I can't quite put my finger on it, and I'm not trying to be alarmist or a Luddite, but it's possible there are some ethical or moral problems in this experiment. Not likely, but still possible.
We should have legal check it out and get back to us.
Sorry, but the gloves are off. WW3 is coming, take your sides now.
As an American who despises Bush and Co., and is extremely worried about the direction our nation is being led, I would like to point out that what you just said is part and parcel the Bush mantra. "You're either with us, or against us." Your seemingly Manichean posture here is as equally repellent to me as Bush's simplistic dividing line. I may take sides, and I assure you it won't be Bush's.
This is why I tell laypeople I'm a "rocket scientist" rather than a "computer programmer/software engineer" or whatever. My official title is "Scientific Software Engineer", but the systems and computer work part is easy. The tough part of my job comes from the maths required to do map projection, end member spectral deconvolution, principal component analysis, and calculating ephemerides. I couldn't design a spacecraft to save my life, but I spend way more brain cycles thinking about space science concepts than I do databases and software development.
This also has the advantage that people don't ask me to fix their PC anymore.:-)
I think this is a wake up call for techies to realize that a way to differentiate ourselves is to become a specialist applying technology to a field. Being able to say "I'm an expert on process manufacturing and inventory control who happens to know Java" (for example) is likely to get us further than being able so say " I know Java". There's no magic bullet, but it's always been a given in IT (and I'm old enough to remember when it was called MIS, and before that DP) that we have to keep up with technology changes. We're just changing the dimension. We have to learn more than the technology now. We have to learn a business and become more vertical knowledge experts. So, I humbly suggest we find industries that interest us, learn as much as we can about them, and bill ourselves as experts who also can speak tech.
But there are no guarantees. Well, maybe there's a guarantee no reporter will call us "IT Workers" again.:-)
but I don't need the State to sanctify my marriage and my responsibility to my family. If the State recognizes some other arrangements as valid, I don't particularly see my family unraveling because of it.
I miss the good ol' days when Republicans wanted to limit federal power. Until, of course, they got their mitts on it. Remember the "Contract with America"? A balanced budget amendment? Fiscal responsibility? Now its record deficits and the only amendments I hear about are anti flag-burning (Hint: any country that makes it illegal to burn its flag deserves to have it burnt) and defining marriage.
p.s. Abortion is easy: It's about property rights. The fetus is trespassing on the mother's body. We use the minimum force required to remove the trespasser. That means early term abortions for now, until some people figure out how to transfer fetuses and grow them to term.
And to reply to myself (lame) I'm going to point out what a doofus I am. Range is not an averaging technique, as I said in the parent post. It's just the lowest and highest values of the data. Useful, but not an average.
No, that's possible. "Average" is not terribly specific, but the mean is a form of average and you can have 95% be below the mean. Consider these data points: 1,2,3,1,4,3,5,1,7,2,6,6,3,2,1,6,1,5,3,100. What's the mean? 8.1. What percent of data values are below the mean? 95%. The same thing would occur if you have 19 values of 99 and one of 100 (The mean is 99.95, but 19 of 20 is below it).
Now, there are other averages (mode, median, and range come to mind, and ISTR something about "upper and lower whiskers" but stats was LOOONG ago), and one would have to question a data set with one value way out of whack with the rest of the data, but you can have a 95% of things are below average if you have a weird distribution of data.
It's unrealistic, but there's nothing inherent to the definition of average that precludes it.
I wrote my first server program using Rexx on an IBM mainframe running VM/CMS. It used BITNet (RIP) to serve messages like RELAY (not unlike IRC, but with channel numbers instead of channel names) and to serve files. It had a plug-in architecture for it so you could write text-based applications (okay, games!), and I could even update it remotely and restart it running the new version without anyone else even noticing except for bugfixes and new features appearing as they used it. This was 1988 or so.
It was a lot of fun. Gotta give it up for IUCVTRAP and Rexx working together.
