Case in point, say I need to program weather models. Should I hire a CS or meteorologist that minoring in CS?
You're right, but I'd switch CS for SE. There is a lot of really awful scientific code out there, and many scientists would benefit from an SE degree (BS or MS), which in my experience tend to cover the CS fundamentals. A short program geared towards scientists (with at least a programming languages course, an algorithms course and an SE overview course) would be a good start.
With every new language or paradigm, you'll find a group of stubborn people who refuse to adopt new techniques because it's "too much" of something for their tastes. For years, C programmers refused to adopt C++, because the code was "too abstracted" from the hardware. The same was said of C, by the assembly gurus. Now, you're giving iteration N+1 ("I'll never use it because the code syntax is too complicated"). It's just another form of Luddism.
The statement "I'll never use it because the code syntax is too complicated" is not necessarily Luddism, and is not analogous to your examples (which are valid). Complex syntax hinders communication between developers and increases defects. If everything else is equal (and it usually is), simpler syntax is better.
I use C++ regularly, and if I didn't restrict myself to a subset of its features I would go nuts. Maybe that means I have a small brain, but if so that makes me part of the majority.
And before you accuse me of being too literal, let me just pre-empt you: I get your point. You think C++ template code is too complicated. Fair enough. But you should realize that you're drawing a relatively arbitrary line in the sand, and your conception of "complicated" is likely to be eclipsed by whatever the next generation of programmers thinks is easy.
Fortunately, the next generation of programmers has many languages available that are not as complicated as C++. Progress in programming language design is indicated by syntactical simplicity, not complexity. C++ is the most syntactically complex language I use regularly, which is why I avoid it whenever I can.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate all religious people. Just the holier-than-thou hypocrites who talk about god while imposing their narrow-minded world view on everyone else.
Don't be so discriminating: it's ok to oppose the imposition of any world view on anyone else, be it narrow-minded or enlightened, imposed by religionists or not, and so on. Non-hypocrites are the scariest of all, when it comes to imposing world views on others. Fortunately there aren't many of them.
There's nothing worse than a federal government dictating one-size-fits-all laws that don't really work for 49% of the population.
Lots of things are worse. Genocide, perpetrated against a majority of the population. Nuclear war. Collapse of civilization leading to mass cannibalism in the cities.
The ugly truth is that people right out of college don't know much about the real world.
Agreed.
Retaking the year and "knowing the material better" is a waste of time. You will learn much more by working in a real job for that same year than studying the same stuff again.
I mostly agree with the second, but disagree with the first. A bad year, even a bad course, can have a cascading effect. If the submitter got a D in Computer Architecture I, what is the likely outcome in Computer Architecture II? There are plenty of advantages to getting into the workplace sooner, but repeating a year will make the degree more valuable to the student. If the degree isn't useful, then fine, but mine was.
I agree that knowing the difference between fantasy and reality is important, but people can still be desensitized to elements found in fantasy. You know that it's a video game and you're not really shooting somebody, but you're still reminded that the concept of shooting somebody exists, so if you're ever in a situation where you have the option of shooting somebody, you'll be familiar with the concept and you'll have trained yourself to think that it's sometimes OK ("when they're not really a person" or "when they really deserve it").
I recently realized that I feel bad when I raze cities and backstab allies in Civ4. Maybe I'm just getting soft in my middle age, but I can see a clear connection between what a person is willing to do in fantasy and what they're willing to do in reality. Another example: I don't like playing RPGs with people who commit atrocities in-character. I don't want to hear how you're raping the horses and riding off on the women, etc. I know it's not real, it's fantasy, but it's not good for people to have fantasies about certain distasteful things. It's worse for them to act out on those in real life, but that doesn't necessarily make it ok to act them out in a fantasy world.
I agree that violent games can be therapeutic; what if Hitler had had Civ4 to distract him? If someone is inclined to fantasize about violence, it's much better for them to distract themselves with a game than to go do it in real life. But, if someone isn't inclined to fantasize about violence, is it healthy to play a game that leads them to do so? I don't know.
