I am a software engineer who graduated with a CS degree in 2004. I have almost 9 years of experience. I think experience is essential. I know I am certainly a lot more productive now than I was after I graduated.
I will say however that I see the rationale for hiring new grads over old gray haired guys with lots of experience especially if when they are self taught. I may have been inexperienced when I was first hired, but I was willing to take less pay and I was very easily molded. Not every new grad is intelligent, but that's what interviews are for. A lot of the older people with 30 or 40+ years of experience are pretty set in their ways. They don't like learning new technologies or methodologies. They tend to find ways to do things their own way regardless of what they are told to do.
I am fairly sure that I am going to be like that when I get to be in my 50's and 60's. I can already feel myself being more stubborn about certain things. I feel fortunate that I had a good background on CS theory. I feel like if my mind becomes closed to new ideas I might be able to last for a while on a good foundation, not that I plan to let that happen. I don't know how hard it will be to learn/appreciate new technologies/ideas when I get older. I guess I will find out when I get there.
I don't know how open you are to getting a formal education, but I can't recommend it enough. I have seen a lot of new grads who are pretty inept. I have seen lots of schools and teachers that do a pretty terrible job of teaching subject matter. But when you get the education just right, it can really work miracles to improve your understanding and productivity. I don;t know how old you need to get before it stops being worth it to get a good education, but I suspect it's older than people think. If you actually enjoy learning I would say you should definitely do it. What's the downside? I watch youtube videos of college lectures in my spare time. I find it extremely fascinating, and I am addicted to the sense of power that comes with knowledge.
I don't think being self taught precludes you from getting a formal education. If you don't need a degree you don't even need to spend any money. You can witness all the same lectures as an MIT or Standford student online. I hope that when I am older, I can keep my sense of curiosity and my desire to learn.
The best way to get a job is to be useful. I am not so great with resumes, and I am not a good salesman, but I do know what I am talking about, and I am confident in my abilities. I always do really well in interviews when I can manage to get them. I can't imagine trying to do the things I do if I had tried to teach myself everything.
If variables with the word "blue" in them were more "perfect" I would agree with that. But since platform independence is a desirable trait and variables with the world blue in them is not, I don't see the point of this comparison.
They can simply compile all the COBOL code to the new platform. Since the COBOL applications in question work perfectly well, I assume they are written in a way that is platform independent.
"COBOL, it's finally becoming clear, isn't going away any time soon; there are far too many business-criticial applications written in it that work perfectly well for that to happen.
Well I guess we can finally fire all the COBOL programmers. Their job is now completed.
...contained in circuits that warp even the most basic rules of physics.
Well if the laws of physics are getting broken (or "warped") by reality, then they can't very well be the laws of physics. The *laws* of physics, by definition, apply universally. Maybe the headline should be "New circuits might work using well studied quantum effects that are not part of the simplified, 19th century version of physics taught in American high schools"
If you value freedom of/from religion. I would actually say the US is more free. We don't have state sponsored religion. Even with as many dumbass religious people we have, for the most part, they have not successfully managed to get religion taught in public schools, or have tax money given to them. The most the get is tax exemptions. Many countries in Europe have state sanctioned religion and taxes that go to the official church.
If you want freedom of speech, I think we have more of that in the United State as well. For the most part we value freedom of speech over the freedom not to be offended. We have many pussy media outlets that will self censor pictures of Muhammad, but you don't get prison time or fines for being offensive to religion.
If you want the freedom to own a gun, the US is more free.
If you want the freedom to walk down the street without risk of being shot by a nutjob with a legally purchased gun, then Europe is more free.
In the US you have more freedom to fire workers.
In Europe you have more freedom to prevent your employer from firing you.
If you want to drink a beer in public that's not in a paper bag, I would say Europe is more free.
If you want to pay for sex, Europe is more free.
As far as economics goes, I don't think either the US or Europe is significantly freer. In Europe your money goes to social programs and clean energy subsidies whether you like it or not. In the US your money goes to rich people, oil companies, and corrupt politicians whether you like it or not.
I think it's a tossup between which country/continent is more free.
You can make an analogy by relating the holocaust with patent trolling. It doesn't mean that you can't discriminate between mass murder and patent trolling. But it does indicate that you don't know what an analogy is.
If someone makes an analogy between running a multinational corporation and a lemonade stand, the proper response is not "Corporations are much bigger than lemonade stands, why can't you see that?", the proper response is "I think this is a good/bad analogy because..."
In this case, I definitely see a valid analogy with the "just following orders" Nuremberg defense rationale. Both examples use complying with rules as an acceptable justification for immoral actions. Both implicitly deny deny responsibility for participating and profiting from a system with immoral rules.
Yes mass murder is worse than patent trolling. The point of using an analogy is present similarities between 2 systems that are dissimilar in other respects (which in this case is the severity of the immoral act).
