Interesting read, and I recognise parts of it. I worked on a project at a major bank that had a big standing contract with TCS, making it much more attractive to hire Indians rather than European programmers. My (now ex-)employer gives away our Open Source CMS and sells expert support for it. The bank thought: free CMS + free Indian programmers = free (as in beer) software!
After a couple of months, the TCS people realised they'd bitten off more than they could chew and hired us to help them.
In all fairness, the Indians working here were quite competent. I mean, they did make very long hours, and didn't really accomplish much more than I did in my barely 8 hours a day, and their code was a big unmaintainable mess with tons of code duplication (we told them several times to fix that, but they never did). But on the whole, they were pretty good. They worked hard, their code worked, and they solved a lot of really complex problems that would have given a lot of programmers trouble. And they were willing to learn and improve themselves (except when it came to cleaning up their code). Most of all, they were far, far better than the people working in India. I heard they had a 20-man team in India working on the same project, and they accomplished less than the three or four of us did over here. Often they just broke stuff or accidentally checked their "My Documents" folder into SVN.
The guys working at the bank office (in Europe) were clearly the cream of the crop.
If Americans are unemployable then why are they the ones paying the Indians to do the job?
Because Americans are willing to spend money to get the job done. Although not enough to hire Americans to do the job.
The money is coming from somewhere,
China.
and to make others do the work for you takes some brains.
Or money.
What this guy doesn't answer is why is it that when I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense even to the Indian staff that's stateside?
I think when you have to review any code that's been written by another company in another office and generally just a bit too far out of your reach, you will notice too late that the code is crap. There are plenty of Americans and Europeans capable of writing crappy code, but Indians can do it much cheaper.
There are also plenty of highly capable Indians who write good code for complex projects, but they're not the ones sitting in India for a slave wage writing code for a distant company they've never heard of. They're sitting next to you in your US/EU office getting paid as much as you.
It's not because of Indians that outsourced code is crap, it's because of the distance and anonimity in how the process works, and the way programmers select themselves for various pay scales and work environments.
What would stop the flipper from flipping the spikes up? The flipper doesn't have to get below the center of gravity, it just has to get below any part of the robot that's firmly attached to the rest. A spike will do, although the flipper has to be tough enough not to get pierced by the spike, I guess.
Pretty soon, every decent robot had some sort of self-righting mechanism, though. You simply need one to compete. And people got pretty creative about self-righters too.
I'm not familiar with Battlebots on Comedy Central, but a couple of years ago, BBC 2 had a couple of seasons of Robot Wars, which was absolutely brilliant. It had flip bots which were indeed powerful, but also a lot of fun. Chaos 2 would often flip its opponent completely out of the arena. But flipping was by no means the only competitive weapon; Hypnodisk had a small blade on a heavy flywheel that literally tore its opponents apart. Great fun, and it did very well in the competition.
Shame they canceled it, though. There's not much on BBC 2 these days.
Of course, keeping a large library of movies just on the offchance that you decide to watch them would be prohibitively expensive - if you paid $20 each for them.
That's why I pay $5 per movie.
What worries me is that in the shop where I buy movies for $5, music CDs still cost $20.
You know, that's something I just simply don't understand: Why don't they bundle some crap with the CDs? Cheap trinkets that cost close to zero but make the fans happy?
Don't you already get that? Most CDs come with a booklet with lyrics and photos of the artists, and they're often little works of art in themselves. It's one of the reasons why I prefer real CDs over downloads.
But then again, they don't even include booklets anymore in CDs,
They don't? Since when? I admit it's been a couple of month since I've bought a new CD, but usually it's only the really old albums that don't come with a booklet.
100 years ago, many scientists thought that almost everything had been discovered, and they only needed to work out the details. Turns out there were completely new worlds hidden in those details.
We know for sure that there are gaps in our scientific knowledge. Who knows what kind of worlds are hidden in those gaps? It's too early to definitively rule out warp travel.
Has it really gotten that bad? My university (back in the '90s) had a ton of really spiffy Sparc Stations. I wouldn't dream of using some crummy PC (and by the time I did, I was really disappointed by their low screen resolution). But PCs have grown quite a bit since then.
