Although not everything on Mythbusters is a useful experiment, this particular one was good. They did have a control (they did three runs!), they measured driving skills (what else would you measure?), and intoxication is a good measure of unacceptable risk, so they effectively had two controls.
The fact that the experiments were done for entertainment instead of science is irrelevant.
You clearly have no fucking idea how real science is done. To do this properly you'd need a sample size greater than one or two people. You'd want a good cross section of people of different ages, cultural backgrounds, both sexes etc.
Furthermore if you're going to fucking compare it to drinking under the influence you're going to need a whole other experiment (probably on a driving simulator to stay legal).
Proving that Jaimie can't drive while talking on the phone says nothing about how well a brain surgeon (use to focus) or pilot (use to multi-tasking) might do.
If you honestly believe Mythbusters is at all scientific, please give your local education department a call and ask for a refund on your schooling.
If you want the privilege of using public roads and putting others at risk, you should take the responsibility of devoting your full attention to driving well. I would be glad to see cell phones outlawed on the road entirely.
What about the radio?
What about driving with a child in the back seat?
Given that every man and their dog seems to ignore the rules anyway the most I'd like to see is cell phone use limited to hands free. What I'd really like is for drivers to be taught how to deal with distractions. Distractions should actually be part of the training (once the basics are mastered) and part of the driving test.
Consider that pilots manage to fly (much harder than driving) while communicating their intentions and getting clearance on the radio. They are taught to prioritize - aviate, navigate, communicate - in that order.
In fact, not only is talking on your mobile more dangerous than talking to passengers, but talking on your mobile while driving can be as dangerous as driving intoxicated, at least according Mythbusters which did a cellphone vs drunk driving experiment on season 3 ("Killer Brace Position")
Karma be damned. Mythbusters is entertainment NOT science and should not be cited by intelligent people to back up their discussions. The mythbusters methods are less than scientific and are more about ensuring ratings than drawing valid conclusions. I don't think I've seen one Mythbusters show where there wasn't an annoying flaw in their experiment. They rarely have a control, and almost always resort to leaping to a general conclusion based on a tiny sample size or very specific case.
That said, cell phone use while driving is dangerous, but comparing it to intoxication isn't useful.
You've just made a slippery slope argument, and those are always poor arguments
What utter rubbish.
Let's think about whether this is realistic. Do you watch 29 minutes of ads for 1 minute of television? No, of course you don't. There is a certain amount of ads that is optimal before people start changing the channel.
Well lets see. Where I live Pay TV was ad free up until a few years ago. They introduced ads only for their own programming, and only 30 seconds at a time, then they decided they needed a new revenue stream and put in ads. The length of the ads has been gradually increasing over time. Now ads are 3-4 minutes long for every 10 minutes of programming, and there's no guarantee that trend will not continue. Will they stop short of some ridiculous ratio of ads to programming? My guess is that ratio will be determined by "what the market will bear". On free to air the situation is even worse. Now they even squash and speed up the movie credits to put on more ads. Of course the ads keep getting longer here too.
If you don't think it's possible that this could get rather stupid I'll just point out that I visited Egypt in 1982 and at the time daytime programming on all channels consisted of 4-6 hours of an unbroken home shopping network. It was totally unwatchable.
Similarly, 20 pages of ads on a test would mean 20 pages that students immediately skip without looking at.
Most students will. Some won't. Spammers have proven that a hit rate of one in a million can be profitable.
I added emphasis to ask the question, why not? Granted, no one wants to be the person whose slight goof caused a major problem. But if your little mistake can truly have such massive repercussions, then you are either (1) in way over your head or (2) in a position of high responsibility (which should imply high pay).
If it's THAT important to the company I should not be the only one testing my code. I do not want to be the fall guy, because for the product to get into production I shouldn't be the last and only line of defence.
What you're implying is that there exist people out there who are capable of writing perfect software, and that those who can't are either way over their head or irresponsible. That's just a boat load of bullshit.
Writing code is, quite fortunately, not a real time activity like say brain surgery or piloting an aircraft. ie. a mistake made in real time (like a typo) can be picked up later when you're coding, whereas if a pilot makes a mistake people die right away. The flip side is that a pilot or brain surgeon gets immediate feedback if they make a mistake, and if they've planned well will often have a chance to correct in real time. A coder may not even realize the mistake has been made until years later when an obscure corner case crops up in production.
My job consists of writing code that provides algorithmic trading logic connectivity to the exchanges on which we trade. The programs simply have to be right; a slight error can cost us lots of money (missed executions, sending orders at the wrong price, sending too many orders, etc). The "team" I'm on consists of one other guy and myself. Somewhat to my chagrin, we basically work independently. My previous position (at another company), while not perfect, at least had team-based collaboration: the little "gotchas" were harder make it into production, only because there were more eyes looking at the product.
