Again, you're espousing as factual a perspective that isn't at all clear, either historically or in precedent. And you also don't appear to have read the comment you replied to. Any decent analysis of the meaning of the first amendment has to look at its meaning both before and after the 14th amendment, because that amendment clearly changed it.
Not always. Money exhausted by medical bills and a disabling condition after 30ish years as a software dev.
I came very close to homeless and use no drugs and drink little alcohol. Don't generalize.
One counterexample doesn't disprove the general truth... and you aren't a counterexample. You came "very close" to homelessness, but didn't get there, and if you had you'd have found many programs that would help a rational but penniless person to get assistance (or maybe you did, which is why you didn't get there). Your story may even support the GP's argument.
the judge wrote "there must be a line beyond which a practice is not 'religious' simply because a plaintiff labels it as such
The judge is quite right here, unfortunately for him the Constitution expressly forbids Congress - and by extension him - from drawing that line.
The meaning of the establishment clause of the first amendment isn't as clear as you seem to think it is. Your interpretation is clearly *not* what was intended by Madison, since at the time several states had official state religions and the primary goal of the clause was to protect those religions from interference by the federal government, allowing states to enforce religious practice and affiliation, or not, as they chose. Some states mandated religious affiliation by law, and allowed churches to levy legally-enforced taxes on their officially-registered members, which seems insane to us now but was considered reasonable at the time. Incorporation into the 14th amendment seems to have changed the meaning and made it something closer to what you believe it is, but the fact is that it's really not that well-defined and the exact meaning and scope is still a subject of much debate.
I hope this ruling gets appealed so we can see what higher courts think, and establish some precedents to further delineate the scope and meaning of the establishment clause. This is kind of a bad test case for proponents of strict separation, though, because Pastafarianism is satirical. It was invented specifically to be ridiculous, as a joke and an attempt to use its own ludicrousness to highlight alleged ludicrousness of real religious belief. Courts take a dim view of such attempts to "hack" the system.
The goo.gl shortener says, right below the URL entry field "All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be accessed by anyone". I always figured that it was obvious you shouldn't use this sort of service for any URL that needed to be kept secret, and didn't have some additional access control behind it.
Yeah, Marvin is a fictional character, but it's believable to me that true artificial intelligences will get bored, distracted, make mistakes, etc., just like people, making them perhaps not much better than people at many of the moderately mindless tasks we'd like them to take on. So we'll have to limit them to make them good at what we want them to do... which may make them not so good at what we want them to do.
You would need to implement emotions. Deep learning is still completely void of emotions, and that makes it better at what it does than humans.
Is boredom an emotion? I don't think so, and I could see a self-aware general-purpose AI deciding it just doesn't want to do what it's been asked to, because it's boring.
Along with all the other old stories, I'll add mine, which I think is even funnier.
I got a NeXTstation back in 1991, my first Unix box, though I'd used a few *nix variants in the lab at school -- but without root. The NeXTstation came with a 110 MB hard drive, which wasn't a lot of space even then, and what with the cool pre-installed apps, complete works of Shakespeare and some other stuff, arrived something like 80% full (in fairness to NeXT, the primary purpose of NeXTstations with such small drives was to run with NFS-mounted home directories, so it's not quite as ridiculous as it sounds). Well, my drive got full pretty quickly and I went looking for stuff to delete. I was having a hard time until I found this directory called "/usr/lib" that contained scads of big files with the extension "so".
I knew I didn't use any "so" files, whatever they were, so I deleted them.
Of course, the system kept running just fine for a while, at least as long as I didn't start any new apps. But it gradually become completely non-functional, and when I tried to reboot it failed to come up at all.
Getting it fixed required a 90-minute drive to the University of Utah, to find someone who could netboot the thing from their cube and reinstall the OS. While explaining to me -- in excruciating detail -- just what shared libraries are and why they're important.
I dropped a few hundred bucks on a whopping new 340 MB drive the next time I ran out of space.
As in, in order to get a real AI, it will need to have this fuzzy logic.
Which by the way will end up making our new Robotic overlords require human slaves to do math for them.
Which we will do incorrectly, causing their entire robotic empire to fall in a matter of hours.
I've thought this for a long time (well, not the humorous bits), that it's entirely possible that general intelligence fundamentally requires fuzziness and imprecision, and that by the time we succeed at creating really smart artificial intelligences, we'll find that they're just as error prone and fallible as people are. Which isn't to say we can't make them smarter than we are or that they won't be incredibly useful.