Huge hole? It was a foot. Although they didn't mention whether the ground was concrete or loose sand, and I have no idea how fast it'd have to go and at what angle to make a crater that's 30 cm in one dimension.
Also, my guess is that it was the hand that was bounced out of the way, rather than the other way around. He said it did send him flying, right? My guess is it was mostly his hand that was send flying. If it's a graze, I don't think it necessarily has to tear his hand off.
Do you realise that one of the biggest factors in the Drake equation is the number of stars in the galaxy?
Exactly - the number of stars is taken into account, which is why the OP was misleading to think he could then factor in the number of stars again to make the probability of life seem almost certain.
What do you mean "again"? You sound like you know the outcome of the Drake equation. If you do, please share, because lots of scientists would love to know.
According to a lot of guesstimates, the outcome of Drake's equation is actually rather large, so that's not the "chance of winning the lottery" that you're looking for. The chance of one particular planet having all the right properties for life is.
It's also why he's insightful and you're not.
Argument ad populum - where in this case, the "populum" is a whole one person who appears to have moderated him Insightful
The fact that only one person modded him insightful doesn't automatically mean he's not insightful. And I'm claiming he is -- moreso than that first AC, at least -- and your spurious logic doesn't really work as a refutation.
The system that made it possible was the microscope, which was invented in The Netherlands. The Netherlends is located in Northwestern Europe. It's also, somewhat ironically, the country you use to justify your largely narrow-minded comments. Just so you know.
Are you seriously trying to say that being from the country where the microscope was invented makes a health care system beyond reproach?
Also, you need more than a microscope to diagnose Crohn's. You need to know what you're looking for.
So our girl with the microscope just ensured she will be harder to employ, have a harder time keeping a job, and will pay more for all forms of insurance for the rest of her life. I could imagine that perhaps someone was trying to protect her from all that.
But when I may have a disease that requires tissue to be examined carefully, I'd want her to do it.
The disease is not confluent over the entire gut, in fact it can be anywhere from mouth to anus, in small patches. Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it? They will have taken many specimens from the girl's GI tract, and if this is the only sample with a granuloma, then it's not too unforgiveable that a patch of cells only around 30 cells-wide is miss. Yes, it sucks, but pathology is actually a fairly bloody hard speciality, with an very vigorous set of examinations
Yet a highschool girl was able to find what the pathologist had not been able to find in the same piece of tissue!
Maybe you guys instantly thought Crohn's, but there are plenty of other rarer diseases it could have been. Without a positive biopsy it would have been incredibly immoral to slap a Crohn's diagnosis on this girl and medicated her for it.
But if it could be Crohn's, and that's an obvious diagnosis, how can it remain undiagnosed for 8 years? I can understand that it takes a couple of months. Years, maybe. But if a highschool girl can find the granuloma in a piece of tissue that the pathologist had already examined, then he just wasn't looking very hard. It's his job. He's the specialist. What use is he if an 18 year old girl can do it better?
Exactly. If an untrained highschool student can find the problem, a doctor should be able to do it too. It's ridiculous to say that having a vested interest is more important than having medical training. That just means the doctor wasn't really trying.
So what kind of doctors were seeing her? Veterinary ones?
Don't mock veterinarians. They know their stuff. When granny dies, people just say her time had come, but when somebody loses a cow, they can get quite upset.
I have yet to hear about an 18-year-old european that had to diagnose her/himself. I don't know what that proves. I'm just saying.
I've yet to hear about an 18-year-old European who is capable of diagnosing her/himself. I'm pretty impressed with what this girl did and the system that made it possibe.
It's true that health care insurance is generally much better in Europe than in the US, but I'm not entirely convinced the same is always true for the health care itself. Some time ago, Netherland had a problem with ridiculously long waiting lists for health care, with people dying on the waiting list for treatment that was technically and financially possible, but there just was no time.
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Why don't they use an audio message instead? That's not only safer, but also sounds a lot more effective as a warning.
Interesting read, and I recognise parts of it. I worked on a project at a major bank that had a big standing contract with TCS, making it much more attractive to hire Indians rather than European programmers. My (now ex-)employer gives away our Open Source CMS and sells expert support for it. The bank thought: free CMS + free Indian programmers = free (as in beer) software!
After a couple of months, the TCS people realised they'd bitten off more than they could chew and hired us to help them.
