In this case, reputable scientist is defined how? Media coverage? There is massive debate in all of the sciences that this touches. A good friend of mine, a solar astrophysicist, has been pointing out for nearly a decade that we have HARD EVIDENCE in the ice records that a massive up-swing in temperature happened in the roughly 500-800AD period, and damaged much of the world's species (there are many human communities that were hurt badly by this).
This change in temperature could have had several causes, but the simplest explanation is that the power output of the sun fluctuates over time...
It was obviously due to human activity... the evilly prosperous Byzantine Empire generated metric tonness of horse dung (and incedental gasses) daily. My computer model (Age of Empires II) demonstrates that it was clearly so.
Now I'm no Scientist (upper S), but "helping" natural selection seems like a pretty dangerous idea.
How do we know that a "bad" gene isn't a "good" gene under different circumstances? i.e. Sickle-cell anemia offering resistance to malaria.
I haven't been actively involved in mapping out the Human Genome, but I'm pretty certain that we don't know what all of the genes and combinations mean just yet.
What if the next few generations carefully weed out genes that cause moles and 300 years from now a mutant Neue Spanish Flu comes along and BAM! the entire human race is gone due to an inability to synthesize protiens that could have only been generated from the now-extinct genes?
Now I'm no Scientist (upper S), but "helping" natural selection seems like a pretty dangerous idea.
How do we know that a "bad" gene isn't a "good" gene under different circumstances? i.e. Sickle-cell anemia offering resistance to malaria.
I haven't been actively involved in mapping out the Human Genome, but I'm pretty certain that we don't know what all of the genes and combinations mean just yet.
What if the next few generations carefully weed out genes that cause moles and 300 years from now a mutant Neue Spanish Flu comes along and BAM! the entire human race is gone due to an inability to synthesize protiens that could have only been generated from the now-extinct genes?
Let me get this straight... somebody wrote a book that had opinions in it? I have never heard of such a thing.
And he favored facts and statistics that helped validate his hypothesis? I am absolutely floored. I cannot picture people doing this.
Am I understand this correctly? It seems that people who agree with him are happy with his book, and people who don't agree him are upset. Once again, I am stunned if this is the case.
Francis Bacon sort of summed it up -
The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; which proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.
I think that all managers, not just the ones who who herd geeks, have to be good with people first and foremost.
In my experience the best managers are acombination of psychologist, administrator, cheerleader, bookkeeper, and nanny.
You know the sort (hopefully) - The ones who credit their team after a success and blame themselves after a failure. The ones who listen to your ideas and sets you straight when you've been an ass. The ones who make make you feel like you're a part of a conspiracy, rather than someone who's being exploited by it.
About 1 in 4 managers (or less!) are like this, or are at least trying to be somewhat like this.
A manager who has coding, network, engineering, etc... skills has a big advanatage when herding geeks, but his/her human being skills are what really makes the difference.
Well if you follow some rules it shouldn't matter what language you use:) Really though, difficulty reading a language is usually due to
1) lack of commenting (duh!)
2) being unfamiliar with a language
3) lack of organization (formatting code blocks)
I'd add a 4th, though it's related to the first:
4) Meaningless variable names.
I rue the times that I've maintained other people's code that was load with code like this:
temp = foo;
if (temp > = g) {
for (int x = 1; x > rst.length; x++ )
{
if (rst[x] < noid) temp -=.05;
}
}
What the????? What is temp? Clearly not the temperature, since this is a financial application. Is it really that freakin' much harder to write something like:
newInterestRate = STANDARD_RATE;
if (interestRate > = cutoffRate) {
for (int x = 1; x < possibleRates.length; x++ )
{
if (possibleRates[x] < THRESHHOLD) newInterestRate -=.05;
}
}
BTW, sorry for using pseudo-java as a ferinstance.
What the heck happened to the cartoon series? Did it just evaporate once it was sold to Comedy Central? I had mere basic cable at that time, so I wouldn't know.
I have two degrees, one in CS and one in Archaeology. CS isn't what I want my career to be in, but I can take my computer skills and development knowledge and apply it to archaeology problems.
