These nostalgia cycles are getting shorter and shorter. How much nostalgia can you really have for an outdated piece of hardware that appeared and disappeared 2 years ago?
I'm going to be modded down for not sucking the dick of AI, but take a look around at the robots currently working.
All of them are designed by engineers. From the spot welders building your cars to the Honda Asimo human-like robot, these were all developed and implemented by engineers. Computer science has its place, but when the rubber meets the road, it's the people who are willing to look at a problem and develop a solution that are the ones that push technology forward.
Genetic and ML processes have bought us what? Better spam filters?
I always laugh at these picture makers who think they are solving the problems of computer science. A box here, an arrow there, voila they've discovered something that the Math majors have taken for granted since 1600.
Meanwhile, the actual implementation of real world problems are left to the CEs and EEs who are taking the jobs away from CS majors at an alarming rate. Well, alarming to the CS majors.
It's a little like the split between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists. One group sits in their ivory towers while the others are making a ton of money in the real world.
But when your SSN is associated with your name, people can use it to pretend to be you and sign up for other forms of ID that can be used and show up as black marks against you...
Is this true? You'd think that at least the most basic protections would be in place to prevent this sort of fraud.
sprintf(ssn , "000-00-0000"); while (1) {
do_bad_stuff(ssn++); }
Now, having said that, I think it stands to reason that any number that can be automatically generated is automatically at risk of hacking.
Which is to say that it is at the same risk of hacking as any other random number. Which is to say that it is not at risk.
As long as your SSN is nothing more than a number, nothing bad can happen to it.
Now, if someone were to take it and try to do something with it, hopefully you guys over in the U.S. have something to protect yourself with. Some kind of legal recourse to protect SSN holders.
I know I'm not assuming too much here. Those Murkins have thought of everything.
I believe that waiting tables in the US is the closest you will come to pure capitalism anywhere. You tip based on their performance. If they suck, you pay them nothing, but if they provide excellent service, you pay them well. I've been known to give 200% tips for excellent service.
But most countries are socialist-leaning, so I'm not surprised you think so lowly of people who actually have to "sing for their supper".
,i>When you swear an oath, you swear an oath. No "carrot" should be necessary, or the oath is worthless.
You have more faith in human nature than I have.
I hate to make a big deal of who I am, but as Santa Claus, I have a pretty good idea of of who is naughty and who is nice (I gots da lists).
If you think that the Nice list outnumbers the Naughty list, you've got another thing coming. (You've been good (enough) so far this year, if it matters.)
I thought that you meant that we should hire the best police officers possible.
I didn't realize you thought that we should hire those officers most afraid of the "stick".
I intended to argue for a better "carrot" but you were intent on arguing for a better "stick".
We are not at odds. I think that the penalty of losing the carrot should outweigh the benefit of taking a bribe. You think that the penalty for taking a bribe should outweight the benefit for upholding the law.
We are arguing at each other when it is clear we have completely opposite and irreconcilable differences in opinion.
Based on your post, I guess we have come to an impasse.
I live in reality and accept that there are serious problems with underpaying police officers and treating them with kid gloves. You seem to live in a fantasy world where all police are true to their oaths and are not tempted by external monies.
I don't believe that for a second. Not for police, not for any public servant. I believe that they are willing to turn over whatever information the payer wants because I know that the policing of such violations is essentially nonexistant.
If you believe that police are working in their jobs because of some "duty" or obligation to the common good, then I have to believe that you are the one who is misguided.
But hey. I'm the one getting modded down, so fire away with whatever "arguments" you've got from that fantasy world of yours.
In fact, I don't think that police should only serve those who pay them tips. I do believe that they should be paid enough that the penalty for accepting a bribe is more than the benfit of accepting it.
The tip is supposed to be paid for services above and beyond the most basic acceptable service. If a waiter doesn't provide acceptable service, it is the customer's responsibility to not only NOT TIP, but also to inform the manager of the bad service.
What is wrong in the above statement is that not tipping is only acceptable in the case of bad service. This is totally wrong, and contrary to the whole concept of tipping.
Tipping is intended as a means of a waiter/tress to earn income above and beyond what they normally earn (which is typically below minimum wage). However to earn that, it is expected, from the customer's perspective, that the waiter must perform services above and beyond what is acceptable as "normal", not what is accepted as "bad service".
I hate bad tippers. I think they are cheapskates and are ripping off good waiters. However, I have to reproach any waiter who thinks that it is my responsibility to pay him extra just for providing "adequate" service. If I wanted expected service, I would have gone to McDonalds.
