Even if this experiment doesn't pan out, there are other viable challengers to The Amazing Randi. Behold, the Power of the Vagina !
Wow! That's great. I just sent her a Burger King gift card. Given that I've pledged $1000 to Randi's prize, that may be a very expensive hamburger for me.
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist?
It could, of course. Magic, astrology, vampires, ghosts: they could all exist. But people keep looking into telepathy it without finding much. For me they're all in same category as Jesus and Santa Claus: a lot of people want them to exist, and a fair number of those have fooled themselves into believing that they do.
Usually I'm patient enough with the believers and seekers; I don't deny that it would be cool if we could, like, totally read each other's minds, man. But sometimes I've had enough, especially when I read of con men cheating the gullible based on wish-it-were-so beliefs like this.
It's really trendy here on/. to whine about SUV's in terms of energy consumption, but, the fuel burned by an SUV pales beside what a semi full of goods headed into the city burns.
The average SUV weighs 4242 lbs and gets 19 MPG. Larger ones like the Escalade are rated at 13 MPG in the city. The cargo for your average grocery store trip is, let's say, 100 lbs. A tractor-trailer rig is somewhere around 25,000 pounds empty, gets 5-6 MPG when loaded, and carries up to 40,000 lbs cargo. Let's assume that the average is half that. If I did the math right, moving groceries by semi is then 57 times more efficient.
As a kicker, truckers use 13% of fuel purchased in the US versus 63% for cars and other light vehicles. So you're right about the "pale" part, but it appears to be the other way around.
Standing sounds like a good idea, but walking? I keep getting this hamster image in my head.
It's surprisingly good for some things. I bought a treadmill off Craigslist and added a sheet of wood where I can put my laptop. I really like it for reading and replying to email and reading stuff on the web. For things where I have to type a lot, 1.5 mph plus or minus seems good. For pure reading, I'll go up to 3.3 mph if I'm feeling peppy.
It's specially nice first thing in the morning when I'm still a little groggy. I'll put on one of the Run to Cadence albums, pop open Google Reader, and do two or three miles of news and email.
For some reason, though, I usually can't walk and code at the same time. (I can chew gum while coding, though.) For coding I just stop the treadmill and use it as a standing desk. If I do that continuously for a couple of hours, I'll switch between the standing position and sitting at a table with a regular chair or an exercise ball.
The ideal is _not_ "neutrality". It is a bald-faced lie to call it that as virtually admitted by the policy on forking. Calling the ideal "mainstream viewpoint" isn't an indictment -- it is a valid ideal to accurately portray the mainstream viewpoint and stating it in those terms is honesty.
You're taking that one word too far. Note that the forking document is actually a guideline; the actual policy is NPOV. The sentence you're quoting is a quick (and inaccurate) recap of the main policy. As the NPOV policy says, "The policy requires that, where there are or have been conflicting views, these should be presented fairly, but not asserted. All significant published points of view are presented, not just the most popular one."
So presenting only the mainstream viewpoint is forbidden; significant minority points of view are explicitly required as well.
Not all of us have the time and motivation to spend out lives fighting political battles over Wikipedia articles.
Oh, and if you come to Wikipedia with political battle on your mind and scoffing at one of the core ideals, it's no wonder you're having a hard time there. You should come with a historian's cool. If you can't edit an article with the same level of detachment as when writing about a 15th-century earl, then you'll naturally have problems with Wikipedia, and you will be prone to misinterpreting Wikipedia's bias against passion as political bias.
Call it "mainstream point of view" or better yet "Wikipedian point of view". Not all of us have the time and motivation to spend out lives fighting political battles over Wikipedia articles.
Of course the Wikipedia is the Wikipedian point of view, in the same way that Encyclopedia Britannica contains the Encyclopedia Britannica point of view. However, as Wikipedia editors we call it "Neutral Point of View" because that's what we strive for, just as the Encyclopedia Britannica aims to be something more than a collection of opinion pieces. We naturally fall short of perfection; that is the lot of humankind. But much better to eternally strive for perfection than to aim for mediocrity at the outset.
And the philosophy of sharing "all significant points of view" is ridiculous. Who writes for the Amish? What about illiterate Chinese? Who writes for the majority of the society that can't tell the difference between URL and IP address? No one.
