Oh no, the US has a ton of problems. But it it's nowhere near as bad as today's (and tomorrow's, for at least another few years) Russia. Here, you can easily live your entire life without giving or receiving a bribe. There, it's just a fact of life, and some fairly mundane things just can't be done without bribing someone. Here, in a court of law, you actually have a pretty solid chance of getting a fair trial. There, you have to bribe the judge and hope to god that your opponent did not pay more (or is not a government bureaucrat; if so you can die in prison for no fault of your own). Here, when a police officer stops your car, he has a legitimate concern about the way you're driving, there it's to shake you down. And so on and so forth.
This _will not_ end well. They now have a whole generation of people in their mid- to late 20s, born in early to mid-80's and raised without fear. Given the lack of upward mobility, these folks are now wondering why is it that a bunch of Politburo style old farts are running the country and not sharing the wealth. Given the lack of the proper political system, the only way for these folks to get what they want will be to overthrow the government one way or another. I give it another 5 years. Putin will not complete his third term.
The difference between the US and this is that in Russia this is paid for with enormous amounts of taxpayer money (hired drummers alone at a pro-Puting meeting cost something like $800K), and people are threatened with pink slips at work unless they go to pro-government meetings. When you live hand to mouth and don't have any savings, the prospect of getting fired over some BS meeting is pretty scary. And when the election time rolls around, they stuff the ballot boxes, and then if that proves insufficient, simply rewrite final counts when no one is looking. That country is truly ruled by a bunch of crooks and thieves. Can't wait to see the Russian people to hang them on the "teeth" of the Kremlin wall. They did this a hundred years ago, they can do it again. Russia just can't catch a fucking break.
Not daily, that's too often (at least for the more senior folks). If you're doing something hard, you can't really finish a cohesive unit of work in a day. Here's how I do it in the project I run. We have a planning meeting every Monday. It lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. During this meeting we discuss what was accomplished over the past week, and plan out the next one or two weeks (usually one). That's it. During the week we just, you know, talk to one another and resolve issues as they come up, and not stress about what we are going to say at our next standup meeting. Works great!
How about we instead turn our rightful indignation against Big Pharma and ask why the fuck is it not legal to buy the same drugs from Canada for less? When I moved to the US, I was shocked by how badly US residents are being gouged when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Nowhere else in the world do drugs cost as much as they do in the US. In some places the same exact drugs by the same exact companies are sold at 1/5th to 1/10th the price.
Most companies don't allow shorting or hedging company stock, at least to higher level employees. Some don't allow it for anyone. This creates conflict of interest.
Why would anyone want retarded shit like this? I mean, seriously? Who has windows this small? How much would it cost if it were the size of a real window? And even if it was remotely affordable, why? It will never be as good as a window at light transmission, and it will never be as good at showing images as a real display.
>> I've got a project that we think you'd really be able to help
And that, my friend, is when you document stuff, by gathering your notes and throwing them up on the Wiki. But in a small company, I don't see how this situation would ever arise. And in a large company, unless you actually demand that the project be assigned to you, you won't get shit, because someone else will be assigned to it instead. I've seen many an engineer wither and burn out by waiting until they're _given_ more responsibility. That's not how it works, you have to take it.
Unless you've been told to do it, don't do any of this at all, for two reasons: 1. Documentation efforts are often perceived by management as a waste of time 2. By documenting everything extremely well, you create a visibility that it would be easy to find a replacement for you if you e.g. demand a raise or screw up one day.
Cynical, I know, but in most places, those are the rules of the game.
Yeah, stick it out if you'd like, but then don't whine that you get reamed in the ass during the yearly performance review. And for the love of god, don't post your resume to the "career sites". Do your research instead. Employers nowadays like employees who are picky. In my last job search, I only sent out resumes to two places. Got interviews from both, got offers from both (actually two offers from the first one, for different positions), with paying being 30% higher than the other. Easy. Lottery? I don't think so. I worked hard for 15 years to build the reputation and chops I have.
But do heed the advice: get off your ass and change jobs every now and then. I changed jobs twice during the crisis. Good people are always in demand. If you want more than sub-inflation raises (or no raises at all), get off your butt and see if you can find something better. With luck, you will. If you don't try, you definitely won't. As simple as that.