I wasn't even going to give your 60 second Dr. Lauraesque pop-psychology snap judgement the courtesy of a reply, but then I thought that perhaps you need to have a basic reality check.
Number one: I'm sure that everybody who posts on Slashdot behaves the exact same way in real life as they do when they post here. Or not. Sorry if using my journals to let off my more immature heads of steam disturbs you. I'll be sure to take it out on my loved ones next time so some computer nerds I've never met remain unoffended. I'd be willing to bet you're the first person to even read my journals. Don't let the 4 digit ID fool you. I'm nobody here.
Number two: Frankly, I've never had to actually engage in this particular game with him. Nick knows I keep track of his computer activity, and he knows why I do so (I go into it more in another reply to someone apparently more balanced). I actually don't have to monitor and control his behaviour much. He's a pretty well-behaved, decent kid who is just dealing with a lack of judgment where time management skills are concerned. He knows (and would tell you) that if he gets his grades up and keeps his home responsibilities under control that I'll let him play on his computer until his eyes cross. When he's back on target, I'll likely join him in a marathon game of Alpha Centauri or Starcraft. Or go out with him and fly kites. Or have a water gun fight in the backyard.
After I see the kinds of judgments you rush to based on such a small amount of evidence, and artificial evidence at that, I can't say I have much faith in your ability to understand human beings. You seem to have a tough enough time of understanding yourself.
Well, you're fifteen, and I would make more allowances for you. It's also a function of many other things. My son is (almost) 12, and is currently getting very poor grades because of (you guessed it) not turning in his work. This is a kid who was on Honor Roll two quarters and narrowly missed it the other two last year. So, he finds he gets monitored more as a result.
When his grades are good and he's doing a reasonable job with his chores (he has to do dishes and keep the kitty litter clean), I don't have a problem with him doing whatever he wants. If you're getting good grades, then I as a parent wouldn't have a problem with you doing slashdot, some computer gaming, watching TV, or whatever. If you're getting the work done, you don't need me micromanaging your day "ah, first homework, then chores". You've got time management down.
I have discovered that every kid is different, and different things motivate them.
Not that he can't play games, but think of the evil that is me logged in the kid's computer from work with "top" running...keeping ol' Dad apprised of everything that kid is doing:
*phone rings*
"Hello?"
"Hi, Nick. It's Dad. Tell me why you're running Galeon."
"Oh, I'm looking up info for my natural disasters report."
*clickety-clickety-click* --Dad brings up the proxy log--
"Hmmmm.... so why did you go to games.yahoo.com?"
"Uhhh... what?"
*clickety-clickety-click* ps auxw | grep nick | grep -v grep | cut -c10-14 | xargs kill -9; passwd -l nick
"Well, you're grounded from the computer for 2 weeks. One for goofing off, and one for lying to me. Any questions?"
*silence*
(Cheerfully) "bu-bye then!"
Needless to say when I see things like "smacx" or "wine dotwine/fake_windows/Program Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe" running when he's supposed to be working on homework assignments he's complete toast.
Re:I'm waiting for Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars..
on
Star Wars TV Show
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Or the classic: "Bocce, motherfucker, do you speak it?"
When merely requesting that the federal government restrict its actions to those specifically permitted in the constitution which formed it is to be labelled a "radical".
It's counterintuitive, but hitting the sun with a rocket is damn near impossible, unless you want to try a really wacky course using planetary gravity wells to accelerate it to the sun.
Once you launch something from earth (escape velocity = 11.2km/sec), you still have to contend with the fact that you're in orbit around the sun (your heliocentric velocity right now is about 15 km/sec just sitting at your computer), and you have to come up with all sorts of delta-v to get there. To get to the sun, you actually have to come up with a speed of 31.8 km/sec (for comparison, you only need 16.6 km/sec to leave the solar system.) to get there.
