I absolutely feel with you and always contemplate that step myself. Except I am not even sure if I would feel so at home at universities anymore either: it seems to me that science actually involves a lot of politics and diplomacy, too, it's usually not about the genius working alone in his study.
My personal idols are people like Stephen Wolfram (book "A New Kind Of Science"), Ray Kurzweill or Jeff Hawkins (book "on intelligence"), who earned a lot of money by founding their own companies and then used the winnings to do their own research. Granted it's hard to plan for making millions, but still - maybe there is a way to do research on one's own accord. Even Einstein still worked at the patent office when he did most of his great stuff, remember? I think he was also delayed in getting his PhD.
I would still be interested in getting a PhD, if only to learn the subject thouroughly. But perhaps there also is a way to do some research for one's one company and eventually wrap it up into a PhD thesis anyway? I am admitting here that the severe cuts in payments are indeed a consideration for me. And besides, I figure that either I'll be really good in what I am doing, in which case formalities will probably not be too much of a hindrance, or it's not worth bothering with it either. There are boring jobs in science, too, so no point in being a second rate scientist really. Doing research for a company would have the added benefit of at least having a chance of being useful, which can't be said for science in general, either.
Lastly, I would recommend the book "What color is your parachute" about finding a fulfilling job. He has some good suggestions, I think. For example instead of going about a career change the hard way (ie direct path, study again etc.), he suggests a two step approach: as a software developer you could first get a job at a research institution as a software developer in step 1. In step 2 you can then become a scientist, as you already have experience with the research stuff (he doesn't describe it for science, but maybe it could work there, too).
I find it annoying that this guy complains about Linux, yet his problems always seem to be with Evolution, which is just an application that runs on Linux.
Suppose you were a Mafia boss and would make Billions from crimes, as long as you donated half the money to charity, it would be alright?
Not saying that Microsoft is evil (I think they are just a company), but I think the donations should also be seen in perspective. It's also a lot easier to donate if you have lots of money to begin with.
"Repeat after me: A hash algorithm is NOT encryption."
Not entirely correct, though. The thing is that many crypotgraphyc "processes" rely on fingerprints of documents (as one signs the fingerprint rather than the whole document and stuff like that). So I think many current protocols would be affected. It's perhaps not encryption in a mathematical sense, but in a practical sense.
Nevertheless the article was crap, it doesn't even say in what way SHA-1 was broken (making it impossible to judge the severity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting mentions many shootings from earlier times (before the internet). Granted, none in the UK in the 40ies and 50ies, but I don't think that proves anything (I don't have time to do more research, either). There have always been "murder sprees" and things like that. Certainly some british kids who were raised with fanny paddles became murdereres at some point later in their lives.
If high school massacers have become more frequent in recent times, it is probably because of the copycats spurned by the media hype, not because of a change in teacher's methods.
Perhaps in modern societies there are more ways to compensate for it (just go to the supermarket, lots of food). Still, you probably had to invest some time into working out a proper diet for you etc. Time other people could have spent to improve other skills and get an advantage over you.
"Welfare mothers, NBA stars with 14 kids, are more fit than CEOs worth millions/billions with one,two, or especially no children, regardless of income."
There is also a case for those children growing up healthy and so on. It's no good for the welfare mother if all her children die in gangwars before maturity, or in a war in a foreign country.
By your definition, some yeast bacteria (or whatever) would be the "fittest" life forms, because they replicate a million times every day? (Actually, they are probably not more or less fit than humans).
Besides, evolution also operates on other aspects, like lifestyle. If Paris Hilton would die today, parts of "her" would live on in the millions of women imitating her lifestyle and clothes.
- Using Perl? Certainly not good enough, I don't want to start a flamewar, but Perl is definitely not great enough to warrant moving 120 miles from home and giving up money
- Playing Half Life after Office hours? Personally, I'd rather get home and play Half Life with my friends. That doesn't mean you couldn't make friends with the Small Shop people, but also, why not make friends with the big corp people. Lots of people are into playing Half Life. Again no good reason to move and give up money
The big company:
- might be a chance to work on a big project, learn lot's of stuff - they are humans, too, might not be so bad after all - if it sucks, you can still quit. - small companies can suck and have annoying superiors, too. In fact, big companies might have programmes in place to try to keep their empoyees happy. Small companies usually only offer overtime hours. - you don't have to move away from friends and family -.Net - why not? I am sure it has some interesting features.
