[8]
So, we have to look at what was written, figure out what it was meant to do (as best as we can) and figure out what impacts it may have, which may very well extend far beyond any effect the legislation's originators ever intended, and hopefully make a decision that optimally accounts for the technicalities of the text, the inferred meaning, and the anticipated impacts. Little wonder the founding fathers thought to dedicate an entire branch of government to this task.
Liberals disagree with you about what the original intent was. Saying that they don't care about original intent is just a flimsy strawman argument.
Well, the founders bestowed power upon the judicial branch to interpret legal documents like the constitution. Meaning is almost never absolutely clear - any document written in any humanly invented language will always contain ambiguity that must be addressed. If the supreme court weren't making official, binding rulings about what the intent of the document is, who would be? You can disagree with their interpretations, but you are getting dangerously close to the thing you originally complained about - painting one political party as scheming villains and questioning their motives, without an ounce of proof.
The truth of it is, some people think the judicial branch is too liberal in their interpretation of the constitution, some people think the current interpretation is too conservative. Every politically active person I know genuinely believes they are fighting for the right interpretation and the right way forward for the country. I personally find it distasteful to let team loyalty and blind ideology prevent us from recognizing good solutions - let's be pragmatic and look at what works, regardless of who came up with it.
What I'm saying is that limiting the size of government is not in and of itself a good thing, and no, I don't have a principle that says "government should always be limited at point X". That's because unbending ideals in this case don't make sense. Sometimes you need more government (more wall street regulations would be good IMO) and sometimes you need less (ITAR regulations, or the ridiculous amount of red tape for building a nuclear power plant). The world is complicated, and policy is complicated, and so it isn't appropriate to pretend there are simple one-size-fits-all answers.
I'm all for constitutionality, but it isn't a perfect document and we have a provision to amend it for that reason. However, I agree with you that we should follow proper legal channels to institute policy, up to and including amending the constitution. I also understand why the federal government pushes the boundaries of power, because it's really a legal question and it's up to the judicial branch to decide what the bounds of the constitution actually are.
Shesh, What do you THINK matters to me? You question my motives, yet you don't answer the posed question.
Wait, what? I don't know which question you're talking about. What I'm saying is that we've got some example of handouts (as in, things given to people with no strings attached and which are in no way "earned") that produce lasting positive results. There's a trend recently in charity for this too - some of the most efficient and productive charities allow contributors to directly transfer cash to people in impoverished areas, with the idea that poor people know what they need the most, and will thus be the best qualified to decide how to lift themselves out of poverty.
That is offensive to conservatives, who care very much about these things.
I have no doubt that conservatives care very much for people, and many of them truly believe that smaller government, limited handouts, etc, is the best way to fix our country's problems. The thing is, I think that belief is, in some cases, totally wrong. And, I think there's an incredibly powerful rhetorical apparatus that keeps producing these arguments that appeal to basic values (of course everybody is for personal responsibility) while having very little merit in terms of producing effective policy.
Do you have ANY principles that would limit the size of government? Do you have ANY limiting principles beyond "As long as it doesn't cost me directly!"? If so, what are they?
Sure I do. Let's limit government when there are clear problems. Let's cut military spending and limit cost-plus funding. Let's cut back some government regulation of nuclear power so there are less barriers to entry. Let's limit congress's control over NASA - allow them to set a budget but not control decisions and funding on specific programs. My thing is, I think ideals are all well and good, but they need to be secondary to what really matters - finding the best and cheapest way to accomplish a given goal. When appeals to personal responsibility are used to justify policy that is both more expensive and less effective, we have a problem.
Here are the two problems I have with "personal responsibility" and the "charitable contributions" thing.
First off, if you take away tithing to churches, conservatives give the same or less than liberals. I don't have a problem with tithing, but the thing is, it isn't fundamentally about helping people, or compassion, or social benefit. It's about propping up the expensive machinery of religious institutions, paying for giant buildings, high-tech entertainment equipment, and the most dynamic public speakers... er...pastors. This kind of "charitable giving" has more in common with country club dues than it does with giving money to the homeless guy on the street or the starving child in another country.