And then, what if you miss? Now you've put something nasty in highly elliptical orbit with its aphelion right near the orbit of earth. Bad idea.
A space elevator does not need to be anchored right at the equator. Its center of gravity must be in geostationary orbit and therefore over the equator, but it does not need to be anchored there.
I know someone worked out the theoretical engineering and showed that you could build an elevator up to several degrees off equator, but now I can't seem to find this data.
The best part was people who would put locks on the rotary wheel to keep you from making calls. But, you just picked up the headset, and tapped out the phone number on the switch hook, with 10 taps for zero, and 1-9 taps for the nine digits.
As a kid, I actually lived in a place where when you made a long-distance call, the operator would come on first and ask you for your phone number. The PHONE COMPANY couldn't identify you when you were on the phone.
And folks, I'm only 37 (ObDennis: "I'm not old!"). This was in the 80s.
With that said, is it even cheating to just follow a link provided by someone else? I just leveraged someone else's knowledge to arrive at the answer. Even those who wrote code to find the answer, you didn't first sit down to prove that the formula you use to generate e is correct, did you?
Good developers know exactly what to write, but great developers know exactly what to steal.
I'm sure it was typo. Just ignore the s. There's a lot of cutting edge research being done in peach recognition. Although not difficult by human standards, getting a computer to recognize the difference between a peach and say, an apricot is not easy.
Great question. And the day the airlines quit queueing up for federal subsidy after federal subsidy, I will let them treat their planes as their private property. Until then, they can cry in their Wheaties all they want but I won't pay them a thin dime to fly if they think they can demand I pay for the ticket, show them ID, AND get supported from my income tax whether I want them to or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't quite put my finger on it, and I'm not trying to be alarmist or a Luddite, but it's possible there are some ethical or moral problems in this experiment. Not likely, but still possible.
We should have legal check it out and get back to us.
As an American who despises Bush and Co., and is extremely worried about the direction our nation is being led, I would like to point out that what you just said is part and parcel the Bush mantra. "You're either with us, or against us." Your seemingly Manichean posture here is as equally repellent to me as Bush's simplistic dividing line. I may take sides, and I assure you it won't be Bush's.
But it won't be yours, either.
This is why I tell laypeople I'm a "rocket scientist" rather than a "computer programmer/software engineer" or whatever. My official title is "Scientific Software Engineer", but the systems and computer work part is easy. The tough part of my job comes from the maths required to do map projection, end member spectral deconvolution, principal component analysis, and calculating ephemerides. I couldn't design a spacecraft to save my life, but I spend way more brain cycles thinking about space science concepts than I do databases and software development.
This also has the advantage that people don't ask me to fix their PC anymore. :-)
I think this is a wake up call for techies to realize that a way to differentiate ourselves is to become a specialist applying technology to a field. Being able to say "I'm an expert on process manufacturing and inventory control who happens to know Java" (for example) is likely to get us further than being able so say " I know Java". There's no magic bullet, but it's always been a given in IT (and I'm old enough to remember when it was called MIS, and before that DP) that we have to keep up with technology changes. We're just changing the dimension. We have to learn more than the technology now. We have to learn a business and become more vertical knowledge experts. So, I humbly suggest we find industries that interest us, learn as much as we can about them, and bill ourselves as experts who also can speak tech.
But there are no guarantees. Well, maybe there's a guarantee no reporter will call us "IT Workers" again. :-)
but I don't need the State to sanctify my marriage and my responsibility to my family. If the State recognizes some other arrangements as valid, I don't particularly see my family unraveling because of it.
I miss the good ol' days when Republicans wanted to limit federal power. Until, of course, they got their mitts on it. Remember the "Contract with America"? A balanced budget amendment? Fiscal responsibility? Now its record deficits and the only amendments I hear about are anti flag-burning (Hint: any country that makes it illegal to burn its flag deserves to have it burnt) and defining marriage.
p.s. Abortion is easy: It's about property rights. The fetus is trespassing on the mother's body. We use the minimum force required to remove the trespasser. That means early term abortions for now, until some people figure out how to transfer fetuses and grow them to term.