Our ancestors came here legally and created a melting pot.
What do you mean by legally? It was "legal" because they had the guns, therefore they got to lay down the laws. I don't see how this has any bearing on the morality of it. As for the melting pot, others have already answered you on that part.
Of course the current illegal immigration problem is unlike anything this country has faced before
I would have thought that their history would give Americans some respect for people leaving their home country, trying to make their luck.
I can't understand how you can bash Mexicans, if your own history is just the same. But anyway - I think people from other countries wouldn't try to come if there weren't jobs for them. It's not like you can steal yourself into a country and then live on it's wellfare.
One step further: I think Americas strength is precisely the influence of the diversity of immigrants. So if the US try to shut out Immigrants, it is merely cutting it's own flesh.
Seriously, the main problem is the notion that maths is so out of your league. The reality is that it IS scary, however, nobody is really good at it! It is painful how we humans try to grasp the concepts of maths, or rather, usually we don't. By various twists and turns we sometimes manage to proove some simple conjectures - but even those usually don't give us any idea of what they really mean, no real understanding. I mean in the sense of those autists who can tell you in an instant wether 1285982340578978943768747897897488899827 is a prime number or not - must of us have sit down and do the calculations. Then we have proven it is prime or not, but it doesn't really mean anything to us.
So quit your unrealistic expectations, that is all there is to it. Try to just enjoy the process of problem solving. By and by you will aquire a toolset which you can apply to all kinds of problems (ie natural induction, equation solving, etc.).
In my own experience (MSc in Mathematics), learning higher mathematics was not so much understanding it step by step. Rather, it is a gradual process of getting used to it. Looking back, those first year problems suddenly seem simple, yet at the time, you were struggling.
As a college student, you probably don't even have an idea yet how much money things really cost. Once you are out of college, many things get more expensive FAST.
- you don't want to live in a student hall forever - you realize that you need some savings for retirement - you don't want to call daddy if you need a new computer - health insurance is much more expensive (students get special rates where I live) - girl friend and family planning cost money - jobs suck, so you might consider having your own company. Startups cost money, too - jobs suck, wait how you feel if the clueless guy next to you makes five times as much money as you do
on and on...
You don't have to strive for a life in vanity to appreciate having money.
"Get a job as a stocker at WalMart and stop being an anarchist/conspiracy theorist (hey, that's what it says on the linked Wikipedia page) refusing to do actual work for money in our 'system'."
Perhaps you missed the part where he is 74 years old and extremely ill?
I also would like to know more about the why and how he got into his situation, but your comment really seems to be far over the top. Not everybody who is poor is "refusing to do actual work".
I am seriously excited about this, but it sounds too good to be true? Please point out any traps in this competition?
The winning conditions seem fair to me, as far as I understand, I even get to keep the rights to my algorithm, I "only" have to give a free license to Netflix? Or are there any traps I don't understand?
Is LISP really the most productive programming l.?
on
Ten Geek Business Myths
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I like LISP (Scheme actually, don't know full LISP yet), but is it really so good? I even borrowed Paul Grahams book from the library recently, but only flipped through it. I simply have my doubts about the syntax: is it really OK for productivity? It looks kind of ugly and verbose.
I like some of the language features, but I am not convinced enough to switch.
"and that tools such as Hibernate and Spring not borne from the community process are superior or, in the case of EJB 3.0, adopted."
That may be true, and isn't inherently a problem, or is it? However, somehow Java tends to be used in big companies and big projects, where it is really helpful to have those official standards. It helps to speed up the decision process on what technology to use for what purpose.
I think you will find that most scientists engaged in global warming research do not wish to see economic growth stopped. Most are ordinary people, like you and me, who are simply engaged in this line of research and possibly concerned about the consequences.
Just for the record I want to mention that you wanted to address that response to the poster I was replying to. I have only made a mistake with the italics-tag, so that his words and my words got mixed. I totally agree with you, and pigeonholing of "environmentalists" makes me sick.
These are all part of nature's climate cycles of cooling and warming trends. To say that man's activity is warming the earth is unproven.
