Your analogies are poor. An open suitcase full of money? Data is not like money. Money is scarce, data isn't. That's one way in which your analogy breaks down.
While the court's question is of some technical interest, it is mostly beside the point. Often an IP address can be connected to an account. Whether the use of an account on a particular occasion can be definitely tied to a person is more of a problem. Some would love to sidestep that latter question by just making the account holder liable regardless. Which means we would all be burdened with the job of policing our own Internet connections. It's no trivial matter. Have you thought about how big a burden such a requirement would impose on us all? It wouldn't stop with Internet access. For example, if you buy a few acres in the country somewhere, you would at the least have to set up surveillance to catch any criminals who happen to trespass on your property, even if the crime they're committing has nothing to do with you. Don't be so eager to ask for that kind of responsibility.
But as I said, that's all a side issue. The main issue here is whether sharing should be criminalized so that copyright can maybe function. Would that make copyright work? We already know the answer to that one: No. Even if it did enable copyright to function as intended, do we want this? In other words, is copyright a bigger public good than sharing? Again, no.
Not so. We'll have to give up our current prejudices about looks.
It's amazing how aerodynamic improvements are routinely maligned and unused because they're "ugly". Skirts on the wheels, smaller grills, golf ball like dimples at the rear, a smooth underside, and a much more tapered rear is cheap to do and pays big dividends in economy. But we won't do it because we have these hangups about what a car should look like. Whenever I hear bragging about something like 0.28 being a good coefficient of drag, I laugh. That hobbyists can tape on some crudely cut and assembled pieces of plastic and massively improve the aerodynamics shows how poor the original design is. Under 0.2 is what we should go for. The X Prize winner was 0.16.
The story focuses a lot on physical drama-- trekking through dangerous wilderness, ruins, and enemy territory, plus of course war zones and battles. Men are physically stronger and better suited for that kind of thing. The things women are better at aren't given much time. Children are even less visible, so no need for any mothering. Talk is hardly needed, as, true to classic fantasy, the lines are already drawn and everything is black and white. Naturally the evil side is so dramatically strong and threatening that the good folks can't afford much disagreement and discussion, nor can they spare time for the complexities of domestics and the pursuit of happiness. When they do, the realm totters. It's all very simple. It's war.
Women and children aren't the only things conspicuous by their absence. There is also nearly zero science. But fantasy has to keep science, logic, and good thinking at a distance, or the fantasy world quickly breaks down. We can't have better forms of government appearing, that would spoil the monarchist idyll. (Funny how fantasies always ignore the Roman Republic and Greek democracies.) No one is inventing better weapons, instead progress is inverted. Such is necessary for monsters to be powerful and scary. That Watcher in the Water would have no chance whatever against a corps of engineers, anymore than solo acts like King Kong or Godzilla had a real chance against an entire city. The Balrog can't prevail with personal combat either. Sauron didn't rely on personal strength even with the Ring, instead he recruited and organized armies, and held territory. For communication we have horse relays, beacons, horns, and mysterious, rare, dangerous magical objects, and sorcery available only to the highest ranks of the enemies. Admittedly, control of a volcano makes for one heck of a beacon and tool for demoralizing and frightening one's foes. The older it is, the better it is, presumably because the forces of evil have been gradually grinding the free peoples down over the ages. Very Goth. Such discovery as there is, is all in the area of traveling and seeing the world. And to make that work, all the peoples have to be extreme homebodies. How else could the elves of Lorien be so out of touch with the Ents?
Proof of how much they've spent? Use your brain! We know they've often sicced law enforcement thugs and lawyers on pirates. You think that doesn't happen, or that it doesn't cost taxpayer money?
What makes such enforcement actions possible is the social climate. They would never get away with pulling such high handed and outright illegal moves if the public understood the situation better. The police and courts would not be willing tools if they didn't think there was significant public support. Note the content industry has also spent a lot of money on propaganda and disinformation, trying to equate sharing with theft, and emphasizing the "starving artist" angle. Still, it's amazing how far they've persuaded the law to go. A bit of bribery-- business for lawyers, work for the police and courts, facile justifications, and the like, not outright payments-- has been a key part of winning the law over. Might have to hire more police to deal with the rampant piracy that's sweeping the nation! It's feeding the Prison-industrial complex.
In the spirit of "the end justifies the means", they feel it's okay to harass "pirates" with legalisms unrelated to the issue. And they've too easily convinced the law to see it their way. But this revoking of the passport is over the top. What's next, will they revoke your citizenship for alleged copyright infringement, without bothering to prove anything?
I bought a BeagleBoard xM. I have not been able to get much use out of it. When I had the thing working, it was quite slow, and its graphics were relatively low res. Mostly though, I've struggled with the 8G Micro SD card I got for it. The card works just well enough to boot an Ubuntu ARM installation, most of the time, but not to use it for long before some data error causes a crash.
Maybe I got a bum SD card. But this experience has me thinking that SD cards aren't good enough to replace the classic spinning hard drive.
I know one company that had a computer lab on the plant floor, and it was nothing but trouble. Metal dust would get into the hard drives (which require some air to operate), and floppy drives, and ruin them. They built a sealed room for these computers to deal with the problems. If you have to have computers in the plant, perhaps go for fanless sorts with solid state drives, and hermetically seal them away.
Have 2 separate A/C and heating systems, one for the office area and one for the plant floor. That could head off all kinds of problems. In fact, isn't that now standard operating procedure for new industrial buildings?
I still have my Apple ][+ that I played with as a teen. There are a number of things about it that aren't so optimal. DOS 3.3 took 45 seconds to boot. A simple bit of sector interleaving sped the boot time up to 15 seconds. There were many 3rd party DOSes that addressed this problem.
