What he should have done was follow the lead of Goldman Sacks executives. Then he wouldn't be prosecuted for anything.
But... How many useless Federal Reserve Chairmen can we have at a time, though?
As an interesting side-note, in looking up one detail of what I wanted to post here, I noticed that the Wikipedia entries on Bernanke and Goldman both curiously (one might even say "conspicuously") fail to make any mention of his acting as their CEO prior to handing them a juicy government bailout. Looks like someone wants to do some "oops I fucked the country" damage control...;)
What the hell do you run, that you can fill over 100GB just with apps (not talking data - So for example, I need MSSQL on my box for dev purposes, but I sure as hell don't install 500GB of actual DBs on the system drive). The games, you have a somewhat valid point in that you still need to at least pay attention to their size and how many you have installed at once, but hardly valid to cry "bullshit".
...Riiight. Show me the $60 SSD drive that will hold Win7, Photoshop, and more than a couple of modern games.
Will 128GB do it for ya?. Not the exact model I have, but the same size - And I have a lot of shit installed. Win7, Office, VS2012, MSSQL2012, hundreds of smaller one-off tools, a handful of games... And have well over half the system disk free.
Win7 64 bit recommends 20GB, but realistically uses around 12GB. Office 2010 takes 3GB. The CS6 "Master Collection" (for you millionaires in the Slashdot audience) takes 14.5GB. VS2012 takes 10GB.
As for a few games, hey, you got me. That spare 80+GB will "only" fit a dozen or so. So for the use case of "hardcore gamer and developer and graphic designer on a shoestring budget", you absolutely should not use an SSD, because it takes just too much work on top of the rest of your busy schedule to uninstall older games.
To me it is not worth it to watch your os boot faster.
First of all, putting the OS on a disk by itself doesn't only mean that Windows runs faster - The OS reads and writes to its files on a near continuous basis. For years before SSDs, we've known that simply getting that activity segregated onto its own disk, away from "real" file activity, gives a decent performance boost across the board; moving it to an ultra-fast random-access media helps even more (and even if you don't care about boot time, how about "responsiveness"? Every time Windows needs to wait for some stupid little icon to load, you need to wait for Windows to wait for some stupid little icon to load).
Second, SSDs have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper. You no longer need to decide between spending a fortune or segregating your apps out; a $60 SSD will hold the OS and every app you could ever possibly run, with plenty of room to spare. Yes, you'll still want that second big-slow-and-cheap HDD for general purpose storage, but you haven't needed to carefully weigh "on which disk should I install this program" for at least a year.
Flash ram is not a permanent solution and will die due to the limited number of writes.
And you think a drive with actual moving parts will live forever?
Make no mistake, SSDs have their flaws, and cost definitely still counts as one of them. But once you really use a system set up with SSD system / HDD data, you'll never even consider going back. And mere boot time has nothing to do with it.
Also there is no such thing as the true value of anything. Value is completely subjective.
Don't act obtuse. Whether or not we can concretely call company X "better" than company Y, we can say that company X has no debt, a low P/E, and a high profit margin, while company Y owes its ass to the banks and loses money quarter after quarter. HFT completely ignores that in favor of "Company Q, with a correlation of 0.9 to company Y, just went up a penny, so buy buy buy Y!".
Not anymore. Thanks to the magic of computers, self-reinforcing feedback between a sufficiently large number of "traders" means the price can skyrocket or crash in a matter of minutes.
And that is why the use of computers is better, because it enables the transparency you crave.
Could you define "transparency" for us? Because you don't seem to mean it the same way as the rest of the world.
HFT may indeed have created something resembling "transparency", but only insofar as it has made the entire market no more meaningful than a biased random number generator. What does it mean to conservatively invest in a company with strong financials and good growth potential, when entire sectors rise and fall with near-perfect correlation? Or more to the point, why do we even have a stock market?
If it makes me a Luddite that I believe "investing" should have at least something to do with lending someone with an idea money in exchange for a cut of the profits, then I'll accept that crown proudly. When "investing" means trying to game the underlying system, do we really wonder why the economy sucks?
We desperately need to implement at least one one of two really, really simple solutions - A transaction tax, and an end to intraday trading. Either of these would kill HFT overnight, and good riddance!
I don't see too many people paying to sit around a gamer.
So, didn't bother to read TFA, eh?
