Smallpox was naturally derived from cowpox. Cowpox is found in animals such as cows, rats and cats. It could very well develop again. Why wouldn't it be a smart idea to keep a hold of small pox just in case? Viruses are highly mutative, we gain a lot of knowledge from holding onto smallpox. There's three scenarios here:
1. Smallpox is delivered as a weapon, either from hidden stockpiles or reverse engineered from cowpox : We use our stockpiles to make vaccine 2. Smallpox is found again in nature, as a natural derivative of cowpox : We use our stockpiles to make vaccine 3. Some other derivative of cowpox shows up due to naturally mutating viruses: We use our stockpiles to compare the two strains, find out why it mutated the way it did, and develop a vaccine.
1 and 3 are likely to happen, as a result of human nature, and good old fashioned nature respectively. In an ideal world, it's conceivable all humans choose to disband biological weapons or something. But it's not realistic to think cowpox won't continue to exist and evolve as viruses do.
How about federally guaranteeing every citizen has a connection to the internet?
How about treating internet providers like utility providers? Every land lord should have the duty to make heat, electricity, water, and internet available to citizens.
Honestly, I think we should make it a constitutional amendment to grant citizens the right to access an unfettered and open internet.
When stupid crap like Survivor, "Jerseylicious" and other MTV pap get on television, that's what kids want to be. They want to be sassy reality TV show stars with glamorous jobs like "hair dresser" and "image-consultant". It's garbage.
Back in the day we had good science fiction. Now science fiction on television is a rarity. The Scifi channel decided it didn't want to be 'nerdy' anymore. It's entertainment that fosters ambition, and today our kids want to marry rich and act like baffoons for millions. Using technology isn't a joy or privelege for them, it's something as dry as making toast.
I don't support using drones as domestic surveillance.
I support drones having the same roles as Police helicopters, as cheaper and safer replacements for police pilots. We don't need 24/7 Monitoring of civilians or whatever.
But say, having a heavily armed assault drone as part of SWAT team equipment? This, I support. That would be awesome. Having drones that can track high-speed chases safely (and perhaps engage in slightly more dangerous manuvers than a human-piloted helicopter might attempt)? This, I support. Replacing a fleet of fuel guzzling, human-risking, high-maintenance helicopters for drones? This, I support.
Using them as domestic cameras, spies or monitors? No, I don't support that.
Aerial drones are the wrong tools for public deterance. That's the role of a patrolman. I can see some kind of ground based Dalek-type robot serving that role, but not an aerial drone. A police robot needs to be able to interact with citizens and offer challenge/response with real people. I wouldn't mind say, a bunch of patrol-bots monitored by policemen, that you could speak to and receive a response from real people. Something that takes over the roll of patrol-car sweeps, for instance. But something that creates a NEW function, and doesn't REPLACE existing humans with more efficient automation, I don't support.
Guards! Armed guards, with weapons! What those are is up to you. Tasers? Guns? Batons? Pepper Spray? Okay!
Afraid someone will hijack a plane? Put a guard or two on it!
Afraid someone will hijack a train? Guard.
Afraid someone will hijack a bus? Guard!
A guard isn't invasive. A guard knows his home turf. A guard doesn't require an expert to run. A guard doesn't break the 4th amendment. A guard has really nothing better to do than people watch. In the event of a real emergency, a guard can help out. A guard deters crime and hijinks, JUST BY BEING THERE.
Cost of a scanning machine= $100,000 plus technical support and technicians Cost of a guard= 50,000 + healthcare plus support.
I daresay, hiring transport guards seems to me the best solution. It would create more jobs, stimulate the economy, and ACTUALLY deter terrorists, as well as common thieves, criminals and mischief makers.
To the people who say 'Why doesn't the government condemn radical Islam?" , the fact is, we do.
The US Government, like all good government, speaks mostly through action rather than words in condemning radical Islam. Think about it.
-Supporting dictatorships in lieu of radical Islamic Groups (The US's support for Pakistan, and propping up the Shah of Iran) -Supporting a dictatorship's war against a theocracy run by radical Muslims (Iran/Iraq War) -Targetted killings of radical Islamicists in Iraq and Afghanistan -Huge bounties on the heads of radical Islamicists (The hunt for Osama Bin Laden) -Wholesale invasions of countries and the dissolution of governments that support radical Islam (Invasion of Afghanistan and the fight against the Taliban) -Supporting moderate Muslim governments over radical ones (Visits to Egypt, funding for Pakistan and Iraq)
In fact, the American military's main goal over the past 9 years has been the suppression, destruction and dissolution of radical Islam over the years. Pretty much every armed force from the Army proper, to the CIA has been devoted to taking radical Islam to task.
*** Paster Terry Jones is acting like an asshat and ruining our work against radical Islam. THAT'S why we're condemning him.