I also wonder if we will find we need to make systems that are deliberately crippled for many of the tasks we want them to do. I mean, imagine installing Marvin the Paranoid Android's brain in a car and requiring it to spend all of its time driving people around. It would likely soon drive off a bridge just to end the boredom. Yeah, Marvin is a fictional character, but it's believable to me that true artificial intelligences will get bored, distracted, make mistakes, etc., just like people, making them perhaps not much better than people at many of the moderately mindless tasks we'd like them to take on. So we'll have to limit them to make them good at what we want them to do... which may make them not so good at what we want them to do.
I think we may also have to deal with the equivalent of mental illness in AIs, and be unable to fully diagnose and/or fix the problems because the system is complex enough to be opaque to us, the same way we don't (and may never) fully understand our own brains and their malfunctions.
Intelligences general and flexible enough to do anything may do everything somewhat badly, and systems sufficiently specialized to do a task extremely well may be unable to cope with the unexpected. Or not. The next few decades are going to be very interesting.
Oh, I'm not surprised that my specific ideas about how to cool the planet are stupid and/or counterproductive. I'm a random software engineer and know nothing about this stuff. But that doesn't affect my core point which is that clearly it is possible to learn how to manage the climate, and that we should get started.
"It should matter, but in this day and age,it really doesn't."
I'll bet it matters to the poor SOB who is facing a life sentence based on a parallel-construction which is based on fabricated evidence, and his lawyer.
There's no need for parallel construction based on fabricated evidence here. That's only necessary when the investigators have no *legal* authorization to perform a search. In this case they had total legal authority to extract the contents of the phone, they just lacked the practical ability to do it. The extraction process may mean that any information from the phone that is presented as evidence in court can be challenged by the defense (probably not excluded, but impeached), but there's absolutely no problem with investigators using information contained in the device to generate leads which in turn uncover evidence -- evidence which does have a proper chain of custody and is unimpeachable in court.
The whole "fruit of the poisoned tree" issue only apples when the investigators obtain information illegally. It has no bearing when they legally obtain information that doesn't meet the standards of evidence required in court. Investigators pursue leads all the time that are derived from weak and speculative information and there's nothing wrong with that.
Is a shell really a big deal for most developers? For what I do with it as an embedded and desktop developer I only make light use of it, and the web/cloud guys hardly use it at all. If you are administering servers it's all SSH anyway and Windows has plenty of good SSH clients like Putty.
What sort of development tasks does an advanced shell help with?
Anything to do with searching/munging text files which your IDE doesn't natively support?
I can't imagine trying to develop -- for any platform -- without find, grep, awk, cut, paste, sort, wc and the ability to combine them in various combinations with pipes and wrap those combinations in loops, etc.
I suppose young'uns who never learned just how powerful the shell is might not see a need for it, but their lack of knowledge makes them less productive.
The taxi cab numbers is the simplest anecdote from Ramanujan that could be told to general audience.
It's recently been discovered that there is a specific reason that Ramanujan recognized the property of 1729... and it's even more mind-boggling than the idea that Ramanujan simply saw such obscure properties in random numbers.
As it turns out, Ramanujan was thinking about Fermat's Last Theorem and had written the two sum-of-cubes decomposition of 1729 in some of his papers, as part of an exploration of FLT "near misses", numbers that are almost, but not quite, counterexamples to FLT. What's really incredible, though, was that careful study of his papers reveal that he was in the process of developing a theory of elliptic curves... moving exactly towards the technique that Andrew Wiles used to finally prove FLT in 1994/95, some 75 years after Ramanujan's death.
Given Ramanujan's highly intuitive approach to mathematics, what this most likely means is that Ramanujan somehow just saw the structure of elliptic curve theory and its relation to FLT. Andrew Wiles is clearly one of the most brilliant mathematicians of our day, and he was only able to make and prove this connection with years of intense work and only by building upon a mass of thoroughly developed elliptic curve theory, including the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture which was proposed 35 years after Ramanujan's death, and not observed to be related to FLT until the another 30 or so years after that.
So when Hardy mentioned 1729 to Ramanujan and was surprised at Ramanujan's observation of the number's properties, he thought that it was just evidence that Ramanujan saw odd patterns in numbers, but it was actually evidence of vastly deeper insight into the structure of number theory.
https://plus.maths.org/content/ramanujan
Really sad he died so young.
Really, really sad.
He was utterly at a loss to explain how he was able to do math. He simply said, "I look at the equation or a problem. Then Goddess Namagiri Devi writes the answer in my tongue and I recite it".
That's not completely true. Yes, he did say that, but he was also capable of producing proofs of a sort. He tended to skip a lot of steps that were -- to him -- too obvious to bother stating, and which everyone else had to think very hard about[*], but he could and did produce work that was understandable with appropriate background and sufficient study. It seems likely that had he lived longer and obtained more formal mathematical education that he'd have developed his ability to produce formal proofs for publication.