I think you might be a bit behind with your information - for a while there were doubts, that is true, but at the moment the consensus seems to converge on "manmade" again (ie temperatrue rises faster than can be explained with ice age cycles or whatever). OK, it's not a proof, but that doesn't disprove it's manmade, either.
I'm a conservationist. There are many ways to conserve the environment and have full economic activity. That is in stark contrast to the environmentalists and Global Warming theorists who want us to reduce and/or stop our economic growth.
Who says that economic growth == more pollutants? I think to build a more energy efficient technology is economic growth, too. Everybody is better off: people are happy, because the air is breathable, they save on energy costs (not all of them are induced by environmentalists), and China will be wanting it, too.
Also, another question: so since you are convinced that manmade global warming is unproven, are you actually convinced that human activity has no effect on the climate whatsoever? I think that is highly doubtfoul. In Europe you can see examples where Romans have turned flourishing landscapes into deserts (several hundred years ago, no machine exhausts needed).
I sincerely hope that the performance issue will be approached soon. One big concern is also the lack of native multithreading - multicore CPUs are becoming the norm...
It kind of annoys me: that author throws together some "rules of thumb" sentences and "it seems plausible to assume", and thinks it makes something worthwhile to publish? I don't know if Metcalfs Law is correct or wrong, and I don't care as long as my internet bandwidth doubles every year, but I am a little bit shocked by this display of extremely low standards. Perhaps the author wanted to prove his own point, though: clearly not all additions to the internet are very valuable...
it is obvious that humans are changing their environment, and history is full of societies that died because of environmental damage they caused (read Collapse by Jared Diamond). So I think this battle of "global warming or not" is a bit ridiculous - just because one particular effect might or might not come to pass, doesn't mean all our actions have no effect.
I think game designers should get rid of the "huge ende monster" paradigm, it regularly ruins gameplay for me. Recent offenders include Tomb Raider: Legends. I also stopped playing Gothic 2 recently because of such a monster. Reloading 100 times is NOT fun. Just let me go on with the story, please.
Slashdot Mirror
...you have to include an extra key labeled "CtrlAltDel" with your product.
Wasn't there a famous column in the MAD magazine?
Seriously, this is so incredibly, incredibly bad, it is beyond words.
I absolutely feel with you and always contemplate that step myself. Except I am not even sure if I would feel so at home at universities anymore either: it seems to me that science actually involves a lot of politics and diplomacy, too, it's usually not about the genius working alone in his study.
My personal idols are people like Stephen Wolfram (book "A New Kind Of Science"), Ray Kurzweill or Jeff Hawkins (book "on intelligence"), who earned a lot of money by founding their own companies and then used the winnings to do their own research. Granted it's hard to plan for making millions, but still - maybe there is a way to do research on one's own accord. Even Einstein still worked at the patent office when he did most of his great stuff, remember? I think he was also delayed in getting his PhD.
I would still be interested in getting a PhD, if only to learn the subject thouroughly. But perhaps there also is a way to do some research for one's one company and eventually wrap it up into a PhD thesis anyway? I am admitting here that the severe cuts in payments are indeed a consideration for me. And besides, I figure that either I'll be really good in what I am doing, in which case formalities will probably not be too much of a hindrance, or it's not worth bothering with it either. There are boring jobs in science, too, so no point in being a second rate scientist really. Doing research for a company would have the added benefit of at least having a chance of being useful, which can't be said for science in general, either.
Lastly, I would recommend the book "What color is your parachute" about finding a fulfilling job. He has some good suggestions, I think. For example instead of going about a career change the hard way (ie direct path, study again etc.), he suggests a two step approach: as a software developer you could first get a job at a research institution as a software developer in step 1. In step 2 you can then become a scientist, as you already have experience with the research stuff (he doesn't describe it for science, but maybe it could work there, too).
I find it annoying that this guy complains about Linux, yet his problems always seem to be with Evolution, which is just an application that runs on Linux.
Suppose you were a Mafia boss and would make Billions from crimes, as long as you donated half the money to charity, it would be alright?
Not saying that Microsoft is evil (I think they are just a company), but I think the donations should also be seen in perspective. It's also a lot easier to donate if you have lots of money to begin with.
"Repeat after me: A hash algorithm is NOT encryption."
Not entirely correct, though. The thing is that many crypotgraphyc "processes" rely on fingerprints of documents (as one signs the fingerprint rather than the whole document and stuff like that). So I think many current protocols would be affected. It's perhaps not encryption in a mathematical sense, but in a practical sense.
