No, I look for people who have a zest for life, but just happen to get some of their thrill from the act of creation inherent in designing and building working systems.
Wow, all that from a personal preference for programmers who actually like programming instead of considering it yet another way to avoid manual labor. You're quite bright, I'm sure.
See, you just don't get it. I ENJOY programming. I like it that I can earn money at it, but I'd do it even if I weren't being paid for it. For some of us, coding is a recreational activity.
It doesn't make you bad at your job, but it means that you are doing it for a paycheck. That'll always fall short of those people who code because they enjoy making the computers dance.
Generally, when looking for software engineers or system administrators, I try to find the people who enjoy what they do enough that they don't mind doing it when they get off of work. If you haven't written anything interesting outside of work, and you're completely uninterested in doing so, then this automatically drops you down a notch among those that I would hire.
Beyond that, though, you can't show prospective employers things that you've done for other companies unless you own the source code. On the other hand, the company you wrote it for absolutely cannot bar you from producing derivative works from memory. That would result in devaluating your skill set, which is considered an unconscionable harm by our courts. Write something similar but less ambitious at home and present that instead.
Family Friendly hasn't done crap for shareholders, IMHO.
Yea, man. I'm right with you. I mean, look what happened to all those poor plantation owners when emancipation came around. There's just no justice in this world.
I think you're misinterpreting the concept of the singularity. What we hit there is a point where things will change so drastically and quickly that we are currently completely unable to predict what might happen afterwards. Think of it as an immense chaos injection. We really don't know what will happen afterwards.
The primary things influencing the outcome are our current state of mind. Considering the drive humans have to prove themselves superior by wiping out anyone even slightly different than themselves, the most probable outcome that I see is the complete subjugation of the human race by machines, with the exception of the genetic pattern of the person who initiated the singularity. Yes, I live in a dark world.
I'm an extremely experienced programmer with more than a passing interest in how human brains are set up. What the good doctor says about brains being designed by hackers is pretty accurate, but he misinterprets the description.
"God" (and I presume he means Einstein's God here) isn't the hacker that creates the human brain, the human behind the wheel is. We have varying genetic predispositions, but even after initial conditions are set, our brains develop differently based on our experiences. It's well known that musical instruction early in life will adjust how much of your gray matter is dedicated to mathematics, and this is pretty much true about all of our faculties.
Put another way, our brains work out the rules one step at a time, similar to your typical basement hacker. It doesn't have access to things like "best practices" or "design patterns", and so it results in about 100 billion cells of spaghetti code.
This doesn't mean that it isn't reverse-engineerable, but it does mean that results from reverse engineering one brain won't be 100% applicable to other brains. This means that we'll have to have some pretty smart automated systems to help us figure out how any one brain is wired.
In Kurzweil's defense, even researchers in these fields tend to fall into the same mental trap, that of "we can't do it now, so we won't be able to do it any time soon." These are the days where we're constantly proving that adage wrong.
on reflection I then think of the "V for Vendetta" movie and I remember that it is possible to make a damn good film out of a graphic novel without following it exactly. I know "Sin City" is more or less a scene for scene clone of the book, likewise "300" - but it does not have to be like that. Vendetta showed us that. I'm fine with both of these, but I think that many of us will agree that Watchmen is something special beyond any other graphic novel. Just like the greatest of songs out there aren't generally improved by interpretation, I can't help but feel that too much interpretation can only lessen the result.
I'm glad to see that the first re-creation of the novel is attempting to recreate it as close to the intention as possible. I would also be happy if, in the future, someone took it as inspiration to create interpretations, but I really want to see the graphic novel itself on screen first.
You use this word "liberal" as if it were a bad thing. Have you actually looked up the meaning of the word, or did you just conveniently file it under "see: Evil" and pat yourself on the head for not having a speck of it in your upbringing?
I'm certain that free-floating carbon nanotubes inhaled are a problem. They might even be a serious skin irritant, and that should be considered. Comparing it to the hazards of asbestos, however, doesn't really fly, and here's why.
