And besides, if you read Genesis (the book, not the band), you know that all the problems in the world started from a woman getting too close to an Apple.
The goal of most DoD procurement is not to get the item needed to the place it's needed as quickly and cheaply as possible, but instead to ensure very large contracts to a very small number of "defense" contracting companies with political connections.
It's not that specifications and standards aren't important. Of course they are. But Microsoft is more than a bit disingenuous in pretending to advocate them when it has been so egregiously, perennially active in undermining them.
That's not quite true - Microsoft loves standards, so long as those standards include specs like "Do this like Windows 95", "Proprietary binary block", and stuff like that, so that nobody else could possibly completely implement those standards. That way, they can claim they're standards-compliant, and at the same time lock their customers in to their software universe.
Re:/. cannot math today it has the dumb
on
Girls Go Geek Again
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It's always had majority men, but 58-42 is very different from the roughly 80-20 split that it has now. It's sort of like the difference between pediatric medicine (currently about 55-45 in favor of women) and nursing (95-5 in favor of women).
In the cases where you have a gender in an extreme minority, you often get silly social reactions around them. For instance, male geeks who stay in all-male environments might not get used to treating women professionally rather than drooling over them or harassing them. Similarly, some female nurses (particularly older female nurses) have been known to mistreat male nurses because they think there is something wrong with the men.
Yes, I forgot to change "he's" to "his" at some point over the course of rewording the sentence. I realized that mistake somewhere in between clicking "Submit" and the post going up.
My apologies for any confusion that might have caused.
The Tea Party aren't Hobbits by any stretch of the imagination - hobbits are more like 1970's back-to-the-land hippie organic farmer types.
No, the Tea Party seems to be much more like the Easterlings, who's society has been thoroughly corrupted by promises of power regardless of the decency or lack thereof of the individual members. And Obama seems to be playing the role of Denethor, trying to hold back the tide but not really being able to do so and kinda ambiguous about where he's loyalties really lie.
That said, my biggest gripe about Paypal is their website
My biggest gripe with PayPal isn't their website, or their fees: My biggest gripe is that they behave like a hybrid between a bank and a payment processor without any legal limitations that are placed on either of them.
Actually, when you're talking about the entire US federal budget of $3,550 billion, the $25 billion or so going to the entire Department of Justice, including $2 billion to the DEA (source), is in fact an insubstantial amount of cash.
Ok, cutting out everything from that list, you've turned something like a $1.41 trillion deficit into a $1.39 trillion deficit. Somehow that doesn't seem like you've solved the problem.
Of course MS-DOS, or any other DOS-like "operating system" (it's really nothing more than a loader) is utter crap when measured by todays standards.
Thing was, it was crap even by the standards of its own day. There were exactly 2 things it had going for it: 1. It ran on the IBM PC, which was a halfway decent hardware platform in 1981. 2. It was compatible with CP/M, which meant it supported some of the more popular applications at the time, like WordStar and dBASE right out of the box.
Other than that, it had nothing whatsoever to make itself any better than its competitors.
If we keep spending at the rate we are, it'll be a much faster decline.
Only if we don't tax enough to cover the cost of the spending. Plenty of countries have governments that spend far more than the US, but they make up for it by taxing more. And I'm not talking about Third World countries, I'm talking about places like Canada, Germany, and the UK.
Another thing that I've noticed regularly in discussions of federal government budgets is that it's much easier to rail against "spending" than it is to pick out what would actually be cut. So what spending would you get rid of? Social Security and Medicare (which you probably have a family member collecting on right now)? The military? Food stamps? Unemployment insurance? Section 8 housing? Public schools for your kids? Environmental protection that keeps nearby businesses from making your home unlivable? OSHA or MSHA, which reduce dramatically your chance of death or injury on the job? Highways?
"Very complicated", referring of course to the process of determining whether your political leanings are threatening or not to the government in power.
Possibly, but you have to understand that "the government in power" in this case isn't Obama, or Bush, or Congress, but instead the TLAs and their massive and growing secret activities. It doesn't matter, for instance, that they've knowingly and repeatedly violated the law - both the Attorney General and the federal courts have said, in short, "Regardless of whether the agency broke the law, you can't talk about it in an open courtroom. Case dismissed."
