I was sympathetic to ousting Saddam, I've been wanting that fucker dead for decades, I felt it was the US "Cleaning up part of their cold war mess". For me, they lost their mandate when Bush stormed out of the UN like a petulant child. Following that, it was nothing less than an act of sheer vandalisim to sack the entire Iraqi public service as soon as Bagdad had fallen, the ensuing looting was entirely predictable and preventable and the chaos it created still has not subsided. Such actions did nothing but turn fence sitters like me firmly against the US action.
wants to have defacto powers to execute americans on american soil without due process. But he wants to give arrest rights to terrorists taken on battlefields. Anyone else see some type of logical disconnect here?
Automotive companies are held liable for their mistakes. Structural engineering companies are. Aircraft companies are. Engineers who do civil or structural engineering carry liability insurance, take exams, and put seals of approval on their work.
And many of those things either rely on computers for the design or have a computer controlling them. Every new car sold where I live must, by law, have electronic stability control installed. Nowadays if a bridge design is not run through a simulation then it won't get built, a modern computer chip is impossible to design without a modern computer, etc, there really isn't much in the way of modern engineering that does not heavily rely on computer controls and/or simulations.
That software is part of the "engineering" and the chief engineer is legally responsible for it just as much as he is responsible for every other part of the project, he can't simply contract out his "seal of approval" to an Elbonian software house and hope for the best, he is compelled by law to follow due diligence on ALL technical aspects of the project and he is personally responsible for checking that the Elbonians do the job they were contracted to do, no different to the civil engineer who responsible for checking the quality of steel or concrete provided by his sub-contractors. And if you don't think these people take their job seriously then you have never worked on a serious software project where lives or large sums of money are under the control of sofware.
Having said that, software engineering is in it's infancy compared to (say) bridge building, since bridges still occasionally fall down I think it's rather unfair to point the finger at an entire industry when an application falls over. People expect an unreasonably high standard from software when compared to simple mechanics, eg: if an accelerator cable frays and jams the throttle open they understand that and shrug, maybe even blame themselves because they skimp on maintenance, but a car's software gets stuck on full throttle (ala Toyota) then it's unforgivable and someone has to be sued for millions to make everyone feel better. Engineers understand that nothing ever works the first time, assemble anything of any size that uses oil and it will leak oil, the only way to find the leaks is to run it in a test environment, and they do exactly the same thing with software. This is the primary reason why rock solid systems that do very simple things (such as payroll) are so fucking expensive, testing costs money.
The "real" engineer (like my dad was in the 70's) performs due diligence mainly by following recognized standards, this does not mean it won't be a catastrophic failure, it just makes it's less likely that the same catastrophic failure will happen a second time. If the engineer performs his due diligence then (quite rightly) he is not to blame when it explodes and takes out a city block. Software is relatively new to the engineering game, when jetliners were first introduced for commercial use their wings kept falling off in mid air for no apparent reason, we now routinely check for metal fatigue (an unknown phenomena until wings started falling off planes).
Now consider this, with all the wizz-bang technical things that could possibly go wrong in a modern operating theater, the biggest killer by a long margin is a simple nick in the surgeons glove.
"Basic income" is how the Roman's overran Europe, the Emporer gave every citizen ~30kg/ of grain per month, distributed via local bakeries. It wasn't long until all of Europe and North Africa were calling themselves Roman citizens and demanding their daily bread, at that point the system collapsed and took the Roman empire with it.
Trillions? To paraphrase Bill Maher (sic?) - "If you take the net worth of the average ISP and add it to a trillion dollars, you still only have a trillion dollars".
Most Russians were clever enough to see through such propaganda
Google "Stalin's funeral", you may be in for a shock. The inmates of Stalin's camps commonly believed their beloved Stalin would one day come and rescue them, the sad truth is he personally reviewed and edited the next day's execution list every night. And yes I can see a metaphor with "job creators" playing the role of Stalin. - such is the power of propaganda that the victim (AKA "useful idiot") will fervently work against his own interest.
Large widget manufacturers will guarantee (via statistical sampling) what percentage of the batch will fail a specific test. This is one thing consistently overlooked when talking about jobs leaving the west, Asia took over the steel industry partly because their newer mills produced a more uniform sheet metal (thickness wise). The result was the new mills used less metal to make the same sized sheet, the higher tolerances in turn saved the mill's customers time and money,...ad infinitum.
Study after study have shown that "drug sniffing" dogs respond more to the handler's cues than they do the actual presence of drugs.
Yet I doubt you can point to a reputable, peer-reviewed, study making those claims, AFAIK it's standard practice around the world that neither the dog nor the trainer know where the drugs are hidden during the training sessions, often they don't know what they are looking for, it could be drugs, explosives, even apples if your a certain Beagle working Hobart airport. The dog and the handler work together so of course they take cues from each other when out in the field, but if the dog didn't have any ability and was just relying on the handler to do all the identification, then why are sniffer dogs so extraordinarily accurate during randomised double blind trials?