Asbestos is a fiber that is most dangerous when used in insulation or as part of an ablative surface like a brake pad. In the first case, it is specifically being manufactured into a loosely bound form so that it maximizes the number of small air pockets in between. In the second case, it is constantly being worn away by its designed use, resulting in small particles of it completely covering every surface near it.
Carbon nanotubes are being used for their structural strength or conductivity. Their value is derived largely from how tightly it can stay bound to the rest of the structure that it is part of. As a result, there are no imaginable use cases where more than negligible free-floating nanotubes would exist in an environment.
This is not to say that this isn't useful information. Although a USE case for nanotubes doesn't exist, there are definitely cases where conditions do exist for the particles to become airborne. Any time you use a subtractive process (buzz saws, lasers, water cutters, whatever) to shape nanotubes then you'll get particulates that need to be managed. Similarly, we should know better than to use nanotubes to build any type of strike plate. They probably wouldn't handle that kind of stress well anyway. Their MIGHT be a danger in high-vibration environments, but generally a thin coating would deal with that.
In any case, it's useful that a profit-centric organization will be informed that NOT taking precautions can be more expensive than the precautions, and this is always valuable. They can't say "but we didn't know!"
If you actually read the rest of my post, you'll notice that we don't actually disagree on much. I agree that we tend to think of our schools as little more than daycare, and our juvenile detention system is just a down-scaled prison system with the same ineffectual educational system dropped into them. This, however, isn't part of the discussion at hand.
I completely agree with you there. The problem is when parents start applying discipline to compensate for a universe that doesn't adequately punish people, especially when the parents feel that the universe should be punishing people for things that aren't intrinsically harmful.
Replace "parents" with "government" til your heart's content.
Children are a somewhat different case because, in theory, they don't have all of the information that they need to make effective decisions about their future.
Neither do adults. You make a nihilist argument. By your statement, there is no difference between children and adults because nobody ever has all of the information.
While this is true in an absolute sense, we have a cultural concept of "adulthood", which is the state where if a person doesn't have all of the answers that they need, it is no longer their guardian's problem to lead him or her to those answers.
There is some reasonable point between infancy and majority at which each individual can be expected to reach that point, but we arbitrarily call 18 the age for most things, and 21 the age for alcohol (to avoid a pile of knocked-up 19 year olds, I guess).
So until the kids hit said majority, it is remains the responsibility of the person's guardians to help guide their actions.
I probably shouldn't have had to explain all of this to you should I?
I think that our AC poster is defining slackers as screw-ups, and Hognoxious isn't. I've made the point of "screw-up" being suggestive before, and here's an excellent example.
Let's take pot-smokers (the archetype/stereotype, not any specific ones). The reason given for marijuana being illegal is that it makes people a-motivational. This means that they would probably languish at dead-end jobs instead of actually "making something of themselves". Our laws are shaped on the premise that languishing at a dead-end job is being enough of a screw-up that we need to incarcerate something like 1% of our population over it.
So please be more specific when talking about this kind of thing.
Smidge, the problem with your statement is that it is a very, very subjective thing to define "screw-up". We might be able to agree here that turning to a life of crime is "screwing up", but there are laws currently on the books that suggest that staying at a minimum wage job for your entire life is something that we should keep an eye out for and prosecute when we discover it.
In short, saying that it's the government's job to prevent people from being screw-ups is giving legislators permission to prosecute anyone that they personally don't approve of.
Not the least bit absurd. Every person has the right to pursue their own happiness. If someone wants to be a complete screw-up, then it is a requirement of a free society that we let them be a screw-up.
Children are a somewhat different case because, in theory, they don't have all of the information that they need to make effective decisions about their future. Unfortunately, physical enforcement of what you think they should be doing isn't going to improve them, it's just going to let them know that they need to be trickier if they're going to avoid an oppressive state.
For children you have three paths. The first is to help them realize that cooperating with those around them and being productive is the most effective long-term strategy for pursuing their happiness. The second is to convince them that the entire world is a bunch of screw-ups that are only vaguely kept in order through threat of violence. The third is to let them screw up and take their lumps. Of the three, the second is actually the one most likely to result in violent, oppressive, and harmful adults.
