My "allotted" amount is exactly as much as I choose to buy. "Responsibility" implies that I have the right to determine exactly how much I can drink and when in order to be sober when I'm ready to drive home.
Does anyone here honestly think nanny = "responsibility"? Yikes. I'd like to keep my liberty, thank you.
You know what, I love lots of anime. I can do without the ninja chicks in bikinis and powered armor, but I personally consider Nausicaa to be the greatest animated film ever made, for example.
But to assume that anime would attract the same kinds of audiences as Disney's crap is ridiculous and unsupportable. No, their releases don't get especially good market support in the US from Disney, but most of the Joe Six-packs I know who've seen Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away thought they were either (a) boring as all hell, (b) pointless, or (c) impossible to understand.
Think what you want of these people, but this is the audience that is attracted to movies like Toy Story or Aladdin or any of the dozens of like films: very American, lots of "physical" humor, not especially deep. People want crap like what Disney produces; they just need to rediscover what makes good crap.
I'll content myself with being among the few Americans who enjoy anime, but I will never delude myself into thinking it might ever be mass-market fare in the US.
HBO and Showtime have plenty of quality programming. So do many cable channels. Yeah, the networks mostly suck, but even they have some good programming along with a lot of bad stuff. But the point is that I don't have to pay for it if I don't want to patronize their advertisers.
FWIW, Monty Python's Flying Circus sucks. I've never liked it, and I'm glad I never had to pay for it. Mandatory fees bad; choice good.
I prefer the situation in the States, in which I can choose to pay or not for programming depending on whether I want to watch it or not. Sometimes the payment is direct (e.g., HBO) and sometimes it's indirect (commercial advertising), but the key to me is choice.
I don't like these all-or-nothing deals that charge me a flat rate when I want only a tiny fraction of what is offered. I mean, $300 is a year of NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV, a much greater volume (let alone percentage) of the programming of which I will enjoy than the BBC's offerings.
If it were practical to do this, the sun would always rise at 7 am, and sunset would be 7 am + however many hours of daylight there are. Heading into the summer, I'd have more daylight hours after leaving work (at the summer solstice, the sun wouldn't set until after 11 pm), which would be excellent for my happiness.
Of course, even better (and easier) would be a move away from the ridiculous notion that everyone should be at work at the same time, and that the wall clock should mean the same thing everywhere in the world. Think about the first point: if people went to work at different times instead of all leaving their homes at 8 am, current roadways would be more than sufficient to handle all traffic: no rush hour; more even levels of traffic.
And the second point: why this arbitrary reliance on a particular number on the clock to denote the start of the day? Why can't the sun rise at 4 pm or at 11 pm or at 3 am?
Let's just move to GMT, free up workers from the 9-5 rush hour chain, and everyone will be happier.
Not sure I buy that this "increases a processor's efficiency as wait latencies are minimized". It seems to me that decreasing latency reduces efficiency because you spend a greater percentage of your cycles changing state (overhead) instead of doing useful work. This is why realtime OS'es aren't the norm: they reduce latencies to critical maximums, but at the cost of overall throughput.
Why is this a concern in and of itself?
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I really don't see why people get overworked when statistics like this come out. Is there anything really wrong with the concept that there might be inherent differences between men and women that would account for something like this? Or will I be modded down like Lawrence Summers effectively was?
Ratings are the only things that matter. An OTA show has only one mission: to get people to watch commercials. If not enough people see the commercials, the show isn't doing its job, and it goes off the air. So if you want the show to stay on the air, the only real solution is to get more people to watch it.
Which is precisely Graham's point.:) High school is primarily a jail formed to give parents 8 hours without having to deal with their kids, not a place to educate the kids.
There is a danger that people will miss these useful general ed classes if we track kids into a specialty too early.
So? No one's stopping you from taking the stuff or reading about it on your own. But to require every student to get a full liberal arts degree in order to get a job in a specialized area is not simply inefficient, it's idiotic.
This more than anything else is the reason the third world (esp. India and China) will eat us alive: we waste too much productivity teaching people things that just don't matter and which they'll forget once they leave the class anyway, when we should leave that to their own interests and their own time.