When Muslims burn bibles, the Western world DOES get upset. Infact, we get so upset we make lists of the incidents and eventually take armed actions against groups that go too far. Obviously we hope that the local governments take care of things, but do you think that the US is so naive? We have diplomats and ambassadors all over the world busy 'nudging' governments whenever such actions occur.
Radical Islam taking action against blasphemers isn't a threat, it's a fact. We have armed men and women protecting us so we CAN do blasphemous acts safely. But doing them makes their job harder. It's just like you don't randomly provoke local gang-members or mafia-men: it's well within your rights to do, but is it SMART? No. Can the government protect you from retaliation? They'll TRY, but whether they'll succeed is a different matter.
Radical Muslims, like any radical members of a religion, are generally brainwashed ignorant thugs. Pastor Terry Jones is a radical Christian. Why should we treat him any differently? We should condemn his sentiments and desires, and make sure to take action in case things turn violent.
I wouldn't say that all military personel everywhere ever should be banned from social networking, but it makes perfect sense that active enlisted personel should not be allowed to post social network or blogs.
Any nation with any kind of practical intelligence apparatus could easily run a crawl/search that analyzes FB status updates of enlisted personel and come up with a pretty good picture of what they're doing an where, complete with photos.
I don't think this should be applied to off-duty and reservist personel unless they were activated. Honestly, it's not difficult to tell whether a reserve unit has been activated anyway (Pretty easy to tell when a good percentage of a population vanishes)- we shouldn't be infringing on more personal freedoms than necessary.
The principle has no power outside of school. If say, his ex-wife made such a post, there would be little he could do about it other than sue.
If say, some anonymous trolls on 4chan made such a post, they would probably get off scot-free.
The principle is obviously abusing his power, by using it to punish for acts outside of his jurisdiction. That would be like punishing children in order to coerce their parents into doing something.
Back in grade school we did spend a good amount of time on Greek and Native American Creation myths...discussing Christian creation myths would only be fair.
ID should be placed in the backseat of history as far as education is concerned, along with Aztec Sun Gods, Zeus and Osirus. Knowledge of that stuff is definitely important in analyzing multiple perspectives from multiple cultures, and in the long run it means ID will be considered a fanciful, romantic, and dead religion that a bunch of people got riled up about.
If they're forcing googles to ditch Outlook, Excel, etc and all the other crutches they've been using for business software, what do you think these guys are going to do?
THEY'RE GOING TO PROGRAM NEW SOLUTIONS! Come on, this is Google, a major software house, that you know, has the objective of creating a competitive online alternative to Office?
This move was probably done to force programmers and office staff to get used to Office alternatives and eventually come up with their own solutions. Foster creativity through adversity.
This would be a stupid move for say, a banking firm, but this is a major software engineering house. Sure , they'll go weeks, months, maybe even years running inefficient office software, but eventually one of their engineers will get sick of it and come up with something that works.
Instead of using buzzwordalicious phrases like "Object-Relational Impedence Mismatch!"
You should probably say "Problems that crop up due to trying to translate RDBMS into Object Oriented Models"
This is exactly what I'm doing now. I recalled your term because it's basically compiler-speak. I bet people started using that because that was just an error message that your programs barfed out from time to time.
I think most people haven't heard these words because honestly, they're pretty much cumbersome and unpronounceable. I couldn't say that to...well, any other human being with a straight face and expect him to know what the hell I was talking about.
It's pretty much the symptomatic problem of trying to take a complex idea and boiling it down to a set of meaning words. I mean, come on, people are NOT HASHMAPS!
This sort of thing crops up every once in a while on Slashdot about how stupid recent college grads are. I mean, can't we go back into the old days when the REAL Geniuses like Archimedes and Newton grokked physics WITHOUT electricity! Or Indoor plumbing!
Fact is that new people haven't been grinded through the mill of real life. Eventually the worthless programmers will get fired and go work at a diner in Jersey.
Quite frankly, I've never had to manually translate hexidecimals or manage memory, but I'm still doing a great job doing what my job entails, putting together web applications in Java.
Most often memory management and binary and other low-level skills come about because of the necessity to conserve memory/increase performance. That's fine when it comes to game programming HF stock trading or other performance intensive apps.
But different jobs require different things. If it's more about getting multiple user friendly views of data, and providing an infinitely mutable codebase for such UIs, then performance takes a backseat to easy-reading, maintainability and extensibility.
A lot of the questions people are amazed can't be answered on-the-fly in an interview are easily learned/picked up from Google. I initially had no idea what a variable scope was, than I googled it..and I was like..you mean..just plain scope, right? I'm not sure it's wise to base your interview questions on things that 10 minutes of googling will solve.
Rarely will it ever be a necessity for your PROGRAMMER to memorize things, as long as he is capable of taking whatever you ask, learning it in a short period of time, and coming back with a solution.
This is probably moot in an electoral position, but shouldn't these books be written by people who are well, you know, experts in history?
The worst part about this farce is that someone without educational experience or relevant academic experience can just waltz in and start dictating things. What happened to the part where we actually listen to qualified experts with degrees in relevant fields?