To choose not to desensitize oneself is one thing. To have someone else deciding what you should or should not be sensitized to and what sorts of matierals are doing the densitizing is a completely different situation. The later situation is not in society's interest.
A good case can be made that it is in society's interest to encourage things that are in society's interest. Few of those things are clearly black or white; they are arguable, which is why I used the word "arguably". Censorship is usually bad, but not always; the pluses and minuses of individual cases should be examined. One case, government censorship of political speech, is clearly bad. Another, parental censorship of what their four year old watches on TV, is clearly good. Maybe society would be better off if more people imagined themselves participating in mass murder, but maybe not; it's arguable.
Well you're assuming that games can desensitize someone to violence or murder.
I know it can, because I've experienced it myself. Movies and TV and books can, too. Being sensitive to something is not a matter of black and white, it is a matter of degrees. The more someone is reminded of something, the less sensitive to it they are, be it TV commercials or bloody murder.
I'd say that if you were capable of being desensitized to those things by a computer game it would be because of some underlying mental instability or flaw - ie. the inability to separate reality for imagination.
If you're not, then you probably can't enjoy a computer game or TV show as much as I can. You win some you lose some, I guess. I don't have any reason to believe that most people don't imagine themselves in the place of the protagonist when they play a game, watch a movie or read a book. It would be foolish to claim that there is no link at all between the media an individual consumes and that individual's life henceforth, so why give violent media a bye?
Note that I'm specifically not claiming that violent media, or any media, should be censored; the negatives usually outweigh the positives, but the positives do exist.
What's the difference between a game that allows you to cut into someone's groin and one that allows you to shoot someone in the face?
Killing someone by sawing into their groin is worse than killing someone by shooting them into the face. Neither is necessarily ok (it depends on circumstances). People are desensitized to what they observe, and it is reasonable to choose to not desensitize oneself to certain things. Arguably, there is a societal interest in not desensitizing citizens to certain things; for example, if I am desensitized to poor people dying all around me, then I might not support measures to prevent poor people from dying, which are arguably in society's interest.
If you buy a DVR without a subscription, and use it as a solid state VCR, you take away everything that's remotely advantageous of having a DVR, in my opinion.
In my opinion, it's remotely advantageous to be able to record more than fits on a videotape or DVD without manually swapping. The ability to archive recordings on a separate file server, which some DVRs offer, is also remotely advantageous.
If you can't play Star Wars without a chart to tell you if a heavy blaster kills you more than a light rifle, you've missed the entire point of roleplaying games.
The Story.
Almost. The entire point of roleplaying games is to Have Fun. If you Have Fun via the story, then focus on the story. If you Have Fun by powergaming the rules, then find a bunch of like-minded buddies and munch out until your mom makes you go to bed.
Some people like wargames-in-RPG-clothing, preferring strategy to story. Even a Monty Haul campaign is fine if everybody's having fun.
For some people, the story is the meat and the rules are the salt. For others, the rules are the meat and the story is the salt.
When the federal government passes laws regarding issues not enumerated in the Constitution, they are ignoring the 10th amendment. Pretty cut and dry, you would think...
Their reasoning goes something like this: people sometimes engage in interstate commerce. Therefore, any law that affects people affects interstate commerce.
Actually, another poster claimed somewhat plausibly that it's legal to discriminate based on race, creed, color or sex when admitting fans to or kicking people out of sporting events. I'd just assumed it was illegal, but I could be wrong.
The simple issue is that the NCAA has to do this to protect their lucrative TV contracts.
How? The NCAA can make their TV contracts say whatever they want. If they choose to negotiate "exclusive live coverage" to a TV station (or radio station or other entity), that's their choice. Since lots of sporting events are covered by more than one type of media (e.g. simultaneous TV and radio coverage), it is reasonable to think that each exclusive license is limited to a particular type of media. Perhaps the NCAA wants someone to pay them for an exclusive blogging license too, which they have every right to try to sell (though that seems unlikely since it's easy to blog about a sporting event via the TV coverage.)
