Have you ever dealt with people who foist NDAs on you?
Only on a fairly regular basis for the last 20yrs, mostly while contracting for large corporates and dealing with their customer's systems. I can recall two instance of a serious start-up "opportunity", in both cases they turned me down before we got as far a NDA's because they didn't like my copyright terms.
However, in the second case, I really don't see how he could avoid some AMT penalty
Use the stock as colateral for a gigantic line of credit, only pay off the interest and only pay it with money from the line of credit. From what I can tell you can do this until your dead and never pay a cent in tax (unless the stock inconvienently pays a divedend).
As to TFA, Larry should have taken a leaf from the politician's play book and replied "I don't recall". Documentation can easily demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that you do 'know' something, but it cannot be proven that you remeber it, all the opposition can do is point out he has a remarkably convienient memory.
About as logical as Larson's own claim that asking someone to sign an NDA is the same as accusing them of being a thief. If the person offering the NDA really thought Larson was a thief, why would they want to talk to him in the first place?
Of course it's nothing of the sort, the person offering the NDA is simply asking Larson to make a formal promise not to divulge the contents of the conversation to others, conceptually no different to two childeren making a pinky swear. Peronally I hope the guy with the NDA makes a squillion dollars and blogs at great length about how Larson missed out because his social skills are such that he was deeply offended when asked to make a formal gesture of trust.
I detect a hint of sarcasm but to be honest it was downright fucking scary the first trip but after a few trips it became as exciting to me as an old fashioned roller coaster is to the guy who stands up on it all day operating the brake. Although a stingray the size of a family dinner table flapping about on an 8X12 deck was never boring.
Had all mine done under local while in my mid-30's, similar prescription drugs, the big tree in the back yard never looked so good. Went to a dinner party that night, took my turn at a J and stood up to pass it on. Next thing I know I'm on the floor lying on top of the (significantly smaller than me) host who had somewhat optimistically tried to catch all 6ft, 100kg of me as I passed out.
I have a pretty good in built clock, don't wear a watch but I can usually guess the current time to the nearest 15 minutes. However to me there is no sense of time whatsoever while under General anestetic, passed out, or comatose drunk, it basically feels like a long blink, which is very strange when you do it at a party and next thing you know the room is empty, it's daylight, and you have a blanet on you.
I imagine death is like that, except for the waking up with a blanket part.
The Tasman sea is notorious for rouge waves. Many moons ago I worked a fishing trawler in Bass Straight, I never saw anything like 120ft but the regular waves were tall enough that the radar was blocked by the peaks when the boat was in a trough, I'm guessing the radar mast was about 30ft above the water line. A lot like riding in a giant roller coaster carriage really, slowly climb up one wave, crest, then race down the other side and watch the bow dig under the next one, throw the water over the wheel house as the bow pops up to the surface, and starts the next climb. From what I've heard, the problem with rouge waves is not so much their height but the fact that they are too steep to climb.
Coincidently Conway's game of life is why I forked out $80 on a secondhand Apple][ in the early eighties. I had read about the game of life in an old SciAM magazine and was obsesed with drawing pages and pages of little squares with pencil and paper, I had no idea how to program the apple, but if you have ever spent all night playing Conway's game using graph paper, you may appeciate why I forked out $80 and took the time to learn. A few years later I dumped my factory job and signed up for a CS degree (graduated in 1990, a couple of years before the commercial boom started in earnest), Even though I didn't know it at the time, that $80 'toy' changed my working life like nothing else since. And I think that last point explains a lot of the nostalgia surround Apple]['s, C64's, XT's Amiga's, etc, because I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter who (for nerdy reasons) was fiddling with a home computer in the 80's and shitting gold bricks in the 90's.
OTOH, I had little to no interest whatsoever in the internet at first, I couldn't see what was so fasinating about 'diplaying a formatted document on a remote computer'.
PS; My (ex) wife had a similar lack of interest in how things worked as my daughter. As an example. as 30-somethings we had a (now legendary) converstaion that went something like...
