... the answer to questions in the form of "should I Move from Java to _____?" is almost always "yes"
The reason being? As others will have pointed out, Java is used in incredibly many places - Android apps, Java application servers even in Oracle databases. IBM mainframes even have dedicated Java CPUs as an option. In short, there are loads of career opportunities that expect you to code Java.
And the language as such is easy to learn - if you have learned C, you are almost there. The downside of Java is that it has been taken over by standards for absolutely everything computers do; but the upside is that there is a standard way to do everything, and because they are standards, they work everywhere. There is no good reason to move away from Java, unless you find it hard to learn how to use the toolset. And, as for that, I imagine one would face the same dilemma in Scala, since they live in the same JVM environment.
I have - probably around 30 times over the last 20 years. Have you?
Everything there is a ripoff of western brands. And copyright infringement is everywhere, and practically encouraged by the government, to give Chinese brands an advantage of superior western ones. And of course many western brands, like google and facebook, are blocked outright, the only reason stuff like baidu even had a chance.
That's not what I have seen in my many visits. Sure, you can find fake goods in the markets, just like you can in similar markets in Europe and I wouldn't be surprised if they can be found in the US. Or Hong Kong, since you claim to be from Hong Kong. It is true that when I came there in the beginning, there weren't many Western style luxury goods, but I don't think it is true that things were of poor quality; they were just different - possibly more suited to Chinese needs and expectations at the time. This has changed a lot, and I think it is a shame that so many good, Chinese things disappear in the name of modernisation and are replaced by anonymous, Western style stuff. China was a developing nation when I first came there, and they are still developing, as opposed to many Western nations. And, you know what? A lot of the coolest, new gadgets seem to turn up over there before they come to the US or Europe. That doesn't sound backwards to me.
But to anyone that has done an honest evaluation of this "wage gap" has seen is that in reality there is no "wage gap".
Throughout history this sort of argument has always been presented as truth in some form - sometimes even by honest people. There were the middle ages, when The Nobles were "obviously" better than peasants and serfs; because peasants were obviously coarse people who were worthy enough when it came to the lower occupations, but who simply didn't have the high-mindedness required to make a True, Holy Knight of God. Never mind the fact that they never had the opportunity to cultivate their aesthetical sensitivities in the daily grind, not least because the socalled High Born actively kept them away from any such opportunity.
Then there were Victorian times, when the upper and middle classes were "obviously" a far better breed than the working class and the poor, who wasted their lives in drunkenness and filth. Never mind that 14 hour working days and unliveable wages made it impossible to strive for betterment. And so on ad nauseam; I think you can see where I am going with this: maybe, if you completely disregard the disparity in opportunities given to different segments of society, you might find a man and woman, who have the same job - say, a nurse, and compare their wages, and "Voila! - they get the same". But that is only a very small part of the picture - there are reasons why you find more women or more blacks in lower paid jobs, and a very big part of it has to do with institutional bias and a culture of not wanting to admit there is a problem, because people like you are selfish and all too willing to feel happy about the status quo. If you are an engineer, you ought to realise that it hits you as well - why do you think that managers are always these rather incompetent individuals, whereas you and others, who might actually make very good managers, never get the promotions? They simply don't want you up there, because they know you might outshine them.
I am all for using clever technology if it gives me something of actual value, but I have yet to hear about any IoT gadget that does anything that I would benefit from in my home. I have used remotely comtrollable gadgets (like networked powerstrips) in server rooms, and that clearly is useful, but I wouldn't spend money on any of the silly gadgets that are on offer, and certainly not if they can only communicate directly to the wider internet - for me to let any gadget in to my home, it must have the option to turn off all wifi and use local, cabled network only, and it would have to use an open protocol, so I can control it from, say, a RaspberryPi, which would be the only entry point from outside. Otherwise you might as well leave all the windows open.
...was suppose to make the world a better place? So far all I'm seeing is crap like this and Fake News. It's not lookin' good.
Oh, and you know, we could just ban stuff like this. I'm just saying...
The rent sharks are always circling, out there. Wouldn't it be great if there was a government that actually had the guts to tackle the real issues that plague what is so euphemistically being called 'the middle class'? But oh no, that would be 'socialism'. Here's an anecdote that illustrates how large the gap can be between the real value of an appartment and the inflated profits of the landlords: we had this problem in Denmark, I think in the 20es, and the government (Social Demcrats) decided to stop it, so they introduced a bill that limited the rent you could require for an appartment to something like the actual expenses on maintaining the buildings plus a reasonable profit. Fast forward to the 80es, when I recall my grandfather talking about how his rent was something 100 DKK per month (something like 14 or 15 USD back then); it was certainly what you would call ridiculously cheap. I'm not saying this is realistic today, but rents don't need to be as high as they are, not by a long way.
