"An awful lot of 'real scientists' (in their day) devoted their lives to alchemy and Platonic solids. Ignorance and misguided research can pop up in any age, regardless of your perceived level of 'scientific' sophistication."
Thus our recent ancestors found the best choice was to formalize and constantly refine a USEFULL scientific methodology that demands the highest standards of emprical evidence and repeatability but never claims truth with absolute certainty.
I did and despite also paying for her stunt wrestling and ice hockey classes she became a woman when she grew up.:)
BTW: I wish you the best of luck but I once lived across the road from someone going through a sex change and from my POV the procedure ruined their life.
Lazy? Having raised teenagers as a single dad I can say with certainty that single parents are anything but lazy, particularly those with small children who also study (as a friend of my daughter is doing here in Australia). As for government support for single parents, if they enforced the payment of reasonable child-support from deadbeat non-custodial parents it would be enough in most cases, but exactly how does one extract money from an unemployed alcoholic ex-spouse? - it certainly wasn't worth the effort to extract the (insulting) $60/month mine was supposed to pay.
The 'problems for white men' (of wich I am the middle aged variety) stem from the (needlessly) high cost of a collage education in the US, it has nothing to do with a bunch of single mums trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I wouldn't wish it on you to find yourself in dire need of welfare because of someone else's irresposibility, but I would love it if people with your prudish, penny-pinching attitude would STFU until you to have walked a mile down that road.
Take a deep breath, the scientists won the science argument years ago and apart from quoting the economic 'alarmist' solution there is nothing technically wrong in his sarcastic generalizations. I have been posting on slashdot for ~8yrs defending the scientific strength of the IPCC's reports but I can still manage to appreciate well thought out sarcasm.
BTW: If you think a post is clueless then put some information in your reply, AC ad-homs won't convince anyone of anything except perhaps that your a witless arsehole.
Once the plane is up in the sky nobody will ever rewrite the whole system, Critical systems are built via evolution not revolution. Fixng the moisture bug on a 'time tested' system is not only safer it is infinitely more efficient than rewriting the code and suffering the cost and time of retesting everything in order to reduce the number of bugs in the new system.
"So moist sensors can crash a $2 billion B-2, but upgrading a 1MHz 25kB processor is too risky."...and expensive.
Yes, the moist sensor thing is a bug in an otherwise very stable system. The bug could very easily turn out to be a bug in sensor maintenance or production procedures, 3/24 is a very high failure rate for such an important part of the system. The application itself is probably running as specified (ie: the MTBF for the sensors would be specified such that the odds of 3 bad sensors are theoreticaly minute but non-zero), the result of that long shot eventuating results in a GIGO problem.
"I think you need to base your risk assessment on facts and statistics"
When lives and/or billions of dollars are at stake engineers do just that, (politicians have a different way of thinking). Age alone is not an indicator of stability but by definition a stable system is one that has run for a long time with few problems, ie: longer up-times between bug reports can only be demonstarted for a 'time tested' system. No system capable of flying a plane is foolproof or bug free but statistically they are safer than driving a car. These statistics are based on emprical evidence from the system in production therefore any replacement system you can possibly dream of can only be demonstrated to be safer than the old system by becoming 'time tested' itself.
Discaimer: In the early 90's I witnessed a completed 2yr/$20 million telco project get permenently shelved because of a dispute over a single feature that was not included in the new system. The problem was a financial 'mexican stand off' due to bad requirements gathering, the customer insisted the feature was part of the project and wanted it for free, the vendor insisted it wasn't requested nor was it in the old system, they wanted an extra $250K to implement it. Ego's took over and rather than split the difference lawyers and accountants were brought in. Pilot turned into an arse covering beauracracy dedicated to recording who spent time on what, contract developers scattered to more sane employers, pilot shutdown, the net result was $20m worth of coding/testing to build a still born system.
"One of my personal theories is that morality is a luxury and a technology."
Morality is a behaviour and often relates to survival. Watched a doco last night where two lions were trying to pull a young adult water buffalo to the ground. Had he been alone he would surely have become dinner however all the other buffalo in the herd ganged together, just the sight of a few dozen buffallo bunched together and trotting towards them was enough to chase the lions away.
At the end of the day the good/bad judgements we make about any social system depends heavily on our position within that system, like all Aussies I'm in the position of paying much less than the average US citizen on health care and recieving better health outcomes, I will never have to choose between medical treatment and bankruptcy. I say "never" since 80+% of the population support UHC, thus politicians have little choice other than to make health care a bi-partisan issue and hound whoever is in power to "do better for patients".