I know that the right-wing agenda can still be reinforced by bringing in right-wing historians that do support these crackpot-proreligious theories, but at least they'd be appealing to a -fake- authority. I'm disturbed that this woman hasn't even had to bring in a Dr. So-And-So to back up her credibility.
Yeah...honestly the solution to the problem isn't to start throwing money at colleges to subsidize them or whatever..
It's to start forcing employers to start lowering there hiring standards. How much grief would we save in the country by making sure when someone says "You need a college degree" a college degree is actually required?
It doesn't require an inspecting office or anything- just allowance for suing/penalizing companies if they're clearly inflating their job requirements. At the very least it could be handled by the Better Business Bureau- if a number of applicants complain about a job listing/etc that is clearly overestimating job requirements, some one steps in and invokes a fine.
The real way to curb inflation is actually doing something about it..because if you let inflation get 'corrected by market forces' you just wind up with a crash cycle.
Right when I was about to graduate college I thought I was going to get into game design. I graduated from NYU, developed contacts with the local gaming companies, attended the functions...etc.
And then I realized it was all way too much effort for too little payoff. I was meeting up with family men in their 30's and 40's who were working jobs with long hours and low pay. They sacrificed high paying, slightly more boring jobs and financial firms for a shot in the games world. The only people that actually got to call the shots and make the games THEY wanted were the dudes that owned the gaming companies. And those guys weren't even hard-core programmers, they were just some guys who put together enough capital to start a business and hire programmers. I learned that being a game programmer/designer was pretty similar to being an actor or director in the movie business. You're looking at long hours, low pay, and potentially an entire lifetime without a shot at the big leagues. You need to spend lots of time in 'the trenches' doing crappy menial work that might just be a giant waste of time.
At my current job as a business oriented programmer, I'm getting good pay, benefits, reasonable hours and a lot of leeway into how to complete my own projects and solve problems. It's a good company and from what I've heard a lot more fulfilling than spending years as a 'code-monkey' in some of the larger software sweatshops. Pretty soon I'll be able to buy some real estate and the like. After I've made some investments that give me the ability to live well without working a top dollar job, I MIGHT consider starting my own little game company startup/devoting time to an indie game.
I think the path to being a game designer is really similar to the path of being the 'shot-caller' in any other field. Amass capital, and start your own. Otherwise you're looking and years and years and years of slave-like working conditions all to common to artistic jobs, only to have to participate in drama and politics once you reach the top. I'd rather dive straight into making a startup, rather then working years as a drone, only to become the boss, and essentially windup with the same responsibilities you might have as a business owner!
If you're actually going to legislate things so that people buy healthy food do this: Fix prices so that HEALTHY FOOD is as CHEAP as BAD FOOD or vice versa.
McDonalds et al. is able to sell effectively because of their huge marketing engine and ability to leverage factory-style production methods to produce food. Often this food is low quality and cheap and terrible.
The obvious answer is to offer subsidies to families/grocers/restaurants to allow them to compete with these outlets at price. You'll never be successful at asking people to increase their food budget to buy healthy meals. You will be successful at making the choice between a healthy sandwich and a burger a matter of taste rather than price/quantity. If people choose to be unhealthy when it comes down to a matter of taste and choice...then quite frankly it's not your business anymore, is it?
Like an earlier post has stated, the Islamic world/Middle East was not always a cesspool of extremism and terrorism. Before the 1979 Islamic revolution and the creation of Israel, the Middle East was as calm a place as any other.
What happened to the Middle East was the same thing that happened to Africa. Years of colonial control under European nations suddenly evaporated after WWII. As a result, lots of crazy came to the surface and extremists took power.
It's the Western world's own damn fault for creating these terrorists and pirates. We imposed Western ideals onto these cultures by force, and as a result it poisoned them to all of our ideas, not only the bad, but also the good. The lesson they learned is that a small number of men leveraging technology, guns and social propaganda can cower an entire populace by force.
It wasn't even as far back as the 16th century that the Middle East was a center of civilization and refinement. Just before WWI, the Ottoman Empire pretty much owned the place and kept the populace happy and educated. It was comparable to the other European monarchies at the time like Austria, Germany or Russia. What they DID lack was a massive build up of militarization due to the European arms race. Don't forget that most of us were still pretty barbaric in the early 20th century- Western powers had no qualms about throwing machine guns and gunboats around prompted by religious reasoning. Of course, it was politics that motivated the start of WWI...really, that's MUCH more rational...
After WWII, the crop of leaders that took the reigns of Middle Eastern countries were pretty reasonable, UNTIL the West suddenly planted a brand new nation in the middle of one of their holiest cities. Go figure. Even after the Six Day War, only Israel really had to worry about Muslim aggression. And that was from whole countries, not terrorists.
The Iranian revolution was THE catalyst for today's terrorists. The revolutionaries fought against mechanized troops, tanks and planes, the best the CIA could supply the Iranian Sultan and Saddam with. We -taught- them that the proper tactics for defeating modern armies was not through force of arms, but social mobilzation.
