Spoken like someone who has never spent a significant part of their life without a car in a country where a car is virtually a necessity.
While I do have a car, I do not typically drive it. In fact, right now I'd imagine the battery is dead. Again. I do understand what it's like not to have a car handy. The only bits of information I'm missing here is why anybody believed they were safe in that city during a hurricane.
What transportation are you going to "find" if you can't afford any? Even if you got a couple hundred dollars, so you blow it on a rental or a taxi to get to the next major city. Now you're out of money in a city where you know no one, where no one is obligated to help you ("why didn't you do what your own city officials told you to do, instead of coming here with no money, no way to feed yourself, and no way to leave?") What then, genius?
I dunno. But you see, having made the choice to get the fuck outta dodge, I'd be alive to work on that problem. You see? I choose life over inconvience.
Look jackass, these people did the perfectly rationale logical thing: the 1/4 of the population that didn't have a car either went to a shelter or stayed home because there was no other way for them to leave the city (no there weren't nearly enough buses to take them out before the hurricane - we're talking nearly 130,000 people without transportation - just look how long it took to get the 20,000 out of the Superdome - and for the buses they did have, they didn't have enough volunteer drivers for).
Maybe you can explain this to me, because I'm confused. You live in a city that everyone KNOWS will be devestated by a hurricane, and you see a nasty one coming towards you. Now, the perfectly logical thing to me would be, you know, to get out of the fucking city. Call me crazy.
They did what the officials told them to do, which was to go to the designated shelters because they were told they would be SAFE there
And that was their mistake. And, those that lived, have learned their lesson. I don't know about the rest of you, but in matters of life and death, I trust no one but myself. Especially when it concerns my daughter. I'd imagine anybody above the age of 20 ( or so ) do the same, having lived long enough to realize people in government are usually a bunch of red tape fuck ups that only work in government because that's the only place where bad decisions are required.
And a lot of those people didn't expect the water to start rising AFTER the hurricane had passed through which is why so many were caught by the water still at their homes or trying to get to a shelter.
Funny, in that show I mentioned ( I believe it was on the education channel ), that was chief among the concerns: The levis breaking. Anybody that didn't plan for that at the government level should have criminal charges leveled against them.
Jeez, you'll say anything to defend the moron we have for a POTUS
You're losing me here. Where did I defend our Commander in Chimp? As much as you dislike him, I probably dislike him more. He's an IQ point or two away from drooling on himself during press conferences. However, that is neither here nor there.
China can move a million people out of the way of a typhoon in less than a week, but the richest country in the world can't move a 100,000 car-less people out of a single coastal city.
This disaster is big enough, there is plenty of blame to go around. The first fault, however, lays with the people themselves not getting the fuck out of there.
What you've basically said here is that its their fault for dying because they were too poor to get out the way all the rich folk did.
No, what I did was point out some facts and indicated what I would have done. I did indicate how I felt, but you picked up that ball and went in new and exciting directions. For example:
The poor are therefore expendable, and that pretty much makes you a
At the risk of sounding like a dick ( which I am, make no mistakes ), here are some fun facts.
1) New Orleans is below sea level 2) It's almost right on the gulf. So close as to not to matter. 3) People have known the danger for *years*. So much so that I saw a tv special last year on the dangers of a hurricane to New Orleans. I live in california. 4) We saw this thing heading right for New orleans on TV days in advance.
Now, taking all these facts together, I wouldn't even be *living* in new orleans. But say I am, and I see this thing headed my way. I'm finding whatever means of transportation I can find and heading to the hills. If that means walking, that's what it means.
Don't feed me this bullshit about not having any way to get out of town. That's a crock. If my life is on the line, then you can bet your ass I'll come up with a method of travel fast enough to get me to high ground. All that is is an excuse for the apathetic who, mistakenly, let others convince them it was all going to be ok. Put simply: It was laziness.
If you want to know why a place like slashdot isn't plastering the front page with donation requests like for 9/11, here's a clue: There wasn't media coverage several days before the tragic event. Those in the towers didn't go in there knowing a plane was going to crash into them.
