Once a tree is cut another one can never be regrown in the same spot! That's why we have to save trees... right?
Trees can be replaced easily. Forest ecosystems can't. If we use fewer trees, we can let some tree farms begin the slow, slow process of returning to being actual forests.
So if I wander around for a while sniffing other peoples butts, regurgitate my own sick and eat it again, then curl up to lick my own balls for a while, that'd be okay with you ? After all, animals do it !
Whatever floats your boat. I'd mostly be wondering how you got flexible enough to lick your own balls.
it's sad how out of touch with modern public high school education so many people here are.
It's sad how people take the experience of their local school system and project it to each of the thousands of school systems across the country.
Maybe principals and school superintendents are cretins and morons in your district. I don't know. But anyone who works for cretins and morons and does not try to change the system, anyone who unthinkingly follows rules laid down by cretins and morons, nominates his or herself for inclusion in that category.
this teacher was going 100% by the book to call the school cop.
I don't know what "the book" for that school system says, and I doubt you do either. But if it does say "call the cops at the first sign of student misbehavior", that means "the book" is broken, and the system insane.
Crappy buildings from 100 years ago fell down a while ago. Extant buildings that are 100 years old represent only the good ones. Even more so for 125 year old buildings; less so for 75, 50, etc. years.
So from our POV, yes, the older they are, the better they were built - because only the better built ones survived. It's why we still have the pyramids but don't still have the hovels of Egyptian peasants.
I'd rather not live in a city that used genetic algorithms to generate it's architecture - the pruning's a bitch.
A picture can explain something faster and more effectively than any amount of text.
Draw me a picture of the Gettysburg Address, then.
Some things are best explained to some people best graphically. Others are not.
The choice of medium depends on both the information and the audience. I, for example, am not a visual learner, and will sometimes stare dumbfounded at someone showing me a technique and saying "like this, like this", until someone gives me a verbal explanation.
I've found that presentation software, like PowerPoint, works best for this.
I swear I am going finally crack and kick the snot out of the next person who gives me a printout of PowerPoint slides in lieu of an actual document.
Code does not document itself. It does not document what considerations went into design. It does not document asssumptions about user behavior or desires. It does not tell you how this module fits with others. It does not give you an pre- or post-conditions of a function or method. The very idea of "self-documenting code" breaks the encapsulation and abstraction that are necessary to build large software projects.
Any software developer who believes in self-documenting code needs to be drummed out of their profession the same way that a dentist who believes in the Tooth Fairy would be.
If everyone who enters IT is expecting to become a manager, I suppose that explains the excess chain of managment found in many companies.
1. Your company is less likely to send managerial positions over seas.
But it is likely to figure out that it's got a surfeit of over-paid do-nothings gumming up the works.
At age 40, you should have aquired experience that makes your time more valuable than gold.
Sure - experience in your field. Two decades of experience as a developer no more necessarily makes you an expert manager than two decades as a beat cop qualifies you for a seat on the city council.
If you're in a managerial position, being fully trained on new technology is not necessary. You only need to know enough to properly manage your associates.
Managers need broad rather than deep training, but still need constant updating.
New college graduates do not have the experience needed to effectively and efficiently manage.
And yet they put novice MBA graduates in charge of seasoned productive people.
Seriously, I actually have RARELY seen it in the tech end of things.
All too true.
Which is a big part of why Weinberg's Second Law still holds: "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
People who create buildings have documentation (blueprints and plans) and review (even called "code" inspections, though they're checking for conformance to buiding codes rather than inspecting computer code). They don't do this for jollies; they do it because over centuries it's been found that this is the way to build things that are less likely to fall down or burn up.
Developers of structures made out of software need to take their hint.
After the complete destruction of their credibility, does it really matter whether they do?
After the what?
The problem was only a few weeks old. They found it via their quality control measures. It effects one month out of thirty years of observation.
Their self-correction enhances, not destroys, their credibility.
As usual, ACC deniers are grasping at straws to pretend that there is some significant doubt about the conclusion that human activity is affecting the climate.
Of course they can. They've been telling students "Go to the principal's office" for as long as there have been schools; and principals can suspend or expel students.
For crying out loud, Wisconsin is a state that mandates bannisters and staircases be built to specific specs just so little kids can grip them.
Dude, they're called "
building codes". They regulate the petty things that can kill people if they're not thought about, and they're hardly unique to Wisconsin.
While it's entirely possible nothing happened, it's just as likely that the student got either violent or extraordinarily disruptive when she was told to hand over her cell phone.
Given that no such violent or disruptive behavior is mentioned in the police report, and that that's exactly the sort of thing cops love to put in at the slightest provocation, it's exceedingly unlikely to have occurred.
So if a student refuses to turn over the phone and do what the teacher says, they HAVE to call the cops, because at that point it becomes an issue of disruption in the classroom.
It only becomes an issue of disruption worthy of armed intervention if the student is directed to leave the classroom and does not do so. At that point they are trespassing.
