Depends what you're after. There is convenience and control when working at home. Sure it costs, but using a home darkroom was never the most economical way.
Weird, mine have never clogged or dried out. I left my printer in a cupboard for over a year because was living somewhere too small to set it up. Pulled it, plugged in and started printing. No trouble at all.
Copyright is not the right of the consumer to make copies. The owner of the copyright has the exclusive right to make copies for the duration of the copyright (this used to be a limited period, but now is effectively unlimited). Fair use recognizes that it is unreasonable to expect consumers to purchase a CD for every CD player or other playback device they own. Some countries go further and recognize that people trade music, it is human nature, part of our normal social interaction.
Democracy and police state are not incompatible. It is one of those myths people have been brainwashed into believing, that democracy and freedom are equivalent.
In many countries, the US and UK included, you are left with a choice between sharks who have only their own interests at heart so you choose the less vicious shark or you simply don't vote.
The government and more particularly the police have always had this option. They can choose to ignore the law up to a point. For instance in many civilised countries the police are told to ignore small-scale drug possession and use - i.e. don't waste the court's time with someone carrying a couple of MDMA tablets.
"And Europeans wonder why a lot of people in the US don't trust the idea of a world court"
Err no, that's because the US government/military has every intention of repeating the past and committing crimes which would be punishable in such a court.
"Whatever happened to national sovereignty?"
Yes US government, whatever happened to national sovereignty. Oh sorry, my mistake, you meant US national sovereignty. Doesn't apply to anyone else does it?
The most serious problem in the EU is that it is controlled by unelected bureaucrats. These people are friends with big business and they are in no way accountable. It's a recipe for disaster.
Specifications aren't about theory, they're about what a system is expected to do, if it is a software specification.
How about this - Boeing engineers announce they don't need specifications, they just start building aircraft and see what happens.
"that real hackers, the ones that I have come to respect over the years, simply sat down and built the tools that they needed"
And you end up with an unmaintainable mess if it is anything more than a simple, short piece of code. Much of the time prima donna, hotshot programmers are a liability on large projects. These are the guys who claim they don't have time to comment or document their code, but also can't explain exactly what it does a couple of months later. They're useful when you need code produced in a hurry and you don't care about modifying the code again later.
If you need to know exactly how that section of code behaves and interacts with the rest of the system, then the documentation, huge as it may be, is more useful than trying to decipher the code.
All this engineering and science is supposed to be hard stuff is just macho bull. I've done a bit of teaching and some students just need a bit more assistance to get over the initial hurdles. If you helped more of these people in first year they would get it and many could go on to become good engineers. It isn't all about intelligence, sometimes a concept just doesn't click for someone until you explain it in the right way for them to get it. And usually the confidence that comes from starting to get it when they thought it would never make any sense pushes them to put in more and more effort. Some of the guys I taught went on to kick the butts of the ones who just got the initial concepts without any assistance.
It takes a bit of effort to remember that concepts typically seem obvious when you already understand them and a bit more effort to figure out clever ways to explain those concepts in terms a novice will grasp. When I couldn't adequately convey something I went away and tried to think of some other ways to explain it. I'm glad to say I almost never failed to make something clear, and I always let students know that if they weren't understanding then it meant I was failing to explain adequately.
When I was at university I had a math lecturer who despite having a class of over 200 students managed to explain concepts in multiple ways and was always willing to take the time to explain things again. If you went to him outside class he'd explain again, and he never turned anyone away. Contrast that with an engineering lecturer who would basically say he'd already explained it and if you don't understand you obviously hadn't put any effort in so go away, you're wasting his time. By all accounts this guy was a brilliant electrical engineer and they did eventually do the sensible thing - stuck him in a lab, let him do his research and kept him away from students.
If I am paying thousands a year to go to a university I expect them to provide some tuition and in decent English if it is an English-language university. I don't generally have a problem with teachers with accents, but I do have a problem with using teachers who can barely speak English. They should refund 90% of my money if I have to do what I did, which was to basically teach myself everything from the textbooks with essentially no assistance or support from the university because the professors/lecturers either could hardly speak English or were just too lazy to do anything other than rattle off what I could just read in the textbook or simply had no ability to even begin to convey complex concepts.
You have to do the work yourself is the standard weak excuse universities have been using forever to justify employing people because they do research not because they have an iota of teaching ability, and expecting students to pay exhorbitant fees to basically be given lists of books from which they'll have to teach themselves and to write an exam.
Most of the time they need not even bother with the lecturers - they're just going to waste an hour that could have been used to try to make sense out of what is in the textbook.
The cost of living is lower in India. Also there are actually countries where people become doctors to help people, not to get rich.
