There are a million generally useful things - know a couple programming paradigms backwards and forward, know business, know how to work with people, get job experience, etc. Anyone who works in software will tell you that.
The biggest specific things I found out that I did right/wrong in my first year out of college.
1) Figure out what you want to do, and take as many courses in that as you can. Get into the graduate level courses as much as possible while you're still an undergrad - they are harder and are more interesting. I took every graphics course offered at my school, and it has made me even as a first-year the expert at my office in certain areas (in my case, GLSL shaders and animation algorithms).
2) Take Operating Systems courses. And don't sleep through the intro one because it sucks and then not remember it. Performance programs are getting more and more multi-threaded because of the multi-core systems coming out now. I spent a lot of my first year slowly learning proper parallel programming techniques as well as how to think about a parallel system. It's in some ways kind of a pain compared to normal, deterministic programming, and I personally would have benefited from a better class on it.
3) Take at least one real software engineering course, or at the very least read up on different development methods like Agile or the old Waterfall models. Take all of them with a grain of salt and figure out what works best for you, but it's very helpful to have at least heard of proper ways to develop like a professional instead of just hacking things to work.
4) Never forget how to hack things that work:) In the end the biggest jump in quality of a software product is still from not working to working.
By the way, a good side effect of taking more advanced courses in a subject is that you will often have the same professors multiple times, and they'll get to know you fairly well. I got my current job off of a recommendation from one of my profs - in terms of getting a job, nothing is more valuable than having a contact.
Keep in mind - I'm coming from a school who doesn't even teach Java, they teach their own made-up C++ variant that no one aside from their research group uses or generally has even heard of (Resolve, bleh).
It is my opinion that there are few things that will benefit a growing programmer more than being forced to use and think in different programming languages and to learn to program in the appropriate paradigm for that language.
I love C as a language as part of understanding the core of the relationship between your code and the machine. A combination of C and assembly should be a requirement for all CS or EE degrees because it makes you think about every single minor thing you try to make the system do. I honestly think that this instruction should be combined with some sort of compiler course - so you can see what your C code is generating and why. It's also a good time to look at performance analysis. However, you should tell, even recommend to your students, that if they're doing something other than kernel or driver work they probably don't want to be touching this stuff again.
I love something like Smalltalk or Java or Object-C or something, anything but C++ for teaching real object-oriented programming. The thing is, you need to force students to learn how to both implement even the lowest level classes, but get them to really comprehend the idea of programming by contract and encapsulation so that you really have no idea what *class* you're even working with, let alone how it is implemented. There is so much more to OO programming than the "grab a class that does what I want and hack it to work" mentality that often seems to be taught in introductory classes, and in my opinion C++ does as much as it can to muddle up that thinking. Most C++ instruction I've seen quickly resembles "C with some conveniences" than it really does OO programming.
I think that everyone needs to be taught or know some scripting language. And please, can it actually be taught instead of self-learned (the VBscript code samples I have found online are often horrifyingly bad). There are a million problems that have nothing to do with the "art" or "science" of CS that still need to be solved every day, and often the best and easiest solution to those problems involve a scripting language.
And of course, you have to throw in Lisp or Scheme, just because the mental model required is so very different from any other programming language. Make people think, and it should help them understand recursion in whatever else they're programming in.
I guess I've always felt that it was a real shame how easily new programmers fall into traps of language wars, and preferring whatever they're familiar with. I hated Resolve, but the best thing it did was force me to learn at least two languages in college, because I knew that I would never be able to get a job with that one:)
I see no need for the struggle that seems to go on in CS academia about Science versus programming versus software engineering. A good school should be aiming to produce people who understand the theory behind what they are doing, are masters of enough programming languages that they can think of how to solve any problem in at least one of them (and can pick the right one for it) as well as being able to pick up a new language in a week, understand the most important practices of software engineering, and are engineers enough to really understand what the hardware is doing.