Then you accept that the officers are underpaid, which is contrary to your previous post which claimed that they are "adequately" paid. If the pay for enforcement of the law can be overcome by the acceptance of "tips", then the base salary is too low to prevent the officers from breaking their oaths.
In addition, if someone is willing to pay extra to have extra police protection, then how is the police officer who assents to investigating "tipped" crimes at fault for spending more time looking into those crimes than into "untipped" crimes?
I don't mean to state the obvious but that's what we've got now.
I agree that law enforcement is a public service. However, I can't think of any public service (other than maybe the post office) where every day on the job means putting the government employee in a life-threatening situation. Every traffic stop is an opportunity for a bad guy to blow one of our public servants away. It's really fucking scary when you think of it.
We sit in our cubes or doored offices and pontificate on what we think we are owed by society, but there are men and women out there making the busts, stopping the speeders, and putting the bad guys away every day and they don't make half what we make.
Some do it because they don't have any other skills, but I think they are few and far between. Most do it out of a sense of duty. They know they are the "thin blue line" that stands between us and lawlessness. And they know that the next window they knock on may be their last.
Perhaps we expect too much when we ask them to put themselves in harm's way to save us time and again for peanuts.
I guess we are going to start having "illumiphiles" who will try to tell us that the incandescent lightbulbs of yesteryear are somehow "warmer" and that humans can tell the difference between LEDs and vacuum tubes.
It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.
I, for one, do not buy into this Lou Dobbs racist/nationalist claptrap that says that we can't trust foreigners. I'm one of the biggest foreigners around, if you consider all the places I have to travel to that I'm not actually a citizen of.
Hey, bad people are in India. And in the U.S. And in Europe. And in Asia. Oh my god! They are everywhere!
Luckily, the bad people are outnumbered by the good. I can just take a look at my lists and figure that one out.
I love it when the IT monkeys get all uppity and the code monkeys go on the defensive.
"I'm a real engineer" "No you're not, you just plug cables into computer boxes" "That's boxen, and you don't even know how to change your password" "That's your job, IT monkey. My job is to write code" "I write code" "bash scripts are not code" "Yeah, well you run Windows!" "I also get paid more than you and have an actual career ahead of me" "Shut up and join the Counterstrike server already"
The unqualifiable answer to that question is an emphatic YES. The fact of the matter is that what we here on/. think of as "computer usage" is a far cry from what normal people with actual exposure to the sun and a plethora of IRL friends think. For us, a computer usage scenario includes hooking up and programming an LED disco light floor to our Linux laptop using USB 2.0 and getting it to spell 55378008.
The typical computer user gets online, checks his email, checks his stock prices, then gets back to his real life. Our real life revolves around computers, so such minimal usage seems strange and scary to us. However, it is actually what most users do.
You'd be surprised to learn that the computer usage scenario of the "real person" I described above is actually that of a "Power User". The typical person can barely turn the computer on, much less open Outlook Express without help from one of these Power Users. So, in fact, this test is useful as a step in the process of weeding out non-computer oriented hires.
I had the opportunity to go to several parties in Boston a few years back. A couple at Harvard and a couple at MIT and a couple near BU. Needless to say, the quality of the parties was inversely proportional to the U.S. News and World Report rankings of these schools. Not to take anything away from the homely girls and stereotypical MIT men, but MIT parties were only slightly better than the Harvard parties in terms of fun. However, Harvard edged out MIT in terms of attractive women (much to Mrs. Claus' chagrin).
Boston U had the best combination of attractive women and fun parties, though the "talent" pool in Boston left much to be desired.
What would be nice is to have this floor shipped over to Caltech or CMU where the attractive and successful Californians can take full advantage of it. The MIT geeks can still control the floor remotely from their dorms in Boston.
Japan's rail systems are a fairly well-done hybrid of computerization and old-fashioned human eyes. The biggest problems down over there have been failures due to catastrophic geologic and meteorological events. Add to that that the train system employees are usually well-trained, and you have a pretty well done system.
It's funny you mention about the atomic bombs. Japan, though certainly not 100% over the incident, has put it behind themselves and tried to get along with the U.S. On the other hand, China and Korea can't let go what happened almost 70 years ago (20 years earlier than the bombs) and are rioting and staging protests against Japan's "whitewashing" of history.
Slashdot Mirror
On a fiber by fiber basis, nanotubes are very fragile. However, in large bunches they are stronger than any other material currently available.
I'd love to see how they manage to mass produce these things. Such a production ability brings the vaunted "space elevator" closer to reality.
But it turns out that this is just a specially-shaped case.
These nostalgia cycles are getting shorter and shorter. How much nostalgia can you really have for an outdated piece of hardware that appeared and disappeared 2 years ago?
