Some of the comments suggest that "mindfulness" is in fact a clinical term of art - but to most people it's a woo-woo term of (pseudo-)spirituality and in the same general space as astrology and homeopathic medicine. So what are we really talking about here?
Leaving aside the question of whether a university education ought to be free (that is, taxpayer-funded, rather than paid for by the student), the numbers leave a big question - if an 'expensive' degree like on in Engineering costs about $60K, why is the cost to attend a typical university closer to $60K PER YEAR? Even if one assumes that half the annual student cost is for room and board, that still suggests there's at least a 100% markup on the tuition. Sure looks like someone is being ripped off here...
Yes - C is still useful, and very relevant as a touchpoint for its descendants.
But no, those other languages do not "have block syntax that's derived from C." They all, including C, have a block syntax that's derived from Algol-68.
I am about to turn [ahem] 60, and have been writing software professionally for 35 years. I long ago made the conscious decision not to go into "management" and in fact have never had a manager title. Team Lead, Project Lead - sure - but never Manager.
There were a few years after the 'Internet bubble' and again during the Great Recession where it was tough to find a job, but those were the years I did freelance work while learning new skills. And that's the deep dark secret - never rest on your laurels. If the key to being in sales is ABC (Always Be Closing) the the key to long-term survival as a programmer is ABL - Always Be Learning. The business lessons you absorb over the years will remain applicable and make you valuable, as long as you also master the new technologies and new languages that come along.
Literally the only valid use of goto is for error handling, and that is covered by exceptions.
I use goto in C all the time to break out of loops and jump to a cleanup function at the end of the code. Of course C doesn't have exceptions and nobody compiles PHP to the metal AFAIK, so I think you're right.
Look up setjmp()/longjmp() and tell us again if you still think C needs GOTO in place of exception handling.
OTOH, using GOTO so that a procedure has limited nesting and only a single exit point is far preferable to having one with super-deep/complicated nesting and/or lots of different exit points (something a lot of PHP programmers seem prone to).
According to article, 'Dianne Feinstein, who is also chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said the issue of drones worried her far more than telephone and internet surveillance, which she believes are subject to sufficient legal oversight.'"
Secret FISA courts are not, in any way, "sufficient legal oversight" and really are no legal oversight at all. Our legal system is based on the idea that judicial proceedings are done in public to prevent abuse and violations of peoples' rights. The FISA court not only renders opinions in secret but even knowledge of the cases it hears are classified. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Spent years with mainframe Assembler, and what seems like dozens of languages in between then and now - currently writing PHP, Javascript, Ruby, HTML, CSS, and most things webby. I've been writing code since the late 1970s and still love what I do.
Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" has to be one of the most depressing books I've ever read. I read it when it was new and it has stuck with me for all the years since - the film helped refresh my memory of its details, of course, but the novel needed no help in establishing that little pit of despair in my brain.
My house is full of Macs, so I use Time Machine for on-site backup - each machine has its own Time Machine drive dedicated to it. Each machine also runs nightly image backups using SuperDuper onto yet other drives dedicated to that purpose.
All info is also backed up offsite. I use CrashPlan Pro, which backs up over the net to their servers somewhere in the American Midwest (Milwaukee?) - in the event of a fire or a giant sinkhole opening up under my house, I can get the full contents of all my computers shipped to me within a few days on external hard drives.
I've been using Linode for a little over a year. I'm using it to run about a dozen instances of the Drupal CMS, plus Tomcat, Solr, and a few other utility-type services.
100% uptime since I signed up.
Here's my "uptime" stats as of about 1 minute ago:
01:07:13 up 416 days, 23:06, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
I wouldn't buy an e-book for $14.99. Maybe for $9.99 but not the higher amount. There's no justification for it, unless that extra $5 is going to the author. I don't buy music from the iTunes Store, either - the prices are unconscionable. It makes much more sense to buy the CD, rip it (at higher bitrates than Apple provides) and resell it, for a per-song price closer to $0.25.
E-books, like e-music, have minimal inventory and distribution costs, and zero production cost, and the inventory/distribution costs are amortized over millions of units. The incremental cost of adding a new book to the marketplace approaches zero.
Re:It is bad, wrong way to go about it
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you really want to fix healthcare, do tort reform first. Then break up the AMA cartel. Then look at other things that may need to be changed.