This is something that should receive more emphasis, I think; a lot of managers don't understand that they aren't leaders - and that they are not even supposed to be leaders. Management is something that requires a certain set of skills - you are required to manage people, ie. you tell your staff what tasks they have to do, you evaluate their performance, you communicate with the wider administration, so your team members don't have to bother with the trivia of administration. In many ways, a manager is a secretary for the team. No leadership is required.
Leadership, on the other hand, is a very simple concept: if you go in front and others follow, you lead. A good leader is often a member of the team, somebody who comes up with ideas about ways to do things. You can see how these concepts can easily get into conflict - a manager will very often not know enough to actually lead, because their expertise is management, not whatever the team is working on; this is what leads to many of the problems people talk about: the manager trying to lead highly skilled workers, who know far better what they are doing and how it should be done.
I'm not sure what can be done from the employees' side about a bad manager - managers certainly need to be able to understand their own limitations and have to trust that their employees wan't to do a good job and are capable of doing it. Quite possibly a manager shouldn't really try to lead - that should be delegated to somebody in the team (or somebody new, who can then become part of the team). This is perhaps one thing the military has got right: you have the officers, who do whatever it is officers do, and they leave the actual leadership to sergeants and lieutenants; this is system that works, simply because it has been tested quite literally to destruction.
I think it is well established by that there is a deeply ingrained bias against older employees, but I wonder why? I think in some cultures, older people are seen as much more valuable than is common in the West, as a source of experience and insight, and this was once the case in our culture as well. Now a days you're simply expected to bugger off and stop being a nuisance; something that came natural back when people would be old and worn out at around 50, but today many continue in good health well into their 60es and 70es, and could easily make a valuable contribution to society.
As for what we can do about it - perhaps it is time for us old ones to get together and form our own businesses where you can't a job unless you have 30 - 40 years of experience. It ought to be simple to outwit and outmaneuver those quite frankly dimwitted youngsters that currently faff around in start-ups. How about that?
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have transformed Hollywood and contributed to an unprecedented number of quality series being produced -- a phenomenon often described as the new Golden Age of TV.
I would like to know where all these "quality series" are - I can't think of even one that hasn't become yet another endless, drivel-ridden soap opera. They start out well enough, sometimes even with a brilliant concept, but then it becomes an exercise in recycling, and because that is boring even to the producers, they start adding "drama" (ie. unrealistic idiocy). And then we get "The Movie", "Rebooted" and the protagonists in their younger days. A good series is one that stops when the story has run its course, probably after less than 6 episodes. What we get now, and perhaps it is because of streaming media, is quantity, not quality. It has simply become too easy to produce something with a decent or even good, technical quality, but there simply aren't enough good, original writers around, so it get diluted; it isn't without reason that everybody keeps going back to the great productions of the past - back then it wasn't easy to get your story produced, so it was far more likely that only the very best made it.
People seem to forget that euphemisms like 'raise money', invesment' and '...-funding' cover variations over the theme of borrowing money, which in the end is going to have to be paid back - and the expectation, when it comes to investment is the equivalent of significantly more than normal loan interest. This is like the infamous 'pay-day loans' that market themselves as your bestest pal ever, who will help you out - but at the cost of what may be equivalent to >100% pa. The normal term for this kind of pal (and now investor) is 'loan shark'.
If the facts of the case really match what I've just read, then there is something fundamentally wrong. The text of any law has been produced by public servants, and if we leave out any suspicion of corruption, they are paid for by the tax payers; already for that reason should the text of any law be in the public domain. On top of that, how can you claim to have a society under the rule of law, if that law isn't easily accessible to any member of society? Secret laws don't belong in any society - we can't follow the rules if we aren't allowed to know them. The text of all laws should be available to download on freely accessible web servers. I may remember wrong, but I think even China does that.
EPA shouldn't exist in the first place. Neither should 99.9999 of what government is doing today, all its agencies and departments, none of it should exist. I suppose de-clawing the agencies, de-funding them as well is a good start in that direction. There shouldn't be such a concept as an income or a property tax, there shouldn't be such a concept as government funded anything.
So, with government reduced to.0001%, or 1 ppm, I assume you would throw away things like public roads, elementary education for all, fundamental, scientific research, etc etc, and with these things also the things that depend on them, like manufaturing, IT, agriculture, trade and all other things that depend on infrastructure, government regulations and international agreements? Not to mention police, military, rescue services, health care and so on. Yeah. let's go back to living in caves, having a life expectancy of 25 and childhood mortality of 75%.
This bill isn't about forcing the EPA to publish its own data, it's about not letting the EPA cite studies that don't make all of their data publicly available (according to the standards of the bill).
