The truth is that you want what they have to offer, you don't feel like paying for it, and you don't want to admit that you're a criminal.
I seem to remember a story about a group of people dressed as indians illegally throwing tea into Boston harbor.
My point is that just because something is illegal, it's not a foregone conclusion that it's immoral or unjust. I wonder how people would respond if tickets to the Louvre in Paris were $1000 a head. Many would stop going. Many would protest. And many would just view copies of the paintings.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. But if this were true, wouldn't the relative humidity be 100% everywhere? There are an awful lot of places on the plant with low humidity.
After all, the Earth is about be destroyed in the Rapture anyways, so why do we care?
I know you were joking. But I thought I'd throw in what christians actually believe. The earth isn't destroyed in the rapture, directly anyway. In the rapture, the christians (from other humans' perspective) simply disappear. You non-christians are left to fend for yourselves.:-)
Having said that, christians have been predicting the rapture for centuries. And jesus comes right out and says that it's going to seem like it's taking forever and should be any minute when it's really far in the future.
So it's silly for people to use that as an excuse to not care about the environment. The destruction of the environment is not a christian value so I'm not sure why these people are thinking like this. Must be either an extra helping of crazy, dumb, or both.
It's quite easy. That's not the point. My point is that it's difficult to feel anything more than apathy for a system where your vote means practically nothing.
The right to vote for your leaders is priceless. But do we actually have that right?
If Ron Paul runs as an independent, I'll vote for him. I think he'll lose. But I'll still vote for him. Regardless, I think Ron Paul will get maybe 10% or 20% of the vote*, then Obama will walk all over McCain.
I believe Obama to be far superior to McCain, and I'm a registered republican. But even if I thought it were close (in spite of what the polls say), I still wouldn't vote for either. I live in a blue state (Illinois) so it really doesn't matter who I vote for. People always say that your vote counts. But where I live, it really doesn't. It's Don Quixote going to the polls. Luckily, the lesser of two evils that I want is likely to win... this time.
* Who knows? Maybe there's hope. Ross Perot started with 39% of the vote, but it declined to 19%. And Ron Paul is far better than All-Ears ever was. Can you imagine a Ron Paul presidency? He'd wear out the veto stamp and have to wear a bullet-proof vest to bed.
Holy crap, your (their?) version is so much better. By the way, here's how I remember the switch from kashyyk/wookies to endor/ewoks:
Lucas caused a plot line problem when he did the first movie. He actually wrote all three up front. But it was obvious that it was too big for one movie, so he split it into three. Before making a new hope, it wasn't obvious that it would be the huge success that it turned out to be. He thought he might only get to make the first of the three movies. And he liked the chewbacca character so much, that he ditched the old copilot character and replaced him with chewie. This caused a plot line problem later with the whole jungle/slave planet/kashyyk thing. From the documentary I was watching, I believe lucas' words were, "so cut them in half and call them ewoks.":-P
I would put the nested loop into it's own function and just return from the function, but not without first considering whether there was a better design. But that's just me.
Here's the unscientific metric I use: The "total number of jobs" number on the dice main page. It's sort of a useless number because there's a lot of dups. But it's a good barometer. It's currently at about 88,600. Last august (it always peaks in august and troughs in december) it was at 96,000. During the peak of the dotcom boom, it was 120,000. A the bottom of the dotcom crash, it was 17,000.
So things are down a bit now, but not bad. And I suspect it's worse in california than here in chicago. I have more work than I can do.
Usually "senior" means 5+ years experience with some piece of technology invented six years ago, though. ... or 7 years of experience with a technology invented 5 years ago.
After 17 years in IT, I always laugh at "senior" level positions with 5+ years of experience. So far, I don't think I've experienced age discrimination yet (i'm 38). Long experience tends to help in the consulting world I think. I've also noticed that my age helps me to get along with management... we tend to be the same age.
Maybe I'll experience more discrimination in another 10 years, but I doubt it. My theory is that people older than me now were guilty by association. They worked on dinosaurs and were themselves, therefore, dinosaurs. They sort of got left behind when the business world moved away from mainframes. But today, there's not much that separates me from a 28 year old, just more experience. And there are a lot more computer people in my generation than there were cobol people. So I think this helps the perception that it's normal to be my age and be in IT. As we all age together over the next 10 years, it will be "normal" to see a 48 year old IT consultant writing code. I see it now rather frequently in fact.