In South Korea, these games mean BIG money. High-end corporate sponsorships, huge live audiences, nationally televised competitions... Every bit as serious (take that as a positive or negative, as you wish) as professional athletes in the US - Who also won't keep playing into their 60s, as another poster pointed out.
And y'know, if I could make over 100k a year playing video games - I'd drop my 9-to-5 in a frickin' heartbeat. "Meaningful" work? Hey, if you think getting accounting system A to talk to POS system B has any deeply satisfying "meaning" to it after 20 years, I have a few seats left I can sell you, to watch the paint dry on my patio.
Re:Slashdot - Multi-Posted Articles for Nerds
on
Curiosity Lands On Mars
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
inorite? Because we land car-sized nuclear-powered portable science laboratories on other planets all the fucking time, right dude?
"News for Nerds, stuff that matters" - This qualifies as both. And we'll probably have a nonstop stream of Curiosity FPs over the next few days. Suck it up or find another site, because as much as I hate to sound exclusionary, it sounds like you jus' don't belong here.
it's not like NASA is doing what NBC is doing with the olympics...:rolleyes:
Speaking of which, have you seen the latest shots of the Curiosity crash site? Man that thing went down har... uh... I mean... uh... Look how the markets reacted to another NASA failu... Um, no, wait... Tune in "live" to see the landing in just four more hours! Will Phelps take gold? Will the skycrane smash down right on top of the rover? The world waits in rapt anticipation!
That's the problem. This technology would not be easily tracked or monitored. Enriching uranium is the stepping stone to making bombs. The US is already up in arms over Iran's uranium enrichment program. US claims it's for bombs, Iran claims it's for energy. How do you verify?
This technology already exists. Please Mr. Genie, go back in the bottle won't you?
Whether or not the NRC gives this tech its official stamp of approval has no bearing on whether or not Iran has already started working on their own SILEX facility. So why the hell shouldn't we benefit from it? The proliferation risk amounts to nothing but an "oops, should have thought of that 25 years ago" footnote to the entire issue.
It's not the country. A "peggy" is a "peggy" if it's in Poland, India, Mexico or Ackerly.
I think you missed the joke...
A recent trend in phone support has someone CLEARLY in Mumbai, with the standard unintelligible accent, answering the phone with "Hi, this is Steve, how may I help you today?", when I would bet you my left nut against a shiny new nickel that that fellow has never even met anyone legitimately named "Steve".
And I don't know which part to consider more insulting, that they think we might actually fall for it; or that they think that, by some hitherto unknown form of magic, we'll feel better about not understanding a damned word spoken by someone with an "American" name than we would from someone using their real name.
The Koch Brothers were among several funders, some of whom actually had decent motives.
Absolutely true - But in the interest of trying to save the planet from ourselves, we should focus on near-legendary conservative sponsors such as the Koch Brothers.
The average climate change denier doesn't give a damn about the NSF or hippies from Lawrence Berkeley. But Bush-the-Elder's friends? Now that carries some weight!
Guilty until proven....who needs to prove anything anymore?
Welcome to the world of "civil forfeiture". Property has no rights, so charge the property with the crime. The DEA's done it for about two decades now.
That said, the present case does seem to go a bit further than even that - At least in normal civil forfeiture, If by some miracle you can prove that the property had nothing to do with a crime, you can theoretically get it back; With Megaupload, the government hasn't even allowed for that nigh-impossible standard of winning.
Quick reminder: one is designed to go from one place to another, the other is designed to kill other people.
...And yet, the former unintentionally kills 32 thousand more people per year just in the US alone.
I know which one I feel safer around.
/ Note that cars also kill about 5k more people in total as well - But while the accidental fatality rate for guns comes out to under 3% of all deaths, for cars you have nearly 100%.
Ignore everyone telling you about the various forensic techniques that can recover your data - Unless you have recently gotten the company sued, they will make a final-state backup of your current files (no special scans for even the easiest of recoverable crap), maybe wipe it, and redeploy it to New Guy "just until they can get him a new one (in five years or so)".
As your realistic biggest concern, you want to make sure the last X backups have nothing interesting in them. So do a normal cleaning of your system, delete all your old mail, delete all your internet shortcuts (and history and cookies and offline files), delete just about everything in your Documents folder, clean up your desktop, empty the recycle bin, run SpyBot's Usage Tracks cleanup, CClean your registry, and then... Do nothing even remotely interesting for your last few weeks. If you have local admin, in your last hour at work, log in as admin, delete your profile, and defragment your drive(s), but you really don't need to go that far.