*pling* (sound of coin dropping). So, in effect the EPA will not be allowed to publish any findings about what goes on in private companies, I suspect, thus granting big polluters more secrecy and protection.
Here my layman's understanding of why this makes sense: A large part of what causes PTSD comes from being trapped and helpless while experiencing extreme fear; playing a simple game like Tetris makes you stop concentrating on the experience - it is complicated enough to require you to concentrate, but it is simple enough to make you feel in control. Other games of a similar level of complexity would probably work too, but tetris old old enough to be available almost universally. Finally, memories take a while to become persistent, so if you can get away from thinking about the experience in the first few hours after it occurred, you may avoid forming the unbreakable loop that is characteristic of PTSD.
Apparently you can, at least sometimes, 'unseat' the negative loop, if you can bring the patient to remember the events, but somehow disassociate them from the extreme fear and replace it with a more in-control feeling. As I understand it, certain drugs, like MDMA and psilocybin may help in this process (but don't try it at home - this isn't 'fun').
They'll be poorer, less powerful and less influential. However, they might actually be happier. Or, at least a fraction of the population will be.
As always, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. In the longer run it makes no real difference; with the constant growth in international trade, travel and communication, the increase in population, the rising living standards, the internationalisation of crime, terrorism, pollution, refugees and climate change, just to mention a few of all the issues that we can only solve together, we will be forced into ever closer, international cooperation. The EU is not a good model for this, perhaps - it certainly has its flaws, although I think we could make it work, if we had the will to do so; at some point, hopefully before too long, the UK will re-join an improved version.
The problem with EU isn't that there is too much bureaucracy (although there certainly is a lot), or that we have to give up part of our sovereignty; the problem was that it was too unambitious - it was only ever about trade, really, and its main focus has always been the interests of business, which has left ordinary people disengaged at best, and resentful that they were left out where it mattered. I am convinced that we will join something like the EU, but better - a political federation with a proper, federal parliament and government, which starts with the people and which has the trade and other agreements as a corollary, which is the right way around.
I believe this will happen, because I am an optimist; one of these slightly strange beasts, the cynical optimists. Humankind has evolved from a bunch of apes 5 million years ago on the edge of extinction, and we made it through all the crises we brought on ourselves, because we had the capacity to learn that the strangers in the other tribes could become friends and that it would benefit everybody. Hell, we even befriend animals of different species - dogs, cats, horses, birds. It is obvious that we will keep using this, our one, real survival skill, so at some point we will find the way back into a union.
So you get rid of the guy who was happy working with the "team" even though he obviously knew his own mind, and probably realised others wouldn't approve of his choices, so he tried to keep it a secret?
My comment wasn't about right or wrong; but how would you handle a situation where you could either choose to do what you think is the morally right action, or let the whole project disintegrate? Sometimes there are no good options, you have to choose which bad option you will run with. There are problems that can't be solved.
Why not get rid of the people who are so intolerant of other people's fantasies that it affects their ability to function in a team? Or would that result in firing a woman - a social taboo that would see every sjw on the planet get triggered.
And will that always work? What if you are responsible for a hugely important project, and it turns out that the whole team can't tolerate one member - in your example, the woman? There is no universal, right formula for solving many problems. But you, as the responsible manager, are required to make a choice. Which will it be?
Trump's not perfect, but at least he rejected both parties. You need to learn to appreciate that, and stop getting herded around like sheep.
You don't think you are being treated like sheep by the bully? Trump behaves like he was the Emperor of China - and with as much competence as they generally had just before they were overthrown - but as we can all see, he is only a mandarin (*wink* *wink*, did you see what I did there?)
We probably need to establish a more permanent presence in space, either in orbit or on the Moon, before we are able to find a cheaper way to get up there. ISS provides very a valuable micro-gravity environment, but at the moment that is the only motivation for sending things up there, more or less. If we had a permanent base on the Moon, for example, which made valuable products and materials that we can't easily produce on Earth or get off the ground, then there would be a much stronger incentive to develop better launch mechanisms.
Disclaimer: I haven't studied the case or even read the article in much detail, so I'm running on empty, mostly. I don't in general have issues with what choices people make in their own lives, as long as it only involves consenting adults.
However, for what it is worth, there are some more general consideration, which in practice may be more important. For a team to be productive, it is necessary that the members of the team feel able to work together. It seems, in this case, that they are not able to do so, and that they have been unable to sort out their differences. If this is the case, then the only practical solution is to not work together - what else can anybody do, practically? "Ought to" only reaches so far. Should the rest of the team be more tolerant? Perhaps, but they aren't, and since this seems to be an open source project with unpaid, voluntary participants, I don't think it is covered by any sort of workers' rights legislation.
I think police should need a warrant to use facial recognition in many cases. I also feel that perhaps searches of electronic devices and online accounts need to strictly limit exactly what is searched for and disallow any evidence of any crimes not listed in the warrant from being used.