I'm going to be modded down for not sucking the dick of AI, but take a look around at the robots currently working.
All of them are designed by engineers. From the spot welders building your cars to the Honda Asimo human-like robot, these were all developed and implemented by engineers. Computer science has its place, but when the rubber meets the road, it's the people who are willing to look at a problem and develop a solution that are the ones that push technology forward.
Genetic and ML processes have bought us what? Better spam filters?
I'm willing to admit that their are some non-idiots that graduate from the typical CS program if you are willing to admit that most of the people who graduate from the typical EE program are carrying you guys on their shoulders.
I always laugh at these picture makers who think they are solving the problems of computer science. A box here, an arrow there, voila they've discovered something that the Math majors have taken for granted since 1600.
Meanwhile, the actual implementation of real world problems are left to the CEs and EEs who are taking the jobs away from CS majors at an alarming rate. Well, alarming to the CS majors.
It's a little like the split between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists. One group sits in their ivory towers while the others are making a ton of money in the real world.
But when your SSN is associated with your name, people can use it to pretend to be you and sign up for other forms of ID that can be used and show up as black marks against you...
Is this true? You'd think that at least the most basic protections would be in place to prevent this sort of fraud.
sprintf(ssn , "000-00-0000");
while (1) {
do_bad_stuff(ssn++);
}
Now, having said that, I think it stands to reason that any number that can be automatically generated is automatically at risk of hacking.
Which is to say that it is at the same risk of hacking as any other random number. Which is to say that it is not at risk.
As long as your SSN is nothing more than a number, nothing bad can happen to it.
Now, if someone were to take it and try to do something with it, hopefully you guys over in the U.S. have something to protect yourself with. Some kind of legal recourse to protect SSN holders.
I know I'm not assuming too much here. Those Murkins have thought of everything.
I believe that waiting tables in the US is the closest you will come to pure capitalism anywhere. You tip based on their performance. If they suck, you pay them nothing, but if they provide excellent service, you pay them well. I've been known to give 200% tips for excellent service.
But most countries are socialist-leaning, so I'm not surprised you think so lowly of people who actually have to "sing for their supper".
,i>When you swear an oath, you swear an oath. No "carrot" should be necessary, or the oath is worthless.
You have more faith in human nature than I have.
I hate to make a big deal of who I am, but as Santa Claus, I have a pretty good idea of of who is naughty and who is nice (I gots da lists).
If you think that the Nice list outnumbers the Naughty list, you've got another thing coming. (You've been good (enough) so far this year, if it matters.)
I thought that you meant that we should hire the best police officers possible.
I didn't realize you thought that we should hire those officers most afraid of the "stick".
I intended to argue for a better "carrot" but you were intent on arguing for a better "stick".
We are not at odds. I think that the penalty of losing the carrot should outweigh the benefit of taking a bribe. You think that the penalty for taking a bribe should outweight the benefit for upholding the law.
We are arguing at each other when it is clear we have completely opposite and irreconcilable differences in opinion.
Based on your post, I guess we have come to an impasse.
I live in reality and accept that there are serious problems with underpaying police officers and treating them with kid gloves. You seem to live in a fantasy world where all police are true to their oaths and are not tempted by external monies.
I don't believe that for a second. Not for police, not for any public servant. I believe that they are willing to turn over whatever information the payer wants because I know that the policing of such violations is essentially nonexistant.
If you believe that police are working in their jobs because of some "duty" or obligation to the common good, then I have to believe that you are the one who is misguided.
But hey. I'm the one getting modded down, so fire away with whatever "arguments" you've got from that fantasy world of yours.
In fact, I don't think that police should only serve those who pay them tips. I do believe that they should be paid enough that the penalty for accepting a bribe is more than the benfit of accepting it.
"Adequate" pay, it ain't.
The tip is supposed to be paid for services above and beyond the most basic acceptable service. If a waiter doesn't provide acceptable service, it is the customer's responsibility to not only NOT TIP, but also to inform the manager of the bad service.
What is wrong in the above statement is that not tipping is only acceptable in the case of bad service. This is totally wrong, and contrary to the whole concept of tipping.
Tipping is intended as a means of a waiter/tress to earn income above and beyond what they normally earn (which is typically below minimum wage). However to earn that, it is expected, from the customer's perspective, that the waiter must perform services above and beyond what is acceptable as "normal", not what is accepted as "bad service".
I hate bad tippers. I think they are cheapskates and are ripping off good waiters. However, I have to reproach any waiter who thinks that it is my responsibility to pay him extra just for providing "adequate" service. If I wanted expected service, I would have gone to McDonalds.