"My understanding would be that the actual outline of the old continents looked nothing like that and we have no way to figure out what they actually did look like."
Why so black and white? Just because we don't know every detail does not mean we have no way to figure out how the earths crust has changed over time. What you are missing is that to a large degree the continents sit in the middle of tectonic plates while the edges of the plates move over and under each other, coastline can change dramatically with the level of the oceans but this has nothing to do with the movement of plates or the location of the continent. Where continents do sit meet the edge of the plates you get mountain ranges. These together with ocean trenches mark the edges of ancient/modern collisions and seperations. Add evidence from fossils, the current motion of the plates, geological features, etc, and it gives you a resonable idea (ie: not a precise map) of what bits have moved where over time. The only thing that I know of where the gross features would be impossible to reconstruct are the land masses that have been subsumed back into the mantle, AFAIK this occurs mainly in deep ocean trenches and not in the middle of a continental land mass (eg: The bedrock in central Australia is ~4 billion years old, The Hawaian islands are an example of a long lived volcano in the middle of a plate).
BTW: Tropical glaciers still exist today but only at very high altitudes.
"A free market is an unregulated market, with no government subsidies, bailouts, handouts, or funding, where the customers ultimately are responsible for the successes or failures for business based on whether they patronize them."
Sorry but there is no such thing as an unregulated market, "the market" is a system and by definition a system has rules. The 'free' part in 'free market' does not mean free from interference/change/rules, in fact the "free" part is a reference to a rule of the market that says everyone is free to participate in the market. Without rules to determine who owns what and who can/can't use force to uphold the rules, the 'market' part of "free market" is meaningless.
Some things work well under your definition of the "free market" but some such as transport and health don't. After all there is a vast difference between running an airport/hospital and swapping home grown vegtables with the neighbours. I'm not suggesting you personally adhrere to a rigid ideology, but to assume regulation and government interference is always a bad thing is to deny the importance of things as trans-US railroads, the Panama canal, the moon landings, equal pay for women & blacks, etc.
Unlike copyright certain common law property rights are not eternal, if you fail to do anything about the tresspass for 25yrs then the legal assumption is you have abandoned the property. The laws were created in a time when nobility owned everything, including villages, roads, paths, etc. Nowadays the laws are mainly used to keep walking tracks through crown estates open to the public, there are clubs in the UK dedicated to systematically walking these tracks to stop them reverting back to the estate under the same laws. Even here in Australia, if I fence off part of my neighbours property and he does nothing about it for 25yrs then the land is mine.
"In order to communicate well enough for history to record it do you need a documented language?"
Good question. David Attenborough belives that humans communicated stories through song and dance long before they learnt to speak and paint. The aboriginal cave paintings he talks about in the link have not changed their design in 30,000yrs. The natives he talked to were still painting the same designs on bark. The paintings themselves are cues for story telling, when Attenbourough asked what the paintings were about he wasn't told much. He found that you have to put the painting, dancing and singing alltogether, to understand the story from the painting alone is like reading slashdot just for the articles.
I'm not an expert inteviewer but during the 90's I had a technical veto on about 30 programmer/analyst positions over several years on a large telco project. Your not reading their mind, your assesing their skill to communicate their "lifelong experience" and their ability to show how it can be usefull. When it comes to development you cannot effectively interview someone for a job if you know nothing about the job yourself so a phycologist has little chance of weeding out a wannabe developer in 5 minutes. However, if you do know the problem space yourself then simply talking in general terms about the project for 5 minutes can give you a great deal of insight into a candidate. For instance, if I get a lot of suggestions but few questions then they are quite likely to develop great answers to the wrong problems. The ideal is someone who asks insightful questions.
Assesing coding skills and humility is also a snap if you know the language well, just ask trivia questions until they either tie themselves up with bullshit or direct you to the manual, if they feel the need to bullshit my part of the process is done within 5 minutes and I would make an excuse to leave the room as a sign to the project manager who would talk to them for another ten minutes or so.
When I'm the one applying for a job I want someone who understands the job interviewing me, some of the contrator pimps are good but HR filter interviews are the worst. This is because the person interviewing you thinks a 'software engineer' is whatever acronyms the project manager wrote in the form, to them an RTFM tatoo across your knuckles is a sign of a mental disorder, a beard is a sign of an 'engineer'.....beard...lack of females...I think I'm on to something here...