Then again, maybe not. Time will tell. Maybe we all have the same chance... try like hell to renew... Carousel!
I definitely remember seeing 6502 machine language in the terminator's vision... references to the A, X, and Y registers and such. Maybe they mixed and matched.
A year ago, I spent a few weeks in Hanoi. Both "carp" and "crab" were commonly available in the restaurants, but both were frequently spelled "crap" on the menu.
Also from Snope on the "Bite the Wax Tadpole" This representation literally translated as "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice," but it acceptably represented the concept of "something palatable from which one receives pleasure."
The story I remember (predating wikipedia and even the internet) was that that unlike japanese, chinese lacks purely phonetic symbols. In japanese, they simply chose the phonetic symbols (katakana) for coca-cola. There was no confusion because the symbols have no inherent meaning (like english letters). This is impossible in chinese though, as they have only one alphabet (with upwards of 20,000 characters). So you have no choice but to automatically generate some crazy meaning when choosing letters to match the sound of a foreign word. The first round of this yielded "bite the wax tadpole", but after learning of the symbolic meaning, the marketing department came up with "happiness in the mouth"... same (or similar) sounds but different characters, so different meaning. This later translation was corroborated by some taiwanese people I used to work with. I wouldn't be surprised if the meaning was slightly off in another chinese dialect.
They were idiotic and got exactly what they deserved.
Since you're here, you're most likely an intelligent person who would never sign a contract without reading and understanding it. That's not normal. Unfortunately, normal is sign without reading. I'm not saying it's smart or right, just what most people do. Most people have no idea what's in their mortgage contract. Instead, they listen to the (dishonest) sales pitch from their broker and believed them. It's no wonder so many people are surprised when their mortgages reset. These are people who have no idea what amortization is, or how the math behind their loan made a reset inevitable. Most people can't calculate how or weather a bank is making money form their loan.
But you can do all those things. So to you, they're stupid and deserve it. I'll agree with the first part, but not the second. They absolutely should lose their homes. But a significant part of the blame falls with the machine that lured them into a trap because of greed. They didn't have a chance.
The hypothesis is that Asperger's syndrome and the autistic spectrum is just the extreme case of the male brain (literally: testosterone poisoning).
I have asperger's and so do three of my children. My daughter (with asd) is entering the 9th grade this year effectively three years ahead of where I was in math. It's frightening. She skipped the 3rd grade and looks younger than she is. She looks like a 12 year old entering high school. I've been preparing her for a couple years for the time (about now) when I won't be able to help her with math anymore. It's really shocking to me how smart she is.
I think the human race, at least in the developed world, is selecting for intelligence. Intelligent people have better health care and better resources making them more likely to reproduce and afford more children. I think this natural selection mixed with how our environment has changed is responsible for the increased incidence in asd.
We need to think long and hard about how we educate children and what we consider normal. The one-size-fits-all public education system is the worst possible thing you can do to an asd kid.
I've seen a lot of shops. And a lot of them like open source for one reason... it's cheap. Not because they're cheap bastards, but because free software often can circumvent the corporate BS associated with spending money.
Once a place has used some open source software, they tend to keep using it. And they tend to want to hire people who know how to use what they have. I wouldn't call it an open source hiring boom. I'd just call it acceptance.
I seriously don't understand the "it's someone elses problem, if they really want it fixed they can call me" attitude.
As a long time consultant, I may be jaded. But it seems to me that if you allow companies to take advantage of you, they will. If you like working for free, then knock yourself out. But since no one else is looking out for me, I think I'll look out for me.
You should be working to live, not living to work. Your employer should spend the money it takes to get the level of service they want/need. It's reprehensible for companies to take advantage of exempt employees, driving them into the ground, so they can save a buck on IT costs.
The IT department is not an asset. It's an expense. The actual hardware and wiring are assets. The people are liabilities. And if they can squeeze more value from you they will, ethics and morals be damned. Stop treating their behavior as acceptable.