It would be fun to calculate the amount of nuclear reaction mass it would take to make the entire moon accelerate at the 10g's or so it would take to press everyone to the floor without killing them, like it did in the first episode. I can presume, though, that it would be more likely to split the moon into pieces and rain death down upon the earth than accelerate it all in one piece, even if the dumps were spread evenly across a large area. But, barring that, the dumps would theoretically have to be centered in just the right place on the far side of the moon (on the equator, probably about 15 degrees forward of directly opposite the Earth.
Orbital dynamics is just momentum. I'm also going to leave it up to finer math wizzes than I to figure out how long it would take to decelerate from 1km/s at 10g's, but I'm betting that it's a lot less than the time it would take to get it to cross the 379,000 or so kilometers between here and there. Even if it were to miss the Earth by a wide margin, however, it would still result in extinction level catastrophes, and probably throw the Earth far out of its normal orbit. Fun!
So in a world filled with preposterous assumptions, it COULD happen *grin*. Nobody even suggested the guys who wrote Space 1999 had any grasp of science.
I'm glad to hear that this is supposed to be tongue in cheek. I'd hate to think that they were propagating the "dark side of the moon" myth from Space 1999 accidentally. Or maybe it's a reference to the Pink Floyd album?
I remember the original commentary about Space 1999 that there is no dark side of the moon. There's a far side of the moon, but if nuclear fuel dumps exploded there it would drive the moon straight at the earth.
I'm in agreement with the parent post. Highlighting every other line doesn't actually produce much difference between the highlighted lines and the unhighlighted ones. There's a minor difference between the two, and you can double check to the front of the line that you're looking at a line of the right color, but the regular spacing between the two actually eliminates the ability to use the striping as a horizontal guide for the eye.
Shading in every third line actually provides the eye a stronger guideline. In the description of the study, they don't test that. I think that's a tremendous oversight on their part. It really seems like they did the study to prove a point.
This has got to be the sparsest review I've seen for any product. WTF? The specs say that it has a USB port and speaker/mic jacks, but did we get a picture of them? Did they even mention them? Nope, I had to guess from the picture of the connectors. The most useful piece of information was the user comments that told us about the two USB jacks and the flimsy hand rest. What, pray tell, was the point of the four images of the logo on (what is that anyway? a bunch of mouse pads?). Really, this has got to be one of the worst hardware reviews I've seen in a long time. And what's with the out-of-focus shots of the mouse? Dudes, have a little professionalism, ok?
Regarding the keyboard, it looks really cool and definitely sets off my gamer-gear radar. Unfortunately I can't imagine that it's worth three other keyboards. I don't even know what a "half-press" would be used for, so I'm not sure why it's valuable. The weight sounds good if you're in the habit of doing the kind of gaming that slides your keyboard around on your desktop, but I've never found that to be a problem.
Really, though, I think the stupid review totally put me off of the product.
Oh, I didn't forget those layers, I just went straight to the bottom one. Tectonic shifts can't really be modeled on biology, nor can our current computers or even architecture. I'm talking about the underlying computing platform that our entire reality runs on, not just our individual biological processes.
Despite all of its jedi-like phrasing and endings based on what's needed to make an action flick popular, there were a few valid conundrums presented by the Matrix. One was the blue pill vs. red pill choice that all of us have to make on a daily basis. Do we sit back in our comfortable job and comfortable house, or do we engage ourselves with the world, try to understand what's out there, and actually try to make a difference? This basic difference in humans has also been typified as Type-A vs. Type-B personalities, and has fascinated lots of people over the ages.
Another one is the idea that we live in a simulation. This is entirely true. The simulation that we live in is run on the hardware of quantum physics instead of silicon engravings, but the process is virtually identical. Of course, this completely violates the description of the term "simulation", but who's to say that we aren't a simulation of someone else's reality run on a higher order platform?
The REAL complaint is that they don't really say anything new to them. They bring them to the attention of a much broader audience. The majority of the audience will just say "ooo, pretty" and get on with their search for the next sparkley, but a few of them will use it as a reason to look deeper into the works of other philosophers, or even as a basis for important realizations about how to live their lives.