"I'm hoping someday I'll have the guts to leave my comfort zone (software engineering)"
No need to leave a good thing, you might be able to step out of the comfort zone elsewhere (do both as you suggested). If by 'comfort zone' you mean that a lot of the time your working life doesn't really feel like work then that's obviously worth keeping. I get a similar "joy of creation" from software engineering as I got from working as a builder's labourer 30yrs ago, (aside from the paypack) the difference is that other people can rarely see the full size and complexity of software as easily as they can see a multi-storey car-park.
Personally, I was married for 20yrs and divorced for 8, my eldest moved out a year after the break up to live with his g/f who's parent eventually helped then buy a house. I looked after my daughter until she was 19 and then rented the house to her and her single mum friend. I just finished helping her and her new husband buy the house (at a considerable discount) so both my kids now have a home so I am 'free' of any sort of financial responsibilty that comes with a family (including a 'bored' alcohlic housewife running the books). I find myself with a healthy bank balance when compared to the other credit crunches, stock/oil crises, etc, that I've lived through and there is no one 'depending' on me.
At the moment I'm 'comfortable' with my unexpected emancipation and I would like to stay where I am (large Japanese company) until I retire. I could get considerably more money by taking on more work but I'm just not interested in a 60hr week these days. Japanese culture respects loyalty a lot more than western culture and according to our Japanese2English language mangler the mother-ship's latest memo says our little sub-kingdom of ~20 old-farts is "Good bossiness! A milk cow for the company!".
Having said that the corporate winds can change rapidly and I rarely write software as a hobby these days, my latest 'hobby' is building a couple of townhouses in the backyard of an old house I just bought in 50/50 deal with my lady friend. Two minutes from the beach, high density zone, two massive hardware stores within a 10 minute drive, and the current "buyer's market" meant I was the only bidder at the auction.:)
Two simple ways to judge TFA (that I haven't read)...
1. A breakthrough for who/what?
2. 4x improvement over what/when?
I'm 50yo and from my own experience the world has definitely changed, IMHO mainly in a good way. Breakthroughs do occur, and when you take science/technology as a whole they have occured at an astonishing rate over the last half century. However even with a science degree and a lifetime of practice reading these things, unless you know something about the subject it can be difficult to tell if a press release is a breakthrough, an advert, or a plea for funding.
"Whatever it is, they should quit it so I can buy a decent solar panel!"
As you suggest, sometimes the technology works well but is not taken up because vested interests have had years to rig the game. For example German roofs are now pumping ~1Gw back on to the grid using the excess generated by private solar panels. Germany is not known for it's sunshine any yet many other countries with much more space and sunshine (eg: here in Australia) won't even look at 'net metering' legislation. Of course it's just a coincidence that coal is a huge export earner for Australia and generates over 90% of it's electricity needs.
The system has always supported the status-quo so if/when you do buy a decent solar panel you may find it an expensive red tape exercise to install it. Ironically, if you go right back to when domestic electricity supply was the breakthrough, you will find the architect of that breakthrough (Edison) had enormous legal and public relations problems with the entrenched gaslight industry who were hell bent on stopping his electric light company.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying solar is THE answer, just that due to it's decentralization effects on an existing industry solar has more working against it than mere clouds.
"Large indigo" assimilation is all fun and ballons until one day when you find yourself sitting in a packed theater watching the "who stole my cheese" video.
In reality nobody can expect a life-long career based on one industry, let alone one employer. For example, I started my full time working life in 1976 as HS drop-out pumping petrol - driveway service went extinct a long time ago where I live. In my early 20's I had a wife and kid and I worked/lived at an old growth sawmill in the middle of nowhere for a year or so - the forestry lease ran out in 1984 and the area is now a national park. Worked on scallop trawlers (fishing) for a year or so - few boats left after the govt. bought back licenses to stop overfishing and protect fish breeding grounds. Worked shift work in a nylon spinning plant in the late 80's - govt signed a treaty and phased out the corporate welfare (tarrifs). Been a well paid geek since ~92-93, whodathunk it?!?
I'm 49, not counting jobs
BTW: I agree a big diverse employer can offer a great deal in the way of internal opportunity.
Speaking of old bugs the guy who sits next to me at work hooked a 15yo mainfame bug a few months back. His stock comment whenever someone mentions it is: "Three more years and that one would have been old enough to vote!"
I'm sure survivours like your sister are more common than suicide cases. Your sisters case at least has a minor assault but I can't think of a single law the woman in TFA has broken. This leads me to suspect the extreme outcome of suicide has prompted prosecuters to make an example of her knowing that any half-arsed lawyer will be able to get her off the trumped up fraud charge. The only rational reason for making her sweat in public is to send a "message" to the general population that basically says "desprate housewives is fictional". What they are doing is not really justice it's institutionalised revenge, ie: "If you can't hang them with a rope then use red-tape".