Her: "Guess what makes batteries work?" (amazement)
Me: "Ummm, do you mean the chemicals inside or the electricity they put out?" (confusion)
Her: "The elctricity! Damm'it, I should have guessed you would know that" (fake sad face)
Me: "What did you think made batteries work?" (genuine curiosity)
Her: "Some sort of Ummph?" (sincerity)
Me: (roaring with laughter).
Her: (angry face).
OTOH that's one of the reasons we got on, her basic sense of amazement at the 'discovery' was the same as mine but seperated by ~30yrs. I vividly remeber I had the same "why isn't everyone amazed" reaction as a 5yo when an older boy showed me how to light a tourch bulb with a battery and a piece of wire.
Few women want to work in an environment that they feel is isolating
I think you've hit the nail on the head, think about 'Penny' from Big Bang Theory (stop drolling nerds). What young woman in real life would want to hang out in Sheldon's apartment? Thing is, 'Sheldon' is just as much a sterotype as the dumb blonde part of Penny's character, and from my long experince "Sheldons" are almost as rare as women in real life software houses, most real life nerds are closer in personality to Raj or Lenorad than the other two, and those that do act like Sheldon rarely have the intelect or skills to be considered irreplacable..
The problem is that young women finish their high school certificates, look deep within and don't see engineering there. It simply isn't 'them'.
Again this matches my personal experience. I have two kids both older than Penny, they have both had access to me as an inhouse software dev and had access to my hardware from an early age. The boy was interested in programming to the point of building a BBS when he was ~12.
My daughter, a self confesed 'tom-boy' and dedicated mum who was hooked on WWF wrestling for a while. She wasn't interested in programming, she was more interesed in using the computer to play games and read about WWF wrestlers than fiinding out how it all worked. They both had the same diverse aproaches to cars, the boy pulled several of his cars apart, the girl complained she had nowhere to park because the driveway was littered with car bits. Nethier I nor their mother discoraged our kids from doing anything because of their gender. But exactly as it was in my childhood. Dad was an engineer and Mum was a housewife, so perhaps just the fact that we had those roles influenced thier behaviour, or perhaps there's an evolved tendency for the wetware in different genders to look at the world from slightly different angles? - I'm starting to think that those two different answers constitute a "chicken and egg" paradox, but I will poner some more while I'm putting out the garbage.;)
Cannot resist 'sexist' joke...
Child: "How do you have your tea grandpa?
Grandpa: "I don't know, ask grandma".
[software developer:] a highly stressful, demanding, and often-times not very rewarding career
If you have worked in other industries and that's what you really think, then one of the following must be true...
A. The ship is sinking.
B. You're young and you're expectations are set way too high (welcome to the real world:).
C. You need to see a doctor about your anxiety attacks.
D. You are useless at the job and should find something less 'demanding'. Not an insult, I'm a useless metal polisher and was (kindly) sacked after the first week of trainning ( filthy, hot, and uncomfortable job anyway:). On the upside, your degree will help to open doors into other careers.
Back on topic, I stated my CS degree in the late 80's with 160 other people, 3 of them were women. Not sure why so few but I don't think it was the prospect of hard work that was scaring them away. In the commercial world I can count the number of female developers I worked with on one hand, 2. There have been plenty of women involved but almost always in a documenting/testing/management role.
OTOH, in the 15yrs before I started Uni I worked as.....
A lumberjack - No females at all.
A deck hand on a fishing trawler - a half dozen of the toughest women you could possibly imagine in a fleet of about 50 trawlers, none on our boat.
A nylon factory worker - Plenty of women, all in the packing area and admin building, none on the factory floor or warehouse. (No men in the packing area).
Builder's labourer - No females at all, although I see a few around today.
Carpenter's lacky - ~200 males building window frames and 1 old lady attaching winders to them.
Taxi driver - Like now, maybe as high as 5% female day drivers, virtually nil on night shifts.
The difference is that the software industry and CS degrees have been actively trying to attract females for at least 20yrs but have failed miserably, All those other industries I worked for pre-1990 actively discouraged them.