What gives them the legal right to control access to live or recorded broadcasts of text accounts of games?
The fact that they are running the games. Do you think that everyone should have the right to go to a play and set up a camera with a live feed out to the world?
Re-read what I wrote: "text accounts". That's not analogous to everyone having the right to go to a play and set up a camera with a live feed because it doesn't require being present and it's not an exact representation of what's happening, it's a translation through the filter of the writer. That being said, I think it would be great if anybody could go to a play and set up a camera with a live feed out to the world.
The courts have already ruled otherwise. It's contract law.
When I watch a game on TV, or from my apartment next to the playing field, I haven't signed any contracts with the NCAA. Their contract with their TV provider or their official paid blogger doesn't bind me.
or on your blog.
That's called "public dissemination", and the copyright statement prohibits it.
The copyright statement claims to prohibit it, but it does not have the legal power to do so. Facts can be extracted from a copyrighted work and rephrased to form a new copyrighted work that is not a derivative of the first, at least according to this guy, who makes a convincing argument (scroll down to "Another Example").
Furthermore, the TV broadcast is a copyrighted work, but a live event is not a copyrighted work. As I mentioned in another post, the NCAA and other sporting organizations have leveraged their right to kick people out of their live events to gain copyrights to various copyrightable accounts of the game, but that doesn't prohibit anybody else from creating new copyrightable accounts of the game (such as a blog post, a newspaper article or a book). If the NFL didn't contractually require the copyright to TV coverage of a game, that TV coverage would be copyrighted by whatever TV network produced it.
You're correct. They can't stop you. But they don't have to let you sit in the stadium while you do it.
That's absolutely correct, and if someone hadn't mentioned it I would have posted a followup (it was one of those "Oh, I should have said that" thoughts 5 minutes after I hit "submit".) That's the only right that the NCAA in this situation has; they've simply leveraged it in order to get people to sign agreements giving them more power (for example, they won't let you broadcast the game on TV unless you agree to their terms.)
They can kick anybody at all out of one of their sporting events for whatever reason they want, or for no reason at all, unless the person they're kicking out is in a privileged class.
Does/can the NCAA stop you from blogging about a game, as it happens, based purely on what you see being broadcast on TV? (i.e., from home) Not trying to make a point, just curious.
That's a point I was about to try to make, but you beat me to it. The NCAA can't stop you from blogging about a game, as it happens, based on what you see being broadcast on TV or what you hear being broadcast on the radio. (Strictly speaking, they could, by frivolously suing you, but their suit would be groundless.) Therefore, it's foolish of them to try to stop someone from blogging from the site of the event; the only difference between on-site and off-site blogging is that on-site blogging is more likely to promote actually going to the game, which is in the interest of NCAA members (they sell more tickets that way).
Oh, so then it must be okay? Talk about a non-story. The guy just got caught violating a policy that he knew about and probably even agreed to as a person with press credentials.
The story isn't "this guy got caught violating a policy that he knew about," the story is "Look what a ridiculous policy the NCAA has."
The NCAA naturally wants to control access to live (and recorded) broadcasts of games (and currently has the legal right to do so), whether they be video, audio, or even text. How or why is "blogging" magically different or protected?
What gives them the legal right to control access to live or recorded broadcasts of text accounts of games? What gives them the legal right to control access to audio commentary of games made by someone not physically present?
I don't think they have those rights, though many sporting organizations try to claim them. Witness the NFL's ridiculous disclaimer: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited." No law that I am aware of stops you from telling somebody what you think about the game, be it over the water cooler at work or on your blog.
Is there something different between a broken network and one that's just very slow?
One way for a network to be broken by design is if the total capacity decreases as the utilization increases; in other words, past a certain point, adding more load decreases the total throughput of the network.
In the same sentence, the article refers to both an "access point" and a "distributed antenna system," indicating that when they say "access point" they're probably not talking about the $2.99 device from CompUSA.