Then there was the BASIC interpreter. The problem here was a design issue of all interpreters. Statements had to be interpreted each time they were seen, which was very wasteful inside loops. The computer of course had very little memory, and really could not spare any for the luxury of optimization. Would've been nice if it could cache a few statements. Yet there were products to speed up BASIC programs. The idea of optimizing Javascript by renaming all the variables to the shortest possible names is not new. That and renumbering to use the smallest possible line numbers was slightly helpful for these BASIC programs. But the most gain was from the products that effectively compiled the BASIC code.
The BASIC interface with the hi-res graphics was wretchedly slow. Anyone who was serious about graphics performance had to do it in assembler. Many game programmers used BASIC or a mix of BASIC and assembler. Some used BASIC for minor graphics. A few even used Pascal. Wasn't Wizardry written in Pascal? The Bard's Tale showed how much better Wizardry could have been if they'd written it in assembler.
We've also become better at Computer Science. Some of the algorithms used back then are laughably naive and slow. Before I'd had any formal training in CS, I was able to spot ways to greatly improve performance in some of those old games. For instance, Dark Forest used a very slow and stupid method to compute how many men a player received. Took a good 15 seconds or more, and to top it off, the method sometimes got it wrong. I hacked in and replaced it with a far faster method that was also correct. The author, Tom Mornini, obviously had shoving the game out the door quickly as his top priority, and perhaps also was not the best programmer.
In short, there were compromises and misses. If anything has changed, it's the quality and scale of the compromises. Then, you might use the BASIC interpreter's graphics subroutines. Now you throw in an entire graphics library such as OpenGL, and on top of that perhaps OGRE or OpenSceneGraph. The most precious resource is still the programmer's time, and usually it's still worth saving hours of coding time at the cost of making the app more bloated and slower.
That's right! There are millions of people who will tell you, with a smirk, that you suck. They aren't doing it for you. Their criticisms aren't constructive. They're trying to get ahead, and if they can get ahead of you by convincing you that you really do suck, they'll do it. Bullying doesn't end when childhood ends.
why doesn't the blog article mention any attempts at intervention before he was let go?
That's what I was wondering. From the sound of it, things went from hunky dory to gone in 60 seconds. Weren't there any warnings? Don't people communicate at FB? (Extremely ironic, that.) That end run around marketing, a instance in which communication was very badly handled, sounds like the likely reason, and could justify an immediate firing, but we can only guess. Zoning out at meetings is bad too, but not necessarily fatal. If the meetings were just big wastes of time, as too many tend to be, then he should have done something about that. Don't go to those meetings, or cancel them, or refocus them. It doesn't sound like those meetings were wastes of time, rather it sounds like they were about vital functions, but he found the subjects (massive spreadsheets and more meetings) "boring". Typical non-engineer attitude.
He also goes a little overboard on eating crow and humble pie, which has me wondering about the sincerity of it. He may be doing some posturing, in order to better sell people on something such as his reformed character.
Finally, he recommends that everyone go through the experience of being fired. Like hell! Good for people with hugely swollen heads, perhaps, when it is their fault. But many people are not massively overconfident braggarts, and many firings are very unfair, executed to cover up someone else's mistake, or to make room for the boss's nephew, or out of personal dislike and jealousy, or sheer and totally impersonal bureaucratic bungling, or dozens of other reasons that would get the employer sued for wrongful termination in a heartbeat if disclosed. All a firing does in those cases is show workers that employers won't treat them fairly. Stories of such firings are legion, but employers don't have to care because there are more desperate workers than jobs. We're expected to suck it up, and for the most part we accept this treatment.
When management messes with the workers by, for instance, setting impossible goals then giving everyone a bad review for under achievement, don't think a few free pizzas make up for that. When management does that, what are they saying? That they think their workers are even dumber than they are, to be stupid enough to fall for that?
There's a difference between being a slave driver and a leader. Much of the management I've seen seems incapable of seeing any distinction.
Tell the team what the goals are and why. Be willing to make changes in response to good arguments. Take suggestions. Have the guts to show a little humility. Many bosses seem to think they have to be the smartest person in the room, and some will even go as far as firing someone just for being smarter than they are. And whatever else you do, don't feed people bull about anything. Refusing to change even the tiniest detail of the plan isn't being a good steadfast leader, it's being stubborn, inflexible, and cowardly. It can also be bluster to cover incompetence or treachery. I've had bosses who were very patronizing to the peons, for just those reasons. Then, when their mighty plan that they refused to divulge-- because the workers are incapable of understanding it, though the truth is more likely that they'd be laughed at-- fails yet again to bring in revenue, the company is suddenly unable to pay all the employees.
Many engineers would make far better managers than the so called elite who usually end up with such jobs. The problem is, we understand that management is a burden, and would rather not do it. Keep that in mind the next time you're tempted to feed us manure, thinking that engineers won't see through you because we are nerds and therefore are gullible suckers on such matters. Again, it's not that we can't manage, it's that we don't want to. Only the fools who think it'd be great to have power are eager to jump into management.
How is copyright to be killed off? Give guys like this a megaphone.
What words could possibly be more damaging to copyright than this proposal to turn it into a blatant fascist tyranny? Plus, making everyone wonder if all supporters of copyright are just as stupid also hurts it. Such proposals do more to kill off copyright than any words Lessig, the EFF, or any other pro technology boffins could say. Go, Ralph, go!
Torn? That nicely shows the problem with the whole idea of copyright.
We want to compensate people for their hard work.
But, we don't want the method of compensation interfering with progress, improvements, fair competition, distribution, and availability.
Copyright does too well at hindering adoption, and too poorly at compensation. It's become a tool to keep artists under the thumbs of powerful rent seekers. Copyright is hardly the only means of compensating artists. We can do better.