The Islamic extremists are simply a more evolved version of what we see in Africa today- demogouges taking advantage of a poor populace and feeding them hatred. The main difference is that they've moved past killing each other, and moved on to killing foreigners. Generally this is how proper nations are made- you stabilize a region by emphasizing a common foreign enemy. In this case, it's 'the evil West"
It's our own ignorance that makes us think that Islam is the root of this problem. It's not. Islam is about as violent as Christianity. They all have their various elements against blasphemy and the like. It's simply the fact that religious leaders in the Islamic communities have MUCH more power. They're petty dictators that have full control over their homelands, and now are moving on to conquer new horizons. Saddams and Castros aren't dangerous because they're content with their little personality cults. These guys are MORE DANGEROUS because they have ambition- they not only have the devotion of their flock, now they're trying to move onto the next country over.
It all goes back to politics. Islam is a vehicle for dictators to make war. These dictators dress up in the robes of clerics and have religious upbringings, but in the end they're the same as Napolean or Saddam, more interested in their own personality cult. When other religious figures threaten them, they are no less ruthless. See the recent Iran elections for evidence.
See, the CIA and the US in general has made a really bad habit of targeting and assassinating leaders. That has been it's modus operandi throughout the Cold War. So these religious leaders have adopted personalities that -transcend- themselves and become part of a religion. Kill them, and they become martyrs. It's the perfect tactic to counter the CIA's headhunting tactics.
DRM is an intellectual issue, not a populist one. It's like software patents and copyright- basically no one else cares but the most intelligent. Why? Because they can't be bothered to.
These are private companies and they won't be swayed by reasonable arguments. Or anything 'reasonable'- I mean, honestly, they don't have to listen. You're nattering on forums, so they get some hired crony to placate you without having to actually change anything.
What needs to be done is we need to whip up some kind of populist frenzy, Tea Party/Republican style. Just spread baldfaced, outright lies about DRM spreading through your computer and leaving it open to viruses. How companies are going to steal your credit card numbers, your social security, and you'll never sleep at night because you're called 24/7 by telemarketers.
What we need is real honest to god fear mongering, and it wouldn't hurt to harass people/exploit vulnerabilities left by intrusive DRM to REALLY hit the point home. We need some Karl Rove tactics here.
Not only that, we need to sue. Sue Sue sue sue sue! Legislation is really the only thing that's going to stop companies from spitting out DRMed titles.
Game sales haven't changed a wit since they introduced DRM- they've just made customers angry. And you know what? They don't care. What we need is to hurt the game companies, rip the publishers a new one to see that consumers can't be trifled with.
I would like to see a company like EA or Ubisoft buried and dusted from a massive legal lawsuit stemming from their intrusive DRM schemes. I know Apple and Microsoft are guilty of the same, but they're too big to truly hurt.
Meh.
I played video games all through out my college years and up to this day. I have a successful job with a salary and a girlfriend. So. Yeah. Mythical unicorn or something, I guess.
Sorry guys, computerized learning is here to stay. Just because you've encountered an old problem in a new format (students being distracted) doesn't mean that 'technology is bad'!
Seriously, when these kids graduate they'll be using computers to take notes all day, no matter what sort of job they're doing. Heck, even mechanics take notes on their laptop pads of parts they need to order, diagrams, etc.
In the real world, people are going to have to learn how to deal with distraction as well, be it from the neighbors cubicle, or heaven forbid, the outside world actually intruding. This teacher is some kind of primadonna, upset about losing an audience he didn't have in the first place.
If you can't compete World of Warcraft or facebook, what does that say about you as a lecturer? What does this say about you as a student? Face it- throughout life you're always going to have some asshole frittering away his time while you do work, there's always going to be kids being distracting, and your boss is going to suck up an inordinate amount of time sending you stupid chain emails- learn to deal with it.
I think all that China is doing is not employing bored script kiddies. From all accounts these hackers have no day jobs.
Our biggest online security threats come from people trying to trick folks into clicking links about viagra and SEE BRITTANY SPEARS NUDE!
Does anyone else see this mob-sourcing thing for what it really is? I wouldn't be surprised if it were an unconscious effect of the little 'shadow government' the Chinese have imposed over their net. The Chinese government employs poltico-bots to troll forums enforcing the will of the government, who says that these guys don't have a hand..a heavy hand in spreading the frenzy?
Also to clarify, the baojia system is probably not really to blame for this. It's a system that essentially exerts feudal control over a handful of families. In reality it isn't very much different than a community organization, or even a corporation. In the old days they were mostly used to raise local militia against bandits and invaders. They were pretty much the foot soldiers and local garrisons during the many invasions and rebellions between the Ming Dynasty and WWII.
