My old man (retired engineer) is the only person I know who found the algorithim without looking up the answer, took him 3 months (also there was no internet back in 1980). I pulled mine to bits, I was simply fascinated that it could rotate in every direction without the corner bits falling off.
Some one give the AC a mod point for the headline.
History is is the fastest way to understanding Science (with a capital 'S') and one of the best "executive summaries" I've read (and watched) is The ascent of man.
Most of the pre-1900 polymaths that gave us the enlightenment were either nobility or one social step down from it. The simple fact of the matter is that they were the only people who could afford the "leisure time" to purse their intellectual curiosity. It was not unusual for these people to pay someone like Galileo (the orphaned son of a prostitute) to do the actual grunt work required to satisfy their curiosity. However Galileo was more of an exception than a rule, the vast majority of commoners could not even read and write until public education was introduced in the mid-1800's.
Edison gets a lot of flack on/. from elephant huggers and Telsa fans, but the fact remains that Menlo Park was the world's first modern laboratory. Modern research is almost without exception, based on Edison's model - ie: find an interesting observation in nature such as, electricity can make a filament glow red, then through trial and error work towards a practical goal such as, the light bulb (which is why a picture of a light bulb is synonymous with "an idea")
Contrast Edison's approach to that of Newton. The story is that when his friend Mr Haley told him about his idea of a recurring comet and asked for advice on how to work out the orbital period from observations, Newton said he had written down some "mathematical principles" that may help and started looking through his (extensive) papers for "something I wrote a while ago". He failed to find it but assured his friend he would try and recreate the document. Two years later he gave his friend a copy of his "Principa" - Arguably the most useful scientific document ever written, it's often credited as the birth certificate of the enlightenment and the point in history where science threw away it's religious crutches to stand or fall on it's own philosophical foundations.
Disclaimer: I was educated in 1960's Oz, all I remember 40yrs later is the political message I was supposed to learn - "this country was built on the sheep's back". it's a shame because Australia actually has the world's oldest culture, a culture that has managed a continent as an "estate" for at least 40,000 years under "The law" (which like the old testament wraps everyday practicalities within religious stories), they invented maps, invented grindstones, carved a massive "cathedral" from sandstone that is 20,000 years older than stone henge and the artwork that's left in the half that is still standing is maintained by the ancestors who are alive today (pics or it didn't happen are somewhere in here). I still consider myself ignorant about history, not from lack of interest but because of the sheer scale of the subject. The best way I've found to absorb some of the more interesting bits is by reading biographies of historical figures that intrigue me for whatever reason.
Underwater robotics is all about advancing the state of the art.
That may be true but the primary aim here is marine research, better robotics is a secondary consideration and besides we already know a 10 km high water column can turn a sub into a cigarette box in the blink of an eye, and it only takes a microscopic imperfection in the hull to trigger such an event.
When we are talking about very expensive research tools "Obsolete" does not mean useless, we are talking about a sub that can (almost) reach 10km down. I can only think of two other subs that have reached that depth and resurfaced in one piece on their maiden voyage. For example, the Woods hole institute has another sub called Alvin that can reach 4.5 km and has been in use since 1965, to date it has transported over 8000 researchers into the abyss, it has told us more about "what's down there" than all the others combined. If anyone wants to know what it found and what it's like diving to that extreme depth, there's an interesting book written by Alvin's only female pilot, well worth a read. I highly recommend all slashdotter's buy a copy for their (12 and up) grand_daughter(s), daughter(s), niece(s), ect.
But actually overall it would mean more moisture in the system, not less...
Exactly, and you know what, water vapor in the atmosphere has been steadily rising since ~1980. However just because there is an increase of water vapor on a global scale does not mean droughts will not become more common on a regional scale. More rain in the tropics actually implies the deserts to on either side of the tropics will widen and become drier. Yes it's "counter intuitive", but not nearly as hard to wrap your head around as (say) quantum mechanics. Google "Hadley cells" for a more technical explanation as to "why", it's quite interesting to read about and not hard to understand. Basically, the tropics expand, the equatorial deserts expand and move pole-wards, the poles melt.
But what they accomplish is not "AI". Even Watson is not "intelligence", it is only the illusion of it.