FWIW I think it was an over-reaction to ring the cops for a teenage breast incident in the first place, unless of course I'm missing some other details?
Had the matter gone to court the BOY could have found himself on the fucked up sex offenders list so quite frankly I can see the motivation of the boy's mother to go on the offensive. My advice if she is personally harassing your sister would be to get the bitch on tape and get a restraining order on her and the boy. If it's just gossip then ignore it and any of your "friends" who buy into it. Depending on the character of your friends you may be lonely for a while but who ever said life was fair?
Suicide is a selfish act and teenagers are generally selfish beings.
Having said that I think the difference here is that an ADULT deliberately set out to make a CHILD's life a misery because of a drama at the local HS. This is very different to getting picked on by other CHILDREN at HS or attacked with random flamebait on slashdot.
This woman either needs phyciatric help or some time in the slammer to think about the morality of harrasing a 14yo to the point of suicide. Unfortuantely there is no law against being a petty minded immature bitch that thrives on the misery of others.
I for one applaud the prosecuters for harrasing this woman with imagantive charges that won't stick and sincerly hope they continue to make her life a misery for the next few years.
The movie plot remark reminded me of a comment by a scientists on TV the other day, he said something like: This report reads like a horror story. For the non-Aussies, the Murry Darling Basin is Australia's bread basket, it covers a large portion of the SE quarter of the continent and according to the most respected scientific body in Australia, it is dying. We are the world's fourth largest exporter of grain but since 1998 there has been only one bumper crop, most years have been down by 40-60%.
The main problem is that the water has been over-used and mismanaged but the region is also becoming drier and they have found that a 10% drop in rainfall converts to a 30% drop in run-off (ie: 30% less water in the system). We have had some periods of good rain but mainly it has been either in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or all at once (as in record breaking floods), many places have now been in severe drought for over a decade. Looking at the news about California it seems to be having similar problems with "fire and water" but that's just the impression I get from news reports. Water rationing is the norm now in Australia's major cities.
Not that I agree with the GP's musings but all wars are resource wars.
"Do we create massive amount of sulfur in the air rapidly killing everything with large scale geothermal?"
Geo-thermal does not create massive amounts of sulphur.
"Do we sterilize the oceans with tidal generators?"
Your kidding right? - Any ideas on just how much energy is in the tides compared to say all the coal on the planet?
"Do we cause massive upheaval that likes of which the most radical Global Warming people do not even think of with massive wind farms?"
How is converting a large part of our generation to wind over 50yrs any more radical than the build up of coal plants over the last 50yrs?
"Solar isn't able to meet our energy needs so it's not an option"
Why is it "not an option", what other single method of generation "meets our needs"? Also I'm not sure what the German's would do since they are pumping a gigawatt back into the grid from the excess generated by roof-top panels.
"You can list all the problems with CO2 and I agree, but outside of nuclear it is the smallest footprint out there that can meet our energy needs."
Only for politically inspired definitions of "footprint".
"Thus simply reducing CO2 does nothing and, in fact, tends to make things worse because we move to greater polluting methods."
Please tell me you are astro-turfing and it's just your friends who think your insightfull.
I agree that the advent of the pill and better living standards in the west has brought a 1/3 of the world's growth to a screaching halt over the last 50-60yrs. China's has also curbed another 1/3 of the growth with the blunt instrument of government oppression. So yes, it could have been much worse (as predicted in the 70's). Dispite the collapse of fisheries in the N. Hemisphere and current downward trend in the global food/person ratio we are still far, far, better off in global food/person than we were in the early 70's (mainly due to China's rise from a famine infested hell-hole to a global super-power since the gang of four were booted out).
I think the root of the problem is that as individuals we instictively think that a constant steady rise in the population of the tribe(s) we belong to is a GoodThing(TM). A tribe of 6+ billion is just too big for our oversized ape-brains to handle in anything but an abstract way. We are at an evolutionary cross-road where our tecnology can both create and identify global problems that our social institutions can not handle. We do have an advantage over the apes and other mammals because we can see the problems, any other mammal (or pre-industrial humans) in such a situation would suffer a rapid population crash or even extinction.
Slashdot Mirror
"An awful lot of 'real scientists' (in their day) devoted their lives to alchemy and Platonic solids. Ignorance and misguided research can pop up in any age, regardless of your perceived level of 'scientific' sophistication."
