As I said here, this won't actually do any good for a lot of people like me who live in cities and towns with single-provider cable monopolies. How about the FCC busts up some of those to give us real choice?
Maybe this is naive, but I wonder how effective a TV PSA campaign would be? Make people aware that the family Windows box could be a threat to national security and tell them where to go to get it checked out and fixed.
True. I live in South Carolina, where many schools are both poor and lousy academically. With more money, they could have school buildings that aren't literally falling down and offer competitive salaries to entice good teachers to live out in the middle of nowhere.
I'm not saying there aren't good public schools in SC. There are plenty, including the one I'm zoned for. But they do tend to be in the areas that have more money and are more urban / less rural.
Why did I have the impression this is a well established fact?
I was actually first introduced to this concept way back in middle school when I read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door. Granted, we now know that mitochondria are not little pig-like creatures that kill cells with overzealous games of ring-around-the-rosy. But L'Engle's understanding of the role mitochondria play within a cell was pretty good, I think. At least, I still remember it from a book I read over 20 years ago.
I get a ton of magazine subscriptions via expired airline miles. Most of them I wouldn't get if they weren't free, but a few I'm willing to pay for once the free sub runs out: fashion and design magazines with pretty pictures and good art direction. These are well-suited to the print medium. Lucky, Domino, and Cookie all have web sites, but I like to be able to relax on the sofa or outside, put my feet up, and enjoy the eye candy. Magazines weigh a lot less than my laptop.
I've found, though, that I don't read business or tech magazines, even if they are free. I go online when I'm looking for information like that.
If signals can't get out, they can't get in either so no using your cell phone inside
The previous owners of our new house must've had an in with the DoD - I think our windows, walls, foundation and fences are coated with this stuff already. Really, it's the weirdest thing: cell phone reception is nonexistent upstairs, extremely poor downstairs, fair-to-middlin' in the yard, and excellent the moment you step across the property line.
Plus, it's not an easy field of study and you need a graduate degree to get any job that pays decently. Smart people interested in science could certainly do better financially if they went into another field. You have to really love oceanography to stick with it.
This poll is also the first time I've ever heard of "blook," and I consider myself fairly Web 2.0-savvy. I personally think it sounds stupider than all the other words.
I do dislike cookie, though, because it's so often misused. At the end of half the Harris Polls I've taken they ask if I think "programs like 'cookies' that track what users do on the Internet" are a violation of privacy. I have told them over and over again that cookies are not programs. They are just text files, configuration files. You cannot run or execute a cookie. But do they listen? Not so far.
This doesn't necessarily assume a controlling intelligence. Cats aren't physically capable of human speech because they didn't evolve that way - they didn't need it, you could say they aren't meant to speak like we are. People haven't evolved to remember every single thing that ever happened to them; we aren't meant to be solely stores of information, we need to eat, work, play, etc.
I suppose someone could make it their goal to remember everything, to devote their life to that. But in general, humans aren't wired to live like that.
We're about to move to a place where Atlantic Broadband is the local monopoly instead of TWC. I guess I should be glad it isn't Comcast. I've heard too many horror stories about them!
You shouldn't have told me that - now I'm going to hassle you endlessly!;)
Seriously though, what's up with the crappy pixellated images on the digital cable channels, and the blocking and tiling on the HD channels? We've had reps out to our house to look at it, we've tried every suggestion TWC made to fix it, and it still happens. Is it like that for everyone, or do I just live in an area with too little bandwidth?
The full text of the article explains that they're not moving focus away from programming proficiency in the CS program itself, they're just not focusing on it so much as a requirement for admission to the program.
"At one time, she said, admission to the program depended on high overall achievement and programming experience. The criteria now, she said, are high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders."
In other words, in order to be a CS student at CMU, you don't have to have spent your weekends writing your own Linux distro. You could, instead, have been captain of the Mathletics team or something like that.
I live in Richland County, SC and will be selling my house in the next couple of months. So if you want to work for Google and really like to plan ahead I can get you a good deal on a nice 3BR before the prices go up!
There's no lack of bandwidth on the backbones; it's with the "last mile" connections to homes and businesses, which requires some type of new infrastructure to be installed.
Exhibit A: digital TV service from my local cable monopoly, Time Warner Cable. The high-number (digital) channels and the HD channels have terrible image quality, full of blocking and tiling and pixellation. If they don't have the bandwidth to provide those services, they shouldn't offer them. We complained about this for a long time and eventually gave up, faced with TWC's constant "huh?" responses.
There may be a case to be made here against anonymous non-traceable postings, but for the most part the internet community seems (so far) to be self-policing.
I've found that any kind of online discussion only remains civil as long as it's either moderated or requires accountability from the participants (i.e. not anonymous). When you allow unmoderated, anonymous discussions, no matter how noble your intentions, they degenerate.
(For an example of this principle in action, browse Slashdot at +4 threaded or nested, then switch to -1 flat.)
Is it a better path to focus on moving into management?