Looking back at my classes, I see places where they could have fit all and any of that into the curriculum without even leaving out what they did cover. I think the better students tend to figure most of this out themselves - but any self-teaching like that has gaps and holes that can come back to bite you in the ass, and in any case contribute to the lower level of professionalism in our field.
College is supposed to prepare you to be an expert in your field. Focusing too much on any one aspect of programming (pure theory, a single
We glanced through some borrowed 3.5 rulebooks, incorporated some of the ideas that made sense, and kept playing.
I've always felt DND was more about just a fun way to hang out with friends. If they release a new version of Monopoly does that invalidate your old version? It isn't computer software.
Macs are reasonably priced if you are comparing them to a comparable PC.
The problem is that there are a million PC combinations and only about, what, six different base mac models. If your needs fall in between the targets of the mac models, you're going to get a much better deal on a PC. Gamers fall into this something hard. Cheapskates do, too.
I just had a hard time convincing my dad to buy an iMac instead of a cheapo PC. *I* could look at the parts of the cheap pc and tell him that it was made out of slow, horrible parts... but all he could see was that he could get a working new PC for $300 at Microcenter whereas the low end iMac was $1k.
Was assuming that the remote control was actually "designed" and not just "thrown together at the end of the day by someone who figured out the circuit board for it and happens to know how to use the layout tool the company owns."
The problem is that they are placed so that if you stop for the red, you have no time to accelerate to merge properly with incoming traffic (unless you're in a little sports coupe and gun it). They also have a tendency to sort of just blink red-green on about a three second interval... I'm not really sure what that's supposed to accomplish, since at the speed you're normally approaching that would pretty much just cause you to slam on your brakes, then mash the accelerator again, and then have it be red by the time you passed anyway.
I guess I can see the point of the idea, but I haven't seen an implementation in practice that seemed to make much sense. They need to be far enough out that they aren't actively impeding your ability to merge onto the road (or, as often seems to be the case, to hit the one open spot that you would have found fine by yourself in the incoming traffic).
I work on an image generator for military simulations. We call it an image generator because the way most simulations work is across several boxes, all talking military sim network protocols - so you have one box running the physics simulations, another controller determining who shot whom, and it gets piped out to several image generators so you can have a big monitor wall or projector wall showing you your simulation.
The whole construct is pretty high tech - think an ride like the Star Wars one in Orlando but where you have control over where your truck drives. We've actually got a game out at six flags based on the same premise.
The problem is that, in general, simulators are five years or more behind what is in any sort of modern game. They just have different priorities - the army doesn't tend to care about lighting, more about how many square miles you can show without a break. And the army doesn't own them - they pay some company (like us, or our competitors) a bunch of money for licenses (10k a seat is cheap) to set up even the simpler, normal-PC based training.
None of this is going to teach you how to shoot straight - but it is useful for cognitive training - what do I do in this situation, how should I respond, how should I work with my teammates. And it's a lot cheaper than (for example) driving around an actual humvee.
There have been a couple different groups working within the military on their own versions of these "video games" for a while - Navy Post Grad has a system they developed themselves, largely from open source components.
I was actually almost hired to modify America's Army for use as a trainer - for small scale stuff it would work fine, and the army already spent millions of dollars to license the version of the Unreal Engine it's using.
But the problem is that game engines don't really support what the army needs, either - they don't support the simulation protocols. They aren't used to passing off all of the game logic to another box, or patching multiple displays together, how many enemies are on the screen simultaneously, or even usually paging in a giant database (the good IG's can do the whole world, or at least the continental US, continuously).
For small time infantry simulations, though (especially the urban combat that they're most likely training on a sim for) a lot of that doesn't matter, and you can probably subvert a normal gaming engine to do it.
Heh, of course, the problem then is actually hiring enough artists to not make it look like crap anyway. You can have all the lighting and normal mapping and effects in the engine that you want, if the office still only hires one artist to do all of it, they aren't going to have time to make it look good.
The problem isn't children citing wikipedia. The problem is lazy teachers and lazy students accepting Britannica as a reference to begin with.