Eager Student: Professor Jooky!!! I found this in the refuse pile of the settlement!!
Professor Jooky: Why, I do believe that what you've found is an old KIM-1 motherboard! And look... see those red letters there? They used to call those ELL-EEE-DEEs...
Eager Student: Woowwww!
Professor Jooky: Now let's see if we can find a "cassette player"... There's a good chance that there may be a piece of software called "Eliza" on it if it's nearby.
How many of you have run across the sort of Comp Sci grad who can espouse the virtues of the Booch Method but can't write a freakin' shell script to save their life?
I don't care HOW you got your knowledge. If you spent $$$ for four years at Carnegie Mellon, fine. If you spent you evenings reading books and writing programs while you were working at McDonalds, fine.
What really matters is how well you can do the job that you are supposed to do.
College sometimes (and even often) helps, but it just helps.
We have met the Enemy, and it is Us...
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
The owners of corporations don't give a damn about what a corporation does as long as it turns a profit and the stock price keeps climbing.
It would be nice to think that it's a couple of coupon-clipping patricians that are the owners. It's true that the same people own a big chunk of all the stock share that are out there.
But middle and lower class people who tuck retirement money and savings via mutual and other funds make up the most influencial block of "owners". And the fact is, most people who invest like this don't give a damn what their investment firm does with it, so long as they get interest out of it.
Corporations lay off workers in order to stabilize their stocks and/or make themselves more profitable in order to attract purchases from investment firms, who will make their purchases with the money supplied by workers.
Hmm... Ironic.
From the Devil's Dictionary (Ambrose Bierce):
Corporation: n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without indvididual responsibility.
Interesting, but I think some of your conclusions are off the mark
If poverty is the Mother of Terrorism, then why aren't Bangladesh, West African countries,
Vietnam or Haiti better known as breeding grounds for Terrorism?
I suspect that it's these countries aren't quite as adept as Middle-Eastern nations at
exploiting external enemies to draw attention away from internal problems.
Political and Religious leaders in the Middle East are primarily concerned about
preserving and/increasing their own power (pretty much like "leaders" everywhere).
The ordinary people there are sucked into viewing Israel and the US as the enemies
of their well-being and prosperity and the Islam religion,
rather than their own leaders.
The attack upon the US has done politicians here a big favor - It's drawn our minds away
from our internal problems, at least for the time being.
Is your country a "third world" country? Look inward for the resolution of
your problems. Be suspicious of finger-pointers.
Is your country a poor country? If it bothers you that much, then do something
about it. More than likely it's more-corrupt-than usual aristocratic or autocratic
government that's keeping its citizens in a state of serfdom.
How 'bout if TPJ sponsors an Unobfuscated Perl contest?
I'm serious, here. It's not very diffucult to make Perl code thats hard to understand, but it's a bit harder to make Perl code thats absolutely clear.
So how about an Unobfuscated Perl contest where the participants are rewarded for making the most difficult/obscure process the most clear? In 250 lines or less.
It's a simple matter of ownership. When a railroad company wants to run tracks across your property, they must purchase or rent it from you. When a cell or radio provider wants to put a fenced in tower and small shack on your property, they must purchase or rent it from you. When you lay an oil, water, or gas pipeline across my property, you must pay rent to me each month. This is the case just south of my home town. In the late '20s a gas line was laid across south-central/south-eastern Kansas. It crossed the family land of a friend of mine. The gas company gave the owners of the land two options. One was $100 in cash. The other was that the price of gas for whomever owns that piece of land will never go up higher than the cost of natural gas the year the line was laid. That's right. They still pay gas prices from the late '20s. Nice.:) Do you think that just because you want to lay a few strands of fiber in the ground that you are exempt from paying me some sort of restitution? I don't think so. What happens if I'm a farmer and you laid the fiber in the ground across one of my fields. I go out one weekend and rebuild a few terraces in that field and end up digging up that piece of fiber. Was it my fault? Unless I gave permission to put that line there (and believe you me I wouldn't do it unless I could have some compensation for baby-sitting it), it is trespassing on my property. You trespassed when you put it there. You dug a trench in my field. That's destruction of private property. Like I said at the beginning, it's a simple matter of ownership.
