That is great if dealing with internal reflections, but when it is diffusely scattering off of not highly polished windshield and any dirt and contamination on it, the light is effectively going straight through the glass in the same way anything outside being looked at is too.
You can either (a) not run into ducks or (b) live with it; it's not an important part of the windshield if your pilots can lean left and right, which means it's just a problem for drones, and we pretty much don't care about drones, since they are cheaper to produce than pilots.
I was involved in the genesis of no less than 5 major open source projects and 7 not so major. License is always a political thing. It has benefitted Samba, benefitted Linux less, Benefitted Hurd not at all, and benefitted Apache, OpenLDAP, and the BSD's to varying degrees.
If they wanted to displace Mach in Hurd, they would have GPLv3'ed it (or done a "GPLv2 or later thing) so RMS could play daddy. They didn't. They're not going to displace Linux, which is the poster boy of GPL through v2, and therefore of the GNU-maniffesto-before-ut-oh-service-requires-patent-licenses realization took place.
This pretty much is not going to mean anything, other than they get to play Pontius Pilate and wash their hand of an inconvenient project going nowhere fast, while looking like a good guy.
Using GPLv2 in this case accomplishes no political goals, other than the promary one, of holding the organization blameless for any further research.
Officials are investigating the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which is alleged to have aided Snowden in getting to and from secure facilities!
The typical problem is that it lights up the whole windshield with diffuse reflection that can be brighter than other sources at night, so while maybe less distracting than flashing light, the pilot would have to deal with random blackouts of their view.
Use a graded index of refraction through the canopy/windshield, and you get a distance adjusted Bessel angle, with almost perfect reflection of the light at an angle equal to the incidence angle vs. the surface normal as it hits the glass. There won't be any (significant) scattering for anything under 10's of watts of beam strength. This is exactly how we implement internal path reflectivity for multimode fiber, which also has to handle multiple laser wavelengths.
Alternately, just have one of the diffraction gratings be fixed, rather than photochormically induced (the little black dots get to be visible when you are being lased, in exchange for the internal reflection being eliminated, and a reduced cost of manufacture).
This is like 1980's optics, albeit with some early 2000's of nanocoating and photochemistry - either way, almost eerything needed to make the problem "not a problem" is over a decade old, technology-wise.
We can't force people to take meds, as a society we seem to have decided not to forcibly institutionalize crazy people either. So they become homeless, pretty much forever.
We can force meds on them, and historically, we did, until the Lanterman–Petris–Short Act passed in California and was signed into law by then governor Ronald Reagan.
Prior to that Act, which was intended to reduce the public mental health cost burden, we can, and did, enforce medication regimens on mentally ill persons.
It was a budgetary decision, which was then adopted by other states, as California started 5150/5250'ing the mentally ill, stabilizing them in the 3 days/14 days of the hold, and then giving them free bus tickets to elsewhere (generally other states; Boulder Colorado was a perennial favorite).
Photochromic windshield coating. Using an organic photochromic coating, the reaction time is on the order of nanoseconds.
They can paint short duration small back dots on the windshield of the plane, but not really do much else. Two coatings in perpendicular directions, with a separation angle window of about 1/2 the smallest wavelength you care about (which, with a band pass coating for visible light in the mix, means that it can be fixed at a pretty big distance), and the pilot won't even see black spots unless looking directly at the laser through the temporary perpendicularly organized difraction gratings.
It's my understanding that military aircraft already have laser protection due to an aircraft area denial weapons system I suggested back around 1976.
Alternative explanation: the system is near to capacity, and making it cost money is necessary to curb demand to the point where the system can (just about) cope. Which seems more likely than "Because I want to screw the homeless."
If it's profitable, then the system isn't near capacity until the busses are all separated by one bus length, and the number of passenger cars on BART and CalTrain exceeds the ability of a locomotive to pull them. Until that point, you just add more employees and more equipment and increase your profit, since your fixed administrative costs aren't going to go up linearly with the rest of the direct costs of providing the services (i.e. the ratio of HR people is not 1:1 with the number of station and transport transit people).
Also you will note that it's not a matter of actually "screwing the homeless" - the gentleman I talked to was not deterred, for example - I was merely giving them the benefit of the doubt for not running more service at a reduced or no cost, if it was a subsidy anyway.