It seems like when they say "access point" they mean "connection to another network outside the hotel". Currently, data might come in a variety of places -- maybe they have a directional antenna on the roof for each local HD tower, plus a satellite dish, plus an internet connection, plus a cable TV connection (maybe they get local channels via cable and other channels via satellite). If things were created in an ad hoc manner there could be multiple wiring closets scattered around a building. Centralizing all that in a single "telecom closet" sounds like a smart move, as does figuring out how to put all those different services on a single physical network inside the hotel.
In my opinion, everyone should have access to the best health care possible
Unfortunately there isn't enough health care to go around, so not everyone can have access to the best health care possible. The real question is this: how should this limited resource be distributed across the population?
One could ration it out, distribute it first come first served, sell it, or do some combination of the three. What makes the first or second morally superior to the third? Is the most morally superior approach the combination that provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and if so, which combination is that?
You're kidding, right? How the hell can you see anything on that? That's far too high a resolution for anything unless you hold the computer at your chest.
Nope: 1920x1200 on a 15.4" widescreen works fine for me. I did need to adjust the default font size up a notch or two in Konqueror. I sit as close as is ergonomic to the screen, and I take breaks periodically in order to focus on something else, which are good things to do in any case. In exchange I get huge productivity benefits from fitting lots of programs on my desktop at once, and content from text to 1080i looks sharp and clear.
I know I'm in the minority, though, because 15.4" laptops with this resolution are few and far between. I might have to go with a 17" or a Dell for my next one.
Slashdot Mirror
Because genuine fans are dumb.
You're right, but I'd switch CS for SE. There is a lot of really awful scientific code out there, and many scientists would benefit from an SE degree (BS or MS), which in my experience tend to cover the CS fundamentals. A short program geared towards scientists (with at least a programming languages course, an algorithms course and an SE overview course) would be a good start.
The statement "I'll never use it because the code syntax is too complicated" is not necessarily Luddism, and is not analogous to your examples (which are valid). Complex syntax hinders communication between developers and increases defects. If everything else is equal (and it usually is), simpler syntax is better.
I use C++ regularly, and if I didn't restrict myself to a subset of its features I would go nuts. Maybe that means I have a small brain, but if so that makes me part of the majority.
Fortunately, the next generation of programmers has many languages available that are not as complicated as C++. Progress in programming language design is indicated by syntactical simplicity, not complexity. C++ is the most syntactically complex language I use regularly, which is why I avoid it whenever I can.
Don't be so discriminating: it's ok to oppose the imposition of any world view on anyone else, be it narrow-minded or enlightened, imposed by religionists or not, and so on. Non-hypocrites are the scariest of all, when it comes to imposing world views on others. Fortunately there aren't many of them.
Lots of things are worse. Genocide, perpetrated against a majority of the population. Nuclear war. Collapse of civilization leading to mass cannibalism in the cities.
Agreed.
I mostly agree with the second, but disagree with the first. A bad year, even a bad course, can have a cascading effect. If the submitter got a D in Computer Architecture I, what is the likely outcome in Computer Architecture II? There are plenty of advantages to getting into the workplace sooner, but repeating a year will make the degree more valuable to the student. If the degree isn't useful, then fine, but mine was.
On the other hand, I was impressed that Card actually finished the Bean/Peter storyline. Say what you will, he's no Robert Jordan.
I agree that knowing the difference between fantasy and reality is important, but people can still be desensitized to elements found in fantasy. You know that it's a video game and you're not really shooting somebody, but you're still reminded that the concept of shooting somebody exists, so if you're ever in a situation where you have the option of shooting somebody, you'll be familiar with the concept and you'll have trained yourself to think that it's sometimes OK ("when they're not really a person" or "when they really deserve it").