Now maybe there are macho software houses full of arrogant young men and pornographic decor that effectively scare most women away, much as they do in some blue collar workplaces. However I've never worked in or seen such a software house. In fact moving from blue to white collar the first thing that struck me was how polite people were to each other in an office, even the bosses say please and thankyou. Not saying white collar workers are better behaved than blue collar (there not, just ask any city waitress how ill-mannered 'suits' can be), but like waitressing, standard office politics requires people to be polite, even if it's through gritted teeth. Standard blue collar politics in a male only workplace is, "Any fist fights and you're both sacked".
So to sum up, there is no doubt in my mind that some male domintaed workplaces are overtly hostile toward females and will openly disscuss (with each other) why they think women should be kept out (and vica-versa with female dominated workplaces). OTOH, I'm clueless as to why there are so few female developers.
PS: When I went to HS boys were not allowed to attend certain classes, typing was one of them (because all the jobs involving typing were female dominated). I was (secretly) interested as a kid in what the girls were learning and it would have been useful when I first got hold of an AppleII. Instead I learnt to 'two finger' type ~35wpm because I was interested in making the computer do something , stopping just to lean how to type faster was always on the bottom of my list. I've had that bad habit for 20+yrs now, I long ago decided the ROI is just not high enough for me to go through all those mind numbing excersices, if I need something typed up fast the missus can do 100+wpm and flirt with me at the same time. Sure, that ancient state sanctioned discrimination hasn't hurt my career prospects in the software industry since typing is definitely not an essential skill for a software dev, but that's aside from the point I'm trying to make.
Just a nit pick; Babies are humans, 'anthropomorphising' a human is tautalogical nonsense.
Also I'm guessing you don't have kids because babies start communicating the instant they start screaming at birth, they learn to control thier facial expressions very early on, from my own experince with my kids and grandkids, smiling seems to be the first comms signal they learn after basic screaming and coo-ing, probably because they are surrounded by large smiling faces as soon as they are born. Of course to someone other than the parent a baby's early attempts to smile just look like the kid is about to throw up. OTOH it's hard for anyone to misintrepret an older baby laughing its arse off long before it can speak.
I think people are confusing magical thinking with magical belief.
In the context of TFA.
Magical thinking - all of us have evolved wetware that automatically assigns personalities to inanimate objects.
Magical belief - some of us believe those personalities are real.
Absolutely everything is being defined as "magical thinking." Including ridiculous things like figures of speech
It's not just a figure of speach its how language is constructed in the first place, why does human language consistently assign agency to inanimate objects? Mere coincidence or is it an expression of thought patterns common to us all? I also think people are misunderstanding what they mean by 'magical thinking', it's means our tendency to assign agency to everything via our inate "theory of mind". It doesn't matter wether or not you conciously belive your pet rock or your car has a personality, the point is that your wetware will automatically label and refer to it by assining it a personality. Someone who claims their mind does not work this way is also claiming they have never smashed, hit, or swore, at an inanimate object because they were frustrated with it, which I personally find very difficult to believe.
Nick Xenophon - Yeah, but to make up the religious nutter ratio we also have people like Family First's Mr 2% that sneak in via one of the major parties self defeating preference deals. Churches are a place for politcians to network with "influential" people, if the clergy loose their flock the politicians will throw them under the bus and chase the flock. It's the same reason politicians all dutifully line up outside Alan Jones' sound booth, he has a large and loyal audience, but not large enough to do anything other than fluking a win on a marginal seat here and there.
The last US census says the percentage of atheists jumped from 10% to 15% of the population, still a long way from the rest of the western world but increasing rapidly. I don't disagree that (western) fundementalists have become increasingly radiaclised and more demanding over the last decade or so, however I think the metaphoric temper tantarums of the religious right we are seeing are just a symptom of their diminishing influence over society. Who knows about the Arab spring, I still remeber Stevie Wonder earnestly singing "peace has come to Zimbabwe" in the early 80's and thinking; I hope he's right.