But they didn't use his "likeness". They used the concrete photograph. I'm sure if they decided to make toys of Gandhi, they'd have to get a different kind of deal. With photographs, it is common practice to have models sign "releases", which lets the photographer do with the photograph what he sees fit.
For instance, F-35 JSF started its life as a carbon copy of Yak-141, blueprints for which Locheed Martin blatantly stole from Russians by first forming and then dissolving a "partnership" with the Yakovlev bureau all in the span of about a year. Don't believe me? Check out the videos below:
So if you wondered why Netflix was shooting itself in the feet repeatedly a few months back, now you know why. Folks are not going to be as satisfied with their by-mail service if DVDs take three days to show up, and three days to get back.
It doesn't matter. Their shuttle was groundbreaking for its time (fully automatic flight and landing of a heavy, multiple-use spacecraft — no one, including the US, could replicate this until late 00s), but they were in the same situation as the US today — they simply couldn't afford it. They can afford to reliably sling a load to ISS every few months, manned or not. In retrospect, their decision to abandon the Buran was the right one, since you can launch thirty people and tons of cargo into orbit for the price of a single shuttle launch.
Another thing to consider is this: it takes mere years of inaction to lose any kind of advanced capability and decades of hard work to get it back. And this particular capability is not something we want to lose.
Think about it this way: it's a heck of a lot cheaper than wars (by an order of magnitude), while still giving politicians and nations an opportunity to compare who's dick is longer. That's what it's all about. Paraphrasing Kennedy: "We don't do it because it's easy, we do it because we have to show our dick is much longer than anyone else's". I mean, Russia is recovering little by little, to such an extent that they're the only country in the world which can still reliably put shit into orbit, and they intend to land on Venus again in 2016, and this time spend a month on the surface, not a couple of hours like their previous missions. In the meanwhile the US is circling down the crapper. Sure, it'll take a long time for us to sink low enough to match Russia's current level, but unless we do something about it, we'll get there eventually. I mean, compare the Pentagon budget to NASA's. If we swapped them, in 10 years we'd get manned interstellar travel at the speed of light.:-)
A couple of things I'd like to see as a follow-up from these guys:
1. More advanced courses. Perhaps even non-trivial project suggestions for folks to try out, with practical advice on how to solve issues. I mean, it would be pretty cool to apply some of the techniques to NLP, pattern recognition and so on. I've done this myself in the past (I've worked in MS Research for a while), but for most folks the barrier to entry will be insurmountable without help. 2. Do a post-mortem on what went well and what sucked (in particular in AI Class, some parts of which really strain human intelligence with ambiguity, lack of practical consideration, and poor explanations), and fix the parts that sucked before the course is re-run. Do this iteratively after each re-run until things are so good, there's nothing to change anymore.
Frankly, I think this is the future of education. It is simply not practical to have a fan-out of a few hundred people for each course for one simple reason: you never know who's a genius and who's not. Giving a starting material to more people will hopefully uncover more folks capable of making progress in the field, even though these classes are rather pedestrian. The missing piece of the puzzle are free textbooks. Combine free (preferably electronic) textbooks, free video lectures and automatic homework grading, and you've got something that will grab people's attention for the entire semester (which neither straight up lectures, nor books alone manage to do).
Another thing this does is it levels the playing field between folks who can pay for Stanford education and those who can not. Not completely, not by any stretch, but you don't really need to be a genius to apply a lot of this stuff. Fairly basic calculus and linear algebra is quite sufficient. You do need to be somewhat more of a genius to invent new stuff in this field, though.:-)
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I have news for you, wealth was not fairly distributed even in the USSR. Some had more than others.
And where did I say anything about "fair" distribution of wealth? There's no such thing. There is such a thing as living without bribery and theft.
Oh no, the US has a ton of problems. But it it's nowhere near as bad as today's (and tomorrow's, for at least another few years) Russia. Here, you can easily live your entire life without giving or receiving a bribe. There, it's just a fact of life, and some fairly mundane things just can't be done without bribing someone. Here, in a court of law, you actually have a pretty solid chance of getting a fair trial. There, you have to bribe the judge and hope to god that your opponent did not pay more (or is not a government bureaucrat; if so you can die in prison for no fault of your own). Here, when a police officer stops your car, he has a legitimate concern about the way you're driving, there it's to shake you down. And so on and so forth.