I can't more highly recommend this essay by Paul Graham as an explanation of why public schooling is so poor. Don't be misled by the title of the essay: that's just the perspective he takes on a more extensive problem.
Unfortunately, Gates doesn't see the real problems: he's right in that public schools don't tailor their education to what students actually need, but he doesn't for instance address the problem of overcredentialling, which is a result of the perception (and, unfortunately, the reality to a large extend) that a degree is necessary to be successful, combined with the fact that most colleges sell degrees, *not* educations. That's somewhat ironic, considering Gates himself has earned no degrees.
Additionally, follow Gates' suggestion to make high school universally more preparatory for college, and you'll see college become as pointless and as irrelevant to success as high school, because more people will go to college without any reason better than "I need a degree in order to get a good job," which will water down the meaning of a college degree as most of those people will spend an additional four years drinking and delaying adulthood instead of learning something useful through a more efficient means (e.g., apprenticeship) that will enable them to get a good job.
You can already see this process happening to a certain extent, as masters' degrees and professional certifications are required to get certain jobs simply so recruiters can cut down the number of resumes they need to sift through, despite the fact that the smartest ones aren't necessarily the most credentialled.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of the education racket: high school should be sufficient for 90% of people to get jobs, but it isn't; so most of these people go to college. Unfortunately, college doesn't prepare kids for jobs either, but instead provides a place for them to socialize while forcing them to take numerous courses unrelated to their eventual job in order to get a liberal arts degree that costs a lot but signifies absolutely nothing except, "I went to college and that other guy didn't, so give me the job instead of him."
I paid $130,000 to get my undergrad degree. I had a great time in college, but how much of that crap do I use today? I certainly didn't learn software engineering in college courses, despite being a computer science major: most of my software engineering skills were honed doing my own projects, in HS, college, grad school, and in my job. If it weren't for the education racket, I might have been able to save myself $130,000 and get a real paying job four or five years earlier. Think of the productivity that's being wasted.
...you can spend lots of money fixing your roof when a NeoMaple branch cracks under the weight of the snow on it and crashes through. Good idea!
I lived through this crap back in 1995-96 (I think) in upstate New York when there was a heavy early snowfall. There was much damage, both to trees and to buildings.
We're still using 100 year old technology to receive radio broadcasts, and it's the major reason why the bandwidth is so underutilized. Nowadays, we can fit very complex receivers on tiny chips, as illustrated by cellphones, so why do we continue to use frequency division as the basis for allocating spectrum?
If we move to code division, the need for regulation of the spectrum almost disappears entirely. It's too bad no one thought of this before deciding on the OTA HDTV standard.:P
I remember one of the biggest complaints about Mozilla was that it was a huge, integrated mess. Now that we have what everyone was clamboring for, what do people ask for? An integrated suite! This just goes to show you that you can't please everyone no matter what you do.
Anytime an American citizen bitches about how America (or should I say Amerikkka) is become a facist dictatorship under the Bush Dynasty, I should refer them to stories like this. Sedition (which is essentially how Chinese authorities see this game) has long been unprosecutable in the United States, whether it is officially restricted by the Constitution or not.
We the People have more power than many of the more hysterical among us admit. The Chinese people have far less than most of us who grew up in the West realize. The prospect of a country with a billion-strong populace subservient to a fascist oligarchy scares the hell out of me. It should scare you too. Do what you can to introduce the Chinese people to the benefits of liberty, or I guarantee you China will be far more formidable and righteous a foe than the Soviet Union ever was.
Clearly the article is not about the same kind of inductive sensors that is available in almost EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.
Come to Massachusetts, where our government is too busy spending our tax dollars on wealth-transfer programs to install such inductive sensors in the roads. Fortunately, they also haven't installed traffic light cameras yet, so when I want to run that red light with the 2 minute cycle time at 11:30 pm, I can without worrying about being ticketed.
Slashdot Mirror
We shouldn't develop weapons in space, because unilaterally declaring peace has been so successful in the past.
</sarcasm>
My "allotted" amount is exactly as much as I choose to buy. "Responsibility" implies that I have the right to determine exactly how much I can drink and when in order to be sober when I'm ready to drive home.
Does anyone here honestly think nanny = "responsibility"? Yikes. I'd like to keep my liberty, thank you.
