The guy may be an idiot, but it's almost irrelevant. The part that jumped out at me is that he's a prick.
Sure, he stood up for his freedom, and the freedom of everyone who reads about the incident and realizes that they're not under any obligation to submit to search on the way out of a retail store.
He also could have picked a time and place for this that wouldn't have scared and hassled his family on Labor Day Weekend, with his whole family in the car, on his sister's birthday!
Ftom TFA:
For the labor day weekend my father decided to host a small family reunion. My sister flew in from California and I drove in from Pittsburgh to visit my father, his wife and my little brother and sister. Shortly after arriving we packed the whole family into my father's Buick and headed off to the grocery store to buy some ingredients to make monkeybread. (It's my little sister's birthday today and that was her cute/bizare birthday request.)
It seems like he might have saved his loved ones a lot of stress if he'd chosen to assert his rights on his own time instead of interrupting the family reunion for it.
"Jatropha, an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation..." What the article fails to mention is the the "refinement" of this fuel source includes feeding it to the poor farmers, attaching a collection bag and waiting 12-24 hours to harvest the resultant natural gas.
Well, Myth "marks" commercials in the recorded programs, and you can set an option to skip the marked commercials during playback. The commercial detection isn't 100%, but it's very, very good.
They leave the commercials in the recording in case Myth marks part of the show as commercial, so that if you realize that it skipped part of the show, you can turn off auto-commercial-skip and watch the skipped part.
Hell, at my workplace we sometimes hire EEs over CS if they're capable of learning to code. It helps that it helps to be smart and analytical for both professions, and EEs often have to do some coding at some point in their careers. Also, many older programmers graduated from schools that didn't offer computer science programs at the time, but their experience in the intervening decades often negates that to an extent. However, that's about where the advantages for hiring an EE over, say, an Art History major end.
There's this bias among EEs that they're intrinsically smarter, because there are fewer of them around. This is probably true on average, just because the growing demand for software engineers lowered the barrier to entry for a while. But it stands to reason that the best software engineers are better software engineers then the best electrical engineers.
There's also an argument that pops up from time to time that computer programming is a subset of EE. This is bogus. EEs will require the training that they missed without a good CS program in order to become good software engineers, or even good programmers. While EEs were learning FFTs, CSs were learning design patterns. To poo-poo that fact hurts the profession as a whole.
One of my pet peeves is when people use big words incorrectly, like "promulgate". I believe the term you were looking for was "propagate". Promulgate basically means to officially announce a new law or rule.
I think people use newspeak bullcrap words like and "meme" because they're so ill-defined that people can use them any way they want without conveying any meaning at all.
they have no motivation but the accumulation of wealth. Corporations are artificial entities necessitated by our legal system, and they don't have any "motivations" at all in the strictest sense. However, the ones that survive and thrive tend to employ people that do things to make the company money. Profit-driven companies aren't the only ones that exist (think Ben and Jerry's before the buy-out), but they're the majority. Any time you hear a company representative talking about higher principles, you may as well just regard that part as corporate propaganda.
If you are not the only one "Jonboy X" that can prove that he is "Jonboy X" than you don't have identity. You are left with plurality at best;-) You had identity before and now you don't have it anymore. Sounds pretty much like theft to me. Of course it is not only about the name. If someone can succesfully pretend to be you - including your debt history, providing correct address, SSN, CC # and your/. account... - how do we know it is you? We don't. You lost your identification. It's not so much the "identity" part that strikes me as odd; it's the "theft" part. When someone steals your television, they have it and you don't. When someone "steals" your identity, you still have it because you're still you. It's just that now, someone else has some information that can be used to impersonate you to people who don't check too closely.
Maybe everyone should periodically be able to buy a public/private cryptographic key pair that can be used to authenticate you. The higher your net worth, the longer (and more expensive) key you buy. To buy something, you just encrypt the message "I bought a book from Jimbo Jones on November 19th, so please give him 20 bucks" and give it to the vendor. The vendor can decrypt the message with your public key to make sure it's really from you, and your bank can do the same when Jimbo shows up for his money.
First off, the term "identity theft" is completely ridiculous. No one is taking away who you are. Your friends and family won't suddenly forget who you are. A better term would be "credit fraud".