An encyclopedia of any source should be the start of your research, not the end of it. It gives you the keywords and background necessary to find the real information from a primary source.
Studies the rise and fall of most of the major civilizations of the world. In all cases some external pressure (often an invasion) forced a young society to reinvent themselves and by responding aggressively raise their place in the world.
In the absence of competition, there is no innovation, no discovery, no drive. In the absence of aggression there is no competition.
I'm not saying that everything needs to be dog eat dog and every man for himself - we are social animals - generally aggression drives societal groups to work together against a common enemy, be it a foreign invasion or environmental catastrophe. Aggression is at the heart of what keeps us pushing forward instead of just sitting down and waiting for something to happen. Thousands of years of human history have repeated that meme. Only when living in a stable society built by those men have people had time to sit back and think "well, maybe we could all just be nice to each other all the time."
I would argue that the capacity for violent behavior is still completely necessary in today's society. Not in a "start some stuff" sort of way, but in a "end what someone else started in your favor" sort of way. People aren't going to stop robbing others just because they aren't watching video games or listening to rap music.
Controlled and focussed aggression and competition are at the heart of our survival as a species and our great works of civilization. Its importance is shown in our old sagas and stories of heroes, in our current movies and books, in the games we play, in the glorification of sports players.
Every study or report that says that such and such "increases aggression" as though it is the more horrible thing in the world disgusts me. They would have as living as women were once forced to live in our society - as meek, childlike creatures with no independence or strength of their.
I'm not saying that uncontrolled violent behavior is in any way a good thing - but neither is passive acceptance and docility. The current brand of civilization would never let any of us grow into men and women, but stay as helpless children.
Google around a bit - some of the guys who have already been released once they finally started having military hearings about their cases have nothing to do with terrorism.
For a while there we were offering a cash reward for anyone who would sell us a terrorist. So countries used that to point out anyone they didn't like and have them sold to us and sent to Gitmo. Two guys were just cartoonists who made fun of their local government! But it took over a year at least for them to be released.
Even ignoring full civilian trial rights, we at least need some sort of legitimate defense so that we have to prove that people were actually enemy combatants before we lock them up. I'm sure even with a court-appointed lawyer we wouldn't have any trouble locking a guy away for the moment because there was eye witness testimony he was shooting at American soldiers.
I would argue that an open mind has more to do with being willing to listen to an argument once or twice and consider it, not whether you then discard it as junk or accept it afterwards. I've already done that with Intelligent Design and Evolution (read several books on it actually) it's just been a while and the focus of the books was less on the answer to my question and more on the consequences of the conclusions than how one would go about legitimately disproving it.
Thanks for the clarification. It's really a sorry state of affairs how much this is dumbed down by the time it gets to most people, and then they have to go make policy decisions based on it. I know even the scientific literature I've read always includes those examples as... if not predictions or proofs, at least things that are "vaguely related consequences" or something of the actual core of current theory. Thanks for giving me a better definition.
Quick question (because I've been trying to think about this a bit myself lately) - what are the claims of the current theory of evolution that can be tested and disproven?
It seems like there's quite a few (progression from less to more complex organisms, commonality of microscopic biological features between species, observed changes of organisms) that seem to in general point at a mechanism, but there are enough oddball organisms and gaps in the fossil record that seem to throw small exceptions in the general theories I've heard, and cause the theory to change to adapt to them.
So, out of curiosity, at this point (given the evidence we have in favor of evolution) what would we have to find to disprove it? Since the ability to be proved false stands at the core of the criticism of ID.
I'm not trying to argue for ID - I think it's a load of bullocks and evolution has a whole lot of research going for it. I'm just curious for those of us who didn't have to take more than high school bio what would actually prove evolution false?
The story of Anakin's downfall was the whole reason I ever wanted to see the prequels made. Watching the noble hero struggle against impossible situations after impossible situation where he or his friends were forced to lose due to the restrictions of the light side of the force, where he miraculously purchases temporary victory at the cost of his soul. We're talking moments like Luke almost killing Vader in a blind rage, or Obi-wan's reaction to Qui-Gon's death. That is the story of Vader that I wanted to hear, not some twit glowering at the camera and massacreing the "younglings."
