Owning a car in the city is just plain dumb unless you need to cart around big heavy items all the time.
Oh come on, some of those egos weigh a ton.;)
Seriously, though, I know a lot of people in NYC (trader types, mostly) who own and drive their cars only because they don't want to be seen as being "cheap" and not have a car. Peer pressure and all that.
There is no substitute for good practice and the more you work on problems, the more insights you have into how things work.
When I was in high-school, our math teacher used to give us hundreds of problems to solve in calculus over the weekends. Oh, it used to be a pain back then, but it sure did make me quite good at math.
Seriously, get a good book, read the concepts and solve the problems. Do as many exercises as possible and as frequently as possible, and keep challenging yourself.
There's no other way around it. Well, unless you are a genius of sorts.
WTO 1: Gentlemen, I propose we send a message to the US by fining them infinity billion dollars! WTO 2: That's the spirit, Bob! But I think a real number might be more effective.
Well, then! Maybe we should fine the US PI number of dollars! To the last digit!
1. No, I just happen to hire other people who work for me.
2. The work place may not be a democracy, but it is the *ministry* of a democratic country that's banned the site for everyone working at that ministry.
3. It is the fact that the actions of a few have caused them to block access to the encyclopedia to everyone else. If they did not want people editing, there are other ways of doing it, rather than instituting a ministry-wide ban.
Wait - so you are telling me that is there a ministry wide ban on an encyclopedia because all of six people spent their time obsessively editing various article.
Yeah, sure.
People are far to quick to cry foul and scream censorship.
No, people are too quick to give up their rights without thinking back to the reasons. If there was a ministry-wide obsession, fine. But six people and everyone in the ministry (in a democracy, no less) is banned from accessing the website? And people do not think this is a bit extreme at all?
The ministry verbally reprimanded each of the six officials, and slapped a ministry-wide order to prohibit access to Wikipedia at work, while disabling access to the site from the ministry...
Sure, some people were wasting their time doing that stuff, but it is an encyclopedia, for crying out loud. Disabling access to the site from the ministry because a handful few were obsessed about spending time on it during work? Definitely over the top.
It's like blocking Slashdot because a bunch of people were commenting obsessively. Especially when you consider the fact that it is a bloody encyclopedia, not a porn site (it may amount to the same amount of time-wasted, but still, it would be of consequence to others in the ministry who may genuinely use Wikipedia as a resource).
Shouldn't there be a censorship icon, rather than a funny one?
Seriously. Sure, these people may have been doing it during work, but a ban on what's probably one of the world's most popular encyclopedias because people are contributing to a compendium of knowledge (leaving their biases aside)? Isn't that a little ridiculous and over the board?
Traditionally, the term Brahmin referred to someone who sought knowledge and enlightenment (through the pursuit of truth). After the various cultures in the Indian-subcontinent started merging, people sought to preserve their identities through a class division based on what they did.
Over time, this became ossified into the caste-system that we know of today - but that was not its original intent.
In fact, if you read a lot of Indian vedic texts, you would see that no caste was held above others. All of them merely performed slightly different tasks.
So why are they (people with engineering qualifications) doing lawyering or quant finance rather than actual engineering?
Because, believe it or not, a lot of people find this to be rather interesting and quite fascinating.
Because the lawyers and financiers have set up a system where they are the rulers and the engineers the ruled.
Not really. It is just the outcome of any sufficiently complex civilization. Any suitably complex civilization needs a lot of rules that keeps it in shape, and a suitable exchange mechanism that keeps it going. The former is law and the latter is currency. Do not believe me? Look at any of the ancient cultures, and you can draw similar analogies. Law-makers have always had control because they decide and control the rules that govern a society and finance and economics people control the fundamental entity that allows for the exchange of things - tangible and intangible (intellectual property, physical property, immovable property etc).
People capable of handling engineering are indeed not dumb, but the system is sick - patents and copyrights mean engineers are shackled in servitude.
How the hell did you jump to that conclusion? Talk of non sequitur. There has always been something that societies have valued more than others - precious metals, land, artificial constructs etc. Today in the age of information, intellectual property is one of those things. For all you know, it may be something else. Believe it or not, such constraints (evolved, artificial or otherwise) are actually good for society because it lets people work towards that goal and enables people to work in a society with those factors as the central key.
In our society today, ideas and intellectual property are in high demand, and there is a supply system for those. Now, the only way to get tangible benefits from them is by converting them into something for which people can exchange something in the society with - i.e., monetizing them. Now, IP laws (copyright, patents etc) are as good a solution as any to that end.
If you have any better, practical and pragmatic ones that you think would work, please enlighten the rest of us.
while the wall street weenies, the lawyers and the "environmental education" majors held as paragons of success?
To be fair, doing any kind of serious economics/finance requires a sound knowledge of math. As someone who is in R&D with a more than a passing interest in applied math and the markets, one thing I have learnt is that a lot of people out there on Wall Street are nerds and geeks in their own right. In fact, a lot of people that I know in top i-banks and trading houses are folks who are mostly math, physics or engineering PhDs. I mean, even doing a program like Quantitative Computational Finance or Quantitative Analysis is hard enough.