Use the fonts, knowing that it is morally right to do so, and don't worry about the legal issues. The law is woefully out of touch, and won't ever be improved if we don't push. Meantime, send the principles a donation if you like.
Be nice if they could post the reminder by the beginning of the day, rather than after 5 PM. Maybe we should be happy they didn't wait until 5 minutes before midnight?
I think that's a sad sign of how screwed up our priorities are, that we somewhat willingly put work before children, and how companies have too much power over workers that they can expect such things of us.
I've talked with Mormon missionaries. I don't mind conversations about religion and politics, and wonder why those subjects are considered taboo in polite conversation. Is it that some people can't control themselves?
On one occasion, needed some help moving some furniture, and the price was having to listen to their pitch. So I talked with them. They agreed that the Earth was approximately 4.5 billion years old. And even that evolution is real. Before I could say anything more, they hastened to add that we are NOT descended from monkeys. Technically true (it's apes, not monkeys), but I knew what they meant.
The most recent encounter was with some missionaries going door to door. This time I asked about Global Warming. They agreed that it was real. And that we were causing it. I was heartened. But when it came to solutions, they blew it. It's in God's hands, they said. Apparently that means that we should do nothing, or that there isn't anything we can do about it.
This is a continuing problem with much organized religion. They just can't accept science, and keep trying to oppose it as if knowledge is the enemy of their faith. It's embarrassing, sad, and pathetic. It's like watching a sucker endlessly playing slots at a casino, under those great prominent signs announcing that the return on slots is less than 100%. They grapple with arguments about as well as one of those coin operated claws grips stuffed toys. These monotheistic religions very badly need some new blood and fresh air.
Screw the privacy concerns, I want to know how I'm doing. How much energy are those blokes using per unit of area and per home? What percentage of their energy goes towards climate control?
For myself, we are in a 2200 sq ft house in north Texas with gas furnace and water tank. House was built in 1977. Per year, we use between 6500 and 7000 kWh, and about 60 MCF of gas. About 50% of that is for heating and cooling.
No hyperbole. War is what will happen if we do nothing. You obviously don't think matters could come to that pass. Sounds naive and childish to me, this refusal to take responsibility for this problem. I would rather not wait until matters have deteriorated to the point that we're at the final option: mass death.
However, we will do something. What, I don't know. Wait until even the dimmest bulbs in our society see that we have a big problem, then spring into action with typical muscular and very costly solutions. Wall off our coasts, like the Netherlands? Huge water projects? More dams, canals, desalination plants, sewage reclamation, and the like to deal with droughts? Powered removal of CO2 from the air? Easier solutions like cutting down carbon emissions now appear to be politically impossible, thanks to people like yourself. Expect you'll claim it would wreck our economy. If so, you couldn't be more wrong. It will stimulate the economy.
I've seen this argument many times. You think we are too insignificant, too small to affect the big bad Earth in any way? You really think so? Why do you think that?
More like, it's that you want to believe it. Then you won't have to change, and it won't be your responsibility or fault. Change isn't always bad, you know. For instance, no one misses the old CRT monitors. Flat screens are so much better in pretty much every way, including power consumption. I'd like to see traffic lights and cars get some brains. I don't like waiting at red lights. It's all the more annoying when the light is making you wait for nothing. There are many other little things we can do, and they all add up.
What will happen is war. After we've screwed up and melted the ice on Greenland and Antarctica, a lot of people on the coast will have to move. Crops will fail as weather patterns change. It will make the dust bowl of the 1930's look like a picnic. Many of us will face starvation. If the Arab Spring shows anything, it's that when food runs short, people fight. Can we keep the nuclear weapons in the silos? If we use nukes, we may well kill ourselves off. We will instantly halt global warming and replace it with nuclear winter, and starve because we won't be able to grow any crops. A very few of us may survive that. May. Once our population has been drastically reduced by famine and war, things will stabilize. It won't be pretty, but that's the future we're looking at if we do nothing about global warming.
It doesn't have to be that way. What should we do? What can we do? Get ready for the changes, since we can't stop some of them now. It's too late for that. But first, we owe it to everyone to at least have a discussion about this problem.
In venture capital circles, you only get to do that once, if that. Takes work to come up with something that they will believe in enough to fund. If you're faking it, they'll see that before you get any money. If you're good enough to fool them, then once you take the money and run without even an honest try, your reputation is ruined and no one will ever talk to you again. You won't have an easy time keeping the money either. You may even have trouble staying out of jail for fraud.
Maybe Kickstarter has a lot more suckers, but it won't last.
You touch on why I am so unhappy with the Republican party. Obama isn't a great choice, but the only alternative with a chance at being elected is far worse because they've gone crazy. The last time I seriously considered voting Republican was in 2000, when I was asking myself if it mattered that W. was dumb, because he had wisely surrounded himself with what seemed an excellent team. Republicans think they're so manly, but they run and hide from any problem that can't be solved by force and hammers. They deny that there is global warming. Of all the problems we face, they've suddenly gone nuts over the deficit, claiming that's the source of all our current ills. And this after they and Obama damaged our credit rating with that debt ceiling showdown they pulled last year, and most of all, that very, very, very expensive War of Choice in Iraq. I haven't believed in Republican's fiscal responsibility since. Nor do I believe in their sincerity. Their sudden concern over spending seems just a cover for their real goal of wrecking the government so that it can't police any activity at all, while we are still recovering from the crash caused by Wall Street going wild! They don't want to save money, they just want to spend it on different, and worse things, such as stupid wars. It doesn't get much dumber than a war in which the stated reason, WMDs, turned out to be false, we didn't have to do it, we were already in another war in Afghanistan, it cost a huge pile of money-- at least $3 trillion, we accomplished nothing more than burdening ourselves with responsibility for Iraq, and still didn't solve any of their real problems or ours either, so that today, Iraq is once again looking shaky. Then, neither side seems willing to get serious about policing Wall Street and putting a stop to all the fraud. Only Madoff's scheme was egregious enough to land him in jail. The rest of the villains? Most of them are still out there, with like minded successors ready to ride the economy into the dirt again when it looks profitable to them to do so. It's the economy, stupid. What are they doing for the economy?