This _will not_ end well. They now have a whole generation of people in their mid- to late 20s, born in early to mid-80's and raised without fear. Given the lack of upward mobility, these folks are now wondering why is it that a bunch of Politburo style old farts are running the country and not sharing the wealth. Given the lack of the proper political system, the only way for these folks to get what they want will be to overthrow the government one way or another. I give it another 5 years. Putin will not complete his third term.
The difference between the US and this is that in Russia this is paid for with enormous amounts of taxpayer money (hired drummers alone at a pro-Puting meeting cost something like $800K), and people are threatened with pink slips at work unless they go to pro-government meetings. When you live hand to mouth and don't have any savings, the prospect of getting fired over some BS meeting is pretty scary. And when the election time rolls around, they stuff the ballot boxes, and then if that proves insufficient, simply rewrite final counts when no one is looking. That country is truly ruled by a bunch of crooks and thieves. Can't wait to see the Russian people to hang them on the "teeth" of the Kremlin wall. They did this a hundred years ago, they can do it again. Russia just can't catch a fucking break.
Not daily, that's too often (at least for the more senior folks). If you're doing something hard, you can't really finish a cohesive unit of work in a day. Here's how I do it in the project I run. We have a planning meeting every Monday. It lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. During this meeting we discuss what was accomplished over the past week, and plan out the next one or two weeks (usually one). That's it. During the week we just, you know, talk to one another and resolve issues as they come up, and not stress about what we are going to say at our next standup meeting. Works great!
How about we instead turn our rightful indignation against Big Pharma and ask why the fuck is it not legal to buy the same drugs from Canada for less? When I moved to the US, I was shocked by how badly US residents are being gouged when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Nowhere else in the world do drugs cost as much as they do in the US. In some places the same exact drugs by the same exact companies are sold at 1/5th to 1/10th the price.
http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/images/07-minister.jpg
I think I'm hearing familiar intonations there.
Most companies don't allow shorting or hedging company stock, at least to higher level employees. Some don't allow it for anyone. This creates conflict of interest.
Why would anyone want retarded shit like this? I mean, seriously? Who has windows this small? How much would it cost if it were the size of a real window? And even if it was remotely affordable, why? It will never be as good as a window at light transmission, and it will never be as good at showing images as a real display.
If there's any industry that needs to be destroyed, it's the blood sucking textbook industry. Looking forward to $9.95 textbooks on the App Store.
That's still 34 lines longer than it needs to be. :-)
>> And, in fact, dartc already cross compiles Dart code to plain Javascript
Last I checked, it compiled "hello world" into a 17K line Javascript program. Not exactly optimal.
Shoulda used a Mac. Time Machine is a godsend.
>> I've got a project that we think you'd really be able to help
And that, my friend, is when you document stuff, by gathering your notes and throwing them up on the Wiki. But in a small company, I don't see how this situation would ever arise. And in a large company, unless you actually demand that the project be assigned to you, you won't get shit, because someone else will be assigned to it instead. I've seen many an engineer wither and burn out by waiting until they're _given_ more responsibility. That's not how it works, you have to take it.
Unless you've been told to do it, don't do any of this at all, for two reasons:
1. Documentation efforts are often perceived by management as a waste of time
2. By documenting everything extremely well, you create a visibility that it would be easy to find a replacement for you if you e.g. demand a raise or screw up one day.
Cynical, I know, but in most places, those are the rules of the game.
Yeah, stick it out if you'd like, but then don't whine that you get reamed in the ass during the yearly performance review. And for the love of god, don't post your resume to the "career sites". Do your research instead. Employers nowadays like employees who are picky. In my last job search, I only sent out resumes to two places. Got interviews from both, got offers from both (actually two offers from the first one, for different positions), with paying being 30% higher than the other. Easy. Lottery? I don't think so. I worked hard for 15 years to build the reputation and chops I have.