Secondly, a tonne of good lawyers that I know of are also not dumb - most of them have impressive tech credentials and end up going to law school after getting at least graduate degrees in engineering or the sciences.
I mean, generalizations and stereotypes only go so far. If anything, I've renewed respect for a lot of people in those areas. Now, there may be weasels and idiots with BA History degrees who work at Joe Law Firm (and whose Dad's contacts helped get that Yale degree), but most top schools are very picky about who they accept for law, MBA and other fields.
I was just questioning the stupidity of the hospital's stance. Imagine a traditional print media, with someone sending letters to a newspaper about something they think is true. How would they find out who the person was? Especially if the person took measures not to be found (i.e. cut paste words from the newspaper and avoid putting their fingerprints on it blah blah).
So why should it be any different on the Internet?
Anonymity is one of the fundamental tenets for the preservation of privacy. Your words may have consequences, therefore, sometimes people express their thoughts anonymously in the hope that doing so would protect them from the probable consequences. The downside to that, of course, is that people may not particularly take them seriously.
This guy expressed his thoughts anonymously. So?
Since they are the ones accusing the blogger, they should be the ones who d evidence to prove that it is libel. If not, they have no case against him and any half decent judge would throw their case through the window.
There is a difference between using Linux at the backend versus targeting Linux end users.
A lot of places use Linux at the back end or at the device level (for which it works well), but front end, desktop applications? Not so much.
This is mostly because of the fact that despite everything, Windows won the desktop war. They literally own it. There are no two ways about it. So, until that changes, you are going to find companies not particularly targeting Linux desktops.
Yes, because when they mean Penn State or Georgia State, they refer to the respective states (as opposed to, say, the State of Pennsylvania or the State of Georgia).
Umm, it says News for Nerds, not necessarily News for IT Nerds.
If you have worked with any kind of finance/economics, you would know that it is all nothing but math. Probability and statistics, linear and dynamic programming, machine learning techniques, data mining techniques and so on and so forth.
Secondly, that was a rather interesting review. For those of who have been reading Slashdot over the years, we are now in positions where we deal with this thing called the Real World. Given that state of the US economy and what the feds have been doing etc, it is definitely of interest to some of us - you know, recession, jobs, budgets, quarterly profits and things like that?
But I forget, there are still 15 year olds on Slashdot who do not think beyond the latest Linux distro or RPG game. If you don't like this place, go elsewhere. But please, enough with the bitchin' already.
Do outdoorsy stuff. Go hiking, camping or just go climb a mountain.
And if you do this regularly, you realize just how relaxing it is to not be connected to anything. In fact, I make it a point on some weekends to not answer my cellphone (in fact, I just put it away) or check my emails.
Well, at least things have begun moving in the right direction (that is, folks can have a shot at going to space without having to be a test pilot or a PhD first).
Not really. If you look at the profiles of most astronauts, you will notice that a lot of them do indeed have PhDs and a lot of them are also qualified pilots.
And in fact, why not? If you want the best of the best, why would you want to settle for something less? Besides, a PhDs are a lot more common these days - hell, at any half decent tech place, most people tend to have at least their master's degrees.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, though, I know a lot of people in NYC (trader types, mostly) who own and drive their cars only because they don't want to be seen as being "cheap" and not have a car. Peer pressure and all that.
Well said and couldn't agree more.
There is no substitute for good practice and the more you work on problems, the more insights you have into how things work.
When I was in high-school, our math teacher used to give us hundreds of problems to solve in calculus over the weekends. Oh, it used to be a pain back then, but it sure did make me quite good at math.
Seriously, get a good book, read the concepts and solve the problems. Do as many exercises as possible and as frequently as possible, and keep challenging yourself.
There's no other way around it. Well, unless you are a genius of sorts.
Indeed.
And you forgot - Yasser Arafat. Oh yes, wonderful thing to be giving someone who was fighting a proxy war against another country a Nobel Peace Prize.
Aren't you going to welcome them?
They'd be disappointed and might just start sucking your blood and stuff.
1. No, I just happen to hire other people who work for me.
2. The work place may not be a democracy, but it is the *ministry* of a democratic country that's banned the site for everyone working at that ministry.
3. It is the fact that the actions of a few have caused them to block access to the encyclopedia to everyone else. If they did not want people editing, there are other ways of doing it, rather than instituting a ministry-wide ban.
Yeah, sure. No, people are too quick to give up their rights without thinking back to the reasons. If there was a ministry-wide obsession, fine. But six people and everyone in the ministry (in a democracy, no less) is banned from accessing the website? And people do not think this is a bit extreme at all?
Wow.
It's like blocking Slashdot because a bunch of people were commenting obsessively. Especially when you consider the fact that it is a bloody encyclopedia, not a porn site (it may amount to the same amount of time-wasted, but still, it would be of consequence to others in the ministry who may genuinely use Wikipedia as a resource).
Shouldn't there be a censorship icon, rather than a funny one?
