A. It's not about time. It's about cost. B. This is why we have logistics software. We minimize costs by finding paths with the minimum cost. Anecdotal arguments are unimportant.
"In my mind the big problem here is not that the US is so dependent on oil, but that we are so dependent on CARS! A million new electric cars means a million consumers of energy. We need a end to unsustainable transportation with a change in our car hungry culture. Regardless of the technology used, an adopted public transportation system is always more efficient in resources than one that proposes a million cars with a single passenger in them."
Agreed to some extent -- we should fund public transport -- however a good portion of current public transit systems need a major overhaul, and is NOT more efficient than autos.
Look at how much gas your local bus system uses. It's a matter of public record, probably. Then look at the miles they drive -- hopefully they'll have a passenger-miles figure which would be ideal.
It turns out that buses (at least in Chicago) aren't more efficient than cars. On a purely gas level, the people taking the bus would be better off in cars. Plus we pay drivers, and buses rip up the streets. Now that doesn't make me want to eliminate bus systems, but it does make me
A. angry as bus companies, but that's not very useful.
B. interested in small transport devices -- autonomous cars, cars in road trains, super efficient cars.
The problem is buses are constantly running around almost empty.
This is a logistics problem. Computing and math solve logistics problems. Some clever person should be able to find the right mix of technologies to increase efficiency. Look to electric and (hopefully soon) autonomous taxis/demand driven small buses to get people to rail systems quickly and efficiently.
(Trains are great -- or at least I've never seen the figure to show they're not. But where trains go, property values are high, so the poor need to use buses just to get to the trains.)
Agreed that taxes are always used to encourage or discourage behaviour. They work for that.
Children are not good for society. They should be expensive. We need to eliminate the aspects of our economic system which work as a pyramid scheme. We do not need more children in the next generation than this one. We obscure the inadequacies of our economy by keeping the economy growing through market/labor growth. The practice goes back to pre-history, but we're really only now (the past century or so) trading our quality of life for this form of economic growth. We don't need to restrict reproduction, but it's insane to subsidise it.
Rail gets you close, trucks get you to the endpoint.
Electric trucks are much, MUCH cheaper to operate in cities which are reasonably close to rail. It is computing that has made modern logistics via inter-modal possible.
Gas taxes are way too low. The fact that gas taxes are so low is a subsidy for the trucking industry.
When you see long haul trucking moving freight which could go inter-modal via rail, you're seeing evidence of the subsidised nature of trucking.
Trucks which weigh 8 times what a car does should clearly pay 8 times what a car does in terms of tolls which should go for road maintenance.
Your dad lived in a different era. We can do better now. Hell, we could do better then, we just didn't need to.
They standardise on things which can read and write OOXML, forcing things to be MS Word, then they say "but you can use any document format you want, so long as what produced it can read and write OOXML." This means people will upgrade to the newest Office, and use the slightly different default non-OOXML format, and those docs will float around, and the path of least resistance will be to upgrade everyone, again. They're specifically embracing the MS trap.
This is a bad decision, but it would be half as bad if they said "everyone has to use OOXML." At least then they'd actually have inter-operability with their versions of Word.
The problem here is that I watched Gilligan's Island when I was less than 10 years old. I just didn't look at it the way ANY adult would. Duh. Of course.
I'm sorry I said anything. The professor was indeed a genius.
As was said by Bob Denver, playing someone who look a lot like Gilligan, in "Back To The Beach": "[The professor] could build a nuclear reactor out of a pineapple and a couple of coconuts, but he couldn't build a _boat_!"
Universities give you the opportunity to learn just about anything. They are INDEED about broadening your horizons. But if you meet CS students who are not excited about computers, they are under the mistaken impression that they are in an expensive trade school. That's pretty common.
Broaden their horizons: Flunk them. They should go study history and philosophy of science. They should get enthusiastic about the rise of the Holy Roman Empire. They should join a madrigal group. They should become obsessed with statistics. They should go do something they actually WANT to do. Computing clearly ain't it.
Pushing should never be required. In the end, everyone teaches themselves. Or they don't.
You make a good point. It's not the knowing which is required. It's the wanting to know.