Your argument is nearly the identical argument that they use to raise the fares and reduce routes.
It's also the same argument the University of California system uses for canceling classes "due to lack of interest", when they accept fewer students, and meanwhile there is documented demand for both to increase. If the primary income stream is tuition, then every additional student is more income, which is more ability to pay teachers and put on classes (presuming the money is not going to line someone's pockets). Otherwise, the enrollment limits are sufficient to limit enrollment, without increasing tuition and fees to keep people out. If you have a hard limit on enrollment, then it doesn't need to be self-limiting due to costs.
That means that if putting on classes and instructors and classroom space isn't cost-effective, the primary income isn't from costs, so increased costs are only designed to keep out poorer students in favor of richer students, so that rather than an egalitarian cross-section of society being accepted up to the limit cap -- and in theory, they'd be the most academically gifted people, regardless of their wealth or lack thereof -- we end up with poor people not getting an education and rich kids whose only measure of worth is the fact that their parents were wealthy getting one instead.
It's the same social engineering happening in both places.
The utility function of the marginal costs of a (not small) fare + inconvenience + timing + freedom of movement vs. the cost of owning a car is enough that most of us are effectively being paid not to take it in the first place. Being free would up ridership for people on the edge.
The whole idea that it's a profit center is pretty stupid, as all public transportation is subsidized anyway, and exists as nothing but a cost center to generate pension paying positions for government employees anyway.
The whole point of making it cost something - anything - is the same reason that health insurance plans require copays: to discourage use. For public transportation, the use they are attempting to discourage is that the homeless will ride around all night in order to avoid freezing to death, or because they have nowhere else to go.
Clue bat: the homeless use busses as public housing anyway, they just get their day out of the way first (I had a nice long conversation with a homeless person who does just that, getting on one of the bus routes that runs all night, and getting off near where he gets on the next morning). Just address your damn homelessness problem, instead of trying to pretend it doesn't exist, or making life (more) miserable for the homeless.
"...to encourage people to live in certain areas."
Then make those areas not suck. Don't (effectively) tax me and everyone else because they want to live somewhere that doesn't suck.
How is making people who can't afford to live some place that doesn't suck live in sucky areas going to make them suck less?
Unless what you really what to do is enforce economic stratification by forcing all the poor people to live in the undesirable areas, instead of damaging the delicate sensibilities of the more well off?
You realize that the employer match is not applied to the $17,500 annual limit on 401K contributions, I assume. (Not counting catch up contributions.)
There *is* a combined employee contribution + match limit of about $51,000.... however assuming you contribute the max $17,500 I think one would be hard pressed to find an employer that matches roughly 200% of an employees contributions (however they do exist) with no cap (not sure if that exists) to comprise the needed $33,500 to put you over the edge.
Nobody maxes their 401K; the IRS limits the employer contribution based on the lowest paid eligible employee, so unless everyone is makes huge salaries, it's impossible to max it anyway. The limits are set so that a magic, egalitarian company that might exist in fairyland some day could theoretically fund employee retirement, you know, if it weren't in business for profit.
So the game is not to max out the total 401K contribution, since it's never going to allow you to retire anyway, the game is to max out the extra money you get from the employer by participating in a 401K.
You actually want as little of your own money going into the 401K as possible (there are way better investment instruments than those available in a 401K), and as much of the employers as possible, because, hey, free money that doesn't get taxed as income.
Frankly, you aren't going to be at your employer for 40 years and retire at 65 any more, and that's all going to be rolled over into an IRA when you go on to the next job anyway. Meanwhile, until you do, that tax free extra money is compounding for you until that day comes around.
3) The stock market funds where you have designated for your 401K contributions goes up during the calendar year. The S&P 500 went up by 30 percent in 2013.
Of course, the market can go down too, but that happens relatively infrequently on a year-over-year basis.
This isn't why people are pissed. The change is intended to cause any 401K program to extract more money out of the employees pretax earnings and less money out of the company's matching contribution, so that the company pays out less in benefits.
It only works if the people they try to pull it on are too stupid to do basic math and/or are too stupid to do minimal financial preplanning. The people complaining are agreeing that they are too stupid. Or they are just complaining because "we fear change".
The 401K matching delay change only matters under to conditions:
(1) You aren't around for when the match happens, and it doesn't happen at severance ("the end of your tenure at the company").
That actually was not the case here.
