The closest thing they may have to work experience is a summer internship. But students usually gain such opportunities (a) because their families, etc. have connections, and/or (b) because their families can afford to pay their living expenses while they spend the summer in unpaid work. Either way, that's relying on snobbery as a critical employment factor.
And choosing only candidates who were fortunate enough to attend a top school isn't?
Either you pay for it in high tuition or you pay for it in high taxes.;-)
If you can't afford $30K/year (and that is for the most prestigious of schools, most schools are much less than that), there are scholarships, grants, and loan programs to pay part or all of your tuition.
My complaint was about a type of student who doesn't learn to code real well, certainly much worse than myself. But they know what it takes to get good grades, including whining until the prof ups their grade, if necessary.
Like I said, in one of the posts, this particular person was a useless team member on a coding project. He was in over his head. But he knew how to get good grades, so he had the highest GPA in CompSci in the class, and got an award for, while I'm sitting there thinking, "But he doesn't know **$* about CompSci!"
I'm just saying all a high GPA proves is that you're good as a student. There are people who legitimately worked hard and deserved their high GPA. There are people who know how to play the system and get higher GPAs than they deserve. There are people who are smart and competant, but just aren't good at school (i.e. Einstein).
If you are an employer who hires based on GPA, you might be hiring the best, but you could also end up with a bullsh*tter and miss out on an Einstein.
slashing higher education in a state basically amounts to telling companies "Nope, you won't find an educated workforce HERE!". Companies that offer good jobs requiring educated people will simply move on.
High taxes are also a motivator for companies to look elsewhere to locate.
So instead of taxing everyone outright, they tax us in another way? What's the difference in the long run?
During these times where many people are collecting unemployment, or had to endure pay cuts, you want to punish them even more by taking more of their money? That would just encourage people to move to another state, further eroding the tax base.
They want to limit benefits, end pay raises (in fact they want to give us two pay decreases), end new positions, drop funding for students, etc.
Many of us had to endure this in the private sector for the past year or two. Why should people in the public sector be immune to downsizing and paycuts?
For us non-homeless, the Govt knows where we live, and work, and gives a SSN#, Maybe a drivers license, passport, etc.
Why should the homeless be any different? Maybe we'll get to find out how many there really are, learn how to REALLY help them, or even *shock* find out that some don't want to be helped.
I used the word "professional" only because I didn't know what else to use. Your description of yourself doesn't match the kind of student I was talking about, so I wasn't talking about you or other students like you.
By "professional", I meant they are really good at getting good grades, but lacking in other areas, and they don't want to learn anything that won't help their GPA, and they certainly wouldn't stay in school longer than necessary unless they were pursuing an advanced degree.
Ohh, they think they're so smart with their high GPAs. I bet they sit around all day talking about their GPAs. "Look at me, I have a 3.9 GPA, I'm soooo smart." Well I'll show them! I'll show the whole world!!! HAH! HAH! HAH!!!
Close, except it was BWAH HA HA!, not HAH! HAH! HAH!
I'm probably a bit bitter because I was stuck working on a major school project with one of these students, and I did about 90% of the work myself because he didn't understand it, and was also too busy with resume-building extracuricular activities. Then at graduation, HE wins the department award, all due to his GPA.
In my school, the people in CS who got the 3.75+ GPAs were the professional students, who were only willing to learn what would help them on the exams, but not anything useful. If it wasn't going to help them on their exam, or help them complete projects. they simply didn't want to know about it.
The "real" geeks who really cared about CS, didn't always score quite so high, but they had a passion for computers, and therefore learned things outside the curriculum and picked up more useful skills, tended to spend their free time "tinkering", and therefore their grades in other requisite Liberal Arts courses may have suffered a bit.
At one point, we had a professor for an "Operating Systems" course, who had lots of real world experience, and his teaching style was less academic and more focused more the real-world. This drove the "3.75+ professional students" crazy. They didn't know how to study for his course, because they actually had to think in ways they weren't used to. His course threatened their GPAs, so they protested. The "geeks" loved his course and got straight A's in it. Too bad the instructor was a bit of a push-over on grading, and ended up bending to the other students' demands, and ended pushing up their grades more than they deserved.
