Conversely, I've encountered a few teams mostly made up of guys who'd known each other for years, went to school together, and had their own little clique.
They were sexist, bigoted douchebags who really were both impossible to work with, and felt they shouldn't be the ones to change. They were offensive to be around, and seem to feel entitled to be.
It got to the point that even other white guys were saying to HR "enough is enough, I can't deal with these clowns any more".
Hell, I once heard someone say to a co-worker with a mild accent that he should "speak white". Needless to say, NOBODY in the room thought that was amusing but him.
All it takes is a few bad apples to mess it up for everybody.
Your company was covering their ass so that if someone does that in the future they can point to the training and say "you were warned".
Playing well with others makes this profession sucktastic?
You think a sausage fest of assholes and idiots saying how cool it is there is no girls allowed is a perk? Really?
Funny, my experience is the childish assholes are terrible to work with for a whole slew of reasons -- mostly because they're self entitled spoiled brats who like to throw tantrums.
Teams in which everyone participates and isn't shoved aside work together, teams which act like high school cliques don't.
You can't force that to happen, but the best teams I've ever been on are more or less ego-less, or at least self correcting for maintaining some mutual respect and listening to one another. You duke it out in front of a whiteboard, and then work together the rest of the time.
Some of the shittiest teams I've been have been populated by people who were stuck in what they 'knew', unwilling to listen to new idea, and mostly closed to outsiders -- because they suffered from insular groupthink and being unwilling to listen to someone who isn't one of them.
Often the senior person in good teams directs, cajoles, and smooths things along... but doesn't impose or dictate.
Willingness to say "this is what I think, but I want to hear if it's stupid" goes a long way to making teams work well together.
"Your idea is crap and you should shut up", not so much.
The Obama administration says HealthCare.gov's connections to data firms were intended to help improve the consumer experience. Officials said outside firms are barred from using the data to further their own business interests.
Just fucking wow.
The stupidity inherent in this choice is beyond belief.
In what universe does a government website selling personal info to advertisers count as even remotely fucking acceptable???
One in which some asshole has decided it needs to run for a profit, or on a cost recovery basis... and with zero regard for patient confidentiality.
I agree with you, and any sane country with privacy laws would be appalled -- and you'd expect this to violate some HIPAA laws.
Essentially this demonstrates the problems with analytics -- is some asshole you don't have anything to do with gets to know everything you do and everything about you.
That's utterly insane, and if it isn't, it should be illegal.
But somehow it seems that ensuring the profits of corporations is more important than privacy and the act of restricting what corporations do is unthinkable to some.
My biggest beef with whitespace having syntactic significance is every developer wants to see different levels of indent, and every editor seems to have its own special way of writing out whitespace. They're not always compatible, and making them all work together can be a pain in the ass (for instance, emacs and vi are notorious for doing it differently, and emacs does it in a way which breaks vi).
I may want tabs at 8 spaces, you might want them at four... someone else might want actual spaces. You can't see them, so you don't really know what's there. It fails miserably in teams where people use different editors.
That, and whitespace having syntactic significance flies in the face of context-free grammars and everything I learned in compilers. If you disagree with the "Dragon Book" by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman... you're wrong.:-P
There's a large amount of whitespace characters, which don't all display the same in every tool -- and, in my opinion, it makes you lazy about closing actual blocks.
To me, relying on the indent level and whitespace is lazy, and something you'd have learned to do 'properly' in a Wirthian language -- where if you don't do begin/end blocks you can end up with crap code which doesn't work the way you expect.
you want it every man for himself? no fucking thank you.
No, not at all.
Am I willing to live with police who will do "by any means necessary" and erode our laws and freedoms in the name of expediency? Hell no.
If the police have to ignore the Constitution, and commit perjury (parallel construction) to "do their job" then something is seriously flawed.
But accepting total power by the police to do anything at all they want to?? That's utterly fucking moronic.
That's living in a police state so you can still have the illusion you're free.
But if the police can do anything they want to, without oversight, and bypassing legal protections which have been in place for a very long time... well, we might as well have pure anarchy.
Precisely. Which is why the default position for police has to be "fuck no, fuck off, we don't believe you".
And there has to be much harsher penalties when they decide the law doesn't apply to them. Me, I'm of the opinion parallel construction should lead to dismissal, and a raft of criminal charges -- obstruction of justice, perjury, being general douchebags.
Because if we did any of these things, we'd be charged.
Sorry, but when your "law enfocement" can bypass the law any time they like, they're just armed thugs who can do anything they want to.