If the student is poking and asking questions, he or she will be good.
If the student is just asking question, without poking, that's a warning sign of a lack of self-confidence. And at 18, that's possibly not going to change that much throughout life, and may indicate a person who's not going to succeed.
If the student expects you to tell him or her everything, and is annoyed at the instructor/materials when things go differently, that's a very bad sign.
If the student only really wants to know what's going to be on the test, that's deadly.
Ten years down the road, you want to work with the first, might put up working with the second, and probably will avoid the third and fourth.
Certainly all this can start at 18, but it's odd, in today's society, where computing information is all around and computers are very cheap, that the exploration process didn't happen earlier. If you have an 18 year old who wants to be in CS and isn't excitedly exploring computing already, unless he or she comes from a family which is dirt-poor or believes that computers are a tool of the devil or ascribes to a strictly no-screens great books sort of education (none of which should necessarily be crippling -- in fact the last/could/ give the 18 year a big leg up), then the student is probably going to fit into one of the latter three categories.
What good first year students should have difficulty handling is handling their time well enough while they obsessively dig into the computer systems around them. You shouldn't have to teach them about Linux, you should have to teach them about how to lay off the obsessive installing, poking, modifying, developing, etc.
If you have to push them/towards/ computing, they're not going to be any good at computing. They should get into something else quickly.
Equipment being a high cost to the company is a a bad sign to see in the argument for allowing workers to bring their own computers in.
In an intelligent company, management should understand that the salary of the worker dwarfs the cost of the machine. A slow machine wastes the salary. To not spend the money needed to get every ounce of productivity out of a worker is to throw away money.
This would be a gray area if computers were $6000. However, they're not. If a tech worker has a clunker computer and the company's not willing to buy a $1k computer, then there's something wrong at the company, and brain damage in one area usually means brain damage in a bunch.
Therefore, if you find that you need to bring in your own hardware, look for another job.
Virus mean venom or poison or slime. Just as saying "jellos" or "waters" doesn't make a lot of sense (though there are some situations when we can), pluralizing virus in Latin would be weird. So we borrow it first, make it a complete English word, then we use English rules to pluralize it.
AltaVista respected punctuation. If you're searching for something with a dash in it, for example, or for the use of some operator in a programming language, AltaVista found it for you.
Google strips your punctuation right away, making it largely useless for such searches.
So when the RIAA sues someone, it's $80k per title for infringement on a small number of titles [cnet.com] when the offender possibly does not even know what they are doing is infringement, but when the RIAA is infringing on a massive scale, having pre-planned for being caught by setting aside money in the case that they were made to pay, which clearly shows that they knew the legalities of what they were doing, they only needed to allocate $167 per title and they were allowed to pay almost exactly what they decided to pay?
Note to all file sharers: The reason the RIAA can sue you for $80k per file is that YOU didn't set the price in the first place. Set aside $167 for every title you share. Or set aside less. Problem solved.
I suspect that this is an optical illusion triggered because the brain is trying to match items by color and size. When color or size changes, the brain matches the wrong blob (which hasn't changed, or just happens to have changed to what the other one was, or to something closer to what the other one was than the other now is) to the original item.
I'd like to see a video with just the fixation point and one datapoint in the periphery. If we still lose track of shape and color changes then that will be harder to explain and more interesting.
I'd also like to see the same multi-blob video done with everything changing in the same way at the same time. I suspect the result would be the same as the one-blob video condition.
Not that this isn't a neat demo as is. I'm just hungry for some more conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
A. It's not about time. It's about cost.
B. This is why we have logistics software. We minimize costs by finding paths with the minimum cost. Anecdotal arguments are unimportant.
Greek Fire.
Because I am a bad, bad person, an evil man who thinks that our economic system should be sustainable. I am indeed going to Hell.
"In my mind the big problem here is not that the US is so dependent on oil, but that we are so dependent on CARS! A million new electric cars means a million consumers of energy. We need a end to unsustainable transportation with a change in our car hungry culture. Regardless of the technology used, an adopted public transportation system is always more efficient in resources than one that proposes a million cars with a single passenger in them."
