You know that and I know that. But I've worked for physicists, chemists and biologists, and believe me, that little detail doesn't stop them one little bit. A little birdie tells me that it's even worse in the social sciences.
MatLab might beat Python, but it's been losing ground.
Very slowly, and in the fields I've worked in, invariably to R.
R? I love R, but it's not a general purpose language and very few scientists know how to use it.
Those two little details don't stop scientists either.
In my experience, scientists will do just about anything to convince themselves that they're not actually programming, if only to avoid pesky annoyances like source code control. The less it looks like a programming language, the better.
Not really. The article is emphasizing that a "mistake" is what lead to human intelligence. ALL changes to the genome are "mistakes", it's not some exciting new concept.
To look at it another way, the copying system can't be too perfect in a given species, because it will mean that evolution doesn't happen. If your species completely eliminates mutations, you will be outcompeted by a species which retains the capacity to adapt.
Words like "mistake", when applied to biological processes, are highly misleading. It reinforces the same folk teleology which leads second-rate science journalists to report that trait X evolved in order to accomplish goal Y, as if there was some kind of... oh, I don't know... intelligent agent guiding the process who had something specific in mind.
The use of the word "mistake" (without the scare quotes, which I note that you correctly put in) inaccurately implies a value judgment that keeping copying 100% perfect was the intention. Words like "mistake" or "error" do not accurately describe any known natural phenomenon, in biology or any other field of the natural sciences. Social science, yes. Political science, yes. Computer science, yes. Biology, no.
A far better strategy would be to reform the way licensing itself works and come up with a fair framework for low-ceremony compulsory licensing at statutory rates that are high enough to encourage both the patent's owner and potential licensor to negotiate directly, but are ALSO aggregate among the holders of all patents.
Good plan! After all, ASCAP is extremely fair both to artists and to venues.
Sure they can (with the possible exception of pollinator decline).
It's the old story of how as soon as someone comes up with a strict definition of what "X" means, where X is a desirable label, human nature is to look for legal loopholes. If the government wants to torture someone, they just bend or skirt around the definition of "torture", right?
In case you were curious, I live in Australia, where the economics are different. The government regulates, manages, taxes and subsidises different things. And nobody thinks that Australian farmers are leeches (unless you count inefficient water usage during the recent drought).
Those things specifically may not be real, but here are a bunch of things that are real:
Soil acidification and salination.
Lake eutrophication.
Oceanic "dead zones".
Pollinator decline.
Half the lakes in the US and half the lakes in Asia are eutrophic. Feral honeybees have declined by 90% in the last 50 years in the US. These are not "localized screw ups", they are widespread environmental disasters which can be more-or-less directly blamed on modern agricultural practices.
It's not that food is artificially cheap today – it's that food is much cheaper and easier to produce now due to advances in technology.
This is true, but you shouldn't also discount the contribution of externalities.
More fertiliser, for example, means more agricultural runoff (resulting in eutrophication and oceanic "dead zones"), more soil acidification and heavy metal accumulation, more methane and nitrous oxide emissions and so on. Your prices can be very low if you never clean up after yourself.
Of course, science can help save us from ourselves. Farmers have been selectively breeding their crops and livestock for yield since before recorded history, and in the last 100 years or so, it's become a science thanks to genetics. Today, we can selectively breed for environmental footprint as well, and this is already happening. Still, selecting for yield has a several-millennia head start.
Yes, Source uses scripting. I think you're confused between Source and most Valve games, which tend to use scripting very lightly, and usually not during gameplay. They prefer to use the game object I/O system for performance reasons.
Having said that, the AC you're referring to is 100% correct that the lion's share of porting Source games (which doesn't include Half-Life, of course) is porting Source, in particular, the stuff to do with infrastructure, packaging, and low-level I/O. The hard parts have already been done, since Source already works on XBox, PlayStation, PC and Mac. The game object layer, where most of the custom C++ stuff for each individual game lies, is already portable.
Actually, they are exactly the type of people Larson was talking about.
Then may I be the 62,607th person to say "well duh". Of course you should never sign an NDA if that's the kind of person you're dealing with! Who the hell does?
That was tongue-in-cheek, by the way. The point I was making is that the guys who say "I have a great idea for a web site and I just need someone to build it" are... OK, they do exist. And there are probably a lot of them. But these aren't the people that Larson are talking about, because if you end up in a potential conversation with them about their "idea", the NDA is the least of your worries.
Making a business out of something like Facebook requires being an arsehole in a way that making a business out of something like Red Hat doesn't. I don't think like that.
So, according to TFA, NDA'ing your employees is fine, because you're offering them some kind of compensation. But asking a guy you called up to have some coffee and toss around an idea to sign... not legit.
So how about if it's a formal job interview? Doesn't knowing if you're a good fit or not require knowing what the business does?
For the record, I have signed such a thing. It was very limited in scope, and had a strict time limit. I think it was 12 months or the date when they publicly announced, whichever came first.
Here's what "idea guys" don't realize: Their idea is very unlikely to be unique. If it is, it's very likely to be complete shit.