However I am more concernd (a reason that I am an ex-CS major too) that the university doesnt offer a single course in PERL, Python, Ruby, PHP, or any of the currently popular languages except Java, and some C as a side benefit from some classes. Don't give me BS about the basic concepts being all the preperation you need from any language.
Actually, this I subscribe to. Further, you can't cover all the languages in any depth that would be helpful. So you take a few languages that are widely used and have a good breadth of skills and you teach students the methods primarily, and how to learn a language secondary.
What I have a problem with is the single minded focus on mere software development concepts. With no head for how it interacts with the hardware, you get people creating buffer overflows without even realizing it. Teach a student how to learn and the basic concepts, then go over how a compiler works and how modern x86 machines process instructions.
They had compiler theory, but it wasn't a bachlor level course. I want that shit in the second year. Students need to know how their work affects the system.
The CS major taught at most colleges don't prepare you for jack nor shit.
I can attest to this. I took 2+ years in college towards my CS major before I gave it up. I had been working the entire time in various tech jobs, and I was picking up on just how little college would prepare someone for the real world.
I did "audit" several higher level courses, and while they provided good information, it's sort of half a degree. With no real training in hardware, software programmers really don't know what they are doing, or how to fix something if it goes BOOM.
Conversely, would you think it was a scary world when a teacher feels too threatened to teach arguments and counterarguments for intelligent design because of anti-creationist nuts?
As long as they don't teach it as a science, I have no problems with it being taught in school. Evolution is science, ID is a belief.
Last I tried gaim, it was buggy on windows, and it couldn't talk to my ssl enable server.
That may have changed since I tried it, but I found a client that doesn't have so clunky an interface and supports the features I need ( pgp encryption no less ) ( psi ).
jabber may well be "something pretty interesting". Several of us are already running a jabber server ( which has plugins to other services, btw ).
If they released an IM service based on jabber, they'd already have an install base ( albeit, not as large as aim/msn ), with the capabilities to talk to the other services through the server of your choice.
The trick would be releasing a decent client. I know of only one jabber client currently that's usable on a daily basis, the rest are just too awkward or weird ( interface design is not "easy" it would seem, or most people leave it as an afterthought, if it even gets that much ).
We'll see, regardless, over the next few days. I think it'd be interesting to see google jump behind jabber. That might give the project the kick in the ass it needs.
Given the level of encryption associated with things like WAP, people would have an easier time trying to get you to install a trojan or the like through email and sniffing your data that way.
I do run a site with a few hundred machines. I also manage 12 unique packages from companies that only have passing knowledge of programming.
I am usually 2 days behind on the patches. Keep in mind, every patch cycle for the past year has broken at least 2 of my packages. There have even been rare occations when I couldn't fix the problem by auditing the test systems to see what changed. In those cases, I had to call my vendor a few times a day until they sent me a patch.
I am not special. I don't know more about my work than anybody else. I don't deal with bullshit from myself or my vendors, and I think that's a big thing.
Whomever was asleep at the wheel should be fired. Of course they won't be, because they'll blame it on software breaking or MS or aliens for all I know. but the hard truth of the matter is, they should be.
Yes, I understand what's required before patches go live. I understand you have a lot of software you need to test before you can approve a patch. I also know how long that takes and how long it takes to make things work. A week, at most, is all you should ever be behind in patches.
Now granted, there are staff shortages and the like. However, there just simply aren't that many software packages. And if you truly are a fortune 500 company, you should be leaning on any software vendor heavily to make them work to keep their software working.
I would also like to point out that school is NOT a playground
Hence the problem. For me, school wasn't exciting, it wasn't interesting. It was a place to go during the day that I didn't want to go.
School should be a fun, exciting and interesting place to be. For the love of Dogs ( I'm dyslexic ), it's a place to learn! What can be more exciting than that?
You are a product of the industrialized education system. So am I. We were taught that work wasn't fun, it was work. And it wasn't something we had a choice in, regardless.
My daughter *loves* school. She loves the work, and looking it over, so would I ( and would have, at her age. ).
When I was in 2nd grade, my math homework ( for example ) was a sheet of numbers and operators. She brings home these little booklets that have word problems, stories, with numbers. Both accomplish the same thing, but hers also teaches problem solving ( figuring out which numbers go where in the equation ) AND she enjoys it because it's a story.