This is the basic scenario: A criminal poses as you to borrow money (usually with a credit card), and then whoever lent that person the money asks you to repay it.
Then there are generally 2 consequences for you: debt and reputation damage. The debt itself is usually the lesser of the two problems, since you're not legally obligated to repay money that someone else borrowed in your name. Reputation damage, on the other hand, is incredibly hard to repair. This usually takes the form of erroneous information on your credit report.
Private agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion are the majors in the USA) maintain this information of your past financial transactions, and sell it to potential lenders in the form of a credit report. Lenders then use this information to decide how risky it would be to lend you money. These credit reporting agencies err on the side of over-reporting negative information, because a defaulted loan from an under-qualified borrower costs banks and lenders much more than a qualified applicant being turned away. Additional services (like providing reportees an easy way to correct errors) would cost credit reporting agencies much more than their client lenders would be willing to pay for the increased accuracy, so they don't bother implementing them.
The short version is that banks and other lenders knowingly rely on imperfect information about potential borrowers, because it is the most economically sensible thing to do. It's not profitable for them to pay for more accurate information. If they decide not to lend you money, even based on erroneous information, it will likely be very hard to change their minds.
Re:My Prediction For 2007: JDJ Continues To Suck
on
2007 Java Predictions
·
· Score: 1
The sad thing is, JDJ used to be it for Java/J2EE news. Granted, sys-con has always been a whore of a publisher (ColdFusion Developers' Journal, anyone?), but JDJ once had insightful news and information that an actual factual professional Java developer could use to better perform his/her job. Nowadays, it's just thinly-veiled pimping for frameworks that no one will ever use, often written in bad Engrish. I think they jumped the shark when Alan Williamson took over as chief editor back in '02. I always loved the guy's columns, but he had a hard time saying "no" to bad articles. When they guessed wrong and started pushing EJB real hard (despite the industry's complete lack of enthusiasm), that was the last straw. Hell, even Williamson himself acknowledged as much in his blog.
I started getting it for free in the late nineties, and was grandfathered in even when they started charging for it. I let my free subscription lapse long ago.
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
·
· Score: 1
Why not keep HTML easy for humans to write? Why make it harder to write programs to write HTML, by forcing us to gum things up with quotes when it doesn't make the slightest difference in any browser used today?
I've got a question for the "hardcore" web designers in the audience: When you want to do a site by hand (as opposed to a visual tool like Dreamweaver or something), would you ever consider using an XML editor like XML Spy or one of the free knockoffs instead of a text editor? It seems like that'd be a great way to keep your quotes closed and your nodes nicely nested. This would also have the side benefit of resulting in XHTML-compliant web sites, which are something everyone can enjoy.
There are both good and bad coders. There are both good and bad web designers. However, it is frequently the case that the skillset of coders is a near superset of that of designers. Coders canto fall into the mindset of "I could do your job better than you, so why should I follow your design?" Also, during crunch time on a software project, the web designers have already washed their hands of the project. This leads to the impression that the designers aren't working as hard as the rest of the team.
If you ask an economist (for whatever reason), he would tell you that the purpose of a lock is not to "keep people out" but to make the thief's best option, in his opinion, to be robbing something else.
...which is why those of us who know economists personally have learned not to ask them open-ended questions like that. You can never get a straight answer out of those doofuses.
P.S.: I kid, I kid. Economics does seem to attract people with a slightly skewed take on reality, but I find it refreshing.
For deep, engrossing, widely variable strategy, try Puerto Rico. It's different every time you play it. For more of a "get in your opponents' way" kind of experience, I'd recommend Power Grid (yes, there's an English version). Finally, if you're into path-building but want a bit more ramdomness in your game, try Settlers of Catan. All good, all German. We used to play these games all the time at lunch at a place I worked a while back, and it's one of the things I miss most about my time there.
Ever heard of suggestions that global variables are harmful? This is even truer for GC memory management. These globals have roots that persist throughout the lifetime of a program. For this reason, Java programmers seem to suffer more GC problems than a functional language programmer. In fact, the only place you need to look at, in the case of a "GC memory leak," is your global variables.