(2) You are bad at simple math.
This is the case that the change counts upon to save the company money.
If you are bad at simple math, you can't work backwards from the maximum contribution amount to get to the exact amount of employee contribution that results in the highest possible employee contribution as a percentage of the total allowable contribution.
The rules change just tail-loads the employer match amount. The net effect is that if you contribute a specific amount per month, and the total of your contributions plus the employer match exceeds the allowable total yearly contributions, then the amount of contributions by you to the total goes up and the employer total contributions goes down.
Given that there's calculators for these amounts all over the web to 'maximize employer 401K contributions' (just google the phrase), anyone who doesn't have their per pay period contribution calculated out to the penny is leaving money on the table; the only difference is whether it's by overcontributing for one pay period, and leaving that amount on the table, or it's overcontributing on multiple pay periods, and potentially leaving it all on the table.
So with per-pay period contributions by the company, if you are a math dullard or too stupid to operate a web calculator, you leave a little bit on the table, and if you do the math, you leave only a few fractions of a cent on the table. With tail-loaded contributions, if you are a math dullard or too stupid to operate a web calculator, you leave potentially all of it on the table, and if you do the math, you leave only a few fractions of a cent on the table.
It's just one more of those places where, while you were bitching about never using algebra or percentages in your future life back in 7th grade, you should have been paying attention and learning math instead.
Personally, I have no problem with people who are bad at math paying more for things, just as I have no problem with them not getting the maximum sales commission they could possible get by pushing a client to purchase after the end of the month instead of before it, or them buying lottery tickets.
GCC moves too damn slow and doesn't include features that developers (and more importantly: the companies which pay developers) want. These days, that includes the changes between the GPLv2 and GPLv3 not being wanted by the people who pay the bills.
GCC was almost replaced by the EGCS fork in 1997, and it took two years before RMS finally gave up on the idea of having the ultimate editorial control over the language implementation, and "blessed" EGCS as the replacement for GCC. When he did that, he gave up on limiting the OSs that the compiler worked on, and limiting the inclusion of things like #pragma (which used to exec "nethack" because RMS didn't like it), and some of the language front ends that are now included, like g77, which RMS didn't want.
GCC is on the verge of being marginalized again by LLVM; all the sexy compiler work is happening in LLVM, all the bright young minds in the compiler world are going to LLVM because it's a lot easier to make a front end for a new language or a back end for a different processor or embedded controller or virtual machine. LLVM is the "go-to" compiler for academic projects involving compiler research.
It makes sense; GCC: 1984; +15 years = EGCS: 1999; +15 years = ????: 2014.
RMS' recent appeal *might* be able to attract a bunch of new ideologues to the GCC project, and have them forsake LLVM work, but more likely course and project requirements for a degree, and after that, an employer, probably mean that LLVM is going to remain the "go-to" compiler for the new blood.
The idea that GCC can leverage some of the new blood by making it easier for them to work with code in both contexts, rather than leaving GCC in the ashbin of history, is about the *only* way to give GCC the transfusion of new blood it's going to need to survive another 15 years.
It also couldn't hurt to expand the number of (or replace) members of the "GCC steering committee" so that GCC can get a little more forward momentum. You can get forward momentum one of two ways: (1) more specific impulse, or (2) take off the parking brake.
Jesus Christ, are you stupid? It is one of the more popular phones on the market, and there is a slim, albeit nonzero chance, that WP8 will actually become very popular very soon.
I can understand people having the occasional toke, even if I don't personally care for it, but I draw the line at people injecting stuff directly into their veins.
Last I heard Chinese was still a surviving written language.
How many programming languages do you know that use Chinese script?
Depends; how many keyboards do you own that have 30,000 keys?
Ideogrammatic languages are great for reading high information density content, but are really crappy when you want to do input processing; chording and composition sequences, such as Kanji hand, tend to be no more useful for input than Romaji or Katakana/Hirugana alphabetic/syllabic input. This is why it's been a holy grail for a while to get working voice input for Japanese, but the information density on audio input is generally worse than text input via keyboard (i.e. a good typist can do 120 WPM, but a good speaker can't spee 2 words per second).
Your decline to take on their project will probably have more positive effect for that company, in the long run, than your attempting to salvage it and shooting your foot off. They'll be forced to either make the existing employee work on it or will be forced to scrap it and ask hard questions of the existing employee in the process.
