Maybe. But then, I enjoy watching C-SPAN. I like the idea of being able to watch what our judges, LEOs, and congress critters are up to.
What I do not like is that a channel (I cannot remember if it was C-SPAN, may have been a different local channel), was recently caught switching views during voting sessions. I think it was the Texas legislature? Anyhow, during the times that the cameras were switched, they would vote, both for themselves and several of their neighbors who were not there. It bothers me that it violated their own state law, it bothers me that for a vote (even a relatively unimportant one), many of those representatives were absent, and it bothers me that the channel was complicit in looking away while these congress critters were engaging in this below-board activity.
It's not "entertainment" like most channels, but like NASA TV (which can be ~boring as all hell), that does not mean it should not be aired. It's a communication medium. If a judge is in bed with law-enforcement or the DA, I'd love to have video evidence of him acting as such. It would be wonderful at his trial.
What I would not like is another propaganda activity, where Justice-TM is shown, but only if the "good guys" are winning. Cutting to a commercial break instead of showing part of the defense would be a source of irritation.
Agreed. Many of these 'green' technologies are a clear case of counting your chickens before they have hatched.
How about we have a viable alternative before we start making plans to switch? Just one green car that can go 360 miles on a single charge / fueling, that doesn't look like a go-cart or tube, that can carry myself + 4 moderately built friends + luggage comfortably, that gets a 5-star for safety requirements, goes over 80 MPH, has an acceleration greater than that of the old minivan, has air conditioning + stereo, whose fueling stations are / can be readily available / widespread in 3 years, and who does not use technology like lithium batteries that require a $20,000 replacement 5 years later. Oh, and try to make it affordable to the average customer, who probably doesn't want to spend more than $30,000 on a new car.
Give me just one worthwhile sedan that meets those requirements.
Well, part of the problem is this: some of that stuff is not really a part of any training. It's something you pick up only through experience. Which is a bitch.
People work for those companies because it pays the bills, but you are right, as soon as something nicer opens up, those employees leave.
Companies do not get to have their cake and eat it. They cooked the CS goose, and will be paying for it very soon. When you order up a lot of CS grads, then try to outsource them, it sends a negative signal to universities that are supposed to put out CS grads. It takes 4-5 years from the beginning of demand to the filling of supply. When they suddenly decided to outsource everyone (not everyone, but enough), they permanently destroyed a part of the local CS industry. Like salting the ground, nothing will grow there.
Their latest venture is "cloud computing," where you no longer have IT in house, or even CS / SE, because the cloud will take care of it. I thought cloud computing was (slight simplification) virtual computing with redundancy and capacity upgrades on demand. But apparently, according to these people, it's something else. It's magic.
Business / marketing f*cked up, and they will try everything else before trying to fix it. Unfortunately, people switch industries, thus when they finally decide to pay up, no one is left to take the money.
You do need some experience in learning the dark secrets or common mistakes of any particular language. That IS necessary.
Knowing the.Net 1.1 framework function for getting files in a directory can sometimes peter out after 256 files is important to know. Knowing that with Java, Swing is a POS and can take years of experience to even begin to tame is important to know. Knowing with C++, you are only going to use 10% of the language when you write code, but that may not be the same 10% as the previous guy, so keep a C++ in a Nutshell book on your bookshelf is an important to know.
But in spite of all that, I welcome you to the programming ranks. It takes a dedicated person to bang away at some code in virtual space. You might want to study OOP, as that has been something of a standard for some time, and it does have its gotchas (that no one is going to explain to you in the work place).
Companies these days are shells of the companies of yesteryear. They do not pay for training, and they are only interested in the short-term. Money spent on a programmer is money not spent on themselves. I may be a programmer for life, but my shelf-life is limited. As soon as they can hire 3 new college grads for the price of me, I will be unemployed.
There must be a more better, intelligent way of getting this done.
Like the 3D gimmick theaters are using these days, I'm over the shininess / newness of it all.The touch screen's responsiveness seriously needs to be improved.
I don't care if I have to use a conveyor belt, and check off the items as they go by, we need a better algorithm than "Scan Item, Place Item in Bag, Wait for Machine to Register Item, Repeat." If I have a shopping cart filled with items, I can be there for an extra 20 minutes.