That one sets high goals isn't necessarily ridiculous. All forms of scholarship share the concerns that you raise. Does that mean we should close down the universities, smash the presses, and burn the libraries? Or that should we pursue an eventualist approach while trying to counter systemic bias?
"The generally accepted policy is that all facts and majority Points of View on a certain subject are treated in one article." This is where the NPOV weasels get to put the kabosh on ideas they don't like.
All significant points of view are presented, not just the most popular one. It should not be asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Readers are left to form their own opinions.
What's your alternate proposal? I gather that you have a notion that's not a fact and not a common point of view, but that you'd like it to be in an encyclopedia article because you consider it important. To me, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Without the NPOV policy, every physics article would be filled with psychoceramic nonsense like the Time Cube cruft.
Moral issues aside, willfully engaging in behavior contrary to basic biological drives (reproduction) indicates something seriously wrong with an individual. It's a trait which, if present in all members of a species, would result in the death of said species very quickly. There are obviously benefits to marriage - if there weren't, homosexuals (presumably) wouldn't seek it. Given that marriage is an artificial construct created by society, why should society provide such advantages to behavior which it finds to be detrimental to it?
Wow. This is so ridiculous that I suspect you're trolling, but just in case somebody believes this stuff, let's try a few facts.
One, that something is natural does not make it right. Violence (in particular, male violence) is clearly natural; see Wrangham's Demonic Males for a good summary and pointers to the research. The next time I hear somebody spout the naturallistic fallacy at me, I'm going to give 'em one in the snoot. Pow! My anger will be entirely natural, so I'm sure they'll be fine with it.
Two, there appears to be no risk that everybody will suddenly turn gay and stop having kids if we allow civil unions, so the end-of-the-species argument makes no sense. Is the ability to get married all that keeps you chasing pussy? I hope not, but if so, find a therapist and ask about projection.
Third, if behavior contrary to basic biological drives indicates pathology, then you have much bigger problems than homosexuals. 98 percent of US women who have had sex have used contreception. And god knows how many people have had oral sex, gone on a diet, or worked third shift.
Fourth, if marriage without children is a problem, why not start with the straight childless couples? There are a lot more of them. And shouldn't you be a lot more worried about organizations that promote a child-free lifestyle for straights?
Fifth, homosexuals have kids. I know that fundies are often a little confused by this, but think of it this way: if artificial insemination was good enough for Baby Jesus, it can work for others. And gosh golly, some families with kids would like to get married. Why stop them?
I'm not familiar with this particular article, but dubious articles that survive for a long time generally do so because they are nearly unused: they get little traffic and aren't linked from anywhere. Wikipedia article quality is usually a function of eyeballs, so you can take comfort that few people see a bad article, even if it's up for a while.
But if you're going to rule out a source because there's an obvious joke in it, you may have to cut your media diet substantially. Both the BBC and The Guardian published great hoaxes with a straight face, as many others have.
The system is simply in testing phase right now and they don't want anyone playing with it, that's all.
That's ridiculous. They put a satellite up in orbit to broadcast this information to the whole globe. What do they have to lose by letting people use it? It's not like somebody could break their service just by listening to it.
I wish I could beat with a crowbar all the cut-and-paste programmers who make my life difficult
A-fucking-men. Copy-paste programming is using a human to do something that machines are a million times better at doing. It may make coding a little easier, but it makes maintenance much harder. Maintenance cost scales by lines of code, so factoring out the duplication saves big bucks down the road. And generally, not even far down the road.
Pair programming can result in two people who are too close to the code to detect flaws in their underlying assumptions.
For teams doing pairing, the standard recommendation is to swap pairs every few hours. I find that changeover very valuable; as I quickly explain to the new pair what I'm up to, I have to think over the big picture again. That makes both of us more likely to catch something.
I also prefer to do pairing in a war room with the rest of the team. Then it's easy to start an ad-hoc design review session when you come across some broader issue.
The message your coworker was giving you, that you missed, is, "Hey, this code is illegible! For starters, how about splitting up this monolithic function into something remotely comprehensible, and then maybe I could give you some useful feedback." No charge for the clue.