I'm not saying that everyone who has a high GPA is this kind of student. I'm just saying I wouldn't decide who to hire based on GPA alone, from on my personal experience.
This really has nothing to do with regulation or deregulation. This argument is simply put forward by those who trust government but not the private sector.
Electric deregulation is relatively new in the US, its been in effect for less than a decade, yet, as you can see these mass power outages have been happening long before then. The current outage was similar in many ways to the 1965 blackout, which occured well before the era of Deregulation.
The real problem is the condition of the power grid is invisible to most people, company execs and politicians. As long as the power flows, they don't see a problem, not until things go terribly wrong, like this, do they wake up and say, "Gee, I guess we need to fix this". But unless these outages become more frequent, the fixes probably won't go far enough.
The theory that deregulation is the culprit goes something like this: Companies neglect infrastructure investments and instead pad their bottom line. Well the electrical transmission system in the US is not truly deregulated. Do you get to choose who DELIVERS (as opposed to generates) your electricity? No? Didn't think so.
Look at the cell phone situation (which is not regulated), Verizon has seemingly invested more in its coverage than the other companies, which seems echoed in customer surveys, (and personally have never experienced signal loss with Verizon, unlike other big carriers). Verizon uses this for competative advantage (all those commercials with the "Can you hear me now, good" guy). Under the "deregulation" theory, Verizon would sell off that excess capacity, and use the money saved to boost earnings.
Contrast that to the US highway infrastructure, which is controlled the various governments. Because the government is behind it, the highways should be well designed and maintained, and not neglected, right? No, it's all politics. Highway funds aren't distributed based on need, but based on what Senators and Congresspeople have the most clout. Where I currently live, we have two very powerful Senators, Kennedy and Kerry. Massachusetts got billions for the Big Dig, a short highway segment through Boston.
Where I used to live, in PA, much needed road projects didn't get funded, or took many years, 30 years in one case, to get a four-mile extension to a highway built. But we didn't have very powerful politicians fighting for us there, either.
At this point the right is the ideologically driven party. The left is pragmatic. To give an example, Tony Blair is a left wing politician but he is certainly not driven by socialist ideology
Blair is a CENTRIST politician who belongs to a party with a leftist tradition. The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right. Just because Blair practices pragmatism doesn't mean left-wing/socialist ideology has gone away.
The solution to the energy crisis might be to drill in Alaska. However forcing the makers of SUVs to put fuel efficient engines in them seems a better solution. The oil in Alaska can only be drilled once and would only account for a years worth of gas burned by the inefficient SUVs. Building an efficient engine is not impossible, there are plenty of fuel efficient power plants. It is not the engine design, it is the engine manufacturing plants that the car makers refuse to modernise so they could built more modern designs.
If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.
well, bad design is linked to deregulation, since good design takes time, and deregulation wants money fast. It goes the same for taking good care of the existing installation : it costs money, and deregulation is about profit more than service.
This system was regulated from almost 100 years ago till maybe half a decade ago. How much time does good design take?
It's their site, they can run it however they want. In fact if they are advertising that you can meet "real" people on their site, then it's sort of their responsibility to purge fake profiles.
There are plenty of places to go on the net to pretend to be someone you are not, so any censorship argument just doesn't hold water.
Consider dogs. DNA tests show that all modern dogs evolved from wolves and were initially bred by cavemen who knew nothing about the genome. Yet the dogs were rapidly transformed into everything from toy poodles to Great Danes. If we begin to reshape our own genetic code, we could presumably achieve even greater variation among our human descendants.
What is he saying? That we'll engineer an entire generation of small humans named "fifi", who will serve no purpose except to walk around with stupid puffy haircuts?
If there was GNU Cash, would one be allowed or even encouraged to "counterfeit" it? Could we put our own picture on it instead of RMS, and still have it be legal tender? Could we cross out the 1, and make the note a 5, 10 or even 100?
A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows a sharp correlation between the use of marajuana, and disbelief of any evidence that marajuana is harmful.
"We believe that marajuana use destroys the part of the brain that causes people to think marajuana is bad for you, known as the Doobie lobe, in honor of Ken Doobie, who discovered it. We are not yet sure why it has this effect."