I thought episode III was the most disappointing of the new trilogy simply because it had such greater promise. It had a chance to be a heroic tragedy in the old Shakespearean or Greek sense set in a lovingly crafted science fiction world. And instead we have a sorry excuse for an actor looking like a sulky fifteen year old at the screen for two hours.
It's entirely possible on modern (or even nearly modern) hardware to have a game that streams everything constantly and never has to load a new level.
It's also HARD.
Not in a "I'm being a lazy game programmer and don't want to do it" sort of way, but in a "I'd rather spend the several months of man-hours that it would take doing something that gamers will care about more" sort of way.
Every feature you add is a trade off, and making a dynamically paging system that can constantly stream in gigabytes of texture memory, models, etc. is going to be taking the place of some big features. I know, I wrote one.
Anyone who grew up in a big family with real "family values" knows that the point of it all is to take care of each other. In a good family you always have an uncle who knows someone who needs a "bright young boy who's willing to work."
And in any case, if you work in the direction of a field that has an opportunity for advancement instead of just planning to be at an introductory level for the rest of your life, you can advance and live nicely without a degree. You start out lower, but you have four years or more to catch up, and I know I'd much rather have the guy who'd been working as a sysadmin's assistant for four years than someone who just got out of college to be a sys admin. What college tends to give you is more flexibility if you get sick of being a sysadmin.
Of course, this is all assuming someone with some reasonable capacity to learn and desire to work hard. Lacking that, yes, you're probably screwed without a college education allowing you to waste your company's time at a white collar job instead of a blue collar one.
And what do you do when there are no local businesses for these uneducated people to go to when they *do* want to start raising a family, because walmart undercut them and put them out of business.
People with barely a high school education, who at the very least need to be able to pay for themselves while they go get a tech degree or something.
The problem with the majority of available jobs being stock-boy at walmart is that there is no upgrade path. You can't start out there on a single young person's salary, gain skills, gain seniority, and go on to something that can support an adult. They *want* people to quit so they can hire someone new for cheaper.
Now, that's fine when it's a subset of the jobs available... but when it is almost all of the jobs available for a high school educated person, there's no reasonable way for them to get to a position that does afford them proper compensation to raise a family. No one expects it right out of high school - but walmart is either a temp position on your way to bigger and better things (which, btw, requires you have the time, motivation, and ability to get some degree of higher education in between working two shifts at walmart just to scrape by yourself) or a dead end.
I'm one of those people who, first thing when OS X came out, moved the dock to the side of the screen and never looked back. For us, the dock works exactly the same way:)
It really does integrate better with the way different controls and buttons are on windows and such. And screens are wider than they are tall, so you have extra space to work with.
From what I understood, Clinton had plans drawn up to capture or kill Bin Laden, but couldn't get confirmation that he was definitely behind things, and couldn't get basing rights to actually go in in any reasonable manner and take him.
He also left an anti-terrorism strategy that was ignored by Bush and company until 9/11.
I don't like Clinton, but at least blame him for the things he actually did.
It's an interesting fact that Ireland was still a net EXPORTER of food during the potato famine, most of it going to England. Politics kills more people than crop failures.
I just did a search... the closest depot to my house is... 90 miles away.... I think Ill just drive. And I live in the capital and largest city of my state.
I have not had a problem with the actual airline service - I am, however, sick to death of being treated like a criminal by everyone on the way there. The fact that instead of saying "Sorry, you cannot take these on the plane" for restricted items they just start going through your bag and tossing things in the trash... it is serious bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a million generally useful things - know a couple programming paradigms backwards and forward, know business, know how to work with people, get job experience, etc. Anyone who works in software will tell you that.
:) In the end the biggest jump in quality of a software product is still from not working to working.
The biggest specific things I found out that I did right/wrong in my first year out of college.