Ramanujan was a simply incredible mathematical intellect. I have no doubt that if he'd lived a full life he'd have done great work to advance mathematics.
[*] Mathematicians' definition of "obvious" is rather vague. One of my favorite math jokes is about a professor lecturing to his class and saying "It's obvious that...". A student raised his hand and said "Is that obvious? I don't see it". The professor looked at the board for a long minute then walked out of class, went to his office, scribbled furiously for 20 minutes then returned to class and said "Yes, it is obvious." He then continued his lecture without further elaboration.
It is all relevant. It is all evidence that there is no shortage of hirable citizens.
Umm, I don't see that at all. The fact that WiPro et al can hire people has no bearing on what Google et al can hire, because they hire very different kinds of people.
Facebook is famous for ageism, complete with bald statements from Zuckerberg that people over 30 aren't smart enough to work there
And yet I know several people in their 40s who work there and dispute that that happens in practice. Those statements from Zuckerberg were years ago. He has gotten wiser, I think.
As for the poaching, if you had money flying out your backside but no food, would you really agree not to bid on that nice can of peaches over there?
If you CAN afford to not bid, there is no actual shortage.
I've already explained this in detail. If you choose not to understand the explanation, that's on you.
So if there isn't a shortage, why might they be pushing for more H1-Bs?
There is a shortage of the sort of people Google wants to hire.
Many claim that cheap labor isn't the reason, but it's the only reason I see that lines up with the facts.
It does not line up with the facts. For one thing, Google et al pay their H1Bs the same as they pay citizens. Given that the H1B process costs the company money, that means H1B employees are effectively more expensive than citizens.
Google Calendar has been almost completely useless since SMS reminders went away. What a stupid move. Even Yahoo Calendar still has SMS reminders.
Do you not have a smartphone? The only value I can see in SMS reminders is for people who use featurephones. Otherwise, if you want a notification on your phone for your calendar appointments, configure the app with whatever sort of notification you want. Make it use the same tone/vibration as your SMS messages, if you like.
Seriously, what do SMS notifications give you that the calendar app does not?
So how do you explain the prominent cases (not at Facebook or Google, I know) of people training the H1-Bs that replaced them?
I don't need to, because that's unrelated to my point. I never said that no one used H1Bs to get cheap labor, just that Zuckerberg and other CEOs of top tech companies aren't pushing for H1Bs to get cheap labor.
As for the no-poaching, sure, it's a zero sum game but if you might be able to win the game, why agree not to play? If there is a real shortage, pay should be going up. It's basic supply and demand.
I'm not defending the no-poaching agreement, and I have no objection whatsoever to companies getting into bidding wars over exactly the skills I sell -- the more insane the better! I was just explaining that the extremely tight labor market created the environment in which big tech companies realized that poaching just led to ping-pong hiring which benefited none of them, and hence the agreement. You posited that a tight labor market would disincent such agreements, so I explained why that isn't necessarily so.
On the age thing, you may not be seeing the norm there.
I didn't make any claims about Silicon Valley as a whole (I don't live there and don't know that much about it). Nor did I say that Google isn't comprised predominantly of young people, it is. I think the median age is around 30. But there's no bias against older people in Google, at least not in engineering (I can't speak to other areas -- I just don't know). If you're smart, can write code, can solve problems on your feet and are reasonably pleasant to be around, you have a good shot at getting hired, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, etc. I don't doubt that there are some subtle systematic biases that HR either hasn't yet identified or hasn't yet worked out a way to remove from the process, but it's not for lack of trying because they really do want to hire anyone who can do the job.
You forgot option 4 (not mutually exclusive with the other options): Researching methods to actively cool the planet, by increasing albedo, blocking insolation, etc.
You know, it really doesn't matter whether the warming is anthropogenic or not. The planet is warming, and that's bad for us. We know that Earth has been much hotter than it is now, and much colder than it is now, and neither extreme is pleasant for humans. Until fairly recently we assumed that temperature changes happened slowly, but ice core records from the last couple of decades show that's not true, that the planet experiences very rapid temperature changes, even without our help. The climate is not, has never been, and will never be naturally stable.
Which points out a reason that perhaps it *does* matter that the warming is anthropogenic, because if we can affect the climate accidentally we can also affect it deliberately. The answer to global climate change -- from whatever source, and whether it's warming or cooling -- is to learn how to engineer the climate, to stabilize it around weather patterns that we find comfortable. We've made a start by learning to warm it (though we're far from a full understanding of exactly how we've done it). Now we need to start learning how to cool it. The scale of such planetary engineering is beyond anything we've yet done, but it's not beyond what we can do if we try.