Slashdot Mirror
Smallpox was naturally derived from cowpox. Cowpox is found in animals such as cows, rats and cats. It could very well develop again. Why wouldn't it be a smart idea to keep a hold of small pox just in case? Viruses are highly mutative, we gain a lot of knowledge from holding onto smallpox. There's three scenarios here:
1. Smallpox is delivered as a weapon, either from hidden stockpiles or reverse engineered from cowpox : We use our stockpiles to make vaccine
2. Smallpox is found again in nature, as a natural derivative of cowpox : We use our stockpiles to make vaccine
3. Some other derivative of cowpox shows up due to naturally mutating viruses: We use our stockpiles to compare the two strains, find out why it mutated the way it did, and develop a vaccine.
1 and 3 are likely to happen, as a result of human nature, and good old fashioned nature respectively. In an ideal world, it's conceivable all humans choose to disband biological weapons or something. But it's not realistic to think cowpox won't continue to exist and evolve as viruses do.
Is robots.
How about federally guaranteeing every citizen has a connection to the internet?
How about treating internet providers like utility providers? Every land lord should have the duty to make heat, electricity, water, and internet available to citizens.
Honestly, I think we should make it a constitutional amendment to grant citizens the right to access an unfettered and open internet.
When stupid crap like Survivor, "Jerseylicious" and other MTV pap get on television, that's what kids want to be. They want to be sassy reality TV show stars with glamorous jobs like "hair dresser" and "image-consultant". It's garbage.
Back in the day we had good science fiction. Now science fiction on television is a rarity. The Scifi channel decided it didn't want to be 'nerdy' anymore. It's entertainment that fosters ambition, and today our kids want to marry rich and act like baffoons for millions. Using technology isn't a joy or privelege for them, it's something as dry as making toast.
I don't support using drones as domestic surveillance.
I support drones having the same roles as Police helicopters, as cheaper and safer replacements for police pilots. We don't need 24/7 Monitoring of civilians or whatever.
But say, having a heavily armed assault drone as part of SWAT team equipment? This, I support. That would be awesome.
Having drones that can track high-speed chases safely (and perhaps engage in slightly more dangerous manuvers than a human-piloted helicopter might attempt)? This, I support.
Replacing a fleet of fuel guzzling, human-risking, high-maintenance helicopters for drones? This, I support.
Using them as domestic cameras, spies or monitors? No, I don't support that.
Aerial drones are the wrong tools for public deterance. That's the role of a patrolman. I can see some kind of ground based Dalek-type robot serving that role, but not an aerial drone. A police robot needs to be able to interact with citizens and offer challenge/response with real people. I wouldn't mind say, a bunch of patrol-bots monitored by policemen, that you could speak to and receive a response from real people. Something that takes over the roll of patrol-car sweeps, for instance. But something that creates a NEW function, and doesn't REPLACE existing humans with more efficient automation, I don't support.
You know what actually secures things?
Guards! Armed guards, with weapons! What those are is up to you. Tasers? Guns? Batons? Pepper Spray? Okay!
Afraid someone will hijack a plane? Put a guard or two on it!
Afraid someone will hijack a train? Guard.
Afraid someone will hijack a bus? Guard!
A guard isn't invasive. A guard knows his home turf. A guard doesn't require an expert to run. A guard doesn't break the 4th amendment. A guard has really nothing better to do than people watch. In the event of a real emergency, a guard can help out.
A guard deters crime and hijinks, JUST BY BEING THERE.
Cost of a scanning machine= $100,000 plus technical support and technicians
Cost of a guard= 50,000 + healthcare plus support.
I daresay, hiring transport guards seems to me the best solution. It would create more jobs, stimulate the economy, and ACTUALLY deter terrorists, as well as common thieves, criminals and mischief makers.
Uhm.
To the people who say 'Why doesn't the government condemn radical Islam?" , the fact is, we do.
The US Government, like all good government, speaks mostly through action rather than words in condemning radical Islam. Think about it.
-Supporting dictatorships in lieu of radical Islamic Groups (The US's support for Pakistan, and propping up the Shah of Iran)
-Supporting a dictatorship's war against a theocracy run by radical Muslims (Iran/Iraq War)
-Targetted killings of radical Islamicists in Iraq and Afghanistan
-Huge bounties on the heads of radical Islamicists (The hunt for Osama Bin Laden)
-Wholesale invasions of countries and the dissolution of governments that support radical Islam (Invasion of Afghanistan and the fight against the Taliban)
-Supporting moderate Muslim governments over radical ones (Visits to Egypt, funding for Pakistan and Iraq)
In fact, the American military's main goal over the past 9 years has been the suppression, destruction and dissolution of radical Islam over the years. Pretty much every armed force from the Army proper, to the CIA has been devoted to taking radical Islam to task.
***
Paster Terry Jones is acting like an asshat and ruining our work against radical Islam. THAT'S why we're condemning him.
When Muslims burn bibles, the Western world DOES get upset. Infact, we get so upset we make lists of the incidents and eventually take armed actions against groups that go too far. Obviously we hope that the local governments take care of things, but do you think that the US is so naive? We have diplomats and ambassadors all over the world busy 'nudging' governments whenever such actions occur.