More typically - When a railroad company, or anybody else, wants to run tracks, roads, pipes, etc across your property, they will bribe local, state, and federal authorities to use "emminent domain" to seize the land from you, claiming that their operation is acting in "the public interest". You may or may not be compensated with money that will come from the treasury, rather than the party that is trying to get your land.
Parties that don't have the lawyers or cash to engage in the more common scenario may have to compensate you.
If I accidentally dig up a cable or pipe on "my" property, more than likely I will be in trouble. I should have consulted with local and county authorities ($$$) and checked with all imaginable utility companies in order to make sure that I wouldn't be causing any problems for them. I could be held liable for the costs of repairs and be fined for such audacity.
Property ownership has been greatly abstracted into mineral rights, water rights, drilling rights, right of way, etc. Property "ownership" really only "guarantees" an individual the "right" to dwell upon, perform minor construction, and possibly farm the property in question, subject to the tender mercies of zoning boards, property taxes, the EPA, etc.
The concept of property ownership is a social convenience that is becoming terribly inconvenient.
Hiring open-source developers for closed-source projects shouldn't be a problem as long as there isn't a conflict of interest.
For example, it's probably not a good idea to hire a developer to work on a closed-source OS if he/she is spending a lot of time on the Linux kernel. One cut-and-paste could conceivably put someone in legal Gehenna.
Hiring someone who is busy with open source or FSF code might me a good idea, though. It show's that they likely give a crap about development, and probably aren't drones.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, reputable scientist is defined how? Media coverage? There is massive debate in all of the sciences that this touches. A good friend of mine, a solar astrophysicist, has been pointing out for nearly a decade that we have HARD EVIDENCE in the ice records that a massive up-swing in temperature happened in the roughly 500-800AD period, and damaged much of the world's species (there are many human communities that were hurt badly by this).
This change in temperature could have had several causes, but the simplest explanation is that the power output of the sun fluctuates over time...
It was obviously due to human activity... the evilly prosperous Byzantine Empire generated metric tonness of horse dung (and incedental gasses) daily. My computer model (Age of Empires II) demonstrates that it was clearly so.
Awwww crap... I agree. :(
Now I'm no Scientist (upper S), but "helping" natural selection seems like a pretty dangerous idea.
How do we know that a "bad" gene isn't a "good" gene under different circumstances? i.e. Sickle-cell anemia offering resistance to malaria.
I haven't been actively involved in mapping out the Human Genome, but I'm pretty certain that we don't know what all of the genes and combinations mean just yet.
What if the next few generations carefully weed out genes that cause moles and 300 years from now a mutant Neue Spanish Flu comes along and BAM! the entire human race is gone due to an inability to synthesize protiens that could have only been generated from the now-extinct genes?
An extreme case, indeed, but you get the picture
Now I'm no Scientist (upper S), but "helping" natural selection seems like a pretty dangerous idea.
How do we know that a "bad" gene isn't a "good" gene under different circumstances? i.e. Sickle-cell anemia offering resistance to malaria.
I haven't been actively involved in mapping out the Human Genome, but I'm pretty certain that we don't know what all of the genes and combinations mean just yet.
What if the next few generations carefully weed out genes that cause moles and 300 years from now a mutant Neue Spanish Flu comes along and BAM! the entire human race is gone due to an inability to synthesize protiens that could have only been generated from the now-extinct genes?
An extreme case, indeed, but you get the picture
Now this is the kind of science that I can enjoy, especially after Book Reviews: The Skeptical Environmentalist
Let me get this straight... somebody wrote a book that had opinions in it? I have never heard of such a thing.
And he favored facts and statistics that helped validate his hypothesis? I am absolutely floored. I cannot picture people doing this.
Am I understand this correctly? It seems that people who agree with him are happy with his book, and people who don't agree him are upset. Once again, I am stunned if this is the case.
Francis Bacon sort of summed it up -
Awwww!
I think that all managers, not just the ones who who herd geeks, have to be good with people first and foremost.
In my experience the best managers are acombination of psychologist, administrator, cheerleader, bookkeeper, and nanny.