Agreed to some extent -- we should fund public transport -- however a good portion of current public transit systems need a major overhaul, and is NOT more efficient than autos.
Look at how much gas your local bus system uses. It's a matter of public record, probably. Then look at the miles they drive -- hopefully they'll have a passenger-miles figure which would be ideal.
It turns out that buses (at least in Chicago) aren't more efficient than cars. On a purely gas level, the people taking the bus would be better off in cars. Plus we pay drivers, and buses rip up the streets. Now that doesn't make me want to eliminate bus systems, but it does make me
A. angry as bus companies, but that's not very useful.
B. interested in small transport devices -- autonomous cars, cars in road trains, super efficient cars.
The problem is buses are constantly running around almost empty.
This is a logistics problem. Computing and math solve logistics problems. Some clever person should be able to find the right mix of technologies to increase efficiency. Look to electric and (hopefully soon) autonomous taxis/demand driven small buses to get people to rail systems quickly and efficiently.
(Trains are great -- or at least I've never seen the figure to show they're not. But where trains go, property values are high, so the poor need to use buses just to get to the trains.)
Agreed that taxes are always used to encourage or discourage behaviour. They work for that.
Children are not good for society. They should be expensive. We need to eliminate the aspects of our economic system which work as a pyramid scheme. We do not need more children in the next generation than this one. We obscure the inadequacies of our economy by keeping the economy growing through market/labor growth. The practice goes back to pre-history, but we're really only now (the past century or so) trading our quality of life for this form of economic growth. We don't need to restrict reproduction, but it's insane to subsidise it.
"Watch the movie: Who Killed the Electric Car? It is full of answers!"
No, Who Killed the Electric Car is mostly filled with questions. Still a very interesting movie.
Addressing your points in no particular order:
Rail gets you close, trucks get you to the endpoint.
Electric trucks are much, MUCH cheaper to operate in cities which are reasonably close to rail. It is computing that has made modern logistics via inter-modal possible.
Gas taxes are way too low. The fact that gas taxes are so low is a subsidy for the trucking industry.
When you see long haul trucking moving freight which could go inter-modal via rail, you're seeing evidence of the subsidised nature of trucking.
Trucks which weigh 8 times what a car does should clearly pay 8 times what a car does in terms of tolls which should go for road maintenance.
Your dad lived in a different era. We can do better now. Hell, we could do better then, we just didn't need to.
This is hilarious.
They standardise on things which can read and write OOXML, forcing things to be MS Word, then they say "but you can use any document format you want, so long as what produced it can read and write OOXML." This means people will upgrade to the newest Office, and use the slightly different default non-OOXML format, and those docs will float around, and the path of least resistance will be to upgrade everyone, again. They're specifically embracing the MS trap.
This is a bad decision, but it would be half as bad if they said "everyone has to use OOXML." At least then they'd actually have inter-operability with their versions of Word.
Crap. You're RIGHT!
The problem here is that I watched Gilligan's Island when I was less than 10 years old. I just didn't look at it the way ANY adult would. Duh. Of course.
I'm sorry I said anything. The professor was indeed a genius.
As was said by Bob Denver, playing someone who look a lot like Gilligan, in "Back To The Beach": "[The professor] could build a nuclear
reactor out of a pineapple and a couple of coconuts, but he couldn't build a _boat_!"
Universities give you the opportunity to learn just about anything. They are INDEED about broadening your horizons. But if you meet CS students who are not excited about computers, they are under the mistaken impression that they are in an expensive trade school. That's pretty common.
Broaden their horizons: Flunk them. They should go study history and philosophy of science. They should get enthusiastic about the rise of the Holy Roman Empire. They should join a madrigal group. They should become obsessed with statistics. They should go do something they actually WANT to do. Computing clearly ain't it.
Pushing should never be required. In the end, everyone teaches themselves. Or they don't.
Now I can finally shoe-horn my coworkers' Excel spreadsheets into a database.
Here here. Good idea.
Other possibilities:
a firewall
a proxy server
a group source code repository
You make a good point. It's not the knowing which is required. It's the wanting to know.
If the student is poking and asking questions, he or she will be good.