But it seems that the student in question was at no point asked to leave. There's no crime here. There's bad behavior, which could be dealt with by parental notification or detention or suspension or other administrative sanction within the school system.
This was not a situation where the threat of force - which is what the presence of a police officer is - was even remotely justified.
but let's say an industrialist works hard to build up a small fortune.
Well, in the real world fortunes are built by leaching off the hard work of others, but we'll pretend.
If he commits the same crime as some high school dropout, the industrialist should have his bail set 1000x higher as a punishment for being successful?
Bail is not a punishment, it's a surety of appearance at trial.
Someone with a metric fuckload of money is going to be more willing to write off a bail of, say, $10,000, and is also more a a flight risk, than an average joe.
(There's also the problem that bails are set so high for the average joe that he often has to pay a bail bondsman a fraction of the bail, rather than put up the whole amount and have it returned when he shows up in court. But that's another issue.)
Same old story. Every generation uses new technology, while the old generation wrings its hands and whines about the good old days. If you don't want to embrace the future, then don't.
Same old story. Technofetishists see some shiny new product and are hypnotized by marketers into thinking it's the thing that's going to make everything better forever; they never consider that it might be the next pneumatic tube network, or spray-on hair, or leaded gasoline.
There are two types of fools. One says, "This is new, and therefore better!" The other says, "This is old, and therefore better!"
You can use Google Maps on your mobile without location data. You just have to enter the location for which you want a map. (And no, I'm not always at the location I want to map, so Google only knows that I was interested in seeing what's around 123 Main Street, not that I was at 123 Main Street at 8:39pm.)
No. This is collusion to commit kidnapping for profit.
Someone with this little regard for the basic human rights of others is the worst threat to the public. They need to be forcibly segregated from the rest of us, in a place where they can receive whatever treatment is necessary to fix their broken brains, until such time as they are capable of treating their fellow humans with at least the minimum level of respect necessary to trust them to roam free among us.
Death Race 2000 has proved to be startlingly prescient, not just in its premise that the nation's masses are obsessed with a spectacular and violent car race but down to the throwaway joke that all our problems, from terrorism to the economy, are blamed on "our enemies, the French." Aaron and I were reflecting that all those dystopian science-fiction films of the Seventies prepared us well for the day when we would grow up to live in one. Always in these films everyone except the hero accepts the oppressive and soulless society in which they live as inevitable and right, an obvious improvement over the messy old world of poverty and struggle--as Jonathan E.'s wife says in the best line in Rollerball: "comfort is freedom." And always, too, there's a scene in which the hero asks, "Were things always like this? How did they get this way? This isn't how people should live!"
I don't think that's an example of extraordinary parenting, although I'm sure it's at least partially environmental. A usual view inside my house as a kid would show a number of people, across generations, all with their noses in books.
Ok, I didn't think of books. When I was nine I might indeed have sat still for more than an hour at time with a book.
But I'll maintain that a nine year old child who will sit still for an hour with no outside stimulation - no books, TV, music, video games, just sitting in contemplation - is a rare child indeed.
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In a sane world, there would be economic incentive - carbon credits, tax incentives, something - to re-forest exploited land.
There is no such thing as a "managed forest". A tree farm ain't a forest, no way, no how.
Logging destroys forests and replaces them with tree farms.
Trees can be replaced easily. Forest ecosystems can't. If we use fewer trees, we can let some tree farms begin the slow, slow process of returning to being actual forests.
A tree farm is NOT a forest.
Whatever floats your boat. I'd mostly be wondering how you got flexible enough to lick your own balls.
In cold hard facts? Probably nothing. In terms of applied primate psychology - i.e., "dealing with people" - a heck of a lot.
Because primates often operate on the "better the devil you know than the one you don't" principle. They greatly fear the unknown.
It's sad how people take the experience of their local school system and project it to each of the thousands of school systems across the country.
Maybe principals and school superintendents are cretins and morons in your district. I don't know. But anyone who works for cretins and morons and does not try to change the system, anyone who unthinkingly follows rules laid down by cretins and morons, nominates his or herself for inclusion in that category.
I don't know what "the book" for that school system says, and I doubt you do either. But if it does say "call the cops at the first sign of student misbehavior", that means "the book" is broken, and the system insane.
Around here (Baltimore, Maryland, USA), a bar or restaurant choosing to install CCTV cameras would be a non-story.
The local police forcing a bar or restaurant to install CCTV cameras, would be a big deal.
Sounds like it;s the same in London.
I suspect it has more to do with selection bias.
Crappy buildings from 100 years ago fell down a while ago. Extant buildings that are 100 years old represent only the good ones. Even more so for 125 year old buildings; less so for 75, 50, etc. years.
So from our POV, yes, the older they are, the better they were built - because only the better built ones survived. It's why we still have the pyramids but don't still have the hovels of Egyptian peasants.
I'd rather not live in a city that used genetic algorithms to generate it's architecture - the pruning's a bitch.
Draw me a picture of the Gettysburg Address, then.
Some things are best explained to some people best graphically. Others are not.