There's a dearth of IT managers out there right now. If you want to stay close to where the action is, focus on project management. With your knowledge of all the different facets of software development, you should be able to relate to your team pretty well. It's a tough and sometimes stressful job that nevertheless can pay well and provide great job security.
I saw a demo last week of some software that actually comes close. We were all blown away. The software lets you take a picture of any size and enlarge it, and it actually improves the level of detail as the picture gets bigger (I need to play around with it more to see what the limitations of this feature are). As a long-time Photoshop user, I was really impressed.
Sadly, it's Windows-only but it's still worth downloading the demo to play with if you can: FotoFusion.
I flew cross-country on a Song airplane last year. Song went out of business, so Delta re-absorbed its planes into its own fleet. I can vouch for the little entertainment console on the back of every seat. Some stuff was free, some you had to pay to access.
One free thing was a trivia game you could play against the other passengers. It kept track of who answered the most questions correctly in the least time and announced a winner each round. Another interesting feature was a map showing approximately where the plane was at any given time. That program sometimes didn't work.
There's always a way to make money on somebody else's stupidity or misfortune
One of my husband's fellow graduate students was a day trader back in the early days of online stock trading. He'd get up early to watch the first financial report of the day on CNN, then immediately buy all the stocks they recommended. At the end of the day, he'd sell those shares. It was a reliable way to make a profit because enough people were willing to just buy whatever CNN's experts recommended.
large parts of the population would earn more because people couldn't be exploited because they wouldn't be so scared of destitution.
It's nice in theory, but the problem is that in the US there are always illegal immigrants willing to work for less than minimum wage and people willing to hire them regardless of the law. So even if Congress says you have to pay your housekeeper/apple picker/dish washer $7.25/hr., you can always find someone willing to do the job for less if you pay in cash and know where to look.
I'm reading a really fascinating take on the Dracula legend right now, The Historian. I don't know if this castle is analagous to the one described in the book as the one he had his vassals build for him in the mountains of Romania to keep back the Ottomans. But in the book (which is fictionalized history), it says he didn't live in that castle for very long - he abandoned it when the Turks got too close.
I just read this morning about a group of researchers at the University of Florida who have used a similar substance (extracts from the acai berry) to kill cultured leukemia cells. The berry extracts work remarkably well at killing the cancer cells, but to quote the linked article,
[Professor Stephen Talcott] cautioned that the study, funded by UF sources, was not intended to show whether compounds found in acai berries could prevent leukemia in people.
"This was only a cell-culture model and we don't want to give anyone false hope," Talcott said.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said here, this won't actually do any good for a lot of people like me who live in cities and towns with single-provider cable monopolies. How about the FCC busts up some of those to give us real choice?
Maybe this is naive, but I wonder how effective a TV PSA campaign would be? Make people aware that the family Windows box could be a threat to national security and tell them where to go to get it checked out and fixed.
I suppose that's the architectural equivalent of a chastity belt, to keep hostile aliens from penetrating our planet's defenses.
True. I live in South Carolina, where many schools are both poor and lousy academically. With more money, they could have school buildings that aren't literally falling down and offer competitive salaries to entice good teachers to live out in the middle of nowhere.
I'm not saying there aren't good public schools in SC. There are plenty, including the one I'm zoned for. But they do tend to be in the areas that have more money and are more urban / less rural.
Why did I have the impression this is a well established fact?
I was actually first introduced to this concept way back in middle school when I read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door. Granted, we now know that mitochondria are not little pig-like creatures that kill cells with overzealous games of ring-around-the-rosy. But L'Engle's understanding of the role mitochondria play within a cell was pretty good, I think. At least, I still remember it from a book I read over 20 years ago.
Print media is dying.
I get a ton of magazine subscriptions via expired airline miles. Most of them I wouldn't get if they weren't free, but a few I'm willing to pay for once the free sub runs out: fashion and design magazines with pretty pictures and good art direction. These are well-suited to the print medium. Lucky, Domino, and Cookie all have web sites, but I like to be able to relax on the sofa or outside, put my feet up, and enjoy the eye candy. Magazines weigh a lot less than my laptop.
I've found, though, that I don't read business or tech magazines, even if they are free. I go online when I'm looking for information like that.
If signals can't get out, they can't get in either so no using your cell phone inside
The previous owners of our new house must've had an in with the DoD - I think our windows, walls, foundation and fences are coated with this stuff already. Really, it's the weirdest thing: cell phone reception is nonexistent upstairs, extremely poor downstairs, fair-to-middlin' in the yard, and excellent the moment you step across the property line.
Plus, it's not an easy field of study and you need a graduate degree to get any job that pays decently. Smart people interested in science could certainly do better financially if they went into another field. You have to really love oceanography to stick with it.
This poll is also the first time I've ever heard of "blook," and I consider myself fairly Web 2.0-savvy. I personally think it sounds stupider than all the other words.
