I had a quick look at what wikipedia says - so blockchain is a kind of database that is highly resistant to modification, it seems, which makes sense if we are talking about currency, but it isn't enough on its own. Money is basically a kind of IOU, backed by a powerful institution, that guarantees the "value" (whatever that means) of it; in principle, at least, you can go to that instution and exchange each unit of currency for a certain quantity of "value". In pratice this doesn't happen, but as a kind of substitute, you have a right to buy goods from any shop, if you have the required amount of legal tender; also, you can bring your disputes over money to court - just imagine what the judge would say if you went to court over a debt in Monopoly money. IOW, the legal system takes money serious.
I'm not convinced that electronic currencies are there yet, and I think the guarantor part is likely to be missing always, if the system is not backed by a centralised authority in some form.
They know perfetcly well that this has been going on for years - I suspect that a certain level of spying is actually not frowned upon by the countries targeted as much as people imagine; when you know somebody is spying, you also know something about what those behind the activities are interested in and capable of, and have a sense of what their motivation and thinking are. And of course, everybody's at it, so the moral outrage is somewhat limited. But once the spying becomes public knowledge, it would look wrong if they ignored it - the Chinese population in this case will expect their government to make stern comments on the issue and possibly even show some resoluteness and strength by kicking out a couple of diplomats.
As for stealing IP: all countries have done it and still do, when there is something worth stealing; the US isn't an entirely self-made nation either. No doubt, in years to come, you will be the ones trying to steal IP secrets from China - if you aren't already. It's part of the international game, and in a sense it benefits us all, if progress is made more widely available. Yes, yes, it's wrong too, but what has morals ever got to do with business and politics?
I'm glad the US didn't go the way of Europe and encourage cheap, high-polluting diesel cars.
To be fair, though, Europe did that because the tests showed diesel cars to be less polluting and more economic than petrol cars. Where they have been stupid was not in making that decision, but in trusting the industry to self-regulate and be honest, which they invariably turn out not to be. This is just one more example of why it isn't a good idea to simply deregulate without thinking. It would be great if governments would be guided by evidence rather than ideology and religious belief.
I suppose they could really help the working man by getting rid of environmental controls altogether. It's a balance
Like pissing yourself to keep warm, it is something that works in the short term only. What would really help everybody is increasing competition, by requiring all car manufacturers to make their parts universally compatible - by which I mean that you should be able to interchange parts for the same function across all brands. As it is now, they go out of their way to design all parts of cars in such a way that they have a monopoly on spare parts. Monopolies hurt consumers, especially the less well off.
The Quest To Crystallize Time - Previously Considered Impossible......a massive feud among physicists...
The combination of this kind of nonsense with big, glossy pictures does a huge disservice to science. On the one hand, it puts those of us who actually have even a basic knowledge about physics, off our lunch, because it is so, I don't know, either disingenious or perhaps written by idiots who don't understand what they are talking about. And on the other hand, it gives the more naive readers the impression that science is something remote and inaccessible; something that is out of this world and certainly out of ordinary people's league; IOW it discourages those who are interested, but not yet experienced enough from believing they could ever be clever enough to do science. I think it is shameful.
Instead of reading this kind of crap, we should encourage people to take part in things like citizen science; real science and research are things that ordinary people can do, and have done in the past, producing important, real results.
if the main reason is women not working full time 40 hours but that's what employers want, the discussion is over and nothing need be done.
Well, it isn't as simple as that - did you really think this has not been considered already? Even after the numbers have been adjusted for all the usual suspects, there still remains a gap, but of course that is not the only problem in this - it is in fact a problem that women are so underrepresented in STEM, for example, when there is a clear tendency for girls to perform better in school than boys, for example. This is not only sad in terms of the loss to the individual women themselves, but who knows what we miss out of in terms of scientific progress, just to mention one thing? To put it into perspective a bit, just imagine if Einstein had been kept out of higher education (it nearly happened) because he was Jewish? Or what if Emmy Noether had been denied an education because "women shouldn't do science" (Einstein called her the most important mathematician ever)? The people who reach the top and make these incredible discoveries are not "destined for greatness" - their talents could simply go to waste if luck isn't with them. So how much greatness and progress do we deny ourselves because we are simply too stupid and biased to give everybody a fair chance?
You're talking about what we diplomatically call 'negotiable affection', here? There are other ways as well, you know. I'm not sure lack of money is the reason people have less sex; people often huddle together in times of stress, and sometimes they do more than huddle, since sex is an effective way to release stress, so I would expect there to be more sex. If you are in a relationship, sex is one of the more enjoyable things you can do, which don't cost money. My suspicion is that it has more to do with obesity, which not only hurts your self-esteem, but also affects your physical health, and thereby your libido as well as your ability to perform.