"Dude, it's great that you have all this research and citations, but where's your evidence, I don't see any.", remarked one pot user and legalization activist upon hearing of the report.
My wife had a friend in College who smoked pot all the time.
They went to see Jurassic Park when it came out, and the pot smoking friend (who wasn't stoned through the movie), said afterward, "I thought there was supposed to be a T-rex in that movie!"
Hey give her a break! She's only 26, so all she knows is what they taught her at UC Berkley, she'll need more time before she learns how the world really works.
While your interest in green energy is laudible, let's be honest here, these technologies are not as mature and cost effective as traditional power generation means.
As governor, will you insist on clean energy at the risk these never get built or are built in an insufficient number, or would you be willing to compromise and build fossil and/or nuclear plants to ensure that the 2001 fiasco which cost CA billions is never repeated?
Sure they can dispute it. They can file suit saying that you are in fact producing a product with their code.
In any case, I don't think your plan will provide any greater protection from a company intent on lieing than the GPL already does.
It's not about protection, it's about going on the offensive instead of being on the defensive.
You have to remember that your customers may not fully grasp the issues involved, but so far only SCO's been on the offensive, and your customers and prospects may be getting uneasy about Linux because of SCO's FUD.
So You can say things to your customers like "We have put nothing from the SCO codebase in our Linux product. (technically true statement even if there really is infringing code) If SCO claims otherwise then they need to show us where it is, because, frankly, we can't find it. The fact that they refuse to tell us where it is, well what does that tell you about their claim?".
All Linux distros need to do is place bright yellow sunburst stickers on their packaging claiming to be Guaranteed, 100% free of infringing SCO code, "for your piece of mind".
SCO really can't dispute that claim without offering proof, and once they offer proof, the distro can issue a patch removing the code from the system, assuming that there really is problem code
My patent for "a method of extortion utilizing secret software source code" has just been granted. I have evidence that you have been violating this patent all over the place. Of course I will be requiring payment for each individual that would be potentially affected by your extortion attempts, whether you successfully collected from them or not.
My lawyers will be contacting you shortly, but why not just keep this uncomplicated and pay me $500 for every individual who has ever used "Linux".
Thank You,
PS, if you need to see proof of my patent claim, you will of course be required to sign an NDA, standard procedure, you understand.
Because then the Linux community can remove the code and depending on which conspiracy you believe:
1) There goes SCO's future revenue stream
2) There goes MS's plan to destroy Linux
3) There was no infringing code (well maybe
main() { or something, nothing that can hold
up in court.)
Slashdot Mirror
The closest thing they may have to work experience is a summer internship. But students usually gain such opportunities (a) because their families, etc. have connections, and/or (b) because their families can afford to pay their living expenses while they spend the summer in unpaid work. Either way, that's relying on snobbery as a critical employment factor.
And choosing only candidates who were fortunate enough to attend a top school isn't?
Either you pay for it in high tuition or you pay for it in high taxes. ;-)
If you can't afford $30K/year (and that is for the most prestigious of schools, most schools are much less than that), there are scholarships, grants, and loan programs to pay part or all of your tuition.
You totally missed my point.
My complaint was about a type of student who doesn't learn to code real well, certainly much worse than myself. But they know what it takes to get good grades, including whining until the prof ups their grade, if necessary.
Like I said, in one of the posts, this particular person was a useless team member on a coding project. He was in over his head. But he knew how to get good grades, so he had the highest GPA in CompSci in the class, and got an award for, while I'm sitting there thinking, "But he doesn't know **$* about CompSci!"
I'm just saying all a high GPA proves is that you're good as a student. There are people who legitimately worked hard and deserved their high GPA. There are people who know how to play the system and get higher GPAs than they deserve. There are people who are smart and competant, but just aren't good at school (i.e. Einstein).
If you are an employer who hires based on GPA, you might be hiring the best, but you could also end up with a bullsh*tter and miss out on an Einstein.
High taxes are also a motivator for companies to look elsewhere to locate.
During these times where many people are collecting unemployment, or had to endure pay cuts, you want to punish them even more by taking more of their money? That would just encourage people to move to another state, further eroding the tax base.
