Yeah, I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering. But I am not an engineer. I have never utilized the degree in a professional setting, or been paid for any engineering work. While I have passed the EIT (Engineer In Training) exam in college, I do not have the requisite years of experience to take the PE (Professional Engineer) exam.
That being said, you can be an engineer without taking/passing the PE. It just usually gets you a raise, and you can be considered a professional in terms of legal cases.
I graduated with my C.S. degree in the summer of 2000. It was still during the dotcom crash. So, I had student loan debt, and the places that I applied at had their choice of "recent graduate with no experience" and "every other programmer in the area with experience who had lost their job".
Mind you, I'm on the completely other side of the country from Silicon Valley, but there were _not_ a lot of entry-level programmer positions open around here in 2000.
So, I ended up getting a retail job (thanks to a friend of mine) a few blocks from where I lived. I thought I'd work it for a few months, continue to put out resumes, and I'd find something.
Except that didn't happen. Every place I sent my resume to either never responded, or they'd "let me know" and then never get back in touch. It didn't help the the university I had graduated from was continuing to graduate C.S. students at a good rate, not warning them at all that "hey, it might be difficult to find a job". (Their job placement assistance service SUCKED at the time.)
I ended up getting stuck in a rut. It was remarkably easy to 'just get by' on what I made working retail. I didn't have a car, so no car-based expenses, but it also limited where I could go for interviews. The job itself was generally boring as hell, but I worked the graveyard shift, so there were nights where I had no customers, but had to keep the store open anyway.
Like I said, I got stuck in a rut. It took complaining about retail customers one too many times to a friend of mine before he asked me if I wanted to try to get a job where he worked. I told him "I can't do sales" (I knew where he worked.) and he said, "No, as a programmer."
And I've been at that company for 4 1/2 years. It's had its ups and downs here, but it's still miles better than working retail, especially during the Christmas season.
Show of hands, who's actually shocked by this news?
Trump is full of all talk, little action, and most of that is misguided. He doesn't seem to have the first clue as to what he's doing, and his administration is either following that lead, or following Trump's only other plan, which is loot as much as possible before leaving office.
I switched jobs when I was 40. I went from a retail job that I had been working at for over a decade, to a programmer at a small company.
Now, I had a degree in Computer Science, so it's not like I was making that jump with nothing to back it up. But I still spent the first couple months on the job just learning. (Hell, technically, I'm still learning.)
Not everyone is going to be able to make that jump. Sometimes it's going to be because of their age. Or rather, because some people believe that at their age, they can't make that jump. Some people can't make that jump because they lack the skills and can't get hired at an entry-level position when there are better applicants available.
Where I work, none of our programmers (of which I am one) are allowed to work from home any more except in cases of emergency. Mind you, it's a small company, and there's only three of us programmers here to begin with, and we're all on Slack and have fairly open lines of communication with each other.
But one of the bosses apparently gets a case of the chapped ass if he can't have a pointless meeting at the drop of a hat to go over something we've covered a handful of times already. So, anyone working from home is a direct affront to his micro-managing style. (This is the same guy who got upset that no one came in on July 4th last year when we were closed.)
Just going by what Grover Norquist says, all taxes are so bad as to be intolerable. Not only must any new tax be offset with a tax reduction somewhere else, but conservatives should all sign his pledge to not add any new taxes, ever, ever, ever.
You know, because the world is perfectly constant, and nothing unexpected ever happens.
It's not even that the rich have to be that smart to pay much less (if anything) in taxes. It's that they can afford to hire people to find/exploit every tax loophole they can. I feel relatively safe in assuming that Trump doesn't pour over his own tax returns every year making sure that everything is set up for him to pay as little as possible. He has people to do that for him.
Because there's generally a pay range for that position. It's actually pretty rare for an open position to be something like "$90K a year, no wiggle room". It's more likely to be something like "$80-95K a year, depending on experience".
And if they know you were making, say, $75K at your last job, maybe they'll offer you something in the lower range, because while it's still more money to you, it's less money that they have to offer.
I don't even think it would be "over time". Pretty much the instant one major ISP starts charging for premium access (or whatever the fuck they end up calling it) the rest will jump on that bandwagon like nobody's business.
First off, this guy is not a programmer. At all. He's just the boss.
He thinks that a word doc detailing the project is 90% of the work.
He doesn't have a problem with waiting until 4:45 p.m. to come into the IT room with a "simple request". (To be fair, about a third of the time it is a simple request.)
