If you remove the income from the illicit transfer of drugs, then these cartels will switch to something else, such as human trafficking or kidnapping.... Legalization is not a panacea.
First of all, no one ever said legalization would cure all ills, including your aunt's gout.
Secondly, if there were all these other productive areas that they could get rich on with violence, why aren't they already doing so? They don't like money? They're keeping those untapped markets in reserve for a rainy day?
You're actually right to a limited extent - if drugs were legalized tomorrow, the crime organizations would *try* to turn their violence and logistics to other markets. The harm of decades of drug criminalization won't disappear like a fart in the wind overnight. It will take years to draw down the power of the cartels. But take their major source of income away, and that draw down can begin.
Crime won't cease to exist. But we can kneecap crime cartels by taking much of their profit from them.
Be the Brookstone of Maker Tech. Bring us the tech tools and devices that get us all hot and bothered. Things that makes us say "cool" and "awesome". Sell home hand tools. Sell home workbenches. Sell the ultra configurable multi everything tools. Sell computer controlled wireless tools. Sell kits to add cameras to our cars. Infrared LEDs to blind traffic cams reading our license plates. In dash monitoring systems that hook into ODBII jacks. Have hands on demos in store. Rotate the demos. Rotate the merchandise. Make radio shack a place we want to go because we think we'll see something interesting.
Invite local maker groups in to display their toys, and then sell those toys. Fine, have cell phones. But also find me the coolest blue tooth devices to go along with them. And find me the *quality* devices, so that I know if I buy it from the Maker Shack, it will be a good device.
Make "The Shack" a brand of tech chic, instead of a brand of rebadged crap electronics.
It seems like Science Fiction shows struggle to avoid cancellation on any channel, not just SyFy.
I think they're just not monetizing properly. Show episodes in theaters. Make it directly available online. Use cable for mass distribution and background noise, but when you have a hit, monetize it. Have subscriber only web sites. Let the peasants watch shows on tv and cable with commercials. After bit torrent, I can't go back to that bullshit.
I'll support a show I like with money, instead of downloading. Just give me the same quality online from your site as I can get from bt. Make it available without me having to buy a thousand cable channels. I don't want a thousand cable channels in the house, any more than I want a thousand boxes of cookies in the house.
I watch very few shows. I'd pay money to be able to access them on the web, and maybe get some premium contents and forums. That would have been perfect for Caprica.
Hulu the shows when they start to build an audience, or put them on a standard cable channel. Then convert the successful ones to premium subscription internet access, with some extras. Let you see the shows earlier, see them longer, see them in higher resolution, and maybe have rights to view them for years. Create search capabilities for scenes, characters, etc.
I wish the NFL would do that in the US too. Let me subscribe to my team. Be able to do video searches for all targets to a specific player in a game, season, etc. Let me look at the contents of all cameras. See all the plays with one player on the field. I want the content, and I'll pay for access and increased functionality. Just show a little creativity and make it available.
"In my opinion, the most important thing for a programmer is to write maintainable, readable code... The ones that aren't incompetent will be productive in the sense that they can bang out some code to a spec fast, but it ends up being useless in the long run because it is impossible for anyone else to modify or debug."
The most important thing for a programmer is to take care of his career.
As a practical matter, writing maintainable, readable code is often completely unnecessary, and potentially harmful, to your career. Managers don't care. And if your code "just works", and can be easily read, you get replaced by a 20 something code monkey as fast as management can find one.
We'd all rather be working somewhere with a commitment to maintainable, readable code *that rewards coders accordingly*. Most places are not like that. Most places will reward you if you can do things quickly, and do things that other people can't. Like maintain your code. In most places, you want your code maintainable *by you*, but not necessarily by the next guy. If I can maintain my code, and your readable and maintainable code, but you spend longer to write your maintainable code, and can't maintain mine, who do you think will get downsized at the next layoff?
Most degrees don't prepare you to be a programmer (or much of anything else). An education prepares you for more education, or to educate others. Certifications don't make you a programmer either.