These machines are supposed to improve the grocery shopping experience, not make us pine for the one register still being manned by a human. I'm starting to think the Grocer Unions bought out the companies that manufacture these machines, and only sell them to stores to ensure job security.
Yes, third rate physics PhDs. Plenty of them out there. If you read published papers, you will see a lot of them. It's not just spelling and grammar errors, which can easily be forgiven (they aren't English majors). It's crap research: they are plagiarizing someone else's work and passing it off as their own, they are performing experiments and fudging the results, they are performing experiments that could be considered fraudulent (grant is to study gravitational lensing, money gets spent on other things (like a trip to Vegas), actual research involves spending a day sifting through stock photos from an eclipse).
I have never taken Computer Science 101. But hey, nice attempt at shifting the conversation to a personal attack.
Creationists? On a bit of a fishing expedition here, aren't you?
And then you attack/. Excellent. I can tell from your UID that you've haven't been on the internet very long, so here's some free advice: not everyone on the internet is going to agree with you, and it's not personal. Here's a *hug* because your parents forgot to give you one.
Now get back out there, and troll as you have never trolled before!
Oh, you meant "pure" science on the taxpayer's dime!
Not like most research was done outside of a University lab for most of mankind's history. Oh wait, it was. And most of those scientists could afford their own labs. Not because they had a lab, then discovered something, but because they discovered something, then bought a lab with the proceeds from that discovery. We do things ass-backwards these days.
The scientists in question choose a lifestyle which relies on taxpayer funding. And like anyone on taxpayer funding, there is always a persistent fear that said funding will be cut. In the above case, like most teachers, they choose security over liberty. Knowing that the taxpayer will always pay some amount of money, even for pointless experiments.
If you were a third-rate physics PHD, who just wants a job that he / she can report to at 8 AM, and leave by 5 PM, with a small, but guaranteed paycheck, why not?
Tell your kids that it's your selfless love for Science that drives you. But in reality, it's your own inferiority complex, the lack of willingness to stretch your wings, even as a third-rate physics PHD, that keeps you were you are.
Yes, because brutally beating workers is such a libertarian ideal.
My goodness, when I read Mises's work on Human Action, where he talked about his experience as a young man wandering around the labor camps, beating the workers to increase productivity, I shed a tear thinking about how I wish it were me...
Except that none of the above is true, especially the parent's post.
Go read a book, and you will learn. Or keep voting for the R's and D's, and you can stay in your box.
And because there would probably be a riot, involving the burning of several state capital building, with members of the state government contained within said buildings.
When people of your state consider it a common occurrence to plan a special day trip to DE just to make big ticket purchases (because there is no sales tax), any serious attempts to enforce this law will have half the legislature de-elected within the fiscal year, with judges losing their seats on a case by case basis. To put things in perspective, a politician would find himself more popular if he publicly announced his desire to make love to a recent corpse, than if he announced his desire to enforce this tax.
If we account for a Vx of 500 MPH, with a component of friction from the air, and a Dy of 30,000 ft, with Ag of 30 ft / sec. and a maximum velocity of what?
Because, with a little finagling, I can claim common carrier status for wifi, even as a college student?
The problem here isn't lose of life or property damage. The problem here, aside from the usual "unauthorized users, who may not be a part of the college" excuse, is that they are looking for someone to sue, and subpenaing a student's router is an extra legal expense.
Wouldn't it all just be easier if everyone had static IPs, and they could just send SWAT to pick you up at the address of that registered IP? Why are you trying to make the investigator's / lawyer's jobs harder than they need to be? Who needs DHCP, it's obviously a hacker's protocol, being able to easily change addresses!
Agreed. But it permanently solves the input sanitization problem.
Sometimes the medicine feels worse than the disease (especially when you first start doing it), but the part where some wanna-be hackers are pounding that textbox on one of your pages, looking for a way into your db, and your server doesn't croak is a truly wonderful feeling.
The response from your fellow team members usually starts with "damn it, it won't break. what did you do that it's not breaking anymore?" followed by you showing them the code + db tables, and their response of "what in the sam hell...WTF...OMG...yes, yes!".
And there is only so much oil that can be drilled.
It comes down to the bang for your buck. If you were designing something to leave the solar system, which fuel source would you invest in? Note that I said leave the solar system, not orbit the sun.