My other beef is that results should matter more than ideals. I'm all for helping people to help themselves, and aiming for an ultimate goal of self-sufficiency rather than government dependency, but the thing is, there are some very good indications that the best way to help people re-integrate into society is through handouts. For instance, in Utah some beancounter realized that the average cost to the state of a homeless person was around $15k a year from police/legal interactions, unpaid emergency room visits, etc... which happens to be less than it would cost to give that homeless person a home. So, they provided a "handout" of a basic apartment, for free, with the only stipulation being that if the person got a job, 30% of the income would go towards rent. The program has been a roaring success. I'm also reminded of the welfare drug tests, which were intended to prevent junkies from getting government assistance, and which caught so few people that it ended up costing much more from testing than it saved by excluding people.
My point is, it is fine to be all about personal responsibility. But what matters to you, ultimately - is it people becoming more self-sufficient, responsible, and productive? Or is it making sure that nobody gets a handout that isn't earned? Because the latter seems to be the real subtext behind many conservative efforts.
I wonder - many of the fundamental technological developments of the 20th century can be attributed to Bell Labs, which was an industrial organization with strict government oversight and an ongoing mission to demonstrate a public benefit to justify Bell's monopoly status. I've been wondering recently if maybe that model is the ideal one for rapid progress... there was much more freedom and less of a focus on quantity of publishing compared to academia, no need for years-long games with grants, and extensive engineering resources available in a wide variety of disciplines to develop any promising idea. I'd be curious if you would welcome more labs on that model...
The problem with public education in the US is that it tends to be locally funded, so you get whatever your neighbors are willing to pay for.
Capable of paying for. That is a more accurate statement.
Not where I'm from. This area is drowning in Acuras and BMWs, but any bill attempting to increase school funding gets shut down hard, year after year. The schools here could be very well funded, but there isn't the will.
When people can shut others down simply because they become drama queens over something they find disagreeable, that's when the real problem happens. It shouldn't, but thanks to political correctness, that's how things have been rolling the past 20 years or so, and it keeps getting worse.
It is only a problem when the law is used to silence people, and that has happened very rarely, and virtually never due to political correctness. If Joe doesn't like what Sally has to say and claims that her beliefs are offensive and ill-informed, he has every right to share his opinion and invite others to join him in ignoring what she says. This is basically what happens with "political correctness" - public figures that say stupid and/or offensive things (exercising their freedom of speech) often get criticized by their detractors (who are likewise exercising freedom of speech). You can complain that their detractors have too much influence, but that isn't due to any laws (except maybe those that protect offensive speech in the first place).
You can't have it both ways. You can either be free to say whatever you want and accept the social consequences, or you can accept limitations on what you express and expect others to abide by those same limitations. If you insist on blaming something, all you are really justified in complaining about is that enough people care about "political correctness" that it matters. Welcome to democracy.
The real question is not 'whether colleges are teaching the right skills people need to join the workforce'. First you need to address this assumption that the point of college is merely to qualify you for a job or increase your future earnings potential. Because it isn't at all clear to me that it would be a problem if college wasn't preparing people to enter industry - the only thing that a university degree specifically ought to prepare you for is further schooling and life in academia.
That said, even if we accept the notion that institutes of higher learning are really degree mills and tickets to future career success (which I admit they are fast becoming), why the hell does anybody expect a computer science grad to have any particular skill in programming? Degrees exist for the discipline in question: it's called software engineering. This is analogous to hiring a physicist to do electrical engineering or mechanical engineering work - sure, the physicist has demonstrated some aptitude in relevant areas, but physics training is in abstracted, idealized, theoretical scenarios, so there's going to be some difficulty making the transition to the concrete, rule-of-thumb, applied world of engineering. Anybody who doesn't understand this distinction shouldn't be in charge of hiring - there are computer scientists, there are software engineers, and they both offer different skills that are required in different degrees depending on the project.