You know the sort (hopefully) - The ones who credit their team after a success and blame themselves after a failure. The ones who listen to your ideas and sets you straight when you've been an ass. The ones who make make you feel like you're a part of a conspiracy, rather than someone who's being exploited by it.
About 1 in 4 managers (or less!) are like this, or are at least trying to be somewhat like this.
A manager who has coding, network, engineering, etc... skills has a big advanatage when herding geeks, but his/her human being skills are what really makes the difference.
Well, sure they can... as corporate executives and marketing people. ;)
Well if you follow some rules it shouldn't matter what language you use :) Really though, difficulty reading a language is usually due to
1) lack of commenting (duh!)
2) being unfamiliar with a language
3) lack of organization (formatting code blocks)
I'd add a 4th, though it's related to the first:
4) Meaningless variable names.
I rue the times that I've maintained other people's code that was load with code like this:
temp = foo;
if (temp > = g) {
for (int x = 1; x > rst.length; x++ )
{
if (rst[x] < noid) temp -=
}
}
What the????? What is temp? Clearly not the temperature, since this is a financial application. Is it really that freakin' much harder to write something like:
newInterestRate = STANDARD_RATE;
if (interestRate > = cutoffRate) {
for (int x = 1; x < possibleRates.length; x++ )
{
if (possibleRates[x] < THRESHHOLD) newInterestRate -=
}
}
BTW, sorry for using pseudo-java as a ferinstance.
What the heck happened to the cartoon series? Did it just evaporate once it was sold to Comedy Central? I had mere basic cable at that time, so I wouldn't know.
Eager Student: Professor Jooky!!! I found this in the refuse pile of the settlement!!
Professor Jooky: Why, I do believe that what you've found is an old KIM-1 motherboard! And look... see those red letters there? They used to call those ELL-EEE-DEEs...
Eager Student: Woowwww!
Professor Jooky: Now let's see if we can find a "cassette player"... There's a good chance that there may be a piece of software called "Eliza" on it if it's nearby.
How many of you have run across the sort of Comp Sci grad who can espouse the virtues of the Booch Method but can't write a freakin' shell script to save their life?
I don't care HOW you got your knowledge. If you spent $$$ for four years at Carnegie Mellon, fine. If you spent you evenings reading books and writing programs while you were working at McDonalds, fine.
What really matters is how well you can do the job that you are supposed to do.
College sometimes (and even often) helps, but it just helps.
The owners of corporations don't give a damn about what a corporation does as long as it turns a profit and the stock price keeps climbing.
It would be nice to think that it's a couple of coupon-clipping patricians that are the owners. It's true that the same people own a big chunk of all the stock share that are out there.
But middle and lower class people who tuck retirement money and savings via mutual and other funds make up the most influencial block of "owners". And the fact is, most people who invest like this don't give a damn what their investment firm does with it, so long as they get interest out of it.
Corporations lay off workers in order to stabilize their stocks and/or make themselves more profitable in order to attract purchases from investment firms, who will make their purchases with the money supplied by workers.
Hmm... Ironic.
From the Devil's Dictionary (Ambrose Bierce):
>> GLOBAL POVERTY
Interesting, but I think some of your conclusions are off the mark
If poverty is the Mother of Terrorism, then why aren't Bangladesh, West African countries,
Vietnam or Haiti better known as breeding grounds for Terrorism?
I suspect that it's these countries aren't quite as adept as Middle-Eastern nations at
exploiting external enemies to draw attention away from internal problems.
Political and Religious leaders in the Middle East are primarily concerned about
preserving and/increasing their own power (pretty much like "leaders" everywhere).
The ordinary people there are sucked into viewing Israel and the US as the enemies
of their well-being and prosperity and the Islam religion,
rather than their own leaders.
The attack upon the US has done politicians here a big favor - It's drawn our minds away
from our internal problems, at least for the time being.
Is your country a "third world" country? Look inward for the resolution of
your problems. Be suspicious of finger-pointers.
Is your country a poor country? If it bothers you that much, then do something
about it. More than likely it's more-corrupt-than usual aristocratic or autocratic
government that's keeping its citizens in a state of serfdom.
