For sure, but to claim that Uber is going to go under because they are running out of "cash on hand" is silly. They can always raise cash. Even Theranos raised money recently, and they are a fraud. Money is extremely cheap and available right now, and the rich are only getting richer.
VC money isn't free, you need to give away some of the company, at some point you run out of company to give.
I don't know what Theranos had to give up for their $100 million but Uber needs several billion annually.
Cash on hard means nothing. This is all fueled by VC money. What a dopey article.
VC's pay out on the expectation of a big payday at the end. If their belief that you'll find profitability doesn't match your need for capital then you go under.
A better way to frame it is when there's an important job to do you suck it up and get it done. And if that involves wealthy countries lending assistance to poor countries who otherwise don't have the economic capacity to carry out those measures then you do it.
Suck it up and get it done? Look, the best way to reduce the impact, if any, of humans on the climate, is to reduce the number of humans. If the continents of Africa and South America were exterminated of all human life, that would eliminate 20% of the world-wide population. (Those continents picked because they're the ones least able to fight off the extermination armies, and they have some of the highest birth rates. But please do be sure to call me racist anyway.) But genocide has such a bad name, doesn't it? After all, you'd feel bad about it, so we can't suck it up and do that important job.
It depends.
If you're seriously suggesting genocide as a way to mitigate global warming then racist would be a charitable term.
But I suspect you're just offering up a dumb unrealistic extremist suggestion because you somehow think it indicates a weakness in my argument, in which case you're being a fool.
It would be like if your spouse said "If we're serious about sending our oldest child to University we wouldn't go on that extravagant vacation" And you replied "Well if we're serious about saving money then we should just kill the youngest child!"
I hope I don't have to explain why that conversation would not go well.
I don't deny climate change or the man-made CO2 volume. What I deny is that I give a fuck. I might have cared before it became an SJW pet issue and another reason for the far-left to shake their finger in my face.
So you're going to screw over the planet and a lot of humanity to shake your finger in the face of "the far-left"? (actually, everybody but the far-right).
The extremists on both sides made it partisan.
No, the major corporations with a vested interest in a fossil fuel economy made it partisan.
The international idea that Americans should compensate the rest of the word for emitting CO2 earlier than them.
Not just Americans, also Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Japanese, and even Columbians. And the retribution for historical emissions is one way to frame it... if not for the obvious inconsistency with Japan's large contribution.
A better way to frame it is when there's an important job to do you suck it up and get it done. And if that involves wealthy countries lending assistance to poor countries who otherwise don't have the economic capacity to carry out those measures then you do it.
If my grandparents had a white picket fence and a CO2 monster V8 Corvette, then GOOD. I'm glad they weren't living in fucking mud huts and collecting wives.
And no rant against SJWs is complete without a completely unnecessary negative stereotype with just enough deniability so it isn't obviously racist.
Trump's behavior is disgusting, unprofessional, and unbecoming of a sitting president of the leader of the free world. The lack of respect that he shows for the office is deplorable. Typically once an election ends, so does the name calling and blaming. Once an election ends, the elected official assumes a much more civil and responsible position. I erroneously thought Trump would do so when I heard him say, "President Obama is a good guy." and this is a direct quote during their pre-inaugural meeting. It turned out that Trump simply continues his campaign as if he is still in an election.
I have a way of trying to model people I disagree with.
When they say or do something I don't like I find there's usually two interpretations. First is the cartoon caricature where they're really evil/stupid/dishonest and performed the action for those reasons. Second, is they're a fundamentally rational well intentioned person, and while I disagree with their objectives I can't say their action was totally out of line.
Historically I've done really well assuming the second, assuming the best of my opponents usually gives me the best understanding and I'm rarely surprised by the media... until Trump.
Ever since he started his campaign I kept looking for evidence of the smart rational person underneath the mask and I've never found it. He can't understand complicated concepts, he's extremely susceptible to manipulation and flattery, he has temper tantrums, he'll say ridiculous lies if it makes his current social interaction easier, he has an extremely limited attention span, just look at any event where he's supposed to stand still, he fidgets!
I don't know if it's cognitive decline, decades of being at the centre of his own universe, or if he's always been that way. But the most reliable way to model Trump is to imagine a very spoiled child between the ages of 8 and 12.
If the grades don't reflect ability, but "improvement", then they're useless to the university for the same reason they're useless to employers. Grades need to be comparable to be useful. If you give two people the same grade, but one just learned what a while loop is and the other learned to prove the complexity of Quicksort, then those grades are useless.
Ideally you'd offer different courses to students with programming experience as opposed to complete newbies. I agree that tailoring the material to initial ability makes fair grading a challenge, if nothing else the course grades should reflect abilities at the end of the course.
If your students with previous programming experience failed to improve, then in snowflake language that means you didn't challenge them enough. You said it yourself: They didn't need to apply analytical skills to get past early problems. Also, it is very easy to improve on almost zero ability. It is very hard to do better when you're already quite good. Improvement grades are bullshit. Results matter. If the result is wrong, it doesn't help that you grew as a person or tried really hard.
I didn't say they were "quite good", I said they had prior programming experience. It was an introductory course, anyone who really knew how to code would have breezed through it, but they just had a high school course or some experience with game scripting.
The problem isn't that they weren't challenged, by the middle of the course they were definitely challenged. The problem is they had learned to code by guess and test, and when the technical difficulties increased the problem solving techniques they'd learned didn't scale.
They didn't need more challenge, they needed to learn a different approach to programming.
The only reason 'happy holidays' exists is because of people who are triggered by hearing 'merry christmas'. Unless the poll records how many people HATE 'merry christmas', then it won't reveal why 'happy holidays' exists.
It's not about triggering, it's about inclusiveness.