I'm going to also assume they've acquired dirt on most of Congress as well as the President and most presidential candidates, as a way to prevent their funding from being taken.
You're trying to be silly, but that kind of information would be useful: - If I have a bunch of people's shopping lists, I'd be able to tell what sort of things were commonly eaten in that society. - Based on how many other people had those foods on the list, I'd likely be able to get an idea as to what's considered rare delicacies versus what's common food (e.g. caviar versus ground beef). - Especially combining that information with where the document was found, I'd have a good chance of linking menus to social classes. - Once I've got an idea of which social classes have these documents and which don't, I'd know how widespread literacy was in that society, whether there were only professional scribes or amateur writers as well, and maybe some sense of how integrated the scribes were with the rest of the society.
I mean, imagine you're an archaeologist from the year 3000 trying to figure out why this "pizza" stuff was so wildly popular in ancient New York. Suddenly the nutritional information on the back of a pepperoni wrapper is vitally important.
Depends what you mean by "pretty good". He spent a large percentage of his time on vacation in Texas, basically ignored National Intelligence Estimates about Al Qaida, and the only major legislation he pushed through before 9/11/2001 was the giant tax cut, mostly for the wealthy, that now has the budget in a serious hole. So if you like tax cuts on principle, you think he did pretty good. If you think the job of the president includes protecting the US from terrorist attack and responding appropriately if they are attacked, then he did a lousy job.
And then, as you noted, started not 1 but 2 wars that were basically unnecessary, accomplished exactly 1 of the stated goals after 10 years (for the record, longer than WWI and WWII combined), at enormous cost.
Actually, what you need is a political culture in your state that values integrity and good ideas over party loyalty. A great example of this is New Hampshire: Their Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, has been in office since 1976, throughout both Democratic and Republican governorships and legislatures, mostly because he's very good at his job and widely seen as valuing clean elections expressing the will of the voters.
Compare that to Ohio, where Secretary of State is often a very politicized position and where Ken Blackwell (the defendant) was doing everything he could to ensure that his party would win. These kinds of things were widely reported in newspapers: - Rejecting voter registrations from heavily Democratic areas because they were on the wrong paper stock. - Rejecting voter registrations from liberal political groups because they had, in order to comply with applicable laws, submitted all the registration forms they got, including ones from Mickey Mouse and the like. - Refusing to do anything at all about churches explicitly endorsing Republican candidates (if a religious body endorses a candidate, they are supposed to lose their tax-exempt status). - Putting fewer voting machines in precincts likely to vote Democrat than in precincts likely to vote Republican, so that Democratic voters had to wait for hours to vote while Republican voters took about 15-30 minutes.
The quote you're alluding to is by Donald Knuth, creator of the Holy Book of The Art of Computer Programming, as well as the Tex typesetter. His exact words were: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
No, Google succeeded because they did search with a far better algorithm than anything else out there at the time. It came into being several years after the first search engines, and was up against several established players, such as Yahoo. They also made one very smart marketing move, which is still with them today: The front page of Google was a simple search box, whereas the front page of their competitors was loaded with widgets and paid ads. In the days of 56k modems, that meant you could load Google faster and search faster.
Facebook, too, also was up against an established competitor in MySpace. They won out by providing a service that was (at the time) less bloated, more private, and less ad-driven than MySpace (and then proceeded to make it more bloated, less private, and more ad-driven, but that's another story).
Plenty of other companies have succeeded in marketplaces with established competitors - Ben and Jerry's, for instance, built up from practically nothing in a highly competitive market.
Luck makes a difference, no doubt: I was talking with another CS grad from my alma mater who had turned down a chance to be Google employee #5 because he was heading to a good job in computer graphics and didn't want to risk it all on some crazy start-up. He's done just fine for himself at Pixar, but one coin flip the other way and he might well have had a fortune.
Every single major corporation does dumb things all the time! Incompetence is rampant! That means, logically, if you want to create a major corporation, you need to cultivate a culture of incompetence and stupidity.
1. I assume you mean "in the last 30 years" for most of that, because literature, science, history, microeconomics, and geography have both had significant changes in the last 3 centuries.