I recently realized that I feel bad when I raze cities and backstab allies in Civ4. Maybe I'm just getting soft in my middle age, but I can see a clear connection between what a person is willing to do in fantasy and what they're willing to do in reality. Another example: I don't like playing RPGs with people who commit atrocities in-character. I don't want to hear how you're raping the horses and riding off on the women, etc. I know it's not real, it's fantasy, but it's not good for people to have fantasies about certain distasteful things. It's worse for them to act out on those in real life, but that doesn't necessarily make it ok to act them out in a fantasy world.
I agree that violent games can be therapeutic; what if Hitler had had Civ4 to distract him? If someone is inclined to fantasize about violence, it's much better for them to distract themselves with a game than to go do it in real life. But, if someone isn't inclined to fantasize about violence, is it healthy to play a game that leads them to do so? I don't know.
A good case can be made that it is in society's interest to encourage things that are in society's interest. Few of those things are clearly black or white; they are arguable, which is why I used the word "arguably". Censorship is usually bad, but not always; the pluses and minuses of individual cases should be examined. One case, government censorship of political speech, is clearly bad. Another, parental censorship of what their four year old watches on TV, is clearly good. Maybe society would be better off if more people imagined themselves participating in mass murder, but maybe not; it's arguable.
I know it can, because I've experienced it myself. Movies and TV and books can, too. Being sensitive to something is not a matter of black and white, it is a matter of degrees. The more someone is reminded of something, the less sensitive to it they are, be it TV commercials or bloody murder.
If you're not, then you probably can't enjoy a computer game or TV show as much as I can. You win some you lose some, I guess. I don't have any reason to believe that most people don't imagine themselves in the place of the protagonist when they play a game, watch a movie or read a book. It would be foolish to claim that there is no link at all between the media an individual consumes and that individual's life henceforth, so why give violent media a bye?
Note that I'm specifically not claiming that violent media, or any media, should be censored; the negatives usually outweigh the positives, but the positives do exist.
Killing someone by sawing into their groin is worse than killing someone by shooting them into the face. Neither is necessarily ok (it depends on circumstances). People are desensitized to what they observe, and it is reasonable to choose to not desensitize oneself to certain things. Arguably, there is a societal interest in not desensitizing citizens to certain things; for example, if I am desensitized to poor people dying all around me, then I might not support measures to prevent poor people from dying, which are arguably in society's interest.
In my opinion, it's remotely advantageous to be able to record more than fits on a videotape or DVD without manually swapping. The ability to archive recordings on a separate file server, which some DVRs offer, is also remotely advantageous.
Almost. The entire point of roleplaying games is to Have Fun. If you Have Fun via the story, then focus on the story. If you Have Fun by powergaming the rules, then find a bunch of like-minded buddies and munch out until your mom makes you go to bed.
Some people like wargames-in-RPG-clothing, preferring strategy to story. Even a Monty Haul campaign is fine if everybody's having fun.
For some people, the story is the meat and the rules are the salt. For others, the rules are the meat and the story is the salt.
Their reasoning goes something like this: people sometimes engage in interstate commerce. Therefore, any law that affects people affects interstate commerce.
Actually, another poster claimed somewhat plausibly that it's legal to discriminate based on race, creed, color or sex when admitting fans to or kicking people out of sporting events. I'd just assumed it was illegal, but I could be wrong.
How? The NCAA can make their TV contracts say whatever they want. If they choose to negotiate "exclusive live coverage" to a TV station (or radio station or other entity), that's their choice. Since lots of sporting events are covered by more than one type of media (e.g. simultaneous TV and radio coverage), it is reasonable to think that each exclusive license is limited to a particular type of media. Perhaps the NCAA wants someone to pay them for an exclusive blogging license too, which they have every right to try to sell (though that seems unlikely since it's easy to blog about a sporting event via the TV coverage.)
Re-read what I wrote: "text accounts". That's not analogous to everyone having the right to go to a play and set up a camera with a live feed because it doesn't require being present and it's not an exact representation of what's happening, it's a translation through the filter of the writer. That being said, I think it would be great if anybody could go to a play and set up a camera with a live feed out to the world.
When I watch a game on TV, or from my apartment next to the playing field, I haven't signed any contracts with the NCAA. Their contract with their TV provider or their official paid blogger doesn't bind me.