Confusion of terms, consciousness and intelligence are two different things - Watson is intelligent in every meaning of the word. It may or may not have a mind, we can't say for sure because we don't know what a mind is.
I taught C to 2nd year uni student in the early 90's but it wasn't until after that I realised that virtually every example in K&R is very elegant object orientated code that was written well before the term "object orientated" came into use. I looked at Java when it came out, it's main claim to fame at the time was "portability", I thought to myself "reinvented p-code?" and pretty much ignored it. A good grounding in C will make it easier to jump to any language, you just need to picture how the "new" language feature (eg: inheritance) would be implemented in C. This was not difficult for me since the first C++ compiler I worked with was Watcom and their implementation of C++ was written with C macros! Having said that I do agree with the "native language" comment. I tend to view languages though a C/C++ prism, I can write fluently without having to look up syntax rules and standard library calls every few lines.
OO, waterfall, parallel, etc, are design paradigms not language features, they can be implemented in any turing complete language, but some are easier to code than others for specific design paradigms. I have a maths major in "operations research" but if I were a true mathematician I would understand parallel design better than I do.
I've been in this industry for more than 30 years and I'm currently mucking around with Hadoop
I'm 55 with 25yrs experience, I picked up NIS scripting for work earlier this year and am currently playing with CUDA, at least 3/4 of the developers I work with on a daily basis are over 40. My dear old dad is 80, he's a retired engineer who started programming as a hobby @ 70.
I have never been discriminated against because of my age, nor have I seen it happen to anyone else. If such practices exists (in Australia) I think they are limited to small outfits run by cheapskates and crooks. Shitty companies in any industry will always want to hire young people simply because they are cheaper and more easily manipulated.If you're that old you can't learn a new technology then it's time to retire and get your Alzheimer's problem looked at.
Using a modern day corruption of the concepts to describe the initial writings further confuses the relevant issues.
The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) for monopoly privileges...[snip]...In an 1818 collection of his writings, the French liberal theorist, Benjamin Constant, argued against the recently introduced idea of "property which has been called intellectual."[7] The term intellectual property can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown., in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears."[8] The statement that "discoveries are...property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years."[9] In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846. - WP link
The advent of Hollywood in the 20th century did two things, created wealthy and respectable citizens out of previously "immoral" entertainers, changed the notion of copyright from a temporary monopoly on property into an eternal property right, the computer industry came up with machines that could be anything you told them to be, the conceptual distinction between ideas and iron vanished and they were able to gain the protections afforded by both copyright and patent law.
I want to see IP law radically reformed: Art would be sponsored not sold, research would be sponsored not sold, software would be serviced not sold, scientific discoveries would be treated the same way as a finding an ancient "treasure trove", depending on it's value to society you either get to keep it in your head or the state publishes it and hand you a token cash reward commensurate with it's perceived value to society.
That's simply not going to happen in my life time, nor would I want it to happen "overnight" since such a rapid switch in basic property law would probably throw the global economy into black hole. It's taken at least 100yrs for the social pendulum to overshoot "reasonable" in the author's/inventor's favour. If you want to help push it back the other way, publishing conspiracy theories on Slashdot is not the way to do it. Getting your facts straight would be a start but "being right" may not help, politics is all about "being listened to" and nothing makes a politicians ears prick up more than the sound of a pen scratching against a cheque book.
Hmmm, my MW is 1100 watts. For frozen meat pies (Australia's national dish), heat for 1min, stand for 5min, heat for 1min, stand for 2min, it comes out like a warm pie from the bakery. However if I heat for 2min straight, the outside is hot, the centre is frozen, and the pastry has turned into something that would be suitable for re-treading tyres. Thermal inertia explains the frozen centre, but I'm neither a cook or chemist so I have no idea why the pastry turns to rubber?
It may sound natural to you but what you are suggesting sounds like magic to me - spend a century or more removing billions of tons of underground water and nothing changes, not even slightly? The research is published in Nature, you know what to do if you think they are wrong, right?
If Google's lawyers really wanted to screw with his head they could probably get away with showing his photo when someone searches the phrase "Physician heal thyself".