They want to limit benefits, end pay raises (in fact they want to give us two pay decreases), end new positions, drop funding for students, etc.Many of us had to endure this in the private sector for the past year or two. Why should people in the public sector be immune to downsizing and paycuts?
Typical politician... comes out on both sides of important and contraversial issues.
For us non-homeless, the Govt knows where we live, and work, and gives a SSN#, Maybe a drivers license, passport, etc.
Why should the homeless be any different? Maybe we'll get to find out how many there really are, learn how to REALLY help them, or even *shock* find out that some don't want to be helped.
I used the word "professional" only because I didn't know what else to use. Your description of yourself doesn't match the kind of student I was talking about, so I wasn't talking about you or other students like you.
By "professional", I meant they are really good at getting good grades, but lacking in other areas, and they don't want to learn anything that won't help their GPA, and they certainly wouldn't stay in school longer than necessary unless they were pursuing an advanced degree.
Close, except it was BWAH HA HA!, not HAH! HAH! HAH!
I'm probably a bit bitter because I was stuck working on a major school project with one of these students, and I did about 90% of the work myself because he didn't understand it, and was also too busy with resume-building extracuricular activities. Then at graduation, HE wins the department award, all due to his GPA.
In my school, the people in CS who got the 3.75+ GPAs were the professional students, who were only willing to learn what would help them on the exams, but not anything useful. If it wasn't going to help them on their exam, or help them complete projects. they simply didn't want to know about it.
The "real" geeks who really cared about CS, didn't always score quite so high, but they had a passion for computers, and therefore learned things outside the curriculum and picked up more useful skills, tended to spend their free time "tinkering", and therefore their grades in other requisite Liberal Arts courses may have suffered a bit.
At one point, we had a professor for an "Operating Systems" course, who had lots of real world experience, and his teaching style was less academic and more focused more the real-world. This drove the "3.75+ professional students" crazy. They didn't know how to study for his course, because they actually had to think in ways they weren't used to. His course threatened their GPAs, so they protested. The "geeks" loved his course and got straight A's in it. Too bad the instructor was a bit of a push-over on grading, and ended up bending to the other students' demands, and ended pushing up their grades more than they deserved.
I'm not saying that everyone who has a high GPA is this kind of student. I'm just saying I wouldn't decide who to hire based on GPA alone, from on my personal experience.
This really has nothing to do with regulation or deregulation. This argument is simply put forward by those who trust government but not the private sector.
Electric deregulation is relatively new in the US, its been in effect for less than a decade, yet, as you can see these mass power outages have been happening long before then. The current outage was similar in many ways to the 1965 blackout, which occured well before the era of Deregulation.
The real problem is the condition of the power grid is invisible to most people, company execs and politicians. As long as the power flows, they don't see a problem, not until things go terribly wrong, like this, do they wake up and say, "Gee, I guess we need to fix this". But unless these outages become more frequent, the fixes probably won't go far enough.
The theory that deregulation is the culprit goes something like this: Companies neglect infrastructure investments and instead pad their bottom line. Well the electrical transmission system in the US is not truly deregulated. Do you get to choose who DELIVERS (as opposed to generates) your electricity? No? Didn't think so.
Look at the cell phone situation (which is not regulated), Verizon has seemingly invested more in its coverage than the other companies, which seems echoed in customer surveys, (and personally have never experienced signal loss with Verizon, unlike other big carriers). Verizon uses this for competative advantage (all those commercials with the "Can you hear me now, good" guy). Under the "deregulation" theory, Verizon would sell off that excess capacity, and use the money saved to boost earnings.
Contrast that to the US highway infrastructure, which is controlled the various governments. Because the government is behind it, the highways should be well designed and maintained, and not neglected, right? No, it's all politics. Highway funds aren't distributed based on need, but based on what Senators and Congresspeople have the most clout. Where I currently live, we have two very powerful Senators, Kennedy and Kerry. Massachusetts got billions for the Big Dig, a short highway segment through Boston.
Where I used to live, in PA, much needed road projects didn't get funded, or took many years, 30 years in one case, to get a four-mile extension to a highway built. But we didn't have very powerful politicians fighting for us there, either.