In all fairness, the Indians working here were quite competent. I mean, they did make very long hours, and didn't really accomplish much more than I did in my barely 8 hours a day, and their code was a big unmaintainable mess with tons of code duplication (we told them several times to fix that, but they never did). But on the whole, they were pretty good. They worked hard, their code worked, and they solved a lot of really complex problems that would have given a lot of programmers trouble. And they were willing to learn and improve themselves (except when it came to cleaning up their code). Most of all, they were far, far better than the people working in India. I heard they had a 20-man team in India working on the same project, and they accomplished less than the three or four of us did over here. Often they just broke stuff or accidentally checked their "My Documents" folder into SVN.
The guys working at the bank office (in Europe) were clearly the cream of the crop.
If Americans are unemployable then why are they the ones paying the Indians to do the job?
Because Americans are willing to spend money to get the job done. Although not enough to hire Americans to do the job.
The money is coming from somewhere,
China.
and to make others do the work for you takes some brains.
Or money.
What this guy doesn't answer is why is it that when I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense even to the Indian staff that's stateside?
I think when you have to review any code that's been written by another company in another office and generally just a bit too far out of your reach, you will notice too late that the code is crap. There are plenty of Americans and Europeans capable of writing crappy code, but Indians can do it much cheaper.
There are also plenty of highly capable Indians who write good code for complex projects, but they're not the ones sitting in India for a slave wage writing code for a distant company they've never heard of. They're sitting next to you in your US/EU office getting paid as much as you.
It's not because of Indians that outsourced code is crap, it's because of the distance and anonimity in how the process works, and the way programmers select themselves for various pay scales and work environments.
What would stop the flipper from flipping the spikes up? The flipper doesn't have to get below the center of gravity, it just has to get below any part of the robot that's firmly attached to the rest. A spike will do, although the flipper has to be tough enough not to get pierced by the spike, I guess.
Pretty soon, every decent robot had some sort of self-righting mechanism, though. You simply need one to compete. And people got pretty creative about self-righters too.
I'm not familiar with Battlebots on Comedy Central, but a couple of years ago, BBC 2 had a couple of seasons of Robot Wars, which was absolutely brilliant. It had flip bots which were indeed powerful, but also a lot of fun. Chaos 2 would often flip its opponent completely out of the arena. But flipping was by no means the only competitive weapon; Hypnodisk had a small blade on a heavy flywheel that literally tore its opponents apart. Great fun, and it did very well in the competition.
Shame they canceled it, though. There's not much on BBC 2 these days.
Of course, keeping a large library of movies just on the offchance that you decide to watch them would be prohibitively expensive - if you paid $20 each for them.
That's why I pay $5 per movie.
What worries me is that in the shop where I buy movies for $5, music CDs still cost $20.
You know, that's something I just simply don't understand: Why don't they bundle some crap with the CDs? Cheap trinkets that cost close to zero but make the fans happy?
Don't you already get that? Most CDs come with a booklet with lyrics and photos of the artists, and they're often little works of art in themselves. It's one of the reasons why I prefer real CDs over downloads.
But then again, they don't even include booklets anymore in CDs,
They don't? Since when? I admit it's been a couple of month since I've bought a new CD, but usually it's only the really old albums that don't come with a booklet.
100 years ago, many scientists thought that almost everything had been discovered, and they only needed to work out the details. Turns out there were completely new worlds hidden in those details.
We know for sure that there are gaps in our scientific knowledge. Who knows what kind of worlds are hidden in those gaps? It's too early to definitively rule out warp travel.
Did anyone else have to do a double take to make sure this article wasn't introducing a Wapship?
I read "warship" and wondered what was so new about that.
But it's apparently also not like the old days when the university provided the resources.
Get proper tires. I haven't had a flat tire in ages.
Has it really gotten that bad? My university (back in the '90s) had a ton of really spiffy Sparc Stations. I wouldn't dream of using some crummy PC (and by the time I did, I was really disappointed by their low screen resolution). But PCs have grown quite a bit since then.
Huge hole? It was a foot. Although they didn't mention whether the ground was concrete or loose sand, and I have no idea how fast it'd have to go and at what angle to make a crater that's 30 cm in one dimension.