2. Even if I give you that, all those fields have changed. I'll give a few examples in each field: * Classic literature: changes a lot based on what's considered "classic" - for instance, 30 years ago Toni Morrison would not have been considered classic, while today many would put her in that category. * Basic science: many of the older texts would teach that there are 9 planets in the solar system and 3 states of matter, and have an older understanding of biological taxonomy. * History: historians have dug up new information on a variety of topics ranging from pre-Columbus contact between the Americas and the rest of the world, Spanish settlements in Florida before the Jamestown colony was founded, revolts in Massachusetts that predate Lexington, the roles of African-Americans in the Revolutionary War, and revolts against plantation owners by cooperating slaves and poor white farmers. * Microeconomics: Behavioral economics has picked out a lot of cases where economic actors don't behave as Adam Smith suggests they ought to. Numerous researchers have looked into lots of cases where supply and demand curves aren't what standard microeconomics say they should be. * Geography: There have been way more than "a few map changes" - the USSR breakup, you have German reunification, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia breakups, several UK and US colonies gaining independence, and significant reshuffling in East Africa. And yes, this is grade school material - for instance, I had to memorize in 7th grade the names and capitals of all recognized countries in the world at the time. * Mathematics: There you're right that the subject hasn't changed very much. The teaching of the subject, however, has changed dramatically due to the widespread availability of graphing calculators.
"The British are coming!" found its way into American Nation, a fairly major textbook, as recently as 2003.
Basically, those myths (and plenty of others) are still very much out there. Historians have been pushing for a couple decades now to correct the problem, and more recent textbooks have gotten somewhat better at it (although they still have a long way to go). What actually happened in US history between 1600 and 1900 hasn't changed much in the last 3 decades, but our understanding of what happened and what it all means has most definitely changed.
Slashdot Mirror
And besides, if you read Genesis (the book, not the band), you know that all the problems in the world started from a woman getting too close to an Apple.
The goal of most DoD procurement is not to get the item needed to the place it's needed as quickly and cheaply as possible, but instead to ensure very large contracts to a very small number of "defense" contracting companies with political connections.
No, I haven't hugged my sysadmin, and I probably won't do so - something about not wanting to get multicolored greasy stains on my shirt.
It's not that specifications and standards aren't important. Of course they are. But Microsoft is more than a bit disingenuous in pretending to advocate them when it has been so egregiously, perennially active in undermining them.
That's not quite true - Microsoft loves standards, so long as those standards include specs like "Do this like Windows 95", "Proprietary binary block", and stuff like that, so that nobody else could possibly completely implement those standards. That way, they can claim they're standards-compliant, and at the same time lock their customers in to their software universe.
It's always had majority men, but 58-42 is very different from the roughly 80-20 split that it has now. It's sort of like the difference between pediatric medicine (currently about 55-45 in favor of women) and nursing (95-5 in favor of women).
In the cases where you have a gender in an extreme minority, you often get silly social reactions around them. For instance, male geeks who stay in all-male environments might not get used to treating women professionally rather than drooling over them or harassing them. Similarly, some female nurses (particularly older female nurses) have been known to mistreat male nurses because they think there is something wrong with the men.
Besides, any fan of Police Academy knows that the best audio gear in existence is Michael Winslow.
No, actually - Cheney is more like one of the Nazgul, a symptom, not the cause.
Yes, I forgot to change "he's" to "his" at some point over the course of rewording the sentence. I realized that mistake somewhere in between clicking "Submit" and the post going up.
My apologies for any confusion that might have caused.
The Tea Party aren't Hobbits by any stretch of the imagination - hobbits are more like 1970's back-to-the-land hippie organic farmer types.
No, the Tea Party seems to be much more like the Easterlings, who's society has been thoroughly corrupted by promises of power regardless of the decency or lack thereof of the individual members. And Obama seems to be playing the role of Denethor, trying to hold back the tide but not really being able to do so and kinda ambiguous about where he's loyalties really lie.
As a general rule, there's less BS in beef farming than there is in any form of public debate.
That said, my biggest gripe about Paypal is their website
My biggest gripe with PayPal isn't their website, or their fees: My biggest gripe is that they behave like a hybrid between a bank and a payment processor without any legal limitations that are placed on either of them.
Actually, when you're talking about the entire US federal budget of $3,550 billion, the $25 billion or so going to the entire Department of Justice, including $2 billion to the DEA (source), is in fact an insubstantial amount of cash.