I personally feel a bit weird wishing Merry Christmas to someone whom I know is Muslim or Jewish. Not because I don't want to offend or trigger them, but because it implies that I didn't know their faith, or I didn't realize their culture didn't celebrate Christmas in the same way mine did. I usually use something like "enjoy the holidays" unless they lead with "Merry Christmas" themselves.
But it's a different issue for businesses, if the business says "Merry Christmas" it identifies the business as Christian. It doesn't seem like much to you but to every non-Christian who hears it there's a subtext that as a non-Christian they don't quite belong in that business and the community of customers that patronizes it. Smart business-people doesn't go around implying that their customers don't belong in their store.
Of course, that's the same reason some people really want to hear "Merry Christmas" and some businesses use it. It carries the message that this store is part of the culture with a Christian heritage, that their community is still a distinctly Christian one, and so the Christians who shop there feel a bit more at home.
If grades aren't important in a first year course, then don't hand out grades. If they talk in depth about the ways students have improved, then give them that information instead of boiling all that valuable information down into a useless number.
The grade is still useful within the school itself, it filters people for scholarships and summer jobs, and frankly, it lets them know if they do have the competency to pursue a given line of study.
Also, the point stands: Some certified programmers have no idea how to create new code. All they do is copy, paste and edit until the compiler doesn't throw errors. Obviously there are at least some places that will allow people with no clue to get programmer certifications. If you pass an introductory course to programming, you should be able to write code. It doesn't have to be elegant, clean, maintainable or big, but it should be your code, not Stack Overflow fragments.
If your only formal CS education is a 1st year CS course then you're not a trained developer. You might be a fantastic self-trained developer, but the CS50 isn't what gave you those talents. But if you did a 4 year CS degree and program by simulating a genetic algorithm then the fault isn't the 1st year course, it's all the subsequent ones.
The only thing the 1st year CS course should give you is a foundation upon which a good software developer can be built with further training or practise.
When I TA'd one pattern I noticed is students with previous programming experience would start strong, but often falter as problems became more conceptually challenging, and smart students who were new to programming would struggle early on, but jump ahead as the problems got stronger.
I suspect a lot of the experienced students knew how to write code, but didn't really understand how to break down and solve a problem, so when problems hit a certain level of complexity they'd hit a bit of a brick wall.
The novices would have to break down the problem almost from the very start, so they'd have experience problem solving when things started getting challenging.
I think those two groups really needed different teaching approaches. The novices did well with the technical challenges slowly building. But the experienced coders really needed to take a step back and focus on problem solving.
Both parties are doing this, so this isn't a Republican or Democratic thing.
Both do it, but both don't do it to remotely equal extents.
Democrats are generally a bit more supportive than their base of strong IP laws, that's probably because of donors in Hollywood.
But Democrats also support financial regulations that their base likes but their donors hate.
Meanwhile the GOP just enacted a massive tax reform that is almost purely a handout to their donors. And a lot of the Trump department appointees are simply industry representatives being asked to regulate themselves.
Basically the Democratic legislators represent their voters and are nudged by their donors, the GOP represents their donors and is nudged by their voters.
I'm involved in hiring new programmers quite often. Way too many of them have absolutely no idea what they're doing, despite making it through some kind of program.
I guess maybe they made a lot of progress towards understanding the flavor of programming. Maybe they learned to leverage the "social dynamic" of programming to cobble together some garbage out of other people's code.
I think it would be better if they learned how to program, and had to prove they could do it before someone gave them a certification. You can learn programming the same way you learn anything else, and there's no reason to teach it or evaluate it differently. It's not magic, and I think with time and a sane approach you could teach most people how to do it in a couple years.
It's a 1st year intro to programming course, they have 3.5 more years to learn proper software development.
Complaining that they aren't writing good programs after the CS50 is like complaining that grade 1 students are making derivative plots when they learn to write complete sentences.
When it's time to assign grades, Malan and his teaching fellows have lots of in-depth conversations about how each student has improved relative to where he or she started...
Because precious snowflakes can't handle the reality that computer programs are supposed to work?
Remember the actual objective of a 1-st year introduction to programming course, it's not to assign jobs or decide grad schools, it's to teach the kids to program, give them good fundamentals in CS, and help filter them into the appropriate academic program.
I don't care if they sing around a campfire or take kickboxing if it helps further those two objectives.
As to your great offence at the idea that they're being too cuddly in a 4-month introduction to programming course. Well I think there's a term for that, something that rhymes with tecious mowblake....
Don't forget to look at the Obama years. Talking about the debt and adding "trillions" isn't complete without an analysis of his tenure and what happened to the national debt under his watch.
Obama got a huge debt due to inheriting a major economic meltdown and two wars.
Trump is about to incur a massive debt with a booming economy as the wars tail off.
And, as a member of the middle class, look at the long term picture. The debt incurred by the tax cut is "only" a trillion dollars because all the middle class tax cuts are set to expire. Of course, it's the GOP's full intention to re-instate the cuts when they come up, or, if the Democrats are in power and let them expire, blame the Democrats for raising taxes.
Either way, if the cuts expire this bill raises your taxes, and if the cuts don't expire it costs way more than a trillion. Whichever way it goes it's a pretty disgustingly cynical way to do politics.
If there's anyone who needs fast-charging stations I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers.
If there's anyone who should be paying for their own electricity instead of getting it for free, I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers.
I don't have a Tesla so I'm just going off of what I read, but my understanding is they were also transitioning away from the charging stations being free, which would make a lot more sense.
And if the concern is that commercial drivers are free-loading then it makes a lot more sense to charge them for super-station usage.
Unless they can swap cars part way they're going to have to re-charge during the work day.
A $500 Tesla wall charger can charge at one-quarter the speed of a Supercharger. A private commercial Supercharger is available that can charge at half the speed of a Tesla public Supercharger.
Which helps, but doesn't solve the issue for commercial drivers running low while away from the office.