Isn't Firefly essentially a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop?
You know what, I love lots of anime. I can do without the ninja chicks in bikinis and powered armor, but I personally consider Nausicaa to be the greatest animated film ever made, for example.
But to assume that anime would attract the same kinds of audiences as Disney's crap is ridiculous and unsupportable. No, their releases don't get especially good market support in the US from Disney, but most of the Joe Six-packs I know who've seen Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away thought they were either (a) boring as all hell, (b) pointless, or (c) impossible to understand.
Think what you want of these people, but this is the audience that is attracted to movies like Toy Story or Aladdin or any of the dozens of like films: very American, lots of "physical" humor, not especially deep. People want crap like what Disney produces; they just need to rediscover what makes good crap.
I'll content myself with being among the few Americans who enjoy anime, but I will never delude myself into thinking it might ever be mass-market fare in the US.
FOr example, in my life, there are very few books that I have read in digital format that I have bought to have as a hard copy.
This is trivially true for most people, as most people have never read a book in digital format.
(1) Nerds care about liberty, part of which includes freedom from unnecessary government fettering; and
:)
(2) Nerds drink.
HBO and Showtime have plenty of quality programming. So do many cable channels. Yeah, the networks mostly suck, but even they have some good programming along with a lot of bad stuff. But the point is that I don't have to pay for it if I don't want to patronize their advertisers.
FWIW, Monty Python's Flying Circus sucks. I've never liked it, and I'm glad I never had to pay for it. Mandatory fees bad; choice good.
I prefer the situation in the States, in which I can choose to pay or not for programming depending on whether I want to watch it or not. Sometimes the payment is direct (e.g., HBO) and sometimes it's indirect (commercial advertising), but the key to me is choice.
I don't like these all-or-nothing deals that charge me a flat rate when I want only a tiny fraction of what is offered. I mean, $300 is a year of NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV, a much greater volume (let alone percentage) of the programming of which I will enjoy than the BBC's offerings.
Let's never build anything because the terrorists might blow it up! That'll show 'em!
If it were practical to do this, the sun would always rise at 7 am, and sunset would be 7 am + however many hours of daylight there are. Heading into the summer, I'd have more daylight hours after leaving work (at the summer solstice, the sun wouldn't set until after 11 pm), which would be excellent for my happiness.
Of course, even better (and easier) would be a move away from the ridiculous notion that everyone should be at work at the same time, and that the wall clock should mean the same thing everywhere in the world. Think about the first point: if people went to work at different times instead of all leaving their homes at 8 am, current roadways would be more than sufficient to handle all traffic: no rush hour; more even levels of traffic.
And the second point: why this arbitrary reliance on a particular number on the clock to denote the start of the day? Why can't the sun rise at 4 pm or at 11 pm or at 3 am?
Let's just move to GMT, free up workers from the 9-5 rush hour chain, and everyone will be happier.
Not sure I buy that this "increases a processor's efficiency as wait latencies are minimized". It seems to me that decreasing latency reduces efficiency because you spend a greater percentage of your cycles changing state (overhead) instead of doing useful work. This is why realtime OS'es aren't the norm: they reduce latencies to critical maximums, but at the cost of overall throughput.
I really don't see why people get overworked when statistics like this come out. Is there anything really wrong with the concept that there might be inherent differences between men and women that would account for something like this? Or will I be modded down like Lawrence Summers effectively was?
Ratings are the only things that matter. An OTA show has only one mission: to get people to watch commercials. If not enough people see the commercials, the show isn't doing its job, and it goes off the air. So if you want the show to stay on the air, the only real solution is to get more people to watch it.
Which is precisely Graham's point. :) High school is primarily a jail formed to give parents 8 hours without having to deal with their kids, not a place to educate the kids.
So? No one's stopping you from taking the stuff or reading about it on your own. But to require every student to get a full liberal arts degree in order to get a job in a specialized area is not simply inefficient, it's idiotic.
This more than anything else is the reason the third world (esp. India and China) will eat us alive: we waste too much productivity teaching people things that just don't matter and which they'll forget once they leave the class anyway, when we should leave that to their own interests and their own time.
So? Most people who judge figure skaters were never figure skaters themselves.