Inventions are ideas. The problem is that we allow obvious inventions/ideas to be patented. This results on wasteful litigation and stifles innovation.
Patents if done properly can encourage innovation, but we are doing it completely wrong. In this climate there is more incentive to be a patent lawyer than an inventor.
Sure, but it's a lot cheaper to hire a drone "pilot" who took a vendor supplied 2 week training course versus hiring an experienced helicopter pilot with years of experience.
Why do you need a pilot with "years" of experience? There are pilots working for regional airlines making $25000 a year and living in apartments with 9 other pilots.
But few police departments are going to use an $80,000 helicopter. Plus, if you're going to cut corners, you can get drones for a lot less than $50,000.
Yes you can. All technology is getting cheaper. My point was not that the cheapest drones will come down to the price of the cheapest helicopters, but that everything is getting cheaper and while you may be freaked out by drones, even without drones, it is possible for the government to do this kind of spying cheaply with piloted aircraft as well, they just choose not to. They choose to do everything in a relatively more expensive way than necessary. We shouldn;t be relying on the high expense of piloted aircraft to be the check on how much surveillance occurs.
So rather than legally limiting the amount of allowable surveillance you would rather depend on the expense of helicopters to deter law enforcement from overreaching?
What if some new material allows helicopters to be made lighter, quieter and more cheaply. Now the FBI can do exactly what we all feared as long as they make sure a person is physically sitting in the helicopter.
Relying on things to remain expensive as a check on government is probably not a bet we should be making as a society. Look at how well it has worked for drones.
Except that drones *are* aeroplanes and helicopters.
According to your logic we should also ban the use of red helicopters. Because if we allow them then the government will be able to use aeroplanes, helicopters, cars, *and* red helicopters.
There were no drones when the 4th amendment was created, but there were fences, hills, ladders, windows, curtains and telescopes. I don't think drones constitute a paradigm shift resulting in the complete obsolescence of the 4th amendment.
Airplanes did come a little bit later, but they have been around for over 100 years now. Spy planes have been around for nearly as long.
A drone has no added ability to see into your house. Yes it can see into your backyard, but so can someone with a ladder. Yes a drone can use infrared, but so can a person on a ladder. or someone in a van parked on your street, or a manned aircraft flying overhead.
The concern should be with the level of surveillance not with the fact that the sensors are mounted on an aircraft whose pilot is on the ground. People are freaking out over the wrong thing.
We as a society can decide how much surveillance we want and whether we want the ability (and the criminals to have the ability) of knowing when they are being watched. Once we decide this, we can decide what rules need to be in place to make sure law enforcement does not overreach. This is true of improving and drone technology as well as improving helicopter technology.
The rules we set for law enforcement shouldn't be tied to a specific technology (e.g. helicopters are ok and drones are not), Helicopters could get cheaper and quieter with new materials. We need to set limits on how much surveillance is allowed and encourage law enforcement to use the cheapest means to achieve this level of surveillance without exceeding it.
Simply banning drones while allowing helicopters ensures that there will be future abuse because it does not get to the root of the issue. Poorly thought out laws lead to poor results.
You can't use your helicopters against them either. I get why your world view would make you opposed to drones. I do not see why you would support helicopter surveillance.
This is not an argument to ban drones. This is an argument to lower the surveillance budget of law enforcement as technology makes surveillance cheaper.
it is just wasteful to force law enforcement to spend more money on obsolete technologies as a way of restricting their reach. We may as well force them to only use computers made before 1970 so they can only do so many database searches per day.
This assume an environment of only one HFT. Yes one HFT can cancel it's offer to sell at $10, but then another one will just swoop in and sell.
If no HFTs are willing to make a "real" sale at $10, then that means you're offer to buy is lower than the market value anyway.
IF there were only one HFT I would say this is extremely exploitive, but because there are many competing HFTs, they make very small margins on each trade. They do enough volume to make this very profitable, but because of the competition, they need faster and faster computers to do larger and larger volumes to make the same profit off of smaller margins.
In fact, if the profits from HFTs were large enough, everyone could just buy shares in companies that engage in HFT and be guaranteed a profit. In reality there are no guarantees and HFTs do actually have a lot of costs and risks associated with them.
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I am a software engineer who graduated with a CS degree in 2004. I have almost 9 years of experience. I think experience is essential. I know I am certainly a lot more productive now than I was after I graduated.
I will say however that I see the rationale for hiring new grads over old gray haired guys with lots of experience especially if when they are self taught. I may have been inexperienced when I was first hired, but I was willing to take less pay and I was very easily molded. Not every new grad is intelligent, but that's what interviews are for. A lot of the older people with 30 or 40+ years of experience are pretty set in their ways. They don't like learning new technologies or methodologies. They tend to find ways to do things their own way regardless of what they are told to do.