If commercial drivers are swamping the fast-charging stations it's because they desperately need them for their Teslas to be a viable option.
0) The change isn't retroactive, so current users can continue to do what they have been doing.
1) The cost for electricity to run a Tesla is roughly one-third the cost of gasoline to run a similar gasoline car. A commercial user will save money operating a Tesla even if they need to invest in a private charging solution.
2) For the Tesla semi truck, they will build out special truck charging stations with the new truck charging connector. Those will not offer unlimited free power, but Tesla says that the new semi will pay for itself within two years just on the cost savings vs. buying diesel fuel for a conventional semi truck.
I think the big issue for commercial users is time more than gas money, having super-chargers available where they need them is the important thing.
Tesla says that the stations are intended for drivers who don't have ready options for charging at home or at work, and that when they're not used for this purpose, "it negatively impacts the availability of Supercharging services for others." Thus, the new policy says that for vehicles purchased after December 15th, drivers who plan to use their vehicles as a taxi, for ridesharing, commercial delivery or transportation, governmental purposes, or other commercial ventures won't be permitted to use the free stations.
If there's anyone who needs fast-charging stations I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers. A typical commuter can easily recharge at home or work after they parked. But a commercial driver can have 8+ hours of sustained use during the day. Unless they can swap cars part way they're going to have to re-charge during the work day. And the time spent re-charging is directly counted in their pay.
If commercial drivers are swamping the fast-charging stations it's because they desperately need them for their Teslas to be a viable option.
If he really was a scientist the first thing he'd do is ask a friend to hop in a sailboat and watch for a few hours, when the sailboat vanished over the horizon, exactly as predicted, he'd go "huh, so I guess the earth is round after all".
The answer I've seen to this is quite clever (FSVO clever) - Light rays are heavy, so they "fall down" over distance, giving us the "illusion" of a round Earth.
Funny, the illusion gives a precisely equal circumference than all other indirect measurements...
Hmm, that is a clever one. And technically kinda correct according to Einstein. Of course their physics break down pretty quickly and you'd probably see a visible distortion in mountains from the effect but that's not something you could easily communicate.
I'm not sure how to disprove that one. Maybe if you have a laser pointer set it up on land and point at the sail, showing that the laser point gets cut off part way, demonstrating that the curvature cuts off the beam, rather than the beam falling ever shorter. But even if you could get one powerful enough it would be a massive pain to calibrate. A transmitter and radio receiver might also do the trick, I've never looked into it but I suspect that's why ships have radio towers (to get around the curvature).
You go uphill and then vanish behind the hill... is the earth now "flat" or a sphere? You ride a boat and vanish... are you behind a hill on the water or is that indication for a sphere?
So that means the earth is either round or there's hills of water. Ok, lets see if we can detect a hill of water. Take measurements from a few different locations on the shore, take measurements between two boats, etc, etc. Eventually you'll discover that there's a hill, precisely matching the supposed curvature of the earth, that always happens to be in exactly between your two observation points.
The only reason you wouldn't do that followup experiment is because you don't want to know the answer.
Sorry, calling other people dumb only makes yourself look dumb.
Actually I said I don't believe this guy is such an idiot, a fact you seemed to miss, along with the fairly obvious followup experiment to your "hill on the water" excuse.
I think someone once said something about people who call other people dumb...
he's just a religious believer playing science With the same likelyhood I could say he is an atheist.
Why is every idiot on the planet convinced that all the other idiots are religios nutcracks instead of 'normal' nutcracks?
It's a metaphor. I was saying his flat earth belief was better classified as a religious belief than a scientific one.
He has a hypothesis and wants to test it. That's more "science" than anything the hockey team has been up to for the last 20 or 30 years
Since you REALLY want to take some shots at AGW research do you actually have a proposal for a better way they could test their hypothesis?
- and we give them billions of dollars taken at gunpoint from the unwilling.
Don't worry, we were already able to deduct your political affiliations.
What's a couple of bucks here and there given by volunteers? And if you aren't going to pitch in anyway, what do you care if his approach is sub-optimal?
Well if you want to give your money to something that is at best, worthless, and more likely a scam then go ahead.
But it's not that it's sub-optimal, it's that he's not interested in testing his flat-earth hypothesis at all. You could stick him on the ISS and he'd come up with some excuse about the windows distorting the light.
Flat-Earthers make me feel the way I'm sure I make climate alarmists feel, but I believe in science (the process), and I'm willing to put a few bucks towards an independent verification. And maybe a bigger factor is that if a schmuck like this can get to space, that can only mean the day is getting closer when I can too.
What does this guy have to do with science?
Back when he just wanted a rocket ride then his first test would have been a ride on a standard commercial hot-air balloon. Of course that wouldn't have been high enough as you apparently need to be about 10k up.
So now that he's apparently done the dedicated research of a 5 minute google search he's realized his rocket (which he backed out of) wouldn't get high enough, but instead of testing his hypothesis by sending up a camera for a few thousand he wants a couple million to play pretend astronaut.
He's not trying to do science, science is about trying to honestly investigate and verify your ideas. If he really was a scientist the first thing he'd do is ask a friend to hop in a sailboat and watch for a few hours, when the sailboat vanished over the horizon, exactly as predicted, he'd go "huh, so I guess the earth is round after all". Of course, if he came up with some dumb excuse for the ship vanishing like oh, it's just too far away I need a telescope then it would immediately occur to him to make two observations with a telescope, one close to sea level and one on a sea cliff. And again he'd disprove his flat earth hypothesis.
I don't believe this guy is such an idiot that I only needed 30 seconds to come up with experiments that never occurred to him in a lifetime of scientific research. Rather, I think this guy isn't a scientist, he's just a religious believer playing science, and he's deliberately avoiding doing anything to challenge his beliefs. Plus if he can get his name in the papers and bilk a bunch of people out of money that's just a bonus.