Ok, cutting out everything from that list, you've turned something like a $1.41 trillion deficit into a $1.39 trillion deficit. Somehow that doesn't seem like you've solved the problem.
Of course MS-DOS, or any other DOS-like "operating system" (it's really nothing more than a loader) is utter crap when measured by todays standards.
Thing was, it was crap even by the standards of its own day. There were exactly 2 things it had going for it:
1. It ran on the IBM PC, which was a halfway decent hardware platform in 1981.
2. It was compatible with CP/M, which meant it supported some of the more popular applications at the time, like WordStar and dBASE right out of the box.
Other than that, it had nothing whatsoever to make itself any better than its competitors.
If we keep spending at the rate we are, it'll be a much faster decline.
Only if we don't tax enough to cover the cost of the spending. Plenty of countries have governments that spend far more than the US, but they make up for it by taxing more. And I'm not talking about Third World countries, I'm talking about places like Canada, Germany, and the UK.
Another thing that I've noticed regularly in discussions of federal government budgets is that it's much easier to rail against "spending" than it is to pick out what would actually be cut. So what spending would you get rid of? Social Security and Medicare (which you probably have a family member collecting on right now)? The military? Food stamps? Unemployment insurance? Section 8 housing? Public schools for your kids? Environmental protection that keeps nearby businesses from making your home unlivable? OSHA or MSHA, which reduce dramatically your chance of death or injury on the job? Highways?
"Very complicated", referring of course to the process of determining whether your political leanings are threatening or not to the government in power.
Possibly, but you have to understand that "the government in power" in this case isn't Obama, or Bush, or Congress, but instead the TLAs and their massive and growing secret activities. It doesn't matter, for instance, that they've knowingly and repeatedly violated the law - both the Attorney General and the federal courts have said, in short, "Regardless of whether the agency broke the law, you can't talk about it in an open courtroom. Case dismissed."
I'm going to also assume they've acquired dirt on most of Congress as well as the President and most presidential candidates, as a way to prevent their funding from being taken.
You're trying to be silly, but that kind of information would be useful:
- If I have a bunch of people's shopping lists, I'd be able to tell what sort of things were commonly eaten in that society.
- Based on how many other people had those foods on the list, I'd likely be able to get an idea as to what's considered rare delicacies versus what's common food (e.g. caviar versus ground beef).
- Especially combining that information with where the document was found, I'd have a good chance of linking menus to social classes.
- Once I've got an idea of which social classes have these documents and which don't, I'd know how widespread literacy was in that society, whether there were only professional scribes or amateur writers as well, and maybe some sense of how integrated the scribes were with the rest of the society.
I mean, imagine you're an archaeologist from the year 3000 trying to figure out why this "pizza" stuff was so wildly popular in ancient New York. Suddenly the nutritional information on the back of a pepperoni wrapper is vitally important.
Bush did pretty good until he started a war.
Depends what you mean by "pretty good". He spent a large percentage of his time on vacation in Texas, basically ignored National Intelligence Estimates about Al Qaida, and the only major legislation he pushed through before 9/11/2001 was the giant tax cut, mostly for the wealthy, that now has the budget in a serious hole. So if you like tax cuts on principle, you think he did pretty good. If you think the job of the president includes protecting the US from terrorist attack and responding appropriately if they are attacked, then he did a lousy job.
And then, as you noted, started not 1 but 2 wars that were basically unnecessary, accomplished exactly 1 of the stated goals after 10 years (for the record, longer than WWI and WWII combined), at enormous cost.
Actually, what you need is a political culture in your state that values integrity and good ideas over party loyalty. A great example of this is New Hampshire: Their Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, has been in office since 1976, throughout both Democratic and Republican governorships and legislatures, mostly because he's very good at his job and widely seen as valuing clean elections expressing the will of the voters.
Compare that to Ohio, where Secretary of State is often a very politicized position and where Ken Blackwell (the defendant) was doing everything he could to ensure that his party would win. These kinds of things were widely reported in newspapers:
- Rejecting voter registrations from heavily Democratic areas because they were on the wrong paper stock.
