This particular upgraded equipment is security theater because numerous experiments have shown that it's easy to smuggle very nasty things past it without detection, and with fairly little effort. Knives, molded plastic explosives (simulated, if I recall correctly), handguns, etc. have all been successfully concealed from this technology. There are plenty of articles on-line detailing how it was done.
The purpose of these machines is to prevent those with malicious intent from getting dangerous materials onto a plane which they could use to hijack it and repeat the 9/11 approach. But since these machines have been shown to be remarkably bad at actually achieving this goal, going forward with the ludicrously expensive purchase and the continued privacy-invading operation of said machines is clearly not ACTUALLY making air travel more secure. However, it looks shiny, and to the average person who doesn't work with security and isn't used to thinking in "black hat" mode it can seem effective. Which is basically the definition of security theater.
You'll notice that approximately zero of the units being pushed by the TSA are of the passive variety. They're either X-ray based (for the past 5 years or so) or Active Millimeter Wave (apparently the new money waster).
And in that case, with a large number of samples you would expect BOTH types of labeling to be equally subject to being split from their partner package and delayed. But that didn't happen, to a high degree of statistical significance.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/prescriptions/2009/09/lets_pay_doctor.html
I call BS. Median salaries for family care are under 150k. Median for even highly specialized fields like anesthesiology are around 250k. That starts in your mid 30s, and comes with a large amount of debt (unless your family dropped half a million on your education). Meanwhile, a good software engineer can clear 200k by the time they hit 30 without much trouble, and they'll have been making over 100k for nearly 10 years by that point rather than going further into debt. If you're smart with your investments, there's no reason you can't do just about as well as the average doctor in the long term.
Now, there are people who use their earning power to go deep into debt to afford all the fancy things you mentioned, but that's not exclusive to doctors except maybe the "old money" wanabe contingent who feel entitled to live that way (which I suspect may be slightly more attracted to that field). But going into more debt to support a lavish lifestyle isn't "rich". And there are the outliers... physical therapists to nationally known sports franchises, etc. who make millions of dollars, but you also have outliers like early employees at Facebook and Google on the other side.
Short answer, I just don't see where doctors are significantly overpaid on average. It doesn't fit the facts.
It appears you're equating "likes to optimize their time to not spend it in traffic or being disrupted in over-crowded cube farm offices" with "gotten lazy". And frankly, I have no idea what would make you do that, because it's flat-out wrong.
You think it's "acting like spoiled brats" to want to work in the environment where you're most productive? Or hey, maybe you think the guy whose child has terminal cancer and doesn't want to spend the last year of their life moving across the country to satisfy a job that KNEW he was going to work remotely when he was hired has a case of "I'm a special flower" and deserves to be dick-slapped with some reality.
Holy hell, you must be a manager, and a terrible one at that.
By FAR the largest use of the water supply is farming, followed by industrial use. Personal use is a distant 3rd.
Which is not to say we won't try to ration there... we impose fuel efficiency metrics on automobiles, even though 2 of the 30ish supertankers currently ferrying freight around the world produce more pollution than the entire automobile fleet. It just wouldn't do much good.
To put out code as fast as possible. It's often very boring, too. 99% of programming is just putting together function calls and libraries others have already coded. There hardly is any "challenge" as so many programmers on Slashdot like to put it. In reality it's boring as hell.
I've seen devs who worked that way. I've worked on the same systems as them. In our case, they ended up shipping code that increased system latency by 2x because they didn't understand how thread pools can impact system performance, and their first 4 attempts to fix it were all laughable, focusing on optimizing things that were already extremely optimized. They would have floundered for months if we'd left them to fix it on their own.
So yes, some programmers work that way. Good luck actually shipping a quality product unless you have some real engineers, though. The extent to which pre-built tools will solve all your problems is inversely related to the complexity of your problems. And even then, putting pre-built solutions together in a way that has no side effects still takes someone who understands the potential side effects.
(1) Aggressively promote domestic energy development, especially fossil fuels (Obama has delayed this at every turn, instead propping up failed green energy companies run by big donors).
Fossil fuels are a dead end. They're climate-negative, limited in availability, and don't do anything more than delay the problem. Funding research for alternative energy is critical. Frankly we need to be doing more of it than Obama is, but at least he's doing some.