If your company wants to take the risk of having critical software written by a team of 2 guys, that's their choice. Regardless of how good you are at some point mistakes will occur and something undesirable will make it into prod. I work on critical code too. The difference is we have a team of programmers who write and unit test and a separate test team who write their test cases based on business specs having never seen the code. I still lose sleep over it. No matter how good your testing procedures are there's always room to improve them and always something that could be missed that would make the difference.
So... long story short, if you're at a position where a little mistake can have massive repercussions, it may be an opportunity to grow as a developer and/or make more money.
Not if you work in a culture where your first mistake sees you fired with a reputation as a developer whose incompetence led to the downfall of a system.
The only saving grace is that its your company that's made the choice to be in this position, not you. You should make sure your bosses are aware of this.
Its time to sort the wheat from the chaff. Man the fuck up. (and spread that to your friends, and their parents too - the great depression was FAR FAR FAR worse than this and they were not whining as much as people now either.)
I love it. Advice to "Man the fuck up" to a generation of men at 65 or so years of age, who've fought in wars and instead of now being able to enjoy a peaceful retirement have to scrounge to make their life sustainable and deny themselves buying things and doing things in their last few remaining years. How about I wait till you're 65 and tell you to "man the fuck up".
As for the great depression, do you really want to say you're doing well just because it's not as bad as it once was? Would you rather people start wondering the streets homeless, see hundreds lining up on the streets for a single low paid job, or launching themselves off tall buildings? Arguing that we shouldn't worry because it could be a lot worse is a sure way to be complacent right until they are worse.
What's the bet you're not enduring too much hardship yourself and that you'd whine like a baby if you did have to give up anything you actually cared about?
Nervous fliers everywhere will now have something legitimate to fear.
It's times like this I wish I weren't an atheist so I could revel in the knowledge that the people involved in producing this destructive rubbish will rot in hell for eternity.
...wait till the kids start coming home and complaining that the questions were too hard to read because they were in super fine print on page 4 in the bottom right hand corner hidden among 20 pages of ads.
If we can't differentiate between an ad catalog and a student's test paper, we shouldn't fool ourselves into pretending we're providing kids with an education.
My current car must have character by now. It was suppose to be my dream car. My tastes aren't extravagant. It's a 1996 Holden Berlina station wagon. It has however turned out to be a lemon. Nothing but trouble. The aircon intermittently on a hot day decides to read the temperature as -30 celcius outside, and blows hot air instead of cold. It has broken down a number of times despite maintenance. It's got power windows that occassionally stick and a boot that won't stay up (needs regassing but I'll be damned if I spend a cent on it that I don't have to!) I abuse it almost every time I get in the damn thing and if that kind of abuse isn't enough to give you character, what is?
What we don't have is a system that explicitly sets out to systematically oppress and render voiceless segments of the population - that is what's behind suicide bombers, because it takes away any value life has
You think people give a shit about having a say in how the country is run? What you don't have is a bunch of people who've watched their friends and relatives killed off with no recourse. You come pretty close on the religious fanaticism in some parts of the US, but you don't have a system where vast numbers of people believe that blowing up other people is your ticket into heaven.
Perhaps programmers that have consistently good code should have some value placed on them. We'll call it "Karma". Programmers with good Karma get audited less often than others. If they fail an audit, they loose some "Karma" and have to write a bunch of excellent code to get it back.
That's awful in so many ways.
For starters look at how poorly Karma works here. It serves to re-enforce awful sheep mentality. Just try putting down Google, Apple or Linux. Or try praising Microsoft.
Next what you're proposing creates a negative feedback loop. A developer codes well and gets through a few audits. Now they're trusted, they can afford to let things slip for some time before anything is caught. There's less incentive to keep producing good code, and there's more of a chance that an error will slip through. No one is perfect and mistakes will happen. The way to protect against them is to ensure there's some redundancy, and taht is exactly what a code review provides.
Also consider retention rates and the average time a developer spends at a company. Does an expert or lead programmer start off having every little thing reviewed? Who's qualified to do that? Or are they trusted based on heresay and a resume? If so how long will it take to find a dud programmer?
Next consider what effect it will have on the morale of a struggling programmer, or one that doesn't cope well with reviews. Especially a junior one whose abilities can be salvaged. A co-operative might work, but constantly giving more and more high pressure code reviews is just about guaranteed to break such an individual.
Finally, you should realize that such "karma" already exists informally and that making it a more formal process achieves very little. In other words developers very quickly get a feel for what the strengths and weaknesses of another developer are.
- To be reprimanded for every little mistake I make, or worse be put in a position where a little mistake on my part can cause a huge, expensive and/or very visible problem
- To be forced to comply with procedures that do not in fact improve quality but do require 90% of my time leaving me with 10% time to program
- To have no creative input into my code.
There are good ways to achieve similar goals without the above antics. Continuous integration comes to mind. Well qualified specialist testers for User Acceptance is good too. Avoiding mistakes in a way that is programmer friendly will actually improve morale and an employer more desirable. The trouble is that too many employers try to equate software manufacture with mass production factory work in every way and treat their programmers accordingly. If you look at the kind of work a programmer enjoys vs the kind a factory worker is expected to do, no wonder they leave or won't join.