I also doubt you have ever owned a dog, or were not smart enough to work out how to communicate with it. All a drug dog trainer is doing is taking advantage of the dog's natural ability to sniff out it's "toy" and it's desire to please and play with you (who they see as the top dog). One reputable study has shown an ordinary dog can be trained to identify 200 different toys by name and retrieve a specific toy from a different room when given just the name as a command, to the dog it's all just a fun game. Which is why drug dog trainers look for the bored young dogs that others find "unmanageable" because they dig up the garden and rip down the washing.
Not sure if it still applies but in Australia it used to be that any naturally occurring water deeper than 3 feet is public property, using it (say to water cattle and crops) required a license. Waterways are public property including 10 meters or so of the land on either side. A farmer can fence it off but they must provide a way for a human to pass thru. Ideally land ownership should not grant indiscriminate license to pollute and degrade the land's utility to the point where it becomes uninhabitable for future generations, sadly all too often it does.
Ummm, Gates was one of the knuckleheads they trotted out, also Zuckenberg, Scmidt, and a bunch of lesser known IT tycoons. TFA basically just picks out some of the names the authour dislikes.Gates, Gore and Clinton often team up for charitable aims, they have strong financing and a wealth of implementation and anti-corruption experience, regardless of your politics it's a huge advantage to have those three publically support your charity.
Celebrities sometimes do much more than they get credit for, Bono and Geldof are often criticsed as being somewhat self-righteous "dogooders" that don't make any real difference to people's lives, but at the end of the day they were the ones who organised an audience of a couple of billion people and basically shamed the "world leaders" into writing off crippling third world debt foisted on impoverished nations during the cold war.
Even OOP is over-engineered. [snip] The basics should be taught in C, or Fortran, or Pascal, or some other procedural language.
Take another look at the examples in the C bible (K&R), if you look closely you will find they are in fact great examples of OOP/OOD and were written long before the OO acronyms existed.
The US has likely been conducting espionage via computer since the capability existed.
The US/UK were spying on Israel using compromised mainframes as long ago as the 1960's, they also didn't tell their allies they could break WW2 encryption methods.
Three dimensions.are mind boggling enough, once you are inside the BH, light is bent such that all directions are pointing towards the "middle", it's sort of like the 3D equivalent of asking which way is north when you are at the south pole.
Were also not very good at organizing large groups, humans evolved to work (hunt, fish, farm) in small groups of around a half dozen people, the only activity that regularly needed larger groups was tribal warfare. Our brains are simply not built to work in large group, our natural communication skills are deeply dependent on "knowing the mind" of those we work with. At best the human brain can handle "knowing" a couple of hundred other minds, but it only seems capable of working with 5-6 others simultaneously. The obvious exception is when everyone in a large group operates mechanically, they follow a known (and simple) procedure, a "Mexican wave" is a good example. The big picture does resemble a human wave, but get down at seat level and there's a lot of "noise" in the signal.
Why do they feel the need for a battering ram to serve a warrant on a kid stealing plans for a toy? Why did they take his credit and bank cards and leave him without access to his own accounts? What he did was wrong but it does not warrant a jackboot response from the authorities.
It's pretty easy to get a company to pay you for your patents if you offer to pay them even more.
Mods, the AC should at least attract a +1 interesting. I very much doubt a giant like Nikon (AKA Mitsubishi) are simply "rolling over", more likely they are "playing dead".
I have a 10yr old Nikkon SLR, cost me $1200 back then. The reason I will never buy another Nikkon is because they deliberately removed the ability to attach a mechanical remote control (shutter release cable). These cables were standard sizes, reasonably priced ~$20, and most (if not all) SLR's supported them. If I wanted to do the same thing with their camera I would have to shell out another $200 for the electronic remote that only worked with their camera.
The list is supplied by the hiring manager, broken into "essential" and "desirable" and given to HR. The HR bod most likely knows nothing about programming, welding or whatever the job is. The moral of the story is to modify your resume to ensure the list (given in the advertisement) is covered.
The tax office in most countries are very interested in large transactions (above ~$10K), all the financial institutions do regular reporting to the taxman on large transactions. It's not illegal to use suitcases full of cash but it does attract the attention of the bean counters in the tax office.
Yep, same here in Oz. An MP can make false allegations and crude insults in parliament, however "misleading parliament" (supplying false answers), is an offense similar to perjury.