There are several reasons, political to technological, that solar, wind, and tidal power haven't taken off.
Solar cells -> these are relatively energy-intensive to create. That's one problem to factor into their design. What more, the quality of the solar cell is linked to the kinds of materials that go into their design. Your garden-variety solar cell has the ability to capture energy from the sun at n% (which is fairly low), while your NASA grade solar cell (which, if I remember correctly, uses some slightly more exotic / costly materials) can capture energy at n + 20%. NASA has issues with micrometeorites piercing their cells in space, we have bigger issues with the elements (hail, dust, wind, etc.) destroying those cells on the earth.
So, when you factor in the energy-cost of creating solar cells, the fact that you either need some expensive rare elements or more of them (eating up more land, more problems), the fact that they can be easily damaged (going to need a warranty for that, 5+ years), and then that you need to either store the energy in batteries (which lose efficiency over time, and tend to be toxic) or push energy back onto the grid (where it's someone else's storage problem) and a few states are making backwards-energy meters illegal...and you need to be in a sunny, relatively cloud-free environment for them to work best, things don't look so hot.
Scientists / engineers care that they get out *lots* more energy than they put in. Just barely breaking even with a fairly expensive setup is not a win.
Wind energy -> you need a place that is relatively windy all year long. The coast is a nice place, but these wind generators are considered an eye sore. Ditto with the storage issues here. Take some photos of those shore-birds that are on the endangered / protected species list, you'll want something to show your kids when they ask what they looked like.
Tidal power -> you typically need a bay for this one. Only so many places that qualify for this one. Ditto with the storage issues here. It can be considered a serious obstruction.
Solar furnace -> eats up land in the desert. Normally not as big a problem as regular photovoltaic cells, but there is only so much desert, and you kind of are screwing up the environment when you line the desert with hundreds / thousands of these mirrors.
The major issue is that preaching conservation of energy (having everyone cut down on their energy use, not the law of physics) is about as useful as preaching abstinence. It feels "good" bashing people over the head with it, and complaining that "we're so wasteful!," but it does little to solve the actual problem. While many devices are becoming more economical with their power use, the number of devices being used today are still increasing.
Nuclear energy, which is one of several big bang for your buck technologies, can be very compact and has tons of energy. With enrichment + recycling, we can run on it for a few thousand years. By that point, if we haven't found a way off the planet and perfected fusion (gotta get that He3 from Jupiter), we probably deserve what's coming to us.
Nonsense. I like to rock the DB by building strings manually all the time. Makes refactoring / debugging them easier.
How do I avoid the stupidity of input sanitization these days? Through the magic of Base64 encoding any input I receive from a user. It sounds crazy, but it works (for now).
I hear fiddling while Rome burned was popular too.
On one hand, there is always some crisis somewhere that *requires* immediate attention. It is conceivable that the man is burned out, numbed, or tired. What more, several months into the office, you probably find that you really don't have the power / influence / friends you thought you did, like being trapped on a roller coaster ride you can't get off, so you just have to grin and bear it.
On the other hand, these are *important* matters that can potentially affect large numbers of people, be it citizens, allies, or (hah!) future citizens of the empire. A stitch in time does save nine, so the saying goes; putting forth some effort now, even if he's in a bad situation, would probably place him / the People / America / the Earth in a better position later. Be lazy, forget to fill the car up with gas or do the laundry (just the basics), and you could be in a very place by the end of the week.
But yes, a cure for Microsoft would be interesting, but I'd think a cure for Apple would pay more. "Where do you want to go today" is not as big a problem as "Think Differently," at least not according to the most annoying criteria. Then I'll cure Linux users of their other (heretical) distributions, leaving only Slackware.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost to Deadman Wonderland here.
And I would support your appointment to that position, if only because I would be on the other side of that gate. ^_^
Maybe. But then, I enjoy watching C-SPAN. I like the idea of being able to watch what our judges, LEOs, and congress critters are up to.
What I do not like is that a channel (I cannot remember if it was C-SPAN, may have been a different local channel), was recently caught switching views during voting sessions. I think it was the Texas legislature? Anyhow, during the times that the cameras were switched, they would vote, both for themselves and several of their neighbors who were not there. It bothers me that it violated their own state law, it bothers me that for a vote (even a relatively unimportant one), many of those representatives were absent, and it bothers me that the channel was complicit in looking away while these congress critters were engaging in this below-board activity.