Is there anything that the government runs that really functions correctly/efficiently?
Dude - you really need to stop reading World News Daily and watching Sean Hannity - they've made you innumerate.
The only people who talk about tort reform and aren't full of shit are the people who have never looked at any numbers. Malpractice claims amount to somewhere between 0.5% and 4% of total healthcare costs - i.e. if you eliminated all malpractice and other tort costs from healthcare bills, within a month you wouldn't even be able to notice the difference.
As for AMA - only about 25% of the nation's MDs are members.
The government used to do lots of things really well - until Ronald Reagan and his corporatists successors dismantled everything, sold it off to campaign contributors, and bought your votes with your own money.
Every 10 years, from 1791 until 1911, Congress did not merely rearrange the deck chairs, they made the deck bigger - that's why we have the decennial census, to see how many congress-critters we need as well as deciding where the districts are to be. But in 1920 Congress just stopped making itself bigger - apparently deciding that it was in their interest to concentrate power in as few people as they could get away with.
So the solution to the reapportionment problem is not just one of how to divide up the electorate into 435 somewhat equally-sized chunks, but also (and, in my opinion, much more importantly) to return to changing the number, as well as the size, of those chunks.
Not to say it couldn't have happened in Plainfield NJ, but in this case it didn't - it's in Joliet Illinois. It'd be nice if the posting were corrected to reflect that.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the comments suggest that "mindfulness" is in fact a clinical term of art - but to most people it's a woo-woo term of (pseudo-)spirituality and in the same general space as astrology and homeopathic medicine. So what are we really talking about here?
That's an edge case - it won't ever happen in the real world!
Leaving aside the question of whether a university education ought to be free (that is, taxpayer-funded, rather than paid for by the student), the numbers leave a big question - if an 'expensive' degree like on in Engineering costs about $60K, why is the cost to attend a typical university closer to $60K PER YEAR? Even if one assumes that half the annual student cost is for room and board, that still suggests there's at least a 100% markup on the tuition. Sure looks like someone is being ripped off here ...
Yes - C is still useful, and very relevant as a touchpoint for its descendants.
But no, those other languages do not "have block syntax that's derived from C." They all, including C, have a block syntax that's derived from Algol-68.
I am about to turn [ahem] 60, and have been writing software professionally for 35 years. I long ago made the conscious decision not to go into "management" and in fact have never had a manager title. Team Lead, Project Lead - sure - but never Manager.
There were a few years after the 'Internet bubble' and again during the Great Recession where it was tough to find a job, but those were the years I did freelance work while learning new skills. And that's the deep dark secret - never rest on your laurels. If the key to being in sales is ABC (Always Be Closing) the the key to long-term survival as a programmer is ABL - Always Be Learning. The business lessons you absorb over the years will remain applicable and make you valuable, as long as you also master the new technologies and new languages that come along.
A developer can make $100k easy and have a career that lasts for more than 4 decades.
True - but earning a million dollars and being a "millionaire" are sets that don't necessarily intersect.
+100
Been there. Still digging out from the last 2 1/2 year stint of being jobless.
... that developers are no less short-sighted, ignorant, or stupid than the rest of the US population.
Literally the only valid use of goto is for error handling, and that is covered by exceptions.
I use goto in C all the time to break out of loops and jump to a cleanup function at the end of the code. Of course C doesn't have exceptions and nobody compiles PHP to the metal AFAIK, so I think you're right.
Look up setjmp()/longjmp() and tell us again if you still think C needs GOTO in place of exception handling.
OTOH, using GOTO so that a procedure has limited nesting and only a single exit point is far preferable to having one with super-deep/complicated nesting and/or lots of different exit points (something a lot of PHP programmers seem prone to).
> Give me a PHP programmer and I can tell you he isn't worth anything
FTFY
Show me a programmer as snottily critical of a language as this and I'll show you a programmer who hasn't been one for very long.
According to article, 'Dianne Feinstein, who is also chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said the issue of drones worried her far more than telephone and internet surveillance, which she believes are subject to sufficient legal oversight.'"