The US appears to have a high per capita level of doctors and lawyers. With so many their pay levels should be declining not escalating.
Doctors are important, but they also rely on the tools provided to them. Medicine wouldn't have advanced much without those tools.
The fact is that medical costs are completely out of control in the US. Those in the medical and pharmaceutical industries are literally making out like bandits.
Of course its hardly surprising that lawyers are part of the problem. People bizarrely expect perfection from doctors and lawyers are happy to encourage this by promoting the suing of doctors who have made errors in judgement. It is one thing to go after someone who has been negligent, another to go after someone who made an honest mistake. Doctors who are found to have been incompetent or negligent should be turfed out of the profession, permanently. If it was an honest mistake, then try to make sure it doesn't happen again.
It really depends on the kind of software you work on. Many engineers produce products that will harm no-one if they go wrong, and many programmers produce software that will cause deaths if it goes wrong. It may well be that more programmers work on non-critical software, but many of us who worked as programmers did so on projects where people would get hurt if our software went wrong. Not to mention that all the cool hardware the engineers produced was basically useless without our software.
It is also not true that software does not have the rigorus and formal tools and processes that the older engineering fields do. The problem is that software is far more difficult and complicated than other types of engineering. Because of this we may never reach the stage of confidence in design methods that we have in other areas of engineering. That doesn't mean programming isn't engineering.
There is no real difference between engineer and applied scientist. It is what the applied scientist/engineer is working on that determines how concerned they need to be with the consequences of a mistake.
I have an electrical engineering degree, but I've never worked as an engineer. It was always obvious to me that my contribution would be undervalued both as far as remuneration and credit for what I was contributing, and that if I wanted to earn a better income I'd have to do something else.
Despite engineers being critical management always pays them the bare minimum and refuses to give decent increases. Meanwhile the easily replaceable management earn several times what the top engineer is paid.
I will say that the professors and lecturers in the engineering department were typically the most abysmal teachers on campus. There were some that were good, but in general they were extremely poor. Unfortunately universities don't require any teaching ability in the people they hire - this is true for all areas, but somehow engineering seemed to have more than its share of bad lecturers.
The failing in teaching starts at school level though. Firstly you should be taught to think and solve problems at school; instead they fill your school days with rote learning - opinionated teenagers are not wrong when they say school is a waste of time. Secondly school is too easy - the first year of university should just be like going into the thirteenth grade, i.e. like moving on to the next year of school, not a leap over a huge chasm. The gap between the level of the last year of school and the first year of university is ridiculous, the reason for high failure rates in the first year at university, and yet this a problem that could be fixed.
"We aren't here to teach you things - we are here to teach you how to think"
Well they're failing. Badly.
Engineering as currently taught is a degree you can get through without caring about engineering or even really having the slightest clue about what you're doing. You can then go out and kill people.
And lecturers do have a tendency to take a liking to some and dislike to others, being exceptionally helpful to those they like and just ignoring those they don't.
I hope it is true and that their entertainment division will continue to hemorrhage, ultimately going where they deserve...out of business. One less criminal organisation in the world.
A good desk and chair won't help if you can't already write decent code, but they're critical when working for long periods. Code quality deteriorates due to fatigue.
You can't blame the employees for just not caring. In large companies IT departments are the computer overlords who will not even allow users to install the own OS or software, or fix something when it goes wrong. Oh no, that's ITs job. If they're babying everyone like that it is to be expected that users will totally abdicate all responsibility.
Some people need help setting up the machine, others don't.
In general large companies seem to treat everyone like they're an idiot and unimportant so why should their employees care about the company?
"his computer will be taken away for "maintenance" for a week"
Possibly illegal in most civilised countries and guaranteed to simply hurt the company not the employee.
"others will know why he is working at the "Concentration Cubicle""
Been wearing those plugs to parties, concerts and clubs for a few years now. They're not the most comfortable things, but they don't change the frequency response much. Because they're not comfortable for long periods I intend to invest in the custom molded versions.
Luckily I only have very minor hearing loss from the prior years of loud noise.
You forgot to mention that self-defense is illegal in the UK too. Such laws were introduced with the express purpose of keeping the population under control.
I've got the LiDE 500f model. Also runs off USB like the rest of the LiDE models. It has the hinge along the long side which I found works well when used vertically. And it can fold out completely so it's easy to scan books.
I've seen the output from the LiDE 30 and it is very good.
Any of these scanners is probably more than adequate for scanning sheet music.
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Depends what you're after. There is convenience and control when working at home. Sure it costs, but using a home darkroom was never the most economical way.
Are Wangs that scary?