Radical Islam taking action against blasphemers isn't a threat, it's a fact. We have armed men and women protecting us so we CAN do blasphemous acts safely. But doing them makes their job harder. It's just like you don't randomly provoke local gang-members or mafia-men: it's well within your rights to do, but is it SMART? No. Can the government protect you from retaliation? They'll TRY, but whether they'll succeed is a different matter.
Radical Muslims, like any radical members of a religion, are generally brainwashed ignorant thugs. Pastor Terry Jones is a radical Christian. Why should we treat him any differently? We should condemn his sentiments and desires, and make sure to take action in case things turn violent.
Agreed,
I wouldn't say that all military personel everywhere ever should be banned from social networking, but it makes perfect sense that active enlisted personel should not be allowed to post social network or blogs.
Any nation with any kind of practical intelligence apparatus could easily run a crawl/search that analyzes FB status updates of enlisted personel and come up with a pretty good picture of what they're doing an where, complete with photos.
I don't think this should be applied to off-duty and reservist personel unless they were activated. Honestly, it's not difficult to tell whether a reserve unit has been activated anyway (Pretty easy to tell when a good percentage of a population vanishes)- we shouldn't be infringing on more personal freedoms than necessary.
The principle has no power outside of school. If say, his ex-wife made such a post, there would be little he could do about it other than sue.
If say, some anonymous trolls on 4chan made such a post, they would probably get off scot-free.
The principle is obviously abusing his power, by using it to punish for acts outside of his jurisdiction. That would be like punishing children in order to coerce their parents into doing something.
Back in grade school we did spend a good amount of time on Greek and Native American Creation myths...discussing Christian creation myths would only be fair.
ID should be placed in the backseat of history as far as education is concerned, along with Aztec Sun Gods, Zeus and Osirus. Knowledge of that stuff is definitely important in analyzing multiple perspectives from multiple cultures, and in the long run it means ID will be considered a fanciful, romantic, and dead religion that a bunch of people got riled up about.
This is Google we're talking about here.
If they're forcing googles to ditch Outlook, Excel, etc and all the other crutches they've been using for business software, what do you think these guys are going to do?
THEY'RE GOING TO PROGRAM NEW SOLUTIONS! Come on, this is Google, a major software house, that you know, has the objective of creating a competitive online alternative to Office?
This move was probably done to force programmers and office staff to get used to Office alternatives and eventually come up with their own solutions. Foster creativity through adversity.
This would be a stupid move for say, a banking firm, but this is a major software engineering house. Sure , they'll go weeks, months, maybe even years running inefficient office software, but eventually one of their engineers will get sick of it and come up with something that works.
Dude, WTF?
Maybe here's the problem.
SPEAK ENGLISH!
Instead of using buzzwordalicious phrases like "Object-Relational Impedence Mismatch!"
You should probably say "Problems that crop up due to trying to translate RDBMS into Object Oriented Models"
This is exactly what I'm doing now. I recalled your term because it's basically compiler-speak. I bet people started using that because that was just an error message that your programs barfed out from time to time.
I think most people haven't heard these words because honestly, they're pretty much cumbersome and unpronounceable. I couldn't say that to...well, any other human being with a straight face and expect him to know what the hell I was talking about.
It's pretty much the symptomatic problem of trying to take a complex idea and boiling it down to a set of meaning words. I mean, come on, people are NOT HASHMAPS!
Crusty Old Guys think New Guys Can't Hack It.
This sort of thing crops up every once in a while on Slashdot about how stupid recent college grads are. I mean, can't we go back into the old days when the REAL Geniuses like Archimedes and Newton grokked physics WITHOUT electricity! Or Indoor plumbing!
Fact is that new people haven't been grinded through the mill of real life. Eventually the worthless programmers will get fired and go work at a diner in Jersey.
Quite frankly, I've never had to manually translate hexidecimals or manage memory, but I'm still doing a great job doing what my job entails, putting together web applications in Java.
Most often memory management and binary and other low-level skills come about because of the necessity to conserve memory/increase performance. That's fine when it comes to game programming HF stock trading or other performance intensive apps.
But different jobs require different things. If it's more about getting multiple user friendly views of data, and providing an infinitely mutable codebase for such UIs, then performance takes a backseat to easy-reading, maintainability and extensibility.
A lot of the questions people are amazed can't be answered on-the-fly in an interview are easily learned/picked up from Google. I initially had no idea what a variable scope was, than I googled it..and I was like..you mean..just plain scope, right? I'm not sure it's wise to base your interview questions on things that 10 minutes of googling will solve.
Rarely will it ever be a necessity for your PROGRAMMER to memorize things, as long as he is capable of taking whatever you ask, learning it in a short period of time, and coming back with a solution.
This is probably moot in an electoral position, but shouldn't these books be written by people who are well, you know, experts in history?