It kind of depends how you define the term "global" for variables. The strict definition is a static (or "class") variable, but that's not the only place you need to look to see where your app might be keeping the GC from freeing unused objects.
If you're coding a J2EE web app, application context is a common dumping ground for stuff you want to have access to from lots of places in the code. It's all too easy to bind something there and forget to unbind it later. If you're tempted to attempt cleanup on user logout, remember that the user may not get around to it and instead just let their session expire.
If it's a long-running non-J2EE app you're working with, pretty much any place could be a hiding spot for memory clutter. Think app-level config maps. Think caches. Then again, if it's a short-running app, memory leaks aren't usually the focal point of your performance optimizations anyway.
I would say that the inability to parse a simple statement, and having just enough logic to be dangerous, but not enough to create valid statements, is probably a better indicator of dumbassness that lack of a job
I was (implicitly) disagreeing with what the parent post was implying. The original quote was "A smart person will find a way to make a living no matter what degree they have." I personally disagree with this statement, as I know several smart people who can't find a job, and the OP was calling them dumb. I guess I should have used the sarcasm tag for that one, to avoid offending men who might be a little sensitive that their wife brings home the bacon because of the hubby's inability to hold down a job.
A task force on Monday recommended that Mayor Thomas Menino assign an as-yet unidentified nonprofit to raise the $16 million to $20 million in private money that the city estimates it will need to build and begin running the Wi-Fi network.
Furthermore...
Boston's proposal aims to reduce the price of broadband Internet access for city residents from an average of roughly $40 a month to $15 by having the nonprofit act as a wholesale seller of network capacity to existing sellers of Internet access. Those companies could offer low-cost or free ad-supported online connections.
City officials hope that even if some Internet providers do not participate, they would face pressure to cut prices for the existing services.
The city will *not* put any money into the project. They will suggest that a non-profit raise the money to build out the network themselves, then lease the hardware to local ISP's on the cheap. Then, because these ISP's are really nice people, they will turn around and either give away the service or sell it on the cheap.
It's a great way for the city to look like it's doing something useful without putting out any money or resources, and at the same time give a nice big wireless gift to local ISP's. Business as usual in Boston...
A smart person will find a way to make a living no matter what degree they have.
This statement also implies its logically-equivalent contrapositive: "If you're out of work, you're not smart." Do you really want to go around calling everyone who can't get a job a dumbass? They tend to have a lot of time on their hands for retribution...
I remember a brief flurry of activity here on/. about the sharpness and power-saving promise of these displays. It seems like if Apple were to incorporate this display tech into something, say, 1/3 the size of the Newton and retain a lot of the old device's capabilities, we'd have a sure winner on our hands.
Where is this tech now? Are there any (viable) devices using it. The last I heard, they were using it mostly in e-book readers, which never quite seemed to get off the ground.
We have those here in the US too. They're called "nerds".
They spend extraordinary effort to get straight A's throughout high school and undergrad in the hopes that someone will pay good money for them later. Sadly, they often get hooked on the intense rush of grade-grubbing and end up spending the next 10 years of their life wildly chasing the next big enlightenment high.
Simon Phipps, the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, has reaffirmed Sun's waning commitment to Open Source in an interview with some dude in bar over the weekend. "Sun tried the free-software thing. The end result was: Dirty hippies can run Solaris on their crappy little x86 boxes for free, and our stock is still circling the drain. Sun learned their lesson, and my job is rapidly being deprecated. I'll be folding sweaters at the Gap before Thanksgiving."
Slashdot Mirror
Please, cite your Futurama quotes...
Sure, he stood up for his freedom, and the freedom of everyone who reads about the incident and realizes that they're not under any obligation to submit to search on the way out of a retail store.
He also could have picked a time and place for this that wouldn't have scared and hassled his family on Labor Day Weekend, with his whole family in the car, on his sister's birthday!
Ftom TFA:
It seems like he might have saved his loved ones a lot of stress if he'd chosen to assert his rights on his own time instead of interrupting the family reunion for it.
-The best damn sweater folder the Gap has ever had
ICQ allows users to send messages directly to one another, whereas AOL's IM relays every message through AOL's servers.