Weird, mine have never clogged or dried out. I left my printer in a cupboard for over a year because was living somewhere too small to set it up. Pulled it, plugged in and started printing. No trouble at all.
Would it be OK if he was nursing a joint? Just wondering if only addictive, toxic drugs are acceptable for CEOs.
Copyright is not the right of the consumer to make copies. The owner of the copyright has the exclusive right to make copies for the duration of the copyright (this used to be a limited period, but now is effectively unlimited). Fair use recognizes that it is unreasonable to expect consumers to purchase a CD for every CD player or other playback device they own. Some countries go further and recognize that people trade music, it is human nature, part of our normal social interaction.
Democracy and police state are not incompatible. It is one of those myths people have been brainwashed into believing, that democracy and freedom are equivalent.
In many countries, the US and UK included, you are left with a choice between sharks who have only their own interests at heart so you choose the less vicious shark or you simply don't vote.
The government and more particularly the police have always had this option. They can choose to ignore the law up to a point. For instance in many civilised countries the police are told to ignore small-scale drug possession and use - i.e. don't waste the court's time with someone carrying a couple of MDMA tablets.
Why? Because your equivalent law was passed 7 years earlier?
"And Europeans wonder why a lot of people in the US don't trust the idea of a world court"
Err no, that's because the US government/military has every intention of repeating the past and committing crimes which would be punishable in such a court.
"Whatever happened to national sovereignty?"
Yes US government, whatever happened to national sovereignty. Oh sorry, my mistake, you meant US national sovereignty. Doesn't apply to anyone else does it?
The most serious problem in the EU is that it is controlled by unelected bureaucrats. These people are friends with big business and they are in no way accountable. It's a recipe for disaster.
Specifications aren't about theory, they're about what a system is expected to do, if it is a software specification.
How about this - Boeing engineers announce they don't need specifications, they just start building aircraft and see what happens.
"that real hackers, the ones that I have come to respect over the years, simply sat down and built the tools that they needed"
And you end up with an unmaintainable mess if it is anything more than a simple, short piece of code. Much of the time prima donna, hotshot programmers are a liability on large projects. These are the guys who claim they don't have time to comment or document their code, but also can't explain exactly what it does a couple of months later. They're useful when you need code produced in a hurry and you don't care about modifying the code again later.
If you need to know exactly how that section of code behaves and interacts with the rest of the system, then the documentation, huge as it may be, is more useful than trying to decipher the code.
All this engineering and science is supposed to be hard stuff is just macho bull. I've done a bit of teaching and some students just need a bit more assistance to get over the initial hurdles. If you helped more of these people in first year they would get it and many could go on to become good engineers. It isn't all about intelligence, sometimes a concept just doesn't click for someone until you explain it in the right way for them to get it. And usually the confidence that comes from starting to get it when they thought it would never make any sense pushes them to put in more and more effort. Some of the guys I taught went on to kick the butts of the ones who just got the initial concepts without any assistance.
It takes a bit of effort to remember that concepts typically seem obvious when you already understand them and a bit more effort to figure out clever ways to explain those concepts in terms a novice will grasp. When I couldn't adequately convey something I went away and tried to think of some other ways to explain it. I'm glad to say I almost never failed to make something clear, and I always let students know that if they weren't understanding then it meant I was failing to explain adequately.
When I was at university I had a math lecturer who despite having a class of over 200 students managed to explain concepts in multiple ways and was always willing to take the time to explain things again. If you went to him outside class he'd explain again, and he never turned anyone away. Contrast that with an engineering lecturer who would basically say he'd already explained it and if you don't understand you obviously hadn't put any effort in so go away, you're wasting his time. By all accounts this guy was a brilliant electrical engineer and they did eventually do the sensible thing - stuck him in a lab, let him do his research and kept him away from students.
If I am paying thousands a year to go to a university I expect them to provide some tuition and in decent English if it is an English-language university. I don't generally have a problem with teachers with accents, but I do have a problem with using teachers who can barely speak English. They should refund 90% of my money if I have to do what I did, which was to basically teach myself everything from the textbooks with essentially no assistance or support from the university because the professors/lecturers either could hardly speak English or were just too lazy to do anything other than rattle off what I could just read in the textbook or simply had no ability to even begin to convey complex concepts.
You have to do the work yourself is the standard weak excuse universities have been using forever to justify employing people because they do research not because they have an iota of teaching ability, and expecting students to pay exhorbitant fees to basically be given lists of books from which they'll have to teach themselves and to write an exam.
Most of the time they need not even bother with the lecturers - they're just going to waste an hour that could have been used to try to make sense out of what is in the textbook.