But the premise is a stupid contractor.
Remember from the OP?
"you don't check out the source code before you accept the assignment"
In case it's not clear from the above, I think we neither bear blame nor responsibility for inequalities in external societies. It's sad they exist, but short of sending in the U.S. military to bomb them into submission, thereby changing the minds of the people in charge by putting different people in charge, there's not a lot of convincing that can be done by rational reasoned argument.
So STEM jobs are worth, on average, and additional $18,900 per year. Looks like the people not going into STEM careers are picking the wrong major.
No, I think you misunderstand: Men in STEM fields make $18.900 more per year than wome in STEM fields.
This is not how you presented your statistic; the statistic presented was the average pay discrepancy, not the average pay specifically in STEM fields. The $18,900 number was calculated based on a 15% weighting for women in the field being subtracted from the remaining 85% weighting in the field for men, leaving a 70% weighting relative to the 100%, which gave a weighting for the absolute difference number, which was intially $27,000 (stated previously in the calculation). This assumes an equal distribution of salary discrepancy across technical and non-technical fields -- and assumption which was *generously* biased to support your argument, since in technical fields, things work, or they don't, and there's really no room for "works sometimes". I suspect that if the people from whom you obtained the statistics were not trying to bolster an argument, they would have divided them by job category. The bottom line is that people in STEM fields make more than people not in STEM fields, because not everyone is capable of STEM field work.
The 1991 vs. 2010 CS BA rates are largely irrelevant to your argument; they are not indicative of a systemic bias, unless you can show that there was no corresponding drop in enrollment rates, only in graduation rates. To me, it says that most student visas and H1-B's are granted to men from largely male-dominated societies which would engage in origin suppression of women (e.g. India, the far East). Of course, that statistic is left out, and we do not have numbers excluding non-resident students to remove any external social bias.
Finally, someone who graduated in 2010 or even 1991 should not expect to be making the same as someone who graduated in 1983, and has been working in the field for 30 years; time in grade matters, both to experience and the perception of your ability to do the job. It also matters in terms of the available career path, which in 1983 specifically meant you worked yourself "ip" into a management position, and if you did OK in that, you worked yourself up into a more general management position, rather than remaining technically focussed.
The statistics are that women make up nearly 52% of the general population.... Yet they make up an average of just 15% in STEM fields. On average, they make just $58,000 a year compared to $85,000 for men.
52% is close enough to half in the noise. Effectively, what you are saying with these two sentences is:
They awarded Obama the Peace Prize because he was personally spearheading negotiations with the Russians to reduce nuclear armament stockpiles.
Actually, the stated reason is:
The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to U.S. President Barack Obama for his "extraordinary efforts" to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.[1] The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award on October 9, 2009, citing Obama's promotion of nuclear nonproliferation[2] and a "new climate" in international relations fostered by Obama, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world>/blockquote>
The Megatons to Megawatts program was Thomas Neff's idea, and he should have gotten the Nobel for it, not Obama. The president at the time the agreement went into effect (1993) was Bill Clinton, coming out of 1992 disarmament 20 year agreement signed by George W. Bush. The only thing Obama did towards this was be president 20 years after the program ramped up under Clinton, and saw it shut down near the end of 2013.
Of course, Obama later "reached out" to the 97% Sunni Muslim population of Libya, continues to "reach out" to the people of Iraq, despite one of his campaign promises in the first term election to withdraw U.S. troops, and has drastically increased the "reaching out" in Afghanistan, "reached out" to predominantly Muslim (94.6%) Pakistan by violating their sovereignty with the mission to take out Bin Laden, not to mention the drone strikes which required violating their airspace. The Muslim prisoners at GITMO (which he promised to shut down) are currently being "reached out" to, and it looks like we are on the brink of "reaching out" to Iran.
The 26th Marine Expeditionary force was deployed to Jordan on the Jordan/Syria border (Syria is 90% Muslim), as reported on Jun 7, 2013, and a further "outreach" occurred with the U.S. deployment of "military advisors" to Somalia, according to a Jan 10, 2014 article in the Washington Post.
So does Snowden deserve the prize more than Obama: I'm going to say "yes".