Asimov said what I think you are trying to say. Science is a major branch of philosophy, in fact in when Newton was kick starting the enlightenment, it wasn't called science, it was called "Natural Philosophy". Assuming scientists make a good faith effort to follow the principles of their chosen philosophy then nobody has to "back down". Both sides of the argument have a strong faith that absolute truth is a worthy but unattainable goal..
There are only 4-5 people in our ~30man dept. who are under 40 and one of those is the secretary. I been there for about 10yrs now, recruiters stopped calling after 5. Not bothered, I like my current job and want to keep it until I retire in another 10. I might get restless and think of doing something else but right now it's a very pleasant and flexible way to earn a buck.
I had dozens of "low paid shitty" blue collar jobs in my 20's. A "good job" is not really about the work or the pay. Sure nobody enjoys cleaning the toilet and the pay is important, but much less so when it's providing a healthy disposable income stream, at that point the "right" people and conditions take priority.
Information will affect what you think, reliable information more so....
"In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website.[10] His website, which features mental health screening tests, was blocked for serving malware that could infect visitors to the site. Epstein...[ threw a very public tantrum, ]... threatened legal action if the warning concerning his website was not removed, and denied that any problems with his website existed.[10] Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but still blamed Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection.[11]" - WP.
The paragraph above that I found via google (top hit) certainly affected the way I think about Epstien. In fact it could be said that google made coffee come out of my nose when I read the line above it - "Epstein has studied psychological maturity and published an online maturity test.".
My son participated in something similar in the early 90's. He was in the last year of primary school (Australia), after introducing the kids to a group of senior via a "party" in a nearby retirement home they paired off kids with seniors followed by maybe a dozen weekly visits where the kids and seniors just sat around and talked. The class was the weekly visit itself there were no set topic of discussion and no notebooks, the home work was to describe each weeks visits in writing. My son was paired up with a Hiroshima survivor who had fought for the Japanese army in Burma, not an everyday lesson but certainly a valuable one.
Having said that, I fully acknowledge that the majority of old people living in these places are either not lucid, require hospitalization, or are not lucky/rich enough to land in descent seniors accommodation: I drove a taxi for 3yrs during the 80's, I've probably seen the inside of more old people's homes than you would care to imagine. A "computer pen pal" scheme such as this one would be a welcome improvement to the depressing circumstances I witnessed in at least 3/4 of those homes. I can still picture the (very)old man with a vomit stained dressing gown tied to a wheel chair in a "geriatric centre" that had been built in the windowless basement of a large hospital, they hadn't even bothered to paint the concrete walls. It's one of the most pitiful real life scenes I've witnessed in 55yrs. But old people wallowing in "piss and vomit" is much worse than just "exploiting" someone vulnerable for financial gain, it's two of the worst of human traits combined - cruelty and neglect.
What these disgracefully neglected people need is basic dignity and respect. Assuming the status-quo in old folks homes doesn't inexplicable change tomorrow, a "bright-eyed and bushy tailed" teenager that reacts to them as a student reacts to a respected teacher is precisely the psychological boost they need. Life experience is all they have left to offer society and they find dignity in the fact that a "young person" (under 70) accepts their offer. Assuming there's no "profit sharing" arrangements between the entity running the old folks home and the advertising company providing the ad-supported social network, I really can't see why you would have a problem with it.
Sorry, i don't want to be pedantic on this but really upsets me when people say "Americans", it's wrong in so many ways that worries me a lot for the kind of education that US kids have.
No problem, I'll do it for you, sans-apology.
First up "i" should be uppercase, even my spiel chucker knows that.
Second, depending on where and when you were born/educated there are between 5 and 7 continents. There's also a reductionist 4 name convention for academics that's based on contiguous land masses (ie: each continent is an island).
The meta-pedant is as follows:
1. There is no such continent called "America" in English speaking nations.
2. Slashdot is published in English.
3. "America" is globally recognised as an abbreviation of "The United States of America" by English and non-English mass media. If the author/speaker is taking (in English) about the definition of "America" (in Spanish), then the context should make that clear to the reader in order to be understood.
Therefore: When posting on Slashdot, Brazil is most definitely a South American nation and "America" is a North American nation.