Nevertheless the article was crap, it doesn't even say in what way SHA-1 was broken (making it impossible to judge the severity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting mentions many shootings from earlier times (before the internet). Granted, none in the UK in the 40ies and 50ies, but I don't think that proves anything (I don't have time to do more research, either). There have always been "murder sprees" and things like that. Certainly some british kids who were raised with fanny paddles became murdereres at some point later in their lives.
If high school massacers have become more frequent in recent times, it is probably because of the copycats spurned by the media hype, not because of a change in teacher's methods.
Perhaps in modern societies there are more ways to compensate for it (just go to the supermarket, lots of food). Still, you probably had to invest some time into working out a proper diet for you etc. Time other people could have spent to improve other skills and get an advantage over you.
"Welfare mothers, NBA stars with 14 kids, are more fit than CEOs worth millions/billions with one,two, or especially no children, regardless of income."
There is also a case for those children growing up healthy and so on. It's no good for the welfare mother if all her children die in gangwars before maturity, or in a war in a foreign country.
By your definition, some yeast bacteria (or whatever) would be the "fittest" life forms, because they replicate a million times every day? (Actually, they are probably not more or less fit than humans).
Besides, evolution also operates on other aspects, like lifestyle. If Paris Hilton would die today, parts of "her" would live on in the millions of women imitating her lifestyle and clothes.
What is in favour of the small company?
.Net - why not? I am sure it has some interesting features.
- Using Perl? Certainly not good enough, I don't want to start a flamewar, but Perl is definitely not great enough to warrant moving 120 miles from home and giving up money
- Playing Half Life after Office hours? Personally, I'd rather get home and play Half Life with my friends. That doesn't mean you couldn't make friends with the Small Shop people, but also, why not make friends with the big corp people. Lots of people are into playing Half Life. Again no good reason to move and give up money
The big company:
- might be a chance to work on a big project, learn lot's of stuff
- they are humans, too, might not be so bad after all
- if it sucks, you can still quit.
- small companies can suck and have annoying superiors, too. In fact, big companies might have programmes in place to try to keep their empoyees happy. Small companies usually only offer overtime hours.
- you don't have to move away from friends and family
-
Our ancestors came here legally and created a melting pot.
What do you mean by legally? It was "legal" because they had the guns, therefore they got to lay down the laws. I don't see how this has any bearing on the morality of it. As for the melting pot, others have already answered you on that part.
Of course the current illegal immigration problem is unlike anything this country has faced before
And in what sense would that be so?
I would have thought that their history would give Americans some respect for people leaving their home country, trying to make their luck.
I can't understand how you can bash Mexicans, if your own history is just the same. But anyway - I think people from other countries wouldn't try to come if there weren't jobs for them. It's not like you can steal yourself into a country and then live on it's wellfare.
One step further: I think Americas strength is precisely the influence of the diversity of immigrants. So if the US try to shut out Immigrants, it is merely cutting it's own flesh.
Perhaps you have forgotten that your ancestors also were people who left there country, trying to make their luck elsewhere.
Seriously, the main problem is the notion that maths is so out of your league. The reality is that it IS scary, however, nobody is really good at it! It is painful how we humans try to grasp the concepts of maths, or rather, usually we don't. By various twists and turns we sometimes manage to proove some simple conjectures - but even those usually don't give us any idea of what they really mean, no real understanding. I mean in the sense of those autists who can tell you in an instant wether 1285982340578978943768747897897488899827 is a prime number or not - must of us have sit down and do the calculations. Then we have proven it is prime or not, but it doesn't really mean anything to us.
So quit your unrealistic expectations, that is all there is to it. Try to just enjoy the process of problem solving. By and by you will aquire a toolset which you can apply to all kinds of problems (ie natural induction, equation solving, etc.).
In my own experience (MSc in Mathematics), learning higher mathematics was not so much understanding it step by step. Rather, it is a gradual process of getting used to it. Looking back, those first year problems suddenly seem simple, yet at the time, you were struggling.
As a college student, you probably don't even have an idea yet how much money things really cost. Once you are out of college, many things get more expensive FAST.