1) Figure out what you want to do, and take as many courses in that as you can. Get into the graduate level courses as much as possible while you're still an undergrad - they are harder and are more interesting. I took every graphics course offered at my school, and it has made me even as a first-year the expert at my office in certain areas (in my case, GLSL shaders and animation algorithms).
2) Take Operating Systems courses. And don't sleep through the intro one because it sucks and then not remember it. Performance programs are getting more and more multi-threaded because of the multi-core systems coming out now. I spent a lot of my first year slowly learning proper parallel programming techniques as well as how to think about a parallel system. It's in some ways kind of a pain compared to normal, deterministic programming, and I personally would have benefited from a better class on it.
3) Take at least one real software engineering course, or at the very least read up on different development methods like Agile or the old Waterfall models. Take all of them with a grain of salt and figure out what works best for you, but it's very helpful to have at least heard of proper ways to develop like a professional instead of just hacking things to work.
4) Never forget how to hack things that work
By the way, a good side effect of taking more advanced courses in a subject is that you will often have the same professors multiple times, and they'll get to know you fairly well. I got my current job off of a recommendation from one of my profs - in terms of getting a job, nothing is more valuable than having a contact.
Keep in mind - I'm coming from a school who doesn't even teach Java, they teach their own made-up C++ variant that no one aside from their research group uses or generally has even heard of (Resolve, bleh).
:)
It is my opinion that there are few things that will benefit a growing programmer more than being forced to use and think in different programming languages and to learn to program in the appropriate paradigm for that language.
I love C as a language as part of understanding the core of the relationship between your code and the machine. A combination of C and assembly should be a requirement for all CS or EE degrees because it makes you think about every single minor thing you try to make the system do. I honestly think that this instruction should be combined with some sort of compiler course - so you can see what your C code is generating and why. It's also a good time to look at performance analysis. However, you should tell, even recommend to your students, that if they're doing something other than kernel or driver work they probably don't want to be touching this stuff again.
I love something like Smalltalk or Java or Object-C or something, anything but C++ for teaching real object-oriented programming. The thing is, you need to force students to learn how to both implement even the lowest level classes, but get them to really comprehend the idea of programming by contract and encapsulation so that you really have no idea what *class* you're even working with, let alone how it is implemented. There is so much more to OO programming than the "grab a class that does what I want and hack it to work" mentality that often seems to be taught in introductory classes, and in my opinion C++ does as much as it can to muddle up that thinking. Most C++ instruction I've seen quickly resembles "C with some conveniences" than it really does OO programming.
I think that everyone needs to be taught or know some scripting language. And please, can it actually be taught instead of self-learned (the VBscript code samples I have found online are often horrifyingly bad). There are a million problems that have nothing to do with the "art" or "science" of CS that still need to be solved every day, and often the best and easiest solution to those problems involve a scripting language.
And of course, you have to throw in Lisp or Scheme, just because the mental model required is so very different from any other programming language. Make people think, and it should help them understand recursion in whatever else they're programming in.
I guess I've always felt that it was a real shame how easily new programmers fall into traps of language wars, and preferring whatever they're familiar with. I hated Resolve, but the best thing it did was force me to learn at least two languages in college, because I knew that I would never be able to get a job with that one
I see no need for the struggle that seems to go on in CS academia about Science versus programming versus software engineering. A good school should be aiming to produce people who understand the theory behind what they are doing, are masters of enough programming languages that they can think of how to solve any problem in at least one of them (and can pick the right one for it) as well as being able to pick up a new language in a week, understand the most important practices of software engineering, and are engineers enough to really understand what the hardware is doing.
Looking back at my classes, I see places where they could have fit all and any of that into the curriculum without even leaving out what they did cover. I think the better students tend to figure most of this out themselves - but any self-teaching like that has gaps and holes that can come back to bite you in the ass, and in any case contribute to the lower level of professionalism in our field.
College is supposed to prepare you to be an expert in your field. Focusing too much on any one aspect of programming (pure theory, a single
Why does everyone feel the need to upgrade?