But the money wasn't spent investigating anything... from TFA:
"initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Reidâ(TM)s, Robert Bigelow"
If Pentagon staff can continue doing the video analysis in their spare time, most of that $22M was wasted on a friend of a politician.
If this were real, it wouldn't be a problem. This seems to be an instance of something being a secret not because of defense but to hide corruption.
My interpretation is that everyone involved was sincere. What probably happened was something like Bigelow really believed in UFOs and wanted to study them so he went to Reid and asked for the money and mandate (so he could get military folks to talk to him) and Reid agreed. As for Bigelow's company doing the project I don't know how the bid would have been done, but I'm guessing the intersection of companies who could competently do the work and people who would take is seriously is not very large.
I don't have a fundamental objection to a little government money going to studying UFOs, it's massive longshot but a huge payoff, and smart people doing weird stuff can generate unexpected spinoffs.
Of course the risk is the whole thing becomes a BS factory where believers trying to justify the project start skewing the evidence and feeding the conspiracy theorists.
So I see a lot of negativity about this, even though in the past with no NN rules almost nothing happened, and when it did was shut down quickly (like torrent throttling).
From 2001-2008 the Bush administration was in charge and the tech and business infrastructure to really exploit the lack of net neutrality wasn't around yet.
From 2009-2016 the Obama administration was in charge and anxious to implement NN, so the telecoms were doing everything they could to make it look like NN was unnecessary.
From 2017-2020 the Trump/Pence administration will be in change, the telecoms can do whatever they want and nothing will get regulated, and by the time 2021 rolls around even if a Democratic administration is in change the internet landscape will have changed enough to make implementing NN very disruptive and difficult to do.
First of all, I don't believe that we have "design specs" when it comes to longevity, or any other characteristic. Indeed, the fact that "a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time," is evidence of either a lack of design or poor design IMO.
To my understanding, there are essentially three major problems, which may be interrelated to various degrees.
1) DNA degradation over time 2) Insufficient repair and regrowth of damaged tissue 3) Inadequate waste removal, including cholesterol and heavy metals.
If we find a treatment for the first, we will likely solve the second.
There has been no evolutionary pressure to solve any of these things. In fact, we could just as easily call reproduction the solution to these problems, since it avoids all of them while maintaining the survival of the species. It does little for the survival of individuals, however, and may even hasten the aging process.;)
Have you ever added a major new feature to an application? You'd think you just write the new feature and you're done, but that's only part of it, because that new feature is going to do things to your application that it wasn't built for, and when that happens you're going to find your application has way more bugs than you realized.
That's basically the case with aging, except its worse because our DNA wasn't written by someone saying "break up the grow_organ function so we can reuse it if we ever implement the regenerate heart feature". It's literally a collection of random hacks to fix fatal bugs, and that's not the recipe for a robust code base.
We do not work well when you expose us to scenarios not covered by evolution. Just look how bad we are metabolically with modern food and lifestyles. And don't even try exposing someone to a vacuum for a minute.
In extreme old age nothing works in the conditions it expects so every system goes haywire, we basically become walking instances of Windows ME.
Thank you! Finally someone actually outlines specific issues instead of just complaining.
Well most of the issues he complained about weren't actually related to Systemd.
But I have to say, I'm using Jessie and I have not experienced any of the problems you have cited... When I kill a process, it gets killed. When I reboot or shutdown, it reboots or shuts down. When I mount/unmount something, it gets mounted/unmounted. The other stuff I can't speak to.
Can I ask, why don't you and other admins/devs like you start to contribute to systemd? Obviously there are huge philosophical differences between the systemd devs and parts of the Linux community, but if people like you never get involved in systemd development because of those issues, can you really expect them to change?
For one thing contributing to a project like that is a massive commitment, but more to the point the poster is fundamentally opposed to the underlying philosophy of Systemd. They can get what they want by simply using init.
I didn't even know systemd existed until I updated from Squeeze to Jessie and found that "service apache2 restart" didn't work. Once I got around the growing pains of learning a few new commands, that was it. It's not like I was like "ZOMG gotta get me some systemd!"
I'm not having any problems with systemd, so why would I switch to a smaller, less supported distro to avoid it? That just opens me up to a huge swath of potential issues that I don't even want to think about. And what's the reason, because people on forums are complaining? Because binary log files break the UNIX philosophy? I don't think you should be that surprised when I say that I really don't care.
For the average user, or person running their own server, it doesn't really change anything. The people affected by Systemd are the hardcore sysadmins running huge networks or mission critical servers.
If you're to believe the people running the major distros the hardcore sysadmins love Systemd since it's given them a bunch of new capabilities and fixed a lot of issues. But there's a lot of people, at least on message boards, who are extremely skeptical of the change.
- Drop this selinux shit. It's too complicated and causes more problems than it solves. Vulnerabilities come from bad code, not a lack of complex call ACLs. Security is a process, not a feature.
If you want to disable SELinux then disable SELinux, but not writing "bad code" isn't an option when even OpenSSL get major holes.
As long as people want new features there will either be new security vulnerabilities or software you can't afford and never gets completed. If SELinux adds enough security to be worth your bother then go for it, if not then disable it.
At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.
Maybe in average lifespan,
True, I should have said average lifespan instead of longevity.
but age 114 seems to be a point after which the human body really starts to fail. And this is apparently related to the balance between the body being able to heal itself vs cells going cancerous.
You're thinking of telomeres? But I think the issue is more basic than that. Evolution designed us to be built once and then last for 50-70 years, but after that there's no real mechanisms to keep things working.
It's not that cells run out of steam ~114, it's that nothing is designed to last that long. So once you're past 110 it doesn't matter if you fix 5 potentially fatal things because 10 others are about to break.