You become a programmer by programming. Education can make you a better programmer, certifications can impart a lot of specific facts, but neither will make you a programmer
I got a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. I did a lot of programming, but not enough, and I didn't learn a lot of technology and modeling techniques that I could have. My advice to those in school, and those out, is to figure out what kind of job you want, and what the skills required for it are. You develop most of those skills by doing the kind of work the job requires - specifically work in the context of an organization.
The null hypothesis in Science is "I don't know", not "A Wizard did it."
Frink: "Yes, over here, [...] in Episode BF12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Appaloosa, yet in the very next scene, my dear, you're clearly atop a winged Arabian! Please do explain it! Lucy Lawless: Uh, yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that... a wizard did it. Frink: Yes, alright, yes, in episode AG04-" Lucy Lawless: Wizard! —The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror X"
Do you think people effectively interview when they're feeling degraded? Effectively search for a job?
Would you never get a job if getting unemployment benefits wasn't humiliating?
I'm in Washington State. The people at the workforce sites I've been to have generally been helpful, or have at least tried to be helpful.
Where are you from? I've lived in NYC and Philadelphia, and generally found more of the kind of hostile attitude you describe in workers, towards both customers and bosses. "How can I hang on to my job while doing as little as possible, and pissing off the boss and customers as much as possible?" A fairly prevalent attitude, particularly among government workers. Not as prevalent out here.
If you want to judge a town, go to a supermarket and ask a clerk "where are the pickles?" First time I did that here, the guy told me where the pickels were, then walked me across the store to the location he described, and viola, he was correct. I nearly fainted in shock at the polite, courteous, and efficient service.
Maybe but its not Government's job to make you feel empowered. The Government should not be in the business of self esteem you precious little snowflake.
The post I was responding to stipulated agreement on spending money on motivation. My comments on whether the capes were demeaning or motivational were given in that context.
You're opposed to it because you perceive it to be demeaning.
I perceive it to be fun, and a little empowering. It doesn't lift you up with someone else's happy talk, it gives you a few moments of thinking of yourself as someone with power, instead of someone powerlessly dependent on the will of would be employers. And it let's you take yourself, and your problems, a little less seriously.
I've been unemployed and gone to Workforce centers. Depressing places. Given the chance, I would have taken a cape. If it was generally encouraged, I might have worn it in their offices. It would have set a more positive tone for the place, and a feeling of camaraderie.
I think it's fun. Personally, I find the usual motivational happy talk dishonest, condescending, and demeaning. People are empowered and motivated in different ways.
I suspect most first adopter types see the future as Netflix. I could pay $10 a month to add one blu ray to a collection - and that on a deal - or I could pay $10 dollars a month to have a library of tens of thousands of movies and tv shows that grows by hundreds or thousands each month.
I think people are missing the point, here. This sounds like a fundamentally new effect. This isn't a better semiconductor, and it's not just focusing light and collecting heat. And they said they could use glass for the material.
So it's a new physical effect, using a cheap material. That sounds significant to me. If nothing else, it sounds like a natural for cogeneration with a heat collecting method.
Regulation, including legal regime around patents.
Lots of regulations make it harder to start a business and bring your product to market. The patent regime allows big companies to squash small companies who can compete in the marketplace, but can't compete in the courtroom.
I predict we're going to get overtaken in drug discovery, application of genomics, and inexpensive medical devices very quickly - if we haven't already.
Khan academy has the right idea. School work should be mastery based, and everything goes into the computer, where it can be analyzed and tracked. Teach, test, and track what a student knows and what they can do. Classes should be given based on the topic to be mastered, and should be attended by those students who haven't yet mastered the subject, regardless of grade.
When you graduate, your diploma prints out what you have mastered, not how many years you sat at a desk.
You never flunk a "grade". You get 12 years of schooling, you can see your progress as you go along, and are given a printout of your levels of mastery when you do.
I grant that you can't do everything this way. But you can do quite a lot, and that will grow every year. And you can have greater human interaction than you do now. You interact with all your fellow students in a joint endeavor to do the same thing - learn the topic at hand.