No. The poachers are poor, stupid fucks who need the money and couldn't care less for the animals. The ONLY way would be going after their "customers". Anyone buying that stuff should face at least from half a year's salary to serius prison time.
An important part of solving the problem is to go after the customers, but punishment alone won't help; education, in particular of the children, will have to be a major part of it. That was a major part of why we became much more aware of envirnmental issues in the West: parents may reject what the government or campaigners tell them, but they find it hard to resist when their children disapprove of what they do.
The other important part of the solution must be to make poaching less desirable to the poachers; criminalising poaching is of course part of it, but if the legal alternatives all mean hard work and poverty, then crime seems attractive all the same.
Starting with "Amazon shares..." makes it look like Amazon is the story. It's not. Headline should have started with "Defendant agrees to share...".
No, I think there are two things worth noticing here: 1) Amazon records what you say in the privacy of your home, and 2) The court felt they had to ask the defendant for permission.
None of these items are actually news, I think, but 1) is remarkable for not being more at the front of people's minds - I suspect most people are not really aware of it. And 2) is remarkable because it runs counter to what a lot of the loudest noise on the web seem to believe, namely that "They" (ie. the covernment and the state) run rough-shod over all civil liberties and rights; this seems not to be the case here.
I don't know if you have worked professionally with QA in any sense? You quickly realise that "poor quality" is also "quality" - QA is mostly a checkboxing exercise: somebody, somewhere gives you a list of criteria a product must meet, and you check the product against the list. If the list says that 50% failed pixels is OK for a pass, then you will pass any screen with more than 50% working pixels, even if you feel it is a piece of worthless junk, 'cause it aint your decision. And the "somebody, somewhere" sits in Nintendo, Japan - it is entirely irrelevant where their manufacturer happens to be - if they had been in the US, the quality would still have been shite, because that is what their customer requires.
It sounds a lot like wishful thinking and hand-waving.
It probably is, at that. In my (limited) experience, phys.org tends to publish stories rich in big, glossy pictures, slightly sensationalising headlines and with a rather too "popular" (read: dumbed down) style. Maybe I'm being unfair, but I don't think their stories tend to qualify as real news, when most of it is a glossy writeup of things I have already seen elsewhere, on general news media like the BBC.
I think this is a fundamental problem when popularising science news - when you look at the totality of science, and especially the amazing discoveries made in the first half of the 20th century, it really is quite mind-blowing, but unfortunately this does not reflect the day-to-day reality of most science. Which is why most attempts at making science news popular and exciting are doomed to be disappointing.
As for the actual idea - I think it is well-established that a magnetic shield would be just the thing to protect the atmosphere of a planet (or the passengers of a spacecraft), but the technical challenges are enormous, and the benefits to Mars would probably be slow and rather minor. At this point it is mostly speculation, but of course, all the great things we now take for granted once were little more than dreams and handwaving, so who knows? Perhaps we find a way to produce a magnetic fields big and strong enough that would endure long enough with little maintenance, and perhaps we find a way to replenish Mars' atmostphere quickly enough to make it worth doing.
In what ways is this better than simply pumping water uphill
It's better if you don't have hills
A large water reservoir on land can cause a number of problems, like tremors, environmental issues, displacement of people, and of course, the water will evaporate to some extent; these problems are avoided by this method. Also, the consequences of a sphere failing catastrophically are likely to be relatively innocent.
But they're ALREADY bringing them in on one job description then assigning them to do other work.
That would count as fraud in my book and should be treated as such. If society has an interest in catching benefit frauds, then we should go after this kind of fraud as well, since.
One of the problems with laws - "the economy of negative values" - is that the "trading partners" are strongly incentivized to find ways to loophole out.
Calling it "the economy of negative values" is just an attempt at making immoral behaviour sound less immoral, isn't it? It is perhaps a fundamental problem of legislation that it can't cover everything; it has to be reactive in nature - otherwise we would have to take away all freedoms. But we could probably be a little bit cleverer about the way we construct our laws - take drugs legislation as an example (without getting into the discussion about whether some drugs should be legal or not): In UK specific mind altering drug were banned, so all the drug dealers had to do was make a small change to the molecule and it would be legal - thus the problems with legal highs. In other countries there was a generic ban on mind altering substances, or types thereof, presumably accompanied by a list of exemptions (since you'd otherwise break the law by making coffee). I'm not saying that this specific legislation is necessarily good or bad, but it illustrates that it is in fact possible to construct laws so they don't have gaping loopholes everywhere. I'm not an expert, but I imagine one might consider putting in a 'catch-all clause' in every law, where the purpose (the spirit, if you will) of the law is set out, specifically stating that going against the stated purpose is in itself breaking the law. Of course, I'm only a developer - as a developer, I put catch all clauses in the code for very much the same reason.