The most paranoid I'd personally bother with (and I definitely wear a tinfoil hat when it comes to "my" files on a work computer - I keep them all in a truecrypt archive from day 1), you could boot to Knoppix and run a "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda". Keep in mind that although that will overwrite everything on the disk, it will also definitely get IT's attention. And honestly, you have the best chance of vanishing quietly into obscurity at that company by not doing anything IT finds all that interesting (see my comment on backups - You can bet that if they get interested enough, they'll find a two year old backup that somehow escaped the regular rotation).
I really hate how the focus these days is on more cores, not faster cores.
TFA refers to a supercomputer, not a high-end gaming rig.
Yes, some problems have a "hard" sequential component, and nothing but "faster" will make a dent in it. We don't really have any options in that realm, however - For a near infinite amount of money, you could conceivably build something 100x faster than the current best commercially available chip - Though in a decade (of which the building of this superchip might take a significant portion to produce), the best commercially available chips will have caught up to that level of performance.
OTOH, we have no shortage of trivially parallelizable problems of great interest to us today, that we can efficiently tackly by throwing more cheap low-power cores at the problem. Weather, fluid dynamics, protein folding, cortical column simulation - We could realistically keep every von Neumann type CPU humanity produces in the next century busy just on a handful of interesting problems like those.
though you can get a diesel riding lawn mower or a diesel lawn tractor if you look hard enough.
You don't actually have to look all that hard - Most of the big-names have diesel models targeted right around the crossover point in their line between residential and light commercial use - But yeah, I just assumed he meant a riding mower, if he used enough fuel to care about the excise tax.:)
No, the problem isn't that you're a geek - it's that you're thirteen years old emotionally.
Occasionally saying something off-color doesn't make one "thirteen years old emotionally", it makes one human.
As so many have said elsewhere in this discussion, it's long past time to grow up.
If I ever "grow up" in the way you mean it - Just kill me and put me out of my misery. I didn't go to school for 18 years just so I could spend the next 40 as a soulless worker-drone - If I can't have fun in what I do, I see no point in doing it. And if that attitude means you want to call me immature - Hey, neither of us will go to our graves wishing we'd done just a little better on our last TPS report.
Yet, many places operate mixed gender teams with no problems at all. As above, the problem isn't the policies - behavior created liabilities, not policy.
I know - I currently work in a mixed-gender team. And fortunately, people around here (of both genders) have a fairly laid back culture when it comes to recognizing humans as humans, rather than PC robots. We respect each other and behave in a generally professional manner, and simply move the conversation along when, not if, someone commits the occasional faux pas. As a result, we have a fun environment and all work great together.
I've also seen an all-male team (not my own, thank Hera) completely destroyed by the addition of a... "sensitive" woman. After the first guy got fired, it turned into a Sprint commercial - You could hear a pin drop in their office, all day every day. People wouldn't even take work calls at their desk, forwarding them to a nearby conference room whenever possible, lest something overheard get misinterpreted as "hostile". Needless to say, their productivity plummeted and they all ended up reassigned to other groups - With the real problem (which management recognized by that point) moved to an all-female team.
Yeah, anecdata, completely useless. Still, I'd rather just avoid the problem entirely.
If you think public education is a waste of public money, you're a fool.
Wow! Your eloquence and the power of your well-thought-out argument has convinced me of the error of my ways! I now see how wrong I've had it all these years!
Except... Hmm... Oh, wait, I didn't actually call public education a waste of public money, or really say much of anything at all about it. I pointed out that an appeal to special interests (particularly personal interests) does not a sound argument make - Oddly enough, it fails in much the same way as calling your opponents fools, because both depend on your opponents giving the least damn about what you like or dislike.
/ Not that sarcasm and mockery makes a whole lot of friends
If you have so little confidence in your crew, why are they still working for you?
Because with victim-defined crimes like sexual harassment, "they" have no control over what the new person might take as fun, rather than as harassment.
And at the risk of stereotyping myself, we geeks seem particularly bad in this regard - I wouldn't say we behave worse than most people, just that we tend to lack some of the "social filters" that most people keep up 24/7. We say what we mean, not what people want to hear.