Thus our recent ancestors found the best choice was to formalize and constantly refine a USEFULL scientific methodology that demands the highest standards of emprical evidence and repeatability but never claims truth with absolute certainty.
"Take your daughters to a planetarium."
:)
I did and despite also paying for her stunt wrestling and ice hockey classes she became a woman when she grew up.
BTW: I wish you the best of luck but I once lived across the road from someone going through a sex change and from my POV the procedure ruined their life.
Lazy? Having raised teenagers as a single dad I can say with certainty that single parents are anything but lazy, particularly those with small children who also study (as a friend of my daughter is doing here in Australia). As for government support for single parents, if they enforced the payment of reasonable child-support from deadbeat non-custodial parents it would be enough in most cases, but exactly how does one extract money from an unemployed alcoholic ex-spouse? - it certainly wasn't worth the effort to extract the (insulting) $60/month mine was supposed to pay.
The 'problems for white men' (of wich I am the middle aged variety) stem from the (needlessly) high cost of a collage education in the US, it has nothing to do with a bunch of single mums trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I wouldn't wish it on you to find yourself in dire need of welfare because of someone else's irresposibility, but I would love it if people with your prudish, penny-pinching attitude would STFU until you to have walked a mile down that road.
Take a deep breath, the scientists won the science argument years ago and apart from quoting the economic 'alarmist' solution there is nothing technically wrong in his sarcastic generalizations. I have been posting on slashdot for ~8yrs defending the scientific strength of the IPCC's reports but I can still manage to appreciate well thought out sarcasm.
BTW: If you think a post is clueless then put some information in your reply, AC ad-homs won't convince anyone of anything except perhaps that your a witless arsehole.
Once the plane is up in the sky nobody will ever rewrite the whole system, Critical systems are built via evolution not revolution. Fixng the moisture bug on a 'time tested' system is not only safer it is infinitely more efficient than rewriting the code and suffering the cost and time of retesting everything in order to reduce the number of bugs in the new system.
"So moist sensors can crash a $2 billion B-2, but upgrading a 1MHz 25kB processor is too risky."...and expensive.
Yes, the moist sensor thing is a bug in an otherwise very stable system. The bug could very easily turn out to be a bug in sensor maintenance or production procedures, 3/24 is a very high failure rate for such an important part of the system. The application itself is probably running as specified (ie: the MTBF for the sensors would be specified such that the odds of 3 bad sensors are theoreticaly minute but non-zero), the result of that long shot eventuating results in a GIGO problem.
"I think you need to base your risk assessment on facts and statistics"
When lives and/or billions of dollars are at stake engineers do just that, (politicians have a different way of thinking). Age alone is not an indicator of stability but by definition a stable system is one that has run for a long time with few problems, ie: longer up-times between bug reports can only be demonstarted for a 'time tested' system. No system capable of flying a plane is foolproof or bug free but statistically they are safer than driving a car. These statistics are based on emprical evidence from the system in production therefore any replacement system you can possibly dream of can only be demonstrated to be safer than the old system by becoming 'time tested' itself.
Discaimer: In the early 90's I witnessed a completed 2yr/$20 million telco project get permenently shelved because of a dispute over a single feature that was not included in the new system. The problem was a financial 'mexican stand off' due to bad requirements gathering, the customer insisted the feature was part of the project and wanted it for free, the vendor insisted it wasn't requested nor was it in the old system, they wanted an extra $250K to implement it. Ego's took over and rather than split the difference lawyers and accountants were brought in. Pilot turned into an arse covering beauracracy dedicated to recording who spent time on what, contract developers scattered to more sane employers, pilot shutdown, the net result was $20m worth of coding/testing to build a still born system.
"One of my personal theories is that morality is a luxury and a technology."
Morality is a behaviour and often relates to survival. Watched a doco last night where two lions were trying to pull a young adult water buffalo to the ground. Had he been alone he would surely have become dinner however all the other buffalo in the herd ganged together, just the sight of a few dozen buffallo bunched together and trotting towards them was enough to chase the lions away.
Sarcastic grain of truth acknowledged.
At the end of the day the good/bad judgements we make about any social system depends heavily on our position within that system, like all Aussies I'm in the position of paying much less than the average US citizen on health care and recieving better health outcomes, I will never have to choose between medical treatment and bankruptcy. I say "never" since 80+% of the population support UHC, thus politicians have little choice other than to make health care a bi-partisan issue and hound whoever is in power to "do better for patients".
"My understanding would be that the actual outline of the old continents looked nothing like that and we have no way to figure out what they actually did look like."