There's a reason they want the H1Bs instead and that's because they understand the limitations of offshoring and the communication and control gaps
In part, but another side of this is that they want to drive down wages, not just for the imported workers, but for the locals as well. The more sensible way to handle this would be to require companies to pay a minimum wage, and not a universal minimum wage, but one that follows the job description or something like that. Something like that is already in place in many countries - in UK, overseas companies can get visas to transfer staff from their overseas departments, but their pay in UK must be of the right size for the job title.That way the companies can get their genuine needs for expertise met, while not being able to undercut wages for local staff.
You can't create an instance of a struct which contains a pointer to a function you've not yet implemented.
With the caveat that I haven't done C for a long time, I think you'll find that you can in fact to that in C; all you need is to specify the pointer type, which you can do without implementing the function. I believe that is one of the motivations for introducing pure virtual methods in C++: they make it a compiler error to try to instantiate the class. As for why you might want to specify a (pointer to) an unimplemented functio in C - this would be one way to implement eg. a module that uses a callback function.
What is wrong with letting people believe in something they want? You guys don't have to be Aholes...
There is nothing wrong in allowing people to have their religion in peace, if they in return don't try to influence others to abandon their trust in science and logic. Unfortunately that doesn't happen - a lot of religious people not only want to be allowed to ignore fact that don't fit into their beliefs, but insist on having a right to decide what scientists can think. Respect is earned - if you want me to respect your choice of religion, then you must in return respect my choice of no religion.
The point of that is to see you implement a relatively simple algorithm, not for you to make something perfect.
Possibly, but the point people are trying to get at is that designing algorithms is not really what being a good developer is about. Most algorithms and design patterns have already been designed and exist in a standard library or catalogue somewhere; a good engineer (including SW engineer) is somebody who knows enough about the existing tools and techniques to be able to choose the right ones on which to base the structure they are building, whether this happens to be a building, a bridge or a computer program. If all you can think of asking a candidate about is algorithms, then you probably shouldn't be conducting the interview in the first place. A much bette rscenario would be to get them to talk about a project they know well from their background, and see what problems they identified and what they took into consideration in solving them. Or if that isn't an option, give them a problem you know well, and talk about how they would go about solving it - but it has to be something that looks and feels like a real-world problem. Asking people about technical minutiae is at best hit and miss; you may or may not know what "Dense Linear Algebra" or "Backtrack Branch and Bound" is off the top of your head (I don't - I just picked them at random from http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.ed...), but you can certainly look them up and learn to use them quickly enough.
And thus the posturing and dick-waving continues, on and on ad nauseam.
Can I invite everybody to take a step back from the namecalling and the petty squabbling over insignificant details? I think, if we look at it calmly, we will probably find that there is definitely a certain culture of bias against women in science and technology; this is not surprising - it was not all that long ago, when women were expected to stay at home and do "female things", and the men were supposed to go to work and make all the money a family needed. I remember feeling vaguely ashamed that my mother had to have a job; and there is still a lot of than hanging over in the background - I think it is clearly visible.
But that's not to say that there aren't any women who hide behind complaints about misogyny, when it is actually just that they don't quite have what it takes - of course there are some. But given the historical background, I think we should always be willing to consider the possibility that the complaints are based on reality. After all, there are far fewer women in certain jobs than there ought to be, when you take into account the number of women with the skills and the talents that are available - which means that there is a lot of talentes that are wasted, in a time when we hear about skills shortages; that doesn't make sense, I think.
The other point I want to make is that we, as males and engineers, should make the effort to take a look at ourselves. Most of us were the nerdy kid at school and were not part of the wider, social context that should have taught us the skills and mindset that go with relating well to the other sex, among other things, and we have taken it with us into adult life. Thus there is an above average risk that we don't have all the tools to judge whether complaints about misogyny are real or not - that should inspire a bit of humility in us, so we don't just sweep them off the table. Personally, as a nerd, there are things that I am absolutely brilliant at, but if I have to make smalltalk to a sales person, for example, I absolutely stink; I just don't have the skill. This is my failing, it isn't because the man or woman I talk to is an idiot. But, being a skill, it is something that can be learned - and mindsets are changeable too.
The mindset expressed in the posting here is a perfect illustration of exactly what is the article's main point: the all-out negative attitude that pervades the teams at floor-level; and, may I add, this is particularly common among SW engineers, believe it or not. I think we all imagine that we are clever and sometimes inspired thinkers who are excited about new technology and new ways of doing things - but are we really? I have seen it again and again: any article that tries to present a new insight to/. seems to be met with this hailstorm of negative comments, and I see it here again. There's the comments along the lines of "This is [obscenity of choice] obvious, what a load of shit", and the "Most [obscenity of choice] idiots who think they are so [obscenity of choice] clever are just [obscenity of choice] idiots" as well as the usual N-step list of reasons why it is never going to work (which is marked "5 insightful", of course).