And say what you will about "if they can't behave, they can't really do the job", but I'll take a good
coder over a Dale Carnegie wannabe any day. If that means keeping the team a "boys club", so it goes - But I consider that a pretty fucking sad consequence of workplace behavior laws designed to help women, because by appealing to the most fragile shrinking violets out there, such laws instead make mixed-gender teams an outright liability.
Every workplace has a "CYA" zero tolerance harassment policy. Virtually none of them enforce it until someone files and official complaint.
More realistically, we really need an overall healthier attitude toward issues like this than "keep your mouth shut or lose your job". We exist as social animals, and have different behavioral standards depending on the gender composition of any given group. That gets somewhat tricky when, for example, you might not know the composition of a give group - "Oh shit, Sally came back in and I didn't notice before saying that? Well, have a nice life guys, off to the unemployment line!"
I don't drive a car, but I do buy gasoline for my lawnmower and snowblower, so I am paying road taxes as well even though I don't drive on them.
You should switch to diesel - Not only does it have a hell of a lot more power, but you can get offroad diesel (or kero in the winter) for which you don't have to pay the excise tax.
That said, unless you run your own landscaping business, you'll probably never make up for the increased cost of diesel equipment by saving 24.4 cents per gallon (plus whatever your state assess). But you may get your money's worth from the massively increased lifespan.
That said...
I don't have a problem with some of my taxes going towards public schools as I think investing money in education is a good idea.
"I like this particular waste of our money, so suck it up" doesn't really make for a very appealing argument.
Yet another rollout of unicorns and rainbows to people living somewhere that Comcast can cheaply and conveniently serve. Woo-hoo.
Meanwhile, let me know when I can get even lowest-of-the-low tier DSL or cable internet in my area (not urban, but not exactly the middle of nowhere either).
The kids aren't dumb asses. Kids are kids. Young kids put things in their mouth, it's human nature. Dumb ass parents, and dumb ass owns of these magnets are why it happens.
So if parents ignore age rating on a goddamned dildo, can we sue the manufacturer for child sexual abuse?
At some point, it comes down to "don't be an idiot". If you buy your kids a gun and they blow their heads off - don't blame Remington, try a frickin' mirror.
Slashdot Mirror
that's why as soon as you get past the appeal you should automatically move to a non-extradition country
That just makes the paperwork to approve the drone strike so much easier for them, Terrorist.
What he should have done was follow the lead of Goldman Sacks executives. Then he wouldn't be prosecuted for anything.
;)
But... How many useless Federal Reserve Chairmen can we have at a time, though?
As an interesting side-note, in looking up one detail of what I wanted to post here, I noticed that the Wikipedia entries on Bernanke and Goldman both curiously (one might even say "conspicuously") fail to make any mention of his acting as their CEO prior to handing them a juicy government bailout. Looks like someone wants to do some "oops I fucked the country" damage control...
Bullshit detected.
...Riiight. Show me the $60 SSD drive that will hold Win7, Photoshop, and more than a couple of modern games.
What the hell do you run, that you can fill over 100GB just with apps (not talking data - So for example, I need MSSQL on my box for dev purposes, but I sure as hell don't install 500GB of actual DBs on the system drive). The games, you have a somewhat valid point in that you still need to at least pay attention to their size and how many you have installed at once, but hardly valid to cry "bullshit".
Will 128GB do it for ya?. Not the exact model I have, but the same size - And I have a lot of shit installed. Win7, Office, VS2012, MSSQL2012, hundreds of smaller one-off tools, a handful of games... And have well over half the system disk free.
Win7 64 bit recommends 20GB, but realistically uses around 12GB. Office 2010 takes 3GB. The CS6 "Master Collection" (for you millionaires in the Slashdot audience) takes 14.5GB. VS2012 takes 10GB.
As for a few games, hey, you got me. That spare 80+GB will "only" fit a dozen or so. So for the use case of "hardcore gamer and developer and graphic designer on a shoestring budget", you absolutely should not use an SSD, because it takes just too much work on top of the rest of your busy schedule to uninstall older games.
To me it is not worth it to watch your os boot faster.
First of all, putting the OS on a disk by itself doesn't only mean that Windows runs faster - The OS reads and writes to its files on a near continuous basis. For years before SSDs, we've known that simply getting that activity segregated onto its own disk, away from "real" file activity, gives a decent performance boost across the board; moving it to an ultra-fast random-access media helps even more (and even if you don't care about boot time, how about "responsiveness"? Every time Windows needs to wait for some stupid little icon to load, you need to wait for Windows to wait for some stupid little icon to load).