(2) Expand the market for U.S. goods overseas by negotiating new trade agreements and standing up to China on intellectual-property and currency issues.
What leverage does Romney plan to bring to the negotiation that Obama hasn't? This is incredibly vague, and doesn't discuss the ACTUAL amount of opportunity. Platitudes don't boost the economy.
(3) Improve workforce skills by transferring job-training programs to the states and going after teachers' unions, which, he says, stand in the way of school choice and better instruction. (When has Obama gone after ANY union?)
He SAYS teacher's unions stand in the way of better instruction. He hasn't proved it. Why WOULD Obama go after unions? They're not the mafia. It's not a foregone conclusion to a majority if the populace that they're evil, like you seem to be blindly accepting.
(4) Attack the deficit through budget cuts, not tax increases. (Obama clearly has the opposite idea here).
Obama has given specific plans that favor budget cuts over tax increases by more than 2:1. So no, Obama does not "clearly" have the opposite idea.
(5), reshape the regulatory climate to "encourage and promote small business" rather than swamp it. (We have a metric ton more regulations now than when Obama entered office).
Really? What new regulations do we have? Most of the new ones that were heavily publicized the last 4 years have specific exemptions for small business, or actively contribute to them (ObamaCare, for example). The problem is, when Romney says "less regulation for small businesses", he really means "less regulation for large businesses." The USA is already fairly under-regulated in terms of what you can get away with compared to most of the 1st world. De-regulation in the way the Republicans want to do it generally means negative economic and environmental impacts for all but a select few.
You may not like some of Romney's plans but at least HE HAS ONE. At this point I'll be happy to vote for someone who just picks a direction and goes there. Democrats had four years, two of which they could have clearly driven direction with zero intervention by anyone and instead they just sat, apparently befuddled. Well screw that, the debt is too high to keep playing around.
This is the most asinine thing I've heard in a long time. A plan to screw things up is absolutely not better than no plan, and even that's a straw-man. Obama has clearly had a direction, and he's been fought by Republicans at literally every turn. Do you remember the health care debates in 2009? Despite being in minority control, they were invited to the discussion because Obama wanted to be inclusive. They chose to drag the process out as long as possible, kicking and screaming like spoiled children, and using every dirty trick in the book to try to derail the process. This was back around the time that Mitch McConnell was saying openly in press conferences that their top priority was to deny Obama a second term. Despite that, they passed a sweeping health care reform bill, and a number of other items. He absolutely executed on a plan. To claim otherwise is just thickheaded.
Yes and no... in certain areas of the industry, absolutely. But when you start getting into fairly high-performance or large-scale systems, a lot of the abstractions start breaking down. When that happens, you need people who know what's going on under the hood as well.
Yes, I am sure you think that I and all my friends are below average, or outright lousy programmers. Not surprised - that is the default position of everyone I have ever dealt with in a hiring situation, even those I could code rings around, or those asking questions full of contradictory and incorrect assumptions, poor practices, etc
If you or any of your friends who are having trouble finding work are really as good as you say, I have a job for you. Guaranteed interview regardless of age, provided you meet the technical bar.
The fact that you read condescension and hostility in my earlier post is confusing me, though. I was only trying to give you an honest opinion based on my experience interviewing candidates over the past 4 years. There are a lot of mediocre coders in the field regardless of age, and our company probably turns away a higher percentage of young candidates than old, purely for competency reasons (admittedly an educated guess based on personal experience, not a hard number).
I'm not saying some places don't have a bad culture. I worked at Microsoft for several years, and would never advise anyone to work there exactly for the politics and culture reasons you outline. But that's not the entire industry.
You have a fairly warped view of the industry. Our company has hired several older programmers (as have a number of companies in the area). In fact, older coders generally tend to have a higher hiring rate because if they're still in the industry after a number of years, they probably know what they're doing.
Now, you absolutely do see fewer older coders because a lot of the competent ones get diverted to management after a while. The skill sets of a good programmer and a good manager have a surprising amount of overlap, and the work can be less stressful depending how you handle your workload. But that doesn't mean it's hard to get hired as an older coder simply because you're old.