I don't think that is realistic or even remotely reasonable. You know, people recognise other people simply by eye-sight; police officers do the same. We can use binoculars to see further away and thus enhance our vision, or we can use an infra red camera to see thing at night - and record it, and so on. There is a continuum from using no technological aid at all to using automatic recognition technology, so where should the limit be set? I think we have to weigh up the benefits against the costs. There is always a risk that technology can be abused - but it is already being abused by criminals, and if the worry is about civil rights issues privacy etc, then that can be addressed with proper education of the police; it does actually work. Most police officers do want to do their job well and be proud of themselves.
As for requiring warrants for using this sort of low-level data gathering is just plain silly - it is simply unworkable.
The 4th amendment is supposed to make it hard to prosecute certain kinds of crime. In my opinion, the police really have no business going after crime that isn't reported to them anyway, except for a few exceptions like murder.
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution):
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
So, the amendment talks about the right to privacy and the right to go about their daily business without being stopped at random by the police. The purpose of this is quite clearly not to "sort of allow certain kinds of crime to take place more easily", as if that was in itself desirable. It is the clear duty of police to investigate crime - all crime - and prevent it if possible, even to the extent that they have a near monopoly on doing so in most countries. Suggesting that they must only react to crime if it is reported to them is blatantly absurd.
Very valid points, of course; the whole idea of open plan is stupid in so many ways; just to take a thing like indoor climate: small offices for 1 or 2 people can have individual heating and aircon, so the ones that like it hot can have that without hearing complaints from those that prefer it cold. You might even have a windows that could open a little bit.
But just as important as the physical environment is the freedom to choose your tools. Developers are skilled workers - I hesitate to use the word 'engineer', I think it is overused and easily misconstrued; an engineer can be anything from the guy that used to shovel coal on a steam locomotive, to a highly academic civil engineer. We skilled workers know best which tools are suitable for our needs. Some people like to use highly complex IDEs with suspicious colour schemes (which remind me of my misspent youth in Soho's nightlife), others actually prefer vi and make scripts in xterm - both setups can be equally productive. Managers prove again and again that they have no clue about what is important for skilled workers; they seem to think we are sort of like sales people, but not as clever, and since sales people fall for glittery kitsch and think the word 'leader' means 'alpha male', that is what they try to serve up to us as well; hence Dilbert.
Well, I have never heard of Center for a New American Security before, so it would be reasonable to be skeptical about how non-partisan they are. Judging from the article alone, however, it appears that 'overhead' is anything that isn't passed on to external contractors, so potentially this could include any research that is done by NASA scientists. If this is the case, I don't think it is non-partisan at all - the position that only work done by external contractors is 'real work' is a highly biased one to start from, IMO, as it seems to dismiss the crucial value of fundamental research.
There have been operating systems which have come and gone which have reasons to exist today, like BeOS. But OS/2 is not among them. Windows 3.1 support? That's not a relevant feature. Please tell me that their actual planned release date is April 1.
You mean just like "The Mainframe Is Doomed"? IBM keeps producing new upgrades of their zSeries HW and the different OSes that run on it, and as a funny aside, inside the big box that houses it, you'll find one or more laptops running OS/2. They may have given up on marketing it, but it is still very much alive, and there are still people who remember it fondly; I can understan why - I used to program for Presentation Manager, the graphics interface of OS/2. The experience of being forced back on Windows was what made me jump head first into Linux as soon as it came along.
I think you will get as many answers as there are users on/. My preferred distro is Debian, simply because that is what I am used to. It is fairly conservative in that it doesn't dance exactly on the bleeding edge, but I have yet to find anything missing; I may just be a rather conservative linux user, of course. You could probably go for any of the popular distibutions and avoid tinkering, if that is what you want - it is more a question of which ones to avoi, in that case, since there are some that are made specifically for that purpose; Gentoo springs to mind.
But I have to ask: Why do you want to avoid tinkering? Even if you choose a distribution that doesn't require it, all Linuxes invite it; it is very open to playing around with the system. And unlike Windows where it is a pain to try to go under the hood, in linux it is more pleasurable.
'Free speech' has become a mantra for bullying the people whose opinion is that there are things they don't like and don't want anyone else to see
Fixed that for you, HTH HAND
You don't really get it, do you? If you are to have free speech, then so must everybody else; but there are people - like you, I suspect - who think it is OK to carry out their own censorship in the form of harrasment, botting, DDOSing, flooding social media with noise, or as you try in your own, feeble way, by childishly ridiculing the well thought out opinions that you happen to not like or understand. You've run out of arguments, and all you can muster is a mindless howling concert.