Oh and I never said Sunday school wasn't fun, but now that you mention it in the mid-sixties school in general and the bible in particular had nothing to do with 'fun'.
My first 'program' that I have any recollection of was in RPN on my dad's HP calculator, it was a privalage to use it because it had cost his company the equivalent of a months wages for a senior engineer. He's almost 80 now but still keeps that calculator in its original box in his wardrobe, nowadays he's reimplementing vintage games in Delphi(*) and maintaing my brother's small bussiness systems. I haven't seen the calculator since I left home in 1977-78 but I think it might be a HP-35 going by the early 70's feel of the memories. I do recall it plugs into 240V Aussie mains, so whatever it is I don't imagine there'a a whole heap of them in existance today, particularly one still in its box with the manual. I hope to turn it into an unusual family hierloom after I die, (assuming the hyperactive old bugger doesn't outlive me).
* Google "Barberic Games" - Please take a look and download if you are intersested, but for god's sake don't slashdot him. "BarbEric" is both a word play on 'barbaric' and a combination of my parents names.
Agree, plus most O/S's have native C bindings to their services. I look after a large repository of commercial C code that is still very active and growing 10+yrs after being ported away from mainframe 'applications'*. The code is modular and builds into multiple 'applications' on 6 or more different target O/S's per 'app'. The one thing it doesn't have is a C GUI since these days you need a good reason NOT to have a web front end. I find Python ideal to automate the crap out of that concophany of build systems and it is also used sparingly for a few of the application components (as complied python binaries). Of course, it's possible to do the convoluted build automation in C, but why would I bother?.
Since working with Python over the last 5 or so years I find I don't do much personal C programming these days, I don't even have a C complier installed on either of my home machines! (yes, I will hand in my geek card after I finish this rant). If I've got an interesting idea/problem I want to explore then I dive straight into the endless ocean of Python libs. The one and only thing that pisses me off about Python is the akwardness of using whitespace to define statement blocks, for a C programmer, that's the only real "broken bit" of the language you're likely to (repeatedly) trip over.
As for TFA. When I was a kid we had the local library and a set of encyclopeidia, both woefully out of date and difficult to search. When my kids were kids they had the same but just caught the start of the net at HS. There's a lot said about the totalitarian potential of the net on slashdot and some of it may even be true, but I personally think it will have the opposite effect on my 3yo grandaughter's generation. The most valuable skill she can lean in the next 20yrs is how to sort the shit from the clay that comes through the portal to what is rapidly becoming a "god's eye view" of our entire species both past and present. IBM's 'Watson' is a glimpse of that future portal, that feat still blows me away and yet most people I know (excluding those I work with) already seem to accept as self-evident that "answering questions is what computers do".
The kid in TFA is a too young for this idea, but if you really want to get a teenage boy interested in programming, show him a simple web spider in python and let him join the dots to infinite free porn downloaded while he sleeps. If he's bright enough to join those dots, he's bright enough to figure out how to modify the example into his own version of "hello world". Supporting an 11yo's natural efforts to build anything (be it a program or a go cart) by researching it on the net first, teaches them how to start teaching themselves, but you will still need to hold the bike seat a little, just to steady them when they first take off their training wheels.
'application'*: Scare quotes because these are distributed applications that run across 1000+ servers and are probably better described as 'corporate systems', in the same way that email is a system and an email client or server is an application.
Disclaimer I currently work for Fujitsu (Australia). They have been investing heavily in DC's here in Oz for a while now. Anyone know if Aussie IBM'ers still have to connect to a mainframe in the US to fill out their time sheets?
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever dealt with people who foist NDAs on you?
Only on a fairly regular basis for the last 20yrs, mostly while contracting for large corporates and dealing with their customer's systems. I can recall two instance of a serious start-up "opportunity", in both cases they turned me down before we got as far a NDA's because they didn't like my copyright terms.
I never said it was unreasonable for him to refuse, nor is it unreasonable for someone to ask.