But do heed the advice: get off your ass and change jobs every now and then. I changed jobs twice during the crisis. Good people are always in demand. If you want more than sub-inflation raises (or no raises at all), get off your butt and see if you can find something better. With luck, you will. If you don't try, you definitely won't. As simple as that.
But they didn't use his "likeness". They used the concrete photograph. I'm sure if they decided to make toys of Gandhi, they'd have to get a different kind of deal. With photographs, it is common practice to have models sign "releases", which lets the photographer do with the photograph what he sees fit.
I believe they actually acquired the respective rights to all the photos.
Recommended. You can safely skip the last 20 minutes.
For instance, F-35 JSF started its life as a carbon copy of Yak-141, blueprints for which Locheed Martin blatantly stole from Russians by first forming and then dissolving a "partnership" with the Yakovlev bureau all in the span of about a year. Don't believe me? Check out the videos below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ohOKthO18 - Yak 141, circa 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki86x1WKPmE - F-35, 2011
See other videos of Yak-141, and see it from the rear in particular. F-35 is a blatant copy, just with today's electronics and stealth.
So if you wondered why Netflix was shooting itself in the feet repeatedly a few months back, now you know why. Folks are not going to be as satisfied with their by-mail service if DVDs take three days to show up, and three days to get back.
It doesn't matter. Their shuttle was groundbreaking for its time (fully automatic flight and landing of a heavy, multiple-use spacecraft — no one, including the US, could replicate this until late 00s), but they were in the same situation as the US today — they simply couldn't afford it. They can afford to reliably sling a load to ISS every few months, manned or not. In retrospect, their decision to abandon the Buran was the right one, since you can launch thirty people and tons of cargo into orbit for the price of a single shuttle launch.
Another thing to consider is this: it takes mere years of inaction to lose any kind of advanced capability and decades of hard work to get it back. And this particular capability is not something we want to lose.
Think about it this way: it's a heck of a lot cheaper than wars (by an order of magnitude), while still giving politicians and nations an opportunity to compare who's dick is longer. That's what it's all about. Paraphrasing Kennedy: "We don't do it because it's easy, we do it because we have to show our dick is much longer than anyone else's". I mean, Russia is recovering little by little, to such an extent that they're the only country in the world which can still reliably put shit into orbit, and they intend to land on Venus again in 2016, and this time spend a month on the surface, not a couple of hours like their previous missions. In the meanwhile the US is circling down the crapper. Sure, it'll take a long time for us to sink low enough to match Russia's current level, but unless we do something about it, we'll get there eventually. I mean, compare the Pentagon budget to NASA's. If we swapped them, in 10 years we'd get manned interstellar travel at the speed of light. :-)
Maybe it is, but when I was driving along there it was all hazy so I couldn't see shit. :-) It was in July a couple of years back.
A couple of things I'd like to see as a follow-up from these guys:
1. More advanced courses. Perhaps even non-trivial project suggestions for folks to try out, with practical advice on how to solve issues. I mean, it would be pretty cool to apply some of the techniques to NLP, pattern recognition and so on. I've done this myself in the past (I've worked in MS Research for a while), but for most folks the barrier to entry will be insurmountable without help.
2. Do a post-mortem on what went well and what sucked (in particular in AI Class, some parts of which really strain human intelligence with ambiguity, lack of practical consideration, and poor explanations), and fix the parts that sucked before the course is re-run. Do this iteratively after each re-run until things are so good, there's nothing to change anymore.
Frankly, I think this is the future of education. It is simply not practical to have a fan-out of a few hundred people for each course for one simple reason: you never know who's a genius and who's not. Giving a starting material to more people will hopefully uncover more folks capable of making progress in the field, even though these classes are rather pedestrian. The missing piece of the puzzle are free textbooks. Combine free (preferably electronic) textbooks, free video lectures and automatic homework grading, and you've got something that will grab people's attention for the entire semester (which neither straight up lectures, nor books alone manage to do).
Another thing this does is it levels the playing field between folks who can pay for Stanford education and those who can not. Not completely, not by any stretch, but you don't really need to be a genius to apply a lot of this stuff. Fairly basic calculus and linear algebra is quite sufficient. You do need to be somewhat more of a genius to invent new stuff in this field, though. :-)