I'm never, ever going to be writing deep, math-theory-heavy code. I just won't. I don't want to, and there are other people who would be better at it, even if I studied it pretty damn hard. "Computer Science" is a wasted concept on me and on the vast majority of coders.
What I do have is a feel for problems.
There are a lot of computing problems that seem easy, but have been proven to be mathematically impossible to solve. For example the Halting problem. Computer science is worth knowing just to make sure that your feel for problems doesn't equate to flawed intuition. However it offers a whole lot more. You get exposed to entire sets of problems that you otherwise have no experience of. That you don't seem to understand this to me at least, implies you'd make a worse problem solver and coder than someone that does.
I have a masters in Astronomy but have never worked in the field and it's the kind of degree more suited to teaching than research. Nevertheless...
I skimmed the paper and I don't think it's saying what you think it's saying.
From section 4 (2) "By contrast, others inaccurately assume the galactic mass distributions follow the measured light distributions (approximately exponential), and then the measured rotational velocity curves are not duplicated. But this assumption of a simple direct relationship between light intensity and mass is very inaccurate. This so-called Mass/Light ratio is inaccurate since both the temperature and opacity/emissivity are important but ignored variables."
In other words the authors believe that the missing mass is indeed there, but that it is ordinary matter, but that it is literally dark (that is it doesn't shine as brightly).
I don't think the math is cutting edge, even if they have taken a novel approach - it looks to me like n-body problem work with standard Newtonian mechanics. (I could be wrong, and am happy to be corrected. It's been years since I looked at this stuff and I never did the calculus formally. I certainly don't have time to go compare this work to other classic work). To their credit they explicitly state that no modification of Newtonian mechanics is required for their work.
After quickly skimming the article, it seems that the "problem" isn't so much with MVC itself as it is with people not understanding what it is. Apparently, a lot of web developers have thought that "model/controller = server-side, view = client-side". This is obviously wrong
Yes the entire article is simply bollox.
MVC is about separating your Model - the entities that make up your business domain - from the logic to View them - ie your screens and reports shouldn't depend on the business model directly. Instead a controller sits in the middle and all logic that ties the two together - what to view and when, how to retrieve the information.
This can indeed be done in any language and any decent architecture. Each business domain (model) can be tied to one or more views or controllers. The trouble is Web 2.0 is about regurgitating old ideas in the guise of new buzzwords and part of the art of selling it is to confuse people into believing that the way they've been doing it all along isn't good and that there's a better way.
Even the MVC paradigm is just a model which may or may not be appropriate at different times. If your application isn't suited to being broken up this way there are alternatives. That's not blurring the lines, it's using a different approach.
If you conclude the worst, and you have the disease you might go and seek medical help sooner. If it turns out you're right, you might catch your disease in time to have something about it.
The other thing to note is that good medical care, even in the "developed" world is increasingly becoming hard to find. Doctors do long hours and are under immense pressure and the best and brightest sren't always attracted to the field, and when they are they often feel entitled to gouge the people they treat while providing sub-standard care. That's not to say there are no good doctors, just that there are surprisingly few. A good doctor will save you but a bad one will get you killed.
I've had friends and loved ones prescribed medications that almost killed them (and had dosage increased by 3 separate doctors in one case, as one of the contraindications got worse and worse!). I've seen routine things completely misdiagnosed. I've seen a woman with maternal asthma barely able to breath and hacking up huge amounts of flem dismissed as a fat hypochondriac. I've seen shoulder dislocations misdiagnosed as swelling - something that commonly happens resulting in long term should instability. (Don't believe me? Check out the literature on posterior shoulder dislocations and include "avoiding a missed diagnosis" in your search).
I've also been told I should have my ankle fused by 2 specialists. According to them I should no longer be walking, but when I looked up the long term prospects - after 3 months off my feet completely only a 70-80% chance of success (in which case repeat once then chop off foot) I can expect a couple of years recovering and about 6-7 years before severe ankle arthritis hits. I have gone for more conservative treatment - staying off the ankle - and while there is still pain I walk a couple of kilometers a day and haven't had to sacrifice my career. I may still have to have the surgery but these surgeons didn't even suggest TRYING anything conservative.
IF you use the internet appropriately instead of looking up ever sneeze and cough and assumign you are dying, the net is a wonderful thing. Anyone who says otherwise has a vested interest in keeping the information from you.
Look at fractals. If you found a Madelbrot set sitting somwhere in space, had a bias toward ID, and didn't realize the pattern behind it wsa simple, you'd be tempted to conclude it was intelligently designed.
Just as you can look at life and argue ID, when in fact some molecules, simple rules and a lot of time can in fact be responsible for the variety we see.
Now instead of an International sporting competition in London, 3 guys from Yorkshire will come down and play rock, paper, scissors. To save face 1000 rounds of RPS will be played, and for each one a different combination of paper hats with different national flags printed on them will be worn by the 3 guys. The IOC is requesting donations as paper hats and printing costs money, as does travel to and from Yorkshire.