If the student is just asking question, without poking, that's a warning sign of a lack of self-confidence. And at 18, that's possibly not going to change that much throughout life, and may indicate a person who's not going to succeed.
If the student expects you to tell him or her everything, and is annoyed at the instructor/materials when things go differently, that's a very bad sign.
If the student only really wants to know what's going to be on the test, that's deadly.
Ten years down the road, you want to work with the first, might put up working with the second, and probably will avoid the third and fourth.
Certainly all this can start at 18, but it's odd, in today's society, where computing information is all around and computers are very cheap, that the exploration process didn't happen earlier. If you have an 18 year old who wants to be in CS and isn't excitedly exploring computing already, unless he or she comes from a family which is dirt-poor or believes that computers are a tool of the devil or ascribes to a strictly no-screens great books sort of education (none of which should necessarily be crippling -- in fact the last /could/ give the 18 year a big leg up), then the student is probably going to fit into one of the latter three categories.
What good first year students should have difficulty handling is handling their time well enough while they obsessively dig into the computer systems around them. You shouldn't have to teach them about Linux, you should have to teach them about how to lay off the obsessive installing, poking, modifying, developing, etc.
If you have to push them /towards/ computing, they're not going to be any good at computing. They should get into something else quickly.
You're backing up your "Not necessarily" with any arguments, there. 90% of CS students may turn out to not be any good.
Surely you mean a gelatin treet.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XU9x8G7khv0/SiAMzyk0yWI/AAAAAAAAEfY/01fomZ26eRk/s400/treet_l.jpg
OUCH! Yees, I did.
Equipment being a high cost to the company is a a bad sign to see in the argument for allowing workers to bring their own computers in.
In an intelligent company, management should understand that the salary of the worker dwarfs the cost of the machine. A slow machine wastes the salary. To not spend the money needed to get every ounce of productivity out of a worker is to throw away money.
This would be a gray area if computers were $6000. However, they're not. If a tech worker has a clunker computer and the company's not willing to buy a $1k computer, then there's something wrong at the company, and brain damage in one area usually means brain damage in a bunch.
Therefore, if you find that you need to bring in your own hardware, look for another job.
More specifically, Virus doesn't make a lot of sense to pluralize as Latin since it's not a noun representing a single discreet thing.
http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=virus&ending=
Virus mean venom or poison or slime. Just as saying "jellos" or "waters" doesn't make a lot of sense (though there are some situations when we can), pluralizing virus in Latin would be weird. So we borrow it first, make it a complete English word, then we use English rules to pluralize it.
AltaVista respected punctuation. If you're searching for something with a dash in it, for example, or for the use of some operator in a programming language, AltaVista found it for you.
Google strips your punctuation right away, making it largely useless for such searches.
OK, so if I shoplift something worth $5, get caught, and am forced to pay $5 for it, that's a loss.
Thanks. That helps with my accounting.
So when the RIAA sues someone, it's $80k per title for infringement on a small number of titles [cnet.com] when the offender possibly does not even know what they are doing is infringement, but when the RIAA is infringing on a massive scale, having pre-planned for being caught by setting aside money in the case that they were made to pay, which clearly shows that they knew the legalities of what they were doing, they only needed to allocate $167 per title and they were allowed to pay almost exactly what they decided to pay?
Note to all file sharers: The reason the RIAA can sue you for $80k per file is that YOU didn't set the price in the first place. Set aside $167 for every title you share. Or set aside less. Problem solved.
DavidTC, that was WELL worth the read. Thank you!
I suspect that this is an optical illusion triggered because the brain is trying to match items by color and size. When color or size changes, the brain matches the wrong blob (which hasn't changed, or just happens to have changed to what the other one was, or to something closer to what the other one was than the other now is) to the original item.
I'd like to see a video with just the fixation point and one datapoint in the periphery. If we still lose track of shape and color changes then that will be harder to explain and more interesting.
I'd also like to see the same multi-blob video done with everything changing in the same way at the same time. I suspect the result would be the same as the one-blob video condition.
Not that this isn't a neat demo as is. I'm just hungry for some more conditions.