There is a right and wrong answer to the question. It is completely fair for a senator to actually have an answer to the question we he assumes his position, rather than being a blank slate.
The funny this is that being a "villain" means that you don't act "within the acceptable norms."
Though Meyer claimed he was being a "hero," he was actually adopting a "villain" persona, and the other players had to act outside the confines of the game to get back at him.
What's a current CS student to do? Go to med school or study patent law.
Alternately: get a job where you bring in money. One of the sorts of jobs I was looking for after I finished my PhD was contract research-- where I would try to bring in money to fulfill the contract. At every point, I would be able to say I generated $X of revenue in exchange for a smaller fraction, $Y, in salary.
The problem with IT and support programming is that it is a cost-center, not a revenue-generator. You'll always be looked upon as a resource that is costing the company money that could be saved if they paid you less or got rid of you. It's a little better if the work you're doing is part of the core mission of the company (eg, a programmer working for a software company as opposed to an internal-software developer at an insurance company), but the key to job security is always having some quantitative method of demonstrating that you make more money for the company than you cost every year.
To be clear, the US isn't a Democracy. It's a Republic. That means once the people are in office, they can do pretty much what they want regardless of what 'the people' want.
No, "Republic" means that we have an elected head of state, rather than a hereditary monarch.
The United States is a democracy (mechanism) and a republic (form). The United Kingdom is a democracy and a monarchy, not a republic.
One has to wonder if it's really worth the money, or is it just a boondoggle? German tax rates are already very high, among the highest in Europe.
Have you been to Germany? Traveled through the country and taken a few train trips? With those taxes comes some of the nicest, most efficiently-running, most well-maintained infrastructure in Europe. It's worth the money in the sense that, to Germans, it ensure that the country has an amenity that keeps their country running in a lifestyle to which they're accustomed.
Now, contrast this with New York City-- the fact that there's no rail connection between the airports and downtown comes across as pretty ghetto and low-rent.
It's a lot like the difference between renting and apartment and owning a house. Renters are understanding that the kitchens and bathrooms are going to be old and not well maintained, because the landlord isn't willing to invest in upgrades if it doesn't give him more rent. On the other hand, people who own their house are going to put money into their homes to upgrade their kitchens and buy nice furniture because they enjoy the lifestyle it provides.
Germans expect to live in a country where they have the amenities they would expect as owners. Americans are content to have their government act as a slumlord.
The iPhone will raise the bar and M$ is just pissed that they didn't get to it first.
You know, I kind of miss the halcyon days of 2000-2002 when the best thing about a new phone was how tiny it was. Now I see people lugging around their sidekicks in their oversized man-bags and purses
The iPhone is just the latest atrocity in the movement to sell us laptops that just happen to be able to make phonecalls. It's not "raising the bar" it's "reinforcing bad design." That people will buy it and it will become a popular gadget pretty much bugs me.
Many people on campus at MIT viewed her as a lightweight. She kept trying to portray herself as a "Den Mother."
The odd thing is that, unlike most other Deans of Admission, at MIT and elsewhere, she had a compulsion to turn herself into a public figure. First she became a public figure on campus, when the previous Dean of Admissions wasn't really known. Then she started becoming a presence among the community of Admissions officials and guidance conselors and universities at high schools. Finally she went on a very public book tour and would have frequent media appearances, making her one of the highest profile Admissions Deans in the country. It's almost as though she had a compulsion to publicly misrepresent herself to larger and larger audiences, as her fake academic would be repeated at all of these venues. She probably saw that she "got away with it" in 1978 and had a need to keep pushing the issue.
My impression is that "never" meant "We are not going to upgrade to Vista as it currently exists." In a couple of years, Vista may be patched to the point where it is considered worth upgrading, but those IT survey respondants are implying that they're not going to make any plans to upgrade before that point.
In fact, I feel the same way about upgrading to Vista on my own window machines.
I realize that there is more to CS than programming, but I would be surprised if theoretical computer science, which is more math intensive, would be that much more appealing
In my experience, women in computer science lean heavily towards theory, where they are over-represented compared to their numbers in CS departments overall. Men in graduate programs tend to heavily dominate the "systems" groups.
I always figured this was because boys grow up "playing with computers" and already have interest in programming, while equally-capable women get into computer science later and, with less already-established interest in programming, get excited about theory.
True. I meant for the United States. In France and Germany, yes... trips of 400-500 miles are perfectly reasonable to do by train. In the US, not so much.
Acela is a nice improvement, seeing as how it's an objectively better service and it points out the need for better tracks. So it's not ideal, but it's a win for trips under 250 miles.
The reason I called them morons is that with the limited resources given to them, they chose to buy expensive high-speed trains before getting tracks good enough to use the trains to their full potential...