Amen to that. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
I can spot a deathmarch project from the next county, and they *ALL* begin with phrases like "The market window for this product is..." or "We have to complete this by XXX or we all die" or my favorite, "My research shows every month we don't have capability X we loose Y dollars."
I don't have a problem with that, really. The trick is to only give the suits levers you want them to pull. The deal I make with my clients is that I control the estimates and they control the scope. I estimate each feature; they decide what order to do them in and when they want to release. Then the dates are their problem.
Once you break them in, they like it fine. It's just like going shopping: you put more in your cart, and you pay more at the checkout. Want a smaller bill? You put less in your cart.
We would take the estimates, double them and add 30%, that is how I bid out all work.
An easier approach is to measure progress.
Divide your project into microfeatures, deliverable units of work that are either done or not done and take less than a week to build. Estimate each microfeature on a simple complexity scale (I like 1/2, 1, 2, 4; anything above 4 gets split into smaller features).
Then just start in developing and see how many units of work get done each week. Even a manager can see that if you got 5 units done each week this month, he should expect you to get 5 done each week in the future.
The advantage of this, besides the simplicity, is that you can then let the suits trade scope against schedule and you don't have to be involved. If they want the project done sooner, they should pull features out. If they want to add stuff, that means they're shifting the end date. Either way, the devs just keep popping features off the stack and making them work.
Any project that you forecast is going to take longer than 3 man weeks ie 120 hours needs some sort of design in place to ensure that the major architectural constructs are already decided before coding takes place.
I agree completely that one should spend time making sure the design is right. But I disagree that it should all happen before starting coding. You will never know less than at the beginning of the project. Improving the design should be a continuous process; then you get to take advantage of new information. Including information on how well your previous design theories are working out in practice.
Not having used any static analysis tools, but having worked on several java projects, I question how useful these tools are. In my experience, most bugs that could be detected by static analysis are usually caught relatively quickly anyway. The trickiest (and potentially most damaging) ones are usually non-general enough to slip past a general-purpose tool. Am I mistaken?
I think it depends on how good you are and how well you use the tools. My IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) has some static analysis built in and it's nice to be reminded of loose ends that I might otherwise forget. But I find it hugely helpful when working over code from non-expert programmers. I just run it and give them a list of the three thousand things they need to fix.
Automating the detection (and sometimes, repair) of stupid mistakes leaves me more time and energy to focus on the subtle and interesting ones.
If they ask for a time estimate, tell them it will be done when they're happy with the result, and don't want anything more, or they're unhappy with the rate of progress, and call the whole thing off.
I agree that incremental development is the right approach, but you can marry incremental estimation with that.
It turns out that programmers are good at relative estimation of small features, although they're very bad at absolute estimation of big features. The solution is to
break the project down into very small features,
estimate their relative complexity on a simple scale (e.g., 1/2, 1, 2, 4),
start building, measuring how many points the team completes each week.
Once that number stabilizes, you can give reasonably useful answers, like "assuming no changes to the plan, the project will be done on date X".
An even more useful feature of this incremental, measured approach is that you can stay out of fights about when the project should be done. If they want to bring the date in, they can drop features, or negotiate with the devs on way to reduce scope for individual features to bring the estimates down. It turns unfocused schedule pressure into helpful pressure to reduce scope. And since both schedule and scope are business concerns rather than technical ones, the suits can have meetings all the live-long day while we devs happily continue to code.
The real problem with this idea comes in with people who want access from rural locations or connecting cities across large distances. Who is going to pay the million bucks to get the wiring from the DFW area to Austin?
As others have pointed out, a solution to the last-mile problem is only about the last mile.
For last-mile solutions in rural areas, let the locals sort it out like they would any other infrastructure question. Maybe they'll treat it like sewage, where everybody decides to do their own thing. Or maybe they'll follow the model of rural electrification cooperatives. Regardless, I think it's a decision best made locally.
For inter-city connections, the problem is already pretty well solved. There are plenty of companies that will sell you connectivity if you're looking for a multi-megabit pipe in a data center. Unlike last-mile connections, that market is diverse and competitive.
Please state where it is illegal to set up a new commercial ISP. I don't think you need an ISP owned by the local government, which is really what telco & cableco fought against.