Downloading maps doesn't hide your location. Your cell phone is still pinging off cell towers and can be triangulated fairly accurately by by the cell towers using only signal strength, which is information it already has in hand in order to handle tower handoffs. If you are talking about a non-communications enabled navigation device, then you might as well buy a Garmin or one of the others, which already have the maps data internally.
Slashdot Mirror
That is great if dealing with internal reflections, but when it is diffusely scattering off of not highly polished windshield and any dirt and contamination on it, the light is effectively going straight through the glass in the same way anything outside being looked at is too.
You can either (a) not run into ducks or (b) live with it; it's not an important part of the windshield if your pilots can lean left and right, which means it's just a problem for drones, and we pretty much don't care about drones, since they are cheaper to produce than pilots.
Unimpressed.
I was involved in the genesis of no less than 5 major open source projects and 7 not so major. License is always a political thing. It has benefitted Samba, benefitted Linux less, Benefitted Hurd not at all, and benefitted Apache, OpenLDAP, and the BSD's to varying degrees.
If they wanted to displace Mach in Hurd, they would have GPLv3'ed it (or done a "GPLv2 or later thing) so RMS could play daddy. They didn't. They're not going to displace Linux, which is the poster boy of GPL through v2, and therefore of the GNU-maniffesto-before-ut-oh-service-requires-patent-licenses realization took place.
This pretty much is not going to mean anything, other than they get to play Pontius Pilate and wash their hand of an inconvenient project going nowhere fast, while looking like a good guy.
Using GPLv2 in this case accomplishes no political goals, other than the promary one, of holding the organization blameless for any further research.
In totally unrelated news... the Ohio and Texas automobile dealers associations are hosting their annual meeting this week in lovely Toronto, Ontario.
This just in!
Officials are investigating the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which is alleged to have aided Snowden in getting to and from secure facilities!
The typical problem is that it lights up the whole windshield with diffuse reflection that can be brighter than other sources at night, so while maybe less distracting than flashing light, the pilot would have to deal with random blackouts of their view.
Use a graded index of refraction through the canopy/windshield, and you get a distance adjusted Bessel angle, with almost perfect reflection of the light at an angle equal to the incidence angle vs. the surface normal as it hits the glass. There won't be any (significant) scattering for anything under 10's of watts of beam strength. This is exactly how we implement internal path reflectivity for multimode fiber, which also has to handle multiple laser wavelengths.
Alternately, just have one of the diffraction gratings be fixed, rather than photochormically induced (the little black dots get to be visible when you are being lased, in exchange for the internal reflection being eliminated, and a reduced cost of manufacture).
This is like 1980's optics, albeit with some early 2000's of nanocoating and photochemistry - either way, almost eerything needed to make the problem "not a problem" is over a decade old, technology-wise.
Your certs don't mean dick.
Oh come on! Not even the MCSE or the CISSP or the Certified ScrumMaster certificates?!?
We can't force people to take meds, as a society we seem to have decided not to forcibly institutionalize crazy people either. So they become homeless, pretty much forever.
We can force meds on them, and historically, we did, until the Lanterman–Petris–Short Act passed in California and was signed into law by then governor Ronald Reagan.
Prior to that Act, which was intended to reduce the public mental health cost burden, we can, and did, enforce medication regimens on mentally ill persons.
It was a budgetary decision, which was then adopted by other states, as California started 5150/5250'ing the mentally ill, stabilizing them in the 3 days/14 days of the hold, and then giving them free bus tickets to elsewhere (generally other states; Boulder Colorado was a perennial favorite).
Photochromic windshield coating. Using an organic photochromic coating, the reaction time is on the order of nanoseconds.
They can paint short duration small back dots on the windshield of the plane, but not really do much else. Two coatings in perpendicular directions, with a separation angle window of about 1/2 the smallest wavelength you care about (which, with a band pass coating for visible light in the mix, means that it can be fixed at a pretty big distance), and the pilot won't even see black spots unless looking directly at the laser through the temporary perpendicularly organized difraction gratings.
It's my understanding that military aircraft already have laser protection due to an aircraft area denial weapons system I suggested back around 1976.
Alternative explanation: the system is near to capacity, and making it cost money is necessary to curb demand to the point where the system can (just about) cope. Which seems more likely than "Because I want to screw the homeless."