That is not how you run a fucking free society.
If we have to hope that the police are obeying the law.. then fuck the police, they're not doing what they're there for.
And increasingly, since it's impossible to know which might be honest, and which are just abusing their power... the only rational thing is to assume they're all crooked.
It's only for scanning buildings before entering to serve already-valid warrants.
And what proof do you have of that? What assurances do you have they don't abuse this?
Sorry, but assuming law enforcement gives a shit about the law, or will follow it, is now such a naive and moronic statement as to be bordering on delusional. Increasingly, law enforcement wants to get around the law and oversight, and just do whatever the hell they want.
Which means you more or less have to assume they're going to misuse every tool in the book, and treat them like children.
And a valid warrant? Don't make me fucking laugh. How many times have law enforcement broken into the wrong damned home and killed some poor schmuck who wasn't doing anything other than defending his home from masked assailants?
I'm long past the point where I trust the actions, motivations, or ethics of the fucking police.
Because apparently they either don't know the law, or don't care.
Which is precisely why people don't trust them, and are growing hostile to them. If collectively the police don't give a shit about our rights, WTF would we give them more power with less oversight.
Sorry, but this is bad policing by agencies who find following the law too inconvenient.
So it's true... when they outlaw privacy, only criminals will have privacy.
And then there's this:
Furthermore, the provision would allow investigators to seize electronically stored information regardless of whether that information is stored inside or outside the court's jurisdiction.
We want extraterritorial laws, with no judicial oversight.
I'm sorry, but can the rest of the world decree that FBI agents should all be shot on sight as enemies of basic civil rights? The argument is about equally stupid as what the FBI claim.
America, you have a problem, and you are making it the problem of everyone on the planet.
Land of the free and home of the brave? You have to be fucking kidding us.
I don't really care what language, but I'm of the opinion you should be laying your groundwork with something with a Wirth-ian syntax.
Why? Because it's the most accessible syntax for people, relies on less of the syntactic sugar of other languages, has very explicit start end end blocks, "reads" very much like English, and in some ways can be useful to describe how things work at the assembly level.
Things in the scheme family have some things which may be far harder to grasp for a beginner since they're essentially mathematical in nature.
And things like Python... well, the whole whitespace being syntactically significant is quite possibly going to give you some bad habits.
There's a reason why Pascal and Java made good teaching languages for so long. If you can "speak" one Wirth-ian language, you can pretty much read all of them.
Get up and move around occasionally. Take breaks and go for a walk. Stand and stretch in your cubicle from time to time. Get a pedometer or a fitbit or something, shoot for 10,000 steps (yes, it's not a magic number, but it's probably more than most of us do).
You are kind of stuck with your job and your hours. You know this already.
So, you either say "bummer, maybe my kids can do this", or you try to fit it into your day.
It won't happen for you.
(And I say this as someone who is pushing 50, and a little too squishy around the middle, I definitely empathize with you.)
This seems to be yet another plan to do North American-area Internet service, which is currently full at current providers.
*Straightens tinfoil hat*
Imagine if you will, you have the ability to deploy satellite interwebs pretty much everywhere. Now, not only can you get everyone connected to the interwebs (your interwebs), you can also see if you can compete with terrestrial interwebs.
Now when the next bit thing hits the interwebs, people just upgrade their receivers, and all those miles of cable doesn't need to be touched.
Now, everyone accesses everything through your interwebs, and you can make zillions of dollars knowing what everybody is doing so you can sell them shit and track them with analytics.
Or, manipulate them into doing whatever you (as an evil cartel of evil corporations) want to do... why, you could practically control the world, because you own the interwebs.
Is the above an intentionally contrived example? Betcherass it is.
Is it so completely so far fetched as to be ridiculous? Sorry, did you miss the part about multi-billion dollar corporations investing in satellites?
Throw in the frickin' "lasers", and you have a bond movie.
So, think about this... billionaires are pooling their resources to both improve space technology, and to provide a commodity they already make money on... allowing them to use that commodity to make even more money.
This is the beginning of Weyland fucking Yutani, mark my words.:-P
Private corporations may soon have more space technology than the US government.
Investing your many billions in profit to fund your future ambitions? Less of a business model challenge than you might think.
It's also eerily cyberpunk, in a creepy sort of way.
Besides, your screen at home isn't as good and I guarantee you that unless you have $10,000 in acoustic treatment you don't have a theatrical sound experience -- I'm a sound designer so I'm a little partial to that, I admit.