"For example, it would be awful if you refer to a french and a portuguese in this way: Portuguese kids and Elderly Europeans"
You think so? - What's the problem? ALL Portuguese are European, NOT all Europeans are Portuguese, right?
I highly recommend using logic and reliable data to alleviate your emotional stress about the issue, It works for me, believe it or not, I do not suffer any mental trauma reconciling the facts that, 1. Victoria is in Canada. 2. I'm a Victorian living in Australia who has never set foot in Canada.
if someone is asking for 2+ years experience for a junior position, they're smoking crack. Perhaps they really want intermediate people at a junior salary.
You do realise a trade apprenticeship (bricklayer, plumber, etc) lasts twice that long, right? Having said that, not many people take up plumbing as a hobby for 10yrs before getting their ticket. IMO, 5ys INSIDE an industry is when you can start calling yourself "experienced".
Formula's fit "naturally" into modern "languages" such as Mathematica, MatLab, etc.
Of course hindsight is always of the 20/20 variety - If we could find a Delorian, we could time travel back to the early 50's and present The good doctor with a technical demo of CUDA running on a modern $150 video card, do we think the boffins of today would be using C++ CUDA kernels, or FORTRAN?
Aside from the hindsight fantasy, what's wrong with using FORTRAN in the way it was intended to be used? - Old certainly doesn't equate to useless, if it did I would be out of a job! Sure, I can be a cynical old bastard but I hope I never become so cynical as to forget I am "standing on the shoulders of giants" when I fumble around with the truly awesome computing power of my "commodity" video card(s). For ~$200 I can get a video card from the local shops with at least an order of magnitude more raw number crunching power than Fujitsu's game changing numerical wind tunnel that held the supercomputing heavyweight tile in the early 90's (not that long ago for someone who was born 2yrs after FORTRAN).
It truly is an interesting time to be alive, during most of the ~500 year old "enlightenment", most the great polymaths such as Newton were children of nobility and the upper classes, they didn't make it into the history books because nobility are any more insightful than commoners, we know their names because they were the only people with enough time and money to devote to intellectual pursuits. It really didn't impact or concern the "common man" until the arrival of the telegraph, public railroads, museums, clothing dyes, public sanitation, etc, took off in the Victorian era. Today the "common man" (at least the western version of him/her) has the time and money to pursue their own intellectual interests, they also have access to a vast repository of knowledge at their fingertips enabling them to learn from others who have gone before them.
The commonly heard lament of the creativity impaired that there's "nothing left to invent or discover", has never before been a more reliable signpost to a lack of intellectual curiosity than it is today. Knowledge begets knowledge, the explosive growth of Science and Technology I have witnessed in my middle aged life time look like it will continue on it's exponential trajectory. I hope the society my grandchildren become part of points that awesome power toward solving the critical problem of the 21st century, resurrecting our neglected and abused life support systems to their pre-industrial glory.
Coincidently the electricity went out at my home last night (after the pole went off like a giant bug zapper). A truck turned up within 30min, someone had told them I had seen sparks so they knocked on my door to ask me what I had seen. The lights came back on soon after. it was cold and raining pretty hard, I put a jacket on went up to where they were working and shouted "thanks gents", the enthusiastic reaction from the group of wet and miserable men told me it doesn't happen to them everyday*. It's not hard to put a bit of cheer into someone's day, especially when they are having a rough one and still get the job done, but don't fuck it up by expecting, me to go out in the rain and thank you for doing your job.
* I already knew that - the first half of my working life was day labouring and blue collar jobs, if you have never been part of the "working class" then you don't know what "underappreciated" feels like. After 15yrs "digging ditches" the first thing I noticed when I moved into an office job was that people said please/thanks just for doing your job. I know they don't really mean it, it's just good manners.
Precisely. Does the submitter walk into an office building and think to themselves, "I'm glad those construction worker's knew what they were doing, must remember to send them a thank-you note"? - Of course not. If you want your employer to "appreciate" something you provide then stop providing it, but be prepared to be sacked for your disruptive narcissism.
Slashdot Mirror
My old man (retired engineer) is the only person I know who found the algorithim without looking up the answer, took him 3 months (also there was no internet back in 1980). I pulled mine to bits, I was simply fascinated that it could rotate in every direction without the corner bits falling off.