Statistics, probability, and data analysis are much more generally important than calculus. The concepts of a limit, derivative, and integral are important for general understanding, but too much effort is spent on learning tricks to analytically compute integrals, instead of actually applying the concepts to data.
Not all societies have the notion that the purpose of education is to make you a useful cog.
Would you accept the purpose being to make you a literate human being capable of understanding the world around you?
"I never used math after highschool." And a sea slug never uses language. Should we assume from that that language is useless?
Mathematics is the language used to model reality, particularly statistics and probability. If you don't know math, you simply lack the mental concepts required to understand any non deterministic process or aggregate. You're limited to "pointy stick *good*", or "mmmmmmm, pi".
We don't have the bandwidth to handle emails, but we do have plenty of labor available to open and analyze mail by hand?
The FBI doesn't have the bandwidth? Should I sign them up for a google account? Who do they think they're kidding? How much of the country's email are they already scanning?
I used to work for a company building a machine that screened pap smears. Of course it was not perfect - but it was much less imperfect that human screeners. But the FDA approval criteria seemed to be that the evil machines had to beat the best human screeners in every category of disease, no matter if the category was fished for post facto.
I suppose it depends on what one does, but I find 2 monitors indispensable for cases like yours, reading some reference material, and applying that reference material to work on another doc.
And for some reason, cutting and pasting takes forever if I have to pop back and forth between two docs covering the same screen, instead of those two docs having fixed locations where I can move a piece of one onto the other.
Slashdot Mirror
If you remove the income from the illicit transfer of drugs, then these cartels will switch to something else, such as human trafficking or kidnapping. ... Legalization is not a panacea.
First of all, no one ever said legalization would cure all ills, including your aunt's gout.
Secondly, if there were all these other productive areas that they could get rich on with violence, why aren't they already doing so? They don't like money? They're keeping those untapped markets in reserve for a rainy day?
You're actually right to a limited extent - if drugs were legalized tomorrow, the crime organizations would *try* to turn their violence and logistics to other markets. The harm of decades of drug criminalization won't disappear like a fart in the wind overnight. It will take years to draw down the power of the cartels. But take their major source of income away, and that draw down can begin.
Crime won't cease to exist. But we can kneecap crime cartels by taking much of their profit from them.
After over a decade of widespread use of web forums, we've only gotten "ignore user".
No, not naked women.
Be the Brookstone of Maker Tech. Bring us the tech tools and devices that get us all hot and bothered. Things that makes us say "cool" and "awesome". Sell home hand tools. Sell home workbenches. Sell the ultra configurable multi everything tools. Sell computer controlled wireless tools. Sell kits to add cameras to our cars. Infrared LEDs to blind traffic cams reading our license plates. In dash monitoring systems that hook into ODBII jacks. Have hands on demos in store. Rotate the demos. Rotate the merchandise. Make radio shack a place we want to go because we think we'll see something interesting.
Invite local maker groups in to display their toys, and then sell those toys. Fine, have cell phones. But also find me the coolest blue tooth devices to go along with them. And find me the *quality* devices, so that I know if I buy it from the Maker Shack, it will be a good device.
Make "The Shack" a brand of tech chic, instead of a brand of rebadged crap electronics.
It seems like Science Fiction shows struggle to avoid cancellation on any channel, not just SyFy.
I think they're just not monetizing properly. Show episodes in theaters. Make it directly available online. Use cable for mass distribution and background noise, but when you have a hit, monetize it. Have subscriber only web sites. Let the peasants watch shows on tv and cable with commercials. After bit torrent, I can't go back to that bullshit.
I'll support a show I like with money, instead of downloading. Just give me the same quality online from your site as I can get from bt. Make it available without me having to buy a thousand cable channels. I don't want a thousand cable channels in the house, any more than I want a thousand boxes of cookies in the house.
Who wants to pay a few more bucks a month for another channel?
People who don't buy cable at all. And I don't want a channel - I just want a few shows.