If it's profitable, then the system isn't near capacity until the busses are all separated by one bus length, and the number of passenger cars on BART and CalTrain exceeds the ability of a locomotive to pull them. Until that point, you just add more employees and more equipment and increase your profit, since your fixed administrative costs aren't going to go up linearly with the rest of the direct costs of providing the services (i.e. the ratio of HR people is not 1:1 with the number of station and transport transit people).
Also you will note that it's not a matter of actually "screwing the homeless" - the gentleman I talked to was not deterred, for example - I was merely giving them the benefit of the doubt for not running more service at a reduced or no cost, if it was a subsidy anyway.
Your argument is nearly the identical argument that they use to raise the fares and reduce routes.
It's also the same argument the University of California system uses for canceling classes "due to lack of interest", when they accept fewer students, and meanwhile there is documented demand for both to increase. If the primary income stream is tuition, then every additional student is more income, which is more ability to pay teachers and put on classes (presuming the money is not going to line someone's pockets). Otherwise, the enrollment limits are sufficient to limit enrollment, without increasing tuition and fees to keep people out. If you have a hard limit on enrollment, then it doesn't need to be self-limiting due to costs.
That means that if putting on classes and instructors and classroom space isn't cost-effective, the primary income isn't from costs, so increased costs are only designed to keep out poorer students in favor of richer students, so that rather than an egalitarian cross-section of society being accepted up to the limit cap -- and in theory, they'd be the most academically gifted people, regardless of their wealth or lack thereof -- we end up with poor people not getting an education and rich kids whose only measure of worth is the fact that their parents were wealthy getting one instead.
It's the same social engineering happening in both places.
You have to wonder which costs more... underground storage tanks which *don't leak*, or underground storage tanks which *leak*.
Public transportation should be free.
The utility function of the marginal costs of a (not small) fare + inconvenience + timing + freedom of movement vs. the cost of owning a car is enough that most of us are effectively being paid not to take it in the first place. Being free would up ridership for people on the edge.
The whole idea that it's a profit center is pretty stupid, as all public transportation is subsidized anyway, and exists as nothing but a cost center to generate pension paying positions for government employees anyway.
The whole point of making it cost something - anything - is the same reason that health insurance plans require copays: to discourage use. For public transportation, the use they are attempting to discourage is that the homeless will ride around all night in order to avoid freezing to death, or because they have nowhere else to go.
Clue bat: the homeless use busses as public housing anyway, they just get their day out of the way first (I had a nice long conversation with a homeless person who does just that, getting on one of the bus routes that runs all night, and getting off near where he gets on the next morning). Just address your damn homelessness problem, instead of trying to pretend it doesn't exist, or making life (more) miserable for the homeless.
"...to encourage people to live in certain areas."
Then make those areas not suck. Don't (effectively) tax me and everyone else because they want to live somewhere that doesn't suck.
How is making people who can't afford to live some place that doesn't suck live in sucky areas going to make them suck less?
Unless what you really what to do is enforce economic stratification by forcing all the poor people to live in the undesirable areas, instead of damaging the delicate sensibilities of the more well off?
You realize that the employer match is not applied to the $17,500 annual limit on 401K contributions, I assume. (Not counting catch up contributions.)
There *is* a combined employee contribution + match limit of about $51,000.... however assuming you contribute the max $17,500 I think one would be hard pressed to find an employer that matches roughly 200% of an employees contributions (however they do exist) with no cap (not sure if that exists) to comprise the needed $33,500 to put you over the edge.
Nobody maxes their 401K; the IRS limits the employer contribution based on the lowest paid eligible employee, so unless everyone is makes huge salaries, it's impossible to max it anyway. The limits are set so that a magic, egalitarian company that might exist in fairyland some day could theoretically fund employee retirement, you know, if it weren't in business for profit.
So the game is not to max out the total 401K contribution, since it's never going to allow you to retire anyway, the game is to max out the extra money you get from the employer by participating in a 401K.
You actually want as little of your own money going into the 401K as possible (there are way better investment instruments than those available in a 401K), and as much of the employers as possible, because, hey, free money that doesn't get taxed as income.
Frankly, you aren't going to be at your employer for 40 years and retire at 65 any more, and that's all going to be rolled over into an IRA when you go on to the next job anyway. Meanwhile, until you do, that tax free extra money is compounding for you until that day comes around.
You can also lose quite a bit if
3) The stock market funds where you have designated for your 401K contributions goes up during the calendar year. The S&P 500 went up by 30 percent in 2013.