We glanced through some borrowed 3.5 rulebooks, incorporated some of the ideas that made sense, and kept playing.
I've always felt DND was more about just a fun way to hang out with friends. If they release a new version of Monopoly does that invalidate your old version? It isn't computer software.
Heck yeah - that's what I'm typing this on.
No way I would recommend a Dell to my dad, though.
His point is that being religious in a conservative sense does not, as many people on slashdot seem to think, mean they are stupid.
I agree.
Macs are reasonably priced if you are comparing them to a comparable PC.
The problem is that there are a million PC combinations and only about, what, six different base mac models. If your needs fall in between the targets of the mac models, you're going to get a much better deal on a PC. Gamers fall into this something hard. Cheapskates do, too.
I just had a hard time convincing my dad to buy an iMac instead of a cheapo PC. *I* could look at the parts of the cheap pc and tell him that it was made out of slow, horrible parts... but all he could see was that he could get a working new PC for $300 at Microcenter whereas the low end iMac was $1k.
Was assuming that the remote control was actually "designed" and not just "thrown together at the end of the day by someone who figured out the circuit board for it and happens to know how to use the layout tool the company owns."
Most people I've seen just seem to ignore them.
The problem is that they are placed so that if you stop for the red, you have no time to accelerate to merge properly with incoming traffic (unless you're in a little sports coupe and gun it). They also have a tendency to sort of just blink red-green on about a three second interval... I'm not really sure what that's supposed to accomplish, since at the speed you're normally approaching that would pretty much just cause you to slam on your brakes, then mash the accelerator again, and then have it be red by the time you passed anyway.
I guess I can see the point of the idea, but I haven't seen an implementation in practice that seemed to make much sense. They need to be far enough out that they aren't actively impeding your ability to merge onto the road (or, as often seems to be the case, to hit the one open spot that you would have found fine by yourself in the incoming traffic).
I work on an image generator for military simulations. We call it an image generator because the way most simulations work is across several boxes, all talking military sim network protocols - so you have one box running the physics simulations, another controller determining who shot whom, and it gets piped out to several image generators so you can have a big monitor wall or projector wall showing you your simulation.
The whole construct is pretty high tech - think an ride like the Star Wars one in Orlando but where you have control over where your truck drives. We've actually got a game out at six flags based on the same premise.
The problem is that, in general, simulators are five years or more behind what is in any sort of modern game. They just have different priorities - the army doesn't tend to care about lighting, more about how many square miles you can show without a break. And the army doesn't own them - they pay some company (like us, or our competitors) a bunch of money for licenses (10k a seat is cheap) to set up even the simpler, normal-PC based training.
None of this is going to teach you how to shoot straight - but it is useful for cognitive training - what do I do in this situation, how should I respond, how should I work with my teammates. And it's a lot cheaper than (for example) driving around an actual humvee.
There have been a couple different groups working within the military on their own versions of these "video games" for a while - Navy Post Grad has a system they developed themselves, largely from open source components.
I was actually almost hired to modify America's Army for use as a trainer - for small scale stuff it would work fine, and the army already spent millions of dollars to license the version of the Unreal Engine it's using.
But the problem is that game engines don't really support what the army needs, either - they don't support the simulation protocols. They aren't used to passing off all of the game logic to another box, or patching multiple displays together, how many enemies are on the screen simultaneously, or even usually paging in a giant database (the good IG's can do the whole world, or at least the continental US, continuously).
For small time infantry simulations, though (especially the urban combat that they're most likely training on a sim for) a lot of that doesn't matter, and you can probably subvert a normal gaming engine to do it.
Heh, of course, the problem then is actually hiring enough artists to not make it look like crap anyway. You can have all the lighting and normal mapping and effects in the engine that you want, if the office still only hires one artist to do all of it, they aren't going to have time to make it look good.
The problem isn't children citing wikipedia. The problem is lazy teachers and lazy students accepting Britannica as a reference to begin with.
An encyclopedia of any source should be the start of your research, not the end of it. It gives you the keywords and background necessary to find the real information from a primary source.