Why so black and white? Just because we don't know every detail does not mean we have no way to figure out how the earths crust has changed over time. What you are missing is that to a large degree the continents sit in the middle of tectonic plates while the edges of the plates move over and under each other, coastline can change dramatically with the level of the oceans but this has nothing to do with the movement of plates or the location of the continent. Where continents do sit meet the edge of the plates you get mountain ranges. These together with ocean trenches mark the edges of ancient/modern collisions and seperations. Add evidence from fossils, the current motion of the plates, geological features, etc, and it gives you a resonable idea (ie: not a precise map) of what bits have moved where over time. The only thing that I know of where the gross features would be impossible to reconstruct are the land masses that have been subsumed back into the mantle, AFAIK this occurs mainly in deep ocean trenches and not in the middle of a continental land mass (eg: The bedrock in central Australia is ~4 billion years old, The Hawaian islands are an example of a long lived volcano in the middle of a plate).
BTW: Tropical glaciers still exist today but only at very high altitudes.
Not sure that forced is the right word although I agree the freedom NOT to partcipate is not in the fundies rule book.
"A free market is an unregulated market, with no government subsidies, bailouts, handouts, or funding, where the customers ultimately are responsible for the successes or failures for business based on whether they patronize them."
Sorry but there is no such thing as an unregulated market, "the market" is a system and by definition a system has rules. The 'free' part in 'free market' does not mean free from interference/change/rules, in fact the "free" part is a reference to a rule of the market that says everyone is free to participate in the market. Without rules to determine who owns what and who can/can't use force to uphold the rules, the 'market' part of "free market" is meaningless.
Some things work well under your definition of the "free market" but some such as transport and health don't. After all there is a vast difference between running an airport/hospital and swapping home grown vegtables with the neighbours. I'm not suggesting you personally adhrere to a rigid ideology, but to assume regulation and government interference is always a bad thing is to deny the importance of things as trans-US railroads, the Panama canal, the moon landings, equal pay for women & blacks, etc.
"I can't understand why, what I like to call, "the grandma scenario" is constantly being brought up here"
Grandma owns the basement and pays the bills.
"What the hell happened to trasspass?"
Unlike copyright certain common law property rights are not eternal, if you fail to do anything about the tresspass for 25yrs then the legal assumption is you have abandoned the property. The laws were created in a time when nobility owned everything, including villages, roads, paths, etc. Nowadays the laws are mainly used to keep walking tracks through crown estates open to the public, there are clubs in the UK dedicated to systematically walking these tracks to stop them reverting back to the estate under the same laws. Even here in Australia, if I fence off part of my neighbours property and he does nothing about it for 25yrs then the land is mine.
"In order to communicate well enough for history to record it do you need a documented language?"
Good question. David Attenborough belives that humans communicated stories through song and dance long before they learnt to speak and paint. The aboriginal cave paintings he talks about in the link have not changed their design in 30,000yrs. The natives he talked to were still painting the same designs on bark. The paintings themselves are cues for story telling, when Attenbourough asked what the paintings were about he wasn't told much. He found that you have to put the painting, dancing and singing alltogether, to understand the story from the painting alone is like reading slashdot just for the articles.
Yep, economic swings and roundabouts. (And now elephants, thanks for the macarbe link)
I'm not an expert inteviewer but during the 90's I had a technical veto on about 30 programmer/analyst positions over several years on a large telco project. Your not reading their mind, your assesing their skill to communicate their "lifelong experience" and their ability to show how it can be usefull. When it comes to development you cannot effectively interview someone for a job if you know nothing about the job yourself so a phycologist has little chance of weeding out a wannabe developer in 5 minutes. However, if you do know the problem space yourself then simply talking in general terms about the project for 5 minutes can give you a great deal of insight into a candidate. For instance, if I get a lot of suggestions but few questions then they are quite likely to develop great answers to the wrong problems. The ideal is someone who asks insightful questions.
Assesing coding skills and humility is also a snap if you know the language well, just ask trivia questions until they either tie themselves up with bullshit or direct you to the manual, if they feel the need to bullshit my part of the process is done within 5 minutes and I would make an excuse to leave the room as a sign to the project manager who would talk to them for another ten minutes or so.
When I'm the one applying for a job I want someone who understands the job interviewing me, some of the contrator pimps are good but HR filter interviews are the worst. This is because the person interviewing you thinks a 'software engineer' is whatever acronyms the project manager wrote in the form, to them an RTFM tatoo across your knuckles is a sign of a mental disorder, a beard is a sign of an 'engineer'.....beard...lack of females...I think I'm on to something here...