Slashdot Mirror
For sure, but to claim that Uber is going to go under because they are running out of "cash on hand" is silly. They can always raise cash. Even Theranos raised money recently, and they are a fraud. Money is extremely cheap and available right now, and the rich are only getting richer.
VC money isn't free, you need to give away some of the company, at some point you run out of company to give.
I don't know what Theranos had to give up for their $100 million but Uber needs several billion annually.
Cash on hard means nothing. This is all fueled by VC money. What a dopey article.
VC's pay out on the expectation of a big payday at the end. If their belief that you'll find profitability doesn't match your need for capital then you go under.
A better way to frame it is when there's an important job to do you suck it up and get it done. And if that involves wealthy countries lending assistance to poor countries who otherwise don't have the economic capacity to carry out those measures then you do it.
Suck it up and get it done? Look, the best way to reduce the impact, if any, of humans on the climate, is to reduce the number of humans. If the continents of Africa and South America were exterminated of all human life, that would eliminate 20% of the world-wide population. (Those continents picked because they're the ones least able to fight off the extermination armies, and they have some of the highest birth rates. But please do be sure to call me racist anyway.) But genocide has such a bad name, doesn't it? After all, you'd feel bad about it, so we can't suck it up and do that important job.
It depends.
If you're seriously suggesting genocide as a way to mitigate global warming then racist would be a charitable term.
But I suspect you're just offering up a dumb unrealistic extremist suggestion because you somehow think it indicates a weakness in my argument, in which case you're being a fool.
It would be like if your spouse said "If we're serious about sending our oldest child to University we wouldn't go on that extravagant vacation"
And you replied "Well if we're serious about saving money then we should just kill the youngest child!"
I hope I don't have to explain why that conversation would not go well.
I don't deny climate change or the man-made CO2 volume. What I deny is that I give a fuck. I might have cared before it became an SJW pet issue and another reason for the far-left to shake their finger in my face.
So you're going to screw over the planet and a lot of humanity to shake your finger in the face of "the far-left"? (actually, everybody but the far-right).
The extremists on both sides made it partisan.
No, the major corporations with a vested interest in a fossil fuel economy made it partisan.
The international idea that Americans should compensate the rest of the word for emitting CO2 earlier than them.
Not just Americans, also Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Japanese, and even Columbians. And the retribution for historical emissions is one way to frame it... if not for the obvious inconsistency with Japan's large contribution.
A better way to frame it is when there's an important job to do you suck it up and get it done. And if that involves wealthy countries lending assistance to poor countries who otherwise don't have the economic capacity to carry out those measures then you do it.
If my grandparents had a white picket fence and a CO2 monster V8 Corvette, then GOOD. I'm glad they weren't living in fucking mud huts and collecting wives.
And no rant against SJWs is complete without a completely unnecessary negative stereotype with just enough deniability so it isn't obviously racist.
Trump's behavior is disgusting, unprofessional, and unbecoming of a sitting president of the leader of the free world. The lack of respect that he shows for the office is deplorable. Typically once an election ends, so does the name calling and blaming. Once an election ends, the elected official assumes a much more civil and responsible position. I erroneously thought Trump would do so when I heard him say, "President Obama is a good guy." and this is a direct quote during their pre-inaugural meeting. It turned out that Trump simply continues his campaign as if he is still in an election.
I have a way of trying to model people I disagree with.
When they say or do something I don't like I find there's usually two interpretations. First is the cartoon caricature where they're really evil/stupid/dishonest and performed the action for those reasons. Second, is they're a fundamentally rational well intentioned person, and while I disagree with their objectives I can't say their action was totally out of line.
Historically I've done really well assuming the second, assuming the best of my opponents usually gives me the best understanding and I'm rarely surprised by the media... until Trump.
Ever since he started his campaign I kept looking for evidence of the smart rational person underneath the mask and I've never found it. He can't understand complicated concepts, he's extremely susceptible to manipulation and flattery, he has temper tantrums, he'll say ridiculous lies if it makes his current social interaction easier, he has an extremely limited attention span, just look at any event where he's supposed to stand still, he fidgets!
I don't know if it's cognitive decline, decades of being at the centre of his own universe, or if he's always been that way. But the most reliable way to model Trump is to imagine a very spoiled child between the ages of 8 and 12.
I actually had to check the root URL because I thought the poll site was a satirical site making fun of Trump.
I honestly don't understand how you can create an organization so incompetent that something like that could be created and published.
If the grades don't reflect ability, but "improvement", then they're useless to the university for the same reason they're useless to employers.
Grades need to be comparable to be useful. If you give two people the same grade, but one just learned what a while loop is and the other learned to prove the complexity of Quicksort, then those grades are useless.
Ideally you'd offer different courses to students with programming experience as opposed to complete newbies. I agree that tailoring the material to initial ability makes fair grading a challenge, if nothing else the course grades should reflect abilities at the end of the course.
If your students with previous programming experience failed to improve, then in snowflake language that means you didn't challenge them enough. You said it yourself: They didn't need to apply analytical skills to get past early problems. Also, it is very easy to improve on almost zero ability. It is very hard to do better when you're already quite good. Improvement grades are bullshit. Results matter. If the result is wrong, it doesn't help that you grew as a person or tried really hard.
I didn't say they were "quite good", I said they had prior programming experience. It was an introductory course, anyone who really knew how to code would have breezed through it, but they just had a high school course or some experience with game scripting.
The problem isn't that they weren't challenged, by the middle of the course they were definitely challenged. The problem is they had learned to code by guess and test, and when the technical difficulties increased the problem solving techniques they'd learned didn't scale.
They didn't need more challenge, they needed to learn a different approach to programming.
The only reason 'happy holidays' exists is because of people who are triggered by hearing 'merry christmas'. Unless the poll records how many people HATE 'merry christmas', then it won't reveal why 'happy holidays' exists.