Last year, we had a day off for some holiday or another (not one of the major ones); HR announced it and everything - no body would be working that day. He came in anyway, and was passive aggressive pissy for the rest of the week because none of the rest of IT came in.
He emails people way, way, waaaaaay after hours about projects.
He doesn't seem to understand the idea of detailing a project from start to finish. Like, we're given a project - do {X}. Only it turns out that {X} is only step one of a much longer project, and that if told us that {X} led to {Y} which led to {Z}, we'd code it differently. But he doesn't do that, so we've spent time refactoring to handle the parts he didn't tell us about. (He's getting better about this, but it's still bad.)
He thinks hard-coding the users which have access to a module in the system is a good idea. Because no one is ever fired or quits. (That's sarcasm)
Hate to break it to you, but digital tools to enhance the pen and paper game have been around for some years as well. Dungeon creators, mapping tools, random encounter generators, character builders. Again, this is "more digital", but it's hardly just now "going digital".
And yet we have testimony from survivors and from Nazis stationed at the camp that they were used for that very thing. Hell's teeth, former SS members who were there have come out against Holocaust deniers.
Why is it appalling? Because millions of people died in the Holocaust, and pretending that it didn't happen is appalling. Because Holocaust deniers aren't interested in an honest conversation, they're interested in pushing their particular view of history regardless of the facts.
If someone claimed that the Flintstones was a documentary, we'd laugh at them. If someone claimed that the Queen of England was a reptilian, we'd laugh at them. But we're supposed to let Holocaust deniers have the benefit of a place at the table in this discussion?
I think there's a bit of difference between "can't sue a foreign government" and "charging foreign spies". Now, if some of the users on Yahoo who were affected by this tried to sue the Russian government over this, that precedent could apply.
Well, the Yahoo hack happened in 2014, and they're just now getting around to charging these Russian spies. So, you know, investigations such as this take a while to run.
Now, the Trump administration is almost certainly doing everything they can to slow-walk any investigation into the election, but that's not the same thing as no investigation happening.
Let's say robots end up planting, tending, and harvesting all our crops. Crop prices will not drop to some amazingly cheap level, because there will still be the inherent costs of seeds, fertilizer and irrigation, as well as the costs of transporting the crops to market.
Then add in the power and maintenance costs of the robots.
Then add in any overhead I missed.
Then add in the profit margin for the corporation who owns the farm and robots.
How long until all the big ISPs do whatever corporate-legalese-bullshit to split into enough "small" ISPs to effectively screw all the customers in the U.S.? By which I mean that they don't actually break up, they just appear to, and legally meet the requirements.
I'm a liberal in a very conservative state, and I don't think all of those on the right are fascists. Hell, barely any of them are. Just like damn few on the left are really communists. Generalizations like that are certainly not helping public discourse.
Except that, depending on the forum, you're already accepting limitations on your freedom of speech by agreeing to their Terms of Use.
I assure you, if I were to (for example) go on the official World of Warcraft forums and start spouting racist nonsense, I would be banned from the forums so fast it would make your head spin. (Now, I wouldn't do that because I'm not racist. It's an example.)
Now, it doesn't matter that I have freedom of speech. I had it. I used it. I used it in a manner that the organization hosting the forum found unacceptable, and they showed me the door.
The problem isn't freedom of speech (or the perceived lack thereof). The problem is people who post toxic stuff and then act like they have an absolute right to do so without any consequences.
Most of us, if not all of us, have seen someone pull this sort of behavior. They act like a jerk, and then when someone takes offense or asks them to stop, they pull a "well, it's only a joke". Now, I'm not saying every post on every forum has to be squeaky-clean and never ever offend anyone. It's just not going to happen.
But most forums ban specific behavior. And they do so for a reason.
If they're refusing access to the forum because the user is a protected class, that would be a potential issue.
Being an asshole isn't a protected class.
And I'm hard pressed to think of a forum that doesn't have some Terms of Use. And most of them spell out behavior that will get you banned.
But does a forum run by a game company, or a business, or a political group or whatever count as a public accommodation? Even if it was, even in a business of public accommodation, there is behavior that will get you shown the door, if not getting the cops called on you.
Freedom of speech is NOT freedom from consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering. But I am not an engineer. I have never utilized the degree in a professional setting, or been paid for any engineering work. While I have passed the EIT (Engineer In Training) exam in college, I do not have the requisite years of experience to take the PE (Professional Engineer) exam.