Seriously. Sure, these people may have been doing it during work, but a ban on what's probably one of the world's most popular encyclopedias because people are contributing to a compendium of knowledge (leaving their biases aside)? Isn't that a little ridiculous and over the board?
It's unfortunate, more than funny. Anime or not.
Traditionally, the term Brahmin referred to someone who sought knowledge and enlightenment (through the pursuit of truth). After the various cultures in the Indian-subcontinent started merging, people sought to preserve their identities through a class division based on what they did.
Over time, this became ossified into the caste-system that we know of today - but that was not its original intent.
In fact, if you read a lot of Indian vedic texts, you would see that no caste was held above others. All of them merely performed slightly different tasks.
Actually, that numeric system was not invented by the Arabs.
They originally evolved in India as the Hindu-Arabic Numeral system and were borrowed and spread by the Arabs.
They are derived from the decimal Indian numeral system.
Yes, because anyone who has an MBA is quite obviously an idiot.
Gee.
That was a wonderful and insightful comment. Well said and hats off, sir.
In our society today, ideas and intellectual property are in high demand, and there is a supply system for those. Now, the only way to get tangible benefits from them is by converting them into something for which people can exchange something in the society with - i.e., monetizing them. Now, IP laws (copyright, patents etc) are as good a solution as any to that end.
If you have any better, practical and pragmatic ones that you think would work, please enlighten the rest of us.
Secondly, a tonne of good lawyers that I know of are also not dumb - most of them have impressive tech credentials and end up going to law school after getting at least graduate degrees in engineering or the sciences.
I mean, generalizations and stereotypes only go so far. If anything, I've renewed respect for a lot of people in those areas. Now, there may be weasels and idiots with BA History degrees who work at Joe Law Firm (and whose Dad's contacts helped get that Yale degree), but most top schools are very picky about who they accept for law, MBA and other fields.
> The anonymous threat, the poison pen letter, doesn't get printed.
That is at the discretion of the editor. If the editor chose to have it published, s/he could do so.
Oh I agree with you.
I was just questioning the stupidity of the hospital's stance. Imagine a traditional print media, with someone sending letters to a newspaper about something they think is true. How would they find out who the person was? Especially if the person took measures not to be found (i.e. cut paste words from the newspaper and avoid putting their fingerprints on it blah blah).
So why should it be any different on the Internet?
Anonymity is one of the fundamental tenets for the preservation of privacy. Your words may have consequences, therefore, sometimes people express their thoughts anonymously in the hope that doing so would protect them from the probable consequences. The downside to that, of course, is that people may not particularly take them seriously.
This guy expressed his thoughts anonymously. So?
Since they are the ones accusing the blogger, they should be the ones who d evidence to prove that it is libel. If not, they have no case against him and any half decent judge would throw their case through the window.
Ahh, but how are they going to prove that it is the truth (or that it is libel)?
I mean, he might be an insider who may know some things that an outsider may not - things that may be true but may come across as libel.
I think that is the dilemma.
There is a difference between using Linux at the backend versus targeting Linux end users.
A lot of places use Linux at the back end or at the device level (for which it works well), but front end, desktop applications? Not so much.
This is mostly because of the fact that despite everything, Windows won the desktop war. They literally own it. There are no two ways about it. So, until that changes, you are going to find companies not particularly targeting Linux desktops.
Yes, because when they mean Penn State or Georgia State, they refer to the respective states (as opposed to, say, the State of Pennsylvania or the State of Georgia).
Gee.
The promise by the government that they will accept it as payment for taxes. ...in exchange for services, infrastructure and governance.
There, fixed that for you.
(Disclaimer - your definition of what government should do may vary.)
Umm, it says News for Nerds, not necessarily News for IT Nerds.
If you have worked with any kind of finance/economics, you would know that it is all nothing but math. Probability and statistics, linear and dynamic programming, machine learning techniques, data mining techniques and so on and so forth.
Secondly, that was a rather interesting review. For those of who have been reading Slashdot over the years, we are now in positions where we deal with this thing called the Real World. Given that state of the US economy and what the feds have been doing etc, it is definitely of interest to some of us - you know, recession, jobs, budgets, quarterly profits and things like that?
But I forget, there are still 15 year olds on Slashdot who do not think beyond the latest Linux distro or RPG game. If you don't like this place, go elsewhere. But please, enough with the bitchin' already.
> Going off backpacking for 6 months usually only works if you are very single.
Not necessarily. If you have a partner who likes being outdoors as much as you do, then you have a match made in heaven.
Me and my girlfriend do a lot of outdoorsy stuff - she has different skills than I do, but hey, that only makes it more interesting.
Do outdoorsy stuff. Go hiking, camping or just go climb a mountain.
And if you do this regularly, you realize just how relaxing it is to not be connected to anything. In fact, I make it a point on some weekends to not answer my cellphone (in fact, I just put it away) or check my emails.
Works wonders.
And in fact, why not? If you want the best of the best, why would you want to settle for something less? Besides, a PhDs are a lot more common these days - hell, at any half decent tech place, most people tend to have at least their master's degrees.