This type of argument is always terrible, no matter where it appears or in what context.
I can't more highly recommend this essay by Paul Graham as an explanation of why public schooling is so poor. Don't be misled by the title of the essay: that's just the perspective he takes on a more extensive problem.
Unfortunately, Gates doesn't see the real problems: he's right in that public schools don't tailor their education to what students actually need, but he doesn't for instance address the problem of overcredentialling, which is a result of the perception (and, unfortunately, the reality to a large extend) that a degree is necessary to be successful, combined with the fact that most colleges sell degrees, *not* educations. That's somewhat ironic, considering Gates himself has earned no degrees.
Additionally, follow Gates' suggestion to make high school universally more preparatory for college, and you'll see college become as pointless and as irrelevant to success as high school, because more people will go to college without any reason better than "I need a degree in order to get a good job," which will water down the meaning of a college degree as most of those people will spend an additional four years drinking and delaying adulthood instead of learning something useful through a more efficient means (e.g., apprenticeship) that will enable them to get a good job.
You can already see this process happening to a certain extent, as masters' degrees and professional certifications are required to get certain jobs simply so recruiters can cut down the number of resumes they need to sift through, despite the fact that the smartest ones aren't necessarily the most credentialled.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of the education racket: high school should be sufficient for 90% of people to get jobs, but it isn't; so most of these people go to college. Unfortunately, college doesn't prepare kids for jobs either, but instead provides a place for them to socialize while forcing them to take numerous courses unrelated to their eventual job in order to get a liberal arts degree that costs a lot but signifies absolutely nothing except, "I went to college and that other guy didn't, so give me the job instead of him."
I paid $130,000 to get my undergrad degree. I had a great time in college, but how much of that crap do I use today? I certainly didn't learn software engineering in college courses, despite being a computer science major: most of my software engineering skills were honed doing my own projects, in HS, college, grad school, and in my job. If it weren't for the education racket, I might have been able to save myself $130,000 and get a real paying job four or five years earlier. Think of the productivity that's being wasted.
If it can be streamed, then it can be downloaded. Someone will quickly point out the way to do this.
...you can spend lots of money fixing your roof when a NeoMaple branch cracks under the weight of the snow on it and crashes through. Good idea!
I lived through this crap back in 1995-96 (I think) in upstate New York when there was a heavy early snowfall. There was much damage, both to trees and to buildings.
"illicit use [of steganography]"? I didn't realize encrypting stuff was illegal. Land of the free and all that.
When the ESA does something stupid, please remember to ridicule it as much as you do NASA's dumb mistakes.
We're still using 100 year old technology to receive radio broadcasts, and it's the major reason why the bandwidth is so underutilized. Nowadays, we can fit very complex receivers on tiny chips, as illustrated by cellphones, so why do we continue to use frequency division as the basis for allocating spectrum?
:P
If we move to code division, the need for regulation of the spectrum almost disappears entirely. It's too bad no one thought of this before deciding on the OTA HDTV standard.
I remember one of the biggest complaints about Mozilla was that it was a huge, integrated mess. Now that we have what everyone was clamboring for, what do people ask for? An integrated suite! This just goes to show you that you can't please everyone no matter what you do.
Anytime an American citizen bitches about how America (or should I say Amerikkka) is become a facist dictatorship under the Bush Dynasty, I should refer them to stories like this. Sedition (which is essentially how Chinese authorities see this game) has long been unprosecutable in the United States, whether it is officially restricted by the Constitution or not.
We the People have more power than many of the more hysterical among us admit. The Chinese people have far less than most of us who grew up in the West realize. The prospect of a country with a billion-strong populace subservient to a fascist oligarchy scares the hell out of me. It should scare you too. Do what you can to introduce the Chinese people to the benefits of liberty, or I guarantee you China will be far more formidable and righteous a foe than the Soviet Union ever was.
Clearly the article is not about the same kind of inductive sensors that is available in almost EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.
Come to Massachusetts, where our government is too busy spending our tax dollars on wealth-transfer programs to install such inductive sensors in the roads. Fortunately, they also haven't installed traffic light cameras yet, so when I want to run that red light with the 2 minute cycle time at 11:30 pm, I can without worrying about being ticketed.