That's missing the point entirely. If you go with Frankston's the-last-mile-is-infrastructure plan, the government isn't the ISP, but I'll bet cash money the telcos will fight it just as hard. As their anti-neutrality push has shown, they aren't interested being competitive ISPs; they're interested in returning to a world where consumers are their property, property that they sell to the highest bidder.
They didn't outlaw commercial internet services. You can try competing against them as an actual business not funded by the local government, which is probably a better way to go anyway.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes. Know why it won't work? Because you'll be competing against organizations with massive war chests, large numbers of lobbyists, an infrastructure that they got to build under monopoly pricing, and regulatory structures that guarantee that they get to make a big profit. In effect, they received a massive government subsidy that is unavailable to you. And they will use that to fuck you and your new ISP.
You should find people doing work that you like and ask them. I don't know a huge amount about the field, but the requirements for a job with serious academic robotics researcher Rodney Brooks at MIT would be different than a job a his company iRobot, maker of the Roomba. And either one of those would probably be different than a job with Mark Tilden building toy robots, and different again from an industrial automation job.
Personally, I'd start with a visit to your nearest Robotics Society and have a chat with fellow enthusiasts about the shape of the field. Next I would start building my own robots to get an appreciation of the many facets of the work. Then I'd pick a few very specific skills, ones in demand with the kinds of teams you want to work with, and master them utterly. Deep skills give them a reason to hire you, and broad skills mean you'll integrate well in a team environment. And don't be shy about taking a job that seems a little beneath your skills if it gets you in the door with a group doing work you like.
According to TFA, they compared phone users to drivers who were at the legal blood-alcohol limit, not those above it. So they have, at most, demonstrated that driving while using a phone is more dangerous than other driving that we consider legal.
I think they've done more than that. If you're at 0.08% BAC and behind the wheel you are driving under the influence. In other words, the kind of impairment caused by using a cellphone is serious enough that were it caused by alcohol, Johnny Law would take your license away on the spot.
Girls putting on make up, combing hair, getting ready, etc. Its unfair to just point out cell phone users and accidents.
As a bicyclist in an urban area, cellphone users are my number one nemesis. I agree other distractions are a problem, but a cell is uniquely bad in that a) a conversation is more distracting than makeup, and b) your comb does not ring, demanding immediate attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if this experiment doesn't pan out, there are other viable challengers to The Amazing Randi. Behold, the Power of the Vagina !
Wow! That's great. I just sent her a Burger King gift card. Given that I've pledged $1000 to Randi's prize, that may be a very expensive hamburger for me.
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist?
It could, of course. Magic, astrology, vampires, ghosts: they could all exist. But people keep looking into telepathy it without finding much. For me they're all in same category as Jesus and Santa Claus: a lot of people want them to exist, and a fair number of those have fooled themselves into believing that they do.
Usually I'm patient enough with the believers and seekers; I don't deny that it would be cool if we could, like, totally read each other's minds, man. But sometimes I've had enough, especially when I read of con men cheating the gullible based on wish-it-were-so beliefs like this.
It's really trendy here on /. to whine about SUV's in terms of energy consumption, but, the fuel burned by an SUV pales beside what a semi full of goods headed into the city burns.
The average SUV weighs 4242 lbs and gets 19 MPG. Larger ones like the Escalade are rated at 13 MPG in the city. The cargo for your average grocery store trip is, let's say, 100 lbs. A tractor-trailer rig is somewhere around 25,000 pounds empty, gets 5-6 MPG when loaded, and carries up to 40,000 lbs cargo. Let's assume that the average is half that. If I did the math right, moving groceries by semi is then 57 times more efficient.
As a kicker, truckers use 13% of fuel purchased in the US versus 63% for cars and other light vehicles. So you're right about the "pale" part, but it appears to be the other way around.
Standing sounds like a good idea, but walking? I keep getting this hamster image in my head.
It's surprisingly good for some things. I bought a treadmill off Craigslist and added a sheet of wood where I can put my laptop. I really like it for reading and replying to email and reading stuff on the web. For things where I have to type a lot, 1.5 mph plus or minus seems good. For pure reading, I'll go up to 3.3 mph if I'm feeling peppy.