The reason people are going into foreclosure is because they took out loans with onerous terms. They did this because either they were duped by bad mortgage brokers, or because they (wrongly) assumed that housing prices would increase forever. This led them to believe that they had to get in on it now or be priced out forever. It also led them to believe that they would always be able to refinance out of their lethal mortgage.
Then two things happened. One, housing prices fell. This prevented refinancing because they now had no (or negative) equity. Two, banks tightened lending standards when they finally came to their senses. Now, people are being forced to accept the bad parts of their mortgage terms that they didn't know about or assumed they would never have to deal with. Mix with that rising commodity prices, massive job losses, and massive amounts of personal debt and it compounds the problems.
Mortgage rates did increase. (in spite of the fed lowering rates) But this was because of the effect of inflationary fears on bond prices. When the fed dropped rates, savings from cheaper money that used to be passed on to borrowers were instead absorbed (and then some) by banks to fatten their margins in an attempt to raise emergency capital.
As for houses, they historically closely follow the rate of inflation. This goes back 100s of years in europe. Anything more than that is a bubble.
In my opinion, all this crap going on right now is the economy taking its medicine. It's a good thing. The recent price hikes are nothing more than commodities catching up with the real value of the dollar. I don't think we'll see $8 a gallon gas unless the dollar loses half its value again (which it could). And I agree with the article summary. This should cause manufacturing jobs to come back here which is only a good thing. But on the down side, it will cause the price of imports to go through the roof. Just wait until china removes their artificial dollar peg. You aint seen nothing yet. Another bad one to watch for is the european central bank raising interest rates.
Even though they've received modest raises, most have taken a pay cut over the last 8 years, but don't realize it. Fun times.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the CERN website, the facility utilizes about 10% of the electricity generated in the canton it is located.
Sacre Bleu! No wondeur my electric bill sucks!
The truth is that you want what they have to offer, you don't feel like paying for it, and you don't want to admit that you're a criminal.
I seem to remember a story about a group of people dressed as indians illegally throwing tea into Boston harbor.
My point is that just because something is illegal, it's not a foregone conclusion that it's immoral or unjust. I wonder how people would respond if tickets to the Louvre in Paris were $1000 a head. Many would stop going. Many would protest. And many would just view copies of the paintings.
The atmosphere is saturated with water vapour.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. But if this were true, wouldn't the relative humidity be 100% everywhere? There are an awful lot of places on the plant with low humidity.
It's interesting you say that. There's supposed to be a awesome party afterwards... but it wont last.
(disclaimer: I'm a christian with a CS degree)
After all, the Earth is about be destroyed in the Rapture anyways, so why do we care?
I know you were joking. But I thought I'd throw in what christians actually believe. The earth isn't destroyed in the rapture, directly anyway. In the rapture, the christians (from other humans' perspective) simply disappear. You non-christians are left to fend for yourselves. :-)
Having said that, christians have been predicting the rapture for centuries. And jesus comes right out and says that it's going to seem like it's taking forever and should be any minute when it's really far in the future.
So it's silly for people to use that as an excuse to not care about the environment. The destruction of the environment is not a christian value so I'm not sure why these people are thinking like this. Must be either an extra helping of crazy, dumb, or both.
How difficult is it to vote in the USA?
It's quite easy. That's not the point. My point is that it's difficult to feel anything more than apathy for a system where your vote means practically nothing.
The right to vote for your leaders is priceless. But do we actually have that right?
Vote?
If Ron Paul runs as an independent, I'll vote for him. I think he'll lose. But I'll still vote for him. Regardless, I think Ron Paul will get maybe 10% or 20% of the vote*, then Obama will walk all over McCain.
I believe Obama to be far superior to McCain, and I'm a registered republican. But even if I thought it were close (in spite of what the polls say), I still wouldn't vote for either. I live in a blue state (Illinois) so it really doesn't matter who I vote for. People always say that your vote counts. But where I live, it really doesn't. It's Don Quixote going to the polls. Luckily, the lesser of two evils that I want is likely to win... this time.
* Who knows? Maybe there's hope. Ross Perot started with 39% of the vote, but it declined to 19%. And Ron Paul is far better than All-Ears ever was. Can you imagine a Ron Paul presidency? He'd wear out the veto stamp and have to wear a bullet-proof vest to bed.