Republicans try to suppress any information, facts, and science that they believe could be against their interests, which is most science. The only science they like is that with obvious military application and the flashy stuff that makes for good propaganda. They act as if science is just another form of propaganda, like religion. They're too willing to butt in and screw up things they don't understand for religious and philosophical dogma that we know is just flat wrong. Atlas Shrugged? Teach the wholly manufactured controversy over Evolution? "Legitimate rape"?! They favored the Apollo program, though not for the science, that was just a nice side bonus. And now? Let's send a man to Mars! Why? Because it'll impress the world. It's Moon Landing 2.0: Mars. There are sooo many other things we could do. Republicans have no subtlety, no originality.
After the moon, people expect that Mars is doable, and therefore are looking for something more. We have to do better than a day long visit to the surface. When we go to Mars, it should be as a first step towards colonization. That's a long ways off yet. In the meantime, continue the work with unmanned probes. Before we go ourselves, we may send bacteria and plants first. Can wheat grow in a greenhouse on Mars, in Martian dirt?
I'd like an alternative to keep the Democrats on their toes. The Republicans aren't up to it anymore.
Seriously. The GP talks as if the money went into a black hole. It goes back into the economy, right away. The recipients are those who most urgently need money for basic necessities. They might even pay down some debt, which means the loan sharks, credit card companies, and other lowlifes who prey upon the poor won't be raking in quite so much money at 30% plus interest.
I'm of the opinion that we do a poor job of teaching math and programming. We could do much better, without extreme measures.
Why is it so poorly taught? Setting aside such issues as politics, bad teachers, bad students, bad home environments, distractions and the like, it comes down to the way the material is presented. We bog down in trivia, such as derivatives and integrals of common formulas. What is the derivative of y = log x? Of y = sin x? y = x^3+2x^2-5x+1? Why should we care about those problems? Rote memorization and practice is of little value to the students who never understood what they are practicing. We bury students with tedium, hoping that if only they do enough math problems, grind through enough meaningless made up formulas designed to force a student to use the product rule, the substitution rule, or a Laplace or Fourier transform, or any of the dozens of other techniques, a light will magically switch on and they'll suddenly get it. Even for the brighter students, this doesn't work well. Where and how can calculus be applied? This question was never explored. The closest we got to it were the dreaded "word problems", which students were anxious to avoid, and teachers were all too willing to skip.
Programming is much the same. Students are drilled on keywords, syntax, data structures, library functions, and similar trivia. People can memorize all that stuff, and yet be utterly incapable of writing a program.
In a beginning programming class, a struggling student demanded a process he could follow in order to write a program. Upon reflection, I thought it an interesting question. How to answer it? Throw Agile Programming at him? But that wasn't really what he was asking. Try an OOP approach of creating a description in English, then pulling nouns out of that for class names, and verbs for member functions? Closer, but not good enough for him. He wanted low level guidance, so he would know when to make a new variable or new function, write a loop, test a condition, and that sort of thing. So, try to explain he's asking a circular question, if it is indeed circular? Or that if there was such a process, we could program a computer to do it for us and then there'd be no need for human programmers? Explain that design is hard, as one must be able to perceive the problems correctly, then devise plans and methods for solving them, and that there are many ways to do this and often the choice of which way to go is seldom clear, and no simple set of rules can do a good job of pointing out a good way?
Yet we could do better. I have a question that most people miss. Of anyone who knows, or thinks they know, what Structured Programming is, I ask: Give an example of a program structure. It's not really a hard question, but an entire class of Computer Science seniors (at, admittedly, a 2nd rate school), was stumped, and needed a number of hints in the form of related questions before they at last got it.
I admit I'm ignorant about water transport, having never sailed, or driven a motorboat. Most I've ever done is a rowboat once, and a canoe once. Maybe it's not possible to outrun pirates, I really do not know. But if it is possible, by all means, have that option available. Not possible for a big lumbering cargo ship or oil tanker to outrun nimble pirate boats, I suppose, but could some kind of racing yacht do it?
All this talk of firearms jumps past another option. Have a way to run away, fast. Add an outboard motor to the ship, for just such emergencies. If pirates come after you, first try to outrun them. If that's not working, then reach for the weaponry.
Absolutely! You'll be hating life if you have a rotten job, no matter what it pays.
Some might think that saving their marriages, feeding their families, paying off debts, and the great difficulty of getting another job in a terrible economy (seems the economy is always terrible), and the like are reasons to put up with the job from Hell. Be stoic about it. No. Saw one damned fool who got married on the understanding that he had to have a steady job. She hit him with a prenup 2 weeks before the wedding. Told him to sign or the wedding was off. He signed. He was doing anything to keep his job. Anything. Yet the things he did to keep his job, things like framing others for his mistakes, repeatedly trying to snow customers with loads of bull, bullying and browbeating underlings, sabotaging anyone who might show him up whether or not that was intended, and general dirty office politicking but assured that he would be fired, as eventually did happen. He understood that, but could not bring himself to act differently, he was so afraid. I don't know what happened to his marriage.
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Your analogies are poor. An open suitcase full of money? Data is not like money. Money is scarce, data isn't. That's one way in which your analogy breaks down.