That's why I used ICQ, back when I was with Al Qu...err, the Boy Scouts.
Well, Myth "marks" commercials in the recorded programs, and you can set an option to skip the marked commercials during playback. The commercial detection isn't 100%, but it's very, very good.
They leave the commercials in the recording in case Myth marks part of the show as commercial, so that if you realize that it skipped part of the show, you can turn off auto-commercial-skip and watch the skipped part.
http://slashdot.org/tags/dvorak
/. link...
Check the third-to-last article listed under the tag "Dvorak". It's not a
How'd that get in there?
So where is the GAO going to set off their dirty bomb?
(It's a joke.)
(...or is it?!?!)
There's this bias among EEs that they're intrinsically smarter, because there are fewer of them around. This is probably true on average, just because the growing demand for software engineers lowered the barrier to entry for a while. But it stands to reason that the best software engineers are better software engineers then the best electrical engineers.
There's also an argument that pops up from time to time that computer programming is a subset of EE. This is bogus. EEs will require the training that they missed without a good CS program in order to become good software engineers, or even good programmers. While EEs were learning FFTs, CSs were learning design patterns. To poo-poo that fact hurts the profession as a whole.
One of my pet peeves is when people use big words incorrectly, like "promulgate". I believe the term you were looking for was "propagate". Promulgate basically means to officially announce a new law or rule.
I think people use newspeak bullcrap words like and "meme" because they're so ill-defined that people can use them any way they want without conveying any meaning at all.
Is this news to anyone?
Maybe everyone should periodically be able to buy a public/private cryptographic key pair that can be used to authenticate you. The higher your net worth, the longer (and more expensive) key you buy. To buy something, you just encrypt the message "I bought a book from Jimbo Jones on November 19th, so please give him 20 bucks" and give it to the vendor. The vendor can decrypt the message with your public key to make sure it's really from you, and your bank can do the same when Jimbo shows up for his money.
First off, the term "identity theft" is completely ridiculous. No one is taking away who you are. Your friends and family won't suddenly forget who you are. A better term would be "credit fraud".
This is the basic scenario: A criminal poses as you to borrow money (usually with a credit card), and then whoever lent that person the money asks you to repay it.
Then there are generally 2 consequences for you: debt and reputation damage. The debt itself is usually the lesser of the two problems, since you're not legally obligated to repay money that someone else borrowed in your name. Reputation damage, on the other hand, is incredibly hard to repair. This usually takes the form of erroneous information on your credit report.
Private agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion are the majors in the USA) maintain this information of your past financial transactions, and sell it to potential lenders in the form of a credit report. Lenders then use this information to decide how risky it would be to lend you money. These credit reporting agencies err on the side of over-reporting negative information, because a defaulted loan from an under-qualified borrower costs banks and lenders much more than a qualified applicant being turned away. Additional services (like providing reportees an easy way to correct errors) would cost credit reporting agencies much more than their client lenders would be willing to pay for the increased accuracy, so they don't bother implementing them.
The short version is that banks and other lenders knowingly rely on imperfect information about potential borrowers, because it is the most economically sensible thing to do. It's not profitable for them to pay for more accurate information. If they decide not to lend you money, even based on erroneous information, it will likely be very hard to change their minds.
The sad thing is, JDJ used to be it for Java/J2EE news. Granted, sys-con has always been a whore of a publisher (ColdFusion Developers' Journal, anyone?), but JDJ once had insightful news and information that an actual factual professional Java developer could use to better perform his/her job. Nowadays, it's just thinly-veiled pimping for frameworks that no one will ever use, often written in bad Engrish. I think they jumped the shark when Alan Williamson took over as chief editor back in '02. I always loved the guy's columns, but he had a hard time saying "no" to bad articles. When they guessed wrong and started pushing EJB real hard (despite the industry's complete lack of enthusiasm), that was the last straw. Hell, even Williamson himself acknowledged as much in his blog.
I started getting it for free in the late nineties, and was grandfathered in even when they started charging for it. I let my free subscription lapse long ago.