It's not "entertainment" like most channels, but like NASA TV (which can be ~boring as all hell), that does not mean it should not be aired. It's a communication medium. If a judge is in bed with law-enforcement or the DA, I'd love to have video evidence of him acting as such. It would be wonderful at his trial.
What I would not like is another propaganda activity, where Justice-TM is shown, but only if the "good guys" are winning. Cutting to a commercial break instead of showing part of the defense would be a source of irritation.
Agreed. Many of these 'green' technologies are a clear case of counting your chickens before they have hatched.
How about we have a viable alternative before we start making plans to switch? Just one green car that can go 360 miles on a single charge / fueling, that doesn't look like a go-cart or tube, that can carry myself + 4 moderately built friends + luggage comfortably, that gets a 5-star for safety requirements, goes over 80 MPH, has an acceleration greater than that of the old minivan, has air conditioning + stereo, whose fueling stations are / can be readily available / widespread in 3 years, and who does not use technology like lithium batteries that require a $20,000 replacement 5 years later. Oh, and try to make it affordable to the average customer, who probably doesn't want to spend more than $30,000 on a new car.
Give me just one worthwhile sedan that meets those requirements.
Well, part of the problem is this: some of that stuff is not really a part of any training. It's something you pick up only through experience. Which is a bitch.
People work for those companies because it pays the bills, but you are right, as soon as something nicer opens up, those employees leave.
Companies do not get to have their cake and eat it. They cooked the CS goose, and will be paying for it very soon. When you order up a lot of CS grads, then try to outsource them, it sends a negative signal to universities that are supposed to put out CS grads. It takes 4-5 years from the beginning of demand to the filling of supply. When they suddenly decided to outsource everyone (not everyone, but enough), they permanently destroyed a part of the local CS industry. Like salting the ground, nothing will grow there.
Their latest venture is "cloud computing," where you no longer have IT in house, or even CS / SE, because the cloud will take care of it. I thought cloud computing was (slight simplification) virtual computing with redundancy and capacity upgrades on demand. But apparently, according to these people, it's something else. It's magic.
Business / marketing f*cked up, and they will try everything else before trying to fix it. Unfortunately, people switch industries, thus when they finally decide to pay up, no one is left to take the money.
You do need some experience in learning the dark secrets or common mistakes of any particular language. That IS necessary.
Knowing the .Net 1.1 framework function for getting files in a directory can sometimes peter out after 256 files is important to know. Knowing that with Java, Swing is a POS and can take years of experience to even begin to tame is important to know. Knowing with C++, you are only going to use 10% of the language when you write code, but that may not be the same 10% as the previous guy, so keep a C++ in a Nutshell book on your bookshelf is an important to know.
But in spite of all that, I welcome you to the programming ranks. It takes a dedicated person to bang away at some code in virtual space. You might want to study OOP, as that has been something of a standard for some time, and it does have its gotchas (that no one is going to explain to you in the work place).
Companies these days are shells of the companies of yesteryear. They do not pay for training, and they are only interested in the short-term. Money spent on a programmer is money not spent on themselves. I may be a programmer for life, but my shelf-life is limited. As soon as they can hire 3 new college grads for the price of me, I will be unemployed.
So, offer to sell them something that they do want.
Uranium to the Chinese.
There must be a more better, intelligent way of getting this done.
Like the 3D gimmick theaters are using these days, I'm over the shininess / newness of it all.The touch screen's responsiveness seriously needs to be improved.
I don't care if I have to use a conveyor belt, and check off the items as they go by, we need a better algorithm than "Scan Item, Place Item in Bag, Wait for Machine to Register Item, Repeat." If I have a shopping cart filled with items, I can be there for an extra 20 minutes.
These machines are supposed to improve the grocery shopping experience, not make us pine for the one register still being manned by a human. I'm starting to think the Grocer Unions bought out the companies that manufacture these machines, and only sell them to stores to ensure job security.
No, because no.