While the court's question is of some technical interest, it is mostly beside the point. Often an IP address can be connected to an account. Whether the use of an account on a particular occasion can be definitely tied to a person is more of a problem. Some would love to sidestep that latter question by just making the account holder liable regardless. Which means we would all be burdened with the job of policing our own Internet connections. It's no trivial matter. Have you thought about how big a burden such a requirement would impose on us all? It wouldn't stop with Internet access. For example, if you buy a few acres in the country somewhere, you would at the least have to set up surveillance to catch any criminals who happen to trespass on your property, even if the crime they're committing has nothing to do with you. Don't be so eager to ask for that kind of responsibility.
But as I said, that's all a side issue. The main issue here is whether sharing should be criminalized so that copyright can maybe function. Would that make copyright work? We already know the answer to that one: No. Even if it did enable copyright to function as intended, do we want this? In other words, is copyright a bigger public good than sharing? Again, no.
Not so. We'll have to give up our current prejudices about looks.
It's amazing how aerodynamic improvements are routinely maligned and unused because they're "ugly". Skirts on the wheels, smaller grills, golf ball like dimples at the rear, a smooth underside, and a much more tapered rear is cheap to do and pays big dividends in economy. But we won't do it because we have these hangups about what a car should look like. Whenever I hear bragging about something like 0.28 being a good coefficient of drag, I laugh. That hobbyists can tape on some crudely cut and assembled pieces of plastic and massively improve the aerodynamics shows how poor the original design is. Under 0.2 is what we should go for. The X Prize winner was 0.16.
The story focuses a lot on physical drama-- trekking through dangerous wilderness, ruins, and enemy territory, plus of course war zones and battles. Men are physically stronger and better suited for that kind of thing. The things women are better at aren't given much time. Children are even less visible, so no need for any mothering. Talk is hardly needed, as, true to classic fantasy, the lines are already drawn and everything is black and white. Naturally the evil side is so dramatically strong and threatening that the good folks can't afford much disagreement and discussion, nor can they spare time for the complexities of domestics and the pursuit of happiness. When they do, the realm totters. It's all very simple. It's war.
Women and children aren't the only things conspicuous by their absence. There is also nearly zero science. But fantasy has to keep science, logic, and good thinking at a distance, or the fantasy world quickly breaks down. We can't have better forms of government appearing, that would spoil the monarchist idyll. (Funny how fantasies always ignore the Roman Republic and Greek democracies.) No one is inventing better weapons, instead progress is inverted. Such is necessary for monsters to be powerful and scary. That Watcher in the Water would have no chance whatever against a corps of engineers, anymore than solo acts like King Kong or Godzilla had a real chance against an entire city. The Balrog can't prevail with personal combat either. Sauron didn't rely on personal strength even with the Ring, instead he recruited and organized armies, and held territory. For communication we have horse relays, beacons, horns, and mysterious, rare, dangerous magical objects, and sorcery available only to the highest ranks of the enemies. Admittedly, control of a volcano makes for one heck of a beacon and tool for demoralizing and frightening one's foes. The older it is, the better it is, presumably because the forces of evil have been gradually grinding the free peoples down over the ages. Very Goth. Such discovery as there is, is all in the area of traveling and seeing the world. And to make that work, all the peoples have to be extreme homebodies. How else could the elves of Lorien be so out of touch with the Ents?
Proof of how much they've spent? Use your brain! We know they've often sicced law enforcement thugs and lawyers on pirates. You think that doesn't happen, or that it doesn't cost taxpayer money?
What makes such enforcement actions possible is the social climate. They would never get away with pulling such high handed and outright illegal moves if the public understood the situation better. The police and courts would not be willing tools if they didn't think there was significant public support. Note the content industry has also spent a lot of money on propaganda and disinformation, trying to equate sharing with theft, and emphasizing the "starving artist" angle. Still, it's amazing how far they've persuaded the law to go. A bit of bribery-- business for lawyers, work for the police and courts, facile justifications, and the like, not outright payments-- has been a key part of winning the law over. Might have to hire more police to deal with the rampant piracy that's sweeping the nation! It's feeding the Prison-industrial complex.
In the spirit of "the end justifies the means", they feel it's okay to harass "pirates" with legalisms unrelated to the issue. And they've too easily convinced the law to see it their way. But this revoking of the passport is over the top. What's next, will they revoke your citizenship for alleged copyright infringement, without bothering to prove anything?
I bought a BeagleBoard xM. I have not been able to get much use out of it. When I had the thing working, it was quite slow, and its graphics were relatively low res. Mostly though, I've struggled with the 8G Micro SD card I got for it. The card works just well enough to boot an Ubuntu ARM installation, most of the time, but not to use it for long before some data error causes a crash.
Maybe I got a bum SD card. But this experience has me thinking that SD cards aren't good enough to replace the classic spinning hard drive.
I know one company that had a computer lab on the plant floor, and it was nothing but trouble. Metal dust would get into the hard drives (which require some air to operate), and floppy drives, and ruin them. They built a sealed room for these computers to deal with the problems. If you have to have computers in the plant, perhaps go for fanless sorts with solid state drives, and hermetically seal them away.
Have 2 separate A/C and heating systems, one for the office area and one for the plant floor. That could head off all kinds of problems. In fact, isn't that now standard operating procedure for new industrial buildings?
I still have my Apple ][+ that I played with as a teen. There are a number of things about it that aren't so optimal. DOS 3.3 took 45 seconds to boot. A simple bit of sector interleaving sped the boot time up to 15 seconds. There were many 3rd party DOSes that addressed this problem.