But at what age could he swim, climb a tree, or swim?
I'm all for teaching kids stuff and making them learn new and interesting skills, but I'd be really wary of turning them into prodigies who master only a single trick
I have no idea and no interest in finding out. I don't believe you have to push a child to do something 24x7 for them to get good at it though. Maybe they make him practice 2 hrs/day like you might do with a musical instrument. If so he still has time for the rest of his life. Why assume the opposite if not for petty jealousy???
However, when I am faced with a Windows computer these days (especially Vista) I have no clue.
That's because Vista is awful too. I have it on my laptop but almost always boot into XP instead. (Vista maybe 1 time in 100, no exaggeration)
That being said, I am still irked by the need to download programs from their website instead of just using my package manager and keeping my system up to date (including all my installed apps) seems like a chore. But my mother-in-law has next no no experience with computers and couldn't find her way around the windows machine they had -- I had to do constant tech support. Since they got a mac she figures it out herself. I don't know if she struggles any less, but she certainly bothers me less.
Perhaps she just uses the computer less. Users who don't enjoy computers usually only boot them when they have to. Do you think if Macs were truly as intuitive as you are implying would be something I'd avoid? Neither is very good at being intuitive. You have to spend time getting to know them. It's just a matter of which devil you know best.
As for a package manager, there are probably 3rd party products out there that will download software on your behalf, but I agree there's no good repository system. Still I don't find it hard to download and install software. When I find something new I want to do I always scour the web for the best tool to do it anyway. For a lot of users, all they'll ever do is write email and browse the web - both of which you can do out of the box with XP. Word documents etc. you don't get for free but you choose a free or paid product and download it once and you're done.
Okay you're still in highschool so I'm going to cut you a little slack.
The people who you respect and who you speak to on/. are great. I'm NOT suggesting you should give up talking to them. However if your self esteem depends on your jokes being modded up on a chat board, you're NOT going to find happiness.
If the people at your high school tell you to beat it or beat you up you have to ask a couple of questions: 1) Am I doing anything to antagonise them? 2) Are they worthwhile people who are worth my time who have a reason to act like this or are they simply trash with no respect for other human beings.
If the answer to number 2 is "they're trash" (and you've made a genuine attempt to assess the whole thing rationally) go out and find people who aren't. Even if these people are outside your age group. Sport and hobby clubs are a good source. It sounds like you DO need to get out but you need to get out doing something you actually enjoy. If hiking, fishing and camping aren't your thing try kite design, or if you can afford it r/c planes. Failing that volunteer some time to keep old people company at a nursing home. The difference in their perspective will amaze you if you open your ears.
Trust me, you may not realize it yet but the friendships you make online are no where near as strong as you think they are. You have lots of aquaintances online, but lifelong friends are hard to make and only get harder with age. Physically relating to people is necessary for strong bonds (not just for sex either!!!). It is just the way we social animals work. We only evolved the skills you use online in the last few thousand years, whereas a smile (not a smiley!!!) is a much older thing.
Regarding the drug thing - find a doctor you trust if you're switching meds. A good doc is EXCEEDINGLY hard to find but worth the time spent. If you start down the road of alcohol and illicit drugs DO NOT waste your time blaming others for decisions YOU are making. It simply isn't constructive. Don't waste your life because you want to rebel against a crap education system. Once you're 18 school is done with, but you MAY be around much longer IF you're lucky AND smart about it. Oh and find a better role model than Eminem. Just because some of his words and music touch you, it doesn't mean he's a good life model. (By all means enjoy the music though).
"-- as long as they purchase an extended three-year warranty."
So they charge you the price of the laptop, but call it warranty. Now they have your money but if you decide to take it back for any reason they owe you nothing since the warranty isn't refundable.
I just recently got to try out a Mac. It has been over a decade since the last time I used one. What shocked me most was just how crappy and unintuitive their UI was. Since UI is basically what Macs have used as their primary selling point since the beginning, I had just taken peoples word for it that it didn't suck. Hands down, it is the least intuitive UI have have ever used short of a command line.
I had a similar experience a few years ago with a testing machine - an eMac - I was setting up for a small consultancy I worked at. To top it off it broke after a week and my customer service experience, as I was the one asked to place the initial service call with Apple, was enough to confirm my view of Apple based on bad experiences I had with the brand in the 80s. All these fanboys who rant about Macs being intuitive and just work and being worth every cent are just a marketer's dream come true: gullible fools.
In all seriousness though, blaming people for being unable to tell the difference between SD and HD isn't a positive thing. The irony being that if they can't tell the difference they get to save themselves a whole lot of money. Thoguh personally I'd rather have decent eyesight and make the choice of SD vs HD based on whether I think it's worth it. I can tell the difference and I'll be sticking with SD until HD is much cheaper by the way.
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Although not everything on Mythbusters is a useful experiment, this particular one was good. They did have a control (they did three runs!), they measured driving skills (what else would you measure?), and intoxication is a good measure of unacceptable risk, so they effectively had two controls.