However, in the second case, I really don't see how he could avoid some AMT penalty
Use the stock as colateral for a gigantic line of credit, only pay off the interest and only pay it with money from the line of credit. From what I can tell you can do this until your dead and never pay a cent in tax (unless the stock inconvienently pays a divedend).
As to TFA, Larry should have taken a leaf from the politician's play book and replied "I don't recall". Documentation can easily demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that you do 'know' something, but it cannot be proven that you remeber it, all the opposition can do is point out he has a remarkably convienient memory.
Yep, it's a lot like a plane, if engine is fucked, gravity takes over and you basically fall of the wave..
No, rouge waves travel the same direction as the swell, they are caused by one wave piling on top of another.
It's definitely an adventure worth having, but if your prone to sea sickeness, as about 1/2 of new crew members are, then it's pure hell.
About as logical as Larson's own claim that asking someone to sign an NDA is the same as accusing them of being a thief. If the person offering the NDA really thought Larson was a thief, why would they want to talk to him in the first place?
Of course it's nothing of the sort, the person offering the NDA is simply asking Larson to make a formal promise not to divulge the contents of the conversation to others, conceptually no different to two childeren making a pinky swear. Peronally I hope the guy with the NDA makes a squillion dollars and blogs at great length about how Larson missed out because his social skills are such that he was deeply offended when asked to make a formal gesture of trust.
I detect a hint of sarcasm but to be honest it was downright fucking scary the first trip but after a few trips it became as exciting to me as an old fashioned roller coaster is to the guy who stands up on it all day operating the brake. Although a stingray the size of a family dinner table flapping about on an 8X12 deck was never boring.
Had all mine done under local while in my mid-30's, similar prescription drugs, the big tree in the back yard never looked so good. Went to a dinner party that night, took my turn at a J and stood up to pass it on. Next thing I know I'm on the floor lying on top of the (significantly smaller than me) host who had somewhat optimistically tried to catch all 6ft, 100kg of me as I passed out.
I have a pretty good in built clock, don't wear a watch but I can usually guess the current time to the nearest 15 minutes. However to me there is no sense of time whatsoever while under General anestetic, passed out, or comatose drunk, it basically feels like a long blink, which is very strange when you do it at a party and next thing you know the room is empty, it's daylight, and you have a blanet on you.
I imagine death is like that, except for the waking up with a blanket part.
The Tasman sea is notorious for rouge waves. Many moons ago I worked a fishing trawler in Bass Straight, I never saw anything like 120ft but the regular waves were tall enough that the radar was blocked by the peaks when the boat was in a trough, I'm guessing the radar mast was about 30ft above the water line. A lot like riding in a giant roller coaster carriage really, slowly climb up one wave, crest, then race down the other side and watch the bow dig under the next one, throw the water over the wheel house as the bow pops up to the surface, and starts the next climb. From what I've heard, the problem with rouge waves is not so much their height but the fact that they are too steep to climb.
Coincidently Conway's game of life is why I forked out $80 on a secondhand Apple][ in the early eighties. I had read about the game of life in an old SciAM magazine and was obsesed with drawing pages and pages of little squares with pencil and paper, I had no idea how to program the apple, but if you have ever spent all night playing Conway's game using graph paper, you may appeciate why I forked out $80 and took the time to learn. A few years later I dumped my factory job and signed up for a CS degree (graduated in 1990, a couple of years before the commercial boom started in earnest), Even though I didn't know it at the time, that $80 'toy' changed my working life like nothing else since. And I think that last point explains a lot of the nostalgia surround Apple]['s, C64's, XT's Amiga's, etc, because I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter who (for nerdy reasons) was fiddling with a home computer in the 80's and shitting gold bricks in the 90's.
OTOH, I had little to no interest whatsoever in the internet at first, I couldn't see what was so fasinating about 'diplaying a formatted document on a remote computer'.
he is doing some pretty wreckless sciencing too!
Not guilty your honour; Albert's famous 1905 paper was 3 pages long with no references.
PS; My (ex) wife had a similar lack of interest in how things worked as my daughter. As an example. as 30-somethings we had a (now legendary) converstaion that went something like...