This article is in fact rather well written, and I think the reason it receives so much negativity here is exactly because it hits too close to home for many people: You it is true, and most of us are almost instictively against anything new, however much we pride ourselves of being the opposite. That includes myself, I have to say, but I try to be conscious about it from time to time, and try to be open minded. In Denmark we call this mindset "the Law of Jante" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante); Terry Pratchett calls it "the crab bucket" (in Unseen Academicals, if you want to check) - the explanation being that if you observe a bucket full of crabs, you will see that some times one will start climbing out, and then the others grabs it and pulls it back down. "Don't think you are cleverer than us".
Can't you see it? People around you can't find the way out of the bucket, but they sure can stop you from escaping the misery and a future in which you are all dumped into boiling water. This is one of the main reasons why people hate going to work, and why innovation only ever happens if the company buys up another company that has already developed the innovation; but it does not have to be like that. This is one of the admittedly few occasions where the blame doesn't fall on incompetent management, but on yourself and the people around you; that means that it ought to be something we can actually change, by a change of attitude.
You are extrapolating madly, here. Firstly, what they have been living on in the past has been wild caught fish and deers, not pork and beef from some cattle factory, where they have been reared on antibiotics, growth hormones and heavily processed animal feed.
Secondly, people who swear by the fad diets like the high-fat diet and the socalled paleo diet generally ignore the fact that when we were mostly foragers, scavengers or hunter-gatherers, we would have lived on sparse resources, and would have eaten anything we came across, including fruits, grass seeds, leaves, rhizomes and insects. It would not have been prime cuts of beef every day - or even every week; more like a thin layer of leathery meat attached to a bone.
It is well-known that eating meat, and especially red meat is an important factor in the development of gout as well as several cancers. You may scoff at the threat of gout, but having your first gout attack tends to wipe the grin off; and chronic gout is actually a disease that kills. A much more likely reason why these people used to be lean but are now getting obese is the simple fact, that in the past getting your daily meal involved a lot of hard work - you would walk great distances with your reindeer, you would go fishing and so on. Now, cheap food has become easily accessible in abundance and without much effort. Mystery solved.
If it truly was an accident and everyone was acting in good faith I think this is a rather severe overreach by the sentencing party.
Two pounds is about 1 kg, the weight of an average iron mallet, I'd say - more or less. Being hit on your head with a falling mallet could very easily kill you - it is only luck that saved this woman. Also, flying a drone is a deliberate act that does in fact carry the risk that it might fail for whatever reason and drop out of the air, which is why there are very clear rules banning you from flying near to people - not to mention near to buildings, overhead cables, and other things that the drone might hit. As it stands, this is not all that different from hurling a mallet or brick out over a crowd "just for a bit of fun"; it doesn't really matter that you were too dim to realise that it is wrong - the damage is the same.
If your users have more difficulty using the open source alternatives for whatever reason, you will spend more money on staff to provide sufficient support.
True - but that comes down to investing in education, and that hurdle is a lot smaller than you might think. A lot of universities teach their students Linux, either directly or indirectly; when most of the advanced SW is available only on Linux, and the teachers all speak from a UNIX/Linux perspective, the students have to either translate everything to Windows terminology - or just pick up Linux. Inevitably there will be a large crowd in the technical jobs, who know and like Linux and are reluctant to use Windows; the last pocket of resistance, in my view, is from the administrative staff, who find they have enough trouble getting their Windows based systems to work and fear that it might be even worse if they have to move to something unfamiliar. Proper education is the obvious answer - once people get used to a Linux based system, they will appreciate the fact that there are fewer problems overall.
- yet. That is exactly what people used to say about IBM products - up until the day in 1993, when IBM posted massive losses and had to lose something like half its workforce, if I remember correctly. If nobody has got fired for buying Microsoft, it may well be because management simply are blind to the very significant cost of keeping a Microsoft only environment in the air, especially on the server side.
In the beginning, when Linux started to be taken serious, there was a lot of nonsense being said, like 'You get what you pay for'; then more and more engineers started wailing about how much trouble Windows servers were, compared to Linux, and in the last several years, even management in many companies have moved away from automatically going for Microsoft software. As far as I can see, Microsoft products are beginning to be regarded as legacy software that you can't get rid of yet. It could be that we will see the day when people will get fired for buying Microsoft, when there clearly are much better options available.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a quick look at what wikipedia says - so blockchain is a kind of database that is highly resistant to modification, it seems, which makes sense if we are talking about currency, but it isn't enough on its own. Money is basically a kind of IOU, backed by a powerful institution, that guarantees the "value" (whatever that means) of it; in principle, at least, you can go to that instution and exchange each unit of currency for a certain quantity of "value". In pratice this doesn't happen, but as a kind of substitute, you have a right to buy goods from any shop, if you have the required amount of legal tender; also, you can bring your disputes over money to court - just imagine what the judge would say if you went to court over a debt in Monopoly money. IOW, the legal system takes money serious.