That being said, you can be an engineer without taking/passing the PE. It just usually gets you a raise, and you can be considered a professional in terms of legal cases.
Between 2009 and 2015, George W. Bush gave at least 200 paid speeches, typically getting $100,000 to $175,000.
Wait, you mean it's only a problem when a Democrat does it?
http://www.politico.com/story/...
I graduated with my C.S. degree in the summer of 2000. It was still during the dotcom crash. So, I had student loan debt, and the places that I applied at had their choice of "recent graduate with no experience" and "every other programmer in the area with experience who had lost their job".
Mind you, I'm on the completely other side of the country from Silicon Valley, but there were _not_ a lot of entry-level programmer positions open around here in 2000.
So, I ended up getting a retail job (thanks to a friend of mine) a few blocks from where I lived. I thought I'd work it for a few months, continue to put out resumes, and I'd find something.
Except that didn't happen. Every place I sent my resume to either never responded, or they'd "let me know" and then never get back in touch. It didn't help the the university I had graduated from was continuing to graduate C.S. students at a good rate, not warning them at all that "hey, it might be difficult to find a job". (Their job placement assistance service SUCKED at the time.)
I ended up getting stuck in a rut. It was remarkably easy to 'just get by' on what I made working retail. I didn't have a car, so no car-based expenses, but it also limited where I could go for interviews. The job itself was generally boring as hell, but I worked the graveyard shift, so there were nights where I had no customers, but had to keep the store open anyway.
Like I said, I got stuck in a rut. It took complaining about retail customers one too many times to a friend of mine before he asked me if I wanted to try to get a job where he worked. I told him "I can't do sales" (I knew where he worked.) and he said, "No, as a programmer."
And I've been at that company for 4 1/2 years. It's had its ups and downs here, but it's still miles better than working retail, especially during the Christmas season.
Hell, I look at code I wrote 3 months ago and wonder what I was thinking.
Show of hands, who's actually shocked by this news?
Trump is full of all talk, little action, and most of that is misguided. He doesn't seem to have the first clue as to what he's doing, and his administration is either following that lead, or following Trump's only other plan, which is loot as much as possible before leaving office.
I switched jobs when I was 40. I went from a retail job that I had been working at for over a decade, to a programmer at a small company.
Now, I had a degree in Computer Science, so it's not like I was making that jump with nothing to back it up. But I still spent the first couple months on the job just learning. (Hell, technically, I'm still learning.)
Not everyone is going to be able to make that jump. Sometimes it's going to be because of their age. Or rather, because some people believe that at their age, they can't make that jump. Some people can't make that jump because they lack the skills and can't get hired at an entry-level position when there are better applicants available.
Where I work, none of our programmers (of which I am one) are allowed to work from home any more except in cases of emergency. Mind you, it's a small company, and there's only three of us programmers here to begin with, and we're all on Slack and have fairly open lines of communication with each other.
But one of the bosses apparently gets a case of the chapped ass if he can't have a pointless meeting at the drop of a hat to go over something we've covered a handful of times already. So, anyone working from home is a direct affront to his micro-managing style. (This is the same guy who got upset that no one came in on July 4th last year when we were closed.)
Just going by what Grover Norquist says, all taxes are so bad as to be intolerable. Not only must any new tax be offset with a tax reduction somewhere else, but conservatives should all sign his pledge to not add any new taxes, ever, ever, ever.
You know, because the world is perfectly constant, and nothing unexpected ever happens.
It's not even that the rich have to be that smart to pay much less (if anything) in taxes. It's that they can afford to hire people to find/exploit every tax loophole they can. I feel relatively safe in assuming that Trump doesn't pour over his own tax returns every year making sure that everything is set up for him to pay as little as possible. He has people to do that for him.
Because there's generally a pay range for that position. It's actually pretty rare for an open position to be something like "$90K a year, no wiggle room". It's more likely to be something like "$80-95K a year, depending on experience".
And if they know you were making, say, $75K at your last job, maybe they'll offer you something in the lower range, because while it's still more money to you, it's less money that they have to offer.
I don't even think it would be "over time". Pretty much the instant one major ISP starts charging for premium access (or whatever the fuck they end up calling it) the rest will jump on that bandwagon like nobody's business.
First off, this guy is not a programmer. At all. He's just the boss.
He thinks that a word doc detailing the project is 90% of the work.
He doesn't have a problem with waiting until 4:45 p.m. to come into the IT room with a "simple request". (To be fair, about a third of the time it is a simple request.)