I agree that it probably isn't worth a damn to you, but to the philosophically impoverished it can be more valuable than diamonds.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I look for people who have a zest for life, but just happen to get some of their thrill from the act of creation inherent in designing and building working systems.
Wow, all that from a personal preference for programmers who actually like programming instead of considering it yet another way to avoid manual labor. You're quite bright, I'm sure.
See, you just don't get it. I ENJOY programming. I like it that I can earn money at it, but I'd do it even if I weren't being paid for it. For some of us, coding is a recreational activity.
It doesn't make you bad at your job, but it means that you are doing it for a paycheck. That'll always fall short of those people who code because they enjoy making the computers dance.
Generally, when looking for software engineers or system administrators, I try to find the people who enjoy what they do enough that they don't mind doing it when they get off of work. If you haven't written anything interesting outside of work, and you're completely uninterested in doing so, then this automatically drops you down a notch among those that I would hire.
Beyond that, though, you can't show prospective employers things that you've done for other companies unless you own the source code. On the other hand, the company you wrote it for absolutely cannot bar you from producing derivative works from memory. That would result in devaluating your skill set, which is considered an unconscionable harm by our courts. Write something similar but less ambitious at home and present that instead.
A few suggestions:
Fractals are ALWAYS cool. Especially the Mandelbrot set.
Maps of the internet are readily available, and if you can line several of them up they can be very educational.
Find and print out a high resolution map of the concepts in Alice in Wonderland. (extra credit, harder to find)
Have someone scan in the back of a circuit board, then blow it up to poster size. It just plain looks cool.
Family Friendly hasn't done crap for shareholders, IMHO.
Yea, man. I'm right with you. I mean, look what happened to all those poor plantation owners when emancipation came around. There's just no justice in this world.
I think you're misinterpreting the concept of the singularity. What we hit there is a point where things will change so drastically and quickly that we are currently completely unable to predict what might happen afterwards. Think of it as an immense chaos injection. We really don't know what will happen afterwards.
The primary things influencing the outcome are our current state of mind. Considering the drive humans have to prove themselves superior by wiping out anyone even slightly different than themselves, the most probable outcome that I see is the complete subjugation of the human race by machines, with the exception of the genetic pattern of the person who initiated the singularity. Yes, I live in a dark world.
I'm an extremely experienced programmer with more than a passing interest in how human brains are set up. What the good doctor says about brains being designed by hackers is pretty accurate, but he misinterprets the description.
"God" (and I presume he means Einstein's God here) isn't the hacker that creates the human brain, the human behind the wheel is. We have varying genetic predispositions, but even after initial conditions are set, our brains develop differently based on our experiences. It's well known that musical instruction early in life will adjust how much of your gray matter is dedicated to mathematics, and this is pretty much true about all of our faculties.
Put another way, our brains work out the rules one step at a time, similar to your typical basement hacker. It doesn't have access to things like "best practices" or "design patterns", and so it results in about 100 billion cells of spaghetti code.
This doesn't mean that it isn't reverse-engineerable, but it does mean that results from reverse engineering one brain won't be 100% applicable to other brains. This means that we'll have to have some pretty smart automated systems to help us figure out how any one brain is wired.
In Kurzweil's defense, even researchers in these fields tend to fall into the same mental trap, that of "we can't do it now, so we won't be able to do it any time soon." These are the days where we're constantly proving that adage wrong.
I'm glad to see that the first re-creation of the novel is attempting to recreate it as close to the intention as possible. I would also be happy if, in the future, someone took it as inspiration to create interpretations, but I really want to see the graphic novel itself on screen first.
You use this word "liberal" as if it were a bad thing. Have you actually looked up the meaning of the word, or did you just conveniently file it under "see: Evil" and pat yourself on the head for not having a speck of it in your upbringing?
I'm certain that free-floating carbon nanotubes inhaled are a problem. They might even be a serious skin irritant, and that should be considered. Comparing it to the hazards of asbestos, however, doesn't really fly, and here's why.
Asbestos is a fiber that is most dangerous when used in insulation or as part of an ablative surface like a brake pad. In the first case, it is specifically being manufactured into a loosely bound form so that it maximizes the number of small air pockets in between. In the second case, it is constantly being worn away by its designed use, resulting in small particles of it completely covering every surface near it.