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I was sympathetic to ousting Saddam, I've been wanting that fucker dead for decades, I felt it was the US "Cleaning up part of their cold war mess". For me, they lost their mandate when Bush stormed out of the UN like a petulant child. Following that, it was nothing less than an act of sheer vandalisim to sack the entire Iraqi public service as soon as Bagdad had fallen, the ensuing looting was entirely predictable and preventable and the chaos it created still has not subsided. Such actions did nothing but turn fence sitters like me firmly against the US action.
wants to have defacto powers to execute americans on american soil without due process. But he wants to give arrest rights to terrorists taken on battlefields. Anyone else see some type of logical disconnect here?
Yes, the quote above is a strawman argument.
That is how it currently works here in Australia. The only way to achieve this state of affairs is to have a consumer watchdog with teeth.
Automotive companies are held liable for their mistakes. Structural engineering companies are. Aircraft companies are. Engineers who do civil or structural engineering carry liability insurance, take exams, and put seals of approval on their work.
And many of those things either rely on computers for the design or have a computer controlling them. Every new car sold where I live must, by law, have electronic stability control installed. Nowadays if a bridge design is not run through a simulation then it won't get built, a modern computer chip is impossible to design without a modern computer, etc, there really isn't much in the way of modern engineering that does not heavily rely on computer controls and/or simulations.
That software is part of the "engineering" and the chief engineer is legally responsible for it just as much as he is responsible for every other part of the project, he can't simply contract out his "seal of approval" to an Elbonian software house and hope for the best, he is compelled by law to follow due diligence on ALL technical aspects of the project and he is personally responsible for checking that the Elbonians do the job they were contracted to do, no different to the civil engineer who responsible for checking the quality of steel or concrete provided by his sub-contractors. And if you don't think these people take their job seriously then you have never worked on a serious software project where lives or large sums of money are under the control of sofware.
Having said that, software engineering is in it's infancy compared to (say) bridge building, since bridges still occasionally fall down I think it's rather unfair to point the finger at an entire industry when an application falls over. People expect an unreasonably high standard from software when compared to simple mechanics, eg: if an accelerator cable frays and jams the throttle open they understand that and shrug, maybe even blame themselves because they skimp on maintenance, but a car's software gets stuck on full throttle (ala Toyota) then it's unforgivable and someone has to be sued for millions to make everyone feel better. Engineers understand that nothing ever works the first time, assemble anything of any size that uses oil and it will leak oil, the only way to find the leaks is to run it in a test environment, and they do exactly the same thing with software. This is the primary reason why rock solid systems that do very simple things (such as payroll) are so fucking expensive, testing costs money.
The "real" engineer (like my dad was in the 70's) performs due diligence mainly by following recognized standards, this does not mean it won't be a catastrophic failure, it just makes it's less likely that the same catastrophic failure will happen a second time. If the engineer performs his due diligence then (quite rightly) he is not to blame when it explodes and takes out a city block. Software is relatively new to the engineering game, when jetliners were first introduced for commercial use their wings kept falling off in mid air for no apparent reason, we now routinely check for metal fatigue (an unknown phenomena until wings started falling off planes).
Now consider this, with all the wizz-bang technical things that could possibly go wrong in a modern operating theater, the biggest killer by a long margin is a simple nick in the surgeons glove.
"Basic income" is how the Roman's overran Europe, the Emporer gave every citizen ~30kg/ of grain per month, distributed via local bakeries. It wasn't long until all of Europe and North Africa were calling themselves Roman citizens and demanding their daily bread, at that point the system collapsed and took the Roman empire with it.
Where the hell is the human medical technology?
Sit tight, we've dispatched a emergency team of psychiatrists armed with a boot-load of Valium.
Trillions? To paraphrase Bill Maher (sic?) - "If you take the net worth of the average ISP and add it to a trillion dollars, you still only have a trillion dollars".
I put it in up mode and it scrolled off the screen...
Most Russians were clever enough to see through such propaganda
Google "Stalin's funeral", you may be in for a shock. The inmates of Stalin's camps commonly believed their beloved Stalin would one day come and rescue them, the sad truth is he personally reviewed and edited the next day's execution list every night. And yes I can see a metaphor with "job creators" playing the role of Stalin. - such is the power of propaganda that the victim (AKA "useful idiot") will fervently work against his own interest.
Large widget manufacturers will guarantee (via statistical sampling) what percentage of the batch will fail a specific test. This is one thing consistently overlooked when talking about jobs leaving the west, Asia took over the steel industry partly because their newer mills produced a more uniform sheet metal (thickness wise). The result was the new mills used less metal to make the same sized sheet, the higher tolerances in turn saved the mill's customers time and money, ...ad infinitum.
Study after study have shown that "drug sniffing" dogs respond more to the handler's cues than they do the actual presence of drugs.