Her: "Guess what makes batteries work?" (amazement)
Me: "Ummm, do you mean the chemicals inside or the electricity they put out?" (confusion)
Her: "The elctricity! Damm'it, I should have guessed you would know that" (fake sad face)
Me: "What did you think made batteries work?" (genuine curiosity)
Her: "Some sort of Ummph?" (sincerity)
Me: (roaring with laughter).
Her: (angry face).
OTOH that's one of the reasons we got on, her basic sense of amazement at the 'discovery' was the same as mine but seperated by ~30yrs. I vividly remeber I had the same "why isn't everyone amazed" reaction as a 5yo when an older boy showed me how to light a tourch bulb with a battery and a piece of wire.
Few women want to work in an environment that they feel is isolating
I think you've hit the nail on the head, think about 'Penny' from Big Bang Theory (stop drolling nerds). What young woman in real life would want to hang out in Sheldon's apartment? Thing is, 'Sheldon' is just as much a sterotype as the dumb blonde part of Penny's character, and from my long experince "Sheldons" are almost as rare as women in real life software houses, most real life nerds are closer in personality to Raj or Lenorad than the other two, and those that do act like Sheldon rarely have the intelect or skills to be considered irreplacable..
The problem is that young women finish their high school certificates, look deep within and don't see engineering there. It simply isn't 'them'.
Again this matches my personal experience. I have two kids both older than Penny, they have both had access to me as an inhouse software dev and had access to my hardware from an early age. The boy was interested in programming to the point of building a BBS when he was ~12.
;)
My daughter, a self confesed 'tom-boy' and dedicated mum who was hooked on WWF wrestling for a while. She wasn't interested in programming, she was more interesed in using the computer to play games and read about WWF wrestlers than fiinding out how it all worked. They both had the same diverse aproaches to cars, the boy pulled several of his cars apart, the girl complained she had nowhere to park because the driveway was littered with car bits. Nethier I nor their mother discoraged our kids from doing anything because of their gender. But exactly as it was in my childhood. Dad was an engineer and Mum was a housewife, so perhaps just the fact that we had those roles influenced thier behaviour, or perhaps there's an evolved tendency for the wetware in different genders to look at the world from slightly different angles? - I'm starting to think that those two different answers constitute a "chicken and egg" paradox, but I will poner some more while I'm putting out the garbage.
Cannot resist 'sexist' joke...
Child: "How do you have your tea grandpa?
Grandpa: "I don't know, ask grandma".
[software developer:] a highly stressful, demanding, and often-times not very rewarding career
If you have worked in other industries and that's what you really think, then one of the following must be true... :).
:). On the upside, your degree will help to open doors into other careers.
A. The ship is sinking.
B. You're young and you're expectations are set way too high (welcome to the real world
C. You need to see a doctor about your anxiety attacks.
D. You are useless at the job and should find something less 'demanding'. Not an insult, I'm a useless metal polisher and was (kindly) sacked after the first week of trainning ( filthy, hot, and uncomfortable job anyway
Back on topic, I stated my CS degree in the late 80's with 160 other people, 3 of them were women. Not sure why so few but I don't think it was the prospect of hard work that was scaring them away. In the commercial world I can count the number of female developers I worked with on one hand, 2. There have been plenty of women involved but almost always in a documenting/testing/management role.
OTOH, in the 15yrs before I started Uni I worked as.....
A lumberjack - No females at all.
A deck hand on a fishing trawler - a half dozen of the toughest women you could possibly imagine in a fleet of about 50 trawlers, none on our boat.
A nylon factory worker - Plenty of women, all in the packing area and admin building, none on the factory floor or warehouse. (No men in the packing area).
Builder's labourer - No females at all, although I see a few around today.
Carpenter's lacky - ~200 males building window frames and 1 old lady attaching winders to them.
Taxi driver - Like now, maybe as high as 5% female day drivers, virtually nil on night shifts.
The difference is that the software industry and CS degrees have been actively trying to attract females for at least 20yrs but have failed miserably, All those other industries I worked for pre-1990 actively discouraged them.