I watch very few shows. I'd pay money to be able to access them on the web, and maybe get some premium contents and forums. That would have been perfect for Caprica.
Hulu the shows when they start to build an audience, or put them on a standard cable channel. Then convert the successful ones to premium subscription internet access, with some extras. Let you see the shows earlier, see them longer, see them in higher resolution, and maybe have rights to view them for years. Create search capabilities for scenes, characters, etc.
I wish the NFL would do that in the US too. Let me subscribe to my team. Be able to do video searches for all targets to a specific player in a game, season, etc. Let me look at the contents of all cameras. See all the plays with one player on the field. I want the content, and I'll pay for access and increased functionality. Just show a little creativity and make it available.
"In my opinion, the most important thing for a programmer is to write maintainable, readable code...
The ones that aren't incompetent will be productive in the sense that they can bang out some code to a spec fast, but it ends up being useless in the long run because it is impossible for anyone else to modify or debug."
The most important thing for a programmer is to take care of his career.
As a practical matter, writing maintainable, readable code is often completely unnecessary, and potentially harmful, to your career. Managers don't care. And if your code "just works", and can be easily read, you get replaced by a 20 something code monkey as fast as management can find one.
We'd all rather be working somewhere with a commitment to maintainable, readable code *that rewards coders accordingly*. Most places are not like that. Most places will reward you if you can do things quickly, and do things that other people can't. Like maintain your code. In most places, you want your code maintainable *by you*, but not necessarily by the next guy. If I can maintain my code, and your readable and maintainable code, but you spend longer to write your maintainable code, and can't maintain mine, who do you think will get downsized at the next layoff?
Most degrees don't prepare you to be a programmer (or much of anything else). An education prepares you for more education, or to educate others. Certifications don't make you a programmer either.
You become a programmer by programming. Education can make you a better programmer, certifications can impart a lot of specific facts, but neither will make you a programmer
I got a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. I did a lot of programming, but not enough, and I didn't learn a lot of technology and modeling techniques that I could have. My advice to those in school, and those out, is to figure out what kind of job you want, and what the skills required for it are. You develop most of those skills by doing the kind of work the job requires - specifically work in the context of an organization.
The null hypothesis in Science is "I don't know", not "A Wizard did it."
Frink: "Yes, over here, [...] in Episode BF12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Appaloosa, yet in the very next scene, my dear, you're clearly atop a winged Arabian! Please do explain it!
Lucy Lawless: Uh, yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that... a wizard did it.
Frink: Yes, alright, yes, in episode AG04-"
Lucy Lawless: Wizard!
—The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror X"
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AWizardDidIt
Bent stick with 1 degree of freedom controlled by another bent stick with 1 degree of freedom. And it's done over the internet! Wowza!
Clearly the moderators don't look farther than the titles of articles.
Do you think people effectively interview when they're feeling degraded? Effectively search for a job?
Would you never get a job if getting unemployment benefits wasn't humiliating?
I'm in Washington State. The people at the workforce sites I've been to have generally been helpful, or have at least tried to be helpful.
Where are you from? I've lived in NYC and Philadelphia, and generally found more of the kind of hostile attitude you describe in workers, towards both customers and bosses. "How can I hang on to my job while doing as little as possible, and pissing off the boss and customers as much as possible?" A fairly prevalent attitude, particularly among government workers. Not as prevalent out here.
If you want to judge a town, go to a supermarket and ask a clerk "where are the pickles?" First time I did that here, the guy told me where the pickels were, then walked me across the store to the location he described, and viola, he was correct. I nearly fainted in shock at the polite, courteous, and efficient service.
Maybe but its not Government's job to make you feel empowered. The Government should not be in the business of self esteem you precious little snowflake.
The post I was responding to stipulated agreement on spending money on motivation. My comments on whether the capes were demeaning or motivational were given in that context.
You're opposed to it because you perceive it to be demeaning.