Some one give the AC a mod point for the headline.
/. from elephant huggers and Telsa fans, but the fact remains that Menlo Park was the world's first modern laboratory. Modern research is almost without exception, based on Edison's model - ie: find an interesting observation in nature such as, electricity can make a filament glow red, then through trial and error work towards a practical goal such as, the light bulb (which is why a picture of a light bulb is synonymous with "an idea")
History is is the fastest way to understanding Science (with a capital 'S') and one of the best "executive summaries" I've read (and watched) is The ascent of man.
Most of the pre-1900 polymaths that gave us the enlightenment were either nobility or one social step down from it. The simple fact of the matter is that they were the only people who could afford the "leisure time" to purse their intellectual curiosity. It was not unusual for these people to pay someone like Galileo (the orphaned son of a prostitute) to do the actual grunt work required to satisfy their curiosity. However Galileo was more of an exception than a rule, the vast majority of commoners could not even read and write until public education was introduced in the mid-1800's.
Edison gets a lot of flack on
Contrast Edison's approach to that of Newton. The story is that when his friend Mr Haley told him about his idea of a recurring comet and asked for advice on how to work out the orbital period from observations, Newton said he had written down some "mathematical principles" that may help and started looking through his (extensive) papers for "something I wrote a while ago". He failed to find it but assured his friend he would try and recreate the document. Two years later he gave his friend a copy of his "Principa" - Arguably the most useful scientific document ever written, it's often credited as the birth certificate of the enlightenment and the point in history where science threw away it's religious crutches to stand or fall on it's own philosophical foundations.
Disclaimer: I was educated in 1960's Oz, all I remember 40yrs later is the political message I was supposed to learn - "this country was built on the sheep's back". it's a shame because Australia actually has the world's oldest culture, a culture that has managed a continent as an "estate" for at least 40,000 years under "The law" (which like the old testament wraps everyday practicalities within religious stories), they invented maps, invented grindstones, carved a massive "cathedral" from sandstone that is 20,000 years older than stone henge and the artwork that's left in the half that is still standing is maintained by the ancestors who are alive today (pics or it didn't happen are somewhere in here). I still consider myself ignorant about history, not from lack of interest but because of the sheer scale of the subject. The best way I've found to absorb some of the more interesting bits is by reading biographies of historical figures that intrigue me for whatever reason.
Underwater robotics is all about advancing the state of the art.
That may be true but the primary aim here is marine research, better robotics is a secondary consideration and besides we already know a 10 km high water column can turn a sub into a cigarette box in the blink of an eye, and it only takes a microscopic imperfection in the hull to trigger such an event.
When we are talking about very expensive research tools "Obsolete" does not mean useless, we are talking about a sub that can (almost) reach 10km down. I can only think of two other subs that have reached that depth and resurfaced in one piece on their maiden voyage. For example, the Woods hole institute has another sub called Alvin that can reach 4.5 km and has been in use since 1965, to date it has transported over 8000 researchers into the abyss, it has told us more about "what's down there" than all the others combined. If anyone wants to know what it found and what it's like diving to that extreme depth, there's an interesting book written by Alvin's only female pilot, well worth a read. I highly recommend all slashdotter's buy a copy for their (12 and up) grand_daughter(s), daughter(s), niece(s), ect.
But actually overall it would mean more moisture in the system, not less...
Exactly, and you know what, water vapor in the atmosphere has been steadily rising since ~1980. However just because there is an increase of water vapor on a global scale does not mean droughts will not become more common on a regional scale. More rain in the tropics actually implies the deserts to on either side of the tropics will widen and become drier. Yes it's "counter intuitive", but not nearly as hard to wrap your head around as (say) quantum mechanics. Google "Hadley cells" for a more technical explanation as to "why", it's quite interesting to read about and not hard to understand. Basically, the tropics expand, the equatorial deserts expand and move pole-wards, the poles melt.
But what they accomplish is not "AI". Even Watson is not "intelligence", it is only the illusion of it.
Confusion of terms, consciousness and intelligence are two different things - Watson is intelligent in every meaning of the word. It may or may not have a mind, we can't say for sure because we don't know what a mind is.