Now maybe there are macho software houses full of arrogant young men and pornographic decor that effectively scare most women away, much as they do in some blue collar workplaces. However I've never worked in or seen such a software house. In fact moving from blue to white collar the first thing that struck me was how polite people were to each other in an office, even the bosses say please and thankyou. Not saying white collar workers are better behaved than blue collar (there not, just ask any city waitress how ill-mannered 'suits' can be), but like waitressing, standard office politics requires people to be polite, even if it's through gritted teeth. Standard blue collar politics in a male only workplace is, "Any fist fights and you're both sacked".
So to sum up, there is no doubt in my mind that some male domintaed workplaces are overtly hostile toward females and will openly disscuss (with each other) why they think women should be kept out (and vica-versa with female dominated workplaces). OTOH, I'm clueless as to why there are so few female developers.
PS: When I went to HS boys were not allowed to attend certain classes, typing was one of them (because all the jobs involving typing were female dominated). I was (secretly) interested as a kid in what the girls were learning and it would have been useful when I first got hold of an AppleII. Instead I learnt to 'two finger' type ~35wpm because I was interested in making the computer do something , stopping just to lean how to type faster was always on the bottom of my list. I've had that bad habit for 20+yrs now, I long ago decided the ROI is just not high enough for me to go through all those mind numbing excersices, if I need something typed up fast the missus can do 100+wpm and flirt with me at the same time. Sure, that ancient state sanctioned discrimination hasn't hurt my career prospects in the software industry since typing is definitely not an essential skill for a software dev, but that's aside from the point I'm trying to make.
Just a nit pick; Babies are humans, 'anthropomorphising' a human is tautalogical nonsense.
Also I'm guessing you don't have kids because babies start communicating the instant they start screaming at birth, they learn to control thier facial expressions very early on, from my own experince with my kids and grandkids, smiling seems to be the first comms signal they learn after basic screaming and coo-ing, probably because they are surrounded by large smiling faces as soon as they are born. Of course to someone other than the parent a baby's early attempts to smile just look like the kid is about to throw up. OTOH it's hard for anyone to misintrepret an older baby laughing its arse off long before it can speak.
I call BS
So you've never smashed, hit, or cursed, an inanimate object in frustration? Where are you from Mr Spock?
I've found that that kind of anthropomorphization is useful as placeholders for other, complex causations
We have a winner, give him a mod point.
pfft, cheap parlour trick. I dropped an ulit cigarette on a workshop floor and it landed standing up on its end.
I think people are confusing magical thinking with magical belief.
In the context of TFA.
Magical thinking - all of us have evolved wetware that automatically assigns personalities to inanimate objects.
Magical belief - some of us believe those personalities are real.
Absolutely everything is being defined as "magical thinking." Including ridiculous things like figures of speech
It's not just a figure of speach its how language is constructed in the first place, why does human language consistently assign agency to inanimate objects? Mere coincidence or is it an expression of thought patterns common to us all? I also think people are misunderstanding what they mean by 'magical thinking', it's means our tendency to assign agency to everything via our inate "theory of mind". It doesn't matter wether or not you conciously belive your pet rock or your car has a personality, the point is that your wetware will automatically label and refer to it by assining it a personality. Someone who claims their mind does not work this way is also claiming they have never smashed, hit, or swore, at an inanimate object because they were frustrated with it, which I personally find very difficult to believe.
Anyway the basic agrument in TFA is not new, Douglas Adams made a much better job of it.
Nick Xenophon - Yeah, but to make up the religious nutter ratio we also have people like Family First's Mr 2% that sneak in via one of the major parties self defeating preference deals. Churches are a place for politcians to network with "influential" people, if the clergy loose their flock the politicians will throw them under the bus and chase the flock. It's the same reason politicians all dutifully line up outside Alan Jones' sound booth, he has a large and loyal audience, but not large enough to do anything other than fluking a win on a marginal seat here and there.
