It does make sense and is a laudable goal to have an "open and inviting" work environment. In practice though, this can lead to a very bleached and flavorless work environment. There is a vast, endless array of things that seems to make different folks uncomfortable from exposed ankles to commonly used phrases, and I don't know where we draw the line. It sure seems a far cry beyond what I would consider hostile.
I am a man, but if that invalidates my opinion I think I've proven my point. I certainly do think we are closer to eggshells than to hostile generally, though you and I might differ on the definition of hostile. There are more murders in the US than claims filed for sexual harassment.
While I can't exactly defend the GP's phrasing, I do agree with part of the sentiment. There's a happy medium to be had, and women aren't the only one's putting up with bullshit. Sexual harassment and a hostile work environment are one extreme, walking around on egg-shells like timid a-sexual lemmings is another. I feel like we're a lot closer to the latter than the former.
Every decent editor has a way to view the code, so there's no reason to feel constrained to any sort of generated code. As a developer, I am perpetually in a mixed mode. It is quite valuable in terms of navigating complicated pages to find that one random label for a text change, as well as seeing how a change to the corresponds to the markup affects a page immediately. In addition, decently built GUI's can prune down innumerable options to only things that are relevant to the task at hand, versus an auto-complete of 800 options on an element.
That said, I rarely to never use the drag and drop ability of the GUI editors, as the code they generate has the most god awful formatting and tends to have needless bloat.
I am located in the north east. A number of counties have begun to disclose teacher pay and it as shocking to see many over 100K and a very large number > 75K. A quick search shows this [schoolteachersalary.com] with the various medians for 2009. Please remember median = just as many lower as higher.
Just parsed out that data from your salary link, and the highest projected median salary is $62,313 in California. The average of all the salaries listed, including projected, is $42k. It's hard to imagine distribution curve where any significant number of teachers make over $100k. Your perceptions of teacher salary need some reworking.
though as I almost stopped reading after you said you "adored" UAC (no hate for the idea, but not too hip on the implementation), I do like your creative spelling for disgraceful...might I suggest diss-crass-full? Or perhaps, 'deys-craze-full?
That taxes have been used to that end is a certainty, but I'd hardly call all forms of taxation social engineering. We wouldn't call it a society if folks didn't try and find ways of sharing burdens and pooling resources.
Once life's out there, it necessarily evolves, and given enough time "incredibly complex" features are in no way unexpected... established evolution is essentially an unavoidable outcome given: time; the chemical reality that mutation occurs; that mutations may affect fitness; and that they're cumulative.
That is merely a statement of faith. You have no way of demonstrating this to be true. It certainly can't be demonstrated in a lab.
Fossil records, speciation via continental drift, genome sequencing all match up like a hand in a glove to evolutionary theory. Are you arguing there's a less well understood method for the specifics of speciation taking place, or that species never evolve? What's your hypothesis as to how we've had such a great diversity of species over these millions of years?
I don't like to be an Iraq war apologist, because there are so many things that were done wrong. You also make several legitimate points. However, it is wrong to just write off someone who invaded neighboring countries, and raped, tortured, and oppressed his own citizens, and is estimated to have murdered 1 million people as just another "tin-pot dictator". He was an evil, evil man and many people don't know the scope of his transgressions. Read up.
It sounds like you are concerned about the code base walking off and so you are going to try and limit access by exposing only APIs. Your outsourced programmers will be hamstrung by the restrictions and unable to review the mechanisms behind the APIs. What then? You'll be spending an inordinate amount of time on support unless you get some damn good outsourced programmers and have much better comments than most.
I can't picture many scenarios where this would be a more cost effective or productive alternative to hiring someone competent and trustworthy to work in house on your monkey business.
I'm not certain we can thank Apple for all that, Amazon was selling DRM free since 2007, and was larger than apple in digital mp3 sales until later in 2008, despite not having Apple's hardware leverage.
There are most assuredly cases where a database isn't a requirement, that point is well taken. Just a couple clarifications:
With regard to the validation, I meant data entry. if a person modifies a flat file in a text editor they can enter whatever they want. At least in a database they are constrained by types.
When I said backup, I meant that guy who's supposed to be able to do your job when you're gone, I should have clarified.:) Also, I modify data directly in databases all the time. Most DB clients make it quite easy, and at the very worst a SQL query.
I think some of your trepidation may come from the developer overhead involved traditionally in interfacing with databases. Modern tools make it nigh on effortless to create a database table and access it as an object in code, far less trouble than writing parsers or dealing with files.