My wife knows and understands that throwing away old computer "junk" is a divorce-actionable offense. :-)
But, then, she's just as bad as me, so there's no way that will happen.
And to reply to myself (lame) I'm going to point out what a doofus I am. Range is not an averaging technique, as I said in the parent post. It's just the lowest and highest values of the data. Useful, but not an average.
*THWACK* Thank you master, may I have another?
No, that's possible. "Average" is not terribly specific, but the mean is a form of average and you can have 95% be below the mean. Consider these data points: 1,2,3,1,4,3,5,1,7,2,6,6,3,2,1,6,1,5,3,100. What's the mean? 8.1. What percent of data values are below the mean? 95%. The same thing would occur if you have 19 values of 99 and one of 100 (The mean is 99.95, but 19 of 20 is below it).
Now, there are other averages (mode, median, and range come to mind, and ISTR something about "upper and lower whiskers" but stats was LOOONG ago), and one would have to question a data set with one value way out of whack with the rest of the data, but you can have a 95% of things are below average if you have a weird distribution of data.
It's unrealistic, but there's nothing inherent to the definition of average that precludes it.
I wrote my first server program using Rexx on an IBM mainframe running VM/CMS. It used BITNet (RIP) to serve messages like RELAY (not unlike IRC, but with channel numbers instead of channel names) and to serve files. It had a plug-in architecture for it so you could write text-based applications (okay, games!), and I could even update it remotely and restart it running the new version without anyone else even noticing except for bugfixes and new features appearing as they used it. This was 1988 or so.
It was a lot of fun. Gotta give it up for IUCVTRAP and Rexx working together.
It's way better than seeing someone translate too exactly, implying a precision that didn't exist before.
Things like "The 500 kilometre journey to..." becomes the "310.6856 mile journey to..." always cracks me up.
I wasn't even going to give your 60 second Dr. Lauraesque pop-psychology snap judgement the courtesy of a reply, but then I thought that perhaps you need to have a basic reality check.
Number one: I'm sure that everybody who posts on Slashdot behaves the exact same way in real life as they do when they post here. Or not. Sorry if using my journals to let off my more immature heads of steam disturbs you. I'll be sure to take it out on my loved ones next time so some computer nerds I've never met remain unoffended. I'd be willing to bet you're the first person to even read my journals. Don't let the 4 digit ID fool you. I'm nobody here.
Number two: Frankly, I've never had to actually engage in this particular game with him. Nick knows I keep track of his computer activity, and he knows why I do so (I go into it more in another reply to someone apparently more balanced). I actually don't have to monitor and control his behaviour much. He's a pretty well-behaved, decent kid who is just dealing with a lack of judgment where time management skills are concerned. He knows (and would tell you) that if he gets his grades up and keeps his home responsibilities under control that I'll let him play on his computer until his eyes cross. When he's back on target, I'll likely join him in a marathon game of Alpha Centauri or Starcraft. Or go out with him and fly kites. Or have a water gun fight in the backyard.
After I see the kinds of judgments you rush to based on such a small amount of evidence, and artificial evidence at that, I can't say I have much faith in your ability to understand human beings. You seem to have a tough enough time of understanding yourself.
Well, you're fifteen, and I would make more allowances for you. It's also a function of many other things. My son is (almost) 12, and is currently getting very poor grades because of (you guessed it) not turning in his work. This is a kid who was on Honor Roll two quarters and narrowly missed it the other two last year. So, he finds he gets monitored more as a result.
When his grades are good and he's doing a reasonable job with his chores (he has to do dishes and keep the kitty litter clean), I don't have a problem with him doing whatever he wants. If you're getting good grades, then I as a parent wouldn't have a problem with you doing slashdot, some computer gaming, watching TV, or whatever. If you're getting the work done, you don't need me micromanaging your day "ah, first homework, then chores". You've got time management down.