What I do see a lot is older programmers who are legitimately not good hires. Either they failed to keep up on even the basics of new technology (I'm talking "Java devs who don't know anything about the new features if Java 6 in 2012" level of out-of-touch) or they just weren't that good to begin with, and stuck around the first job they managed to hire into until they became an "older programmer".
Left - Believes the money was never yours to begin with. Ownership of it is limited and its value subjected to change. Not a bug, a feature. It's called inflation (a form of backdoor taxation). The government is allowed to spend because - again - it was never your money in the first place.
That is absolutely not correct. Please spend some time learning before you make more retarded claims.
That, or you don't understand how experimental treatments work. This has been "proved" in 10 mice. That's all. There are a host of potential problems that could easily be discovered with this treatment in the process of bringing it to wide-spread human use. Many of those problems could involve unacceptable side effects, or even simply failing to have the same benefit in humans.
This is how science works, man. You don't jump to "hooray, we cured cancer" on the basis of one promising test.
One, it's Ogg Vorbis. Theora was for video. And two, Ogg is still alive and kicking thanks to the fact that Android's built-in music player handles it just fine.
Having spent several go-rounds with the woefully incomprehensible CS reps at Amazon, I have to say this makes a hell of a lot more sense than any other possibility.
Since we are talking about Christianity here, it should be noted that Christianity is based on the New Testament. That's where Christ, the root word of Christianity, taught that such behavior was wrong. I even hinted at that when I pointed out the "...cast the first stone" quote. You are confusing Islam and Judaism with Christianity.
Which branch of Christianity, specifically? Several of them take the Old Testament as part of their teachings, and many of the self-described Christians who preach against homosexuality most heavily are quoting Leviticus when they do so. Even aside from that, the New Testament has plenty of hate for homosexuals itself.
Citation needed. In other words, show me where Santorum has said that homosexuals should be thrown in jail for nothing more than being homosexuals.
Santorum argued against repealing anti-sodomy laws on the radio show "Sons Of Liberty". He said he thought the law should remain in effect. These laws made sodomy a criminal offense, which would often end in jail time if successfully prosecuted. Ergo, Santorum thinks homosexuals should be jailed.
But, again, the point is that original poster said that Santorum was against civil rights based on his views that homosexuality is wrong. I've shows a quote where MLK said that homosexuality was a "problem" and it needed to be fixed. So, if Santorum is against civil rights, then so is MLK. Do you still stand by that point?
I'm not affiliated with the original poster. I am saying that Santorum is against civil rights because he wants to make homosexuality illegal. I've already clearly explained that simply holding anti-homosexual views does not make you anti-civil rights. Only trying to enforce those views through law qualifies for that. As far as I can tell, MLK does not meet that bar, while Santorum does.
If you can find me where in Christian doctrine where it says that gays should be stoned or executed in some other horrific fashion, or that a prominent politician, like Santorum, is suggesting this, we can talk. Until then, you are either lying or extremely ignorant.
I assume you're not playing dumb to the point that you think the bible doesn't call for homosexuals to be put to death. I agree that it doesn't specify any particularly gruesome method, but I'm curious what method of execution you think existed 2000 years ago that wasn't fairly gruesome.
And yes, Santorum doesn't advocate killing homosexuals. He just advocates locking them away. It's a difference of degrees, but not of intent. His religion says that even though what they did has no effect on him or anyone other than the two people involved, they should be harshly disciplined by the legal system. That's Sharia in a nutshell, my friend. Segregation wasn't ended by putting a new coat of paint on the black schools.
It is obvious that MLK viewed homosexuality as a choice, not a genetic trait. It is also obvious that he viewed it as "problem". So again, I ask you, was Martin Luther King Jr against Civil Rights?
It depends... did he advocate laws penalizing homosexuality? Your quote just indicates a personal belief. Holding personal views that a lifestyle is wrong might make you a bigot in one area, but unless you're actively discriminating against those people or worse, advocating for laws that discriminate against them, you're not really a factor in the progress or decline of civil liberties.
Being against what some would perceive as a "right" does not makes someone against all rights.