I taught C to 2nd year uni student in the early 90's but it wasn't until after that I realised that virtually every example in K&R is very elegant object orientated code that was written well before the term "object orientated" came into use. I looked at Java when it came out, it's main claim to fame at the time was "portability", I thought to myself "reinvented p-code?" and pretty much ignored it. A good grounding in C will make it easier to jump to any language, you just need to picture how the "new" language feature (eg: inheritance) would be implemented in C. This was not difficult for me since the first C++ compiler I worked with was Watcom and their implementation of C++ was written with C macros! Having said that I do agree with the "native language" comment. I tend to view languages though a C/C++ prism, I can write fluently without having to look up syntax rules and standard library calls every few lines.
OO, waterfall, parallel, etc, are design paradigms not language features, they can be implemented in any turing complete language, but some are easier to code than others for specific design paradigms. I have a maths major in "operations research" but if I were a true mathematician I would understand parallel design better than I do.
I've been in this industry for more than 30 years and I'm currently mucking around with Hadoop
I'm 55 with 25yrs experience, I picked up NIS scripting for work earlier this year and am currently playing with CUDA, at least 3/4 of the developers I work with on a daily basis are over 40. My dear old dad is 80, he's a retired engineer who started programming as a hobby @ 70.
I have never been discriminated against because of my age, nor have I seen it happen to anyone else. If such practices exists (in Australia) I think they are limited to small outfits run by cheapskates and crooks. Shitty companies in any industry will always want to hire young people simply because they are cheaper and more easily manipulated.If you're that old you can't learn a new technology then it's time to retire and get your Alzheimer's problem looked at.
Using a modern day corruption of the concepts to describe the initial writings further confuses the relevant issues.
The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) for monopoly privileges...[snip]...In an 1818 collection of his writings, the French liberal theorist, Benjamin Constant, argued against the recently introduced idea of "property which has been called intellectual."[7] The term intellectual property can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown., in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears."[8] The statement that "discoveries are...property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years."[9] In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846. - WP link
The advent of Hollywood in the 20th century did two things, created wealthy and respectable citizens out of previously "immoral" entertainers, changed the notion of copyright from a temporary monopoly on property into an eternal property right, the computer industry came up with machines that could be anything you told them to be, the conceptual distinction between ideas and iron vanished and they were able to gain the protections afforded by both copyright and patent law.
I want to see IP law radically reformed: Art would be sponsored not sold, research would be sponsored not sold, software would be serviced not sold, scientific discoveries would be treated the same way as a finding an ancient "treasure trove", depending on it's value to society you either get to keep it in your head or the state publishes it and hand you a token cash reward commensurate with it's perceived value to society.
That's simply not going to happen in my life time, nor would I want it to happen "overnight" since such a rapid switch in basic property law would probably throw the global economy into black hole. It's taken at least 100yrs for the social pendulum to overshoot "reasonable" in the author's/inventor's favour. If you want to help push it back the other way, publishing conspiracy theories on Slashdot is not the way to do it. Getting your facts straight would be a start but "being right" may not help, politics is all about "being listened to" and nothing makes a politicians ears prick up more than the sound of a pen scratching against a cheque book.
Hmmm, my MW is 1100 watts. For frozen meat pies (Australia's national dish), heat for 1min, stand for 5min, heat for 1min, stand for 2min, it comes out like a warm pie from the bakery. However if I heat for 2min straight, the outside is hot, the centre is frozen, and the pastry has turned into something that would be suitable for re-treading tyres. Thermal inertia explains the frozen centre, but I'm neither a cook or chemist so I have no idea why the pastry turns to rubber?
It may sound natural to you but what you are suggesting sounds like magic to me - spend a century or more removing billions of tons of underground water and nothing changes, not even slightly? The research is published in Nature, you know what to do if you think they are wrong, right?
If Google's lawyers really wanted to screw with his head they could probably get away with showing his photo when someone searches the phrase "Physician heal thyself".
Asimov said what I think you are trying to say. Science is a major branch of philosophy, in fact in when Newton was kick starting the enlightenment, it wasn't called science, it was called "Natural Philosophy". Assuming scientists make a good faith effort to follow the principles of their chosen philosophy then nobody has to "back down". Both sides of the argument have a strong faith that absolute truth is a worthy but unattainable goal..