LOL... allow me to clarify this for you, in case there is any chance nobody has told you this... for the vast majority of the people in the world, people who talk about such drivel are complete, unmitigated wankers. Most of us really only hear "good enough", and simply roll our eyes at people like you.
No, seriously, you might care. The rest of us, not so much. I look at anybody who would spend $10K in acoustic treatment as a fool who needed to part with some money.
I'm betting the overwhelming majority of people can't tell the difference except "louder". So the warmly yellow sound with bright bass and minty undertones... sounds like marketing drivel to my middle aged ears with no musical talent to back them up.
You don't see any value in getting out of the house, getting dinner, meeting people, dressing up a little?
Are you drunk? Do you know anybody who dresses up to go to the movies and meets people there? What is this, 1964? Let's all put on our Sunday best and go to the cinema and meet up with the Jones and act like we're all upscale and stuff? Really?
What the hell are you talking about? Do people do this? I've never known a single person to dress up to go a movie.
but they don't generate the same revenue
But, we don't give a crap about your revenue. We care about our own pocket books, and our own experience. And, for me, a movie theater has passed the point where it provides any value to me.
Sticky floors, overpriced food, and some little shit who won't put his phone away.
At a certain point, I'll trade all of the bullshit "theatrical sound experience" for "sitting in the comfort of my own damned home experience".
It's now been over two years since I was in a movie theater. And I don't see myself going back.
Like why would you want to pay $13 for a movie on your cellphone when going to the Arclight matinee is $16?
I guess it's more convenient but it's a little tragic when people don't have enough free time to leave the house to go to a movie theater, which is just about the lowest-impact social activity the western world has yet devised.
Dude, are you insane?
For $25 I can buy the Bluray, and watch it in my own home theater in a reclining leather seat, eat my own snacks, drink beer, and pause it if I want to take a leak.
Not leaving my fscking house is low impact, and it costs me a fraction of movie theaters. I figure they're pretty much doomed as a business model.
Slashdot Mirror
The extermination industry, however, sees great promise in the control of rodents.
Conversely, I've encountered a few teams mostly made up of guys who'd known each other for years, went to school together, and had their own little clique.
They were sexist, bigoted douchebags who really were both impossible to work with, and felt they shouldn't be the ones to change. They were offensive to be around, and seem to feel entitled to be.
It got to the point that even other white guys were saying to HR "enough is enough, I can't deal with these clowns any more".
Hell, I once heard someone say to a co-worker with a mild accent that he should "speak white". Needless to say, NOBODY in the room thought that was amusing but him.
All it takes is a few bad apples to mess it up for everybody.
Your company was covering their ass so that if someone does that in the future they can point to the training and say "you were warned".
Playing well with others makes this profession sucktastic?
You think a sausage fest of assholes and idiots saying how cool it is there is no girls allowed is a perk? Really?
Funny, my experience is the childish assholes are terrible to work with for a whole slew of reasons -- mostly because they're self entitled spoiled brats who like to throw tantrums.
Teams in which everyone participates and isn't shoved aside work together, teams which act like high school cliques don't.
You can't force that to happen, but the best teams I've ever been on are more or less ego-less, or at least self correcting for maintaining some mutual respect and listening to one another. You duke it out in front of a whiteboard, and then work together the rest of the time.
Some of the shittiest teams I've been have been populated by people who were stuck in what they 'knew', unwilling to listen to new idea, and mostly closed to outsiders -- because they suffered from insular groupthink and being unwilling to listen to someone who isn't one of them.
Often the senior person in good teams directs, cajoles, and smooths things along ... but doesn't impose or dictate.
Willingness to say "this is what I think, but I want to hear if it's stupid" goes a long way to making teams work well together.
"Your idea is crap and you should shut up", not so much.
You're absolutely correct:
Just fucking wow.
The stupidity inherent in this choice is beyond belief.
One in which some asshole has decided it needs to run for a profit, or on a cost recovery basis ... and with zero regard for patient confidentiality.
I agree with you, and any sane country with privacy laws would be appalled -- and you'd expect this to violate some HIPAA laws.
Essentially this demonstrates the problems with analytics -- is some asshole you don't have anything to do with gets to know everything you do and everything about you.
That's utterly insane, and if it isn't, it should be illegal.
But somehow it seems that ensuring the profits of corporations is more important than privacy and the act of restricting what corporations do is unthinkable to some.
My biggest beef with whitespace having syntactic significance is every developer wants to see different levels of indent, and every editor seems to have its own special way of writing out whitespace. They're not always compatible, and making them all work together can be a pain in the ass (for instance, emacs and vi are notorious for doing it differently, and emacs does it in a way which breaks vi).