It's not about triggering, it's about inclusiveness.
I personally feel a bit weird wishing Merry Christmas to someone whom I know is Muslim or Jewish. Not because I don't want to offend or trigger them, but because it implies that I didn't know their faith, or I didn't realize their culture didn't celebrate Christmas in the same way mine did. I usually use something like "enjoy the holidays" unless they lead with "Merry Christmas" themselves.
But it's a different issue for businesses, if the business says "Merry Christmas" it identifies the business as Christian. It doesn't seem like much to you but to every non-Christian who hears it there's a subtext that as a non-Christian they don't quite belong in that business and the community of customers that patronizes it. Smart business-people doesn't go around implying that their customers don't belong in their store.
Of course, that's the same reason some people really want to hear "Merry Christmas" and some businesses use it. It carries the message that this store is part of the culture with a Christian heritage, that their community is still a distinctly Christian one, and so the Christians who shop there feel a bit more at home.
If grades aren't important in a first year course, then don't hand out grades. If they talk in depth about the ways students have improved, then give them that information instead of boiling all that valuable information down into a useless number.
The grade is still useful within the school itself, it filters people for scholarships and summer jobs, and frankly, it lets them know if they do have the competency to pursue a given line of study.
Also, the point stands: Some certified programmers have no idea how to create new code. All they do is copy, paste and edit until the compiler doesn't throw errors. Obviously there are at least some places that will allow people with no clue to get programmer certifications. If you pass an introductory course to programming, you should be able to write code. It doesn't have to be elegant, clean, maintainable or big, but it should be your code, not Stack Overflow fragments.
If your only formal CS education is a 1st year CS course then you're not a trained developer. You might be a fantastic self-trained developer, but the CS50 isn't what gave you those talents. But if you did a 4 year CS degree and program by simulating a genetic algorithm then the fault isn't the 1st year course, it's all the subsequent ones.
The only thing the 1st year CS course should give you is a foundation upon which a good software developer can be built with further training or practise.
When I TA'd one pattern I noticed is students with previous programming experience would start strong, but often falter as problems became more conceptually challenging, and smart students who were new to programming would struggle early on, but jump ahead as the problems got stronger.
I suspect a lot of the experienced students knew how to write code, but didn't really understand how to break down and solve a problem, so when problems hit a certain level of complexity they'd hit a bit of a brick wall.
The novices would have to break down the problem almost from the very start, so they'd have experience problem solving when things started getting challenging.
I think those two groups really needed different teaching approaches. The novices did well with the technical challenges slowly building. But the experienced coders really needed to take a step back and focus on problem solving.
Both parties are doing this, so this isn't a Republican or Democratic thing.
Both do it, but both don't do it to remotely equal extents.
Democrats are generally a bit more supportive than their base of strong IP laws, that's probably because of donors in Hollywood.
But Democrats also support financial regulations that their base likes but their donors hate.
Meanwhile the GOP just enacted a massive tax reform that is almost purely a handout to their donors. And a lot of the Trump department appointees are simply industry representatives being asked to regulate themselves.
Basically the Democratic legislators represent their voters and are nudged by their donors, the GOP represents their donors and is nudged by their voters.
I'm involved in hiring new programmers quite often. Way too many of them have absolutely no idea what they're doing, despite making it through some kind of program.
I guess maybe they made a lot of progress towards understanding the flavor of programming. Maybe they learned to leverage the "social dynamic" of programming to cobble together some garbage out of other people's code.
I think it would be better if they learned how to program, and had to prove they could do it before someone gave them a certification. You can learn programming the same way you learn anything else, and there's no reason to teach it or evaluate it differently. It's not magic, and I think with time and a sane approach you could teach most people how to do it in a couple years.
It's a 1st year intro to programming course, they have 3.5 more years to learn proper software development.
Complaining that they aren't writing good programs after the CS50 is like complaining that grade 1 students are making derivative plots when they learn to write complete sentences.
When it's time to assign grades, Malan and his teaching fellows have lots of in-depth conversations about how each student has improved relative to where he or she started...
Because precious snowflakes can't handle the reality that computer programs are supposed to work?
Remember the actual objective of a 1-st year introduction to programming course, it's not to assign jobs or decide grad schools, it's to teach the kids to program, give them good fundamentals in CS, and help filter them into the appropriate academic program.
I don't care if they sing around a campfire or take kickboxing if it helps further those two objectives.
As to your great offence at the idea that they're being too cuddly in a 4-month introduction to programming course. Well I think there's a term for that, something that rhymes with tecious mowblake....
Don't forget to look at the Obama years. Talking about the debt and adding "trillions" isn't complete without an analysis of his tenure and what happened to the national debt under his watch.
Obama got a huge debt due to inheriting a major economic meltdown and two wars.
Trump is about to incur a massive debt with a booming economy as the wars tail off.
And, as a member of the middle class, look at the long term picture. The debt incurred by the tax cut is "only" a trillion dollars because all the middle class tax cuts are set to expire. Of course, it's the GOP's full intention to re-instate the cuts when they come up, or, if the Democrats are in power and let them expire, blame the Democrats for raising taxes.
Either way, if the cuts expire this bill raises your taxes, and if the cuts don't expire it costs way more than a trillion. Whichever way it goes it's a pretty disgustingly cynical way to do politics.
If there's anyone who needs fast-charging stations I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers.
If there's anyone who should be paying for their own electricity instead of getting it for free, I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers.
I don't have a Tesla so I'm just going off of what I read, but my understanding is they were also transitioning away from the charging stations being free, which would make a lot more sense.
And if the concern is that commercial drivers are free-loading then it makes a lot more sense to charge them for super-station usage.
Unless they can swap cars part way they're going to have to re-charge during the work day.