I do dislike cookie, though, because it's so often misused. At the end of half the Harris Polls I've taken they ask if I think "programs like 'cookies' that track what users do on the Internet" are a violation of privacy. I have told them over and over again that cookies are not programs. They are just text files, configuration files. You cannot run or execute a cookie. But do they listen? Not so far.
perhaps we're not meant to?
Meant to by whom? God?
This doesn't necessarily assume a controlling intelligence. Cats aren't physically capable of human speech because they didn't evolve that way - they didn't need it, you could say they aren't meant to speak like we are. People haven't evolved to remember every single thing that ever happened to them; we aren't meant to be solely stores of information, we need to eat, work, play, etc.
I suppose someone could make it their goal to remember everything, to devote their life to that. But in general, humans aren't wired to live like that.
We're about to move to a place where Atlantic Broadband is the local monopoly instead of TWC. I guess I should be glad it isn't Comcast. I've heard too many horror stories about them!
I work for TWC's customer support
;)
You shouldn't have told me that - now I'm going to hassle you endlessly!
Seriously though, what's up with the crappy pixellated images on the digital cable channels, and the blocking and tiling on the HD channels? We've had reps out to our house to look at it, we've tried every suggestion TWC made to fix it, and it still happens. Is it like that for everyone, or do I just live in an area with too little bandwidth?
The full text of the article explains that they're not moving focus away from programming proficiency in the CS program itself, they're just not focusing on it so much as a requirement for admission to the program.
"At one time, she said, admission to the program depended on high overall achievement and programming experience. The criteria now, she said, are high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders."
In other words, in order to be a CS student at CMU, you don't have to have spent your weekends writing your own Linux distro. You could, instead, have been captain of the Mathletics team or something like that.
I live in Richland County, SC and will be selling my house in the next couple of months. So if you want to work for Google and really like to plan ahead I can get you a good deal on a nice 3BR before the prices go up!
There's no lack of bandwidth on the backbones; it's with the "last mile" connections to homes and businesses, which requires some type of new infrastructure to be installed.
Exhibit A: digital TV service from my local cable monopoly, Time Warner Cable. The high-number (digital) channels and the HD channels have terrible image quality, full of blocking and tiling and pixellation. If they don't have the bandwidth to provide those services, they shouldn't offer them. We complained about this for a long time and eventually gave up, faced with TWC's constant "huh?" responses.
There may be a case to be made here against anonymous non-traceable postings, but for the most part the internet community seems (so far) to be self-policing.
I've found that any kind of online discussion only remains civil as long as it's either moderated or requires accountability from the participants (i.e. not anonymous). When you allow unmoderated, anonymous discussions, no matter how noble your intentions, they degenerate.
(For an example of this principle in action, browse Slashdot at +4 threaded or nested, then switch to -1 flat.)
Is it a better path to focus on moving into management?
There's a dearth of IT managers out there right now. If you want to stay close to where the action is, focus on project management. With your knowledge of all the different facets of software development, you should be able to relate to your team pretty well. It's a tough and sometimes stressful job that nevertheless can pay well and provide great job security.
I saw a demo last week of some software that actually comes close. We were all blown away. The software lets you take a picture of any size and enlarge it, and it actually improves the level of detail as the picture gets bigger (I need to play around with it more to see what the limitations of this feature are). As a long-time Photoshop user, I was really impressed.
Sadly, it's Windows-only but it's still worth downloading the demo to play with if you can: FotoFusion.
I flew cross-country on a Song airplane last year. Song went out of business, so Delta re-absorbed its planes into its own fleet. I can vouch for the little entertainment console on the back of every seat. Some stuff was free, some you had to pay to access.
One free thing was a trivia game you could play against the other passengers. It kept track of who answered the most questions correctly in the least time and announced a winner each round. Another interesting feature was a map showing approximately where the plane was at any given time. That program sometimes didn't work.
If you thought that the Street Fighter movie was bad, check out this review of the Japanese porn version, "Street Fucker."
There's always a way to make money on somebody else's stupidity or misfortune
One of my husband's fellow graduate students was a day trader back in the early days of online stock trading. He'd get up early to watch the first financial report of the day on CNN, then immediately buy all the stocks they recommended. At the end of the day, he'd sell those shares. It was a reliable way to make a profit because enough people were willing to just buy whatever CNN's experts recommended.
large parts of the population would earn more because people couldn't be exploited because they wouldn't be so scared of destitution.
It's nice in theory, but the problem is that in the US there are always illegal immigrants willing to work for less than minimum wage and people willing to hire them regardless of the law. So even if Congress says you have to pay your housekeeper/apple picker/dish washer $7.25/hr., you can always find someone willing to do the job for less if you pay in cash and know where to look.
Wish I could mod your post "scary."
I'm reading a really fascinating take on the Dracula legend right now, The Historian. I don't know if this castle is analagous to the one described in the book as the one he had his vassals build for him in the mountains of Romania to keep back the Ottomans. But in the book (which is fictionalized history), it says he didn't live in that castle for very long - he abandoned it when the Turks got too close.