Second, SSDs have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper. You no longer need to decide between spending a fortune or segregating your apps out; a $60 SSD will hold the OS and every app you could ever possibly run, with plenty of room to spare. Yes, you'll still want that second big-slow-and-cheap HDD for general purpose storage, but you haven't needed to carefully weigh "on which disk should I install this program" for at least a year.
Flash ram is not a permanent solution and will die due to the limited number of writes.
And you think a drive with actual moving parts will live forever?
Make no mistake, SSDs have their flaws, and cost definitely still counts as one of them. But once you really use a system set up with SSD system / HDD data, you'll never even consider going back. And mere boot time has nothing to do with it.
Also there is no such thing as the true value of anything. Value is completely subjective.
Don't act obtuse. Whether or not we can concretely call company X "better" than company Y, we can say that company X has no debt, a low P/E, and a high profit margin, while company Y owes its ass to the banks and loses money quarter after quarter. HFT completely ignores that in favor of "Company Q, with a correlation of 0.9 to company Y, just went up a penny, so buy buy buy Y!".
Bubbles take years to develop, no microseconds.
Not anymore. Thanks to the magic of computers, self-reinforcing feedback between a sufficiently large number of "traders" means the price can skyrocket or crash in a matter of minutes.
And that is why the use of computers is better, because it enables the transparency you crave.
Could you define "transparency" for us? Because you don't seem to mean it the same way as the rest of the world.
HFT may indeed have created something resembling "transparency", but only insofar as it has made the entire market no more meaningful than a biased random number generator. What does it mean to conservatively invest in a company with strong financials and good growth potential, when entire sectors rise and fall with near-perfect correlation? Or more to the point, why do we even have a stock market?
If it makes me a Luddite that I believe "investing" should have at least something to do with lending someone with an idea money in exchange for a cut of the profits, then I'll accept that crown proudly. When "investing" means trying to game the underlying system, do we really wonder why the economy sucks?
We desperately need to implement at least one one of two really, really simple solutions - A transaction tax, and an end to intraday trading. Either of these would kill HFT overnight, and good riddance!
I don't see too many people paying to sit around a gamer.
So, didn't bother to read TFA, eh?
In South Korea, these games mean BIG money. High-end corporate sponsorships, huge live audiences, nationally televised competitions... Every bit as serious (take that as a positive or negative, as you wish) as professional athletes in the US - Who also won't keep playing into their 60s, as another poster pointed out.
And y'know, if I could make over 100k a year playing video games - I'd drop my 9-to-5 in a frickin' heartbeat. "Meaningful" work? Hey, if you think getting accounting system A to talk to POS system B has any deeply satisfying "meaning" to it after 20 years, I have a few seats left I can sell you, to watch the paint dry on my patio.
inorite? Because we land car-sized nuclear-powered portable science laboratories on other planets all the fucking time, right dude?
"News for Nerds, stuff that matters" - This qualifies as both. And we'll probably have a nonstop stream of Curiosity FPs over the next few days. Suck it up or find another site, because as much as I hate to sound exclusionary, it sounds like you jus' don't belong here.
it's not like NASA is doing what NBC is doing with the olympics... :rolleyes:
Speaking of which, have you seen the latest shots of the Curiosity crash site? Man that thing went down har... uh... I mean... uh... Look how the markets reacted to another NASA failu... Um, no, wait... Tune in "live" to see the landing in just four more hours! Will Phelps take gold? Will the skycrane smash down right on top of the rover? The world waits in rapt anticipation!
That's the problem. This technology would not be easily tracked or monitored. Enriching uranium is the stepping stone to making bombs. The US is already up in arms over Iran's uranium enrichment program. US claims it's for bombs, Iran claims it's for energy. How do you verify?
This technology already exists. Please Mr. Genie, go back in the bottle won't you?
Whether or not the NRC gives this tech its official stamp of approval has no bearing on whether or not Iran has already started working on their own SILEX facility. So why the hell shouldn't we benefit from it? The proliferation risk amounts to nothing but an "oops, should have thought of that 25 years ago" footnote to the entire issue.
It's not the country. A "peggy" is a "peggy" if it's in Poland, India, Mexico or Ackerly.
I think you missed the joke...