I won't even get into the science. They do some awsome things with science now.
History, for some reason, they still teach like they did when I was in school. On this date, this happened. On this date, this happened. And then they test you on the dates. idiotic.
My overall point being, we were taught by our schools not to have fun while doing work. Now a days, teachers have better tools at their disposal, and kids are actually learning to have fun while working.
Now if we could only get the parents to show some interest in their child's education and get the ID people to drop it. A scary world where a teacher feels too threatened to teach science theory because of religous nuts.
Part of problem solving *is* defining the problem.
As you pointed out, what good is being able to solve a problem if you can't define it. You aren't the first to come up with this insight, and as such, these things are taught if the teacher is truly interested in teaching problem solving.
Top three reasons why I don't want EA involved in this
1) Homework will take 10 hours a night to complete, but "only during crunch time".
2) There are always other students willing to participate in the program if you don't want to
3) Students won't get extra credit, no matter HOW much homework they do
On a more serious note, I've been saying for YEARS that we need to focus on these so called "softer" skills. Current education is too hooked on what a child knows and how well they can memorize, not how able they are to figure things out. I realize that the subjects are supposed to be vehicles to teaching these "softer" skills, the problem is many teachers don't. They teach facts to be memorized ( especially at the higher levels ), not concepts to be thought about.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like someone who has never spent a significant part of their life without a car in a country where a car is virtually a necessity.
While I do have a car, I do not typically drive it. In fact, right now I'd imagine the battery is dead. Again. I do understand what it's like not to have a car handy. The only bits of information I'm missing here is why anybody believed they were safe in that city during a hurricane.
What transportation are you going to "find" if you can't afford any? Even if you got a couple hundred dollars, so you blow it on a rental or a taxi to get to the next major city. Now you're out of money in a city where you know no one, where no one is obligated to help you ("why didn't you do what your own city officials told you to do, instead of coming here with no money, no way to feed yourself, and no way to leave?") What then, genius?
I dunno. But you see, having made the choice to get the fuck outta dodge, I'd be alive to work on that problem. You see? I choose life over inconvience.
Look jackass, these people did the perfectly rationale logical thing: the 1/4 of the population that didn't have a car either went to a shelter or stayed home because there was no other way for them to leave the city (no there weren't nearly enough buses to take them out before the hurricane - we're talking nearly 130,000 people without transportation - just look how long it took to get the 20,000 out of the Superdome - and for the buses they did have, they didn't have enough volunteer drivers for).
Maybe you can explain this to me, because I'm confused. You live in a city that everyone KNOWS will be devestated by a hurricane, and you see a nasty one coming towards you. Now, the perfectly logical thing to me would be, you know, to get out of the fucking city. Call me crazy.
They did what the officials told them to do, which was to go to the designated shelters because they were told they would be SAFE there
And that was their mistake. And, those that lived, have learned their lesson. I don't know about the rest of you, but in matters of life and death, I trust no one but myself. Especially when it concerns my daughter. I'd imagine anybody above the age of 20 ( or so ) do the same, having lived long enough to realize people in government are usually a bunch of red tape fuck ups that only work in government because that's the only place where bad decisions are required.
And a lot of those people didn't expect the water to start rising AFTER the hurricane had passed through which is why so many were caught by the water still at their homes or trying to get to a shelter.
Funny, in that show I mentioned ( I believe it was on the education channel ), that was chief among the concerns: The levis breaking. Anybody that didn't plan for that at the government level should have criminal charges leveled against them.
Jeez, you'll say anything to defend the moron we have for a POTUS
You're losing me here. Where did I defend our Commander in Chimp? As much as you dislike him, I probably dislike him more. He's an IQ point or two away from drooling on himself during press conferences. However, that is neither here nor there.
China can move a million people out of the way of a typhoon in less than a week, but the richest country in the world can't move a 100,000 car-less people out of a single coastal city.
This disaster is big enough, there is plenty of blame to go around. The first fault, however, lays with the people themselves not getting the fuck out of there.