Then you accept that the officers are underpaid, which is contrary to your previous post which claimed that they are "adequately" paid. If the pay for enforcement of the law can be overcome by the acceptance of "tips", then the base salary is too low to prevent the officers from breaking their oaths.
In addition, if someone is willing to pay extra to have extra police protection, then how is the police officer who assents to investigating "tipped" crimes at fault for spending more time looking into those crimes than into "untipped" crimes?
I don't mean to state the obvious but that's what we've got now.
I think you're the first to mention the "B" word. What is the problem with underpaid law enforcers from accepting tips?
However, if they think the pay is too low, they should find another career rather than augment their pay with criminal activity.
You would leave the upholding of the law to those who found nothing more available to them than the low pay offerred by the police department?
I agree that law enforcement is a public service. However, I can't think of any public service (other than maybe the post office) where every day on the job means putting the government employee in a life-threatening situation. Every traffic stop is an opportunity for a bad guy to blow one of our public servants away. It's really fucking scary when you think of it.
We sit in our cubes or doored offices and pontificate on what we think we are owed by society, but there are men and women out there making the busts, stopping the speeders, and putting the bad guys away every day and they don't make half what we make.
Some do it because they don't have any other skills, but I think they are few and far between. Most do it out of a sense of duty. They know they are the "thin blue line" that stands between us and lawlessness. And they know that the next window they knock on may be their last.
Perhaps we expect too much when we ask them to put themselves in harm's way to save us time and again for peanuts.
Should the rat be held in lower esteem than the perpetrator of the crime?
In a society that values laws, isn't the demonizing of whistleblowers something that should be frowned upon?
I guess we are going to start having "illumiphiles" who will try to tell us that the incandescent lightbulbs of yesteryear are somehow "warmer" and that humans can tell the difference between LEDs and vacuum tubes.
It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.
I, for one, do not buy into this Lou Dobbs racist/nationalist claptrap that says that we can't trust foreigners. I'm one of the biggest foreigners around, if you consider all the places I have to travel to that I'm not actually a citizen of.
Hey, bad people are in India. And in the U.S. And in Europe. And in Asia. Oh my god! They are everywhere!
Luckily, the bad people are outnumbered by the good. I can just take a look at my lists and figure that one out.
Geek slapfight!
I love it when the IT monkeys get all uppity and the code monkeys go on the defensive.
"I'm a real engineer"
"No you're not, you just plug cables into computer boxes"
"That's boxen, and you don't even know how to change your password"
"That's your job, IT monkey. My job is to write code"
"I write code"
"bash scripts are not code"
"Yeah, well you run Windows!"
"I also get paid more than you and have an actual career ahead of me"
"Shut up and join the Counterstrike server already"
The unqualifiable answer to that question is an emphatic YES. The fact of the matter is that what we here on /. think of as "computer usage" is a far cry from what normal people with actual exposure to the sun and a plethora of IRL friends think. For us, a computer usage scenario includes hooking up and programming an LED disco light floor to our Linux laptop using USB 2.0 and getting it to spell 55378008.
The typical computer user gets online, checks his email, checks his stock prices, then gets back to his real life. Our real life revolves around computers, so such minimal usage seems strange and scary to us. However, it is actually what most users do.
You'd be surprised to learn that the computer usage scenario of the "real person" I described above is actually that of a "Power User". The typical person can barely turn the computer on, much less open Outlook Express without help from one of these Power Users. So, in fact, this test is useful as a step in the process of weeding out non-computer oriented hires.
I had the opportunity to go to several parties in Boston a few years back. A couple at Harvard and a couple at MIT and a couple near BU. Needless to say, the quality of the parties was inversely proportional to the U.S. News and World Report rankings of these schools. Not to take anything away from the homely girls and stereotypical MIT men, but MIT parties were only slightly better than the Harvard parties in terms of fun. However, Harvard edged out MIT in terms of attractive women (much to Mrs. Claus' chagrin).
Boston U had the best combination of attractive women and fun parties, though the "talent" pool in Boston left much to be desired.
What would be nice is to have this floor shipped over to Caltech or CMU where the attractive and successful Californians can take full advantage of it. The MIT geeks can still control the floor remotely from their dorms in Boston.
Japan's rail systems are a fairly well-done hybrid of computerization and old-fashioned human eyes. The biggest problems down over there have been failures due to catastrophic geologic and meteorological events. Add to that that the train system employees are usually well-trained, and you have a pretty well done system.
It's funny you mention about the atomic bombs. Japan, though certainly not 100% over the incident, has put it behind themselves and tried to get along with the U.S. On the other hand, China and Korea can't let go what happened almost 70 years ago (20 years earlier than the bombs) and are rioting and staging protests against Japan's "whitewashing" of history.