Carbon nanotubes are being used for their structural strength or conductivity. Their value is derived largely from how tightly it can stay bound to the rest of the structure that it is part of. As a result, there are no imaginable use cases where more than negligible free-floating nanotubes would exist in an environment.
This is not to say that this isn't useful information. Although a USE case for nanotubes doesn't exist, there are definitely cases where conditions do exist for the particles to become airborne. Any time you use a subtractive process (buzz saws, lasers, water cutters, whatever) to shape nanotubes then you'll get particulates that need to be managed. Similarly, we should know better than to use nanotubes to build any type of strike plate. They probably wouldn't handle that kind of stress well anyway. Their MIGHT be a danger in high-vibration environments, but generally a thin coating would deal with that.
In any case, it's useful that a profit-centric organization will be informed that NOT taking precautions can be more expensive than the precautions, and this is always valuable. They can't say "but we didn't know!"
The only problem I see with this statement is that the poster felt it necessary to restrict the scope to the state of Illinois. *grin*
If you actually read the rest of my post, you'll notice that we don't actually disagree on much. I agree that we tend to think of our schools as little more than daycare, and our juvenile detention system is just a down-scaled prison system with the same ineffectual educational system dropped into them. This, however, isn't part of the discussion at hand.
I completely agree with you there. The problem is when parents start applying discipline to compensate for a universe that doesn't adequately punish people, especially when the parents feel that the universe should be punishing people for things that aren't intrinsically harmful.
Replace "parents" with "government" til your heart's content.
Neither do adults. You make a nihilist argument. By your statement, there is no difference between children and adults because nobody ever has all of the information.
While this is true in an absolute sense, we have a cultural concept of "adulthood", which is the state where if a person doesn't have all of the answers that they need, it is no longer their guardian's problem to lead him or her to those answers.
There is some reasonable point between infancy and majority at which each individual can be expected to reach that point, but we arbitrarily call 18 the age for most things, and 21 the age for alcohol (to avoid a pile of knocked-up 19 year olds, I guess).
So until the kids hit said majority, it is remains the responsibility of the person's guardians to help guide their actions.
I probably shouldn't have had to explain all of this to you should I?
I think that our AC poster is defining slackers as screw-ups, and Hognoxious isn't. I've made the point of "screw-up" being suggestive before, and here's an excellent example.
Let's take pot-smokers (the archetype/stereotype, not any specific ones). The reason given for marijuana being illegal is that it makes people a-motivational. This means that they would probably languish at dead-end jobs instead of actually "making something of themselves". Our laws are shaped on the premise that languishing at a dead-end job is being enough of a screw-up that we need to incarcerate something like 1% of our population over it.
So please be more specific when talking about this kind of thing.
I'll side with the Anonymous Coward on this one. Stating that it's an adage doesn't relieve you from demonstrating that it has some validity.
Smidge, the problem with your statement is that it is a very, very subjective thing to define "screw-up". We might be able to agree here that turning to a life of crime is "screwing up", but there are laws currently on the books that suggest that staying at a minimum wage job for your entire life is something that we should keep an eye out for and prosecute when we discover it.
In short, saying that it's the government's job to prevent people from being screw-ups is giving legislators permission to prosecute anyone that they personally don't approve of.
Not the least bit absurd. Every person has the right to pursue their own happiness. If someone wants to be a complete screw-up, then it is a requirement of a free society that we let them be a screw-up.
Children are a somewhat different case because, in theory, they don't have all of the information that they need to make effective decisions about their future. Unfortunately, physical enforcement of what you think they should be doing isn't going to improve them, it's just going to let them know that they need to be trickier if they're going to avoid an oppressive state.
For children you have three paths. The first is to help them realize that cooperating with those around them and being productive is the most effective long-term strategy for pursuing their happiness. The second is to convince them that the entire world is a bunch of screw-ups that are only vaguely kept in order through threat of violence. The third is to let them screw up and take their lumps. Of the three, the second is actually the one most likely to result in violent, oppressive, and harmful adults.