I'm not convinced that electronic currencies are there yet, and I think the guarantor part is likely to be missing always, if the system is not backed by a centralised authority in some form.
They know perfetcly well that this has been going on for years - I suspect that a certain level of spying is actually not frowned upon by the countries targeted as much as people imagine; when you know somebody is spying, you also know something about what those behind the activities are interested in and capable of, and have a sense of what their motivation and thinking are. And of course, everybody's at it, so the moral outrage is somewhat limited. But once the spying becomes public knowledge, it would look wrong if they ignored it - the Chinese population in this case will expect their government to make stern comments on the issue and possibly even show some resoluteness and strength by kicking out a couple of diplomats.
As for stealing IP: all countries have done it and still do, when there is something worth stealing; the US isn't an entirely self-made nation either. No doubt, in years to come, you will be the ones trying to steal IP secrets from China - if you aren't already. It's part of the international game, and in a sense it benefits us all, if progress is made more widely available. Yes, yes, it's wrong too, but what has morals ever got to do with business and politics?
I'm glad the US didn't go the way of Europe and encourage cheap, high-polluting diesel cars.
To be fair, though, Europe did that because the tests showed diesel cars to be less polluting and more economic than petrol cars. Where they have been stupid was not in making that decision, but in trusting the industry to self-regulate and be honest, which they invariably turn out not to be. This is just one more example of why it isn't a good idea to simply deregulate without thinking. It would be great if governments would be guided by evidence rather than ideology and religious belief.
I suppose they could really help the working man by getting rid of environmental controls altogether. It's a balance
Like pissing yourself to keep warm, it is something that works in the short term only. What would really help everybody is increasing competition, by requiring all car manufacturers to make their parts universally compatible - by which I mean that you should be able to interchange parts for the same function across all brands. As it is now, they go out of their way to design all parts of cars in such a way that they have a monopoly on spare parts. Monopolies hurt consumers, especially the less well off.
Notice how they faked Obama's birth certificate.
Apropos birth certificates - Obama isn't the only one who's been introuble, it seems, just look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The Quest To Crystallize Time - Previously Considered Impossible... ...a massive feud among physicists...
The combination of this kind of nonsense with big, glossy pictures does a huge disservice to science. On the one hand, it puts those of us who actually have even a basic knowledge about physics, off our lunch, because it is so, I don't know, either disingenious or perhaps written by idiots who don't understand what they are talking about. And on the other hand, it gives the more naive readers the impression that science is something remote and inaccessible; something that is out of this world and certainly out of ordinary people's league; IOW it discourages those who are interested, but not yet experienced enough from believing they could ever be clever enough to do science. I think it is shameful.
Instead of reading this kind of crap, we should encourage people to take part in things like citizen science; real science and research are things that ordinary people can do, and have done in the past, producing important, real results.
if the main reason is women not working full time 40 hours but that's what employers want, the discussion is over and nothing need be done.
Well, it isn't as simple as that - did you really think this has not been considered already? Even after the numbers have been adjusted for all the usual suspects, there still remains a gap, but of course that is not the only problem in this - it is in fact a problem that women are so underrepresented in STEM, for example, when there is a clear tendency for girls to perform better in school than boys, for example. This is not only sad in terms of the loss to the individual women themselves, but who knows what we miss out of in terms of scientific progress, just to mention one thing? To put it into perspective a bit, just imagine if Einstein had been kept out of higher education (it nearly happened) because he was Jewish? Or what if Emmy Noether had been denied an education because "women shouldn't do science" (Einstein called her the most important mathematician ever)? The people who reach the top and make these incredible discoveries are not "destined for greatness" - their talents could simply go to waste if luck isn't with them. So how much greatness and progress do we deny ourselves because we are simply too stupid and biased to give everybody a fair chance?
You're talking about what we diplomatically call 'negotiable affection', here? There are other ways as well, you know. I'm not sure lack of money is the reason people have less sex; people often huddle together in times of stress, and sometimes they do more than huddle, since sex is an effective way to release stress, so I would expect there to be more sex. If you are in a relationship, sex is one of the more enjoyable things you can do, which don't cost money. My suspicion is that it has more to do with obesity, which not only hurts your self-esteem, but also affects your physical health, and thereby your libido as well as your ability to perform.