Flat files are almost always the wrong solution. Here is why:
It means someone needs write access to a file system to change a configuration to an application
complications arising from scaling to multiple machines requiring either duplicate identical configs, shared network paths, and the associated complexities
keys, constraints, defined types, all of the benefits of a database should not be ignored out of hand by saying, oh, I don't need them. Really? You don't need data validation/integrity? How about your backup?
A big reason your school was so much cheaper is that it was likely subsidized more. If you were eligible (as many folks were), pell grant would pay 80% of your tuition in 1975, scaling back to 40% by the year 2000. There has been a large shift from grants to loans from the federal government, and it's become even worse at the state level as education funding has taken quite a hit since the recession. Do you really think anyone is getting rich at our public universities? (the debacle with the for-profit colleges like university of phoenix screwing the goverment out of money notwithstanding) The average salary for a faculty is 80k nationally. I hear of unionized garbage men making more than that.
Some kids start playing football at age 5 in pop warner, so lets not pretend this is a hazard only borne by adults making informed choices. I played football in middle school/high school, and I bet I suffered some brain injury because of it. I wouldn't say i was adequately informed then of the potential risks, and I likely would have made a poor decision even if I were informed. My parents, on the other hand, would probably have loved to know the true risks of a sport as their baby boy was out there knocking heads. Many of us were lead to believe that modern helmets all but alleviated the risk of brain injury.
Honestly, kids and young adults are being pressured by parents, coaches, peers into playing a sport that is now known to cause brain damage, and Slashdot can do nothing but complain about professional athletes pay and make fun of dumb jocks.
Some of the revolutionary ethics are laudable, I'll concede. Trying to separate out the moral teachings from all of the future predicting, miracles, and lofty pontificating is a futile exercise, so I'd defend Lewis in that regard. If one did separate out only those teachings, there isn't much novel he put forward, and of those some were downright sinister: thought crime- Matthew 5:27-28, non-resistance to evil, vicarious redemption/scapegoating.
I think the golden rule, which per-dates Jesus significantly, easily provides the moral justification for accommodation of the weak. If Christianity pursued this idea vigorously certainly they deserve credit, but I don't think they earned moral preeminence for it.
I have to say I'm less a fan of those ethics. No through for the morrow is no way for a person to live that isn't sure of an afterlife. Heaping the sins of one upon another is not moral, and forgiveness without accountability isn't a sustainable model for behavior. I think CS Lewis summed it up pretty well in Mere Christianity:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
I think we can all see how preventing the flow of information to a worker about how much s/he is worth is good for their employer. The free market can be a real bitch sometimes! This hardly seems like a reason such collusion should be allowed. As an aside, if you can't compete on money, how about more time off, better working conditions, more flexible schedules. It doesn't always have to be how much green is in the pa$ture, though that's certainly a good starting point.
That's a far cry from a rebuttal. Of course, there would be repercussions of drastic actions on the part of a president doing something so radical (if, in fact, it was done in a such a radical way). Worse repercussions than the blow back from our continued meddling? It's not possible to say, or at least, I've not heard anyone give any meaningful analysis of the prospect. Only gloom and doom, the only way forward is our continued global interference. If there was any remnant of compromise left in the government this would be a perfect opportunity for a helping of that, somewhere between Ron Paul and our war hawks. As it stands, he is the only one standing up on the other side (with Kucinich, of course).
Certainly we cannot prove everything, but to bring the argument full circle, if your belief set requires abject credulity it's not justifiable to put that on equal footing with a skeptical point of view with outliers on both sides.
Fair enough, it may too broad a stroke to paint it as a contrast between Abrahamic and atheistic points of view, but they do comprise something close to 70% of the population combined, and in the context of the GP arguing with someone going door to door proselytizing seemed a reasonable assumption. With regard to the holy books, whether one believes it is the inerrant word of God or the inspired word of God seems to be of little practical consequence when it is used to construct a belief set that includes unproven miracles as guiding principles.
I truly do appreciate your skepticism about the limits of understanding, that is well advised. However:
It isn't taught to most religious people as a dogma, either.
You must know you're wrong about this. Faith is placed above reason in the dogma of all monotheistic religions, and there is no better proof than each claims their their holy book is the word of God. And how does each know that it's the word of God? Faith, Trust. I would love to see someone reason a monotheistic religious world view in the absence of its holy book.
I've discovered a fundamental mechanism through which eternal salvation is attained through means of a telepathic acknowledgement of a truth. I've been able to reproduce this via a petri disc soul conversion of all known possible choices and indeed, there is only one acknowledgement available for salvation.