Yes, third rate physics PhDs. Plenty of them out there. If you read published papers, you will see a lot of them. It's not just spelling and grammar errors, which can easily be forgiven (they aren't English majors). It's crap research: they are plagiarizing someone else's work and passing it off as their own, they are performing experiments and fudging the results, they are performing experiments that could be considered fraudulent (grant is to study gravitational lensing, money gets spent on other things (like a trip to Vegas), actual research involves spending a day sifting through stock photos from an eclipse).
I have never taken Computer Science 101. But hey, nice attempt at shifting the conversation to a personal attack.
Creationists? On a bit of a fishing expedition here, aren't you?
And then you attack /. Excellent. I can tell from your UID that you've haven't been on the internet very long, so here's some free advice: not everyone on the internet is going to agree with you, and it's not personal. Here's a *hug* because your parents forgot to give you one.
Now get back out there, and troll as you have never trolled before!
It can, and it does.
Oh, you meant "pure" science on the taxpayer's dime!
Not like most research was done outside of a University lab for most of mankind's history. Oh wait, it was. And most of those scientists could afford their own labs. Not because they had a lab, then discovered something, but because they discovered something, then bought a lab with the proceeds from that discovery. We do things ass-backwards these days.
The scientists in question choose a lifestyle which relies on taxpayer funding. And like anyone on taxpayer funding, there is always a persistent fear that said funding will be cut. In the above case, like most teachers, they choose security over liberty. Knowing that the taxpayer will always pay some amount of money, even for pointless experiments.
If you were a third-rate physics PHD, who just wants a job that he / she can report to at 8 AM, and leave by 5 PM, with a small, but guaranteed paycheck, why not?
Tell your kids that it's your selfless love for Science that drives you. But in reality, it's your own inferiority complex, the lack of willingness to stretch your wings, even as a third-rate physics PHD, that keeps you were you are.
I ask you, if we find that all this pollution is holding off an Ice Age, what do we get to call you?
Yes, because brutally beating workers is such a libertarian ideal.
My goodness, when I read Mises's work on Human Action, where he talked about his experience as a young man wandering around the labor camps, beating the workers to increase productivity, I shed a tear thinking about how I wish it were me...
Except that none of the above is true, especially the parent's post.
Go read a book, and you will learn. Or keep voting for the R's and D's, and you can stay in your box.
And because there would probably be a riot, involving the burning of several state capital building, with members of the state government contained within said buildings.
When people of your state consider it a common occurrence to plan a special day trip to DE just to make big ticket purchases (because there is no sales tax), any serious attempts to enforce this law will have half the legislature de-elected within the fiscal year, with judges losing their seats on a case by case basis. To put things in perspective, a politician would find himself more popular if he publicly announced his desire to make love to a recent corpse, than if he announced his desire to enforce this tax.
Hmm. I wonder about a bailout over an ocean.
If we account for a Vx of 500 MPH, with a component of friction from the air, and a Dy of 30,000 ft, with Ag of 30 ft / sec. and a maximum velocity of what?
Too tired to do the math.
Or a slow HD.
Seriously. I have a 128 GB SSD installed on my home machine, running Windows 7, and it's instantaneous on resume.
On the other hand, the IBM Thinkpad with the 4200 rpm HD is so slow I want to place it in a brown paper bag, and leave it in someone's shopping cart.
Because, with a little finagling, I can claim common carrier status for wifi, even as a college student?
The problem here isn't lose of life or property damage. The problem here, aside from the usual "unauthorized users, who may not be a part of the college" excuse, is that they are looking for someone to sue, and subpenaing a student's router is an extra legal expense.
Wouldn't it all just be easier if everyone had static IPs, and they could just send SWAT to pick you up at the address of that registered IP? Why are you trying to make the investigator's / lawyer's jobs harder than they need to be? Who needs DHCP, it's obviously a hacker's protocol, being able to easily change addresses!
Minutes. 45 minutes. It does not last a full hour.
And it takes one of my cores hostage when it goes down.
Agreed. But it permanently solves the input sanitization problem.
Sometimes the medicine feels worse than the disease (especially when you first start doing it), but the part where some wanna-be hackers are pounding that textbox on one of your pages, looking for a way into your db, and your server doesn't croak is a truly wonderful feeling.
The response from your fellow team members usually starts with "damn it, it won't break. what did you do that it's not breaking anymore?" followed by you showing them the code + db tables, and their response of "what in the sam hell...WTF...OMG...yes, yes!".