I've got a question for the "hardcore" web designers in the audience: When you want to do a site by hand (as opposed to a visual tool like Dreamweaver or something), would you ever consider using an XML editor like XML Spy or one of the free knockoffs instead of a text editor? It seems like that'd be a great way to keep your quotes closed and your nodes nicely nested. This would also have the side benefit of resulting in XHTML-compliant web sites, which are something everyone can enjoy.
There are both good and bad coders. There are both good and bad web designers. However, it is frequently the case that the skillset of coders is a near superset of that of designers. Coders canto fall into the mindset of "I could do your job better than you, so why should I follow your design?" Also, during crunch time on a software project, the web designers have already washed their hands of the project. This leads to the impression that the designers aren't working as hard as the rest of the team.
P.S.: I kid, I kid. Economics does seem to attract people with a slightly skewed take on reality, but I find it refreshing.
For deep, engrossing, widely variable strategy, try Puerto Rico. It's different every time you play it. For more of a "get in your opponents' way" kind of experience, I'd recommend Power Grid (yes, there's an English version). Finally, if you're into path-building but want a bit more ramdomness in your game, try Settlers of Catan. All good, all German. We used to play these games all the time at lunch at a place I worked a while back, and it's one of the things I miss most about my time there.
It kind of depends how you define the term "global" for variables. The strict definition is a static (or "class") variable, but that's not the only place you need to look to see where your app might be keeping the GC from freeing unused objects.
If you're coding a J2EE web app, application context is a common dumping ground for stuff you want to have access to from lots of places in the code. It's all too easy to bind something there and forget to unbind it later. If you're tempted to attempt cleanup on user logout, remember that the user may not get around to it and instead just let their session expire.
If it's a long-running non-J2EE app you're working with, pretty much any place could be a hiding spot for memory clutter. Think app-level config maps. Think caches. Then again, if it's a short-running app, memory leaks aren't usually the focal point of your performance optimizations anyway.
I would say that the inability to parse a simple statement, and having just enough logic to be dangerous, but not enough to create valid statements, is probably a better indicator of dumbassness that lack of a job
I was (implicitly) disagreeing with what the parent post was implying. The original quote was "A smart person will find a way to make a living no matter what degree they have." I personally disagree with this statement, as I know several smart people who can't find a job, and the OP was calling them dumb. I guess I should have used the sarcasm tag for that one, to avoid offending men who might be a little sensitive that their wife brings home the bacon because of the hubby's inability to hold down a job.
Furthermore...
The city will *not* put any money into the project. They will suggest that a non-profit raise the money to build out the network themselves, then lease the hardware to local ISP's on the cheap. Then, because these ISP's are really nice people, they will turn around and either give away the service or sell it on the cheap.
It's a great way for the city to look like it's doing something useful without putting out any money or resources, and at the same time give a nice big wireless gift to local ISP's. Business as usual in Boston...
A smart person will find a way to make a living no matter what degree they have.
This statement also implies its logically-equivalent contrapositive: "If you're out of work, you're not smart." Do you really want to go around calling everyone who can't get a job a dumbass? They tend to have a lot of time on their hands for retribution...
I remember a brief flurry of activity here on /. about the sharpness and power-saving promise of these displays. It seems like if Apple were to incorporate this display tech into something, say, 1/3 the size of the Newton and retain a lot of the old device's capabilities, we'd have a sure winner on our hands.
Where is this tech now? Are there any (viable) devices using it. The last I heard, they were using it mostly in e-book readers, which never quite seemed to get off the ground.
We have those here in the US too. They're called "nerds".
They spend extraordinary effort to get straight A's throughout high school and undergrad in the hopes that someone will pay good money for them later. Sadly, they often get hooked on the intense rush of grade-grubbing and end up spending the next 10 years of their life wildly chasing the next big enlightenment high.
I've seen it happen. It ain't pretty.
Simon Phipps, the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, has reaffirmed Sun's waning commitment to Open Source in an interview with some dude in bar over the weekend. "Sun tried the free-software thing. The end result was: Dirty hippies can run Solaris on their crappy little x86 boxes for free, and our stock is still circling the drain. Sun learned their lesson, and my job is rapidly being deprecated. I'll be folding sweaters at the Gap before Thanksgiving."