It's specially nice first thing in the morning when I'm still a little groggy. I'll put on one of the Run to Cadence albums, pop open Google Reader, and do two or three miles of news and email.
For some reason, though, I usually can't walk and code at the same time. (I can chew gum while coding, though.) For coding I just stop the treadmill and use it as a standing desk. If I do that continuously for a couple of hours, I'll switch between the standing position and sitting at a table with a regular chair or an exercise ball.
The ideal is _not_ "neutrality". It is a bald-faced lie to call it that as virtually admitted by the policy on forking. Calling the ideal "mainstream viewpoint" isn't an indictment -- it is a valid ideal to accurately portray the mainstream viewpoint and stating it in those terms is honesty.
You're taking that one word too far. Note that the forking document is actually a guideline; the actual policy is NPOV. The sentence you're quoting is a quick (and inaccurate) recap of the main policy. As the NPOV policy says, "The policy requires that, where there are or have been conflicting views, these should be presented fairly, but not asserted. All significant published points of view are presented, not just the most popular one."
So presenting only the mainstream viewpoint is forbidden; significant minority points of view are explicitly required as well.
Not all of us have the time and motivation to spend out lives fighting political battles over Wikipedia articles.
Oh, and if you come to Wikipedia with political battle on your mind and scoffing at one of the core ideals, it's no wonder you're having a hard time there. You should come with a historian's cool. If you can't edit an article with the same level of detachment as when writing about a 15th-century earl, then you'll naturally have problems with Wikipedia, and you will be prone to misinterpreting Wikipedia's bias against passion as political bias.
Call it "mainstream point of view" or better yet "Wikipedian point of view". Not all of us have the time and motivation to spend out lives fighting political battles over Wikipedia articles.
Of course the Wikipedia is the Wikipedian point of view, in the same way that Encyclopedia Britannica contains the Encyclopedia Britannica point of view. However, as Wikipedia editors we call it "Neutral Point of View" because that's what we strive for, just as the Encyclopedia Britannica aims to be something more than a collection of opinion pieces. We naturally fall short of perfection; that is the lot of humankind. But much better to eternally strive for perfection than to aim for mediocrity at the outset.
And the philosophy of sharing "all significant points of view" is ridiculous. Who writes for the Amish? What about illiterate Chinese? Who writes for the majority of the society that can't tell the difference between URL and IP address? No one.
That one sets high goals isn't necessarily ridiculous. All forms of scholarship share the concerns that you raise. Does that mean we should close down the universities, smash the presses, and burn the libraries? Or that should we pursue an eventualist approach while trying to counter systemic bias?
A better statement is from the NPOV policy:
What's your alternate proposal? I gather that you have a notion that's not a fact and not a common point of view, but that you'd like it to be in an encyclopedia article because you consider it important. To me, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Without the NPOV policy, every physics article would be filled with psychoceramic nonsense like the Time Cube cruft.
Moral issues aside, willfully engaging in behavior contrary to basic biological drives (reproduction) indicates something seriously wrong with an individual. It's a trait which, if present in all members of a species, would result in the death of said species very quickly. There are obviously benefits to marriage - if there weren't, homosexuals (presumably) wouldn't seek it. Given that marriage is an artificial construct created by society, why should society provide such advantages to behavior which it finds to be detrimental to it?
Wow. This is so ridiculous that I suspect you're trolling, but just in case somebody believes this stuff, let's try a few facts.
One, that something is natural does not make it right. Violence (in particular, male violence) is clearly natural; see Wrangham's Demonic Males for a good summary and pointers to the research. The next time I hear somebody spout the naturallistic fallacy at me, I'm going to give 'em one in the snoot. Pow! My anger will be entirely natural, so I'm sure they'll be fine with it.
Two, there appears to be no risk that everybody will suddenly turn gay and stop having kids if we allow civil unions, so the end-of-the-species argument makes no sense. Is the ability to get married all that keeps you chasing pussy? I hope not, but if so, find a therapist and ask about projection.
Third, if behavior contrary to basic biological drives indicates pathology, then you have much bigger problems than homosexuals. 98 percent of US women who have had sex have used contreception. And god knows how many people have had oral sex, gone on a diet, or worked third shift.