No. The poachers are poor, stupid fucks who need the money and couldn't care less for the animals.
The ONLY way would be going after their "customers".
Anyone buying that stuff should face at least from half a year's salary to serius prison time.
An important part of solving the problem is to go after the customers, but punishment alone won't help; education, in particular of the children, will have to be a major part of it. That was a major part of why we became much more aware of envirnmental issues in the West: parents may reject what the government or campaigners tell them, but they find it hard to resist when their children disapprove of what they do.
The other important part of the solution must be to make poaching less desirable to the poachers; criminalising poaching is of course part of it, but if the legal alternatives all mean hard work and poverty, then crime seems attractive all the same.
Starting with "Amazon shares..." makes it look like Amazon is the story. It's not. Headline should have started with "Defendant agrees to share...".
No, I think there are two things worth noticing here: 1) Amazon records what you say in the privacy of your home, and 2) The court felt they had to ask the defendant for permission.
None of these items are actually news, I think, but 1) is remarkable for not being more at the front of people's minds - I suspect most people are not really aware of it. And 2) is remarkable because it runs counter to what a lot of the loudest noise on the web seem to believe, namely that "They" (ie. the covernment and the state) run rough-shod over all civil liberties and rights; this seems not to be the case here.
I don't know if you have worked professionally with QA in any sense? You quickly realise that "poor quality" is also "quality" - QA is mostly a checkboxing exercise: somebody, somewhere gives you a list of criteria a product must meet, and you check the product against the list. If the list says that 50% failed pixels is OK for a pass, then you will pass any screen with more than 50% working pixels, even if you feel it is a piece of worthless junk, 'cause it aint your decision. And the "somebody, somewhere" sits in Nintendo, Japan - it is entirely irrelevant where their manufacturer happens to be - if they had been in the US, the quality would still have been shite, because that is what their customer requires.
It sounds a lot like wishful thinking and hand-waving.
It probably is, at that. In my (limited) experience, phys.org tends to publish stories rich in big, glossy pictures, slightly sensationalising headlines and with a rather too "popular" (read: dumbed down) style. Maybe I'm being unfair, but I don't think their stories tend to qualify as real news, when most of it is a glossy writeup of things I have already seen elsewhere, on general news media like the BBC.
I think this is a fundamental problem when popularising science news - when you look at the totality of science, and especially the amazing discoveries made in the first half of the 20th century, it really is quite mind-blowing, but unfortunately this does not reflect the day-to-day reality of most science. Which is why most attempts at making science news popular and exciting are doomed to be disappointing.
As for the actual idea - I think it is well-established that a magnetic shield would be just the thing to protect the atmosphere of a planet (or the passengers of a spacecraft), but the technical challenges are enormous, and the benefits to Mars would probably be slow and rather minor. At this point it is mostly speculation, but of course, all the great things we now take for granted once were little more than dreams and handwaving, so who knows? Perhaps we find a way to produce a magnetic fields big and strong enough that would endure long enough with little maintenance, and perhaps we find a way to replenish Mars' atmostphere quickly enough to make it worth doing.
In what ways is this better than simply pumping water uphill
It's better if you don't have hills
A large water reservoir on land can cause a number of problems, like tremors, environmental issues, displacement of people, and of course, the water will evaporate to some extent; these problems are avoided by this method. Also, the consequences of a sphere failing catastrophically are likely to be relatively innocent.
But they're ALREADY bringing them in on one job description then assigning them to do other work.
That would count as fraud in my book and should be treated as such. If society has an interest in catching benefit frauds, then we should go after this kind of fraud as well, since .
One of the problems with laws - "the economy of negative values" - is that the "trading partners" are strongly incentivized to find ways to loophole out.
Calling it "the economy of negative values" is just an attempt at making immoral behaviour sound less immoral, isn't it? It is perhaps a fundamental problem of legislation that it can't cover everything; it has to be reactive in nature - otherwise we would have to take away all freedoms. But we could probably be a little bit cleverer about the way we construct our laws - take drugs legislation as an example (without getting into the discussion about whether some drugs should be legal or not): In UK specific mind altering drug were banned, so all the drug dealers had to do was make a small change to the molecule and it would be legal - thus the problems with legal highs. In other countries there was a generic ban on mind altering substances, or types thereof, presumably accompanied by a list of exemptions (since you'd otherwise break the law by making coffee). I'm not saying that this specific legislation is necessarily good or bad, but it illustrates that it is in fact possible to construct laws so they don't have gaping loopholes everywhere. I'm not an expert, but I imagine one might consider putting in a 'catch-all clause' in every law, where the purpose (the spirit, if you will) of the law is set out, specifically stating that going against the stated purpose is in itself breaking the law. Of course, I'm only a developer - as a developer, I put catch all clauses in the code for very much the same reason.