This is obtuse to the extreme. Prior to the "civil rights movement", plenty of people were in favor of freedom of speech, the right to vote, own property, etc. for white males, but simultaneously wanted to treat black people and women like property. By your logic, those people were "pro civil rights".
The government is basically already in the state you described. You can get married in a church, but you enter a marriage contract in the eyes of a state only once you've signed a marriage license and some other forms at the courthouse. The state function is limited to the contractual side of things, but also performs brief ceremonies if you want one (2-3 minutes of a judge talking to you before you enter the contract). All the recent state battles over gay marriage have been over whether they're allowed to participate in this contract. None of them have been about forcing churches to hold gay ceremonies. The government IS already in the contract business, nothing more.
And comparing Christianity to the Taliban is just stupid.
It's pretty apt in this case, actually. Sure, not all Christians are like the Taliban, but in Santorum's case, when he's actively promoting the idea that federal law needs to be subservient to Christian religious code, and when he is advocating instituting harsh legal penalties for people who have done nothing wrong except offend his religiously-based sensibilities, I don't see much of a difference.
If you made a product, and 1 million people used it, but only 500,000 paid you for it, I think you'd be angry, too.
Possibly, but the question is whether you would have any right to be. First Sale is a long-standing precedent, and plenty of people have made a profit on video games, books, music, and movies even though a healthy market for used goods exists.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but the people buying the products are.
This particular upgraded equipment is security theater because numerous experiments have shown that it's easy to smuggle very nasty things past it without detection, and with fairly little effort. Knives, molded plastic explosives (simulated, if I recall correctly), handguns, etc. have all been successfully concealed from this technology. There are plenty of articles on-line detailing how it was done.
The purpose of these machines is to prevent those with malicious intent from getting dangerous materials onto a plane which they could use to hijack it and repeat the 9/11 approach. But since these machines have been shown to be remarkably bad at actually achieving this goal, going forward with the ludicrously expensive purchase and the continued privacy-invading operation of said machines is clearly not ACTUALLY making air travel more secure. However, it looks shiny, and to the average person who doesn't work with security and isn't used to thinking in "black hat" mode it can seem effective. Which is basically the definition of security theater.
You'll notice that approximately zero of the units being pushed by the TSA are of the passive variety. They're either X-ray based (for the past 5 years or so) or Active Millimeter Wave (apparently the new money waster).
You might want to read some history... the actual founders of America were quite liberal for their time. Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012
And in that case, with a large number of samples you would expect BOTH types of labeling to be equally subject to being split from their partner package and delayed. But that didn't happen, to a high degree of statistical significance.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/prescriptions/2009/09/lets_pay_doctor.html
I call BS. Median salaries for family care are under 150k. Median for even highly specialized fields like anesthesiology are around 250k. That starts in your mid 30s, and comes with a large amount of debt (unless your family dropped half a million on your education). Meanwhile, a good software engineer can clear 200k by the time they hit 30 without much trouble, and they'll have been making over 100k for nearly 10 years by that point rather than going further into debt. If you're smart with your investments, there's no reason you can't do just about as well as the average doctor in the long term.
Now, there are people who use their earning power to go deep into debt to afford all the fancy things you mentioned, but that's not exclusive to doctors except maybe the "old money" wanabe contingent who feel entitled to live that way (which I suspect may be slightly more attracted to that field). But going into more debt to support a lavish lifestyle isn't "rich". And there are the outliers... physical therapists to nationally known sports franchises, etc. who make millions of dollars, but you also have outliers like early employees at Facebook and Google on the other side.
Short answer, I just don't see where doctors are significantly overpaid on average. It doesn't fit the facts.
It appears you're equating "likes to optimize their time to not spend it in traffic or being disrupted in over-crowded cube farm offices" with "gotten lazy". And frankly, I have no idea what would make you do that, because it's flat-out wrong.
You think it's "acting like spoiled brats" to want to work in the environment where you're most productive? Or hey, maybe you think the guy whose child has terminal cancer and doesn't want to spend the last year of their life moving across the country to satisfy a job that KNEW he was going to work remotely when he was hired has a case of "I'm a special flower" and deserves to be dick-slapped with some reality.
Holy hell, you must be a manager, and a terrible one at that.