- you don't want to live in a student hall forever
- you realize that you need some savings for retirement
- you don't want to call daddy if you need a new computer
- health insurance is much more expensive (students get special rates where I live)
- girl friend and family planning cost money
- jobs suck, so you might consider having your own company. Startups cost money, too
- jobs suck, wait how you feel if the clueless guy next to you makes five times as much money as you do
on and on...
You don't have to strive for a life in vanity to appreciate having money.
"Get a job as a stocker at WalMart and stop being an anarchist/conspiracy theorist (hey, that's what it says on the linked Wikipedia page) refusing to do actual work for money in our 'system'."
Perhaps you missed the part where he is 74 years old and extremely ill?
I also would like to know more about the why and how he got into his situation, but your comment really seems to be far over the top. Not everybody who is poor is "refusing to do actual work".
I am seriously excited about this, but it sounds too good to be true? Please point out any traps in this competition?
The winning conditions seem fair to me, as far as I understand, I even get to keep the rights to my algorithm, I "only" have to give a free license to Netflix? Or are there any traps I don't understand?
I like LISP (Scheme actually, don't know full LISP yet), but is it really so good? I even borrowed Paul Grahams book from the library recently, but only flipped through it. I simply have my doubts about the syntax: is it really OK for productivity? It looks kind of ugly and verbose.
I like some of the language features, but I am not convinced enough to switch.
Any experiences out there?
"and that tools such as Hibernate and Spring not borne from the community process are superior or, in the case of EJB 3.0, adopted."
That may be true, and isn't inherently a problem, or is it? However, somehow Java tends to be used in big companies and big projects, where it is really helpful to have those official standards. It helps to speed up the decision process on what technology to use for what purpose.
The article mentions the extremely important best practices and patterns of AJAX. So what supposedly are they?
I think you will find that most scientists engaged in global warming research do not wish to see economic growth stopped. Most are ordinary people, like you and me, who are simply engaged in this line of research and possibly concerned about the consequences.
Just for the record I want to mention that you wanted to address that response to the poster I was replying to. I have only made a mistake with the italics-tag, so that his words and my words got mixed. I totally agree with you, and pigeonholing of "environmentalists" makes me sick.
These are all part of nature's climate cycles of cooling and warming trends. To say that man's activity is warming the earth is unproven.
I think you might be a bit behind with your information - for a while there were doubts, that is true, but at the moment the consensus seems to converge on "manmade" again (ie temperatrue rises faster than can be explained with ice age cycles or whatever). OK, it's not a proof, but that doesn't disprove it's manmade, either.
I'm a conservationist. There are many ways to conserve the environment and have full economic activity. That is in stark contrast to the environmentalists and Global Warming theorists who want us to reduce and/or stop our economic growth.
Who says that economic growth == more pollutants? I think to build a more energy efficient technology is economic growth, too. Everybody is better off: people are happy, because the air is breathable, they save on energy costs (not all of them are induced by environmentalists), and China will be wanting it, too. Also, another question: so since you are convinced that manmade global warming is unproven, are you actually convinced that human activity has no effect on the climate whatsoever? I think that is highly doubtfoul. In Europe you can see examples where Romans have turned flourishing landscapes into deserts (several hundred years ago, no machine exhausts needed).
Ruby is very young yet
No it isn't, it has been around since 1993.
I sincerely hope that the performance issue will be approached soon. One big concern is also the lack of native multithreading - multicore CPUs are becoming the norm...
It kind of annoys me: that author throws together some "rules of thumb" sentences and "it seems plausible to assume", and thinks it makes something worthwhile to publish? I don't know if Metcalfs Law is correct or wrong, and I don't care as long as my internet bandwidth doubles every year, but I am a little bit shocked by this display of extremely low standards. Perhaps the author wanted to prove his own point, though: clearly not all additions to the internet are very valuable...
it is obvious that humans are changing their environment, and history is full of societies that died because of environmental damage they caused (read Collapse by Jared Diamond). So I think this battle of "global warming or not" is a bit ridiculous - just because one particular effect might or might not come to pass, doesn't mean all our actions have no effect.
I think game designers should get rid of the "huge ende monster" paradigm, it regularly ruins gameplay for me. Recent offenders include Tomb Raider: Legends. I also stopped playing Gothic 2 recently because of such a monster. Reloading 100 times is NOT fun. Just let me go on with the story, please.