Then there was the BASIC interpreter. The problem here was a design issue of all interpreters. Statements had to be interpreted each time they were seen, which was very wasteful inside loops. The computer of course had very little memory, and really could not spare any for the luxury of optimization. Would've been nice if it could cache a few statements. Yet there were products to speed up BASIC programs. The idea of optimizing Javascript by renaming all the variables to the shortest possible names is not new. That and renumbering to use the smallest possible line numbers was slightly helpful for these BASIC programs. But the most gain was from the products that effectively compiled the BASIC code.
The BASIC interface with the hi-res graphics was wretchedly slow. Anyone who was serious about graphics performance had to do it in assembler. Many game programmers used BASIC or a mix of BASIC and assembler. Some used BASIC for minor graphics. A few even used Pascal. Wasn't Wizardry written in Pascal? The Bard's Tale showed how much better Wizardry could have been if they'd written it in assembler.
We've also become better at Computer Science. Some of the algorithms used back then are laughably naive and slow. Before I'd had any formal training in CS, I was able to spot ways to greatly improve performance in some of those old games. For instance, Dark Forest used a very slow and stupid method to compute how many men a player received. Took a good 15 seconds or more, and to top it off, the method sometimes got it wrong. I hacked in and replaced it with a far faster method that was also correct. The author, Tom Mornini, obviously had shoving the game out the door quickly as his top priority, and perhaps also was not the best programmer.
In short, there were compromises and misses. If anything has changed, it's the quality and scale of the compromises. Then, you might use the BASIC interpreter's graphics subroutines. Now you throw in an entire graphics library such as OpenGL, and on top of that perhaps OGRE or OpenSceneGraph. The most precious resource is still the programmer's time, and usually it's still worth saving hours of coding time at the cost of making the app more bloated and slower.
That's right! There are millions of people who will tell you, with a smirk, that you suck. They aren't doing it for you. Their criticisms aren't constructive. They're trying to get ahead, and if they can get ahead of you by convincing you that you really do suck, they'll do it. Bullying doesn't end when childhood ends.
why doesn't the blog article mention any attempts at intervention before he was let go?
That's what I was wondering. From the sound of it, things went from hunky dory to gone in 60 seconds. Weren't there any warnings? Don't people communicate at FB? (Extremely ironic, that.) That end run around marketing, a instance in which communication was very badly handled, sounds like the likely reason, and could justify an immediate firing, but we can only guess. Zoning out at meetings is bad too, but not necessarily fatal. If the meetings were just big wastes of time, as too many tend to be, then he should have done something about that. Don't go to those meetings, or cancel them, or refocus them. It doesn't sound like those meetings were wastes of time, rather it sounds like they were about vital functions, but he found the subjects (massive spreadsheets and more meetings) "boring". Typical non-engineer attitude.
He also goes a little overboard on eating crow and humble pie, which has me wondering about the sincerity of it. He may be doing some posturing, in order to better sell people on something such as his reformed character.
Finally, he recommends that everyone go through the experience of being fired. Like hell! Good for people with hugely swollen heads, perhaps, when it is their fault. But many people are not massively overconfident braggarts, and many firings are very unfair, executed to cover up someone else's mistake, or to make room for the boss's nephew, or out of personal dislike and jealousy, or sheer and totally impersonal bureaucratic bungling, or dozens of other reasons that would get the employer sued for wrongful termination in a heartbeat if disclosed. All a firing does in those cases is show workers that employers won't treat them fairly. Stories of such firings are legion, but employers don't have to care because there are more desperate workers than jobs. We're expected to suck it up, and for the most part we accept this treatment.
Respect, oh yes!
When management messes with the workers by, for instance, setting impossible goals then giving everyone a bad review for under achievement, don't think a few free pizzas make up for that. When management does that, what are they saying? That they think their workers are even dumber than they are, to be stupid enough to fall for that?
There's a difference between being a slave driver and a leader. Much of the management I've seen seems incapable of seeing any distinction.
Tell the team what the goals are and why. Be willing to make changes in response to good arguments. Take suggestions. Have the guts to show a little humility. Many bosses seem to think they have to be the smartest person in the room, and some will even go as far as firing someone just for being smarter than they are. And whatever else you do, don't feed people bull about anything. Refusing to change even the tiniest detail of the plan isn't being a good steadfast leader, it's being stubborn, inflexible, and cowardly. It can also be bluster to cover incompetence or treachery. I've had bosses who were very patronizing to the peons, for just those reasons. Then, when their mighty plan that they refused to divulge-- because the workers are incapable of understanding it, though the truth is more likely that they'd be laughed at-- fails yet again to bring in revenue, the company is suddenly unable to pay all the employees.
Many engineers would make far better managers than the so called elite who usually end up with such jobs. The problem is, we understand that management is a burden, and would rather not do it. Keep that in mind the next time you're tempted to feed us manure, thinking that engineers won't see through you because we are nerds and therefore are gullible suckers on such matters. Again, it's not that we can't manage, it's that we don't want to. Only the fools who think it'd be great to have power are eager to jump into management.
How is copyright to be killed off? Give guys like this a megaphone.
What words could possibly be more damaging to copyright than this proposal to turn it into a blatant fascist tyranny? Plus, making everyone wonder if all supporters of copyright are just as stupid also hurts it. Such proposals do more to kill off copyright than any words Lessig, the EFF, or any other pro technology boffins could say. Go, Ralph, go!
Torn? That nicely shows the problem with the whole idea of copyright.
We want to compensate people for their hard work.
But, we don't want the method of compensation interfering with progress, improvements, fair competition, distribution, and availability.
Copyright does too well at hindering adoption, and too poorly at compensation. It's become a tool to keep artists under the thumbs of powerful rent seekers. Copyright is hardly the only means of compensating artists. We can do better.