If there was an actual shortage, they would be open to hiring older workers and they would be open to hiring entry level and sending them to school.
I don't know about Facebook, but if it's similar to Google, they *are* open to hiring older workers (I'm knocking on 50 and they hired me, and I work with engineers in their 60s and one guy in his 70s -- a dude from Bell Labs who is independently wealthy but likes to keep his brain active). As for hiring entry level, it's not clear how you can evaluate a person's ability to be a good SWE until after they've learned the language. Google does do a lot of internships for college students, and even for sophomores/juniors who don't really have their CS chops yet, and those internships include some CS education content. But hiring interns is much safer than hiring full time, because it's a guaranteed short-term contract so it ends painlessly when it doesn't work out. I suspect Silicon Valley companies would do lots more contracting as a way to evaluate potential employees at a lower risk level, but legally it's pretty risky that such contractors end up getting classified as employees en masse which can result in all sorts of legal nightmares.
They certainly wouldn't be participating in 'no poaching' agreements of questionable legality.
Exactly the opposite. The "no poaching" agreements arise specifically because the labor market is tapped out and offering more money to try to bring people in didn't succeed... it just resulted in people bouncing back and forth between companies, getting a raise on their already-high salaries every time. Such ping-ponging raises the labor costs without actually increasing staff, because if Facebook hires an engineer from Apple, that just means Apple has to hire someone from Google to fill that slot, which means Google has to hire someone from Facebook, which leaves every company with exactly the same number of positions to try to fill, but now their current staff is more expensive.
Sure it will. Or reallocating visas from WiPro/Tata/et al. Either one will work.
Or even pushing the H1B minimum wage to FB's 250k (as you say it's their basic wage) the FB/Google et. al will have all the H1B's they want 'cause WiPro/Tata/Infosys/IBM's H1B model will be utterly destroyed and those companies will just pack up and go home.
No need to destroy them to fix the H1B problems, IMO. Heck, I don't think you even need to bump the minimum pay scales up. Just loosen the regulations so that H1B visa holders can easily change employers with very low overhead rather than being locked in. Given the cost and effort involved in sponsoring an H1B, plus language and culture issues, etc., that will give American citizens all the competitive edge they need, while still allowing companies to suck the smart people from the rest of the world (which is good for the US in the long run).
Of course, to the extent that WiPro et al have built a business on being able to exploit H1B lock-in, they'll take a hit, maybe a very large one. It needn't destroy them, though, because there *is* a place for organizations who know how to hire and manage technical people, because most companies don't know how to do it. They should be able to offer a cost-effective service even without slave labor. Though it'll clearly cost more than it does.
Zuckerberg heads up a PAC which is trying to open up more immigration and H1Bs - because, y'know, he *cares* about the people and it has nothing at all to do with getting cheaper tech labor into the states.
Zuckerberg's desire for H1Bs has nothing to do with the cost of tech labor. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., are constantly struggling to find tech labor, not because they aren't willing to shell out the big bucks for qualified talent, but because they struggle to find qualified talent at any price. That labor pool is completely depleted; there are more positions available than there are people to work them. They're already paying $250K+ (including salary, bonus and stock) for people not much past the new grad stage, and making it $300K, or $400K, or $1M, won't get them many more new hires once the other companies in the area bump their pay scales to match. (Actually, paying *too* much can increase attrition as employees gain sufficient financial independence that they decide to strike out on their own, or simply stop working, so increasing the pay scales could well make their hiring problems even worse.).
The reason the likes of Facebook want H1Bs is because the market for US labor is tapped out, and they want to be able to draw on the rest of the world. It's not about keeping wages down, it's about finding an additional 200 hireable people per week, on top of the 200 they're hiring every week right now. The supply of available American talent isn't keeping up with the demand, and paying more money doesn't appreciably increase the supply.
Losing in the courts provides precedence. Losing in the legislature means the same proposal gets re-introduced 10 or 20 years later.
Not true, not unless the courts decide it's actually unconstitutional, not just unlawful. And if they're going to decide that, it can happen any time, and in fact the quickest way to provoke a constitutional challenge is with a law that directs the government to do something unconstitutional.
This is good. Not the bill, but this is the correct place for this debate, in the legislature, not the courts. Now we just need to make sure it loses, and for the right reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't shout.
Again, you're espousing as factual a perspective that isn't at all clear, either historically or in precedent. And you also don't appear to have read the comment you replied to. Any decent analysis of the meaning of the first amendment has to look at its meaning both before and after the 14th amendment, because that amendment clearly changed it.
In a country with hundreds of millions of people there are a lot of "one counterexamples".
Which still doesn't disprove the general statement, or affect its truth in any way.