A recent trend in phone support has someone CLEARLY in Mumbai, with the standard unintelligible accent, answering the phone with "Hi, this is Steve, how may I help you today?", when I would bet you my left nut against a shiny new nickel that that fellow has never even met anyone legitimately named "Steve".
And I don't know which part to consider more insulting, that they think we might actually fall for it; or that they think that, by some hitherto unknown form of magic, we'll feel better about not understanding a damned word spoken by someone with an "American" name than we would from someone using their real name.
The Koch Brothers were among several funders, some of whom actually had decent motives.
Absolutely true - But in the interest of trying to save the planet from ourselves, we should focus on near-legendary conservative sponsors such as the Koch Brothers.
The average climate change denier doesn't give a damn about the NSF or hippies from Lawrence Berkeley. But Bush-the-Elder's friends? Now that carries some weight!
Guilty until proven....who needs to prove anything anymore?
Welcome to the world of "civil forfeiture". Property has no rights, so charge the property with the crime. The DEA's done it for about two decades now.
That said, the present case does seem to go a bit further than even that - At least in normal civil forfeiture, If by some miracle you can prove that the property had nothing to do with a crime, you can theoretically get it back; With Megaupload, the government hasn't even allowed for that nigh-impossible standard of winning.
Quick reminder: one is designed to go from one place to another, the other is designed to kill other people.
...And yet, the former unintentionally kills 32 thousand more people per year just in the US alone.
I know which one I feel safer around.
/ Note that cars also kill about 5k more people in total as well - But while the accidental fatality rate for guns comes out to under 3% of all deaths, for cars you have nearly 100%.
Ignore everyone telling you about the various forensic techniques that can recover your data - Unless you have recently gotten the company sued, they will make a final-state backup of your current files (no special scans for even the easiest of recoverable crap), maybe wipe it, and redeploy it to New Guy "just until they can get him a new one (in five years or so)".
As your realistic biggest concern, you want to make sure the last X backups have nothing interesting in them. So do a normal cleaning of your system, delete all your old mail, delete all your internet shortcuts (and history and cookies and offline files), delete just about everything in your Documents folder, clean up your desktop, empty the recycle bin, run SpyBot's Usage Tracks cleanup, CClean your registry, and then... Do nothing even remotely interesting for your last few weeks. If you have local admin, in your last hour at work, log in as admin, delete your profile, and defragment your drive(s), but you really don't need to go that far.
The most paranoid I'd personally bother with (and I definitely wear a tinfoil hat when it comes to "my" files on a work computer - I keep them all in a truecrypt archive from day 1), you could boot to Knoppix and run a "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda". Keep in mind that although that will overwrite everything on the disk, it will also definitely get IT's attention. And honestly, you have the best chance of vanishing quietly into obscurity at that company by not doing anything IT finds all that interesting (see my comment on backups - You can bet that if they get interested enough, they'll find a two year old backup that somehow escaped the regular rotation).
I really hate how the focus these days is on more cores, not faster cores.
TFA refers to a supercomputer, not a high-end gaming rig.
Yes, some problems have a "hard" sequential component, and nothing but "faster" will make a dent in it. We don't really have any options in that realm, however - For a near infinite amount of money, you could conceivably build something 100x faster than the current best commercially available chip - Though in a decade (of which the building of this superchip might take a significant portion to produce), the best commercially available chips will have caught up to that level of performance.
OTOH, we have no shortage of trivially parallelizable problems of great interest to us today, that we can efficiently tackly by throwing more cheap low-power cores at the problem. Weather, fluid dynamics, protein folding, cortical column simulation - We could realistically keep every von Neumann type CPU humanity produces in the next century busy just on a handful of interesting problems like those.
though you can get a diesel riding lawn mower or a diesel lawn tractor if you look hard enough.
:)
You don't actually have to look all that hard - Most of the big-names have diesel models targeted right around the crossover point in their line between residential and light commercial use - But yeah, I just assumed he meant a riding mower, if he used enough fuel to care about the excise tax.
No, the problem isn't that you're a geek - it's that you're thirteen years old emotionally.
Occasionally saying something off-color doesn't make one "thirteen years old emotionally", it makes one human.
As so many have said elsewhere in this discussion, it's long past time to grow up.
If I ever "grow up" in the way you mean it - Just kill me and put me out of my misery. I didn't go to school for 18 years just so I could spend the next 40 as a soulless worker-drone - If I can't have fun in what I do, I see no point in doing it. And if that attitude means you want to call me immature - Hey, neither of us will go to our graves wishing we'd done just a little better on our last TPS report.