Of course, the market can go down too, but that happens relatively infrequently on a year-over-year basis.
This isn't why people are pissed. The change is intended to cause any 401K program to extract more money out of the employees pretax earnings and less money out of the company's matching contribution, so that the company pays out less in benefits.
It only works if the people they try to pull it on are too stupid to do basic math and/or are too stupid to do minimal financial preplanning. The people complaining are agreeing that they are too stupid. Or they are just complaining because "we fear change".
401K matching changes: tax on bad mathematicians
The 401K matching delay change only matters under to conditions:
(1) You aren't around for when the match happens, and it doesn't happen at severance ("the end of your tenure at the company").
That actually was not the case here.
(2) You are bad at simple math.
This is the case that the change counts upon to save the company money.
If you are bad at simple math, you can't work backwards from the maximum contribution amount to get to the exact amount of employee contribution that results in the highest possible employee contribution as a percentage of the total allowable contribution.
The rules change just tail-loads the employer match amount. The net effect is that if you contribute a specific amount per month, and the total of your contributions plus the employer match exceeds the allowable total yearly contributions, then the amount of contributions by you to the total goes up and the employer total contributions goes down.
Given that there's calculators for these amounts all over the web to 'maximize employer 401K contributions' (just google the phrase), anyone who doesn't have their per pay period contribution calculated out to the penny is leaving money on the table; the only difference is whether it's by overcontributing for one pay period, and leaving that amount on the table, or it's overcontributing on multiple pay periods, and potentially leaving it all on the table.
So with per-pay period contributions by the company, if you are a math dullard or too stupid to operate a web calculator, you leave a little bit on the table, and if you do the math, you leave only a few fractions of a cent on the table. With tail-loaded contributions, if you are a math dullard or too stupid to operate a web calculator, you leave potentially all of it on the table, and if you do the math, you leave only a few fractions of a cent on the table.
It's just one more of those places where, while you were bitching about never using algebra or percentages in your future life back in 7th grade, you should have been paying attention and learning math instead.
Personally, I have no problem with people who are bad at math paying more for things, just as I have no problem with them not getting the maximum sales commission they could possible get by pushing a client to purchase after the end of the month instead of before it, or them buying lottery tickets.
I'm not sure how GCC could benefit from this.
You are not reading history.
GCC moves too damn slow and doesn't include features that developers (and more importantly: the companies which pay developers) want. These days, that includes the changes between the GPLv2 and GPLv3 not being wanted by the people who pay the bills.
GCC was more or less started in 1984: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnup...
GCC was almost replaced by the EGCS fork in 1997, and it took two years before RMS finally gave up on the idea of having the ultimate editorial control over the language implementation, and "blessed" EGCS as the replacement for GCC. When he did that, he gave up on limiting the OSs that the compiler worked on, and limiting the inclusion of things like #pragma (which used to exec "nethack" because RMS didn't like it), and some of the language front ends that are now included, like g77, which RMS didn't want.
GCC is on the verge of being marginalized again by LLVM; all the sexy compiler work is happening in LLVM, all the bright young minds in the compiler world are going to LLVM because it's a lot easier to make a front end for a new language or a back end for a different processor or embedded controller or virtual machine. LLVM is the "go-to" compiler for academic projects involving compiler research.
It makes sense; GCC: 1984; +15 years = EGCS: 1999; +15 years = ????: 2014.
RMS' recent appeal *might* be able to attract a bunch of new ideologues to the GCC project, and have them forsake LLVM work, but more likely course and project requirements for a degree, and after that, an employer, probably mean that LLVM is going to remain the "go-to" compiler for the new blood.
The idea that GCC can leverage some of the new blood by making it easier for them to work with code in both contexts, rather than leaving GCC in the ashbin of history, is about the *only* way to give GCC the transfusion of new blood it's going to need to survive another 15 years.
It also couldn't hurt to expand the number of (or replace) members of the "GCC steering committee" so that GCC can get a little more forward momentum. You can get forward momentum one of two ways: (1) more specific impulse, or (2) take off the parking brake.
Jesus Christ, are you stupid? It is one of the more popular phones on the market, and there is a slim, albeit nonzero chance, that WP8 will actually become very popular very soon.