I am fairly sure that I am going to be like that when I get to be in my 50's and 60's. I can already feel myself being more stubborn about certain things. I feel fortunate that I had a good background on CS theory. I feel like if my mind becomes closed to new ideas I might be able to last for a while on a good foundation, not that I plan to let that happen. I don't know how hard it will be to learn/appreciate new technologies/ideas when I get older. I guess I will find out when I get there.
I don't know how open you are to getting a formal education, but I can't recommend it enough. I have seen a lot of new grads who are pretty inept. I have seen lots of schools and teachers that do a pretty terrible job of teaching subject matter. But when you get the education just right, it can really work miracles to improve your understanding and productivity. I don;t know how old you need to get before it stops being worth it to get a good education, but I suspect it's older than people think. If you actually enjoy learning I would say you should definitely do it. What's the downside? I watch youtube videos of college lectures in my spare time. I find it extremely fascinating, and I am addicted to the sense of power that comes with knowledge.
I don't think being self taught precludes you from getting a formal education. If you don't need a degree you don't even need to spend any money. You can witness all the same lectures as an MIT or Standford student online. I hope that when I am older, I can keep my sense of curiosity and my desire to learn.
The best way to get a job is to be useful. I am not so great with resumes, and I am not a good salesman, but I do know what I am talking about, and I am confident in my abilities. I always do really well in interviews when I can manage to get them. I can't imagine trying to do the things I do if I had tried to teach myself everything.
If variables with the word "blue" in them were more "perfect" I would agree with that. But since platform independence is a desirable trait and variables with the world blue in them is not, I don't see the point of this comparison.
They can simply compile all the COBOL code to the new platform. Since the COBOL applications in question work perfectly well, I assume they are written in a way that is platform independent.
"COBOL, it's finally becoming clear, isn't going away any time soon; there are far too many business-criticial applications written in it that work perfectly well for that to happen.
Well I guess we can finally fire all the COBOL programmers. Their job is now completed.
...contained in circuits that warp even the most basic rules of physics.
Well if the laws of physics are getting broken (or "warped") by reality, then they can't very well be the laws of physics. The *laws* of physics, by definition, apply universally. Maybe the headline should be "New circuits might work using well studied quantum effects that are not part of the simplified, 19th century version of physics taught in American high schools"
I guess it depends which freedoms you value.
If you value freedom of/from religion. I would actually say the US is more free. We don't have state sponsored religion. Even with as many dumbass religious people we have, for the most part, they have not successfully managed to get religion taught in public schools, or have tax money given to them. The most the get is tax exemptions. Many countries in Europe have state sanctioned religion and taxes that go to the official church.
If you want freedom of speech, I think we have more of that in the United State as well. For the most part we value freedom of speech over the freedom not to be offended. We have many pussy media outlets that will self censor pictures of Muhammad, but you don't get prison time or fines for being offensive to religion.
If you want the freedom to own a gun, the US is more free.
If you want the freedom to walk down the street without risk of being shot by a nutjob with a legally purchased gun, then Europe is more free.
In the US you have more freedom to fire workers.
In Europe you have more freedom to prevent your employer from firing you.
If you want to drink a beer in public that's not in a paper bag, I would say Europe is more free.
If you want to pay for sex, Europe is more free.
As far as economics goes, I don't think either the US or Europe is significantly freer. In Europe your money goes to social programs and clean energy subsidies whether you like it or not. In the US your money goes to rich people, oil companies, and corrupt politicians whether you like it or not.
I think it's a tossup between which country/continent is more free.
or XMirWayland or in case I want to run XMir in Wayland.
You can make an analogy by relating the holocaust with patent trolling. It doesn't mean that you can't discriminate between mass murder and patent trolling. But it does indicate that you don't know what an analogy is.
If someone makes an analogy between running a multinational corporation and a lemonade stand, the proper response is not "Corporations are much bigger than lemonade stands, why can't you see that?", the proper response is "I think this is a good/bad analogy because..."
In this case, I definitely see a valid analogy with the "just following orders" Nuremberg defense rationale. Both examples use complying with rules as an acceptable justification for immoral actions. Both implicitly deny deny responsibility for participating and profiting from a system with immoral rules.
Yes mass murder is worse than patent trolling. The point of using an analogy is present similarities between 2 systems that are dissimilar in other respects (which in this case is the severity of the immoral act).
Inventions are ideas. The problem is that we allow obvious inventions/ideas to be patented. This results on wasteful litigation and stifles innovation. Patents if done properly can encourage innovation, but we are doing it completely wrong. In this climate there is more incentive to be a patent lawyer than an inventor.
Sure, but it's a lot cheaper to hire a drone "pilot" who took a vendor supplied 2 week training course versus hiring an experienced helicopter pilot with years of experience.