"Idea guys" is a caricature. An accurate one in some cases, admittedly, but inaccurate in many others.
Many people may have the same idea, but only a small fraction have the wherewithal to turn it into a successful business. Even if you have had the same idea, the chances are that you don't have the business skills, marketing skills and so on to turn it into a sustainable source of revenue.
A start-up's NDA is not to protect the idea from other programmers. It's to protect funders from the risk of other businesspeople who have the resources to build the same business faster.
It constantly shocks me what "ideas" get turned into successful businesses. I had the software idea behind Facebook. Many of us probably did, especially those who already knew about The Well. We didn't do it because a) we had better things to do, b) there was no obvious way to make a living off it, and c) we didn't know how to run a business anyway.
What never occurred to me was the business model idea behind Facebook, namely, selling the privacy of your clients to the highest bidder. It is, as you say, complete shit. But some people spend 16 hours a damn day there. Who knew, right?
In terms of statistics, men are better than women in software, even if some women are highly competent and better than a lot of men. This is mostly due to conditioning. Being good at software development takes a lot of time and dedication from an early age; the priorities in the lives of young men are more able to fulfill those requirements than that of young women.
I'm not sure that this means anything, but when I was an undergrad, biology was the science that you did if you loved science but didn't think you were good at maths. Bioinformatics has changed things a lot, but I have to wonder if this is still a factor.
There's a useful comparison here with jazz. It's been noted more than once that there aren't very many women who are elite jazz instrumentalists. It's clearly not lack of talent, because there's no shortage of women in the elite classical music world. And it's clearly not lack of interest in the music, because there's no shortage of great female jazz singers. It must be something about the culture, or perception of the culture, which dissuades women from doing it.
Imagine if I turned up to a job interview and said "employ me - my education was built round the ZX81 microcomputer - so I am the person for your job!".
Actually, if I needed to employ someone to program a modern microcontroller (PIC or AVR), I'd consider 8-bit micro experience a bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
That would explain why none of their code looks like it's written in a programming language.
+1, Sympathy
Excel isn't a language.
You know that and I know that. But I've worked for physicists, chemists and biologists, and believe me, that little detail doesn't stop them one little bit. A little birdie tells me that it's even worse in the social sciences.
MatLab might beat Python, but it's been losing ground.
Very slowly, and in the fields I've worked in, invariably to R.
R? I love R, but it's not a general purpose language and very few scientists know how to use it.
Those two little details don't stop scientists either.
In my experience, scientists will do just about anything to convince themselves that they're not actually programming, if only to avoid pesky annoyances like source code control. The less it looks like a programming language, the better.
Some people don't seem to know the difference between a police state and a crony-capitalist plutocracy.
Precisely. If any language can be said to dominate the scientific community these days, it's probably Excel, with Matlab and R close behind.
Not really. The article is emphasizing that a "mistake" is what lead to human intelligence. ALL changes to the genome are "mistakes", it's not some exciting new concept.
To look at it another way, the copying system can't be too perfect in a given species, because it will mean that evolution doesn't happen. If your species completely eliminates mutations, you will be outcompeted by a species which retains the capacity to adapt.
Words like "mistake", when applied to biological processes, are highly misleading. It reinforces the same folk teleology which leads second-rate science journalists to report that trait X evolved in order to accomplish goal Y, as if there was some kind of... oh, I don't know... intelligent agent guiding the process who had something specific in mind.
The use of the word "mistake" (without the scare quotes, which I note that you correctly put in) inaccurately implies a value judgment that keeping copying 100% perfect was the intention. Words like "mistake" or "error" do not accurately describe any known natural phenomenon, in biology or any other field of the natural sciences. Social science, yes. Political science, yes. Computer science, yes. Biology, no.
A far better strategy would be to reform the way licensing itself works and come up with a fair framework for low-ceremony compulsory licensing at statutory rates that are high enough to encourage both the patent's owner and potential licensor to negotiate directly, but are ALSO aggregate among the holders of all patents.
Good plan! After all, ASCAP is extremely fair both to artists and to venues.
I think pretty much everyone worked out that it was hyperbole.
Sure they can (with the possible exception of pollinator decline).
It's the old story of how as soon as someone comes up with a strict definition of what "X" means, where X is a desirable label, human nature is to look for legal loopholes. If the government wants to torture someone, they just bend or skirt around the definition of "torture", right?
Here's one from last year.
In case you were curious, I live in Australia, where the economics are different. The government regulates, manages, taxes and subsidises different things. And nobody thinks that Australian farmers are leeches (unless you count inefficient water usage during the recent drought).
GMO's on the other hand, have one purpose and one purpose only: To allow the use of herbicides and pesticides that would kill the "natural" plant.
Not true. GMOs have been developed for lots of purposes, drought-hardiness and surviving in more acidic or more saline soil.
Those things specifically may not be real, but here are a bunch of things that are real:
Half the lakes in the US and half the lakes in Asia are eutrophic. Feral honeybees have declined by 90% in the last 50 years in the US. These are not "localized screw ups", they are widespread environmental disasters which can be more-or-less directly blamed on modern agricultural practices.