Use the fonts, knowing that it is morally right to do so, and don't worry about the legal issues. The law is woefully out of touch, and won't ever be improved if we don't push. Meantime, send the principles a donation if you like.
Just signed up this morning (Saturday).
Same here.
Be nice if they could post the reminder by the beginning of the day, rather than after 5 PM. Maybe we should be happy they didn't wait until 5 minutes before midnight?
Men in workaholic countries like the US, perhaps.
I think that's a sad sign of how screwed up our priorities are, that we somewhat willingly put work before children, and how companies have too much power over workers that they can expect such things of us.
I've talked with Mormon missionaries. I don't mind conversations about religion and politics, and wonder why those subjects are considered taboo in polite conversation. Is it that some people can't control themselves?
On one occasion, needed some help moving some furniture, and the price was having to listen to their pitch. So I talked with them. They agreed that the Earth was approximately 4.5 billion years old. And even that evolution is real. Before I could say anything more, they hastened to add that we are NOT descended from monkeys. Technically true (it's apes, not monkeys), but I knew what they meant.
The most recent encounter was with some missionaries going door to door. This time I asked about Global Warming. They agreed that it was real. And that we were causing it. I was heartened. But when it came to solutions, they blew it. It's in God's hands, they said. Apparently that means that we should do nothing, or that there isn't anything we can do about it.
This is a continuing problem with much organized religion. They just can't accept science, and keep trying to oppose it as if knowledge is the enemy of their faith. It's embarrassing, sad, and pathetic. It's like watching a sucker endlessly playing slots at a casino, under those great prominent signs announcing that the return on slots is less than 100%. They grapple with arguments about as well as one of those coin operated claws grips stuffed toys. These monotheistic religions very badly need some new blood and fresh air.
Screw the privacy concerns, I want to know how I'm doing. How much energy are those blokes using per unit of area and per home? What percentage of their energy goes towards climate control?
For myself, we are in a 2200 sq ft house in north Texas with gas furnace and water tank. House was built in 1977. Per year, we use between 6500 and 7000 kWh, and about 60 MCF of gas. About 50% of that is for heating and cooling.
No hyperbole. War is what will happen if we do nothing. You obviously don't think matters could come to that pass. Sounds naive and childish to me, this refusal to take responsibility for this problem. I would rather not wait until matters have deteriorated to the point that we're at the final option: mass death.
However, we will do something. What, I don't know. Wait until even the dimmest bulbs in our society see that we have a big problem, then spring into action with typical muscular and very costly solutions. Wall off our coasts, like the Netherlands? Huge water projects? More dams, canals, desalination plants, sewage reclamation, and the like to deal with droughts? Powered removal of CO2 from the air? Easier solutions like cutting down carbon emissions now appear to be politically impossible, thanks to people like yourself. Expect you'll claim it would wreck our economy. If so, you couldn't be more wrong. It will stimulate the economy.
I've seen this argument many times. You think we are too insignificant, too small to affect the big bad Earth in any way? You really think so? Why do you think that?
More like, it's that you want to believe it. Then you won't have to change, and it won't be your responsibility or fault. Change isn't always bad, you know. For instance, no one misses the old CRT monitors. Flat screens are so much better in pretty much every way, including power consumption. I'd like to see traffic lights and cars get some brains. I don't like waiting at red lights. It's all the more annoying when the light is making you wait for nothing. There are many other little things we can do, and they all add up.
What will happen is war. After we've screwed up and melted the ice on Greenland and Antarctica, a lot of people on the coast will have to move. Crops will fail as weather patterns change. It will make the dust bowl of the 1930's look like a picnic. Many of us will face starvation. If the Arab Spring shows anything, it's that when food runs short, people fight. Can we keep the nuclear weapons in the silos? If we use nukes, we may well kill ourselves off. We will instantly halt global warming and replace it with nuclear winter, and starve because we won't be able to grow any crops. A very few of us may survive that. May. Once our population has been drastically reduced by famine and war, things will stabilize. It won't be pretty, but that's the future we're looking at if we do nothing about global warming.
It doesn't have to be that way. What should we do? What can we do? Get ready for the changes, since we can't stop some of them now. It's too late for that. But first, we owe it to everyone to at least have a discussion about this problem.
In venture capital circles, you only get to do that once, if that. Takes work to come up with something that they will believe in enough to fund. If you're faking it, they'll see that before you get any money. If you're good enough to fool them, then once you take the money and run without even an honest try, your reputation is ruined and no one will ever talk to you again. You won't have an easy time keeping the money either. You may even have trouble staying out of jail for fraud.
Maybe Kickstarter has a lot more suckers, but it won't last.
You touch on why I am so unhappy with the Republican party. Obama isn't a great choice, but the only alternative with a chance at being elected is far worse because they've gone crazy. The last time I seriously considered voting Republican was in 2000, when I was asking myself if it mattered that W. was dumb, because he had wisely surrounded himself with what seemed an excellent team. Republicans think they're so manly, but they run and hide from any problem that can't be solved by force and hammers. They deny that there is global warming. Of all the problems we face, they've suddenly gone nuts over the deficit, claiming that's the source of all our current ills. And this after they and Obama damaged our credit rating with that debt ceiling showdown they pulled last year, and most of all, that very, very, very expensive War of Choice in Iraq. I haven't believed in Republican's fiscal responsibility since. Nor do I believe in their sincerity. Their sudden concern over spending seems just a cover for their real goal of wrecking the government so that it can't police any activity at all, while we are still recovering from the crash caused by Wall Street going wild! They don't want to save money, they just want to spend it on different, and worse things, such as stupid wars. It doesn't get much dumber than a war in which the stated reason, WMDs, turned out to be false, we didn't have to do it, we were already in another war in Afghanistan, it cost a huge pile of money-- at least $3 trillion, we accomplished nothing more than burdening ourselves with responsibility for Iraq, and still didn't solve any of their real problems or ours either, so that today, Iraq is once again looking shaky. Then, neither side seems willing to get serious about policing Wall Street and putting a stop to all the fraud. Only Madoff's scheme was egregious enough to land him in jail. The rest of the villains? Most of them are still out there, with like minded successors ready to ride the economy into the dirt again when it looks profitable to them to do so. It's the economy, stupid. What are they doing for the economy?