Slashdot Mirror
... the answer to questions in the form of "should I Move from Java to _____?" is almost always "yes"
The reason being? As others will have pointed out, Java is used in incredibly many places - Android apps, Java application servers even in Oracle databases. IBM mainframes even have dedicated Java CPUs as an option. In short, there are loads of career opportunities that expect you to code Java.
And the language as such is easy to learn - if you have learned C, you are almost there. The downside of Java is that it has been taken over by standards for absolutely everything computers do; but the upside is that there is a standard way to do everything, and because they are standards, they work everywhere. There is no good reason to move away from Java, unless you find it hard to learn how to use the toolset. And, as for that, I imagine one would face the same dilemma in Scala, since they live in the same JVM environment.
Have you ever been to China?
I have - probably around 30 times over the last 20 years. Have you?
Everything there is a ripoff of western brands. And copyright infringement is everywhere, and practically encouraged by the government, to give Chinese brands an advantage of superior western ones. And of course many western brands, like google and facebook, are blocked outright, the only reason stuff like baidu even had a chance.
That's not what I have seen in my many visits. Sure, you can find fake goods in the markets, just like you can in similar markets in Europe and I wouldn't be surprised if they can be found in the US. Or Hong Kong, since you claim to be from Hong Kong. It is true that when I came there in the beginning, there weren't many Western style luxury goods, but I don't think it is true that things were of poor quality; they were just different - possibly more suited to Chinese needs and expectations at the time. This has changed a lot, and I think it is a shame that so many good, Chinese things disappear in the name of modernisation and are replaced by anonymous, Western style stuff. China was a developing nation when I first came there, and they are still developing, as opposed to many Western nations. And, you know what? A lot of the coolest, new gadgets seem to turn up over there before they come to the US or Europe. That doesn't sound backwards to me.
But to anyone that has done an honest evaluation of this "wage gap" has seen is that in reality there is no "wage gap".
Throughout history this sort of argument has always been presented as truth in some form - sometimes even by honest people. There were the middle ages, when The Nobles were "obviously" better than peasants and serfs; because peasants were obviously coarse people who were worthy enough when it came to the lower occupations, but who simply didn't have the high-mindedness required to make a True, Holy Knight of God. Never mind the fact that they never had the opportunity to cultivate their aesthetical sensitivities in the daily grind, not least because the socalled High Born actively kept them away from any such opportunity.
Then there were Victorian times, when the upper and middle classes were "obviously" a far better breed than the working class and the poor, who wasted their lives in drunkenness and filth. Never mind that 14 hour working days and unliveable wages made it impossible to strive for betterment. And so on ad nauseam; I think you can see where I am going with this: maybe, if you completely disregard the disparity in opportunities given to different segments of society, you might find a man and woman, who have the same job - say, a nurse, and compare their wages, and "Voila! - they get the same". But that is only a very small part of the picture - there are reasons why you find more women or more blacks in lower paid jobs, and a very big part of it has to do with institutional bias and a culture of not wanting to admit there is a problem, because people like you are selfish and all too willing to feel happy about the status quo. If you are an engineer, you ought to realise that it hits you as well - why do you think that managers are always these rather incompetent individuals, whereas you and others, who might actually make very good managers, never get the promotions? They simply don't want you up there, because they know you might outshine them.
I am all for using clever technology if it gives me something of actual value, but I have yet to hear about any IoT gadget that does anything that I would benefit from in my home. I have used remotely comtrollable gadgets (like networked powerstrips) in server rooms, and that clearly is useful, but I wouldn't spend money on any of the silly gadgets that are on offer, and certainly not if they can only communicate directly to the wider internet - for me to let any gadget in to my home, it must have the option to turn off all wifi and use local, cabled network only, and it would have to use an open protocol, so I can control it from, say, a RaspberryPi, which would be the only entry point from outside. Otherwise you might as well leave all the windows open.
...was suppose to make the world a better place? So far all I'm seeing is crap like this and Fake News. It's not lookin' good.
Oh, and you know, we could just ban stuff like this. I'm just saying...
The rent sharks are always circling, out there. Wouldn't it be great if there was a government that actually had the guts to tackle the real issues that plague what is so euphemistically being called 'the middle class'? But oh no, that would be 'socialism'. Here's an anecdote that illustrates how large the gap can be between the real value of an appartment and the inflated profits of the landlords: we had this problem in Denmark, I think in the 20es, and the government (Social Demcrats) decided to stop it, so they introduced a bill that limited the rent you could require for an appartment to something like the actual expenses on maintaining the buildings plus a reasonable profit. Fast forward to the 80es, when I recall my grandfather talking about how his rent was something 100 DKK per month (something like 14 or 15 USD back then); it was certainly what you would call ridiculously cheap. I'm not saying this is realistic today, but rents don't need to be as high as they are, not by a long way.