How 'bout if TPJ sponsors an Unobfuscated Perl contest?
I'm serious, here. It's not very diffucult to make Perl code thats hard to understand, but it's a bit harder to make Perl code thats absolutely clear.
So how about an Unobfuscated Perl contest where the participants are rewarded for making the most difficult/obscure process the most clear? In 250 lines or less.
The lesson here?
Republicans or Democrats
Conservatives or Liberals
Money talks!
And that justice is available for anyone who can afford it.
A fungus who liked to eat CDs
Made its way to a corp'rate PC
the backups all fried
and admins all cried
mostly bitter 'bout lost MP3s
Hopefully the seating will be nice, but not too expensive.
This is just too Neeeeeeeeeet!
Knowing assembly
like a modern day wizard,
yet girls don't like me
It's a simple matter of ownership. When a railroad company wants to run tracks across your property, they must purchase or rent it from you. When a cell or radio provider wants to put a fenced in tower and small shack on your property, they must purchase or rent it from you. When you lay an oil, water, or gas pipeline across my property, you must pay rent to me each month. This is the case just south of my home town. In the late '20s a gas line was laid across south-central/south-eastern Kansas. It crossed the family land of a friend of mine. The gas company gave the owners of the land two options. One was $100 in cash. The other was that the price of gas for whomever owns that piece of land will never go up higher than the cost of natural gas the year the line was laid. That's right. They still pay gas prices from the late '20s. Nice. :) Do you think that just because you want to lay a few strands of fiber in the ground that you are exempt from paying me some sort of restitution? I don't think so. What happens if I'm a farmer and you laid the fiber in the ground across one of my fields. I go out one weekend and rebuild a few terraces in that field and end up digging up that piece of fiber. Was it my fault? Unless I gave permission to put that line there (and believe you me I wouldn't do it unless I could have some compensation for baby-sitting it), it is trespassing on my property. You trespassed when you put it there. You dug a trench in my field. That's destruction of private property. Like I said at the beginning, it's a simple matter of ownership.
More typically - When a railroad company, or anybody else, wants to run tracks, roads, pipes, etc across your property, they will bribe local, state, and federal authorities to use "emminent domain" to seize the land from you, claiming that their operation is acting in "the public interest". You may or may not be compensated with money that will come from the treasury, rather than the party that is trying to get your land.
Parties that don't have the lawyers or cash to engage in the more common scenario may have to compensate you.
If I accidentally dig up a cable or pipe on "my" property, more than likely I will be in trouble. I should have consulted with local and county authorities ($$$) and checked with all imaginable utility companies in order to make sure that I wouldn't be causing any problems for them. I could be held liable for the costs of repairs and be fined for such audacity.
Property ownership has been greatly abstracted into mineral rights, water rights, drilling rights, right of way, etc. Property "ownership" really only "guarantees" an individual the "right" to dwell upon, perform minor construction, and possibly farm the property in question, subject to the tender mercies of zoning boards, property taxes, the EPA, etc.
The concept of property ownership is a social convenience that is becoming terribly inconvenient.
Good. I was afraid that the Skylab incident might have turned off Australia to space programs forever. Wink, Wink.
Or maybe the Aussies are plotting some sort of vengeance?
Here's the obligatory HREF for you young'uns.
Hiring open-source developers for closed-source projects shouldn't be a problem as long as there isn't a conflict of interest.
For example, it's probably not a good idea to hire a developer to work on a closed-source OS if he/she is spending a lot of time on the Linux kernel. One cut-and-paste could conceivably put someone in legal Gehenna.
Hiring someone who is busy with open source or FSF code might me a good idea, though. It show's that they likely give a crap about development, and probably aren't drones.
Jessica Alba! Ooooooo-wheeeeee!
Jessica Alba.
What about Ashley Judd? Yeah! Ashley Judd!
Jessica Alba - though - those dark eyes...
No... Ashley Judd.
I'm too old for Jessica Alba, anyway.
How old is Ashley Judd?
Yeah, Ashley Judd, definitely.
Well, maybe Jessica Alba.
...