Why do you need a pilot with "years" of experience? There are pilots working for regional airlines making $25000 a year and living in apartments with 9 other pilots.
But few police departments are going to use an $80,000 helicopter. Plus, if you're going to cut corners, you can get drones for a lot less than $50,000.
Yes you can. All technology is getting cheaper. My point was not that the cheapest drones will come down to the price of the cheapest helicopters, but that everything is getting cheaper and while you may be freaked out by drones, even without drones, it is possible for the government to do this kind of spying cheaply with piloted aircraft as well, they just choose not to. They choose to do everything in a relatively more expensive way than necessary. We shouldn;t be relying on the high expense of piloted aircraft to be the check on how much surveillance occurs.
1. Drones have pilots too.
2. You can get pilots for cheaper than $80,000.
3. You can get helicopters for less than $1M.
4. Sticking a camera on a helicopter is easier and cheaper than sticking the same camera on a drone.
The government just likes to spend more money on things. That doesn't mean it has to.
You mean if suddenly the cheapest helicopters were $50,000 instead of $80,000 it would mean the world was a drastically different place?
So rather than legally limiting the amount of allowable surveillance you would rather depend on the expense of helicopters to deter law enforcement from overreaching?
What if some new material allows helicopters to be made lighter, quieter and more cheaply. Now the FBI can do exactly what we all feared as long as they make sure a person is physically sitting in the helicopter.
Relying on things to remain expensive as a check on government is probably not a bet we should be making as a society. Look at how well it has worked for drones.
Except that drones *are* aeroplanes and helicopters.
According to your logic we should also ban the use of red helicopters. Because if we allow them then the government will be able to use aeroplanes, helicopters, cars, *and* red helicopters.
The FBI still doesn't have hellfire missiles, they have RC airplanes with cameras on them.
Conflating "drone" with "weaponized military drone" is like conflating "car" with "Abrams tank".
You are cool with helicopter surveillance because you feel comfortable shooting at the helicopter pilot? Do you realize how crazy that sounds?
We should also ban the FBI from using cars, because some cars have missiles too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Avenger_missile.jpg /s
There were no drones when the 4th amendment was created, but there were fences, hills, ladders, windows, curtains and telescopes. I don't think drones constitute a paradigm shift resulting in the complete obsolescence of the 4th amendment.
Airplanes did come a little bit later, but they have been around for over 100 years now. Spy planes have been around for nearly as long.
A drone has no added ability to see into your house. Yes it can see into your backyard, but so can someone with a ladder. Yes a drone can use infrared, but so can a person on a ladder. or someone in a van parked on your street, or a manned aircraft flying overhead.
The concern should be with the level of surveillance not with the fact that the sensors are mounted on an aircraft whose pilot is on the ground. People are freaking out over the wrong thing.
Unfortunately air is mostly transparent. Maybe you need better curtains.
We as a society can decide how much surveillance we want and whether we want the ability (and the criminals to have the ability) of knowing when they are being watched. Once we decide this, we can decide what rules need to be in place to make sure law enforcement does not overreach. This is true of improving and drone technology as well as improving helicopter technology.
The rules we set for law enforcement shouldn't be tied to a specific technology (e.g. helicopters are ok and drones are not), Helicopters could get cheaper and quieter with new materials. We need to set limits on how much surveillance is allowed and encourage law enforcement to use the cheapest means to achieve this level of surveillance without exceeding it.
Simply banning drones while allowing helicopters ensures that there will be future abuse because it does not get to the root of the issue. Poorly thought out laws lead to poor results.
You can't use your helicopters against them either. I get why your world view would make you opposed to drones. I do not see why you would support helicopter surveillance.
This is not an argument to ban drones. This is an argument to lower the surveillance budget of law enforcement as technology makes surveillance cheaper.
it is just wasteful to force law enforcement to spend more money on obsolete technologies as a way of restricting their reach. We may as well force them to only use computers made before 1970 so they can only do so many database searches per day.
Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't spend any effort on catching criminals?
So what I hear you saying is that if for some reason helicopters became much cheaper and easier to use they would need to be made illegal too.
This assume an environment of only one HFT. Yes one HFT can cancel it's offer to sell at $10, but then another one will just swoop in and sell.
If no HFTs are willing to make a "real" sale at $10, then that means you're offer to buy is lower than the market value anyway.
IF there were only one HFT I would say this is extremely exploitive, but because there are many competing HFTs, they make very small margins on each trade. They do enough volume to make this very profitable, but because of the competition, they need faster and faster computers to do larger and larger volumes to make the same profit off of smaller margins.
In fact, if the profits from HFTs were large enough, everyone could just buy shares in companies that engage in HFT and be guaranteed a profit. In reality there are no guarantees and HFTs do actually have a lot of costs and risks associated with them.