There's a reason they want the H1Bs instead and that's because they understand the limitations of offshoring and the communication and control gaps
In part, but another side of this is that they want to drive down wages, not just for the imported workers, but for the locals as well. The more sensible way to handle this would be to require companies to pay a minimum wage, and not a universal minimum wage, but one that follows the job description or something like that. Something like that is already in place in many countries - in UK, overseas companies can get visas to transfer staff from their overseas departments, but their pay in UK must be of the right size for the job title.That way the companies can get their genuine needs for expertise met, while not being able to undercut wages for local staff.
You can't create an instance of a struct which contains a pointer to a function you've not yet implemented.
With the caveat that I haven't done C for a long time, I think you'll find that you can in fact to that in C; all you need is to specify the pointer type, which you can do without implementing the function. I believe that is one of the motivations for introducing pure virtual methods in C++: they make it a compiler error to try to instantiate the class. As for why you might want to specify a (pointer to) an unimplemented functio in C - this would be one way to implement eg. a module that uses a callback function.
What is wrong with letting people believe in something they want? You guys don't have to be Aholes...
There is nothing wrong in allowing people to have their religion in peace, if they in return don't try to influence others to abandon their trust in science and logic. Unfortunately that doesn't happen - a lot of religious people not only want to be allowed to ignore fact that don't fit into their beliefs, but insist on having a right to decide what scientists can think. Respect is earned - if you want me to respect your choice of religion, then you must in return respect my choice of no religion.
The point of that is to see you implement a relatively simple algorithm, not for you to make something perfect.
Possibly, but the point people are trying to get at is that designing algorithms is not really what being a good developer is about. Most algorithms and design patterns have already been designed and exist in a standard library or catalogue somewhere; a good engineer (including SW engineer) is somebody who knows enough about the existing tools and techniques to be able to choose the right ones on which to base the structure they are building, whether this happens to be a building, a bridge or a computer program. If all you can think of asking a candidate about is algorithms, then you probably shouldn't be conducting the interview in the first place. A much bette rscenario would be to get them to talk about a project they know well from their background, and see what problems they identified and what they took into consideration in solving them. Or if that isn't an option, give them a problem you know well, and talk about how they would go about solving it - but it has to be something that looks and feels like a real-world problem. Asking people about technical minutiae is at best hit and miss; you may or may not know what "Dense Linear Algebra" or "Backtrack Branch and Bound" is off the top of your head (I don't - I just picked them at random from http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.ed...), but you can certainly look them up and learn to use them quickly enough.
And thus the posturing and dick-waving continues, on and on ad nauseam.
Can I invite everybody to take a step back from the namecalling and the petty squabbling over insignificant details? I think, if we look at it calmly, we will probably find that there is definitely a certain culture of bias against women in science and technology; this is not surprising - it was not all that long ago, when women were expected to stay at home and do "female things", and the men were supposed to go to work and make all the money a family needed. I remember feeling vaguely ashamed that my mother had to have a job; and there is still a lot of than hanging over in the background - I think it is clearly visible.
But that's not to say that there aren't any women who hide behind complaints about misogyny, when it is actually just that they don't quite have what it takes - of course there are some. But given the historical background, I think we should always be willing to consider the possibility that the complaints are based on reality. After all, there are far fewer women in certain jobs than there ought to be, when you take into account the number of women with the skills and the talents that are available - which means that there is a lot of talentes that are wasted, in a time when we hear about skills shortages; that doesn't make sense, I think.
The other point I want to make is that we, as males and engineers, should make the effort to take a look at ourselves. Most of us were the nerdy kid at school and were not part of the wider, social context that should have taught us the skills and mindset that go with relating well to the other sex, among other things, and we have taken it with us into adult life. Thus there is an above average risk that we don't have all the tools to judge whether complaints about misogyny are real or not - that should inspire a bit of humility in us, so we don't just sweep them off the table. Personally, as a nerd, there are things that I am absolutely brilliant at, but if I have to make smalltalk to a sales person, for example, I absolutely stink; I just don't have the skill. This is my failing, it isn't because the man or woman I talk to is an idiot. But, being a skill, it is something that can be learned - and mindsets are changeable too.
The mindset expressed in the posting here is a perfect illustration of exactly what is the article's main point: the all-out negative attitude that pervades the teams at floor-level; and, may I add, this is particularly common among SW engineers, believe it or not. I think we all imagine that we are clever and sometimes inspired thinkers who are excited about new technology and new ways of doing things - but are we really? I have seen it again and again: any article that tries to present a new insight to /. seems to be met with this hailstorm of negative comments, and I see it here again. There's the comments along the lines of "This is [obscenity of choice] obvious, what a load of shit", and the "Most [obscenity of choice] idiots who think they are so [obscenity of choice] clever are just [obscenity of choice] idiots" as well as the usual N-step list of reasons why it is never going to work (which is marked "5 insightful", of course).