Republicans try to suppress any information, facts, and science that they believe could be against their interests, which is most science. The only science they like is that with obvious military application and the flashy stuff that makes for good propaganda. They act as if science is just another form of propaganda, like religion. They're too willing to butt in and screw up things they don't understand for religious and philosophical dogma that we know is just flat wrong. Atlas Shrugged? Teach the wholly manufactured controversy over Evolution? "Legitimate rape"?! They favored the Apollo program, though not for the science, that was just a nice side bonus. And now? Let's send a man to Mars! Why? Because it'll impress the world. It's Moon Landing 2.0: Mars. There are sooo many other things we could do. Republicans have no subtlety, no originality.
After the moon, people expect that Mars is doable, and therefore are looking for something more. We have to do better than a day long visit to the surface. When we go to Mars, it should be as a first step towards colonization. That's a long ways off yet. In the meantime, continue the work with unmanned probes. Before we go ourselves, we may send bacteria and plants first. Can wheat grow in a greenhouse on Mars, in Martian dirt?
I'd like an alternative to keep the Democrats on their toes. The Republicans aren't up to it anymore.
Seriously. The GP talks as if the money went into a black hole. It goes back into the economy, right away. The recipients are those who most urgently need money for basic necessities. They might even pay down some debt, which means the loan sharks, credit card companies, and other lowlifes who prey upon the poor won't be raking in quite so much money at 30% plus interest.
I'm of the opinion that we do a poor job of teaching math and programming. We could do much better, without extreme measures.
Why is it so poorly taught? Setting aside such issues as politics, bad teachers, bad students, bad home environments, distractions and the like, it comes down to the way the material is presented. We bog down in trivia, such as derivatives and integrals of common formulas. What is the derivative of y = log x? Of y = sin x? y = x^3+2x^2-5x+1? Why should we care about those problems? Rote memorization and practice is of little value to the students who never understood what they are practicing. We bury students with tedium, hoping that if only they do enough math problems, grind through enough meaningless made up formulas designed to force a student to use the product rule, the substitution rule, or a Laplace or Fourier transform, or any of the dozens of other techniques, a light will magically switch on and they'll suddenly get it. Even for the brighter students, this doesn't work well. Where and how can calculus be applied? This question was never explored. The closest we got to it were the dreaded "word problems", which students were anxious to avoid, and teachers were all too willing to skip.
Programming is much the same. Students are drilled on keywords, syntax, data structures, library functions, and similar trivia. People can memorize all that stuff, and yet be utterly incapable of writing a program.
In a beginning programming class, a struggling student demanded a process he could follow in order to write a program. Upon reflection, I thought it an interesting question. How to answer it? Throw Agile Programming at him? But that wasn't really what he was asking. Try an OOP approach of creating a description in English, then pulling nouns out of that for class names, and verbs for member functions? Closer, but not good enough for him. He wanted low level guidance, so he would know when to make a new variable or new function, write a loop, test a condition, and that sort of thing. So, try to explain he's asking a circular question, if it is indeed circular? Or that if there was such a process, we could program a computer to do it for us and then there'd be no need for human programmers? Explain that design is hard, as one must be able to perceive the problems correctly, then devise plans and methods for solving them, and that there are many ways to do this and often the choice of which way to go is seldom clear, and no simple set of rules can do a good job of pointing out a good way?
Yet we could do better. I have a question that most people miss. Of anyone who knows, or thinks they know, what Structured Programming is, I ask: Give an example of a program structure. It's not really a hard question, but an entire class of Computer Science seniors (at, admittedly, a 2nd rate school), was stumped, and needed a number of hints in the form of related questions before they at last got it.
I admit I'm ignorant about water transport, having never sailed, or driven a motorboat. Most I've ever done is a rowboat once, and a canoe once. Maybe it's not possible to outrun pirates, I really do not know. But if it is possible, by all means, have that option available. Not possible for a big lumbering cargo ship or oil tanker to outrun nimble pirate boats, I suppose, but could some kind of racing yacht do it?
All this talk of firearms jumps past another option. Have a way to run away, fast. Add an outboard motor to the ship, for just such emergencies. If pirates come after you, first try to outrun them. If that's not working, then reach for the weaponry.
Enjoying what you do is *everything*
Absolutely! You'll be hating life if you have a rotten job, no matter what it pays.
Some might think that saving their marriages, feeding their families, paying off debts, and the great difficulty of getting another job in a terrible economy (seems the economy is always terrible), and the like are reasons to put up with the job from Hell. Be stoic about it. No. Saw one damned fool who got married on the understanding that he had to have a steady job. She hit him with a prenup 2 weeks before the wedding. Told him to sign or the wedding was off. He signed. He was doing anything to keep his job. Anything. Yet the things he did to keep his job, things like framing others for his mistakes, repeatedly trying to snow customers with loads of bull, bullying and browbeating underlings, sabotaging anyone who might show him up whether or not that was intended, and general dirty office politicking but assured that he would be fired, as eventually did happen. He understood that, but could not bring himself to act differently, he was so afraid. I don't know what happened to his marriage.