Yet, many places operate mixed gender teams with no problems at all. As above, the problem isn't the policies - behavior created liabilities, not policy.
I know - I currently work in a mixed-gender team. And fortunately, people around here (of both genders) have a fairly laid back culture when it comes to recognizing humans as humans, rather than PC robots. We respect each other and behave in a generally professional manner, and simply move the conversation along when, not if, someone commits the occasional faux pas. As a result, we have a fun environment and all work great together.
I've also seen an all-male team (not my own, thank Hera) completely destroyed by the addition of a... "sensitive" woman. After the first guy got fired, it turned into a Sprint commercial - You could hear a pin drop in their office, all day every day. People wouldn't even take work calls at their desk, forwarding them to a nearby conference room whenever possible, lest something overheard get misinterpreted as "hostile". Needless to say, their productivity plummeted and they all ended up reassigned to other groups - With the real problem (which management recognized by that point) moved to an all-female team.
Yeah, anecdata, completely useless. Still, I'd rather just avoid the problem entirely.
If you think public education is a waste of public money, you're a fool.
Wow! Your eloquence and the power of your well-thought-out argument has convinced me of the error of my ways! I now see how wrong I've had it all these years!
Except... Hmm... Oh, wait, I didn't actually call public education a waste of public money, or really say much of anything at all about it. I pointed out that an appeal to special interests (particularly personal interests) does not a sound argument make - Oddly enough, it fails in much the same way as calling your opponents fools, because both depend on your opponents giving the least damn about what you like or dislike.
/ Not that sarcasm and mockery makes a whole lot of friends
If you have so little confidence in your crew, why are they still working for you?
Because with victim-defined crimes like sexual harassment, "they" have no control over what the new person might take as fun, rather than as harassment.
And at the risk of stereotyping myself, we geeks seem particularly bad in this regard - I wouldn't say we behave worse than most people, just that we tend to lack some of the "social filters" that most people keep up 24/7. We say what we mean, not what people want to hear.
And say what you will about "if they can't behave, they can't really do the job", but I'll take a good coder over a Dale Carnegie wannabe any day. If that means keeping the team a "boys club", so it goes - But I consider that a pretty fucking sad consequence of workplace behavior laws designed to help women, because by appealing to the most fragile shrinking violets out there, such laws instead make mixed-gender teams an outright liability.
Fired them. (No tolerance policy.)
Every workplace has a "CYA" zero tolerance harassment policy. Virtually none of them enforce it until someone files and official complaint.
More realistically, we really need an overall healthier attitude toward issues like this than "keep your mouth shut or lose your job". We exist as social animals, and have different behavioral standards depending on the gender composition of any given group. That gets somewhat tricky when, for example, you might not know the composition of a give group - "Oh shit, Sally came back in and I didn't notice before saying that? Well, have a nice life guys, off to the unemployment line!"
I don't drive a car, but I do buy gasoline for my lawnmower and snowblower, so I am paying road taxes as well even though I don't drive on them.
You should switch to diesel - Not only does it have a hell of a lot more power, but you can get offroad diesel (or kero in the winter) for which you don't have to pay the excise tax.
That said, unless you run your own landscaping business, you'll probably never make up for the increased cost of diesel equipment by saving 24.4 cents per gallon (plus whatever your state assess). But you may get your money's worth from the massively increased lifespan.
That said...
I don't have a problem with some of my taxes going towards public schools as I think investing money in education is a good idea.
"I like this particular waste of our money, so suck it up" doesn't really make for a very appealing argument.
And all you can do is complain.
Yup.
Yet another rollout of unicorns and rainbows to people living somewhere that Comcast can cheaply and conveniently serve. Woo-hoo.
Meanwhile, let me know when I can get even lowest-of-the-low tier DSL or cable internet in my area (not urban, but not exactly the middle of nowhere either).
The kids aren't dumb asses. Kids are kids. Young kids put things in their mouth, it's human nature. Dumb ass parents, and dumb ass owns of these magnets are why it happens.
So if parents ignore age rating on a goddamned dildo, can we sue the manufacturer for child sexual abuse?
At some point, it comes down to "don't be an idiot". If you buy your kids a gun and they blow their heads off - don't blame Remington, try a frickin' mirror.