The fact that the experiments were done for entertainment instead of science is irrelevant.
You clearly have no fucking idea how real science is done. To do this properly you'd need a sample size greater than one or two people. You'd want a good cross section of people of different ages, cultural backgrounds, both sexes etc.
Furthermore if you're going to fucking compare it to drinking under the influence you're going to need a whole other experiment (probably on a driving simulator to stay legal).
Proving that Jaimie can't drive while talking on the phone says nothing about how well a brain surgeon (use to focus) or pilot (use to multi-tasking) might do.
If you honestly believe Mythbusters is at all scientific, please give your local education department a call and ask for a refund on your schooling.
If you want the privilege of using public roads and putting others at risk, you should take the responsibility of devoting your full attention to driving well. I would be glad to see cell phones outlawed on the road entirely.
What about the radio?
What about driving with a child in the back seat?
Given that every man and their dog seems to ignore the rules anyway the most I'd like to see is cell phone use limited to hands free. What I'd really like is for drivers to be taught how to deal with distractions. Distractions should actually be part of the training (once the basics are mastered) and part of the driving test.
Consider that pilots manage to fly (much harder than driving) while communicating their intentions and getting clearance on the radio. They are taught to prioritize - aviate, navigate, communicate - in that order.
In fact, not only is talking on your mobile more dangerous than talking to passengers, but talking on your mobile while driving can be as dangerous as driving intoxicated, at least according Mythbusters which did a cellphone vs drunk driving experiment on season 3 ("Killer Brace Position")
Karma be damned. Mythbusters is entertainment NOT science and should not be cited by intelligent people to back up their discussions. The mythbusters methods are less than scientific and are more about ensuring ratings than drawing valid conclusions. I don't think I've seen one Mythbusters show where there wasn't an annoying flaw in their experiment. They rarely have a control, and almost always resort to leaping to a general conclusion based on a tiny sample size or very specific case.
That said, cell phone use while driving is dangerous, but comparing it to intoxication isn't useful.
You've just made a slippery slope argument, and those are always poor arguments
What utter rubbish.
Let's think about whether this is realistic. Do you watch 29 minutes of ads for 1 minute of television? No, of course you don't. There is a certain amount of ads that is optimal before people start changing the channel.
Well lets see. Where I live Pay TV was ad free up until a few years ago. They introduced ads only for their own programming, and only 30 seconds at a time, then they decided they needed a new revenue stream and put in ads. The length of the ads has been gradually increasing over time. Now ads are 3-4 minutes long for every 10 minutes of programming, and there's no guarantee that trend will not continue. Will they stop short of some ridiculous ratio of ads to programming? My guess is that ratio will be determined by "what the market will bear". On free to air the situation is even worse. Now they even squash and speed up the movie credits to put on more ads. Of course the ads keep getting longer here too.
If you don't think it's possible that this could get rather stupid I'll just point out that I visited Egypt in 1982 and at the time daytime programming on all channels consisted of 4-6 hours of an unbroken home shopping network. It was totally unwatchable.
Similarly, 20 pages of ads on a test would mean 20 pages that students immediately skip without looking at.
Most students will. Some won't. Spammers have proven that a hit rate of one in a million can be profitable.
I added emphasis to ask the question, why not? Granted, no one wants to be the person whose slight goof caused a major problem. But if your little mistake can truly have such massive repercussions, then you are either (1) in way over your head or (2) in a position of high responsibility (which should imply high pay).
If it's THAT important to the company I should not be the only one testing my code. I do not want to be the fall guy, because for the product to get into production I shouldn't be the last and only line of defence.
What you're implying is that there exist people out there who are capable of writing perfect software, and that those who can't are either way over their head or irresponsible. That's just a boat load of bullshit.
Writing code is, quite fortunately, not a real time activity like say brain surgery or piloting an aircraft. ie. a mistake made in real time (like a typo) can be picked up later when you're coding, whereas if a pilot makes a mistake people die right away. The flip side is that a pilot or brain surgeon gets immediate feedback if they make a mistake, and if they've planned well will often have a chance to correct in real time. A coder may not even realize the mistake has been made until years later when an obscure corner case crops up in production.
My job consists of writing code that provides algorithmic trading logic connectivity to the exchanges on which we trade. The programs simply have to be right; a slight error can cost us lots of money (missed executions, sending orders at the wrong price, sending too many orders, etc). The "team" I'm on consists of one other guy and myself. Somewhat to my chagrin, we basically work independently. My previous position (at another company), while not perfect, at least had team-based collaboration: the little "gotchas" were harder make it into production, only because there were more eyes looking at the product.
If your company wants to take the risk of having critical software written by a team of 2 guys, that's their choice. Regardless of how good you are at some point mistakes will occur and something undesirable will make it into prod. I work on critical code too. The difference is we have a team of programmers who write and unit test and a separate test team who write their test cases based on business specs having never seen the code. I still lose sleep over it. No matter how good your testing procedures are there's always room to improve them and always something that could be missed that would make the difference.