The choice of medium depends on both the information and the audience. I, for example, am not a visual learner, and will sometimes stare dumbfounded at someone showing me a technique and saying "like this, like this", until someone gives me a verbal explanation.
I swear I am going finally crack and kick the snot out of the next person who gives me a printout of PowerPoint slides in lieu of an actual document.
Bullshit.
Let me say that again, with appropriate emphasis:
BULLSHIT.
Code does not document itself. It does not document what considerations went into design. It does not document asssumptions about user behavior or desires. It does not tell you how this module fits with others. It does not give you an pre- or post-conditions of a function or method. The very idea of "self-documenting code" breaks the encapsulation and abstraction that are necessary to build large software projects.
Any software developer who believes in self-documenting code needs to be drummed out of their profession the same way that a dentist who believes in the Tooth Fairy would be.
If everyone who enters IT is expecting to become a manager, I suppose that explains the excess chain of managment found in many companies.
But it is likely to figure out that it's got a surfeit of over-paid do-nothings gumming up the works.
Sure - experience in your field. Two decades of experience as a developer no more necessarily makes you an expert manager than two decades as a beat cop qualifies you for a seat on the city council.
Managers need broad rather than deep training, but still need constant updating.
And yet they put novice MBA graduates in charge of seasoned productive people.
All too true.
Which is a big part of why Weinberg's Second Law still holds: "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
People who create buildings have documentation (blueprints and plans) and review (even called "code" inspections, though they're checking for conformance to buiding codes rather than inspecting computer code). They don't do this for jollies; they do it because over centuries it's been found that this is the way to build things that are less likely to fall down or burn up.
Developers of structures made out of software need to take their hint.
After the what?
The problem was only a few weeks old. They found it via their quality control measures. It effects one month out of thirty years of observation.
Their self-correction enhances, not destroys, their credibility.
As usual, ACC deniers are grasping at straws to pretend that there is some significant doubt about the conclusion that human activity is affecting the climate.
Of course they can. They've been telling students "Go to the principal's office" for as long as there have been schools; and principals can suspend or expel students.
Dude, they're called " building codes". They regulate the petty things that can kill people if they're not thought about, and they're hardly unique to Wisconsin.
Given that no such violent or disruptive behavior is mentioned in the police report, and that that's exactly the sort of thing cops love to put in at the slightest provocation, it's exceedingly unlikely to have occurred.
It only becomes an issue of disruption worthy of armed intervention if the student is directed to leave the classroom and does not do so. At that point they are trespassing.
But it seems that the student in question was at no point asked to leave. There's no crime here. There's bad behavior, which could be dealt with by parental notification or detention or suspension or other administrative sanction within the school system.
This was not a situation where the threat of force - which is what the presence of a police officer is - was even remotely justified.
Well, in the real world fortunes are built by leaching off the hard work of others, but we'll pretend.
Bail is not a punishment, it's a surety of appearance at trial.
Someone with a metric fuckload of money is going to be more willing to write off a bail of, say, $10,000, and is also more a a flight risk, than an average joe.
(There's also the problem that bails are set so high for the average joe that he often has to pay a bail bondsman a fraction of the bail, rather than put up the whole amount and have it returned when he shows up in court. But that's another issue.)
Security through obscurity - a hidden location - is often "good enough" in meatspace, and considerably cheaper than 24 hour armed guards.
See here for an example of a shelter with a secrecy policy
Same old story. Technofetishists see some shiny new product and are hypnotized by marketers into thinking it's the thing that's going to make everything better forever; they never consider that it might be the next pneumatic tube network, or spray-on hair, or leaded gasoline.
There are two types of fools. One says, "This is new, and therefore better!" The other says, "This is old, and therefore better!"
I enjoy the opportunity to be out in public without pants. Fresh air and sunshine for all my anatomy, hurrah!
It also means I don't have pockets in which to carry gizmos that others might want to use to track my whereabouts.
And to the GP: being opposed to the irresponsible use of technology no more makes one a Luddite than being opposed to rape makes a person anti-sex.
You can use Google Maps on your mobile without location data. You just have to enter the location for which you want a map. (And no, I'm not always at the location I want to map, so Google only knows that I was interested in seeing what's around 123 Main Street, not that I was at 123 Main Street at 8:39pm.)
No. This is collusion to commit kidnapping for profit.
Someone with this little regard for the basic human rights of others is the worst threat to the public. They need to be forcibly segregated from the rest of us, in a place where they can receive whatever treatment is necessary to fix their broken brains, until such time as they are capable of treating their fellow humans with at least the minimum level of respect necessary to trust them to roam free among us.
It's true that bad (or at least low-budget) science fiction movies seem to have be the best predictor of contemporary America. See Tim Krieder's commentary from a few years ago:
Ok, I didn't think of books. When I was nine I might indeed have sat still for more than an hour at time with a book.
But I'll maintain that a nine year old child who will sit still for an hour with no outside stimulation - no books, TV, music, video games, just sitting in contemplation - is a rare child indeed.