I perceive it to be fun, and a little empowering. It doesn't lift you up with someone else's happy talk, it gives you a few moments of thinking of yourself as someone with power, instead of someone powerlessly dependent on the will of would be employers. And it let's you take yourself, and your problems, a little less seriously.
I've been unemployed and gone to Workforce centers. Depressing places. Given the chance, I would have taken a cape. If it was generally encouraged, I might have worn it in their offices. It would have set a more positive tone for the place, and a feeling of camaraderie.
I think it's fun. Personally, I find the usual motivational happy talk dishonest, condescending, and demeaning. People are empowered and motivated in different ways.
We've already seen what happened to cds.
I suspect most first adopter types see the future as Netflix. I could pay $10 a month to add one blu ray to a collection - and that on a deal - or I could pay $10 dollars a month to have a library of tens of thousands of movies and tv shows that grows by hundreds or thousands each month.
I think people are missing the point, here. This sounds like a fundamentally new effect. This isn't a better semiconductor, and it's not just focusing light and collecting heat. And they said they could use glass for the material.
So it's a new physical effect, using a cheap material. That sounds significant to me. If nothing else, it sounds like a natural for cogeneration with a heat collecting method.
Regulation, including legal regime around patents.
Lots of regulations make it harder to start a business and bring your product to market. The patent regime allows big companies to squash small companies who can compete in the marketplace, but can't compete in the courtroom.
I predict we're going to get overtaken in drug discovery, application of genomics, and inexpensive medical devices very quickly - if we haven't already.
One of the great things about totalitarians is that the logic of control pushes them to absurdities like this.
I guess it beats taking your sister to the prom.
Now, what service can I use to to create her a boyfriend, and see how their relationship turns out?
Khan academy has the right idea. School work should be mastery based, and everything goes into the computer, where it can be analyzed and tracked. Teach, test, and track what a student knows and what they can do. Classes should be given based on the topic to be mastered, and should be attended by those students who haven't yet mastered the subject, regardless of grade.
When you graduate, your diploma prints out what you have mastered, not how many years you sat at a desk.
You never flunk a "grade". You get 12 years of schooling, you can see your progress as you go along, and are given a printout of your levels of mastery when you do.
I grant that you can't do everything this way. But you can do quite a lot, and that will grow every year. And you can have greater human interaction than you do now. You interact with all your fellow students in a joint endeavor to do the same thing - learn the topic at hand.
I agree with you there.
Statistics, probability, and data analysis are much more generally important than calculus. The concepts of a limit, derivative, and integral are important for general understanding, but too much effort is spent on learning tricks to analytically compute integrals, instead of actually applying the concepts to data.
Not all societies have the notion that the purpose of education is to make you a useful cog.
Would you accept the purpose being to make you a literate human being capable of understanding the world around you?
"I never used math after highschool." And a sea slug never uses language. Should we assume from that that language is useless?
Mathematics is the language used to model reality, particularly statistics and probability. If you don't know math, you simply lack the mental concepts required to understand any non deterministic process or aggregate. You're limited to "pointy stick *good*", or "mmmmmmm, pi".
We don't have the bandwidth to handle emails, but we do have plenty of labor available to open and analyze mail by hand?
The FBI doesn't have the bandwidth? Should I sign them up for a google account? Who do they think they're kidding? How much of the country's email are they already scanning?
Is this a leftover April Fools Day article?
I used to work for a company building a machine that screened pap smears. Of course it was not perfect - but it was much less imperfect that human screeners. But the FDA approval criteria seemed to be that the evil machines had to beat the best human screeners in every category of disease, no matter if the category was fished for post facto.
The marginal cost of software, and even software services, approaches zero. The marginal value of a consumer's attention does not approach zero.
Give away software and software services, sell the attention of your users.
Profit.
I suppose it depends on what one does, but I find 2 monitors indispensable for cases like yours, reading some reference material, and applying that reference material to work on another doc.
And for some reason, cutting and pasting takes forever if I have to pop back and forth between two docs covering the same screen, instead of those two docs having fixed locations where I can move a piece of one onto the other.