Yet I doubt you can point to a reputable, peer-reviewed, study making those claims, AFAIK it's standard practice around the world that neither the dog nor the trainer know where the drugs are hidden during the training sessions, often they don't know what they are looking for, it could be drugs, explosives, even apples if your a certain Beagle working Hobart airport. The dog and the handler work together so of course they take cues from each other when out in the field, but if the dog didn't have any ability and was just relying on the handler to do all the identification, then why are sniffer dogs so extraordinarily accurate during randomised double blind trials?
I also doubt you have ever owned a dog, or were not smart enough to work out how to communicate with it. All a drug dog trainer is doing is taking advantage of the dog's natural ability to sniff out it's "toy" and it's desire to please and play with you (who they see as the top dog). One reputable study has shown an ordinary dog can be trained to identify 200 different toys by name and retrieve a specific toy from a different room when given just the name as a command, to the dog it's all just a fun game. Which is why drug dog trainers look for the bored young dogs that others find "unmanageable" because they dig up the garden and rip down the washing.
Not sure if it still applies but in Australia it used to be that any naturally occurring water deeper than 3 feet is public property, using it (say to water cattle and crops) required a license. Waterways are public property including 10 meters or so of the land on either side. A farmer can fence it off but they must provide a way for a human to pass thru. Ideally land ownership should not grant indiscriminate license to pollute and degrade the land's utility to the point where it becomes uninhabitable for future generations, sadly all too often it does.
And it's "overflowing" (ie: "leaking" over the top) because the business that runs the place doesn't care enough to prevent it.
Ummm, Gates was one of the knuckleheads they trotted out, also Zuckenberg, Scmidt, and a bunch of lesser known IT tycoons. TFA basically just picks out some of the names the authour dislikes.Gates, Gore and Clinton often team up for charitable aims, they have strong financing and a wealth of implementation and anti-corruption experience, regardless of your politics it's a huge advantage to have those three publically support your charity.
Celebrities sometimes do much more than they get credit for, Bono and Geldof are often criticsed as being somewhat self-righteous "dogooders" that don't make any real difference to people's lives, but at the end of the day they were the ones who organised an audience of a couple of billion people and basically shamed the "world leaders" into writing off crippling third world debt foisted on impoverished nations during the cold war.
Even OOP is over-engineered. [snip] The basics should be taught in C, or Fortran, or Pascal, or some other procedural language.
Take another look at the examples in the C bible (K&R), if you look closely you will find they are in fact great examples of OOP/OOD and were written long before the OO acronyms existed.
The US has likely been conducting espionage via computer since the capability existed.
The US/UK were spying on Israel using compromised mainframes as long ago as the 1960's, they also didn't tell their allies they could break WW2 encryption methods.
Three dimensions.are mind boggling enough, once you are inside the BH, light is bent such that all directions are pointing towards the "middle", it's sort of like the 3D equivalent of asking which way is north when you are at the south pole.
Were also not very good at organizing large groups, humans evolved to work (hunt, fish, farm) in small groups of around a half dozen people, the only activity that regularly needed larger groups was tribal warfare. Our brains are simply not built to work in large group, our natural communication skills are deeply dependent on "knowing the mind" of those we work with. At best the human brain can handle "knowing" a couple of hundred other minds, but it only seems capable of working with 5-6 others simultaneously. The obvious exception is when everyone in a large group operates mechanically, they follow a known (and simple) procedure, a "Mexican wave" is a good example. The big picture does resemble a human wave, but get down at seat level and there's a lot of "noise" in the signal.
Why do they feel the need for a battering ram to serve a warrant on a kid stealing plans for a toy? Why did they take his credit and bank cards and leave him without access to his own accounts? What he did was wrong but it does not warrant a jackboot response from the authorities.
It's pretty easy to get a company to pay you for your patents if you offer to pay them even more. Mods, the AC should at least attract a +1 interesting. I very much doubt a giant like Nikon (AKA Mitsubishi) are simply "rolling over", more likely they are "playing dead".
I have a 10yr old Nikkon SLR, cost me $1200 back then. The reason I will never buy another Nikkon is because they deliberately removed the ability to attach a mechanical remote control (shutter release cable). These cables were standard sizes, reasonably priced ~$20, and most (if not all) SLR's supported them. If I wanted to do the same thing with their camera I would have to shell out another $200 for the electronic remote that only worked with their camera.
No offense but it doesn't take a genius to get past HR.
The list is supplied by the hiring manager, broken into "essential" and "desirable" and given to HR. The HR bod most likely knows nothing about programming, welding or whatever the job is. The moral of the story is to modify your resume to ensure the list (given in the advertisement) is covered.
The tax office in most countries are very interested in large transactions (above ~$10K), all the financial institutions do regular reporting to the taxman on large transactions. It's not illegal to use suitcases full of cash but it does attract the attention of the bean counters in the tax office.
Yep, same here in Oz. An MP can make false allegations and crude insults in parliament, however "misleading parliament" (supplying false answers), is an offense similar to perjury.