The last US census says the percentage of atheists jumped from 10% to 15% of the population, still a long way from the rest of the western world but increasing rapidly. I don't disagree that (western) fundementalists have become increasingly radiaclised and more demanding over the last decade or so, however I think the metaphoric temper tantarums of the religious right we are seeing are just a symptom of their diminishing influence over society. Who knows about the Arab spring, I still remeber Stevie Wonder earnestly singing "peace has come to Zimbabwe" in the early 80's and thinking; I hope he's right.
Oh and I never said Sunday school wasn't fun, but now that you mention it in the mid-sixties school in general and the bible in particular had nothing to do with 'fun'.
BASIC, never had no luxury like that. :)
My first 'program' that I have any recollection of was in RPN on my dad's HP calculator, it was a privalage to use it because it had cost his company the equivalent of a months wages for a senior engineer. He's almost 80 now but still keeps that calculator in its original box in his wardrobe, nowadays he's reimplementing vintage games in Delphi(*) and maintaing my brother's small bussiness systems. I haven't seen the calculator since I left home in 1977-78 but I think it might be a HP-35 going by the early 70's feel of the memories. I do recall it plugs into 240V Aussie mains, so whatever it is I don't imagine there'a a whole heap of them in existance today, particularly one still in its box with the manual. I hope to turn it into an unusual family hierloom after I die, (assuming the hyperactive old bugger doesn't outlive me).
* Google "Barberic Games" - Please take a look and download if you are intersested, but for god's sake don't slashdot him. "BarbEric" is both a word play on 'barbaric' and a combination of my parents names.
Nonsense. C is a general purpose language
Agree, plus most O/S's have native C bindings to their services. I look after a large repository of commercial C code that is still very active and growing 10+yrs after being ported away from mainframe 'applications'*. The code is modular and builds into multiple 'applications' on 6 or more different target O/S's per 'app'. The one thing it doesn't have is a C GUI since these days you need a good reason NOT to have a web front end. I find Python ideal to automate the crap out of that concophany of build systems and it is also used sparingly for a few of the application components (as complied python binaries). Of course, it's possible to do the convoluted build automation in C, but why would I bother?.
Since working with Python over the last 5 or so years I find I don't do much personal C programming these days, I don't even have a C complier installed on either of my home machines! (yes, I will hand in my geek card after I finish this rant). If I've got an interesting idea/problem I want to explore then I dive straight into the endless ocean of Python libs. The one and only thing that pisses me off about Python is the akwardness of using whitespace to define statement blocks, for a C programmer, that's the only real "broken bit" of the language you're likely to (repeatedly) trip over.
As for TFA. When I was a kid we had the local library and a set of encyclopeidia, both woefully out of date and difficult to search. When my kids were kids they had the same but just caught the start of the net at HS. There's a lot said about the totalitarian potential of the net on slashdot and some of it may even be true, but I personally think it will have the opposite effect on my 3yo grandaughter's generation. The most valuable skill she can lean in the next 20yrs is how to sort the shit from the clay that comes through the portal to what is rapidly becoming a "god's eye view" of our entire species both past and present. IBM's 'Watson' is a glimpse of that future portal, that feat still blows me away and yet most people I know (excluding those I work with) already seem to accept as self-evident that "answering questions is what computers do".
The kid in TFA is a too young for this idea, but if you really want to get a teenage boy interested in programming, show him a simple web spider in python and let him join the dots to infinite free porn downloaded while he sleeps. If he's bright enough to join those dots, he's bright enough to figure out how to modify the example into his own version of "hello world". Supporting an 11yo's natural efforts to build anything (be it a program or a go cart) by researching it on the net first, teaches them how to start teaching themselves, but you will still need to hold the bike seat a little, just to steady them when they first take off their training wheels.
'application'*: Scare quotes because these are distributed applications that run across 1000+ servers and are probably better described as 'corporate systems', in the same way that email is a system and an email client or server is an application.
Disclaimer I currently work for Fujitsu (Australia). They have been investing heavily in DC's here in Oz for a while now. Anyone know if Aussie IBM'ers still have to connect to a mainframe in the US to fill out their time sheets?