This article is in fact rather well written, and I think the reason it receives so much negativity here is exactly because it hits too close to home for many people: You it is true, and most of us are almost instictively against anything new, however much we pride ourselves of being the opposite. That includes myself, I have to say, but I try to be conscious about it from time to time, and try to be open minded. In Denmark we call this mindset "the Law of Jante" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante); Terry Pratchett calls it "the crab bucket" (in Unseen Academicals, if you want to check) - the explanation being that if you observe a bucket full of crabs, you will see that some times one will start climbing out, and then the others grabs it and pulls it back down. "Don't think you are cleverer than us".
Can't you see it? People around you can't find the way out of the bucket, but they sure can stop you from escaping the misery and a future in which you are all dumped into boiling water. This is one of the main reasons why people hate going to work, and why innovation only ever happens if the company buys up another company that has already developed the innovation; but it does not have to be like that. This is one of the admittedly few occasions where the blame doesn't fall on incompetent management, but on yourself and the people around you; that means that it ought to be something we can actually change, by a change of attitude.
meat good, grain bad.
You are extrapolating madly, here. Firstly, what they have been living on in the past has been wild caught fish and deers, not pork and beef from some cattle factory, where they have been reared on antibiotics, growth hormones and heavily processed animal feed.
Secondly, people who swear by the fad diets like the high-fat diet and the socalled paleo diet generally ignore the fact that when we were mostly foragers, scavengers or hunter-gatherers, we would have lived on sparse resources, and would have eaten anything we came across, including fruits, grass seeds, leaves, rhizomes and insects. It would not have been prime cuts of beef every day - or even every week; more like a thin layer of leathery meat attached to a bone.
It is well-known that eating meat, and especially red meat is an important factor in the development of gout as well as several cancers. You may scoff at the threat of gout, but having your first gout attack tends to wipe the grin off; and chronic gout is actually a disease that kills. A much more likely reason why these people used to be lean but are now getting obese is the simple fact, that in the past getting your daily meal involved a lot of hard work - you would walk great distances with your reindeer, you would go fishing and so on. Now, cheap food has become easily accessible in abundance and without much effort. Mystery solved.
If it truly was an accident and everyone was acting in good faith I think this is a rather severe overreach by the sentencing party.
Two pounds is about 1 kg, the weight of an average iron mallet, I'd say - more or less. Being hit on your head with a falling mallet could very easily kill you - it is only luck that saved this woman. Also, flying a drone is a deliberate act that does in fact carry the risk that it might fail for whatever reason and drop out of the air, which is why there are very clear rules banning you from flying near to people - not to mention near to buildings, overhead cables, and other things that the drone might hit. As it stands, this is not all that different from hurling a mallet or brick out over a crowd "just for a bit of fun"; it doesn't really matter that you were too dim to realise that it is wrong - the damage is the same.
If your users have more difficulty using the open source alternatives for whatever reason, you will spend more money on staff to provide sufficient support.
True - but that comes down to investing in education, and that hurdle is a lot smaller than you might think. A lot of universities teach their students Linux, either directly or indirectly; when most of the advanced SW is available only on Linux, and the teachers all speak from a UNIX/Linux perspective, the students have to either translate everything to Windows terminology - or just pick up Linux. Inevitably there will be a large crowd in the technical jobs, who know and like Linux and are reluctant to use Windows; the last pocket of resistance, in my view, is from the administrative staff, who find they have enough trouble getting their Windows based systems to work and fear that it might be even worse if they have to move to something unfamiliar. Proper education is the obvious answer - once people get used to a Linux based system, they will appreciate the fact that there are fewer problems overall.
- yet. That is exactly what people used to say about IBM products - up until the day in 1993, when IBM posted massive losses and had to lose something like half its workforce, if I remember correctly. If nobody has got fired for buying Microsoft, it may well be because management simply are blind to the very significant cost of keeping a Microsoft only environment in the air, especially on the server side.
In the beginning, when Linux started to be taken serious, there was a lot of nonsense being said, like 'You get what you pay for'; then more and more engineers started wailing about how much trouble Windows servers were, compared to Linux, and in the last several years, even management in many companies have moved away from automatically going for Microsoft software. As far as I can see, Microsoft products are beginning to be regarded as legacy software that you can't get rid of yet. It could be that we will see the day when people will get fired for buying Microsoft, when there clearly are much better options available.
Nobody takes testosterone for anemia or 'bone health'. It is always about muscle & sex.
Here's a nice little article about testosterone:
http://blogs.christianpost.com...