Secret FISA courts are not, in any way, "sufficient legal oversight" and really are no legal oversight at all. Our legal system is based on the idea that judicial proceedings are done in public to prevent abuse and violations of peoples' rights. The FISA court not only renders opinions in secret but even knowledge of the cases it hears are classified. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Spent years with mainframe Assembler, and what seems like dozens of languages in between then and now - currently writing PHP, Javascript, Ruby, HTML, CSS, and most things webby. I've been writing code since the late 1970s and still love what I do.
Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" has to be one of the most depressing books I've ever read. I read it when it was new and it has stuck with me for all the years since - the film helped refresh my memory of its details, of course, but the novel needed no help in establishing that little pit of despair in my brain.
My house is full of Macs, so I use Time Machine for on-site backup - each machine has its own Time Machine drive dedicated to it. Each machine also runs nightly image backups using SuperDuper onto yet other drives dedicated to that purpose.
All info is also backed up offsite. I use CrashPlan Pro, which backs up over the net to their servers somewhere in the American Midwest (Milwaukee?) - in the event of a fire or a giant sinkhole opening up under my house, I can get the full contents of all my computers shipped to me within a few days on external hard drives.
I've been using Linode for a little over a year. I'm using it to run about a dozen instances of the Drupal CMS, plus Tomcat, Solr, and a few other utility-type services.
100% uptime since I signed up.
Here's my "uptime" stats as of about 1 minute ago:
01:07:13 up 416 days, 23:06, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
N2VD is QRV
(ex KD2HN, ex WA2BSZ, ex WN2KBR)
It makes much more sense to buy the CD, rip it (at higher bitrates than Apple provides) and resell it, for a per-song price closer to $0.25.
An immediate per-song cost of $0.25. A hell of a lot higher if you ever get charged for your copyright violations.
It's fair use, not a copyright violation.
I wouldn't buy an e-book for $14.99. Maybe for $9.99 but not the higher amount. There's no justification for it, unless that extra $5 is going to the author. I don't buy music from the iTunes Store, either - the prices are unconscionable. It makes much more sense to buy the CD, rip it (at higher bitrates than Apple provides) and resell it, for a per-song price closer to $0.25.
E-books, like e-music, have minimal inventory and distribution costs, and zero production cost, and the inventory/distribution costs are amortized over millions of units. The incremental cost of adding a new book to the marketplace approaches zero.
If you really want to fix healthcare, do tort reform first. Then break up the AMA cartel. Then look at other things that may need to be changed.
Is there anything that the government runs that really functions correctly/efficiently?
Dude - you really need to stop reading World News Daily and watching Sean Hannity - they've made you innumerate.
The only people who talk about tort reform and aren't full of shit are the people who have never looked at any numbers. Malpractice claims amount to somewhere between 0.5% and 4% of total healthcare costs - i.e. if you eliminated all malpractice and other tort costs from healthcare bills, within a month you wouldn't even be able to notice the difference.
As for AMA - only about 25% of the nation's MDs are members.
The government used to do lots of things really well - until Ronald Reagan and his corporatists successors dismantled everything, sold it off to campaign contributors, and bought your votes with your own money.
Every 10 years, from 1791 until 1911, Congress did not merely rearrange the deck chairs, they made the deck bigger - that's why we have the decennial census, to see how many congress-critters we need as well as deciding where the districts are to be. But in 1920 Congress just stopped making itself bigger - apparently deciding that it was in their interest to concentrate power in as few people as they could get away with.
So the solution to the reapportionment problem is not just one of how to divide up the electorate into 435 somewhat equally-sized chunks, but also (and, in my opinion, much more importantly) to return to changing the number, as well as the size, of those chunks.
There is something deeply suspect about a company that has movers and shakers named "Bing" and "Trip."
Being from NJ myself, I noticed this right away.
Not to say it couldn't have happened in Plainfield NJ, but in this case it didn't - it's in Joliet Illinois. It'd be nice if the posting were corrected to reflect that.
I can buy massive amounts of fast storage for under $1/GB. I can run it in a RAID and/or pull a mirror off for offsite storage - all for under $1/GB.
So why pay somebody about the same amount every 6 months for rent, when I can own it, especially when the breakeven timeframe is so short?
I notice there's no Mozilla Thunderbird in the Pack.
Google wouldn't want to cut in on their own GMail market, ehh?
No, I'm not absolutely sure - but IE/Mac 5.2 still credits Mosaic and Spyglass in the "About" box.