What you've basically said here is that its their fault for dying because they were too poor to get out the way all the rich folk did.
No, what I did was point out some facts and indicated what I would have done. I did indicate how I felt, but you picked up that ball and went in new and exciting directions. For example:
The poor are therefore expendable, and that pretty much makes you a
Half eaten pbj, paperwork from the last useless convention i was sent to, and condoms. :)
At the risk of sounding like a dick ( which I am, make no mistakes ), here are some fun facts.
1) New Orleans is below sea level
2) It's almost right on the gulf. So close as to not to matter.
3) People have known the danger for *years*. So much so that I saw a tv special last year on the dangers of a hurricane to New Orleans. I live in california.
4) We saw this thing heading right for New orleans on TV days in advance.
Now, taking all these facts together, I wouldn't even be *living* in new orleans. But say I am, and I see this thing headed my way. I'm finding whatever means of transportation I can find and heading to the hills. If that means walking, that's what it means.
Don't feed me this bullshit about not having any way to get out of town. That's a crock. If my life is on the line, then you can bet your ass I'll come up with a method of travel fast enough to get me to high ground. All that is is an excuse for the apathetic who, mistakenly, let others convince them it was all going to be ok. Put simply: It was laziness.
If you want to know why a place like slashdot isn't plastering the front page with donation requests like for 9/11, here's a clue: There wasn't media coverage several days before the tragic event. Those in the towers didn't go in there knowing a plane was going to crash into them.
Seriously? Is it the minds ability to process data? Then wouldn't that make an baseball player as intelligent as a rocket scientist?
Or a wood worker who does extrodonairy work, is that intelligence too?
Intelligence is a bullshit term we invented to fit a very limited set of skills ( and I suspect, to make ourselves feel better about ourselves ).
As the research is not yet published there's nothing more to go on than the press reports
But, by god, we aren't going to let that stop us, are we?!
I think I got the other two interesting mods just because of you.
I guess, in a weird sort of way, I should thank you.
China _does_ have oil.
Well, there now, sounds to me like they may be harboring terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.
We must persevere. Stay true to our convictions, and continue to sacrifice. For the good of the world, in our war on terrorism.
Please take note that sign-up occurs via mobile phone at the moment
Let me be the first to say, huh?
Is this odd to anybody else?
However I am more concernd (a reason that I am an ex-CS major too) that the university doesnt offer a single course in PERL, Python, Ruby, PHP, or any of the currently popular languages except Java, and some C as a side benefit from some classes. Don't give me BS about the basic concepts being all the preperation you need from any language.
Actually, this I subscribe to. Further, you can't cover all the languages in any depth that would be helpful. So you take a few languages that are widely used and have a good breadth of skills and you teach students the methods primarily, and how to learn a language secondary.
What I have a problem with is the single minded focus on mere software development concepts. With no head for how it interacts with the hardware, you get people creating buffer overflows without even realizing it. Teach a student how to learn and the basic concepts, then go over how a compiler works and how modern x86 machines process instructions.
They had compiler theory, but it wasn't a bachlor level course. I want that shit in the second year. Students need to know how their work affects the system.
The CS major taught at most colleges don't prepare you for jack nor shit.
I can attest to this. I took 2+ years in college towards my CS major before I gave it up. I had been working the entire time in various tech jobs, and I was picking up on just how little college would prepare someone for the real world.
I did "audit" several higher level courses, and while they provided good information, it's sort of half a degree. With no real training in hardware, software programmers really don't know what they are doing, or how to fix something if it goes BOOM.
SIGN. ME. UP.
Between a baby/toddler teething and my CIO position, sleep is something I hear about more than actually get.
Conversely, would you think it was a scary world when a teacher feels too threatened to teach arguments and counterarguments for intelligent design because of anti-creationist nuts?
As long as they don't teach it as a science, I have no problems with it being taught in school. Evolution is science, ID is a belief.
PSI runs under windows too.
Last I tried gaim, it was buggy on windows, and it couldn't talk to my ssl enable server.
That may have changed since I tried it, but I found a client that doesn't have so clunky an interface and supports the features I need ( pgp encryption no less ) ( psi ).
psi, I meant to put it in my original post, then I saw something....OOOO SHINY!!!
jabber may well be "something pretty interesting". Several of us are already running a jabber server ( which has plugins to other services, btw ).