...event horizon...
Awesome! That's what I'm going to call it now! My "event horizon"!
"Here it comes baby, the point of no return!"
Actually... yes. ;)
That's what women say they want, but their behavior says otherwise.
Holy crap, your (their?) version is so much better. By the way, here's how I remember the switch from kashyyk/wookies to endor/ewoks:
Lucas caused a plot line problem when he did the first movie. He actually wrote all three up front. But it was obvious that it was too big for one movie, so he split it into three. Before making a new hope, it wasn't obvious that it would be the huge success that it turned out to be. He thought he might only get to make the first of the three movies. And he liked the chewbacca character so much, that he ditched the old copilot character and replaced him with chewie. This caused a plot line problem later with the whole jungle/slave planet/kashyyk thing. From the documentary I was watching, I believe lucas' words were, "so cut them in half and call them ewoks." :-P
Quick! Someone sign this guy up for Chicks with Dicks magazine! Be sure to check "bill me later".
I would put the nested loop into it's own function and just return from the function, but not without first considering whether there was a better design. But that's just me.
Where do you work? I'm looking for a new contract.
Here's the unscientific metric I use: The "total number of jobs" number on the dice main page. It's sort of a useless number because there's a lot of dups. But it's a good barometer. It's currently at about 88,600. Last august (it always peaks in august and troughs in december) it was at 96,000. During the peak of the dotcom boom, it was 120,000. A the bottom of the dotcom crash, it was 17,000.
So things are down a bit now, but not bad. And I suspect it's worse in california than here in chicago. I have more work than I can do.
Usually "senior" means 5+ years experience with some piece of technology invented six years ago, though.
... or 7 years of experience with a technology invented 5 years ago.
After 17 years in IT, I always laugh at "senior" level positions with 5+ years of experience. So far, I don't think I've experienced age discrimination yet (i'm 38). Long experience tends to help in the consulting world I think. I've also noticed that my age helps me to get along with management... we tend to be the same age.
Maybe I'll experience more discrimination in another 10 years, but I doubt it. My theory is that people older than me now were guilty by association. They worked on dinosaurs and were themselves, therefore, dinosaurs. They sort of got left behind when the business world moved away from mainframes. But today, there's not much that separates me from a 28 year old, just more experience. And there are a lot more computer people in my generation than there were cobol people. So I think this helps the perception that it's normal to be my age and be in IT. As we all age together over the next 10 years, it will be "normal" to see a 48 year old IT consultant writing code. I see it now rather frequently in fact.
Then again, maybe not. Time will tell. Maybe we all have the same chance... try like hell to renew... Carousel!
I definitely remember seeing 6502 machine language in the terminator's vision... references to the A, X, and Y registers and such. Maybe they mixed and matched.
god i'm such a dork.
A year ago, I spent a few weeks in Hanoi. Both "carp" and "crab" were commonly available in the restaurants, but both were frequently spelled "crap" on the menu.
Also from Snope on the "Bite the Wax Tadpole"
This representation literally translated as "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice," but it acceptably represented the concept of "something palatable from which one receives pleasure."
The story I remember (predating wikipedia and even the internet) was that that unlike japanese, chinese lacks purely phonetic symbols. In japanese, they simply chose the phonetic symbols (katakana) for coca-cola. There was no confusion because the symbols have no inherent meaning (like english letters). This is impossible in chinese though, as they have only one alphabet (with upwards of 20,000 characters). So you have no choice but to automatically generate some crazy meaning when choosing letters to match the sound of a foreign word. The first round of this yielded "bite the wax tadpole", but after learning of the symbolic meaning, the marketing department came up with "happiness in the mouth"... same (or similar) sounds but different characters, so different meaning. This later translation was corroborated by some taiwanese people I used to work with. I wouldn't be surprised if the meaning was slightly off in another chinese dialect.
You can't. It's write-only memory.
They were idiotic and got exactly what they deserved.