So... long story short, if you're at a position where a little mistake can have massive repercussions, it may be an opportunity to grow as a developer and/or make more money.
Not if you work in a culture where your first mistake sees you fired with a reputation as a developer whose incompetence led to the downfall of a system.
The only saving grace is that its your company that's made the choice to be in this position, not you. You should make sure your bosses are aware of this.
Its time to sort the wheat from the chaff. Man the fuck up. (and spread that to your friends, and their parents too - the great depression was FAR FAR FAR worse than this and they were not whining as much as people now either.)
I love it. Advice to "Man the fuck up" to a generation of men at 65 or so years of age, who've fought in wars and instead of now being able to enjoy a peaceful retirement have to scrounge to make their life sustainable and deny themselves buying things and doing things in their last few remaining years. How about I wait till you're 65 and tell you to "man the fuck up".
As for the great depression, do you really want to say you're doing well just because it's not as bad as it once was? Would you rather people start wondering the streets homeless, see hundreds lining up on the streets for a single low paid job, or launching themselves off tall buildings? Arguing that we shouldn't worry because it could be a lot worse is a sure way to be complacent right until they are worse.
What's the bet you're not enduring too much hardship yourself and that you'd whine like a baby if you did have to give up anything you actually cared about?
Quick, let's beat them up.
Nervous fliers everywhere will now have something legitimate to fear.
It's times like this I wish I weren't an atheist so I could revel in the knowledge that the people involved in producing this destructive rubbish will rot in hell for eternity.
...wait till the kids start coming home and complaining that the questions were too hard to read because they were in super fine print on page 4 in the bottom right hand corner hidden among 20 pages of ads.
If we can't differentiate between an ad catalog and a student's test paper, we shouldn't fool ourselves into pretending we're providing kids with an education.
My current car must have character by now. It was suppose to be my dream car. My tastes aren't extravagant. It's a 1996 Holden Berlina station wagon. It has however turned out to be a lemon. Nothing but trouble. The aircon intermittently on a hot day decides to read the temperature as -30 celcius outside, and blows hot air instead of cold. It has broken down a number of times despite maintenance. It's got power windows that occassionally stick and a boot that won't stay up (needs regassing but I'll be damned if I spend a cent on it that I don't have to!) I abuse it almost every time I get in the damn thing and if that kind of abuse isn't enough to give you character, what is?
Is it, post-grease-squeel?
Does it feature either a young Olivia Newton John or Michelle Pfieffer in a tight outfit?
What we don't have is a system that explicitly sets out to systematically oppress and render voiceless segments of the population - that is what's behind suicide bombers, because it takes away any value life has
You think people give a shit about having a say in how the country is run? What you don't have is a bunch of people who've watched their friends and relatives killed off with no recourse. You come pretty close on the religious fanaticism in some parts of the US, but you don't have a system where vast numbers of people believe that blowing up other people is your ticket into heaven.
Perhaps programmers that have consistently good code should have some value placed on them. We'll call it "Karma". Programmers with good Karma get audited less often than others. If they fail an audit, they loose some "Karma" and have to write a bunch of excellent code to get it back.
That's awful in so many ways.
For starters look at how poorly Karma works here. It serves to re-enforce awful sheep mentality. Just try putting down Google, Apple or Linux. Or try praising Microsoft.
Next what you're proposing creates a negative feedback loop. A developer codes well and gets through a few audits. Now they're trusted, they can afford to let things slip for some time before anything is caught. There's less incentive to keep producing good code, and there's more of a chance that an error will slip through. No one is perfect and mistakes will happen. The way to protect against them is to ensure there's some redundancy, and taht is exactly what a code review provides.
Also consider retention rates and the average time a developer spends at a company. Does an expert or lead programmer start off having every little thing reviewed? Who's qualified to do that? Or are they trusted based on heresay and a resume? If so how long will it take to find a dud programmer?
Next consider what effect it will have on the morale of a struggling programmer, or one that doesn't cope well with reviews. Especially a junior one whose abilities can be salvaged. A co-operative might work, but constantly giving more and more high pressure code reviews is just about guaranteed to break such an individual.
Finally, you should realize that such "karma" already exists informally and that making it a more formal process achieves very little. In other words developers very quickly get a feel for what the strengths and weaknesses of another developer are.
What I don't want is:
- To be reprimanded for every little mistake I make, or worse be put in a position where a little mistake on my part can cause a huge, expensive and/or very visible problem
- To be forced to comply with procedures that do not in fact improve quality but do require 90% of my time leaving me with 10% time to program
- To have no creative input into my code.
There are good ways to achieve similar goals without the above antics. Continuous integration comes to mind. Well qualified specialist testers for User Acceptance is good too. Avoiding mistakes in a way that is programmer friendly will actually improve morale and an employer more desirable. The trouble is that too many employers try to equate software manufacture with mass production factory work in every way and treat their programmers accordingly. If you look at the kind of work a programmer enjoys vs the kind a factory worker is expected to do, no wonder they leave or won't join.