The worst part about this farce is that someone without educational experience or relevant academic experience can just waltz in and start dictating things. What happened to the part where we actually listen to qualified experts with degrees in relevant fields?
I know that the right-wing agenda can still be reinforced by bringing in right-wing historians that do support these crackpot-proreligious theories, but at least they'd be appealing to a -fake- authority. I'm disturbed that this woman hasn't even had to bring in a Dr. So-And-So to back up her credibility.
Yeah...honestly the solution to the problem isn't to start throwing money at colleges to subsidize them or whatever..
It's to start forcing employers to start lowering there hiring standards. How much grief would we save in the country by making sure when someone says "You need a college degree" a college degree is actually required?
It doesn't require an inspecting office or anything- just allowance for suing/penalizing companies if they're clearly inflating their job requirements.
At the very least it could be handled by the Better Business Bureau- if a number of applicants complain about a job listing/etc that is clearly overestimating job requirements, some one steps in and invokes a fine.
The real way to curb inflation is actually doing something about it..because if you let inflation get 'corrected by market forces' you just wind up with a crash cycle.
Right when I was about to graduate college I thought I was going to get into game design. I graduated from NYU, developed contacts with the local gaming companies, attended the functions...etc.
And then I realized it was all way too much effort for too little payoff. I was meeting up with family men in their 30's and 40's who were working jobs with long hours and low pay. They sacrificed high paying, slightly more boring jobs and financial firms for a shot in the games world. The only people that actually got to call the shots and make the games THEY wanted were the dudes that owned the gaming companies. And those guys weren't even hard-core programmers, they were just some guys who put together enough capital to start a business and hire programmers.
I learned that being a game programmer/designer was pretty similar to being an actor or director in the movie business. You're looking at long hours, low pay, and potentially an entire lifetime without a shot at the big leagues. You need to spend lots of time in 'the trenches' doing crappy menial work that might just be a giant waste of time.
At my current job as a business oriented programmer, I'm getting good pay, benefits, reasonable hours and a lot of leeway into how to complete my own projects and solve problems. It's a good company and from what I've heard a lot more fulfilling than spending years as a 'code-monkey' in some of the larger software sweatshops. Pretty soon I'll be able to buy some real estate and the like. After I've made some investments that give me the ability to live well without working a top dollar job, I MIGHT consider starting my own little game company startup/devoting time to an indie game.
I think the path to being a game designer is really similar to the path of being the 'shot-caller' in any other field. Amass capital, and start your own. Otherwise you're looking and years and years and years of slave-like working conditions all to common to artistic jobs, only to have to participate in drama and politics once you reach the top. I'd rather dive straight into making a startup, rather then working years as a drone, only to become the boss, and essentially windup with the same responsibilities you might have as a business owner!
If you're actually going to legislate things so that people buy healthy food do this:
Fix prices so that HEALTHY FOOD is as CHEAP as BAD FOOD
or vice versa.
McDonalds et al. is able to sell effectively because of their huge marketing engine and ability to leverage factory-style production methods to produce food. Often this food is low quality and cheap and terrible.
The obvious answer is to offer subsidies to families/grocers/restaurants to allow them to compete with these outlets at price. You'll never be successful at asking people to increase their food budget to buy healthy meals. You will be successful at making the choice between a healthy sandwich and a burger a matter of taste rather than price/quantity. If people choose to be unhealthy when it comes down to a matter of taste and choice...then quite frankly it's not your business anymore, is it?
Like an earlier post has stated, the Islamic world/Middle East was not always a cesspool of extremism and terrorism. Before the 1979 Islamic revolution and the creation of Israel, the Middle East was as calm a place as any other.
What happened to the Middle East was the same thing that happened to Africa. Years of colonial control under European nations suddenly evaporated after WWII. As a result, lots of crazy came to the surface and extremists took power.
It's the Western world's own damn fault for creating these terrorists and pirates. We imposed Western ideals onto these cultures by force, and as a result it poisoned them to all of our ideas, not only the bad, but also the good. The lesson they learned is that a small number of men leveraging technology, guns and social propaganda can cower an entire populace by force.
It wasn't even as far back as the 16th century that the Middle East was a center of civilization and refinement. Just before WWI, the Ottoman Empire pretty much owned the place and kept the populace happy and educated. It was comparable to the other European monarchies at the time like Austria, Germany or Russia. What they DID lack was a massive build up of militarization due to the European arms race. Don't forget that most of us were still pretty barbaric in the early 20th century- Western powers had no qualms about throwing machine guns and gunboats around prompted by religious reasoning. Of course, it was politics that motivated the start of WWI...really, that's MUCH more rational...
After WWII, the crop of leaders that took the reigns of Middle Eastern countries were pretty reasonable, UNTIL the West suddenly planted a brand new nation in the middle of one of their holiest cities. Go figure. Even after the Six Day War, only Israel really had to worry about Muslim aggression. And that was from whole countries, not terrorists.