Blair is a CENTRIST politician who belongs to a party with a leftist tradition. The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right. Just because Blair practices pragmatism doesn't mean left-wing/socialist ideology has gone away.
The solution to the energy crisis might be to drill in Alaska. However forcing the makers of SUVs to put fuel efficient engines in them seems a better solution. The oil in Alaska can only be drilled once and would only account for a years worth of gas burned by the inefficient SUVs. Building an efficient engine is not impossible, there are plenty of fuel efficient power plants. It is not the engine design, it is the engine manufacturing plants that the car makers refuse to modernise so they could built more modern designs.If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.
This system was regulated from almost 100 years ago till maybe half a decade ago. How much time does good design take?
It's their site, they can run it however they want. In fact if they are advertising that you can meet "real" people on their site, then it's sort of their responsibility to purge fake profiles.
There are plenty of places to go on the net to pretend to be someone you are not, so any censorship argument just doesn't hold water.
What is he saying? That we'll engineer an entire generation of small humans named "fifi", who will serve no purpose except to walk around with stupid puffy haircuts?
If there was GNU Cash, would one be allowed or even encouraged to "counterfeit" it? Could we put our own picture on it instead of RMS, and still have it be legal tender? Could we cross out the 1, and make the note a 5, 10 or even 100?
A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows a sharp correlation between the use of marajuana, and disbelief of any evidence that marajuana is harmful.
"We believe that marajuana use destroys the part of the brain that causes people to think marajuana is bad for you, known as the Doobie lobe, in honor of Ken Doobie, who discovered it. We are not yet sure why it has this effect."
"Dude, it's great that you have all this research and citations, but where's your evidence, I don't see any.", remarked one pot user and legalization activist upon hearing of the report.
My wife had a friend in College who smoked pot all the time.
They went to see Jurassic Park when it came out, and the pot smoking friend (who wasn't stoned through the movie), said afterward, "I thought there was supposed to be a T-rex in that movie!"
Hey give her a break! She's only 26, so all she knows is what they taught her at UC Berkley, she'll need more time before she learns how the world really works.
While your interest in green energy is laudible, let's be honest here, these technologies are not as mature and cost effective as traditional power generation means.
As governor, will you insist on clean energy at the risk these never get built or are built in an insufficient number, or would you be willing to compromise and build fossil and/or nuclear plants to ensure that the 2001 fiasco which cost CA billions is never repeated?
In any case, I don't think your plan will provide any greater protection from a company intent on lieing than the GPL already does.
It's not about protection, it's about going on the offensive instead of being on the defensive. You have to remember that your customers may not fully grasp the issues involved, but so far only SCO's been on the offensive, and your customers and prospects may be getting uneasy about Linux because of SCO's FUD.
So You can say things to your customers like "We have put nothing from the SCO codebase in our Linux product. (technically true statement even if there really is infringing code) If SCO claims otherwise then they need to show us where it is, because, frankly, we can't find it. The fact that they refuse to tell us where it is, well what does that tell you about their claim?".
All Linux distros need to do is place bright yellow sunburst stickers on their packaging claiming to be Guaranteed, 100% free of infringing SCO code, "for your piece of mind".
SCO really can't dispute that claim without offering proof, and once they offer proof, the distro can issue a patch removing the code from the system, assuming that there really is problem code
You forgot that they will need to do an Environment Impact Study to determine what ill effects a new set of jokes will have on the environment
I sent them this:
Dear SCO,
My patent for "a method of extortion utilizing secret software source code" has just been granted. I have evidence that you have been violating this patent all over the place. Of course I will be requiring payment for each individual that would be potentially affected by your extortion attempts, whether you successfully collected from them or not.
My lawyers will be contacting you shortly, but why not just keep this uncomplicated and pay me $500 for every individual who has ever used "Linux".
Thank You,
PS, if you need to see proof of my patent claim, you will of course be required to sign an NDA, standard procedure, you understand.
Because then the Linux community can remove the code and depending on which conspiracy you believe:
1) There goes SCO's future revenue stream
2) There goes MS's plan to destroy Linux
3) There was no infringing code (well maybe
main() { or something, nothing that can hold
up in court.)