I can understand people having the occasional toke, even if I don't personally care for it, but I draw the line at people injecting stuff directly into their veins.
Last I heard Chinese was still a surviving written language.
How many programming languages do you know that use Chinese script?
Depends; how many keyboards do you own that have 30,000 keys?
Ideogrammatic languages are great for reading high information density content, but are really crappy when you want to do input processing; chording and composition sequences, such as Kanji hand, tend to be no more useful for input than Romaji or Katakana/Hirugana alphabetic/syllabic input. This is why it's been a holy grail for a while to get working voice input for Japanese, but the information density on audio input is generally worse than text input via keyboard (i.e. a good typist can do 120 WPM, but a good speaker can't spee 2 words per second).
Your decline to take on their project will probably have more positive effect for that company, in the long run, than your attempting to salvage it and shooting your foot off. They'll be forced to either make the existing employee work on it or will be forced to scrap it and ask hard questions of the existing employee in the process.
But the premise is a stupid contractor.
Remember from the OP?
"you don't check out the source code before you accept the assignment"
In case it's not clear from the above, I think we neither bear blame nor responsibility for inequalities in external societies. It's sad they exist, but short of sending in the U.S. military to bomb them into submission, thereby changing the minds of the people in charge by putting different people in charge, there's not a lot of convincing that can be done by rational reasoned argument.
There will be no singularity. It's doesn't work.
Unless you are talking about the OS at MS research.
I think a singularity is highly probable, and that it would work.
Unless you are talking about that OS at MS research, in which case I'll agree that that's not going to work.
So STEM jobs are worth, on average, and additional $18,900 per year. Looks like the people not going into STEM careers are picking the wrong major.
No, I think you misunderstand: Men in STEM fields make $18.900 more per year than wome in STEM fields.
This is not how you presented your statistic; the statistic presented was the average pay discrepancy, not the average pay specifically in STEM fields. The $18,900 number was calculated based on a 15% weighting for women in the field being subtracted from the remaining 85% weighting in the field for men, leaving a 70% weighting relative to the 100%, which gave a weighting for the absolute difference number, which was intially $27,000 (stated previously in the calculation). This assumes an equal distribution of salary discrepancy across technical and non-technical fields -- and assumption which was *generously* biased to support your argument, since in technical fields, things work, or they don't, and there's really no room for "works sometimes". I suspect that if the people from whom you obtained the statistics were not trying to bolster an argument, they would have divided them by job category. The bottom line is that people in STEM fields make more than people not in STEM fields, because not everyone is capable of STEM field work.
The 1991 vs. 2010 CS BA rates are largely irrelevant to your argument; they are not indicative of a systemic bias, unless you can show that there was no corresponding drop in enrollment rates, only in graduation rates. To me, it says that most student visas and H1-B's are granted to men from largely male-dominated societies which would engage in origin suppression of women (e.g. India, the far East). Of course, that statistic is left out, and we do not have numbers excluding non-resident students to remove any external social bias.
Finally, someone who graduated in 2010 or even 1991 should not expect to be making the same as someone who graduated in 1983, and has been working in the field for 30 years; time in grade matters, both to experience and the perception of your ability to do the job. It also matters in terms of the available career path, which in 1983 specifically meant you worked yourself "ip" into a management position, and if you did OK in that, you worked yourself up into a more general management position, rather than remaining technically focussed.
The statistics are that women make up nearly 52% of the general population. ... Yet they make up an average of just 15% in STEM fields. On average, they make just $58,000 a year compared to $85,000 for men.
52% is close enough to half in the noise. Effectively, what you are saying with these two sentences is:
$85,000 - $58,000 = $27,000
100% - 15% = 85%
85% - 15% = 70%
$27,000 x 70% = $18,900
So STEM jobs are worth, on average, and additional $18,900 per year. Looks like the people not going into STEM careers are picking the wrong major.
They didn't award it to Obama for anything.
They awarded Obama the Peace Prize because he was personally spearheading negotiations with the Russians to reduce nuclear armament stockpiles.
Actually, the stated reason is:
Downloading maps doesn't hide your location. Your cell phone is still pinging off cell towers and can be triangulated fairly accurately by by the cell towers using only signal strength, which is information it already has in hand in order to handle tower handoffs. If you are talking about a non-communications enabled navigation device, then you might as well buy a Garmin or one of the others, which already have the maps data internally.