Wt..... troll, or wrong as hell for a joke?
By FAR the largest use of the water supply is farming, followed by industrial use. Personal use is a distant 3rd.
Which is not to say we won't try to ration there... we impose fuel efficiency metrics on automobiles, even though 2 of the 30ish supertankers currently ferrying freight around the world produce more pollution than the entire automobile fleet. It just wouldn't do much good.
I've seen devs who worked that way. I've worked on the same systems as them. In our case, they ended up shipping code that increased system latency by 2x because they didn't understand how thread pools can impact system performance, and their first 4 attempts to fix it were all laughable, focusing on optimizing things that were already extremely optimized. They would have floundered for months if we'd left them to fix it on their own.
So yes, some programmers work that way. Good luck actually shipping a quality product unless you have some real engineers, though. The extent to which pre-built tools will solve all your problems is inversely related to the complexity of your problems. And even then, putting pre-built solutions together in a way that has no side effects still takes someone who understands the potential side effects.
Fossil fuels are a dead end. They're climate-negative, limited in availability, and don't do anything more than delay the problem. Funding research for alternative energy is critical. Frankly we need to be doing more of it than Obama is, but at least he's doing some.
What leverage does Romney plan to bring to the negotiation that Obama hasn't? This is incredibly vague, and doesn't discuss the ACTUAL amount of opportunity. Platitudes don't boost the economy.
He SAYS teacher's unions stand in the way of better instruction. He hasn't proved it. Why WOULD Obama go after unions? They're not the mafia. It's not a foregone conclusion to a majority if the populace that they're evil, like you seem to be blindly accepting.
Obama has given specific plans that favor budget cuts over tax increases by more than 2:1. So no, Obama does not "clearly" have the opposite idea.
Really? What new regulations do we have? Most of the new ones that were heavily publicized the last 4 years have specific exemptions for small business, or actively contribute to them (ObamaCare, for example). The problem is, when Romney says "less regulation for small businesses", he really means "less regulation for large businesses." The USA is already fairly under-regulated in terms of what you can get away with compared to most of the 1st world. De-regulation in the way the Republicans want to do it generally means negative economic and environmental impacts for all but a select few.
This is the most asinine thing I've heard in a long time. A plan to screw things up is absolutely not better than no plan, and even that's a straw-man. Obama has clearly had a direction, and he's been fought by Republicans at literally every turn. Do you remember the health care debates in 2009? Despite being in minority control, they were invited to the discussion because Obama wanted to be inclusive. They chose to drag the process out as long as possible, kicking and screaming like spoiled children, and using every dirty trick in the book to try to derail the process. This was back around the time that Mitch McConnell was saying openly in press conferences that their top priority was to deny Obama a second term. Despite that, they passed a sweeping health care reform bill, and a number of other items. He absolutely executed on a plan. To claim otherwise is just thickheaded.
Yes and no... in certain areas of the industry, absolutely. But when you start getting into fairly high-performance or large-scale systems, a lot of the abstractions start breaking down. When that happens, you need people who know what's going on under the hood as well.
If you or any of your friends who are having trouble finding work are really as good as you say, I have a job for you. Guaranteed interview regardless of age, provided you meet the technical bar.
The fact that you read condescension and hostility in my earlier post is confusing me, though. I was only trying to give you an honest opinion based on my experience interviewing candidates over the past 4 years. There are a lot of mediocre coders in the field regardless of age, and our company probably turns away a higher percentage of young candidates than old, purely for competency reasons (admittedly an educated guess based on personal experience, not a hard number).
I'm not saying some places don't have a bad culture. I worked at Microsoft for several years, and would never advise anyone to work there exactly for the politics and culture reasons you outline. But that's not the entire industry.
You have a fairly warped view of the industry. Our company has hired several older programmers (as have a number of companies in the area). In fact, older coders generally tend to have a higher hiring rate because if they're still in the industry after a number of years, they probably know what they're doing.
Now, you absolutely do see fewer older coders because a lot of the competent ones get diverted to management after a while. The skill sets of a good programmer and a good manager have a surprising amount of overlap, and the work can be less stressful depending how you handle your workload. But that doesn't mean it's hard to get hired as an older coder simply because you're old.