Since you're here, you're most likely an intelligent person who would never sign a contract without reading and understanding it. That's not normal. Unfortunately, normal is sign without reading. I'm not saying it's smart or right, just what most people do. Most people have no idea what's in their mortgage contract. Instead, they listen to the (dishonest) sales pitch from their broker and believed them. It's no wonder so many people are surprised when their mortgages reset. These are people who have no idea what amortization is, or how the math behind their loan made a reset inevitable. Most people can't calculate how or weather a bank is making money form their loan.
But you can do all those things. So to you, they're stupid and deserve it. I'll agree with the first part, but not the second. They absolutely should lose their homes. But a significant part of the blame falls with the machine that lured them into a trap because of greed. They didn't have a chance.
Judging form the success of the furniture rental business model, I'd say they can charge $24.95+ a month and still be a huge success.
The hypothesis is that Asperger's syndrome and the autistic spectrum is just the extreme case of the male brain (literally: testosterone poisoning).
I have asperger's and so do three of my children. My daughter (with asd) is entering the 9th grade this year effectively three years ahead of where I was in math. It's frightening. She skipped the 3rd grade and looks younger than she is. She looks like a 12 year old entering high school. I've been preparing her for a couple years for the time (about now) when I won't be able to help her with math anymore. It's really shocking to me how smart she is.
I think the human race, at least in the developed world, is selecting for intelligence. Intelligent people have better health care and better resources making them more likely to reproduce and afford more children. I think this natural selection mixed with how our environment has changed is responsible for the increased incidence in asd.
We need to think long and hard about how we educate children and what we consider normal. The one-size-fits-all public education system is the worst possible thing you can do to an asd kid.
I've seen a lot of shops. And a lot of them like open source for one reason... it's cheap. Not because they're cheap bastards, but because free software often can circumvent the corporate BS associated with spending money.
Once a place has used some open source software, they tend to keep using it. And they tend to want to hire people who know how to use what they have. I wouldn't call it an open source hiring boom. I'd just call it acceptance.
I seriously don't understand the "it's someone elses problem, if they really want it fixed they can call me" attitude.
As a long time consultant, I may be jaded. But it seems to me that if you allow companies to take advantage of you, they will. If you like working for free, then knock yourself out. But since no one else is looking out for me, I think I'll look out for me.
You should be working to live, not living to work. Your employer should spend the money it takes to get the level of service they want/need. It's reprehensible for companies to take advantage of exempt employees, driving them into the ground, so they can save a buck on IT costs.
The IT department is not an asset. It's an expense. The actual hardware and wiring are assets. The people are liabilities. And if they can squeeze more value from you they will, ethics and morals be damned. Stop treating their behavior as acceptable.
Not to pick nits but...
The reason people are going into foreclosure is because they took out loans with onerous terms. They did this because either they were duped by bad mortgage brokers, or because they (wrongly) assumed that housing prices would increase forever. This led them to believe that they had to get in on it now or be priced out forever. It also led them to believe that they would always be able to refinance out of their lethal mortgage.
Then two things happened. One, housing prices fell. This prevented refinancing because they now had no (or negative) equity. Two, banks tightened lending standards when they finally came to their senses. Now, people are being forced to accept the bad parts of their mortgage terms that they didn't know about or assumed they would never have to deal with. Mix with that rising commodity prices, massive job losses, and massive amounts of personal debt and it compounds the problems.
Mortgage rates did increase. (in spite of the fed lowering rates) But this was because of the effect of inflationary fears on bond prices. When the fed dropped rates, savings from cheaper money that used to be passed on to borrowers were instead absorbed (and then some) by banks to fatten their margins in an attempt to raise emergency capital.
As for houses, they historically closely follow the rate of inflation. This goes back 100s of years in europe. Anything more than that is a bubble.
In my opinion, all this crap going on right now is the economy taking its medicine. It's a good thing. The recent price hikes are nothing more than commodities catching up with the real value of the dollar. I don't think we'll see $8 a gallon gas unless the dollar loses half its value again (which it could). And I agree with the article summary. This should cause manufacturing jobs to come back here which is only a good thing. But on the down side, it will cause the price of imports to go through the roof. Just wait until china removes their artificial dollar peg. You aint seen nothing yet. Another bad one to watch for is the european central bank raising interest rates.
Even though they've received modest raises, most have taken a pay cut over the last 8 years, but don't realize it. Fun times.