Well, if you're Amtrak, which would you rather have the people do? Complain that the trains run too slow (they won't notice or care about the shiny new tracks) or complain that the new shiny trains they're on could run so much faster if only they had to good sense and money to improve the tracks? Seems to me like the latter would cause a greater public push for more funding for track improvement.
The I-95 Corridor between DC and NYC is so incredibly congested, it shocks even me, who tends not to be shocked by these things. And there's a flight between NYC and DC that ran late 100% of the time in 2006. 100%!
The biggest problem of all: while there are reasons to debate whether or not to take the train over the plane for a trip of about 250 miles or so, once the distance extends to about 400-450 miles, there's no effective alternative to air travel, so the airports get clogged and flights run late, and passengers need to suck it up because they have no other comparable choice.
You may find it surprising that despite the low population density people nevertheless travel to urban locations called "airports" where they board "airplanes" which take them to another urban area with an "airport."
No one claims that "airplanes aren't viable because the US is too spread out." Similarly, Intercity rail transport between SF and LA or between DC and Boston isn't just feasible-- it's becoming a necessity because there is just too much traffic in our airports and on our highways connecting these metro areas.
Unloading that 10% onto the highways and into the airports will, you'll find, cause more problems that you think.
By the same token, increasing that percentage to, say, 12% will solve a lot more problems that you think. Why? Places where rail is most commonly used is in very concentrated areas. Coincidently, the same places would likely have large payoffs in terms of taking on more passenger traffic even if, as a proportion of all passenger traffic, it is comparatively small.
Similar story to me. I didn't see why anyone would pay hundreds of dollars for an iPod, and I figured it was a bad idea that wouldn't take off. Then I bought a 3G iPod, and I also own a nano. I'll probably get a 5G iPod in the near future.
I have no need for an iPhone. I don't have any intention of paying hundreds of dollars for one now. However, I'm completely open to the possibility that it may be a good device and in a couple years I might buy one. Maybe Apple has discovered something about cell phones that we didn't know we needed (I had no idea I "needed" to hold my entire music collection on one device until I could-- now it seems like a great idea). I don't, however, know what it is about the iPhone that I couldn't get in other smart devices for about the same money.
Sometimes at certain internet cafes, you can't get wireless access but need to upload files. In this case, taking along an external hard drive can do the job for you. An iPod, of course, can serve the same purpose.
... and it all worked out well for me. My laptop was invaluable (a thinkpad X31. it was very light)-- wireless is becoming more common, and I had to edit some research papers on my way, so it came in handy. Also, it was a necessity to transfer my digital camera pictures to a hard drive on a semi-regular basis. Then I would upload my pictures to flickr.
I don't feel I was lacking for anything with this technology on me. Much more important is to remember sun screen, a flashlight, a first aid kit, and a leatherman. A pair of binoculars isn't a bad thing, either.
I do wish I had brought with me a more durable watch (like one with a metal bracelet, not a leather strap) and a shortwave radio.
Also: medicines. Pepto and Advil are a necessity. For dealing with those long busrides or train rides in 3rd world countries, bring a packet of Immodium AD. Before your train/bush ride, look at the packet and see what the recommended dosage is. Take double that dosage.
At no point in my post did I mention anything about price caps. In fact, I pointed out that under the current regime, I will have to pay more money if I use more bandwidth. I don't know where you're getting the pricecap thing from.
My take is this, Net Neutrality sounds great on the surface, but here's why I don't like it; if you are a content producer you should pay for the bandwidth that is allocated for your content
Excuse me, but as a content producer myself, I ALREADY pay for the bandwidth of my content. At the moment, it costs about $10/month, but in the event that my weblog becomes much more popular than it is now, I'm going to have to start shelling out much more money.
Google already pays millions of dollars a month for its bandwidth. Kos himself pays thousands a month to maintain dailkos.com. The bandwidth is already paid for. The telcos shouldn't be charging "protection money" from web site producers who are already paying big money for their bandwidth.
For young graduates straight out of college, those "how many pennies would it take to fill this room?"-type questions are (a) amusing and (b) provide an opportunity for applicants with no other track record of experience to prove themselves.
When you're an experienced member of industry being recruited by another firm, the last thing you want is to put up with that kind of juvenile crap.
I have the first issue of this comic from when it came out. Great premise, good art, but I was unimpressed with the story and writing, and I had no desire to follow up on it. The comic thought it was much deeper than it actually was.
That said, this probably translates a lot better to television.
The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush's second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.
Now, call me crazy, but when you're forming technology policy, it was always my impression that you got the best and brightest experts from all over the country to design and form policies.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a right and wrong answer to the question. It is completely fair for a senator to actually have an answer to the question we he assumes his position, rather than being a blank slate.
The funny this is that being a "villain" means that you don't act "within the acceptable norms."