Of course, that is how things ought to work in hiring. How things do work is another matter entirely.
If that was true, why is Putin playing games like this? He's continually going out of his way to maintain even just a thin veneer of plausible deniability and has the propaganda machine turned up to 11 with the constant misinformation campaign. You don't go to those lengths unless you're worried about provoking a response - if Russia truly believed that they could invade aggressively and with impunity, they would. As it is, Putin is making a series of small initiatives, each of which independently is too small to get a real response. But, put them together, and...
The amount of disinformation that is coming from Russia, but also Ukraine and the NATO command is vast and it is very hard to sift through it to get to the truth. Very likely Russian troops are somehow involved in the conflict, but trust me that if Russia started an invasion of Ukraine, they could take Kiev the next day. So Occam's razor applied, this is not an invasion.
if Russia started an invasion of Ukraine, and wanted to provoke immediate international retaliation they could take Kiev the next day. FTFY.
Thanks for bringing some actual quotes into the discussion. Still kind of weird, though - the trend in education for the past few decades has been moving towards learning big ideas and less on rote memorization and un-contextualized facts, but this seems to be advocating the opposite.
Thanks, bunnie, for doing the interview, I found your answers interesting and I enjoyed the read. Also, thanks samzenpus, for not doing the video thing that seems trendy for slashdot interviews lately. I much prefer this format, and find that for interviews on this site, where the questions are often highly technical, that a written response is much more useful. We have enough inane, dumbed-down youtube soundbites if we want them, some lengthy and technically detailed answers are much preferred.
I'm tentatively pretty excited about this. I got acquainted with 2nd edition D&D through Baldur's Gate (I think that was their ruleset) and then spent a summer playing 3.5E like crazy and investing way too much time in character optimization and digging through forums. I've played a session or two of 4E.
Cool things that make me excited about this edition:
Attributes, races, and classes seem very faithful to old school D&D.
Combat seems similar to old-school D&D (none of the sliding around BS from 4E).
Classes seem balanced but unique. Casters are nerfed somewhat but still quite powerful, fighter is the only one with multiple attacks, rogue gets multiple actions (of certain types) per round to be versatile. Many things that were previously must-have feats for a class and therefore made you "follow the rails" to have a decent character are now built in (Weapon Finesse for 3.5 rogues, for instance).
Every level gives new abilities. You don't have any "dead levels" with minimal progression.
The whole Background system both encourages character backstory development and makes it mechanically purposeful. Cool and versatile and should aid the storytelling.
The Archetypes allow you to meaningfully distinguish a character of your class from all the others, while keeping some thematic consistency. Easy customization like this is great.
The system is certainly recognizable as D&D but also makes significant strides to simplify. Many complex mechanics have been replaced - don't have to confirm a critical hit or worry about which damage bonuses get added when (just roll double on the damage dice). You roll two D20's to represent an advantage or disadvantage - pick the higher of the two in the first case, the lower in the latter. You don't have modifiers for two-handed fighting, etc. At the same time, armor and weapons are the same as they've always been, along with ability modifiers and many class features (Evasion, for instance).
I'm sure people will find things to dislike, but overall this is a positive move. It seems that they are trying to accentuate the fun parts of the game while remaining faithful to the essence of D&D. And, if I'm not mistaken, I detect similar language and design approach to Legend, which is a very innovative yet D&D-esque system published by a company called Rule of Cool. Their lead designer, Jacob Kurzer, left earlier this year because of mysterious new employment with a noncompete agreement that prohibited him from further development of Legend. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a hand in the development of this new release, and if he is now at WotC I'm really excited to see what else they'll be coming up with.
I, for one, welcome our new Making overlords. Or at least, I think this is a useful addition, so that those of us who are interested in 3D printers and Arduino and Raspberry Pi can find the articles that interest us, and those of you who aren't interested can more easily avoid them. I swear I've never heard of a group of more change-averse readers.