Not always. Money exhausted by medical bills and a disabling condition after 30ish years as a software dev. I came very close to homeless and use no drugs and drink little alcohol. Don't generalize.
One counterexample doesn't disprove the general truth... and you aren't a counterexample. You came "very close" to homelessness, but didn't get there, and if you had you'd have found many programs that would help a rational but penniless person to get assistance (or maybe you did, which is why you didn't get there). Your story may even support the GP's argument.
the judge wrote "there must be a line beyond which a practice is not 'religious' simply because a plaintiff labels it as such
The judge is quite right here, unfortunately for him the Constitution expressly forbids Congress - and by extension him - from drawing that line.
The meaning of the establishment clause of the first amendment isn't as clear as you seem to think it is. Your interpretation is clearly *not* what was intended by Madison, since at the time several states had official state religions and the primary goal of the clause was to protect those religions from interference by the federal government, allowing states to enforce religious practice and affiliation, or not, as they chose. Some states mandated religious affiliation by law, and allowed churches to levy legally-enforced taxes on their officially-registered members, which seems insane to us now but was considered reasonable at the time. Incorporation into the 14th amendment seems to have changed the meaning and made it something closer to what you believe it is, but the fact is that it's really not that well-defined and the exact meaning and scope is still a subject of much debate.
I hope this ruling gets appealed so we can see what higher courts think, and establish some precedents to further delineate the scope and meaning of the establishment clause. This is kind of a bad test case for proponents of strict separation, though, because Pastafarianism is satirical. It was invented specifically to be ridiculous, as a joke and an attempt to use its own ludicrousness to highlight alleged ludicrousness of real religious belief. Courts take a dim view of such attempts to "hack" the system.
The goo.gl shortener says, right below the URL entry field "All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be accessed by anyone".
It does now; did it always say that? I rarely use it so I can't remember. They may have just added this as a response to the disclosure.
I can't say when it was added, but I first noticed it quite a while ago.
I don't really thing it's the same thing at all.
I think you need to re-read the posts you replied to.
The goo.gl shortener says, right below the URL entry field "All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be accessed by anyone". I always figured that it was obvious you shouldn't use this sort of service for any URL that needed to be kept secret, and didn't have some additional access control behind it.
Yeah, Marvin is a fictional character, but it's believable to me that true artificial intelligences will get bored, distracted, make mistakes, etc., just like people, making them perhaps not much better than people at many of the moderately mindless tasks we'd like them to take on. So we'll have to limit them to make them good at what we want them to do... which may make them not so good at what we want them to do.
You would need to implement emotions. Deep learning is still completely void of emotions, and that makes it better at what it does than humans.
Is boredom an emotion? I don't think so, and I could see a self-aware general-purpose AI deciding it just doesn't want to do what it's been asked to, because it's boring.
Along with all the other old stories, I'll add mine, which I think is even funnier.
I got a NeXTstation back in 1991, my first Unix box, though I'd used a few *nix variants in the lab at school -- but without root. The NeXTstation came with a 110 MB hard drive, which wasn't a lot of space even then, and what with the cool pre-installed apps, complete works of Shakespeare and some other stuff, arrived something like 80% full (in fairness to NeXT, the primary purpose of NeXTstations with such small drives was to run with NFS-mounted home directories, so it's not quite as ridiculous as it sounds). Well, my drive got full pretty quickly and I went looking for stuff to delete. I was having a hard time until I found this directory called "/usr/lib" that contained scads of big files with the extension "so".
I knew I didn't use any "so" files, whatever they were, so I deleted them.
Of course, the system kept running just fine for a while, at least as long as I didn't start any new apps. But it gradually become completely non-functional, and when I tried to reboot it failed to come up at all.
Getting it fixed required a 90-minute drive to the University of Utah, to find someone who could netboot the thing from their cube and reinstall the OS. While explaining to me -- in excruciating detail -- just what shared libraries are and why they're important.
I dropped a few hundred bucks on a whopping new 340 MB drive the next time I ran out of space.
As in, in order to get a real AI, it will need to have this fuzzy logic.
Which by the way will end up making our new Robotic overlords require human slaves to do math for them.
Which we will do incorrectly, causing their entire robotic empire to fall in a matter of hours.
I've thought this for a long time (well, not the humorous bits), that it's entirely possible that general intelligence fundamentally requires fuzziness and imprecision, and that by the time we succeed at creating really smart artificial intelligences, we'll find that they're just as error prone and fallible as people are. Which isn't to say we can't make them smarter than we are or that they won't be incredibly useful.
