Asking "How do we get kids interested in computers?" on a website like Slashdot is like asking "How do we get kids interested in working on cars?" in an automotive magazine.
You don't. Your kids will pick what they want to be interested in as a natural result of what they do in life. My parents tried to get me interested in all sorts of things they thought would be good for me - soccer, football, tennis, math team, piano lessons, foreign language, blah blah. The only two things I ever became really "good/involved" at are computers (my full-time career) and paintball (hobby), both of which my parents discouraged (paintball in general, computers in the "don't spend so much time on computers!" sense). I still resent this quite a bit as I would be better at the activities I ultimately chose to be involved in if I hadn't had to waste time appeasing my parents' desire for me to be interested in the activities they thought I should be interested in.
How did *I* get involved in computers? My dad got a computer with a modem, and I was quickly discouraged from spending time on it because I was spending nearly all of my free time on the computer (time not at school or with friends, when we were not messing around with computers), and this was viewed as "bad". I eventually forced them into getting a second phone line, but the next 8 years that I lived at home would be a constant battle between me and them over how much time I spent on the computer.
Ultimately, I escaped to college and a computer engineering major and then got to spend all the time on the computer I wanted. But those 8 years of fighting my parents over it put me quite a bit behind the kids who'd had unfettered, and even encouraged, access to their machines.
So if you have a computer in your house, and your kid is not ALREADY spending all of their time in front of the computer, they're not interested in computers. Nobody had to figure out for you how to get you interested in computers, you figured it out yourself. It will be the same for whatever your kid decides to be interested in. No matter how much you as a computer geek want your kids to be interested in computers, chances are your kids are going to become very interested in something that is NOT computers, whether it be sports, guitar, chess, student government, whatever. Do your kid a favor and support whatever it is your kid spends all their time doing. If you have to "show" them how to be interested in it, they're not interested in it, and you're wasting both of your time.
40,000+ people die in car accidents every year. Thousands are killed in floods every few years. Millions die every year from famine.
Death, and to a lesser extent, death from natural disasters, is pretty common. A lot of death from a natural disaster is less newsworthy than a little death from a terrorist attack.
There's also an information problem - it was a lot easier to get information out of new york on 9/11 than it is to get information out of a devastated remote area in Thailand.
The reason people post pictures on buildings is because they are DESPERATE. It's a waste of time, but it's the only thing they can do other than nothing, and nobody wants to just admit that there's nothing they can do.
Governments maintain a list of people who are missing, and people check in as they are found. If people can't call their own family (either because they're lazy or they're injured or they're dead), there's really nothing you can do to accelerate the process: If they're lazy, there's no way for you to find them other than them finally checking in, and if they're injured or dead, you're not going to know they're injured or dead until they get to a hospital or you find the body (or part) and match them to someone on the missing list.
The bottleneck isn't tracking who is missing/found. The bottleneck is reaching/finding, identifying, and being able to communicate who is found. A database isn't goign to get soemone to call their mother or help you find a body.
The scale in the pictures is different - at first glance, it looks like the water in the later picture is quite a bit more to the right, but further investigation shows that it's in EXCTLY the same spot, with some flooding in the interior. Match up the landmarks - the buildings in the earlier picture are smaller because the scale is smaller. The later picture shows exactly the same buildings, slightly larger, but with the waterline in the same spot. Anyway, everything is still there.
Or at last chance you could be like my girlfriend, loose the recipt and just dress in a miniskirt and a tight shirt and act dingy to the pimply faced associate.
And this works because the associate has never seen something in a miniskirt MOO before?
Wal-Mart says that if I present an item to the cashier, and I have done something so that the price scans lower than the posted price, I'm guilty of stealing from wal-mart....
Then if I present an item to the cashier, and it scans a price higher than the posted price, is Wal-Mart guilty of stealing from me?
Doesn't seem like they should be able to have it both ways. How is swapping bar codes to get a lower price any different than "accidentally" entering a higher price for a particular barcode into the database?
Mainstream media can only handle one natural disaster at a time, and the one that happened NOW is more important than the one which has a 2.7% chance of happening in 25 years.