This is something that should receive more emphasis, I think; a lot of managers don't understand that they aren't leaders - and that they are not even supposed to be leaders. Management is something that requires a certain set of skills - you are required to manage people, ie. you tell your staff what tasks they have to do, you evaluate their performance, you communicate with the wider administration, so your team members don't have to bother with the trivia of administration. In many ways, a manager is a secretary for the team. No leadership is required.
Leadership, on the other hand, is a very simple concept: if you go in front and others follow, you lead. A good leader is often a member of the team, somebody who comes up with ideas about ways to do things. You can see how these concepts can easily get into conflict - a manager will very often not know enough to actually lead, because their expertise is management, not whatever the team is working on; this is what leads to many of the problems people talk about: the manager trying to lead highly skilled workers, who know far better what they are doing and how it should be done.
I'm not sure what can be done from the employees' side about a bad manager - managers certainly need to be able to understand their own limitations and have to trust that their employees wan't to do a good job and are capable of doing it. Quite possibly a manager shouldn't really try to lead - that should be delegated to somebody in the team (or somebody new, who can then become part of the team). This is perhaps one thing the military has got right: you have the officers, who do whatever it is officers do, and they leave the actual leadership to sergeants and lieutenants; this is system that works, simply because it has been tested quite literally to destruction.
I think it is well established by that there is a deeply ingrained bias against older employees, but I wonder why? I think in some cultures, older people are seen as much more valuable than is common in the West, as a source of experience and insight, and this was once the case in our culture as well. Now a days you're simply expected to bugger off and stop being a nuisance; something that came natural back when people would be old and worn out at around 50, but today many continue in good health well into their 60es and 70es, and could easily make a valuable contribution to society.
As for what we can do about it - perhaps it is time for us old ones to get together and form our own businesses where you can't a job unless you have 30 - 40 years of experience. It ought to be simple to outwit and outmaneuver those quite frankly dimwitted youngsters that currently faff around in start-ups. How about that?
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have transformed Hollywood and contributed to an unprecedented number of quality series being produced -- a phenomenon often described as the new Golden Age of TV.
I would like to know where all these "quality series" are - I can't think of even one that hasn't become yet another endless, drivel-ridden soap opera. They start out well enough, sometimes even with a brilliant concept, but then it becomes an exercise in recycling, and because that is boring even to the producers, they start adding "drama" (ie. unrealistic idiocy). And then we get "The Movie", "Rebooted" and the protagonists in their younger days. A good series is one that stops when the story has run its course, probably after less than 6 episodes. What we get now, and perhaps it is because of streaming media, is quantity, not quality. It has simply become too easy to produce something with a decent or even good, technical quality, but there simply aren't enough good, original writers around, so it get diluted; it isn't without reason that everybody keeps going back to the great productions of the past - back then it wasn't easy to get your story produced, so it was far more likely that only the very best made it.
People seem to forget that euphemisms like 'raise money', invesment' and '...-funding' cover variations over the theme of borrowing money, which in the end is going to have to be paid back - and the expectation, when it comes to investment is the equivalent of significantly more than normal loan interest. This is like the infamous 'pay-day loans' that market themselves as your bestest pal ever, who will help you out - but at the cost of what may be equivalent to >100% pa. The normal term for this kind of pal (and now investor) is 'loan shark'.
If the facts of the case really match what I've just read, then there is something fundamentally wrong. The text of any law has been produced by public servants, and if we leave out any suspicion of corruption, they are paid for by the tax payers; already for that reason should the text of any law be in the public domain. On top of that, how can you claim to have a society under the rule of law, if that law isn't easily accessible to any member of society? Secret laws don't belong in any society - we can't follow the rules if we aren't allowed to know them. The text of all laws should be available to download on freely accessible web servers. I may remember wrong, but I think even China does that.
EPA shouldn't exist in the first place. Neither should 99.9999 of what government is doing today, all its agencies and departments, none of it should exist. I suppose de-clawing the agencies, de-funding them as well is a good start in that direction. There shouldn't be such a concept as an income or a property tax, there shouldn't be such a concept as government funded anything.
So, with government reduced to .0001%, or 1 ppm, I assume you would throw away things like public roads, elementary education for all, fundamental, scientific research, etc etc, and with these things also the things that depend on them, like manufaturing, IT, agriculture, trade and all other things that depend on infrastructure, government regulations and international agreements? Not to mention police, military, rescue services, health care and so on. Yeah. let's go back to living in caves, having a life expectancy of 25 and childhood mortality of 75%.
This bill isn't about forcing the EPA to publish its own data, it's about not letting the EPA cite studies that don't make all of their data publicly available (according to the standards of the bill).
*pling* (sound of coin dropping). So, in effect the EPA will not be allowed to publish any findings about what goes on in private companies, I suspect, thus granting big polluters more secrecy and protection.