Note that I said any input from the user gets stored with Base64.
Any input I create can be stored normally, though I do tend to store strings as Base64 anyway.
Numbers usually aren't a problem, but I grant you that looking at tables with Base64 encodings does take some time getting used to it.
And there is only so much oil that can be drilled.
It comes down to the bang for your buck. If you were designing something to leave the solar system, which fuel source would you invest in? Note that I said leave the solar system, not orbit the sun.
There are several reasons, political to technological, that solar, wind, and tidal power haven't taken off.
Solar cells -> these are relatively energy-intensive to create. That's one problem to factor into their design. What more, the quality of the solar cell is linked to the kinds of materials that go into their design. Your garden-variety solar cell has the ability to capture energy from the sun at n% (which is fairly low), while your NASA grade solar cell (which, if I remember correctly, uses some slightly more exotic / costly materials) can capture energy at n + 20%. NASA has issues with micrometeorites piercing their cells in space, we have bigger issues with the elements (hail, dust, wind, etc.) destroying those cells on the earth.
So, when you factor in the energy-cost of creating solar cells, the fact that you either need some expensive rare elements or more of them (eating up more land, more problems), the fact that they can be easily damaged (going to need a warranty for that, 5+ years), and then that you need to either store the energy in batteries (which lose efficiency over time, and tend to be toxic) or push energy back onto the grid (where it's someone else's storage problem) and a few states are making backwards-energy meters illegal...and you need to be in a sunny, relatively cloud-free environment for them to work best, things don't look so hot.
Scientists / engineers care that they get out *lots* more energy than they put in. Just barely breaking even with a fairly expensive setup is not a win.
Wind energy -> you need a place that is relatively windy all year long. The coast is a nice place, but these wind generators are considered an eye sore. Ditto with the storage issues here. Take some photos of those shore-birds that are on the endangered / protected species list, you'll want something to show your kids when they ask what they looked like.
Tidal power -> you typically need a bay for this one. Only so many places that qualify for this one. Ditto with the storage issues here. It can be considered a serious obstruction.
Solar furnace -> eats up land in the desert. Normally not as big a problem as regular photovoltaic cells, but there is only so much desert, and you kind of are screwing up the environment when you line the desert with hundreds / thousands of these mirrors.
The major issue is that preaching conservation of energy (having everyone cut down on their energy use, not the law of physics) is about as useful as preaching abstinence. It feels "good" bashing people over the head with it, and complaining that "we're so wasteful!," but it does little to solve the actual problem. While many devices are becoming more economical with their power use, the number of devices being used today are still increasing.
Nuclear energy, which is one of several big bang for your buck technologies, can be very compact and has tons of energy. With enrichment + recycling, we can run on it for a few thousand years. By that point, if we haven't found a way off the planet and perfected fusion (gotta get that He3 from Jupiter), we probably deserve what's coming to us.
Nonsense. I like to rock the DB by building strings manually all the time. Makes refactoring / debugging them easier.
How do I avoid the stupidity of input sanitization these days? Through the magic of Base64 encoding any input I receive from a user. It sounds crazy, but it works (for now).
I hear fiddling while Rome burned was popular too.
On one hand, there is always some crisis somewhere that *requires* immediate attention. It is conceivable that the man is burned out, numbed, or tired. What more, several months into the office, you probably find that you really don't have the power / influence / friends you thought you did, like being trapped on a roller coaster ride you can't get off, so you just have to grin and bear it.
On the other hand, these are *important* matters that can potentially affect large numbers of people, be it citizens, allies, or (hah!) future citizens of the empire. A stitch in time does save nine, so the saying goes; putting forth some effort now, even if he's in a bad situation, would probably place him / the People / America / the Earth in a better position later. Be lazy, forget to fill the car up with gas or do the laundry (just the basics), and you could be in a very place by the end of the week.
/. removed the joke tags.
Why do we have Plain Old Text if it strips the tags out?
It's not?
Damn, now I feel bad about voting for Palin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_sclerosis
But yes, a cure for Microsoft would be interesting, but I'd think a cure for Apple would pay more. "Where do you want to go today" is not as big a problem as "Think Differently," at least not according to the most annoying criteria. Then I'll cure Linux users of their other (heretical) distributions, leaving only Slackware.