Also, we should expect the probability of impact to continue to increase until it either goes to zero (most likely) or 1. This asteroid has a sigma of 0 - that means the MOST LIKELY path is impact. More observations are most likely going to eliminate the outlying paths first, so as we eliminate more and more of the outlying paths of possibility the most likely path will be more and more likely.
Until we get the observation that says "Ah, yeah, definitely going to miss", and then it'll be zero again.
In this case, the money is probably in the FIRST level or two of the scheme. I already don't have 5 people who would get 5 friends to sign up; and I'd be the first level if I signed up, so they'd get maybe $60-$180 out of me and my friends, and give out *NO* I-pods.
It's also not a true pyramid scheme in the sense that you don't have to pay any money to get in. There's a fine line between a pyramid scheme and just paying people to do sales. My company has a bunch of people we pay JUST to sell stuff. And in fact, some of the people they sell stuff too then turn around and sell it to someone else. We call those people END USERS.
In this case, the people who sign up for offers but don't get iPods are just the end users. The people who manage to get other people to sign up and get iPods are just a cheap sales force.
Look, MMORPGs are no different than everywhere else: Some people are on top, some are on the bottom, and the people on the bottom bitch.
The difference between MMORPGs and real life is real life doesn't come with a number on the box to call when you realize you suck.
If other players in your MMPORGs are causing you grief, get better and kill them. If you're not able to do that, you'll just have to be one of those people who suck at life *AND* MMORPGs.
Is that you think it's ok to substitute your own personal judgement for the rights and judgement of others.
You didn't have to deny the request of the father. You just had to EXCERCISE DUE DILIGENCE in making sure that the person on the other end of the line actually was the father, and that the customer in question was actually dead.
How else can you prove who you are over the phone?
Lots of ways:
- Make sure that the phone number the call is originating from is a phone number associated with the accunt - Make sure the person knows the account number - Make sure the person knows how much they were billed last month (from their statement) - Make sure the person knows who they sent email to recently. - Ask the person to attempt to log in from the same computer they last logged in from successfully.
Etc, etc, etc.
It really is sad when people put FEELING like they've done something positive ahead of ACTUALLY doing something positive. Quite selfish really. You put your own personal feelings ahead of protecting the accounts of your customers from unauthorized access. Nice work.
I've got a bunch of names and social security numbers, and your customer's email, if not profitable for me, should at least be amusing.
Oh, and if I could have your direct extension too, that would be nice.
In short, you exposed all the users of your ISP to fraud by allowing anyone who called you with a sob story and some previously compramised data account access they shouldn't have. But hey, as long as your CONSCIENCE feels good....
The argument of the book seems to be that H1-B's are good for the economy because they pay taxes and buy stuff.
What that argument misses entirely is that if we had an unemployed US citizen in that same job, they would ALSO pay the SAME taxes and buy stuff, and NOT send money to a foreign country. "Because the immigrant came to the US, they had to buy a car!" So? Because the immigrant stole an American's job, that American couldn't buy a car! There is no net gain (and perhaps a net loss) to US Citizens from employing an immigrant.
The better argument for allowing immigrants to work here, and one that also appears to be in this book, is that the economy works better if we have the people who are best at doing a job do those jobs. If we can take the best and the brightest from other countries and have them work in our companies and produce better product for us, we should steal every single one of them we can get. If this means that Americans who are less qualified for those jobs have to do something else (like sell cars to our better-qualified immigrants), that's fine. Trying to protect the jobs of people who are not as good at them from people who are better at them, but happen to have been born somewhere else, just means we're paying someone more to do less. That's a sure way to criple an economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Asking "How do we get kids interested in computers?" on a website like Slashdot is like asking "How do we get kids interested in working on cars?" in an automotive magazine.
You don't. Your kids will pick what they want to be interested in as a natural result of what they do in life. My parents tried to get me interested in all sorts of things they thought would be good for me - soccer, football, tennis, math team, piano lessons, foreign language, blah blah. The only two things I ever became really "good/involved" at are computers (my full-time career) and paintball (hobby), both of which my parents discouraged (paintball in general, computers in the "don't spend so much time on computers!" sense). I still resent this quite a bit as I would be better at the activities I ultimately chose to be involved in if I hadn't had to waste time appeasing my parents' desire for me to be interested in the activities they thought I should be interested in.