I'm in my mid fifties, I'm not seeing it either.
There are only 4-5 people in our ~30man dept. who are under 40 and one of those is the secretary. I been there for about 10yrs now, recruiters stopped calling after 5. Not bothered, I like my current job and want to keep it until I retire in another 10. I might get restless and think of doing something else but right now it's a very pleasant and flexible way to earn a buck.
I had dozens of "low paid shitty" blue collar jobs in my 20's. A "good job" is not really about the work or the pay. Sure nobody enjoys cleaning the toilet and the pay is important, but much less so when it's providing a healthy disposable income stream, at that point the "right" people and conditions take priority.
Information will affect what you think, reliable information more so....
...[ threw a very public tantrum, ]... threatened legal action if the warning concerning his website was not removed, and denied that any problems with his website existed.[10] Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but still blamed Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection.[11]" - WP.
"In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website.[10] His website, which features mental health screening tests, was blocked for serving malware that could infect visitors to the site. Epstein
The paragraph above that I found via google (top hit) certainly affected the way I think about Epstien. In fact it could be said that google made coffee come out of my nose when I read the line above it - "Epstein has studied psychological maturity and published an online maturity test.".
It has but philosophy will continue to ask "why".
+1 Nasal caffeine.
I have seen far too much senior exploitation
My son participated in something similar in the early 90's. He was in the last year of primary school (Australia), after introducing the kids to a group of senior via a "party" in a nearby retirement home they paired off kids with seniors followed by maybe a dozen weekly visits where the kids and seniors just sat around and talked. The class was the weekly visit itself there were no set topic of discussion and no notebooks, the home work was to describe each weeks visits in writing. My son was paired up with a Hiroshima survivor who had fought for the Japanese army in Burma, not an everyday lesson but certainly a valuable one.
Having said that, I fully acknowledge that the majority of old people living in these places are either not lucid, require hospitalization, or are not lucky/rich enough to land in descent seniors accommodation: I drove a taxi for 3yrs during the 80's, I've probably seen the inside of more old people's homes than you would care to imagine. A "computer pen pal" scheme such as this one would be a welcome improvement to the depressing circumstances I witnessed in at least 3/4 of those homes. I can still picture the (very)old man with a vomit stained dressing gown tied to a wheel chair in a "geriatric centre" that had been built in the windowless basement of a large hospital, they hadn't even bothered to paint the concrete walls. It's one of the most pitiful real life scenes I've witnessed in 55yrs. But old people wallowing in "piss and vomit" is much worse than just "exploiting" someone vulnerable for financial gain, it's two of the worst of human traits combined - cruelty and neglect.
What these disgracefully neglected people need is basic dignity and respect. Assuming the status-quo in old folks homes doesn't inexplicable change tomorrow, a "bright-eyed and bushy tailed" teenager that reacts to them as a student reacts to a respected teacher is precisely the psychological boost they need. Life experience is all they have left to offer society and they find dignity in the fact that a "young person" (under 70) accepts their offer. Assuming there's no "profit sharing" arrangements between the entity running the old folks home and the advertising company providing the ad-supported social network, I really can't see why you would have a problem with it.
..but they understand "gringo". ;)
Sorry, i don't want to be pedantic on this but really upsets me when people say "Americans", it's wrong in so many ways that worries me a lot for the kind of education that US kids have.
No problem, I'll do it for you, sans-apology.
First up "i" should be uppercase, even my spiel chucker knows that.
Second, depending on where and when you were born/educated there are between 5 and 7 continents. There's also a reductionist 4 name convention for academics that's based on contiguous land masses (ie: each continent is an island).
The meta-pedant is as follows:
1. There is no such continent called "America" in English speaking nations.
2. Slashdot is published in English.
3. "America" is globally recognised as an abbreviation of "The United States of America" by English and non-English mass media. If the author/speaker is taking (in English) about the definition of "America" (in Spanish), then the context should make that clear to the reader in order to be understood.
Therefore: When posting on Slashdot, Brazil is most definitely a South American nation and "America" is a North American nation.
"For example, it would be awful if you refer to a french and a portuguese in this way: Portuguese kids and Elderly Europeans"
You think so? - What's the problem? ALL Portuguese are European, NOT all Europeans are Portuguese, right?