The Iranian revolution was THE catalyst for today's terrorists. The revolutionaries fought against mechanized troops, tanks and planes, the best the CIA could supply the Iranian Sultan and Saddam with. We -taught- them that the proper tactics for defeating modern armies was not through force of arms, but social mobilzation.
The Islamic extremists are simply a more evolved version of what we see in Africa today- demogouges taking advantage of a poor populace and feeding them hatred. The main difference is that they've moved past killing each other, and moved on to killing foreigners. Generally this is how proper nations are made- you stabilize a region by emphasizing a common foreign enemy. In this case, it's 'the evil West"
It's our own ignorance that makes us think that Islam is the root of this problem. It's not. Islam is about as violent as Christianity. They all have their various elements against blasphemy and the like. It's simply the fact that religious leaders in the Islamic communities have MUCH more power. They're petty dictators that have full control over their homelands, and now are moving on to conquer new horizons. Saddams and Castros aren't dangerous because they're content with their little personality cults. These guys are MORE DANGEROUS because they have ambition- they not only have the devotion of their flock, now they're trying to move onto the next country over.
It all goes back to politics. Islam is a vehicle for dictators to make war. These dictators dress up in the robes of clerics and have religious upbringings, but in the end they're the same as Napolean or Saddam, more interested in their own personality cult. When other religious figures threaten them, they are no less ruthless. See the recent Iran elections for evidence.
See, the CIA and the US in general has made a really bad habit of targeting and assassinating leaders. That has been it's modus operandi throughout the Cold War. So these religious leaders have adopted personalities that -transcend- themselves and become part of a religion. Kill them, and they become martyrs. It's the perfect tactic to counter the CIA's headhunting tactics.
He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing
..Uhm, what happens if I can code well AND money is my primary motivator?
DRM is an intellectual issue, not a populist one. It's like software patents and copyright- basically no one else cares but the most intelligent. Why? Because they can't be bothered to.
These are private companies and they won't be swayed by reasonable arguments. Or anything 'reasonable'- I mean, honestly, they don't have to listen. You're nattering on forums, so they get some hired crony to placate you without having to actually change anything.
What needs to be done is we need to whip up some kind of populist frenzy, Tea Party/Republican style. Just spread baldfaced, outright lies about DRM spreading through your computer and leaving it open to viruses. How companies are going to steal your credit card numbers, your social security, and you'll never sleep at night because you're called 24/7 by telemarketers.
What we need is real honest to god fear mongering, and it wouldn't hurt to harass people/exploit vulnerabilities left by intrusive DRM to REALLY hit the point home. We need some Karl Rove tactics here.
Not only that, we need to sue. Sue Sue sue sue sue! Legislation is really the only thing that's going to stop companies from spitting out DRMed titles.
Game sales haven't changed a wit since they introduced DRM- they've just made customers angry. And you know what? They don't care. What we need is to hurt the game companies, rip the publishers a new one to see that consumers can't be trifled with.
I would like to see a company like EA or Ubisoft buried and dusted from a massive legal lawsuit stemming from their intrusive DRM schemes. I know Apple and Microsoft are guilty of the same, but they're too big to truly hurt.
Meh. I played video games all through out my college years and up to this day. I have a successful job with a salary and a girlfriend. So. Yeah. Mythical unicorn or something, I guess.
Sorry guys, computerized learning is here to stay. Just because you've encountered an old problem in a new format (students being distracted) doesn't mean that 'technology is bad'! Seriously, when these kids graduate they'll be using computers to take notes all day, no matter what sort of job they're doing. Heck, even mechanics take notes on their laptop pads of parts they need to order, diagrams, etc. In the real world, people are going to have to learn how to deal with distraction as well, be it from the neighbors cubicle, or heaven forbid, the outside world actually intruding. This teacher is some kind of primadonna, upset about losing an audience he didn't have in the first place. If you can't compete World of Warcraft or facebook, what does that say about you as a lecturer? What does this say about you as a student? Face it- throughout life you're always going to have some asshole frittering away his time while you do work, there's always going to be kids being distracting, and your boss is going to suck up an inordinate amount of time sending you stupid chain emails- learn to deal with it.
I think all that China is doing is not employing bored script kiddies. From all accounts these hackers have no day jobs. Our biggest online security threats come from people trying to trick folks into clicking links about viagra and SEE BRITTANY SPEARS NUDE!
Does anyone else see this mob-sourcing thing for what it really is? I wouldn't be surprised if it were an unconscious effect of the little 'shadow government' the Chinese have imposed over their net. The Chinese government employs poltico-bots to troll forums enforcing the will of the government, who says that these guys don't have a hand..a heavy hand in spreading the frenzy? Also to clarify, the baojia system is probably not really to blame for this. It's a system that essentially exerts feudal control over a handful of families. In reality it isn't very much different than a community organization, or even a corporation. In the old days they were mostly used to raise local militia against bandits and invaders. They were pretty much the foot soldiers and local garrisons during the many invasions and rebellions between the Ming Dynasty and WWII.