To be fair, the farmer doesn't pay the cost of externalities like runoff pollution, health problems or pollinator decline.
It's not that food is artificially cheap today – it's that food is much cheaper and easier to produce now due to advances in technology.
This is true, but you shouldn't also discount the contribution of externalities.
More fertiliser, for example, means more agricultural runoff (resulting in eutrophication and oceanic "dead zones"), more soil acidification and heavy metal accumulation, more methane and nitrous oxide emissions and so on. Your prices can be very low if you never clean up after yourself.
Of course, science can help save us from ourselves. Farmers have been selectively breeding their crops and livestock for yield since before recorded history, and in the last 100 years or so, it's become a science thanks to genetics. Today, we can selectively breed for environmental footprint as well, and this is already happening. Still, selecting for yield has a several-millennia head start.
Ah, but nobody on this thread has complained about the lack of HL2:Ep3 yet.
Yes, Source uses scripting. I think you're confused between Source and most Valve games, which tend to use scripting very lightly, and usually not during gameplay. They prefer to use the game object I/O system for performance reasons.
Having said that, the AC you're referring to is 100% correct that the lion's share of porting Source games (which doesn't include Half-Life, of course) is porting Source, in particular, the stuff to do with infrastructure, packaging, and low-level I/O. The hard parts have already been done, since Source already works on XBox, PlayStation, PC and Mac. The game object layer, where most of the custom C++ stuff for each individual game lies, is already portable.
Actually, they are exactly the type of people Larson was talking about.
Then may I be the 62,607th person to say "well duh". Of course you should never sign an NDA if that's the kind of person you're dealing with! Who the hell does?
Who knew? Lot's of people!
That was tongue-in-cheek, by the way. The point I was making is that the guys who say "I have a great idea for a web site and I just need someone to build it" are... OK, they do exist. And there are probably a lot of them. But these aren't the people that Larson are talking about, because if you end up in a potential conversation with them about their "idea", the NDA is the least of your worries.
Making a business out of something like Facebook requires being an arsehole in a way that making a business out of something like Red Hat doesn't. I don't think like that.
So, according to TFA, NDA'ing your employees is fine, because you're offering them some kind of compensation. But asking a guy you called up to have some coffee and toss around an idea to sign... not legit.
So how about if it's a formal job interview? Doesn't knowing if you're a good fit or not require knowing what the business does?
For the record, I have signed such a thing. It was very limited in scope, and had a strict time limit. I think it was 12 months or the date when they publicly announced, whichever came first.
Here's what "idea guys" don't realize: Their idea is very unlikely to be unique. If it is, it's very likely to be complete shit.
"Idea guys" is a caricature. An accurate one in some cases, admittedly, but inaccurate in many others.
Many people may have the same idea, but only a small fraction have the wherewithal to turn it into a successful business. Even if you have had the same idea, the chances are that you don't have the business skills, marketing skills and so on to turn it into a sustainable source of revenue.
A start-up's NDA is not to protect the idea from other programmers. It's to protect funders from the risk of other businesspeople who have the resources to build the same business faster.
It constantly shocks me what "ideas" get turned into successful businesses. I had the software idea behind Facebook. Many of us probably did, especially those who already knew about The Well. We didn't do it because a) we had better things to do, b) there was no obvious way to make a living off it, and c) we didn't know how to run a business anyway.
What never occurred to me was the business model idea behind Facebook, namely, selling the privacy of your clients to the highest bidder. It is, as you say, complete shit. But some people spend 16 hours a damn day there. Who knew, right?
Dear Elector,
We like the sound of free energy forever. We have only two questions, which will help us decide if it's worth it.
1. Whose pockets does it line? We need to know so we can extract campaign funding from them.
2. How many elections into the future before this "free energy forever" happens? If it's more than two, it's not worth it.
We await your response.
Yours sincerely,
Your Elected Representatives
The official Google party line is "we want the best of the best (of the best, SIR!)".
Do they not have women in management positions, or do they use the gender-neutral Star Trek honorific?
In terms of statistics, men are better than women in software, even if some women are highly competent and better than a lot of men. This is mostly due to conditioning. Being good at software development takes a lot of time and dedication from an early age; the priorities in the lives of young men are more able to fulfill those requirements than that of young women.
[citation needed]
I'm not sure that this means anything, but when I was an undergrad, biology was the science that you did if you loved science but didn't think you were good at maths. Bioinformatics has changed things a lot, but I have to wonder if this is still a factor.
There's a useful comparison here with jazz. It's been noted more than once that there aren't very many women who are elite jazz instrumentalists. It's clearly not lack of talent, because there's no shortage of women in the elite classical music world. And it's clearly not lack of interest in the music, because there's no shortage of great female jazz singers. It must be something about the culture, or perception of the culture, which dissuades women from doing it.
Imagine if I turned up to a job interview and said "employ me - my education was built round the ZX81 microcomputer - so I am the person for your job!".
Actually, if I needed to employ someone to program a modern microcontroller (PIC or AVR), I'd consider 8-bit micro experience a bonus.