It would be fun to calculate the amount of nuclear reaction mass it would take to make the entire moon accelerate at the 10g's or so it would take to press everyone to the floor without killing them, like it did in the first episode. I can presume, though, that it would be more likely to split the moon into pieces and rain death down upon the earth than accelerate it all in one piece, even if the dumps were spread evenly across a large area. But, barring that, the dumps would theoretically have to be centered in just the right place on the far side of the moon (on the equator, probably about 15 degrees forward of directly opposite the Earth.
Orbital dynamics is just momentum. I'm also going to leave it up to finer math wizzes than I to figure out how long it would take to decelerate from 1km/s at 10g's, but I'm betting that it's a lot less than the time it would take to get it to cross the 379,000 or so kilometers between here and there. Even if it were to miss the Earth by a wide margin, however, it would still result in extinction level catastrophes, and probably throw the Earth far out of its normal orbit. Fun!
So in a world filled with preposterous assumptions, it COULD happen *grin*. Nobody even suggested the guys who wrote Space 1999 had any grasp of science.
I'm glad to hear that this is supposed to be tongue in cheek. I'd hate to think that they were propagating the "dark side of the moon" myth from Space 1999 accidentally. Or maybe it's a reference to the Pink Floyd album?
I remember the original commentary about Space 1999 that there is no dark side of the moon. There's a far side of the moon, but if nuclear fuel dumps exploded there it would drive the moon straight at the earth.
I'm in agreement with the parent post. Highlighting every other line doesn't actually produce much difference between the highlighted lines and the unhighlighted ones. There's a minor difference between the two, and you can double check to the front of the line that you're looking at a line of the right color, but the regular spacing between the two actually eliminates the ability to use the striping as a horizontal guide for the eye.
Shading in every third line actually provides the eye a stronger guideline. In the description of the study, they don't test that. I think that's a tremendous oversight on their part. It really seems like they did the study to prove a point.
This has got to be the sparsest review I've seen for any product. WTF? The specs say that it has a USB port and speaker/mic jacks, but did we get a picture of them? Did they even mention them? Nope, I had to guess from the picture of the connectors. The most useful piece of information was the user comments that told us about the two USB jacks and the flimsy hand rest. What, pray tell, was the point of the four images of the logo on (what is that anyway? a bunch of mouse pads?). Really, this has got to be one of the worst hardware reviews I've seen in a long time. And what's with the out-of-focus shots of the mouse? Dudes, have a little professionalism, ok?
Regarding the keyboard, it looks really cool and definitely sets off my gamer-gear radar. Unfortunately I can't imagine that it's worth three other keyboards. I don't even know what a "half-press" would be used for, so I'm not sure why it's valuable. The weight sounds good if you're in the habit of doing the kind of gaming that slides your keyboard around on your desktop, but I've never found that to be a problem.
Really, though, I think the stupid review totally put me off of the product.
Oh, I didn't forget those layers, I just went straight to the bottom one. Tectonic shifts can't really be modeled on biology, nor can our current computers or even architecture. I'm talking about the underlying computing platform that our entire reality runs on, not just our individual biological processes.
Despite all of its jedi-like phrasing and endings based on what's needed to make an action flick popular, there were a few valid conundrums presented by the Matrix. One was the blue pill vs. red pill choice that all of us have to make on a daily basis. Do we sit back in our comfortable job and comfortable house, or do we engage ourselves with the world, try to understand what's out there, and actually try to make a difference? This basic difference in humans has also been typified as Type-A vs. Type-B personalities, and has fascinated lots of people over the ages.
Another one is the idea that we live in a simulation. This is entirely true. The simulation that we live in is run on the hardware of quantum physics instead of silicon engravings, but the process is virtually identical. Of course, this completely violates the description of the term "simulation", but who's to say that we aren't a simulation of someone else's reality run on a higher order platform?
The REAL complaint is that they don't really say anything new to them. They bring them to the attention of a much broader audience. The majority of the audience will just say "ooo, pretty" and get on with their search for the next sparkley, but a few of them will use it as a reason to look deeper into the works of other philosophers, or even as a basis for important realizations about how to live their lives.
I agree that it probably isn't worth a damn to you, but to the philosophically impoverished it can be more valuable than diamonds.