I have discovered that every kid is different, and different things motivate them.
You joke, but this exactly what I did.
Not that he can't play games, but think of the evil that is me logged in the kid's computer from work with "top" running...keeping ol' Dad apprised of everything that kid is doing:
*phone rings*
"Hello?"
"Hi, Nick. It's Dad. Tell me why you're running Galeon."
"Oh, I'm looking up info for my natural disasters report."
*clickety-clickety-click* --Dad brings up the proxy log--
"Hmmmm.... so why did you go to games.yahoo.com?"
"Uhhh... what?"
*clickety-clickety-click* ps auxw | grep nick | grep -v grep | cut -c10-14 | xargs kill -9; passwd -l nick
"Well, you're grounded from the computer for 2 weeks. One for goofing off, and one for lying to me. Any questions?"
*silence*
(Cheerfully) "bu-bye then!"
Needless to say when I see things like "smacx" or "wine dotwine/fake_windows/Program Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe" running when he's supposed to be working on homework assignments he's complete toast.
Or the classic: "Bocce, motherfucker, do you speak it?"
When merely requesting that the federal government restrict its actions to those specifically permitted in the constitution which formed it is to be labelled a "radical".
It's counterintuitive, but hitting the sun with a rocket is damn near impossible, unless you want to try a really wacky course using planetary gravity wells to accelerate it to the sun.
Once you launch something from earth (escape velocity = 11.2km/sec), you still have to contend with the fact that you're in orbit around the sun (your heliocentric velocity right now is about 15 km/sec just sitting at your computer), and you have to come up with all sorts of delta-v to get there. To get to the sun, you actually have to come up with a speed of 31.8 km/sec (for comparison, you only need 16.6 km/sec to leave the solar system.) to get there.
And then, what if you miss? Now you've put something nasty in highly elliptical orbit with its aphelion right near the orbit of earth. Bad idea.
Chewing gum? Hey, you got any Beeman's? Loan me some, willya? I'll pay you back later!
In related news: A statistician from the local college drowned today in a lake with an average depth of 7 inches.
A space elevator does not need to be anchored right at the equator. Its center of gravity must be in geostationary orbit and therefore over the equator, but it does not need to be anchored there.
I know someone worked out the theoretical engineering and showed that you could build an elevator up to several degrees off equator, but now I can't seem to find this data.
<AOL>Me too!</AOL>
The best part was people who would put locks on the rotary wheel to keep you from making calls. But, you just picked up the headset, and tapped out the phone number on the switch hook, with 10 taps for zero, and 1-9 taps for the nine digits.
As a kid, I actually lived in a place where when you made a long-distance call, the operator would come on first and ask you for your phone number. The PHONE COMPANY couldn't identify you when you were on the phone.
And folks, I'm only 37 (ObDennis: "I'm not old!"). This was in the 80s.
With that said, is it even cheating to just follow a link provided by someone else? I just leveraged someone else's knowledge to arrive at the answer. Even those who wrote code to find the answer, you didn't first sit down to prove that the formula you use to generate e is correct, did you?
Good developers know exactly what to write, but great developers know exactly what to steal.
I'm sure it was typo. Just ignore the s. There's a lot of cutting edge research being done in peach recognition. Although not difficult by human standards, getting a computer to recognize the difference between a peach and say, an apricot is not easy.
Yeah, especially for your current spouse.
Makes me glad we don't have the CowboyNeal options anymore.
Great question. And the day the airlines quit queueing up for federal subsidy after federal subsidy, I will let them treat their planes as their private property. Until then, they can cry in their Wheaties all they want but I won't pay them a thin dime to fly if they think they can demand I pay for the ticket, show them ID, AND get supported from my income tax whether I want them to or not.