I'm never, ever going to be writing deep, math-theory-heavy code. I just won't. I don't want to, and there are other people who would be better at it, even if I studied it pretty damn hard. "Computer Science" is a wasted concept on me and on the vast majority of coders.
What I do have is a feel for problems.
There are a lot of computing problems that seem easy, but have been proven to be mathematically impossible to solve. For example the Halting problem. Computer science is worth knowing just to make sure that your feel for problems doesn't equate to flawed intuition. However it offers a whole lot more. You get exposed to entire sets of problems that you otherwise have no experience of. That you don't seem to understand this to me at least, implies you'd make a worse problem solver and coder than someone that does.
I have a masters in Astronomy but have never worked in the field and it's the kind of degree more suited to teaching than research. Nevertheless...
I skimmed the paper and I don't think it's saying what you think it's saying.
From section 4 (2)
"By contrast, others inaccurately assume the galactic mass distributions follow
the measured light distributions (approximately exponential), and then the measured rotational
velocity curves are not duplicated. But this assumption of a simple direct relationship between
light intensity and mass is very inaccurate. This so-called Mass/Light ratio is inaccurate since both
the temperature and opacity/emissivity are important but ignored variables."
In other words the authors believe that the missing mass is indeed there, but that it is ordinary matter, but that it is literally dark (that is it doesn't shine as brightly).
I don't think the math is cutting edge, even if they have taken a novel approach - it looks to me like n-body problem work with standard Newtonian mechanics. (I could be wrong, and am happy to be corrected. It's been years since I looked at this stuff and I never did the calculus formally. I certainly don't have time to go compare this work to other classic work). To their credit they explicitly state that no modification of Newtonian mechanics is required for their work.
After quickly skimming the article, it seems that the "problem" isn't so much with MVC itself as it is with people not understanding what it is. Apparently, a lot of web developers have thought that "model/controller = server-side, view = client-side". This is obviously wrong
Yes the entire article is simply bollox.
MVC is about separating your Model - the entities that make up your business domain - from the logic to View them - ie your screens and reports shouldn't depend on the business model directly. Instead a controller sits in the middle and all logic that ties the two together - what to view and when, how to retrieve the information.
This can indeed be done in any language and any decent architecture. Each business domain (model) can be tied to one or more views or controllers. The trouble is Web 2.0 is about regurgitating old ideas in the guise of new buzzwords and part of the art of selling it is to confuse people into believing that the way they've been doing it all along isn't good and that there's a better way.
Even the MVC paradigm is just a model which may or may not be appropriate at different times. If your application isn't suited to being broken up this way there are alternatives. That's not blurring the lines, it's using a different approach.
If you conclude the worst, and you have the disease you might go and seek medical help sooner. If it turns out you're right, you might catch your disease in time to have something about it.
The other thing to note is that good medical care, even in the "developed" world is increasingly becoming hard to find. Doctors do long hours and are under immense pressure and the best and brightest sren't always attracted to the field, and when they are they often feel entitled to gouge the people they treat while providing sub-standard care. That's not to say there are no good doctors, just that there are surprisingly few. A good doctor will save you but a bad one will get you killed.
I've had friends and loved ones prescribed medications that almost killed them (and had dosage increased by 3 separate doctors in one case, as one of the contraindications got worse and worse!). I've seen routine things completely misdiagnosed. I've seen a woman with maternal asthma barely able to breath and hacking up huge amounts of flem dismissed as a fat hypochondriac. I've seen shoulder dislocations misdiagnosed as swelling - something that commonly happens resulting in long term should instability. (Don't believe me? Check out the literature on posterior shoulder dislocations and include "avoiding a missed diagnosis" in your search).
I've also been told I should have my ankle fused by 2 specialists. According to them I should no longer be walking, but when I looked up the long term prospects - after 3 months off my feet completely only a 70-80% chance of success (in which case repeat once then chop off foot) I can expect a couple of years recovering and about 6-7 years before severe ankle arthritis hits. I have gone for more conservative treatment - staying off the ankle - and while there is still pain I walk a couple of kilometers a day and haven't had to sacrifice my career. I may still have to have the surgery but these surgeons didn't even suggest TRYING anything conservative.
IF you use the internet appropriately instead of looking up ever sneeze and cough and assumign you are dying, the net is a wonderful thing. Anyone who says otherwise has a vested interest in keeping the information from you.
Look at fractals. If you found a Madelbrot set sitting somwhere in space, had a bias toward ID, and didn't realize the pattern behind it wsa simple, you'd be tempted to conclude it was intelligently designed.
Just as you can look at life and argue ID, when in fact some molecules, simple rules and a lot of time can in fact be responsible for the variety we see.