You made the analogy that bit-bashing is to modern programming what classic greek is to modern logic. So, mostly irrelevant and unnecessary. And you tried to use Amazon and Facebook to prove your point. Don't blame me for the implications of the words you chose. The bottom line is that there is a lot of programming out there that isn't web development, and so bit-bashing is often a very useful thing to know.
You're claiming that bit-bashing is obsolete and irrelevant, because you won't use it working for Facebook or Amazon. Yes? If that isn't the argument, why the fuck do you even mention Facebook and Amazon?
And as soon as you work for Facebook or Amazon, you will never have any use for 'bit bashing' again.
You assume all programmers would want to work for Facebook or Amazon. I have no interest in that sort of thing, and it turns out that bit-bashing has been pretty damn useful in the areas I have programmed in (robotics, electronics testing, data analysis).
Exactly. I wish Facebook would just leave it alone - I don't want "intelligent" delivery of the posts facebook thinks I want to see - I would rather see a true feed representative of the people in my social network, rather than some secretly curated selection based on inscrutable mechanisms that I have no control over.
There's a complicated relationship between muscle mass and testosterone. Higher levels of testosterone do help you to build muscle, but there's also a strong indication that heavy resistance exercise increases testosterone and that higher levels of muscle mass will increase your testosterone production.
Your definition of "random" and your understanding of quantum mechanics isn't quite right, although the rest of your post was quite interesting. A thought experiment known as EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen), followed up by the Stern-Gerlach apparatus and Bell's theorem, actually proved that certain attributes of particles in no way persist between measurements, and that they "choose" outcomes based on a mechanism that is not only unknown, but proven by experiment to be non-describable by deterministic theories.
I was going to spend a while typing up an explanation, but this is a very thorough discussion of all the possibilities that is much better than I could hope to do myself:
http://www.scienceclarified.co...
Can someone explain to me again why this couldn't be modified, scaled up and used as a micro thrust system for satellites and such?
First problem: it goes round and round, but doesn't produce net thrust in any one direction.
Second problem: it doesn't work in a vacuum. Those bulbs are partially evacuated - too much atmosphere, and it doesn't work, too little, and it doesn't work. Which points to this being some kind of expansion-contraction thermal effect rather than some kind of spacey photon-momentum thing.
Point of interest: I've also heard that if you put one of these things in a freezer you can get them to run backwards...
> Private industry already designs and builds basically everything they do
Indeed, and dishonest cost estimates from private companies are usually the main reason for things going way over-budget.
And this is exactly where it needs to restructure itself. Dismantle the SLS program, pour more funds into research and facilities like JPL.
I'm not convinced that all the restructuring in the world will fix NASA as long as congress keeps using them as a jobs program with some technical objectives stapled on top as an afterthought.
SLS is NOT a decent project. It's an old-school design based on expensive and outdated tech with known problems! The only thing SLS succeeds at is keeping the same cash flowing to the same congressional districts. That money would be far better spent on commercial crew or developing an entirely new system from the ground up.
Slashdot Mirror
It is trivially easy to think of an example where the intent is the fundamental point of dispute: the ACLU vs. the NRA's interpretation of the second amendment.
Ultimately, BOTH sides choose interpretations to further their agendas. Very few people earnestly go to a document to see what it says, and in truth, the set of laws that are laid out in our founding documents are not complete without the centuries of precedent and supreme court interpretation clarifying their intent and application.
I would say you are viewing the intent in the Hobby Lobby case to suit your agenda. An absurd amount of activity has been justified under free speech, Citizens United being a prime example, where the supreme court ruled that corporations, first of all, are people, and secondly, are entitled to use money to influence political processes, which means that money is considered speech. In what universe is this the intention of "no law shall be made abridging the freedom of speech"!? Hobby Lobby was more of this (IMO) dubious first amendment interpretation, where the rights of a corporation to make religious choices for their employees overruled the rights of those individual employees to make their own religious choices.