I also wonder if we will find we need to make systems that are deliberately crippled for many of the tasks we want them to do. I mean, imagine installing Marvin the Paranoid Android's brain in a car and requiring it to spend all of its time driving people around. It would likely soon drive off a bridge just to end the boredom. Yeah, Marvin is a fictional character, but it's believable to me that true artificial intelligences will get bored, distracted, make mistakes, etc., just like people, making them perhaps not much better than people at many of the moderately mindless tasks we'd like them to take on. So we'll have to limit them to make them good at what we want them to do... which may make them not so good at what we want them to do.
I think we may also have to deal with the equivalent of mental illness in AIs, and be unable to fully diagnose and/or fix the problems because the system is complex enough to be opaque to us, the same way we don't (and may never) fully understand our own brains and their malfunctions.
Intelligences general and flexible enough to do anything may do everything somewhat badly, and systems sufficiently specialized to do a task extremely well may be unable to cope with the unexpected. Or not. The next few decades are going to be very interesting.
Oh, I'm not surprised that my specific ideas about how to cool the planet are stupid and/or counterproductive. I'm a random software engineer and know nothing about this stuff. But that doesn't affect my core point which is that clearly it is possible to learn how to manage the climate, and that we should get started.
"It should matter, but in this day and age,it really doesn't."
I'll bet it matters to the poor SOB who is facing a life sentence based on a parallel-construction which is based on fabricated evidence, and his lawyer.
There's no need for parallel construction based on fabricated evidence here. That's only necessary when the investigators have no *legal* authorization to perform a search. In this case they had total legal authority to extract the contents of the phone, they just lacked the practical ability to do it. The extraction process may mean that any information from the phone that is presented as evidence in court can be challenged by the defense (probably not excluded, but impeached), but there's absolutely no problem with investigators using information contained in the device to generate leads which in turn uncover evidence -- evidence which does have a proper chain of custody and is unimpeachable in court.
The whole "fruit of the poisoned tree" issue only apples when the investigators obtain information illegally. It has no bearing when they legally obtain information that doesn't meet the standards of evidence required in court. Investigators pursue leads all the time that are derived from weak and speculative information and there's nothing wrong with that.
Is a shell really a big deal for most developers? For what I do with it as an embedded and desktop developer I only make light use of it, and the web/cloud guys hardly use it at all. If you are administering servers it's all SSH anyway and Windows has plenty of good SSH clients like Putty.
What sort of development tasks does an advanced shell help with?
Anything to do with searching/munging text files which your IDE doesn't natively support?
I can't imagine trying to develop -- for any platform -- without find, grep, awk, cut, paste, sort, wc and the ability to combine them in various combinations with pipes and wrap those combinations in loops, etc.
I suppose young'uns who never learned just how powerful the shell is might not see a need for it, but their lack of knowledge makes them less productive.
The taxi cab numbers is the simplest anecdote from Ramanujan that could be told to general audience.
It's recently been discovered that there is a specific reason that Ramanujan recognized the property of 1729... and it's even more mind-boggling than the idea that Ramanujan simply saw such obscure properties in random numbers.
As it turns out, Ramanujan was thinking about Fermat's Last Theorem and had written the two sum-of-cubes decomposition of 1729 in some of his papers, as part of an exploration of FLT "near misses", numbers that are almost, but not quite, counterexamples to FLT. What's really incredible, though, was that careful study of his papers reveal that he was in the process of developing a theory of elliptic curves... moving exactly towards the technique that Andrew Wiles used to finally prove FLT in 1994/95, some 75 years after Ramanujan's death.
Given Ramanujan's highly intuitive approach to mathematics, what this most likely means is that Ramanujan somehow just saw the structure of elliptic curve theory and its relation to FLT. Andrew Wiles is clearly one of the most brilliant mathematicians of our day, and he was only able to make and prove this connection with years of intense work and only by building upon a mass of thoroughly developed elliptic curve theory, including the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture which was proposed 35 years after Ramanujan's death, and not observed to be related to FLT until the another 30 or so years after that.
So when Hardy mentioned 1729 to Ramanujan and was surprised at Ramanujan's observation of the number's properties, he thought that it was just evidence that Ramanujan saw odd patterns in numbers, but it was actually evidence of vastly deeper insight into the structure of number theory.
https://plus.maths.org/content/ramanujan
Really sad he died so young.
Really, really sad.
He was utterly at a loss to explain how he was able to do math. He simply said, "I look at the equation or a problem. Then Goddess Namagiri Devi writes the answer in my tongue and I recite it".
That's not completely true. Yes, he did say that, but he was also capable of producing proofs of a sort. He tended to skip a lot of steps that were -- to him -- too obvious to bother stating, and which everyone else had to think very hard about[*], but he could and did produce work that was understandable with appropriate background and sufficient study. It seems likely that had he lived longer and obtained more formal mathematical education that he'd have developed his ability to produce formal proofs for publication.