Here my layman's understanding of why this makes sense: A large part of what causes PTSD comes from being trapped and helpless while experiencing extreme fear; playing a simple game like Tetris makes you stop concentrating on the experience - it is complicated enough to require you to concentrate, but it is simple enough to make you feel in control. Other games of a similar level of complexity would probably work too, but tetris old old enough to be available almost universally. Finally, memories take a while to become persistent, so if you can get away from thinking about the experience in the first few hours after it occurred, you may avoid forming the unbreakable loop that is characteristic of PTSD.
Apparently you can, at least sometimes, 'unseat' the negative loop, if you can bring the patient to remember the events, but somehow disassociate them from the extreme fear and replace it with a more in-control feeling. As I understand it, certain drugs, like MDMA and psilocybin may help in this process (but don't try it at home - this isn't 'fun').
They'll be poorer, less powerful and less influential. However, they might actually be happier. Or, at least a fraction of the population will be.
As always, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. In the longer run it makes no real difference; with the constant growth in international trade, travel and communication, the increase in population, the rising living standards, the internationalisation of crime, terrorism, pollution, refugees and climate change, just to mention a few of all the issues that we can only solve together, we will be forced into ever closer, international cooperation. The EU is not a good model for this, perhaps - it certainly has its flaws, although I think we could make it work, if we had the will to do so; at some point, hopefully before too long, the UK will re-join an improved version.
The problem with EU isn't that there is too much bureaucracy (although there certainly is a lot), or that we have to give up part of our sovereignty; the problem was that it was too unambitious - it was only ever about trade, really, and its main focus has always been the interests of business, which has left ordinary people disengaged at best, and resentful that they were left out where it mattered. I am convinced that we will join something like the EU, but better - a political federation with a proper, federal parliament and government, which starts with the people and which has the trade and other agreements as a corollary, which is the right way around.
I believe this will happen, because I am an optimist; one of these slightly strange beasts, the cynical optimists. Humankind has evolved from a bunch of apes 5 million years ago on the edge of extinction, and we made it through all the crises we brought on ourselves, because we had the capacity to learn that the strangers in the other tribes could become friends and that it would benefit everybody. Hell, we even befriend animals of different species - dogs, cats, horses, birds. It is obvious that we will keep using this, our one, real survival skill, so at some point we will find the way back into a union.
So you get rid of the guy who was happy working with the "team" even though he obviously knew his own mind, and probably realised others wouldn't approve of his choices, so he tried to keep it a secret?
My comment wasn't about right or wrong; but how would you handle a situation where you could either choose to do what you think is the morally right action, or let the whole project disintegrate? Sometimes there are no good options, you have to choose which bad option you will run with. There are problems that can't be solved.
Why not get rid of the people who are so intolerant of other people's fantasies that it affects their ability to function in a team? Or would that result in firing a woman - a social taboo that would see every sjw on the planet get triggered.
And will that always work? What if you are responsible for a hugely important project, and it turns out that the whole team can't tolerate one member - in your example, the woman? There is no universal, right formula for solving many problems. But you, as the responsible manager, are required to make a choice. Which will it be?
Trump's not perfect, but at least he rejected both parties. You need to learn to appreciate that, and stop getting herded around like sheep.
You don't think you are being treated like sheep by the bully? Trump behaves like he was the Emperor of China - and with as much competence as they generally had just before they were overthrown - but as we can all see, he is only a mandarin (*wink* *wink*, did you see what I did there?)
We probably need to establish a more permanent presence in space, either in orbit or on the Moon, before we are able to find a cheaper way to get up there. ISS provides very a valuable micro-gravity environment, but at the moment that is the only motivation for sending things up there, more or less. If we had a permanent base on the Moon, for example, which made valuable products and materials that we can't easily produce on Earth or get off the ground, then there would be a much stronger incentive to develop better launch mechanisms.
Disclaimer: I haven't studied the case or even read the article in much detail, so I'm running on empty, mostly. I don't in general have issues with what choices people make in their own lives, as long as it only involves consenting adults.
However, for what it is worth, there are some more general consideration, which in practice may be more important. For a team to be productive, it is necessary that the members of the team feel able to work together. It seems, in this case, that they are not able to do so, and that they have been unable to sort out their differences. If this is the case, then the only practical solution is to not work together - what else can anybody do, practically? "Ought to" only reaches so far. Should the rest of the team be more tolerant? Perhaps, but they aren't, and since this seems to be an open source project with unpaid, voluntary participants, I don't think it is covered by any sort of workers' rights legislation.
I think police should need a warrant to use facial recognition in many cases. I also feel that perhaps searches of electronic devices and online accounts need to strictly limit exactly what is searched for and disallow any evidence of any crimes not listed in the warrant from being used.