How did *I* get involved in computers? My dad got a computer with a modem, and I was quickly discouraged from spending time on it because I was spending nearly all of my free time on the computer (time not at school or with friends, when we were not messing around with computers), and this was viewed as "bad". I eventually forced them into getting a second phone line, but the next 8 years that I lived at home would be a constant battle between me and them over how much time I spent on the computer.
Ultimately, I escaped to college and a computer engineering major and then got to spend all the time on the computer I wanted. But those 8 years of fighting my parents over it put me quite a bit behind the kids who'd had unfettered, and even encouraged, access to their machines.
So if you have a computer in your house, and your kid is not ALREADY spending all of their time in front of the computer, they're not interested in computers. Nobody had to figure out for you how to get you interested in computers, you figured it out yourself. It will be the same for whatever your kid decides to be interested in. No matter how much you as a computer geek want your kids to be interested in computers, chances are your kids are going to become very interested in something that is NOT computers, whether it be sports, guitar, chess, student government, whatever. Do your kid a favor and support whatever it is your kid spends all their time doing. If you have to "show" them how to be interested in it, they're not interested in it, and you're wasting both of your time.
Enroll them in a management class, and then they can hire students in the computer programming class to be interested for them.
the heavier guy GAINED WEIGHT on this job!!!
I wonder how much you have to eat in order to gain weight in space... must be a lot.
Yeah, no kidding.
There were NO stories about the complete annihilation of the planet Xythnaran last week. Total earth-centric bias in the earth media.
40,000+ people die in car accidents every year. Thousands are killed in floods every few years. Millions die every year from famine.
Death, and to a lesser extent, death from natural disasters, is pretty common. A lot of death from a natural disaster is less newsworthy than a little death from a terrorist attack.
There's also an information problem - it was a lot easier to get information out of new york on 9/11 than it is to get information out of a devastated remote area in Thailand.
The reason people post pictures on buildings is because they are DESPERATE. It's a waste of time, but it's the only thing they can do other than nothing, and nobody wants to just admit that there's nothing they can do.
Governments maintain a list of people who are missing, and people check in as they are found. If people can't call their own family (either because they're lazy or they're injured or they're dead), there's really nothing you can do to accelerate the process: If they're lazy, there's no way for you to find them other than them finally checking in, and if they're injured or dead, you're not going to know they're injured or dead until they get to a hospital or you find the body (or part) and match them to someone on the missing list.
The bottleneck isn't tracking who is missing/found. The bottleneck is reaching/finding, identifying, and being able to communicate who is found. A database isn't goign to get soemone to call their mother or help you find a body.
The scale in the pictures is different - at first glance, it looks like the water in the later picture is quite a bit more to the right, but further investigation shows that it's in EXCTLY the same spot, with some flooding in the interior. Match up the landmarks - the buildings in the earlier picture are smaller because the scale is smaller. The later picture shows exactly the same buildings, slightly larger, but with the waterline in the same spot. Anyway, everything is still there.
Or at last chance you could be like my girlfriend, loose the recipt and just dress in a miniskirt and a tight shirt and act dingy to the pimply faced associate.
And this works because the associate has never seen something in a miniskirt MOO before?
Wal-Mart says that if I present an item to the cashier, and I have done something so that the price scans lower than the posted price, I'm guilty of stealing from wal-mart....
Then if I present an item to the cashier, and it scans a price higher than the posted price, is Wal-Mart guilty of stealing from me?
Doesn't seem like they should be able to have it both ways. How is swapping bar codes to get a lower price any different than "accidentally" entering a higher price for a particular barcode into the database?
Since the American game is apparently more challenging, Americans are.
2.7e-2 = 0.027
9.4e-7 = 0.00000094 or pretty much 0.
Roulette has 18 black, 18 red, and 1 green for those not in the know.
You're not a very good roulette player, are you?
Mainstream media can only handle one natural disaster at a time, and the one that happened NOW is more important than the one which has a 2.7% chance of happening in 25 years.