Fourth, if marriage without children is a problem, why not start with the straight childless couples? There are a lot more of them. And shouldn't you be a lot more worried about organizations that promote a child-free lifestyle for straights?
Fifth, homosexuals have kids. I know that fundies are often a little confused by this, but think of it this way: if artificial insemination was good enough for Baby Jesus, it can work for others. And gosh golly, some families with kids would like to get married. Why stop them?
The thing stayed up for more than a year.
I'm not familiar with this particular article, but dubious articles that survive for a long time generally do so because they are nearly unused: they get little traffic and aren't linked from anywhere. Wikipedia article quality is usually a function of eyeballs, so you can take comfort that few people see a bad article, even if it's up for a while.
But if you're going to rule out a source because there's an obvious joke in it, you may have to cut your media diet substantially. Both the BBC and The Guardian published great hoaxes with a straight face, as many others have.
The system is simply in testing phase right now and they don't want anyone playing with it, that's all.
That's ridiculous. They put a satellite up in orbit to broadcast this information to the whole globe. What do they have to lose by letting people use it? It's not like somebody could break their service just by listening to it.
I wish I could beat with a crowbar all the cut-and-paste programmers who make my life difficult
A-fucking-men. Copy-paste programming is using a human to do something that machines are a million times better at doing. It may make coding a little easier, but it makes maintenance much harder. Maintenance cost scales by lines of code, so factoring out the duplication saves big bucks down the road. And generally, not even far down the road.
Pair programming can result in two people who are too close to the code to detect flaws in their underlying assumptions.
For teams doing pairing, the standard recommendation is to swap pairs every few hours. I find that changeover very valuable; as I quickly explain to the new pair what I'm up to, I have to think over the big picture again. That makes both of us more likely to catch something.
I also prefer to do pairing in a war room with the rest of the team. Then it's easy to start an ad-hoc design review session when you come across some broader issue.
The message your coworker was giving you, that you missed, is, "Hey, this code is illegible! For starters, how about splitting up this monolithic function into something remotely comprehensible, and then maybe I could give you some useful feedback." No charge for the clue.
Amen to that. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
I can spot a deathmarch project from the next county, and they *ALL* begin with phrases like "The market window for this product is..." or "We have to complete this by XXX or we all die" or my favorite, "My research shows every month we don't have capability X we loose Y dollars."
I don't have a problem with that, really. The trick is to only give the suits levers you want them to pull. The deal I make with my clients is that I control the estimates and they control the scope. I estimate each feature; they decide what order to do them in and when they want to release. Then the dates are their problem.
Once you break them in, they like it fine. It's just like going shopping: you put more in your cart, and you pay more at the checkout. Want a smaller bill? You put less in your cart.
We would take the estimates, double them and add 30%, that is how I bid out all work.
An easier approach is to measure progress.
Divide your project into microfeatures, deliverable units of work that are either done or not done and take less than a week to build. Estimate each microfeature on a simple complexity scale (I like 1/2, 1, 2, 4; anything above 4 gets split into smaller features).
Then just start in developing and see how many units of work get done each week. Even a manager can see that if you got 5 units done each week this month, he should expect you to get 5 done each week in the future.
The advantage of this, besides the simplicity, is that you can then let the suits trade scope against schedule and you don't have to be involved. If they want the project done sooner, they should pull features out. If they want to add stuff, that means they're shifting the end date. Either way, the devs just keep popping features off the stack and making them work.
That's how I do it now, and I love it.
Any project that you forecast is going to take longer than 3 man weeks ie 120 hours needs some sort of design in place to ensure that the major architectural constructs are already decided before coding takes place.
I agree completely that one should spend time making sure the design is right. But I disagree that it should all happen before starting coding. You will never know less than at the beginning of the project. Improving the design should be a continuous process; then you get to take advantage of new information. Including information on how well your previous design theories are working out in practice.
Not having used any static analysis tools, but having worked on several java projects, I question how useful these tools are. In my experience, most bugs that could be detected by static analysis are usually caught relatively quickly anyway. The trickiest (and potentially most damaging) ones are usually non-general enough to slip past a general-purpose tool. Am I mistaken?
I think it depends on how good you are and how well you use the tools. My IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) has some static analysis built in and it's nice to be reminded of loose ends that I might otherwise forget. But I find it hugely helpful when working over code from non-expert programmers. I just run it and give them a list of the three thousand things they need to fix.