Last year, we had a day off for some holiday or another (not one of the major ones); HR announced it and everything - no body would be working that day. He came in anyway, and was passive aggressive pissy for the rest of the week because none of the rest of IT came in.
He emails people way, way, waaaaaay after hours about projects.
He doesn't seem to understand the idea of detailing a project from start to finish. Like, we're given a project - do {X}. Only it turns out that {X} is only step one of a much longer project, and that if told us that {X} led to {Y} which led to {Z}, we'd code it differently. But he doesn't do that, so we've spent time refactoring to handle the parts he didn't tell us about. (He's getting better about this, but it's still bad.)
He thinks hard-coding the users which have access to a module in the system is a good idea. Because no one is ever fired or quits. (That's sarcasm)
Hate to break it to you, but digital tools to enhance the pen and paper game have been around for some years as well. Dungeon creators, mapping tools, random encounter generators, character builders. Again, this is "more digital", but it's hardly just now "going digital".
And yet we have testimony from survivors and from Nazis stationed at the camp that they were used for that very thing. Hell's teeth, former SS members who were there have come out against Holocaust deniers.
I seem to have read your argument about gas chambers somewhere else. It's pretty damn similar to the wikipedia article concerning criticism of Holocaust denier arguments.
Why is it appalling? Because millions of people died in the Holocaust, and pretending that it didn't happen is appalling. Because Holocaust deniers aren't interested in an honest conversation, they're interested in pushing their particular view of history regardless of the facts.
If someone claimed that the Flintstones was a documentary, we'd laugh at them. If someone claimed that the Queen of England was a reptilian, we'd laugh at them. But we're supposed to let Holocaust deniers have the benefit of a place at the table in this discussion?
Fuck that.
I seriously doubt anyone is going to put to death over hacking Yahoo.
I think there's a bit of difference between "can't sue a foreign government" and "charging foreign spies". Now, if some of the users on Yahoo who were affected by this tried to sue the Russian government over this, that precedent could apply.
Well, the Yahoo hack happened in 2014, and they're just now getting around to charging these Russian spies. So, you know, investigations such as this take a while to run.
Now, the Trump administration is almost certainly doing everything they can to slow-walk any investigation into the election, but that's not the same thing as no investigation happening.
Bet it feels really good when you stop.
Don't count on that.
Let's say robots end up planting, tending, and harvesting all our crops. Crop prices will not drop to some amazingly cheap level, because there will still be the inherent costs of seeds, fertilizer and irrigation, as well as the costs of transporting the crops to market.
Then add in the power and maintenance costs of the robots.
Then add in any overhead I missed.
Then add in the profit margin for the corporation who owns the farm and robots.
How long until all the big ISPs do whatever corporate-legalese-bullshit to split into enough "small" ISPs to effectively screw all the customers in the U.S.? By which I mean that they don't actually break up, they just appear to, and legally meet the requirements.
Oh, horseshit.
I'm a liberal in a very conservative state, and I don't think all of those on the right are fascists. Hell, barely any of them are. Just like damn few on the left are really communists. Generalizations like that are certainly not helping public discourse.
Except that, depending on the forum, you're already accepting limitations on your freedom of speech by agreeing to their Terms of Use.
I assure you, if I were to (for example) go on the official World of Warcraft forums and start spouting racist nonsense, I would be banned from the forums so fast it would make your head spin. (Now, I wouldn't do that because I'm not racist. It's an example.)
Now, it doesn't matter that I have freedom of speech. I had it. I used it. I used it in a manner that the organization hosting the forum found unacceptable, and they showed me the door.
The problem isn't freedom of speech (or the perceived lack thereof). The problem is people who post toxic stuff and then act like they have an absolute right to do so without any consequences.
Most of us, if not all of us, have seen someone pull this sort of behavior. They act like a jerk, and then when someone takes offense or asks them to stop, they pull a "well, it's only a joke". Now, I'm not saying every post on every forum has to be squeaky-clean and never ever offend anyone. It's just not going to happen.
But most forums ban specific behavior. And they do so for a reason.
If they're refusing access to the forum because the user is a protected class, that would be a potential issue.
Being an asshole isn't a protected class.
And I'm hard pressed to think of a forum that doesn't have some Terms of Use. And most of them spell out behavior that will get you banned.
But does a forum run by a game company, or a business, or a political group or whatever count as a public accommodation? Even if it was, even in a business of public accommodation, there is behavior that will get you shown the door, if not getting the cops called on you.
Freedom of speech is NOT freedom from consequences.