I highly recommend using logic and reliable data to alleviate your emotional stress about the issue, It works for me, believe it or not, I do not suffer any mental trauma reconciling the facts that, 1. Victoria is in Canada. 2. I'm a Victorian living in Australia who has never set foot in Canada.
if someone is asking for 2+ years experience for a junior position, they're smoking crack. Perhaps they really want intermediate people at a junior salary.
You do realise a trade apprenticeship (bricklayer, plumber, etc) lasts twice that long, right? Having said that, not many people take up plumbing as a hobby for 10yrs before getting their ticket. IMO, 5ys INSIDE an industry is when you can start calling yourself "experienced".
Formula's fit "naturally" into modern "languages" such as Mathematica, MatLab, etc.
Of course hindsight is always of the 20/20 variety - If we could find a Delorian, we could time travel back to the early 50's and present The good doctor with a technical demo of CUDA running on a modern $150 video card, do we think the boffins of today would be using C++ CUDA kernels, or FORTRAN?
Aside from the hindsight fantasy, what's wrong with using FORTRAN in the way it was intended to be used? - Old certainly doesn't equate to useless, if it did I would be out of a job! Sure, I can be a cynical old bastard but I hope I never become so cynical as to forget I am "standing on the shoulders of giants" when I fumble around with the truly awesome computing power of my "commodity" video card(s). For ~$200 I can get a video card from the local shops with at least an order of magnitude more raw number crunching power than Fujitsu's game changing numerical wind tunnel that held the supercomputing heavyweight tile in the early 90's (not that long ago for someone who was born 2yrs after FORTRAN).
It truly is an interesting time to be alive, during most of the ~500 year old "enlightenment", most the great polymaths such as Newton were children of nobility and the upper classes, they didn't make it into the history books because nobility are any more insightful than commoners, we know their names because they were the only people with enough time and money to devote to intellectual pursuits. It really didn't impact or concern the "common man" until the arrival of the telegraph, public railroads, museums, clothing dyes, public sanitation, etc, took off in the Victorian era. Today the "common man" (at least the western version of him/her) has the time and money to pursue their own intellectual interests, they also have access to a vast repository of knowledge at their fingertips enabling them to learn from others who have gone before them.
The commonly heard lament of the creativity impaired that there's "nothing left to invent or discover", has never before been a more reliable signpost to a lack of intellectual curiosity than it is today. Knowledge begets knowledge, the explosive growth of Science and Technology I have witnessed in my middle aged life time look like it will continue on it's exponential trajectory. I hope the society my grandchildren become part of points that awesome power toward solving the critical problem of the 21st century, resurrecting our neglected and abused life support systems to their pre-industrial glory.
A: Legacy code.
AKA battle hardened libraries that work as advertised.
Coincidently the electricity went out at my home last night (after the pole went off like a giant bug zapper). A truck turned up within 30min, someone had told them I had seen sparks so they knocked on my door to ask me what I had seen. The lights came back on soon after. it was cold and raining pretty hard, I put a jacket on went up to where they were working and shouted "thanks gents", the enthusiastic reaction from the group of wet and miserable men told me it doesn't happen to them everyday*. It's not hard to put a bit of cheer into someone's day, especially when they are having a rough one and still get the job done, but don't fuck it up by expecting, me to go out in the rain and thank you for doing your job.
* I already knew that - the first half of my working life was day labouring and blue collar jobs, if you have never been part of the "working class" then you don't know what "underappreciated" feels like. After 15yrs "digging ditches" the first thing I noticed when I moved into an office job was that people said please/thanks just for doing your job. I know they don't really mean it, it's just good manners.
mindless outsourcers, contract buyers, and CIO magazine readers
In other words jobs and people you know nothing about, sort of like how executives know nothing about network infrastructure, right?
Disclaimer: I'm not "picking on you", I'm acknowledging you are human.
Precisely. Does the submitter walk into an office building and think to themselves, "I'm glad those construction worker's knew what they were doing, must remember to send them a thank-you note"? - Of course not. If you want your employer to "appreciate" something you provide then stop providing it, but be prepared to be sacked for your disruptive narcissism.