I don't think that is realistic or even remotely reasonable. You know, people recognise other people simply by eye-sight; police officers do the same. We can use binoculars to see further away and thus enhance our vision, or we can use an infra red camera to see thing at night - and record it, and so on. There is a continuum from using no technological aid at all to using automatic recognition technology, so where should the limit be set? I think we have to weigh up the benefits against the costs. There is always a risk that technology can be abused - but it is already being abused by criminals, and if the worry is about civil rights issues privacy etc, then that can be addressed with proper education of the police; it does actually work. Most police officers do want to do their job well and be proud of themselves.
As for requiring warrants for using this sort of low-level data gathering is just plain silly - it is simply unworkable.
The 4th amendment is supposed to make it hard to prosecute certain kinds of crime. In my opinion, the police really have no business going after crime that isn't reported to them anyway, except for a few exceptions like murder.
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution):
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
So, the amendment talks about the right to privacy and the right to go about their daily business without being stopped at random by the police. The purpose of this is quite clearly not to "sort of allow certain kinds of crime to take place more easily", as if that was in itself desirable. It is the clear duty of police to investigate crime - all crime - and prevent it if possible, even to the extent that they have a near monopoly on doing so in most countries. Suggesting that they must only react to crime if it is reported to them is blatantly absurd.
Very valid points, of course; the whole idea of open plan is stupid in so many ways; just to take a thing like indoor climate: small offices for 1 or 2 people can have individual heating and aircon, so the ones that like it hot can have that without hearing complaints from those that prefer it cold. You might even have a windows that could open a little bit.
But just as important as the physical environment is the freedom to choose your tools. Developers are skilled workers - I hesitate to use the word 'engineer', I think it is overused and easily misconstrued; an engineer can be anything from the guy that used to shovel coal on a steam locomotive, to a highly academic civil engineer. We skilled workers know best which tools are suitable for our needs. Some people like to use highly complex IDEs with suspicious colour schemes (which remind me of my misspent youth in Soho's nightlife), others actually prefer vi and make scripts in xterm - both setups can be equally productive. Managers prove again and again that they have no clue about what is important for skilled workers; they seem to think we are sort of like sales people, but not as clever, and since sales people fall for glittery kitsch and think the word 'leader' means 'alpha male', that is what they try to serve up to us as well; hence Dilbert.
Rant's over - I have real work to do.
Well, I have never heard of Center for a New American Security before, so it would be reasonable to be skeptical about how non-partisan they are. Judging from the article alone, however, it appears that 'overhead' is anything that isn't passed on to external contractors, so potentially this could include any research that is done by NASA scientists. If this is the case, I don't think it is non-partisan at all - the position that only work done by external contractors is 'real work' is a highly biased one to start from, IMO, as it seems to dismiss the crucial value of fundamental research.
Well, it had to come, didn't? Government as a Service.
There have been operating systems which have come and gone which have reasons to exist today, like BeOS. But OS/2 is not among them. Windows 3.1 support? That's not a relevant feature. Please tell me that their actual planned release date is April 1.
You mean just like "The Mainframe Is Doomed"? IBM keeps producing new upgrades of their zSeries HW and the different OSes that run on it, and as a funny aside, inside the big box that houses it, you'll find one or more laptops running OS/2. They may have given up on marketing it, but it is still very much alive, and there are still people who remember it fondly; I can understan why - I used to program for Presentation Manager, the graphics interface of OS/2. The experience of being forced back on Windows was what made me jump head first into Linux as soon as it came along.
I think you will get as many answers as there are users on /. My preferred distro is Debian, simply because that is what I am used to. It is fairly conservative in that it doesn't dance exactly on the bleeding edge, but I have yet to find anything missing; I may just be a rather conservative linux user, of course. You could probably go for any of the popular distibutions and avoid tinkering, if that is what you want - it is more a question of which ones to avoi, in that case, since there are some that are made specifically for that purpose; Gentoo springs to mind.
But I have to ask: Why do you want to avoid tinkering? Even if you choose a distribution that doesn't require it, all Linuxes invite it; it is very open to playing around with the system. And unlike Windows where it is a pain to try to go under the hood, in linux it is more pleasurable.
'Free speech' has become a mantra for bullying the people whose opinion is that there are things they don't like and don't want anyone else to see
Fixed that for you, HTH HAND
You don't really get it, do you? If you are to have free speech, then so must everybody else; but there are people - like you, I suspect - who think it is OK to carry out their own censorship in the form of harrasment, botting, DDOSing, flooding social media with noise, or as you try in your own, feeble way, by childishly ridiculing the well thought out opinions that you happen to not like or understand. You've run out of arguments, and all you can muster is a mindless howling concert.