You're right, but if you ask me weed is the good stuff. :o
"I'm hoping someday I'll have the guts to leave my comfort zone (software engineering)"
:)
No need to leave a good thing, you might be able to step out of the comfort zone elsewhere (do both as you suggested). If by 'comfort zone' you mean that a lot of the time your working life doesn't really feel like work then that's obviously worth keeping. I get a similar "joy of creation" from software engineering as I got from working as a builder's labourer 30yrs ago, (aside from the paypack) the difference is that other people can rarely see the full size and complexity of software as easily as they can see a multi-storey car-park.
Personally, I was married for 20yrs and divorced for 8, my eldest moved out a year after the break up to live with his g/f who's parent eventually helped then buy a house. I looked after my daughter until she was 19 and then rented the house to her and her single mum friend. I just finished helping her and her new husband buy the house (at a considerable discount) so both my kids now have a home so I am 'free' of any sort of financial responsibilty that comes with a family (including a 'bored' alcohlic housewife running the books). I find myself with a healthy bank balance when compared to the other credit crunches, stock/oil crises, etc, that I've lived through and there is no one 'depending' on me.
At the moment I'm 'comfortable' with my unexpected emancipation and I would like to stay where I am (large Japanese company) until I retire. I could get considerably more money by taking on more work but I'm just not interested in a 60hr week these days. Japanese culture respects loyalty a lot more than western culture and according to our Japanese2English language mangler the mother-ship's latest memo says our little sub-kingdom of ~20 old-farts is "Good bossiness! A milk cow for the company!".
Having said that the corporate winds can change rapidly and I rarely write software as a hobby these days, my latest 'hobby' is building a couple of townhouses in the backyard of an old house I just bought in 50/50 deal with my lady friend. Two minutes from the beach, high density zone, two massive hardware stores within a 10 minute drive, and the current "buyer's market" meant I was the only bidder at the auction.
Two simple ways to judge TFA (that I haven't read)...
1. A breakthrough for who/what?
2. 4x improvement over what/when?
I'm 50yo and from my own experience the world has definitely changed, IMHO mainly in a good way. Breakthroughs do occur, and when you take science/technology as a whole they have occured at an astonishing rate over the last half century. However even with a science degree and a lifetime of practice reading these things, unless you know something about the subject it can be difficult to tell if a press release is a breakthrough, an advert, or a plea for funding.
"Whatever it is, they should quit it so I can buy a decent solar panel!"
As you suggest, sometimes the technology works well but is not taken up because vested interests have had years to rig the game. For example German roofs are now pumping ~1Gw back on to the grid using the excess generated by private solar panels. Germany is not known for it's sunshine any yet many other countries with much more space and sunshine (eg: here in Australia) won't even look at 'net metering' legislation. Of course it's just a coincidence that coal is a huge export earner for Australia and generates over 90% of it's electricity needs.
The system has always supported the status-quo so if/when you do buy a decent solar panel you may find it an expensive red tape exercise to install it. Ironically, if you go right back to when domestic electricity supply was the breakthrough, you will find the architect of that breakthrough (Edison) had enormous legal and public relations problems with the entrenched gaslight industry who were hell bent on stopping his electric light company.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying solar is THE answer, just that due to it's decentralization effects on an existing industry solar has more working against it than mere clouds.
"Large indigo" assimilation is all fun and ballons until one day when you find yourself sitting in a packed theater watching the "who stole my cheese" video.
In reality nobody can expect a life-long career based on one industry, let alone one employer. For example, I started my full time working life in 1976 as HS drop-out pumping petrol - driveway service went extinct a long time ago where I live. In my early 20's I had a wife and kid and I worked/lived at an old growth sawmill in the middle of nowhere for a year or so - the forestry lease ran out in 1984 and the area is now a national park. Worked on scallop trawlers (fishing) for a year or so - few boats left after the govt. bought back licenses to stop overfishing and protect fish breeding grounds. Worked shift work in a nylon spinning plant in the late 80's - govt signed a treaty and phased out the corporate welfare (tarrifs). Been a well paid geek since ~92-93, whodathunk it?!?
I'm 49, not counting jobs
BTW: I agree a big diverse employer can offer a great deal in the way of internal opportunity.
Great post, I'm still laughing as I type.
Speaking of old bugs the guy who sits next to me at work hooked a 15yo mainfame bug a few months back. His stock comment whenever someone mentions it is: "Three more years and that one would have been old enough to vote!"