Now instead of an International sporting competition in London, 3 guys from Yorkshire will come down and play rock, paper, scissors. To save face 1000 rounds of RPS will be played, and for each one a different combination of paper hats with different national flags printed on them will be worn by the 3 guys. The IOC is requesting donations as paper hats and printing costs money, as does travel to and from Yorkshire.
But at what age could he swim, climb a tree, or swim?
I'm all for teaching kids stuff and making them learn new and interesting skills, but I'd be really wary of turning them into prodigies who master only a single trick
I have no idea and no interest in finding out. I don't believe you have to push a child to do something 24x7 for them to get good at it though. Maybe they make him practice 2 hrs/day like you might do with a musical instrument. If so he still has time for the rest of his life. Why assume the opposite if not for petty jealousy???
However, when I am faced with a Windows computer these days (especially Vista) I have no clue.
That's because Vista is awful too. I have it on my laptop but almost always boot into XP instead. (Vista maybe 1 time in 100, no exaggeration)
That being said, I am still irked by the need to download programs from their website instead of just using my package manager and keeping my system up to date (including all my installed apps) seems like a chore. But my mother-in-law has next no no experience with computers and couldn't find her way around the windows machine they had -- I had to do constant tech support. Since they got a mac she figures it out herself. I don't know if she struggles any less, but she certainly bothers me less.
Perhaps she just uses the computer less. Users who don't enjoy computers usually only boot them when they have to. Do you think if Macs were truly as intuitive as you are implying would be something I'd avoid? Neither is very good at being intuitive. You have to spend time getting to know them. It's just a matter of which devil you know best.
As for a package manager, there are probably 3rd party products out there that will download software on your behalf, but I agree there's no good repository system. Still I don't find it hard to download and install software. When I find something new I want to do I always scour the web for the best tool to do it anyway. For a lot of users, all they'll ever do is write email and browse the web - both of which you can do out of the box with XP. Word documents etc. you don't get for free but you choose a free or paid product and download it once and you're done.
Okay you're still in highschool so I'm going to cut you a little slack.
The people who you respect and who you speak to on /. are great. I'm NOT suggesting you should give up talking to them. However if your self esteem depends on your jokes being modded up on a chat board, you're NOT going to find happiness.
If the people at your high school tell you to beat it or beat you up you have to ask a couple of questions:
1) Am I doing anything to antagonise them?
2) Are they worthwhile people who are worth my time who have a reason to act like this or are they simply trash with no respect for other human beings.
If the answer to number 2 is "they're trash" (and you've made a genuine attempt to assess the whole thing rationally) go out and find people who aren't. Even if these people are outside your age group. Sport and hobby clubs are a good source. It sounds like you DO need to get out but you need to get out doing something you actually enjoy. If hiking, fishing and camping aren't your thing try kite design, or if you can afford it r/c planes. Failing that volunteer some time to keep old people company at a nursing home. The difference in their perspective will amaze you if you open your ears.
Trust me, you may not realize it yet but the friendships you make online are no where near as strong as you think they are. You have lots of aquaintances online, but lifelong friends are hard to make and only get harder with age. Physically relating to people is necessary for strong bonds (not just for sex either!!!). It is just the way we social animals work. We only evolved the skills you use online in the last few thousand years, whereas a smile (not a smiley!!!) is a much older thing.
Regarding the drug thing - find a doctor you trust if you're switching meds. A good doc is EXCEEDINGLY hard to find but worth the time spent. If you start down the road of alcohol and illicit drugs DO NOT waste your time blaming others for decisions YOU are making. It simply isn't constructive. Don't waste your life because you want to rebel against a crap education system. Once you're 18 school is done with, but you MAY be around much longer IF you're lucky AND smart about it. Oh and find a better role model than Eminem. Just because some of his words and music touch you, it doesn't mean he's a good life model. (By all means enjoy the music though).
"-- as long as they purchase an extended three-year warranty."
So they charge you the price of the laptop, but call it warranty. Now they have your money but if you decide to take it back for any reason they owe you nothing since the warranty isn't refundable.
I just recently got to try out a Mac. It has been over a decade since the last time I used one. What shocked me most was just how crappy and unintuitive their UI was. Since UI is basically what Macs have used as their primary selling point since the beginning, I had just taken peoples word for it that it didn't suck. Hands down, it is the least intuitive UI have have ever used short of a command line.
I had a similar experience a few years ago with a testing machine - an eMac - I was setting up for a small consultancy I worked at. To top it off it broke after a week and my customer service experience, as I was the one asked to place the initial service call with Apple, was enough to confirm my view of Apple based on bad experiences I had with the brand in the 80s. All these fanboys who rant about Macs being intuitive and just work and being worth every cent are just a marketer's dream come true: gullible fools.
Please use usersAreBlind instead ;-)
In all seriousness though, blaming people for being unable to tell the difference between SD and HD isn't a positive thing. The irony being that if they can't tell the difference they get to save themselves a whole lot of money. Thoguh personally I'd rather have decent eyesight and make the choice of SD vs HD based on whether I think it's worth it. I can tell the difference and I'll be sticking with SD until HD is much cheaper by the way.