Also, my guess is that it was the hand that was bounced out of the way, rather than the other way around. He said it did send him flying, right? My guess is it was mostly his hand that was send flying. If it's a graze, I don't think it necessarily has to tear his hand off.
The article states that "14-year-old hit by 30,000 mph space meteorite", which sounds like he would have been hit by it with this velocity.
It sounds more like the speed the asteroid would have had when it entered the atmosphere.
Honda and Toyota wouldn't even know how to start building a car that tough.
Toyota probably does. Haven't seen the Toyota Hilux video, have you?
Do you realise that one of the biggest factors in the Drake equation is the number of stars in the galaxy?
Exactly - the number of stars is taken into account, which is why the OP was misleading to think he could then factor in the number of stars again to make the probability of life seem almost certain.
What do you mean "again"? You sound like you know the outcome of the Drake equation. If you do, please share, because lots of scientists would love to know.
According to a lot of guesstimates, the outcome of Drake's equation is actually rather large, so that's not the "chance of winning the lottery" that you're looking for. The chance of one particular planet having all the right properties for life is.
It's also why he's insightful and you're not.
Argument ad populum - where in this case, the "populum" is a whole one person who appears to have moderated him Insightful
The fact that only one person modded him insightful doesn't automatically mean he's not insightful. And I'm claiming he is -- moreso than that first AC, at least -- and your spurious logic doesn't really work as a refutation.
I hope they have baked cookies for the angry mod that will be outside thier offices tomorrow morning
Or they might lose karma!
Even most VHS copy protection (macrovision).
That reminds me of a guy who bought a third VHS recorder in order to copy protected tapes.
The system that made it possible was the microscope, which was invented in The Netherlands. The Netherlends is located in Northwestern Europe. It's also, somewhat ironically, the country you use to justify your largely narrow-minded comments. Just so you know.
Are you seriously trying to say that being from the country where the microscope was invented makes a health care system beyond reproach?
Also, you need more than a microscope to diagnose Crohn's. You need to know what you're looking for.
So our girl with the microscope just ensured she will be harder to employ, have a harder time keeping a job, and will pay more for all forms of insurance for the rest of her life. I could imagine that perhaps someone was trying to protect her from all that.
But when I may have a disease that requires tissue to be examined carefully, I'd want her to do it.
The disease is not confluent over the entire gut, in fact it can be anywhere from mouth to anus, in small patches. Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it? They will have taken many specimens from the girl's GI tract, and if this is the only sample with a granuloma, then it's not too unforgiveable that a patch of cells only around 30 cells-wide is miss. Yes, it sucks, but pathology is actually a fairly bloody hard speciality, with an very vigorous set of examinations
Yet a highschool girl was able to find what the pathologist had not been able to find in the same piece of tissue!
Maybe you guys instantly thought Crohn's, but there are plenty of other rarer diseases it could have been. Without a positive biopsy it would have been incredibly immoral to slap a Crohn's diagnosis on this girl and medicated her for it.
But if it could be Crohn's, and that's an obvious diagnosis, how can it remain undiagnosed for 8 years? I can understand that it takes a couple of months. Years, maybe. But if a highschool girl can find the granuloma in a piece of tissue that the pathologist had already examined, then he just wasn't looking very hard. It's his job. He's the specialist. What use is he if an 18 year old girl can do it better?
Exactly. If an untrained highschool student can find the problem, a doctor should be able to do it too. It's ridiculous to say that having a vested interest is more important than having medical training. That just means the doctor wasn't really trying.
So what kind of doctors were seeing her? Veterinary ones?
Don't mock veterinarians. They know their stuff. When granny dies, people just say her time had come, but when somebody loses a cow, they can get quite upset.
(Apologies to Terry Pratchett)
I have yet to hear about an 18-year-old european that had to diagnose her/himself. I don't know what that proves. I'm just saying.
I've yet to hear about an 18-year-old European who is capable of diagnosing her/himself. I'm pretty impressed with what this girl did and the system that made it possibe.
It's true that health care insurance is generally much better in Europe than in the US, but I'm not entirely convinced the same is always true for the health care itself. Some time ago, Netherland had a problem with ridiculously long waiting lists for health care, with people dying on the waiting list for treatment that was technically and financially possible, but there just was no time.