I may want tabs at 8 spaces, you might want them at four ... someone else might want actual spaces. You can't see them, so you don't really know what's there. It fails miserably in teams where people use different editors.
That, and whitespace having syntactic significance flies in the face of context-free grammars and everything I learned in compilers. If you disagree with the "Dragon Book" by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman ... you're wrong. :-P
There's a large amount of whitespace characters, which don't all display the same in every tool -- and, in my opinion, it makes you lazy about closing actual blocks.
To me, relying on the indent level and whitespace is lazy, and something you'd have learned to do 'properly' in a Wirthian language -- where if you don't do begin/end blocks you can end up with crap code which doesn't work the way you expect.
Geez, Babs, look at you all submitting and stuff.
That's several stories in the last few days.
Just don't go all Bassett Houndleton on us and start posting long, tedious opinion pieces.
No, not at all.
Am I willing to live with police who will do "by any means necessary" and erode our laws and freedoms in the name of expediency? Hell no.
If the police have to ignore the Constitution, and commit perjury (parallel construction) to "do their job" then something is seriously flawed.
But accepting total power by the police to do anything at all they want to?? That's utterly fucking moronic.
That's living in a police state so you can still have the illusion you're free.
But if the police can do anything they want to, without oversight, and bypassing legal protections which have been in place for a very long time ... well, we might as well have pure anarchy.
Precisely. Which is why the default position for police has to be "fuck no, fuck off, we don't believe you".
And there has to be much harsher penalties when they decide the law doesn't apply to them. Me, I'm of the opinion parallel construction should lead to dismissal, and a raft of criminal charges -- obstruction of justice, perjury, being general douchebags.
Because if we did any of these things, we'd be charged.
Sorry, but when your "law enfocement" can bypass the law any time they like, they're just armed thugs who can do anything they want to.
That is not how you run a fucking free society.
If we have to hope that the police are obeying the law .. then fuck the police, they're not doing what they're there for.
And increasingly, since it's impossible to know which might be honest, and which are just abusing their power ... the only rational thing is to assume they're all crooked.
And then they'll outlaw that.
Essentially anything which interferes with their ability to monitor your without restriction is now being deemed illegal.
Soon, they'll make it illegal to have secrets in your head, and you must submit to mandatory questioning and reeducation.
Sorry, but America has jumped the shark, and is taking down the whole world with them.
And for some reason, people are blindly accepting this crap.
And what proof do you have of that? What assurances do you have they don't abuse this?
Sorry, but assuming law enforcement gives a shit about the law, or will follow it, is now such a naive and moronic statement as to be bordering on delusional. Increasingly, law enforcement wants to get around the law and oversight, and just do whatever the hell they want.
Which means you more or less have to assume they're going to misuse every tool in the book, and treat them like children.
And a valid warrant? Don't make me fucking laugh. How many times have law enforcement broken into the wrong damned home and killed some poor schmuck who wasn't doing anything other than defending his home from masked assailants?
I'm long past the point where I trust the actions, motivations, or ethics of the fucking police.
Because apparently they either don't know the law, or don't care.
Which is precisely why people don't trust them, and are growing hostile to them. If collectively the police don't give a shit about our rights, WTF would we give them more power with less oversight.
Sorry, but this is bad policing by agencies who find following the law too inconvenient.
So it's true ... when they outlaw privacy, only criminals will have privacy.
And then there's this:
We want extraterritorial laws, with no judicial oversight.
I'm sorry, but can the rest of the world decree that FBI agents should all be shot on sight as enemies of basic civil rights? The argument is about equally stupid as what the FBI claim.
America, you have a problem, and you are making it the problem of everyone on the planet.
Land of the free and home of the brave? You have to be fucking kidding us.
I don't really care what language, but I'm of the opinion you should be laying your groundwork with something with a Wirth-ian syntax.
Why? Because it's the most accessible syntax for people, relies on less of the syntactic sugar of other languages, has very explicit start end end blocks, "reads" very much like English, and in some ways can be useful to describe how things work at the assembly level.
Things in the scheme family have some things which may be far harder to grasp for a beginner since they're essentially mathematical in nature.
And things like Python ... well, the whole whitespace being syntactically significant is quite possibly going to give you some bad habits.
There's a reason why Pascal and Java made good teaching languages for so long. If you can "speak" one Wirth-ian language, you can pretty much read all of them.
Totally.