The cost of living is lower in India. Also there are actually countries where people become doctors to help people, not to get rich.
The US appears to have a high per capita level of doctors and lawyers. With so many their pay levels should be declining not escalating.
Doctors are important, but they also rely on the tools provided to them. Medicine wouldn't have advanced much without those tools.
The fact is that medical costs are completely out of control in the US. Those in the medical and pharmaceutical industries are literally making out like bandits.
Of course its hardly surprising that lawyers are part of the problem. People bizarrely expect perfection from doctors and lawyers are happy to encourage this by promoting the suing of doctors who have made errors in judgement. It is one thing to go after someone who has been negligent, another to go after someone who made an honest mistake. Doctors who are found to have been incompetent or negligent should be turfed out of the profession, permanently. If it was an honest mistake, then try to make sure it doesn't happen again.
It really depends on the kind of software you work on. Many engineers produce products that will harm no-one if they go wrong, and many programmers produce software that will cause deaths if it goes wrong. It may well be that more programmers work on non-critical software, but many of us who worked as programmers did so on projects where people would get hurt if our software went wrong. Not to mention that all the cool hardware the engineers produced was basically useless without our software.
It is also not true that software does not have the rigorus and formal tools and processes that the older engineering fields do. The problem is that software is far more difficult and complicated than other types of engineering. Because of this we may never reach the stage of confidence in design methods that we have in other areas of engineering. That doesn't mean programming isn't engineering.
There is no real difference between engineer and applied scientist. It is what the applied scientist/engineer is working on that determines how concerned they need to be with the consequences of a mistake.
I have an electrical engineering degree, but I've never worked as an engineer. It was always obvious to me that my contribution would be undervalued both as far as remuneration and credit for what I was contributing, and that if I wanted to earn a better income I'd have to do something else.
Despite engineers being critical management always pays them the bare minimum and refuses to give decent increases. Meanwhile the easily replaceable management earn several times what the top engineer is paid.
I will say that the professors and lecturers in the engineering department were typically the most abysmal teachers on campus. There were some that were good, but in general they were extremely poor. Unfortunately universities don't require any teaching ability in the people they hire - this is true for all areas, but somehow engineering seemed to have more than its share of bad lecturers.
The failing in teaching starts at school level though. Firstly you should be taught to think and solve problems at school; instead they fill your school days with rote learning - opinionated teenagers are not wrong when they say school is a waste of time. Secondly school is too easy - the first year of university should just be like going into the thirteenth grade, i.e. like moving on to the next year of school, not a leap over a huge chasm. The gap between the level of the last year of school and the first year of university is ridiculous, the reason for high failure rates in the first year at university, and yet this a problem that could be fixed.
"We aren't here to teach you things - we are here to teach you how to think"
Well they're failing. Badly.
Engineering as currently taught is a degree you can get through without caring about engineering or even really having the slightest clue about what you're doing. You can then go out and kill people.
And lecturers do have a tendency to take a liking to some and dislike to others, being exceptionally helpful to those they like and just ignoring those they don't.
I hope it is true and that their entertainment division will continue to hemorrhage, ultimately going where they deserve...out of business. One less criminal organisation in the world.
A good desk and chair won't help if you can't already write decent code, but they're critical when working for long periods. Code quality deteriorates due to fatigue.
You can't blame the employees for just not caring. In large companies IT departments are the computer overlords who will not even allow users to install the own OS or software, or fix something when it goes wrong. Oh no, that's ITs job. If they're babying everyone like that it is to be expected that users will totally abdicate all responsibility.
Some people need help setting up the machine, others don't.
In general large companies seem to treat everyone like they're an idiot and unimportant so why should their employees care about the company?
"his computer will be taken away for "maintenance" for a week"
Possibly illegal in most civilised countries and guaranteed to simply hurt the company not the employee.
"others will know why he is working at the "Concentration Cubicle""
But they'll have no reason to care.
Been wearing those plugs to parties, concerts and clubs for a few years now. They're not the most comfortable things, but they don't change the frequency response much. Because they're not comfortable for long periods I intend to invest in the custom molded versions.
Luckily I only have very minor hearing loss from the prior years of loud noise.
They'd be called terrorists today.
You forgot to mention that self-defense is illegal in the UK too. Such laws were introduced with the express purpose of keeping the population under control.
I've got the LiDE 500f model. Also runs off USB like the rest of the LiDE models. It has the hinge along the long side which I found works well when used vertically. And it can fold out completely so it's easy to scan books.
I've seen the output from the LiDE 30 and it is very good.
Any of these scanners is probably more than adequate for scanning sheet music.