I'm sure survivours like your sister are more common than suicide cases. Your sisters case at least has a minor assault but I can't think of a single law the woman in TFA has broken. This leads me to suspect the extreme outcome of suicide has prompted prosecuters to make an example of her knowing that any half-arsed lawyer will be able to get her off the trumped up fraud charge. The only rational reason for making her sweat in public is to send a "message" to the general population that basically says "desprate housewives is fictional". What they are doing is not really justice it's institutionalised revenge, ie: "If you can't hang them with a rope then use red-tape".
FWIW I think it was an over-reaction to ring the cops for a teenage breast incident in the first place, unless of course I'm missing some other details?
Had the matter gone to court the BOY could have found himself on the fucked up sex offenders list so quite frankly I can see the motivation of the boy's mother to go on the offensive. My advice if she is personally harassing your sister would be to get the bitch on tape and get a restraining order on her and the boy. If it's just gossip then ignore it and any of your "friends" who buy into it. Depending on the character of your friends you may be lonely for a while but who ever said life was fair?
Suicide is a selfish act and teenagers are generally selfish beings.
Having said that I think the difference here is that an ADULT deliberately set out to make a CHILD's life a misery because of a drama at the local HS. This is very different to getting picked on by other CHILDREN at HS or attacked with random flamebait on slashdot.
This woman either needs phyciatric help or some time in the slammer to think about the morality of harrasing a 14yo to the point of suicide. Unfortuantely there is no law against being a petty minded immature bitch that thrives on the misery of others.
I for one applaud the prosecuters for harrasing this woman with imagantive charges that won't stick and sincerly hope they continue to make her life a misery for the next few years.
The movie plot remark reminded me of a comment by a scientists on TV the other day, he said something like: This report reads like a horror story. For the non-Aussies, the Murry Darling Basin is Australia's bread basket, it covers a large portion of the SE quarter of the continent and according to the most respected scientific body in Australia, it is dying. We are the world's fourth largest exporter of grain but since 1998 there has been only one bumper crop, most years have been down by 40-60%.
The main problem is that the water has been over-used and mismanaged but the region is also becoming drier and they have found that a 10% drop in rainfall converts to a 30% drop in run-off (ie: 30% less water in the system). We have had some periods of good rain but mainly it has been either in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or all at once (as in record breaking floods), many places have now been in severe drought for over a decade. Looking at the news about California it seems to be having similar problems with "fire and water" but that's just the impression I get from news reports. Water rationing is the norm now in Australia's major cities.
Not that I agree with the GP's musings but all wars are resource wars.
"Do we create massive amount of sulfur in the air rapidly killing everything with large scale geothermal?"
Geo-thermal does not create massive amounts of sulphur.
"Do we sterilize the oceans with tidal generators?"
Your kidding right? - Any ideas on just how much energy is in the tides compared to say all the coal on the planet?
"Do we cause massive upheaval that likes of which the most radical Global Warming people do not even think of with massive wind farms?"
How is converting a large part of our generation to wind over 50yrs any more radical than the build up of coal plants over the last 50yrs?
"Solar isn't able to meet our energy needs so it's not an option"
Why is it "not an option", what other single method of generation "meets our needs"? Also I'm not sure what the German's would do since they are pumping a gigawatt back into the grid from the excess generated by roof-top panels.
"You can list all the problems with CO2 and I agree, but outside of nuclear it is the smallest footprint out there that can meet our energy needs."
Only for politically inspired definitions of "footprint".
"Thus simply reducing CO2 does nothing and, in fact, tends to make things worse because we move to greater polluting methods."
Please tell me you are astro-turfing and it's just your friends who think your insightfull.
I agree that the advent of the pill and better living standards in the west has brought a 1/3 of the world's growth to a screaching halt over the last 50-60yrs. China's has also curbed another 1/3 of the growth with the blunt instrument of government oppression. So yes, it could have been much worse (as predicted in the 70's). Dispite the collapse of fisheries in the N. Hemisphere and current downward trend in the global food/person ratio we are still far, far, better off in global food/person than we were in the early 70's (mainly due to China's rise from a famine infested hell-hole to a global super-power since the gang of four were booted out).
I think the root of the problem is that as individuals we instictively think that a constant steady rise in the population of the tribe(s) we belong to is a GoodThing(TM). A tribe of 6+ billion is just too big for our oversized ape-brains to handle in anything but an abstract way. We are at an evolutionary cross-road where our tecnology can both create and identify global problems that our social institutions can not handle. We do have an advantage over the apes and other mammals because we can see the problems, any other mammal (or pre-industrial humans) in such a situation would suffer a rapid population crash or even extinction.