Automating the detection (and sometimes, repair) of stupid mistakes leaves me more time and energy to focus on the subtle and interesting ones.
I agree that incremental development is the right approach, but you can marry incremental estimation with that.
It turns out that programmers are good at relative estimation of small features, although they're very bad at absolute estimation of big features. The solution is to
- break the project down into very small features,
- estimate their relative complexity on a simple scale (e.g., 1/2, 1, 2, 4),
- start building, measuring how many points the team completes each week.
Once that number stabilizes, you can give reasonably useful answers, like "assuming no changes to the plan, the project will be done on date X".An even more useful feature of this incremental, measured approach is that you can stay out of fights about when the project should be done. If they want to bring the date in, they can drop features, or negotiate with the devs on way to reduce scope for individual features to bring the estimates down. It turns unfocused schedule pressure into helpful pressure to reduce scope. And since both schedule and scope are business concerns rather than technical ones, the suits can have meetings all the live-long day while we devs happily continue to code.
The real problem with this idea comes in with people who want access from rural locations or connecting cities across large distances. Who is going to pay the million bucks to get the wiring from the DFW area to Austin?
As others have pointed out, a solution to the last-mile problem is only about the last mile.
For last-mile solutions in rural areas, let the locals sort it out like they would any other infrastructure question. Maybe they'll treat it like sewage, where everybody decides to do their own thing. Or maybe they'll follow the model of rural electrification cooperatives. Regardless, I think it's a decision best made locally.
For inter-city connections, the problem is already pretty well solved. There are plenty of companies that will sell you connectivity if you're looking for a multi-megabit pipe in a data center. Unlike last-mile connections, that market is diverse and competitive.
Please state where it is illegal to set up a new commercial ISP. I don't think you need an ISP owned by the local government, which is really what telco & cableco fought against.
That's missing the point entirely. If you go with Frankston's the-last-mile-is-infrastructure plan, the government isn't the ISP, but I'll bet cash money the telcos will fight it just as hard. As their anti-neutrality push has shown, they aren't interested being competitive ISPs; they're interested in returning to a world where consumers are their property, property that they sell to the highest bidder.
They didn't outlaw commercial internet services. You can try competing against them as an actual business not funded by the local government, which is probably a better way to go anyway.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes. Know why it won't work? Because you'll be competing against organizations with massive war chests, large numbers of lobbyists, an infrastructure that they got to build under monopoly pricing, and regulatory structures that guarantee that they get to make a big profit. In effect, they received a massive government subsidy that is unavailable to you. And they will use that to fuck you and your new ISP.
You should find people doing work that you like and ask them. I don't know a huge amount about the field, but the requirements for a job with serious academic robotics researcher Rodney Brooks at MIT would be different than a job a his company iRobot, maker of the Roomba. And either one of those would probably be different than a job with Mark Tilden building toy robots, and different again from an industrial automation job.
Personally, I'd start with a visit to your nearest Robotics Society and have a chat with fellow enthusiasts about the shape of the field. Next I would start building my own robots to get an appreciation of the many facets of the work. Then I'd pick a few very specific skills, ones in demand with the kinds of teams you want to work with, and master them utterly. Deep skills give them a reason to hire you, and broad skills mean you'll integrate well in a team environment. And don't be shy about taking a job that seems a little beneath your skills if it gets you in the door with a group doing work you like.
According to TFA, they compared phone users to drivers who were at the legal blood-alcohol limit, not those above it. So they have, at most, demonstrated that driving while using a phone is more dangerous than other driving that we consider legal.
I think they've done more than that. If you're at 0.08% BAC and behind the wheel you are driving under the influence. In other words, the kind of impairment caused by using a cellphone is serious enough that were it caused by alcohol, Johnny Law would take your license away on the spot.
Girls putting on make up, combing hair, getting ready, etc. Its unfair to just point out cell phone users and accidents.
As a bicyclist in an urban area, cellphone users are my number one nemesis. I agree other distractions are a problem, but a cell is uniquely bad in that a) a conversation is more distracting than makeup, and b) your comb does not ring, demanding immediate attention.