But cooperation to do what - compete against the environment, against an external force.
Arnold J. Toynbee - A Study of History
http://www.amazon.com/Study-History-Abridgement-Volumes-I-VI/dp/0195050800/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197032602&sr=8-2
Studies the rise and fall of most of the major civilizations of the world. In all cases some external pressure (often an invasion) forced a young society to reinvent themselves and by responding aggressively raise their place in the world.
In the absence of competition, there is no innovation, no discovery, no drive. In the absence of aggression there is no competition.
I'm not saying that everything needs to be dog eat dog and every man for himself - we are social animals - generally aggression drives societal groups to work together against a common enemy, be it a foreign invasion or environmental catastrophe. Aggression is at the heart of what keeps us pushing forward instead of just sitting down and waiting for something to happen. Thousands of years of human history have repeated that meme. Only when living in a stable society built by those men have people had time to sit back and think "well, maybe we could all just be nice to each other all the time."
I would argue that the capacity for violent behavior is still completely necessary in today's society. Not in a "start some stuff" sort of way, but in a "end what someone else started in your favor" sort of way. People aren't going to stop robbing others just because they aren't watching video games or listening to rap music.
Controlled and focussed aggression and competition are at the heart of our survival as a species and our great works of civilization. Its importance is shown in our old sagas and stories of heroes, in our current movies and books, in the games we play, in the glorification of sports players.
Every study or report that says that such and such "increases aggression" as though it is the more horrible thing in the world disgusts me. They would have as living as women were once forced to live in our society - as meek, childlike creatures with no independence or strength of their.
I'm not saying that uncontrolled violent behavior is in any way a good thing - but neither is passive acceptance and docility. The current brand of civilization would never let any of us grow into men and women, but stay as helpless children.
But many of them weren't taken in combat.
Google around a bit - some of the guys who have already been released once they finally started having military hearings about their cases have nothing to do with terrorism.
For a while there we were offering a cash reward for anyone who would sell us a terrorist. So countries used that to point out anyone they didn't like and have them sold to us and sent to Gitmo. Two guys were just cartoonists who made fun of their local government! But it took over a year at least for them to be released.
Even ignoring full civilian trial rights, we at least need some sort of legitimate defense so that we have to prove that people were actually enemy combatants before we lock them up. I'm sure even with a court-appointed lawyer we wouldn't have any trouble locking a guy away for the moment because there was eye witness testimony he was shooting at American soldiers.
I would argue that an open mind has more to do with being willing to listen to an argument once or twice and consider it, not whether you then discard it as junk or accept it afterwards. I've already done that with Intelligent Design and Evolution (read several books on it actually) it's just been a while and the focus of the books was less on the answer to my question and more on the consequences of the conclusions than how one would go about legitimately disproving it.
Thanks for the clarification. It's really a sorry state of affairs how much this is dumbed down by the time it gets to most people, and then they have to go make policy decisions based on it. I know even the scientific literature I've read always includes those examples as... if not predictions or proofs, at least things that are "vaguely related consequences" or something of the actual core of current theory. Thanks for giving me a better definition.
Quick question (because I've been trying to think about this a bit myself lately) - what are the claims of the current theory of evolution that can be tested and disproven?
It seems like there's quite a few (progression from less to more complex organisms, commonality of microscopic biological features between species, observed changes of organisms) that seem to in general point at a mechanism, but there are enough oddball organisms and gaps in the fossil record that seem to throw small exceptions in the general theories I've heard, and cause the theory to change to adapt to them.
So, out of curiosity, at this point (given the evidence we have in favor of evolution) what would we have to find to disprove it? Since the ability to be proved false stands at the core of the criticism of ID.
I'm not trying to argue for ID - I think it's a load of bullocks and evolution has a whole lot of research going for it. I'm just curious for those of us who didn't have to take more than high school bio what would actually prove evolution false?
I agree 100%.