The copyright statement claims to prohibit it, but it does not have the legal power to do so. Facts can be extracted from a copyrighted work and rephrased to form a new copyrighted work that is not a derivative of the first, at least according to this guy, who makes a convincing argument (scroll down to "Another Example").
Furthermore, the TV broadcast is a copyrighted work, but a live event is not a copyrighted work. As I mentioned in another post, the NCAA and other sporting organizations have leveraged their right to kick people out of their live events to gain copyrights to various copyrightable accounts of the game, but that doesn't prohibit anybody else from creating new copyrightable accounts of the game (such as a blog post, a newspaper article or a book). If the NFL didn't contractually require the copyright to TV coverage of a game, that TV coverage would be copyrighted by whatever TV network produced it.
That's absolutely correct, and if someone hadn't mentioned it I would have posted a followup (it was one of those "Oh, I should have said that" thoughts 5 minutes after I hit "submit".) That's the only right that the NCAA in this situation has; they've simply leveraged it in order to get people to sign agreements giving them more power (for example, they won't let you broadcast the game on TV unless you agree to their terms.)
They can kick anybody at all out of one of their sporting events for whatever reason they want, or for no reason at all, unless the person they're kicking out is in a privileged class.
That's a point I was about to try to make, but you beat me to it. The NCAA can't stop you from blogging about a game, as it happens, based on what you see being broadcast on TV or what you hear being broadcast on the radio. (Strictly speaking, they could, by frivolously suing you, but their suit would be groundless.) Therefore, it's foolish of them to try to stop someone from blogging from the site of the event; the only difference between on-site and off-site blogging is that on-site blogging is more likely to promote actually going to the game, which is in the interest of NCAA members (they sell more tickets that way).
The story isn't "this guy got caught violating a policy that he knew about," the story is "Look what a ridiculous policy the NCAA has."
What gives them the legal right to control access to live or recorded broadcasts of text accounts of games? What gives them the legal right to control access to audio commentary of games made by someone not physically present?
I don't think they have those rights, though many sporting organizations try to claim them. Witness the NFL's ridiculous disclaimer: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited." No law that I am aware of stops you from telling somebody what you think about the game, be it over the water cooler at work or on your blog.
One way for a network to be broken by design is if the total capacity decreases as the utilization increases; in other words, past a certain point, adding more load decreases the total throughput of the network.
In the same sentence, the article refers to both an "access point" and a "distributed antenna system," indicating that when they say "access point" they're probably not talking about the $2.99 device from CompUSA.
It seems like when they say "access point" they mean "connection to another network outside the hotel". Currently, data might come in a variety of places -- maybe they have a directional antenna on the roof for each local HD tower, plus a satellite dish, plus an internet connection, plus a cable TV connection (maybe they get local channels via cable and other channels via satellite). If things were created in an ad hoc manner there could be multiple wiring closets scattered around a building. Centralizing all that in a single "telecom closet" sounds like a smart move, as does figuring out how to put all those different services on a single physical network inside the hotel.
Re-read the post you're responding to. They're not compiling every device driver under the sun into their kernel.
Unfortunately there isn't enough health care to go around, so not everyone can have access to the best health care possible. The real question is this: how should this limited resource be distributed across the population?
One could ration it out, distribute it first come first served, sell it, or do some combination of the three. What makes the first or second morally superior to the third? Is the most morally superior approach the combination that provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and if so, which combination is that?
Nope: 1920x1200 on a 15.4" widescreen works fine for me. I did need to adjust the default font size up a notch or two in Konqueror. I sit as close as is ergonomic to the screen, and I take breaks periodically in order to focus on something else, which are good things to do in any case. In exchange I get huge productivity benefits from fitting lots of programs on my desktop at once, and content from text to 1080i looks sharp and clear.
I know I'm in the minority, though, because 15.4" laptops with this resolution are few and far between. I might have to go with a 17" or a Dell for my next one.