What I do see a lot is older programmers who are legitimately not good hires. Either they failed to keep up on even the basics of new technology (I'm talking "Java devs who don't know anything about the new features if Java 6 in 2012" level of out-of-touch) or they just weren't that good to begin with, and stuck around the first job they managed to hire into until they became an "older programmer".
That is absolutely not correct. Please spend some time learning before you make more retarded claims.
That, or you don't understand how experimental treatments work. This has been "proved" in 10 mice. That's all. There are a host of potential problems that could easily be discovered with this treatment in the process of bringing it to wide-spread human use. Many of those problems could involve unacceptable side effects, or even simply failing to have the same benefit in humans.
This is how science works, man. You don't jump to "hooray, we cured cancer" on the basis of one promising test.
They already made that. It's called Terminator.
Well said. Too many people in our society today have not only forgotten this, but drifted the other way into boastful ignorance.
One, it's Ogg Vorbis. Theora was for video. And two, Ogg is still alive and kicking thanks to the fact that Android's built-in music player handles it just fine.
Having spent several go-rounds with the woefully incomprehensible CS reps at Amazon, I have to say this makes a hell of a lot more sense than any other possibility.
Which branch of Christianity, specifically? Several of them take the Old Testament as part of their teachings, and many of the self-described Christians who preach against homosexuality most heavily are quoting Leviticus when they do so. Even aside from that, the New Testament has plenty of hate for homosexuals itself.
Santorum argued against repealing anti-sodomy laws on the radio show "Sons Of Liberty". He said he thought the law should remain in effect. These laws made sodomy a criminal offense, which would often end in jail time if successfully prosecuted. Ergo, Santorum thinks homosexuals should be jailed.
I'm not affiliated with the original poster. I am saying that Santorum is against civil rights because he wants to make homosexuality illegal. I've already clearly explained that simply holding anti-homosexual views does not make you anti-civil rights. Only trying to enforce those views through law qualifies for that. As far as I can tell, MLK does not meet that bar, while Santorum does.
I assume you're not playing dumb to the point that you think the bible doesn't call for homosexuals to be put to death. I agree that it doesn't specify any particularly gruesome method, but I'm curious what method of execution you think existed 2000 years ago that wasn't fairly gruesome.
And yes, Santorum doesn't advocate killing homosexuals. He just advocates locking them away. It's a difference of degrees, but not of intent. His religion says that even though what they did has no effect on him or anyone other than the two people involved, they should be harshly disciplined by the legal system. That's Sharia in a nutshell, my friend. Segregation wasn't ended by putting a new coat of paint on the black schools.
It depends... did he advocate laws penalizing homosexuality? Your quote just indicates a personal belief. Holding personal views that a lifestyle is wrong might make you a bigot in one area, but unless you're actively discriminating against those people or worse, advocating for laws that discriminate against them, you're not really a factor in the progress or decline of civil liberties.
This is obtuse to the extreme. Prior to the "civil rights movement", plenty of people were in favor of freedom of speech, the right to vote, own property, etc. for white males, but simultaneously wanted to treat black people and women like property. By your logic, those people were "pro civil rights".
The government is basically already in the state you described. You can get married in a church, but you enter a marriage contract in the eyes of a state only once you've signed a marriage license and some other forms at the courthouse. The state function is limited to the contractual side of things, but also performs brief ceremonies if you want one (2-3 minutes of a judge talking to you before you enter the contract). All the recent state battles over gay marriage have been over whether they're allowed to participate in this contract. None of them have been about forcing churches to hold gay ceremonies. The government IS already in the contract business, nothing more.
It's pretty apt in this case, actually. Sure, not all Christians are like the Taliban, but in Santorum's case, when he's actively promoting the idea that federal law needs to be subservient to Christian religious code, and when he is advocating instituting harsh legal penalties for people who have done nothing wrong except offend his religiously-based sensibilities, I don't see much of a difference.
Possibly, but the question is whether you would have any right to be. First Sale is a long-standing precedent, and plenty of people have made a profit on video games, books, music, and movies even though a healthy market for used goods exists.
Because that's how investments and taxes are structured in US law. That fact doesn't magically transport company profits directly to the shareholders.