The story of Anakin's downfall was the whole reason I ever wanted to see the prequels made. Watching the noble hero struggle against impossible situations after impossible situation where he or his friends were forced to lose due to the restrictions of the light side of the force, where he miraculously purchases temporary victory at the cost of his soul. We're talking moments like Luke almost killing Vader in a blind rage, or Obi-wan's reaction to Qui-Gon's death. That is the story of Vader that I wanted to hear, not some twit glowering at the camera and massacreing the "younglings."
I thought episode III was the most disappointing of the new trilogy simply because it had such greater promise. It had a chance to be a heroic tragedy in the old Shakespearean or Greek sense set in a lovingly crafted science fiction world. And instead we have a sorry excuse for an actor looking like a sulky fifteen year old at the screen for two hours.
It's entirely possible on modern (or even nearly modern) hardware to have a game that streams everything constantly and never has to load a new level.
It's also HARD.
Not in a "I'm being a lazy game programmer and don't want to do it" sort of way, but in a "I'd rather spend the several months of man-hours that it would take doing something that gamers will care about more" sort of way.
Every feature you add is a trade off, and making a dynamically paging system that can constantly stream in gigabytes of texture memory, models, etc. is going to be taking the place of some big features. I know, I wrote one.
That is, frankly, what family is for.
Anyone who grew up in a big family with real "family values" knows that the point of it all is to take care of each other. In a good family you always have an uncle who knows someone who needs a "bright young boy who's willing to work."
And in any case, if you work in the direction of a field that has an opportunity for advancement instead of just planning to be at an introductory level for the rest of your life, you can advance and live nicely without a degree. You start out lower, but you have four years or more to catch up, and I know I'd much rather have the guy who'd been working as a sysadmin's assistant for four years than someone who just got out of college to be a sys admin. What college tends to give you is more flexibility if you get sick of being a sysadmin.
Of course, this is all assuming someone with some reasonable capacity to learn and desire to work hard. Lacking that, yes, you're probably screwed without a college education allowing you to waste your company's time at a white collar job instead of a blue collar one.
And what do you do when there are no local businesses for these uneducated people to go to when they *do* want to start raising a family, because walmart undercut them and put them out of business.
People with barely a high school education, who at the very least need to be able to pay for themselves while they go get a tech degree or something.
The problem with the majority of available jobs being stock-boy at walmart is that there is no upgrade path. You can't start out there on a single young person's salary, gain skills, gain seniority, and go on to something that can support an adult. They *want* people to quit so they can hire someone new for cheaper.
Now, that's fine when it's a subset of the jobs available... but when it is almost all of the jobs available for a high school educated person, there's no reasonable way for them to get to a position that does afford them proper compensation to raise a family. No one expects it right out of high school - but walmart is either a temp position on your way to bigger and better things (which, btw, requires you have the time, motivation, and ability to get some degree of higher education in between working two shifts at walmart just to scrape by yourself) or a dead end.
I'm one of those people who, first thing when OS X came out, moved the dock to the side of the screen and never looked back. For us, the dock works exactly the same way :)
It really does integrate better with the way different controls and buttons are on windows and such. And screens are wider than they are tall, so you have extra space to work with.
From what I understood, Clinton had plans drawn up to capture or kill Bin Laden, but couldn't get confirmation that he was definitely behind things, and couldn't get basing rights to actually go in in any reasonable manner and take him.
He also left an anti-terrorism strategy that was ignored by Bush and company until 9/11.
I don't like Clinton, but at least blame him for the things he actually did.
It's an interesting fact that Ireland was still a net EXPORTER of food during the potato famine, most of it going to England. Politics kills more people than crop failures.
Would be so lovely if I could travel by train.
I just did a search... the closest depot to my house is... 90 miles away.... I think Ill just drive. And I live in the capital and largest city of my state.
I have not had a problem with the actual airline service - I am, however, sick to death of being treated like a criminal by everyone on the way there. The fact that instead of saying "Sorry, you cannot take these on the plane" for restricted items they just start going through your bag and tossing things in the trash... it is serious bullshit.