It is easy to sit on a high horse and believe you are the one who respects the constitution while your enemies ignores it, but that world only exists in the mind of blind partisans. It is less easy to be sure of yourself when you admit that you interpret the constitution one way while others interpret it another way, but that world is the one we live in. Stop demonizing liberals, or at least if you insist on doing it, stop whining when they demonize you right back. Everybody is trying to do the best thing for the country, the only difference is the approach.
In the case of US Federal Law, law is made by majority vote in two chambers, and is then signed by the President. 536 people are therefore potentially involved in this process, and not one of them needs to share the same intentions as any other of them in order to play their part in ratifying the bill. They need only vote; their vote will count the same if they share the same intent as their colleagues, if they do not share the intent of their colleagues, and indeed, if they have no particular intention, and are voting solely because their party whip handed them a note saying "be on the Senate floor at 9:36pm and say 'Aye'." Their vote will count even if they are falling-down drunk or if they have not even read the bill under consideration.[7] All of which is to say that giving effect to the intent of the legislature not only presumes that there is a singular intent – no less dubious an assertion where statutes are concerned than where the Constitution is – but, worse yet, the very diversity of these bodies may permit a judge to corrupt his inquiry by finding a floor statement or committee report which suggests an intent that the Judge thinks would be a good result.[8]
So, we have to look at what was written, figure out what it was meant to do (as best as we can) and figure out what impacts it may have, which may very well extend far beyond any effect the legislation's originators ever intended, and hopefully make a decision that optimally accounts for the technicalities of the text, the inferred meaning, and the anticipated impacts. Little wonder the founding fathers thought to dedicate an entire branch of government to this task.
Liberals disagree with you about what the original intent was. Saying that they don't care about original intent is just a flimsy strawman argument.
Well, the founders bestowed power upon the judicial branch to interpret legal documents like the constitution. Meaning is almost never absolutely clear - any document written in any humanly invented language will always contain ambiguity that must be addressed. If the supreme court weren't making official, binding rulings about what the intent of the document is, who would be? You can disagree with their interpretations, but you are getting dangerously close to the thing you originally complained about - painting one political party as scheming villains and questioning their motives, without an ounce of proof.
The truth of it is, some people think the judicial branch is too liberal in their interpretation of the constitution, some people think the current interpretation is too conservative. Every politically active person I know genuinely believes they are fighting for the right interpretation and the right way forward for the country. I personally find it distasteful to let team loyalty and blind ideology prevent us from recognizing good solutions - let's be pragmatic and look at what works, regardless of who came up with it.
What I'm saying is that limiting the size of government is not in and of itself a good thing, and no, I don't have a principle that says "government should always be limited at point X". That's because unbending ideals in this case don't make sense. Sometimes you need more government (more wall street regulations would be good IMO) and sometimes you need less (ITAR regulations, or the ridiculous amount of red tape for building a nuclear power plant). The world is complicated, and policy is complicated, and so it isn't appropriate to pretend there are simple one-size-fits-all answers.
I'm all for constitutionality, but it isn't a perfect document and we have a provision to amend it for that reason. However, I agree with you that we should follow proper legal channels to institute policy, up to and including amending the constitution. I also understand why the federal government pushes the boundaries of power, because it's really a legal question and it's up to the judicial branch to decide what the bounds of the constitution actually are.
Shesh, What do you THINK matters to me? You question my motives, yet you don't answer the posed question.
Wait, what? I don't know which question you're talking about. What I'm saying is that we've got some example of handouts (as in, things given to people with no strings attached and which are in no way "earned") that produce lasting positive results. There's a trend recently in charity for this too - some of the most efficient and productive charities allow contributors to directly transfer cash to people in impoverished areas, with the idea that poor people know what they need the most, and will thus be the best qualified to decide how to lift themselves out of poverty.
That is offensive to conservatives, who care very much about these things.
I have no doubt that conservatives care very much for people, and many of them truly believe that smaller government, limited handouts, etc, is the best way to fix our country's problems. The thing is, I think that belief is, in some cases, totally wrong. And, I think there's an incredibly powerful rhetorical apparatus that keeps producing these arguments that appeal to basic values (of course everybody is for personal responsibility) while having very little merit in terms of producing effective policy.