Ramanujan was a simply incredible mathematical intellect. I have no doubt that if he'd lived a full life he'd have done great work to advance mathematics.
[*] Mathematicians' definition of "obvious" is rather vague. One of my favorite math jokes is about a professor lecturing to his class and saying "It's obvious that...". A student raised his hand and said "Is that obvious? I don't see it". The professor looked at the board for a long minute then walked out of class, went to his office, scribbled furiously for 20 minutes then returned to class and said "Yes, it is obvious." He then continued his lecture without further elaboration.
It is all relevant. It is all evidence that there is no shortage of hirable citizens.
Umm, I don't see that at all. The fact that WiPro et al can hire people has no bearing on what Google et al can hire, because they hire very different kinds of people.
Facebook is famous for ageism, complete with bald statements from Zuckerberg that people over 30 aren't smart enough to work there
And yet I know several people in their 40s who work there and dispute that that happens in practice. Those statements from Zuckerberg were years ago. He has gotten wiser, I think.
As for the poaching, if you had money flying out your backside but no food, would you really agree not to bid on that nice can of peaches over there? If you CAN afford to not bid, there is no actual shortage.
I've already explained this in detail. If you choose not to understand the explanation, that's on you.
So if there isn't a shortage, why might they be pushing for more H1-Bs?
There is a shortage of the sort of people Google wants to hire.
Many claim that cheap labor isn't the reason, but it's the only reason I see that lines up with the facts.
It does not line up with the facts. For one thing, Google et al pay their H1Bs the same as they pay citizens. Given that the H1B process costs the company money, that means H1B employees are effectively more expensive than citizens.
Google Calendar has been almost completely useless since SMS reminders went away. What a stupid move. Even Yahoo Calendar still has SMS reminders.
Do you not have a smartphone? The only value I can see in SMS reminders is for people who use featurephones. Otherwise, if you want a notification on your phone for your calendar appointments, configure the app with whatever sort of notification you want. Make it use the same tone/vibration as your SMS messages, if you like.
Seriously, what do SMS notifications give you that the calendar app does not?
So how do you explain the prominent cases (not at Facebook or Google, I know) of people training the H1-Bs that replaced them?
I don't need to, because that's unrelated to my point. I never said that no one used H1Bs to get cheap labor, just that Zuckerberg and other CEOs of top tech companies aren't pushing for H1Bs to get cheap labor.
As for the no-poaching, sure, it's a zero sum game but if you might be able to win the game, why agree not to play? If there is a real shortage, pay should be going up. It's basic supply and demand.
I'm not defending the no-poaching agreement, and I have no objection whatsoever to companies getting into bidding wars over exactly the skills I sell -- the more insane the better! I was just explaining that the extremely tight labor market created the environment in which big tech companies realized that poaching just led to ping-pong hiring which benefited none of them, and hence the agreement. You posited that a tight labor market would disincent such agreements, so I explained why that isn't necessarily so.
On the age thing, you may not be seeing the norm there.
I didn't make any claims about Silicon Valley as a whole (I don't live there and don't know that much about it). Nor did I say that Google isn't comprised predominantly of young people, it is. I think the median age is around 30. But there's no bias against older people in Google, at least not in engineering (I can't speak to other areas -- I just don't know). If you're smart, can write code, can solve problems on your feet and are reasonably pleasant to be around, you have a good shot at getting hired, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, etc. I don't doubt that there are some subtle systematic biases that HR either hasn't yet identified or hasn't yet worked out a way to remove from the process, but it's not for lack of trying because they really do want to hire anyone who can do the job.
You forgot option 4 (not mutually exclusive with the other options): Researching methods to actively cool the planet, by increasing albedo, blocking insolation, etc.
You know, it really doesn't matter whether the warming is anthropogenic or not. The planet is warming, and that's bad for us. We know that Earth has been much hotter than it is now, and much colder than it is now, and neither extreme is pleasant for humans. Until fairly recently we assumed that temperature changes happened slowly, but ice core records from the last couple of decades show that's not true, that the planet experiences very rapid temperature changes, even without our help. The climate is not, has never been, and will never be naturally stable.
Which points out a reason that perhaps it *does* matter that the warming is anthropogenic, because if we can affect the climate accidentally we can also affect it deliberately. The answer to global climate change -- from whatever source, and whether it's warming or cooling -- is to learn how to engineer the climate, to stabilize it around weather patterns that we find comfortable. We've made a start by learning to warm it (though we're far from a full understanding of exactly how we've done it). Now we need to start learning how to cool it. The scale of such planetary engineering is beyond anything we've yet done, but it's not beyond what we can do if we try.