A $500 Tesla wall charger can charge at one-quarter the speed of a Supercharger. A private commercial Supercharger is available that can charge at half the speed of a Tesla public Supercharger.
Which helps, but doesn't solve the issue for commercial drivers running low while away from the office.
If commercial drivers are swamping the fast-charging stations it's because they desperately need them for their Teslas to be a viable option.
0) The change isn't retroactive, so current users can continue to do what they have been doing.
1) The cost for electricity to run a Tesla is roughly one-third the cost of gasoline to run a similar gasoline car. A commercial user will save money operating a Tesla even if they need to invest in a private charging solution.
2) For the Tesla semi truck, they will build out special truck charging stations with the new truck charging connector. Those will not offer unlimited free power, but Tesla says that the new semi will pay for itself within two years just on the cost savings vs. buying diesel fuel for a conventional semi truck.
I think the big issue for commercial users is time more than gas money, having super-chargers available where they need them is the important thing.
Tesla says that the stations are intended for drivers who don't have ready options for charging at home or at work, and that when they're not used for this purpose, "it negatively impacts the availability of Supercharging services for others." Thus, the new policy says that for vehicles purchased after December 15th, drivers who plan to use their vehicles as a taxi, for ridesharing, commercial delivery or transportation, governmental purposes, or other commercial ventures won't be permitted to use the free stations.
If there's anyone who needs fast-charging stations I'd expect it to be the commercial drivers. A typical commuter can easily recharge at home or work after they parked. But a commercial driver can have 8+ hours of sustained use during the day. Unless they can swap cars part way they're going to have to re-charge during the work day. And the time spent re-charging is directly counted in their pay.
If commercial drivers are swamping the fast-charging stations it's because they desperately need them for their Teslas to be a viable option.
The answer I've seen to this is quite clever (FSVO clever) - Light rays are heavy, so they "fall down" over distance, giving us the "illusion" of a round Earth.
Funny, the illusion gives a precisely equal circumference than all other indirect measurements...
Hmm, that is a clever one. And technically kinda correct according to Einstein. Of course their physics break down pretty quickly and you'd probably see a visible distortion in mountains from the effect but that's not something you could easily communicate.
I'm not sure how to disprove that one. Maybe if you have a laser pointer set it up on land and point at the sail, showing that the laser point gets cut off part way, demonstrating that the curvature cuts off the beam, rather than the beam falling ever shorter. But even if you could get one powerful enough it would be a massive pain to calibrate. A transmitter and radio receiver might also do the trick, I've never looked into it but I suspect that's why ships have radio towers (to get around the curvature).
You go uphill and then vanish behind the hill ... is the earth now "flat" or a sphere? ... are you behind a hill on the water or is that indication for a sphere?
You ride a boat and vanish
So that means the earth is either round or there's hills of water. Ok, lets see if we can detect a hill of water. Take measurements from a few different locations on the shore, take measurements between two boats, etc, etc. Eventually you'll discover that there's a hill, precisely matching the supposed curvature of the earth, that always happens to be in exactly between your two observation points.
The only reason you wouldn't do that followup experiment is because you don't want to know the answer.
Sorry, calling other people dumb only makes yourself look dumb.
Actually I said I don't believe this guy is such an idiot, a fact you seemed to miss, along with the fairly obvious followup experiment to your "hill on the water" excuse.
I think someone once said something about people who call other people dumb...
he's just a religious believer playing science
With the same likelyhood I could say he is an atheist.
Why is every idiot on the planet convinced that all the other idiots are religios nutcracks instead of 'normal' nutcracks?
It's a metaphor. I was saying his flat earth belief was better classified as a religious belief than a scientific one.
He has a hypothesis and wants to test it. That's more "science" than anything the hockey team has been up to for the last 20 or 30 years
Since you REALLY want to take some shots at AGW research do you actually have a proposal for a better way they could test their hypothesis?
- and we give them billions of dollars taken at gunpoint from the unwilling.
Don't worry, we were already able to deduct your political affiliations.
What's a couple of bucks here and there given by volunteers? And if you aren't going to pitch in anyway, what do you care if his approach is sub-optimal?
Well if you want to give your money to something that is at best, worthless, and more likely a scam then go ahead.
But it's not that it's sub-optimal, it's that he's not interested in testing his flat-earth hypothesis at all. You could stick him on the ISS and he'd come up with some excuse about the windows distorting the light.
I'll pitch in $10.
Flat-Earthers make me feel the way I'm sure I make climate alarmists feel, but I believe in science (the process), and I'm willing to put a few bucks towards an independent verification. And maybe a bigger factor is that if a schmuck like this can get to space, that can only mean the day is getting closer when I can too.
What does this guy have to do with science?
Back when he just wanted a rocket ride then his first test would have been a ride on a standard commercial hot-air balloon. Of course that wouldn't have been high enough as you apparently need to be about 10k up.
So now that he's apparently done the dedicated research of a 5 minute google search he's realized his rocket (which he backed out of) wouldn't get high enough, but instead of testing his hypothesis by sending up a camera for a few thousand he wants a couple million to play pretend astronaut.
He's not trying to do science, science is about trying to honestly investigate and verify your ideas. If he really was a scientist the first thing he'd do is ask a friend to hop in a sailboat and watch for a few hours, when the sailboat vanished over the horizon, exactly as predicted, he'd go "huh, so I guess the earth is round after all". Of course, if he came up with some dumb excuse for the ship vanishing like oh, it's just too far away I need a telescope then it would immediately occur to him to make two observations with a telescope, one close to sea level and one on a sea cliff. And again he'd disprove his flat earth hypothesis.
I don't believe this guy is such an idiot that I only needed 30 seconds to come up with experiments that never occurred to him in a lifetime of scientific research. Rather, I think this guy isn't a scientist, he's just a religious believer playing science, and he's deliberately avoiding doing anything to challenge his beliefs. Plus if he can get his name in the papers and bilk a bunch of people out of money that's just a bonus.