Do you have ANY principles that would limit the size of government? Do you have ANY limiting principles beyond "As long as it doesn't cost me directly!"? If so, what are they?
Sure I do. Let's limit government when there are clear problems. Let's cut military spending and limit cost-plus funding. Let's cut back some government regulation of nuclear power so there are less barriers to entry. Let's limit congress's control over NASA - allow them to set a budget but not control decisions and funding on specific programs. My thing is, I think ideals are all well and good, but they need to be secondary to what really matters - finding the best and cheapest way to accomplish a given goal. When appeals to personal responsibility are used to justify policy that is both more expensive and less effective, we have a problem.
Here are the two problems I have with "personal responsibility" and the "charitable contributions" thing.
First off, if you take away tithing to churches, conservatives give the same or less than liberals. I don't have a problem with tithing, but the thing is, it isn't fundamentally about helping people, or compassion, or social benefit. It's about propping up the expensive machinery of religious institutions, paying for giant buildings, high-tech entertainment equipment, and the most dynamic public speakers... er...pastors. This kind of "charitable giving" has more in common with country club dues than it does with giving money to the homeless guy on the street or the starving child in another country.
My other beef is that results should matter more than ideals. I'm all for helping people to help themselves, and aiming for an ultimate goal of self-sufficiency rather than government dependency, but the thing is, there are some very good indications that the best way to help people re-integrate into society is through handouts. For instance, in Utah some beancounter realized that the average cost to the state of a homeless person was around $15k a year from police/legal interactions, unpaid emergency room visits, etc... which happens to be less than it would cost to give that homeless person a home. So, they provided a "handout" of a basic apartment, for free, with the only stipulation being that if the person got a job, 30% of the income would go towards rent. The program has been a roaring success. I'm also reminded of the welfare drug tests, which were intended to prevent junkies from getting government assistance, and which caught so few people that it ended up costing much more from testing than it saved by excluding people.
My point is, it is fine to be all about personal responsibility. But what matters to you, ultimately - is it people becoming more self-sufficient, responsible, and productive? Or is it making sure that nobody gets a handout that isn't earned? Because the latter seems to be the real subtext behind many conservative efforts.
I wonder - many of the fundamental technological developments of the 20th century can be attributed to Bell Labs, which was an industrial organization with strict government oversight and an ongoing mission to demonstrate a public benefit to justify Bell's monopoly status. I've been wondering recently if maybe that model is the ideal one for rapid progress... there was much more freedom and less of a focus on quantity of publishing compared to academia, no need for years-long games with grants, and extensive engineering resources available in a wide variety of disciplines to develop any promising idea. I'd be curious if you would welcome more labs on that model...
The problem with public education in the US is that it tends to be locally funded, so you get whatever your neighbors are willing to pay for.
Capable of paying for. That is a more accurate statement.
Not where I'm from. This area is drowning in Acuras and BMWs, but any bill attempting to increase school funding gets shut down hard, year after year. The schools here could be very well funded, but there isn't the will.
When people can shut others down simply because they become drama queens over something they find disagreeable, that's when the real problem happens. It shouldn't, but thanks to political correctness, that's how things have been rolling the past 20 years or so, and it keeps getting worse.
It is only a problem when the law is used to silence people, and that has happened very rarely, and virtually never due to political correctness. If Joe doesn't like what Sally has to say and claims that her beliefs are offensive and ill-informed, he has every right to share his opinion and invite others to join him in ignoring what she says. This is basically what happens with "political correctness" - public figures that say stupid and/or offensive things (exercising their freedom of speech) often get criticized by their detractors (who are likewise exercising freedom of speech). You can complain that their detractors have too much influence, but that isn't due to any laws (except maybe those that protect offensive speech in the first place).
You can't have it both ways. You can either be free to say whatever you want and accept the social consequences, or you can accept limitations on what you express and expect others to abide by those same limitations. If you insist on blaming something, all you are really justified in complaining about is that enough people care about "political correctness" that it matters. Welcome to democracy.