Mauled by bears, set upon by rabid weasels, abducted by aliens, falling into a volcano, poisoned by fugu ...
The lesson here is "run, because the universe is trying to kill your sorry ass, and if you sit in one place too long it will get you". ;-)
So, does this mean that Russia is finally catching up with the US in terms of monitoring its citizens?
The mind reels.
Papers please, comrade.
Get up and move around occasionally. Take breaks and go for a walk. Stand and stretch in your cubicle from time to time. Get a pedometer or a fitbit or something, shoot for 10,000 steps (yes, it's not a magic number, but it's probably more than most of us do).
You are kind of stuck with your job and your hours. You know this already.
So, you either say "bummer, maybe my kids can do this", or you try to fit it into your day.
It won't happen for you.
(And I say this as someone who is pushing 50, and a little too squishy around the middle, I definitely empathize with you.)
I think that says "people who sit all day have a 15-20% higher chance of dying, no matter what the specific cause".
Long term, yes, nobody gets out alive.
But over the same time period, people who sit all day long are more likely to die sooner -- no matter what it's from.
The implication being that sitting all day seems to help whatever is already killing you do it faster.
LOL, no disrespect ... but was there really a point at which someone thought it was too risky to build a brewery in ... Australia?
You're having us on, right? :-P
*Straightens tinfoil hat*
Imagine if you will, you have the ability to deploy satellite interwebs pretty much everywhere. Now, not only can you get everyone connected to the interwebs (your interwebs), you can also see if you can compete with terrestrial interwebs.
Now when the next bit thing hits the interwebs, people just upgrade their receivers, and all those miles of cable doesn't need to be touched.
Now, everyone accesses everything through your interwebs, and you can make zillions of dollars knowing what everybody is doing so you can sell them shit and track them with analytics.
Or, manipulate them into doing whatever you (as an evil cartel of evil corporations) want to do ... why, you could practically control the world, because you own the interwebs.
Is the above an intentionally contrived example? Betcherass it is.
Is it so completely so far fetched as to be ridiculous? Sorry, did you miss the part about multi-billion dollar corporations investing in satellites?
Throw in the frickin' "lasers", and you have a bond movie.
So, think about this ... billionaires are pooling their resources to both improve space technology, and to provide a commodity they already make money on ... allowing them to use that commodity to make even more money.
This is the beginning of Weyland fucking Yutani, mark my words. :-P
Private corporations may soon have more space technology than the US government.
Investing your many billions in profit to fund your future ambitions? Less of a business model challenge than you might think.
It's also eerily cyberpunk, in a creepy sort of way.
'Nuff said.
LOL ... allow me to clarify this for you, in case there is any chance nobody has told you this ... for the vast majority of the people in the world, people who talk about such drivel are complete, unmitigated wankers. Most of us really only hear "good enough", and simply roll our eyes at people like you.
No, seriously, you might care. The rest of us, not so much. I look at anybody who would spend $10K in acoustic treatment as a fool who needed to part with some money.
I'm betting the overwhelming majority of people can't tell the difference except "louder". So the warmly yellow sound with bright bass and minty undertones ... sounds like marketing drivel to my middle aged ears with no musical talent to back them up.
Are you drunk? Do you know anybody who dresses up to go to the movies and meets people there? What is this, 1964? Let's all put on our Sunday best and go to the cinema and meet up with the Jones and act like we're all upscale and stuff? Really?
What the hell are you talking about? Do people do this? I've never known a single person to dress up to go a movie.
But, we don't give a crap about your revenue. We care about our own pocket books, and our own experience. And, for me, a movie theater has passed the point where it provides any value to me.
Sticky floors, overpriced food, and some little shit who won't put his phone away.
At a certain point, I'll trade all of the bullshit "theatrical sound experience" for "sitting in the comfort of my own damned home experience".
It's now been over two years since I was in a movie theater. And I don't see myself going back.
Dude, are you insane?
For $25 I can buy the Bluray, and watch it in my own home theater in a reclining leather seat, eat my own snacks, drink beer, and pause it if I want to take a leak.
Not leaving my fscking house is low impact, and it costs me a fraction of movie theaters. I figure they're pretty much doomed as a business model.
I'm sorry, but are we treating John McAfee is a credible source for anything these days?
As far as I can tell he's a somewhat crazy fugitive drug user with some paranoid sounding theories.
I rank him about as credible as Charlie Sheen on a meth fueled rant.
He's a bit unhinged and likes to tell stories, but I'm not sure that means any of it is real.