I don't feel like the Palin comment was much of a stretch. The interview, if I recall correctly, was asking about her experience dealing with foreign nations, and she cites proximity to Russia as though that's some sort of qualifier. The point was never that she could or could not see Russia nor the specifics of how she stated it, the point (and the joke) is more that it's a ridiculous way to claim you have foreign policy experience.
Slashdot Mirror
It does make sense and is a laudable goal to have an "open and inviting" work environment. In practice though, this can lead to a very bleached and flavorless work environment. There is a vast, endless array of things that seems to make different folks uncomfortable from exposed ankles to commonly used phrases, and I don't know where we draw the line. It sure seems a far cry beyond what I would consider hostile.
I am a man, but if that invalidates my opinion I think I've proven my point. I certainly do think we are closer to eggshells than to hostile generally, though you and I might differ on the definition of hostile. There are more murders in the US than claims filed for sexual harassment.
While I can't exactly defend the GP's phrasing, I do agree with part of the sentiment. There's a happy medium to be had, and women aren't the only one's putting up with bullshit. Sexual harassment and a hostile work environment are one extreme, walking around on egg-shells like timid a-sexual lemmings is another. I feel like we're a lot closer to the latter than the former.
Every decent editor has a way to view the code, so there's no reason to feel constrained to any sort of generated code. As a developer, I am perpetually in a mixed mode. It is quite valuable in terms of navigating complicated pages to find that one random label for a text change, as well as seeing how a change to the corresponds to the markup affects a page immediately. In addition, decently built GUI's can prune down innumerable options to only things that are relevant to the task at hand, versus an auto-complete of 800 options on an element.
That said, I rarely to never use the drag and drop ability of the GUI editors, as the code they generate has the most god awful formatting and tends to have needless bloat.
I am located in the north east. A number of counties have begun to disclose teacher pay and it as shocking to see many over 100K and a very large number > 75K. A quick search shows this [schoolteachersalary.com] with the various medians for 2009. Please remember median = just as many lower as higher.
Just parsed out that data from your salary link, and the highest projected median salary is $62,313 in California. The average of all the salaries listed, including projected, is $42k. It's hard to imagine distribution curve where any significant number of teachers make over $100k. Your perceptions of teacher salary need some reworking.
though as I almost stopped reading after you said you "adored" UAC (no hate for the idea, but not too hip on the implementation), I do like your creative spelling for disgraceful...might I suggest diss-crass-full? Or perhaps, 'deys-craze-full?
That taxes have been used to that end is a certainty, but I'd hardly call all forms of taxation social engineering. We wouldn't call it a society if folks didn't try and find ways of sharing burdens and pooling resources.
Once life's out there, it necessarily evolves, and given enough time "incredibly complex" features are in no way unexpected ... established evolution is essentially an unavoidable outcome given: time; the chemical reality that mutation occurs; that mutations may affect fitness; and that they're cumulative.
That is merely a statement of faith. You have no way of demonstrating this to be true. It certainly can't be demonstrated in a lab.
Fossil records, speciation via continental drift, genome sequencing all match up like a hand in a glove to evolutionary theory. Are you arguing there's a less well understood method for the specifics of speciation taking place, or that species never evolve? What's your hypothesis as to how we've had such a great diversity of species over these millions of years?
I don't like to be an Iraq war apologist, because there are so many things that were done wrong. You also make several legitimate points. However, it is wrong to just write off someone who invaded neighboring countries, and raped, tortured, and oppressed his own citizens, and is estimated to have murdered 1 million people as just another "tin-pot dictator". He was an evil, evil man and many people don't know the scope of his transgressions. Read up.
It sounds like you are concerned about the code base walking off and so you are going to try and limit access by exposing only APIs. Your outsourced programmers will be hamstrung by the restrictions and unable to review the mechanisms behind the APIs. What then? You'll be spending an inordinate amount of time on support unless you get some damn good outsourced programmers and have much better comments than most.
I can't picture many scenarios where this would be a more cost effective or productive alternative to hiring someone competent and trustworthy to work in house on your monkey business.
I'm not certain we can thank Apple for all that, Amazon was selling DRM free since 2007, and was larger than apple in digital mp3 sales until later in 2008, despite not having Apple's hardware leverage.
There are most assuredly cases where a database isn't a requirement, that point is well taken. Just a couple clarifications:
With regard to the validation, I meant data entry. if a person modifies a flat file in a text editor they can enter whatever they want. At least in a database they are constrained by types.
When I said backup, I meant that guy who's supposed to be able to do your job when you're gone, I should have clarified. :) Also, I modify data directly in databases all the time. Most DB clients make it quite easy, and at the very worst a SQL query.
I think some of your trepidation may come from the developer overhead involved traditionally in interfacing with databases. Modern tools make it nigh on effortless to create a database table and access it as an object in code, far less trouble than writing parsers or dealing with files.