The real question is not 'whether colleges are teaching the right skills people need to join the workforce'. First you need to address this assumption that the point of college is merely to qualify you for a job or increase your future earnings potential. Because it isn't at all clear to me that it would be a problem if college wasn't preparing people to enter industry - the only thing that a university degree specifically ought to prepare you for is further schooling and life in academia.
That said, even if we accept the notion that institutes of higher learning are really degree mills and tickets to future career success (which I admit they are fast becoming), why the hell does anybody expect a computer science grad to have any particular skill in programming? Degrees exist for the discipline in question: it's called software engineering. This is analogous to hiring a physicist to do electrical engineering or mechanical engineering work - sure, the physicist has demonstrated some aptitude in relevant areas, but physics training is in abstracted, idealized, theoretical scenarios, so there's going to be some difficulty making the transition to the concrete, rule-of-thumb, applied world of engineering. Anybody who doesn't understand this distinction shouldn't be in charge of hiring - there are computer scientists, there are software engineers, and they both offer different skills that are required in different degrees depending on the project.
Of course, that is how things ought to work in hiring. How things do work is another matter entirely.
If that was true, why is Putin playing games like this? He's continually going out of his way to maintain even just a thin veneer of plausible deniability and has the propaganda machine turned up to 11 with the constant misinformation campaign. You don't go to those lengths unless you're worried about provoking a response - if Russia truly believed that they could invade aggressively and with impunity, they would. As it is, Putin is making a series of small initiatives, each of which independently is too small to get a real response. But, put them together, and...
The amount of disinformation that is coming from Russia, but also Ukraine and the NATO command is vast and it is very hard to sift through it to get to the truth. Very likely Russian troops are somehow involved in the conflict, but trust me that if Russia started an invasion of Ukraine, they could take Kiev the next day. So Occam's razor applied, this is not an invasion.
if Russia started an invasion of Ukraine, and wanted to provoke immediate international retaliation they could take Kiev the next day. FTFY.
Thanks for bringing some actual quotes into the discussion. Still kind of weird, though - the trend in education for the past few decades has been moving towards learning big ideas and less on rote memorization and un-contextualized facts, but this seems to be advocating the opposite.
Thanks, bunnie, for doing the interview, I found your answers interesting and I enjoyed the read. Also, thanks samzenpus, for not doing the video thing that seems trendy for slashdot interviews lately. I much prefer this format, and find that for interviews on this site, where the questions are often highly technical, that a written response is much more useful. We have enough inane, dumbed-down youtube soundbites if we want them, some lengthy and technically detailed answers are much preferred.
I'm tentatively pretty excited about this. I got acquainted with 2nd edition D&D through Baldur's Gate (I think that was their ruleset) and then spent a summer playing 3.5E like crazy and investing way too much time in character optimization and digging through forums. I've played a session or two of 4E.
Cool things that make me excited about this edition:
Attributes, races, and classes seem very faithful to old school D&D.
Combat seems similar to old-school D&D (none of the sliding around BS from 4E).
Classes seem balanced but unique. Casters are nerfed somewhat but still quite powerful, fighter is the only one with multiple attacks, rogue gets multiple actions (of certain types) per round to be versatile. Many things that were previously must-have feats for a class and therefore made you "follow the rails" to have a decent character are now built in (Weapon Finesse for 3.5 rogues, for instance).
Every level gives new abilities. You don't have any "dead levels" with minimal progression.
The whole Background system both encourages character backstory development and makes it mechanically purposeful. Cool and versatile and should aid the storytelling.
The Archetypes allow you to meaningfully distinguish a character of your class from all the others, while keeping some thematic consistency. Easy customization like this is great.
The system is certainly recognizable as D&D but also makes significant strides to simplify. Many complex mechanics have been replaced - don't have to confirm a critical hit or worry about which damage bonuses get added when (just roll double on the damage dice). You roll two D20's to represent an advantage or disadvantage - pick the higher of the two in the first case, the lower in the latter. You don't have modifiers for two-handed fighting, etc. At the same time, armor and weapons are the same as they've always been, along with ability modifiers and many class features (Evasion, for instance).