Though Meyer claimed he was being a "hero," he was actually adopting a "villain" persona, and the other players had to act outside the confines of the game to get back at him.
What's a current CS student to do? Go to med school or study patent law.
Alternately: get a job where you bring in money. One of the sorts of jobs I was looking for after I finished my PhD was contract research-- where I would try to bring in money to fulfill the contract. At every point, I would be able to say I generated $X of revenue in exchange for a smaller fraction, $Y, in salary.
The problem with IT and support programming is that it is a cost-center, not a revenue-generator. You'll always be looked upon as a resource that is costing the company money that could be saved if they paid you less or got rid of you. It's a little better if the work you're doing is part of the core mission of the company (eg, a programmer working for a software company as opposed to an internal-software developer at an insurance company), but the key to job security is always having some quantitative method of demonstrating that you make more money for the company than you cost every year.
To be clear, the US isn't a Democracy. It's a Republic. That means once the people are in office, they can do pretty much what they want regardless of what 'the people' want.
No, "Republic" means that we have an elected head of state, rather than a hereditary monarch.
The United States is a democracy (mechanism) and a republic (form). The United Kingdom is a democracy and a monarchy, not a republic.
One has to wonder if it's really worth the money, or is it just a boondoggle? German tax rates are already very high, among the highest in Europe.
Have you been to Germany? Traveled through the country and taken a few train trips? With those taxes comes some of the nicest, most efficiently-running, most well-maintained infrastructure in Europe. It's worth the money in the sense that, to Germans, it ensure that the country has an amenity that keeps their country running in a lifestyle to which they're accustomed.
Now, contrast this with New York City-- the fact that there's no rail connection between the airports and downtown comes across as pretty ghetto and low-rent.
It's a lot like the difference between renting and apartment and owning a house. Renters are understanding that the kitchens and bathrooms are going to be old and not well maintained, because the landlord isn't willing to invest in upgrades if it doesn't give him more rent. On the other hand, people who own their house are going to put money into their homes to upgrade their kitchens and buy nice furniture because they enjoy the lifestyle it provides.
Germans expect to live in a country where they have the amenities they would expect as owners. Americans are content to have their government act as a slumlord.
The iPhone will raise the bar and M$ is just pissed that they didn't get to it first.
You know, I kind of miss the halcyon days of 2000-2002 when the best thing about a new phone was how tiny it was. Now I see people lugging around their sidekicks in their oversized man-bags and purses
The iPhone is just the latest atrocity in the movement to sell us laptops that just happen to be able to make phonecalls. It's not "raising the bar" it's "reinforcing bad design." That people will buy it and it will become a popular gadget pretty much bugs me.
Many people on campus at MIT viewed her as a lightweight. She kept trying to portray herself as a "Den Mother."
The odd thing is that, unlike most other Deans of Admission, at MIT and elsewhere, she had a compulsion to turn herself into a public figure. First she became a public figure on campus, when the previous Dean of Admissions wasn't really known. Then she started becoming a presence among the community of Admissions officials and guidance conselors and universities at high schools. Finally she went on a very public book tour and would have frequent media appearances, making her one of the highest profile Admissions Deans in the country. It's almost as though she had a compulsion to publicly misrepresent herself to larger and larger audiences, as her fake academic would be repeated at all of these venues. She probably saw that she "got away with it" in 1978 and had a need to keep pushing the issue.
I think this claim is a media creation. Any IT person who says they will "never" upgrade, yet stay with Windows, is a crackpot.
I think all those IT people who said they would "never" upgrade to WindowsME did well for themselves, don't you think?
I have no plans to upgrade to Vista until either SP1 comes out or, if that's still not an improvement, Vista's successor is released.
My impression is that "never" meant "We are not going to upgrade to Vista as it currently exists." In a couple of years, Vista may be patched to the point where it is considered worth upgrading, but those IT survey respondants are implying that they're not going to make any plans to upgrade before that point.
In fact, I feel the same way about upgrading to Vista on my own window machines.
May I ask what you ended up doing? Did you stick with science, in the end?
I realize that there is more to CS than programming, but I would be surprised if theoretical computer science, which is more math intensive, would be that much more appealing
In my experience, women in computer science lean heavily towards theory, where they are over-represented compared to their numbers in CS departments overall. Men in graduate programs tend to heavily dominate the "systems" groups.
I always figured this was because boys grow up "playing with computers" and already have interest in programming, while equally-capable women get into computer science later and, with less already-established interest in programming, get excited about theory.
True. I meant for the United States. In France and Germany, yes... trips of 400-500 miles are perfectly reasonable to do by train. In the US, not so much.
Acela is a nice improvement, seeing as how it's an objectively better service and it points out the need for better tracks. So it's not ideal, but it's a win for trips under 250 miles.
The reason I called them morons is that with the limited resources given to them, they chose to buy expensive high-speed trains before getting tracks good enough to use the trains to their full potential...