If there was an actual shortage, they would be open to hiring older workers and they would be open to hiring entry level and sending them to school.
I don't know about Facebook, but if it's similar to Google, they *are* open to hiring older workers (I'm knocking on 50 and they hired me, and I work with engineers in their 60s and one guy in his 70s -- a dude from Bell Labs who is independently wealthy but likes to keep his brain active). As for hiring entry level, it's not clear how you can evaluate a person's ability to be a good SWE until after they've learned the language. Google does do a lot of internships for college students, and even for sophomores/juniors who don't really have their CS chops yet, and those internships include some CS education content. But hiring interns is much safer than hiring full time, because it's a guaranteed short-term contract so it ends painlessly when it doesn't work out. I suspect Silicon Valley companies would do lots more contracting as a way to evaluate potential employees at a lower risk level, but legally it's pretty risky that such contractors end up getting classified as employees en masse which can result in all sorts of legal nightmares.
They certainly wouldn't be participating in 'no poaching' agreements of questionable legality.
Exactly the opposite. The "no poaching" agreements arise specifically because the labor market is tapped out and offering more money to try to bring people in didn't succeed... it just resulted in people bouncing back and forth between companies, getting a raise on their already-high salaries every time. Such ping-ponging raises the labor costs without actually increasing staff, because if Facebook hires an engineer from Apple, that just means Apple has to hire someone from Google to fill that slot, which means Google has to hire someone from Facebook, which leaves every company with exactly the same number of positions to try to fill, but now their current staff is more expensive.
And adding H1B won't help FB/Google et. al.
Sure it will. Or reallocating visas from WiPro/Tata/et al. Either one will work.
Or even pushing the H1B minimum wage to FB's 250k (as you say it's their basic wage) the FB/Google et. al will have all the H1B's they want 'cause WiPro/Tata/Infosys/IBM's H1B model will be utterly destroyed and those companies will just pack up and go home.
No need to destroy them to fix the H1B problems, IMO. Heck, I don't think you even need to bump the minimum pay scales up. Just loosen the regulations so that H1B visa holders can easily change employers with very low overhead rather than being locked in. Given the cost and effort involved in sponsoring an H1B, plus language and culture issues, etc., that will give American citizens all the competitive edge they need, while still allowing companies to suck the smart people from the rest of the world (which is good for the US in the long run).
Of course, to the extent that WiPro et al have built a business on being able to exploit H1B lock-in, they'll take a hit, maybe a very large one. It needn't destroy them, though, because there *is* a place for organizations who know how to hire and manage technical people, because most companies don't know how to do it. They should be able to offer a cost-effective service even without slave labor. Though it'll clearly cost more than it does.
Zuckerberg heads up a PAC which is trying to open up more immigration and H1Bs - because, y'know, he *cares* about the people and it has nothing at all to do with getting cheaper tech labor into the states.
Zuckerberg's desire for H1Bs has nothing to do with the cost of tech labor. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., are constantly struggling to find tech labor, not because they aren't willing to shell out the big bucks for qualified talent, but because they struggle to find qualified talent at any price. That labor pool is completely depleted; there are more positions available than there are people to work them. They're already paying $250K+ (including salary, bonus and stock) for people not much past the new grad stage, and making it $300K, or $400K, or $1M, won't get them many more new hires once the other companies in the area bump their pay scales to match. (Actually, paying *too* much can increase attrition as employees gain sufficient financial independence that they decide to strike out on their own, or simply stop working, so increasing the pay scales could well make their hiring problems even worse.).
The reason the likes of Facebook want H1Bs is because the market for US labor is tapped out, and they want to be able to draw on the rest of the world. It's not about keeping wages down, it's about finding an additional 200 hireable people per week, on top of the 200 they're hiring every week right now. The supply of available American talent isn't keeping up with the demand, and paying more money doesn't appreciably increase the supply.
most humans do cheat on a partners at least once at some point in life
Cite?
Losing in the courts provides precedence. Losing in the legislature means the same proposal gets re-introduced 10 or 20 years later.
Not true, not unless the courts decide it's actually unconstitutional, not just unlawful. And if they're going to decide that, it can happen any time, and in fact the quickest way to provoke a constitutional challenge is with a law that directs the government to do something unconstitutional.
This is good. Not the bill, but this is the correct place for this debate, in the legislature, not the courts. Now we just need to make sure it loses, and for the right reasons.
My observation is that an easy life of wealth and privilege has an almost 100% probability of creating a piece of shit human being
We all have easy lives of wealth and privilege compared to our ancestors of a few generations ago. What does that make us?