I'm sure people will find things to dislike, but overall this is a positive move. It seems that they are trying to accentuate the fun parts of the game while remaining faithful to the essence of D&D. And, if I'm not mistaken, I detect similar language and design approach to Legend, which is a very innovative yet D&D-esque system published by a company called Rule of Cool. Their lead designer, Jacob Kurzer, left earlier this year because of mysterious new employment with a noncompete agreement that prohibited him from further development of Legend. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a hand in the development of this new release, and if he is now at WotC I'm really excited to see what else they'll be coming up with.
I, for one, welcome our new Making overlords. Or at least, I think this is a useful addition, so that those of us who are interested in 3D printers and Arduino and Raspberry Pi can find the articles that interest us, and those of you who aren't interested can more easily avoid them. I swear I've never heard of a group of more change-averse readers.
You made the analogy that bit-bashing is to modern programming what classic greek is to modern logic. So, mostly irrelevant and unnecessary. And you tried to use Amazon and Facebook to prove your point. Don't blame me for the implications of the words you chose. The bottom line is that there is a lot of programming out there that isn't web development, and so bit-bashing is often a very useful thing to know.
You're claiming that bit-bashing is obsolete and irrelevant, because you won't use it working for Facebook or Amazon. Yes? If that isn't the argument, why the fuck do you even mention Facebook and Amazon?
And as soon as you work for Facebook or Amazon, you will never have any use for 'bit bashing' again.
You assume all programmers would want to work for Facebook or Amazon. I have no interest in that sort of thing, and it turns out that bit-bashing has been pretty damn useful in the areas I have programmed in (robotics, electronics testing, data analysis).
Exactly. I wish Facebook would just leave it alone - I don't want "intelligent" delivery of the posts facebook thinks I want to see - I would rather see a true feed representative of the people in my social network, rather than some secretly curated selection based on inscrutable mechanisms that I have no control over.
There's a complicated relationship between muscle mass and testosterone. Higher levels of testosterone do help you to build muscle, but there's also a strong indication that heavy resistance exercise increases testosterone and that higher levels of muscle mass will increase your testosterone production.
Your definition of "random" and your understanding of quantum mechanics isn't quite right, although the rest of your post was quite interesting. A thought experiment known as EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen), followed up by the Stern-Gerlach apparatus and Bell's theorem, actually proved that certain attributes of particles in no way persist between measurements, and that they "choose" outcomes based on a mechanism that is not only unknown, but proven by experiment to be non-describable by deterministic theories.
I was going to spend a while typing up an explanation, but this is a very thorough discussion of all the possibilities that is much better than I could hope to do myself: http://www.scienceclarified.co...
Can someone explain to me again why this couldn't be modified, scaled up and used as a micro thrust system for satellites and such?
First problem: it goes round and round, but doesn't produce net thrust in any one direction.
Second problem: it doesn't work in a vacuum. Those bulbs are partially evacuated - too much atmosphere, and it doesn't work, too little, and it doesn't work. Which points to this being some kind of expansion-contraction thermal effect rather than some kind of spacey photon-momentum thing.
Point of interest: I've also heard that if you put one of these things in a freezer you can get them to run backwards...
> Private industry already designs and builds basically everything they do
Indeed, and dishonest cost estimates from private companies are usually the main reason for things going way over-budget.
And this is exactly where it needs to restructure itself. Dismantle the SLS program, pour more funds into research and facilities like JPL.
I'm not convinced that all the restructuring in the world will fix NASA as long as congress keeps using them as a jobs program with some technical objectives stapled on top as an afterthought.
SLS is NOT a decent project. It's an old-school design based on expensive and outdated tech with known problems! The only thing SLS succeeds at is keeping the same cash flowing to the same congressional districts. That money would be far better spent on commercial crew or developing an entirely new system from the ground up.