Also, we should expect the probability of impact to continue to increase until it either goes to zero (most likely) or 1. This asteroid has a sigma of 0 - that means the MOST LIKELY path is impact. More observations are most likely going to eliminate the outlying paths first, so as we eliminate more and more of the outlying paths of possibility the most likely path will be more and more likely.
Until we get the observation that says "Ah, yeah, definitely going to miss", and then it'll be zero again.
In this case, the money is probably in the FIRST level or two of the scheme. I already don't have 5 people who would get 5 friends to sign up; and I'd be the first level if I signed up, so they'd get maybe $60-$180 out of me and my friends, and give out *NO* I-pods.
It's also not a true pyramid scheme in the sense that you don't have to pay any money to get in. There's a fine line between a pyramid scheme and just paying people to do sales. My company has a bunch of people we pay JUST to sell stuff. And in fact, some of the people they sell stuff too then turn around and sell it to someone else. We call those people END USERS.
In this case, the people who sign up for offers but don't get iPods are just the end users. The people who manage to get other people to sign up and get iPods are just a cheap sales force.
George Bush decided that Social Security is Just Fine.
But I bet if you're really nice you might get some pity masturbation.
Where have you been? It's been like this for 15, 20 years.
Upping your kill count *IS* a good time.
Look, MMORPGs are no different than everywhere else: Some people are on top, some are on the bottom, and the people on the bottom bitch.
The difference between MMORPGs and real life is real life doesn't come with a number on the box to call when you realize you suck.
If other players in your MMPORGs are causing you grief, get better and kill them. If you're not able to do that, you'll just have to be one of those people who suck at life *AND* MMORPGs.
Is that you think it's ok to substitute your own personal judgement for the rights and judgement of others.
You didn't have to deny the request of the father. You just had to EXCERCISE DUE DILIGENCE in making sure that the person on the other end of the line actually was the father, and that the customer in question was actually dead.
You were LAZY, not righteous.
How else can you prove who you are over the phone?
Lots of ways:
- Make sure that the phone number the call is originating from is a phone number associated with the accunt
- Make sure the person knows the account number
- Make sure the person knows how much they were billed last month (from their statement)
- Make sure the person knows who they sent email to recently.
- Ask the person to attempt to log in from the same computer they last logged in from successfully.
Etc, etc, etc.
It really is sad when people put FEELING like they've done something positive ahead of ACTUALLY doing something positive. Quite selfish really. You put your own personal feelings ahead of protecting the accounts of your customers from unauthorized access. Nice work.
Doesn't the Constitution prevented people from being forced to inherit their parents' flamewars?
Now I have to change my password.
I've got a bunch of names and social security numbers, and your customer's email, if not profitable for me, should at least be amusing.
Oh, and if I could have your direct extension too, that would be nice.
In short, you exposed all the users of your ISP to fraud by allowing anyone who called you with a sob story and some previously compramised data account access they shouldn't have. But hey, as long as your CONSCIENCE feels good....
Movies even have PRECURRING revenue...
Isn't that what Star Wars IV, V, VI and then I, II and III is?
The argument of the book seems to be that H1-B's are good for the economy because they pay taxes and buy stuff.
What that argument misses entirely is that if we had an unemployed US citizen in that same job, they would ALSO pay the SAME taxes and buy stuff, and NOT send money to a foreign country. "Because the immigrant came to the US, they had to buy a car!" So? Because the immigrant stole an American's job, that American couldn't buy a car! There is no net gain (and perhaps a net loss) to US Citizens from employing an immigrant.
The better argument for allowing immigrants to work here, and one that also appears to be in this book, is that the economy works better if we have the people who are best at doing a job do those jobs. If we can take the best and the brightest from other countries and have them work in our companies and produce better product for us, we should steal every single one of them we can get. If this means that Americans who are less qualified for those jobs have to do something else (like sell cars to our better-qualified immigrants), that's fine. Trying to protect the jobs of people who are not as good at them from people who are better at them, but happen to have been born somewhere else, just means we're paying someone more to do less. That's a sure way to criple an economy.