Well, if you're Amtrak, which would you rather have the people do? Complain that the trains run too slow (they won't notice or care about the shiny new tracks) or complain that the new shiny trains they're on could run so much faster if only they had to good sense and money to improve the tracks? Seems to me like the latter would cause a greater public push for more funding for track improvement.
The I-95 Corridor between DC and NYC is so incredibly congested, it shocks even me, who tends not to be shocked by these things. And there's a flight between NYC and DC that ran late 100% of the time in 2006. 100%!
The biggest problem of all: while there are reasons to debate whether or not to take the train over the plane for a trip of about 250 miles or so, once the distance extends to about 400-450 miles, there's no effective alternative to air travel, so the airports get clogged and flights run late, and passengers need to suck it up because they have no other comparable choice.
You may find it surprising that despite the low population density people nevertheless travel to urban locations called "airports" where they board "airplanes" which take them to another urban area with an "airport."
No one claims that "airplanes aren't viable because the US is too spread out." Similarly, Intercity rail transport between SF and LA or between DC and Boston isn't just feasible-- it's becoming a necessity because there is just too much traffic in our airports and on our highways connecting these metro areas.
Unloading that 10% onto the highways and into the airports will, you'll find, cause more problems that you think.
By the same token, increasing that percentage to, say, 12% will solve a lot more problems that you think. Why? Places where rail is most commonly used is in very concentrated areas. Coincidently, the same places would likely have large payoffs in terms of taking on more passenger traffic even if, as a proportion of all passenger traffic, it is comparatively small.
Similar story to me. I didn't see why anyone would pay hundreds of dollars for an iPod, and I figured it was a bad idea that wouldn't take off. Then I bought a 3G iPod, and I also own a nano. I'll probably get a 5G iPod in the near future.
I have no need for an iPhone. I don't have any intention of paying hundreds of dollars for one now. However, I'm completely open to the possibility that it may be a good device and in a couple years I might buy one. Maybe Apple has discovered something about cell phones that we didn't know we needed (I had no idea I "needed" to hold my entire music collection on one device until I could-- now it seems like a great idea). I don't, however, know what it is about the iPhone that I couldn't get in other smart devices for about the same money.
Sometimes at certain internet cafes, you can't get wireless access but need to upload files. In this case, taking along an external hard drive can do the job for you. An iPod, of course, can serve the same purpose.
... and it all worked out well for me. My laptop was invaluable (a thinkpad X31. it was very light)-- wireless is becoming more common, and I had to edit some research papers on my way, so it came in handy. Also, it was a necessity to transfer my digital camera pictures to a hard drive on a semi-regular basis. Then I would upload my pictures to flickr.
I don't feel I was lacking for anything with this technology on me. Much more important is to remember sun screen, a flashlight, a first aid kit, and a leatherman. A pair of binoculars isn't a bad thing, either.
I do wish I had brought with me a more durable watch (like one with a metal bracelet, not a leather strap) and a shortwave radio.
Also: medicines. Pepto and Advil are a necessity. For dealing with those long busrides or train rides in 3rd world countries, bring a packet of Immodium AD. Before your train/bush ride, look at the packet and see what the recommended dosage is. Take double that dosage.
At no point in my post did I mention anything about price caps. In fact, I pointed out that under the current regime, I will have to pay more money if I use more bandwidth. I don't know where you're getting the pricecap thing from.
My take is this, Net Neutrality sounds great on the surface, but here's why I don't like it; if you are a content producer you should pay for the bandwidth that is allocated for your content
Excuse me, but as a content producer myself, I ALREADY pay for the bandwidth of my content. At the moment, it costs about $10/month, but in the event that my weblog becomes much more popular than it is now, I'm going to have to start shelling out much more money.
Google already pays millions of dollars a month for its bandwidth. Kos himself pays thousands a month to maintain dailkos.com. The bandwidth is already paid for. The telcos shouldn't be charging "protection money" from web site producers who are already paying big money for their bandwidth.
The oval I can see... but what about the "rectangular shadows" he claims to have seen? Where are they supposed to be?
For young graduates straight out of college, those "how many pennies would it take to fill this room?"-type questions are (a) amusing and (b) provide an opportunity for applicants with no other track record of experience to prove themselves.
When you're an experienced member of industry being recruited by another firm, the last thing you want is to put up with that kind of juvenile crap.
I have the first issue of this comic from when it came out. Great premise, good art, but I was unimpressed with the story and writing, and I had no desire to follow up on it. The comic thought it was much deeper than it actually was.
That said, this probably translates a lot better to television.
Uh, no... per the article (if you read it):
The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush's second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.
Now, call me crazy, but when you're forming technology policy, it was always my impression that you got the best and brightest experts from all over the country to design and form policies.