- Rejecting voter registrations from liberal political groups because they had, in order to comply with applicable laws, submitted all the registration forms they got, including ones from Mickey Mouse and the like.
- Refusing to do anything at all about churches explicitly endorsing Republican candidates (if a religious body endorses a candidate, they are supposed to lose their tax-exempt status).
- Putting fewer voting machines in precincts likely to vote Democrat than in precincts likely to vote Republican, so that Democratic voters had to wait for hours to vote while Republican voters took about 15-30 minutes.
The quote you're alluding to is by Donald Knuth, creator of the Holy Book of The Art of Computer Programming, as well as the Tex typesetter. His exact words were:
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
No, Google succeeded because they did search with a far better algorithm than anything else out there at the time. It came into being several years after the first search engines, and was up against several established players, such as Yahoo. They also made one very smart marketing move, which is still with them today: The front page of Google was a simple search box, whereas the front page of their competitors was loaded with widgets and paid ads. In the days of 56k modems, that meant you could load Google faster and search faster.
Facebook, too, also was up against an established competitor in MySpace. They won out by providing a service that was (at the time) less bloated, more private, and less ad-driven than MySpace (and then proceeded to make it more bloated, less private, and more ad-driven, but that's another story).
Plenty of other companies have succeeded in marketplaces with established competitors - Ben and Jerry's, for instance, built up from practically nothing in a highly competitive market.
Luck makes a difference, no doubt: I was talking with another CS grad from my alma mater who had turned down a chance to be Google employee #5 because he was heading to a good job in computer graphics and didn't want to risk it all on some crazy start-up. He's done just fine for himself at Pixar, but one coin flip the other way and he might well have had a fortune.
Every single major corporation does dumb things all the time! Incompetence is rampant! That means, logically, if you want to create a major corporation, you need to cultivate a culture of incompetence and stupidity.
1. I assume you mean "in the last 30 years" for most of that, because literature, science, history, microeconomics, and geography have both had significant changes in the last 3 centuries.
2. Even if I give you that, all those fields have changed. I'll give a few examples in each field:
* Classic literature: changes a lot based on what's considered "classic" - for instance, 30 years ago Toni Morrison would not have been considered classic, while today many would put her in that category.
* Basic science: many of the older texts would teach that there are 9 planets in the solar system and 3 states of matter, and have an older understanding of biological taxonomy.
* History: historians have dug up new information on a variety of topics ranging from pre-Columbus contact between the Americas and the rest of the world, Spanish settlements in Florida before the Jamestown colony was founded, revolts in Massachusetts that predate Lexington, the roles of African-Americans in the Revolutionary War, and revolts against plantation owners by cooperating slaves and poor white farmers.
* Microeconomics: Behavioral economics has picked out a lot of cases where economic actors don't behave as Adam Smith suggests they ought to. Numerous researchers have looked into lots of cases where supply and demand curves aren't what standard microeconomics say they should be.
* Geography: There have been way more than "a few map changes" - the USSR breakup, you have German reunification, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia breakups, several UK and US colonies gaining independence, and significant reshuffling in East Africa. And yes, this is grade school material - for instance, I had to memorize in 7th grade the names and capitals of all recognized countries in the world at the time.
* Mathematics: There you're right that the subject hasn't changed very much. The teaching of the subject, however, has changed dramatically due to the widespread availability of graphing calculators.
Columbus proving the world was round, in textbooks in 1983, other school materials in 1988, and probably lingering elsewhere:
http://americanvision.org/1216/christopher-columbus-flat-earth-myth-part-6/
The real kicker on that one is that even the Encyclopedia Brittanica had it wrong in 1966.
George Washington chopping down the cherry tree seems to be on teacher materials for Presidents Day right now:
http://www.apples4theteacher.com/holidays/presidents-day/george-washington/short-stories/the-cherry-tree.html
"The British are coming!" found its way into American Nation, a fairly major textbook, as recently as 2003.
Basically, those myths (and plenty of others) are still very much out there. Historians have been pushing for a couple decades now to correct the problem, and more recent textbooks have gotten somewhat better at it (although they still have a long way to go). What actually happened in US history between 1600 and 1900 hasn't changed much in the last 3 decades, but our understanding of what happened and what it all means has most definitely changed.
Yes, like we totally forgot about OJ Simpson.