But the money wasn't spent investigating anything... from TFA:
"initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Reidâ(TM)s, Robert Bigelow"
If Pentagon staff can continue doing the video analysis in their spare time, most of that $22M was wasted on a friend of a politician.
If this were real, it wouldn't be a problem. This seems to be an instance of something being a secret not because of defense but to hide corruption.
My interpretation is that everyone involved was sincere. What probably happened was something like Bigelow really believed in UFOs and wanted to study them so he went to Reid and asked for the money and mandate (so he could get military folks to talk to him) and Reid agreed. As for Bigelow's company doing the project I don't know how the bid would have been done, but I'm guessing the intersection of companies who could competently do the work and people who would take is seriously is not very large.
I don't have a fundamental objection to a little government money going to studying UFOs, it's massive longshot but a huge payoff, and smart people doing weird stuff can generate unexpected spinoffs.
Of course the risk is the whole thing becomes a BS factory where believers trying to justify the project start skewing the evidence and feeding the conspiracy theorists.
So I see a lot of negativity about this, even though in the past with no NN rules almost nothing happened, and when it did was shut down quickly (like torrent throttling).
From 2001-2008 the Bush administration was in charge and the tech and business infrastructure to really exploit the lack of net neutrality wasn't around yet.
From 2009-2016 the Obama administration was in charge and anxious to implement NN, so the telecoms were doing everything they could to make it look like NN was unnecessary.
From 2017-2020 the Trump/Pence administration will be in change, the telecoms can do whatever they want and nothing will get regulated, and by the time 2021 rolls around even if a Democratic administration is in change the internet landscape will have changed enough to make implementing NN very disruptive and difficult to do.
First of all, I don't believe that we have "design specs" when it comes to longevity, or any other characteristic. Indeed, the fact that "a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time," is evidence of either a lack of design or poor design IMO.
To my understanding, there are essentially three major problems, which may be interrelated to various degrees.
1) DNA degradation over time
2) Insufficient repair and regrowth of damaged tissue
3) Inadequate waste removal, including cholesterol and heavy metals.
If we find a treatment for the first, we will likely solve the second.
There has been no evolutionary pressure to solve any of these things. In fact, we could just as easily call reproduction the solution to these problems, since it avoids all of them while maintaining the survival of the species. It does little for the survival of individuals, however, and may even hasten the aging process. ;)
Have you ever added a major new feature to an application? You'd think you just write the new feature and you're done, but that's only part of it, because that new feature is going to do things to your application that it wasn't built for, and when that happens you're going to find your application has way more bugs than you realized.
That's basically the case with aging, except its worse because our DNA wasn't written by someone saying "break up the grow_organ function so we can reuse it if we ever implement the regenerate heart feature". It's literally a collection of random hacks to fix fatal bugs, and that's not the recipe for a robust code base.
We do not work well when you expose us to scenarios not covered by evolution. Just look how bad we are metabolically with modern food and lifestyles. And don't even try exposing someone to a vacuum for a minute.
In extreme old age nothing works in the conditions it expects so every system goes haywire, we basically become walking instances of Windows ME.
Thank you! Finally someone actually outlines specific issues instead of just complaining.
Well most of the issues he complained about weren't actually related to Systemd.
But I have to say, I'm using Jessie and I have not experienced any of the problems you have cited... When I kill a process, it gets killed. When I reboot or shutdown, it reboots or shuts down. When I mount/unmount something, it gets mounted/unmounted. The other stuff I can't speak to.
Usually no, but it happens
Can I ask, why don't you and other admins/devs like you start to contribute to systemd? Obviously there are huge philosophical differences between the systemd devs and parts of the Linux community, but if people like you never get involved in systemd development because of those issues, can you really expect them to change?
For one thing contributing to a project like that is a massive commitment, but more to the point the poster is fundamentally opposed to the underlying philosophy of Systemd. They can get what they want by simply using init.
I didn't even know systemd existed until I updated from Squeeze to Jessie and found that "service apache2 restart" didn't work. Once I got around the growing pains of learning a few new commands, that was it. It's not like I was like "ZOMG gotta get me some systemd!"
I'm not having any problems with systemd, so why would I switch to a smaller, less supported distro to avoid it? That just opens me up to a huge swath of potential issues that I don't even want to think about. And what's the reason, because people on forums are complaining? Because binary log files break the UNIX philosophy? I don't think you should be that surprised when I say that I really don't care.
For the average user, or person running their own server, it doesn't really change anything. The people affected by Systemd are the hardcore sysadmins running huge networks or mission critical servers.
If you're to believe the people running the major distros the hardcore sysadmins love Systemd since it's given them a bunch of new capabilities and fixed a lot of issues. But there's a lot of people, at least on message boards, who are extremely skeptical of the change.
- Drop this selinux shit. It's too complicated and causes more problems than it solves. Vulnerabilities come from bad code, not a lack of complex call ACLs. Security is a process, not a feature.
If you want to disable SELinux then disable SELinux, but not writing "bad code" isn't an option when even OpenSSL get major holes.
As long as people want new features there will either be new security vulnerabilities or software you can't afford and never gets completed. If SELinux adds enough security to be worth your bother then go for it, if not then disable it.
At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.
Maybe in average lifespan,
True, I should have said average lifespan instead of longevity.
but age 114 seems to be a point after which the human body really starts to fail. And this is apparently related to the balance between the body being able to heal itself vs cells going cancerous.
You're thinking of telomeres? But I think the issue is more basic than that. Evolution designed us to be built once and then last for 50-70 years, but after that there's no real mechanisms to keep things working.
It's not that cells run out of steam ~114, it's that nothing is designed to last that long. So once you're past 110 it doesn't matter if you fix 5 potentially fatal things because 10 others are about to break.