Flat files are almost always the wrong solution. Here is why:
A big reason your school was so much cheaper is that it was likely subsidized more. If you were eligible (as many folks were), pell grant would pay 80% of your tuition in 1975, scaling back to 40% by the year 2000. There has been a large shift from grants to loans from the federal government, and it's become even worse at the state level as education funding has taken quite a hit since the recession. Do you really think anyone is getting rich at our public universities? (the debacle with the for-profit colleges like university of phoenix screwing the goverment out of money notwithstanding) The average salary for a faculty is 80k nationally. I hear of unionized garbage men making more than that.
Some kids start playing football at age 5 in pop warner, so lets not pretend this is a hazard only borne by adults making informed choices. I played football in middle school/high school, and I bet I suffered some brain injury because of it. I wouldn't say i was adequately informed then of the potential risks, and I likely would have made a poor decision even if I were informed. My parents, on the other hand, would probably have loved to know the true risks of a sport as their baby boy was out there knocking heads. Many of us were lead to believe that modern helmets all but alleviated the risk of brain injury.
Honestly, kids and young adults are being pressured by parents, coaches, peers into playing a sport that is now known to cause brain damage, and Slashdot can do nothing but complain about professional athletes pay and make fun of dumb jocks.
Some of the revolutionary ethics are laudable, I'll concede. Trying to separate out the moral teachings from all of the future predicting, miracles, and lofty pontificating is a futile exercise, so I'd defend Lewis in that regard. If one did separate out only those teachings, there isn't much novel he put forward, and of those some were downright sinister: thought crime- Matthew 5:27-28, non-resistance to evil, vicarious redemption/scapegoating.
I think the golden rule, which per-dates Jesus significantly, easily provides the moral justification for accommodation of the weak. If Christianity pursued this idea vigorously certainly they deserve credit, but I don't think they earned moral preeminence for it.
I have to say I'm less a fan of those ethics. No through for the morrow is no way for a person to live that isn't sure of an afterlife. Heaping the sins of one upon another is not moral, and forgiveness without accountability isn't a sustainable model for behavior. I think CS Lewis summed it up pretty well in Mere Christianity:
Agreed, I'm still hoping it's a joke.
I think we can all see how preventing the flow of information to a worker about how much s/he is worth is good for their employer. The free market can be a real bitch sometimes! This hardly seems like a reason such collusion should be allowed. As an aside, if you can't compete on money, how about more time off, better working conditions, more flexible schedules. It doesn't always have to be how much green is in the pa$ture, though that's certainly a good starting point.
That's a far cry from a rebuttal. Of course, there would be repercussions of drastic actions on the part of a president doing something so radical (if, in fact, it was done in a such a radical way). Worse repercussions than the blow back from our continued meddling? It's not possible to say, or at least, I've not heard anyone give any meaningful analysis of the prospect. Only gloom and doom, the only way forward is our continued global interference. If there was any remnant of compromise left in the government this would be a perfect opportunity for a helping of that, somewhere between Ron Paul and our war hawks. As it stands, he is the only one standing up on the other side (with Kucinich, of course).
Certainly we cannot prove everything, but to bring the argument full circle, if your belief set requires abject credulity it's not justifiable to put that on equal footing with a skeptical point of view with outliers on both sides.
Fair enough, it may too broad a stroke to paint it as a contrast between Abrahamic and atheistic points of view, but they do comprise something close to 70% of the population combined, and in the context of the GP arguing with someone going door to door proselytizing seemed a reasonable assumption. With regard to the holy books, whether one believes it is the inerrant word of God or the inspired word of God seems to be of little practical consequence when it is used to construct a belief set that includes unproven miracles as guiding principles.
I truly do appreciate your skepticism about the limits of understanding, that is well advised. However:
It isn't taught to most religious people as a dogma, either.
You must know you're wrong about this. Faith is placed above reason in the dogma of all monotheistic religions, and there is no better proof than each claims their their holy book is the word of God. And how does each know that it's the word of God? Faith, Trust. I would love to see someone reason a monotheistic religious world view in the absence of its holy book.
This false equivalence is not helpful, with regard to faith. "Trust not thy own understanding" isn't taught to atheists as a dogma, and it is evident
I don't feel like the Palin comment was much of a stretch. The interview, if I recall correctly, was asking about her experience dealing with foreign nations, and she cites proximity to Russia as though that's some sort of qualifier. The point was never that she could or could not see Russia nor the specifics of how she stated it, the point (and the joke) is more that it's a ridiculous way to claim you have foreign policy experience.