If they released an IM service based on jabber, they'd already have an install base ( albeit, not as large as aim/msn ), with the capabilities to talk to the other services through the server of your choice.
The trick would be releasing a decent client. I know of only one jabber client currently that's usable on a daily basis, the rest are just too awkward or weird ( interface design is not "easy" it would seem, or most people leave it as an afterthought, if it even gets that much ).
We'll see, regardless, over the next few days. I think it'd be interesting to see google jump behind jabber. That might give the project the kick in the ass it needs.
Not that I think this will go through, but in case it does: Asterisk ( I'm trying to stay relevent ).
Now, on to bigger and better things. Who borked the comments?
I need to preview more often. I meant WPA, not WEP.
Looks like I chose the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!
Given the level of encryption associated with things like WAP, people would have an easier time trying to get you to install a trojan or the like through email and sniffing your data that way.
I do run a site with a few hundred machines. I also manage 12 unique packages from companies that only have passing knowledge of programming.
I am usually 2 days behind on the patches. Keep in mind, every patch cycle for the past year has broken at least 2 of my packages. There have even been rare occations when I couldn't fix the problem by auditing the test systems to see what changed. In those cases, I had to call my vendor a few times a day until they sent me a patch.
I am not special. I don't know more about my work than anybody else. I don't deal with bullshit from myself or my vendors, and I think that's a big thing.
This was my thought.
Whomever was asleep at the wheel should be fired. Of course they won't be, because they'll blame it on software breaking or MS or aliens for all I know. but the hard truth of the matter is, they should be.
Yes, I understand what's required before patches go live. I understand you have a lot of software you need to test before you can approve a patch. I also know how long that takes and how long it takes to make things work. A week, at most, is all you should ever be behind in patches.
Now granted, there are staff shortages and the like. However, there just simply aren't that many software packages. And if you truly are a fortune 500 company, you should be leaning on any software vendor heavily to make them work to keep their software working.
I would also like to point out that school is NOT a playground
Hence the problem. For me, school wasn't exciting, it wasn't interesting. It was a place to go during the day that I didn't want to go.
School should be a fun, exciting and interesting place to be. For the love of Dogs ( I'm dyslexic ), it's a place to learn! What can be more exciting than that?
Some work just can't be fun.
You are a product of the industrialized education system. So am I. We were taught that work wasn't fun, it was work. And it wasn't something we had a choice in, regardless.
My daughter *loves* school. She loves the work, and looking it over, so would I ( and would have, at her age. ).
When I was in 2nd grade, my math homework ( for example ) was a sheet of numbers and operators. She brings home these little booklets that have word problems, stories, with numbers. Both accomplish the same thing, but hers also teaches problem solving ( figuring out which numbers go where in the equation ) AND she enjoys it because it's a story.
I won't even get into the science. They do some awsome things with science now.
History, for some reason, they still teach like they did when I was in school. On this date, this happened. On this date, this happened. And then they test you on the dates. idiotic.
My overall point being, we were taught by our schools not to have fun while doing work. Now a days, teachers have better tools at their disposal, and kids are actually learning to have fun while working.
Now if we could only get the parents to show some interest in their child's education and get the ID people to drop it. A scary world where a teacher feels too threatened to teach science theory because of religous nuts.
Part of problem solving *is* defining the problem.
As you pointed out, what good is being able to solve a problem if you can't define it. You aren't the first to come up with this insight, and as such, these things are taught if the teacher is truly interested in teaching problem solving.
Top three reasons why I don't want EA involved in this
1) Homework will take 10 hours a night to complete, but "only during crunch time".
2) There are always other students willing to participate in the program if you don't want to
3) Students won't get extra credit, no matter HOW much homework they do
On a more serious note, I've been saying for YEARS that we need to focus on these so called "softer" skills. Current education is too hooked on what a child knows and how well they can memorize, not how able they are to figure things out. I realize that the subjects are supposed to be vehicles to teaching these "softer" skills, the problem is many teachers don't. They teach facts to be memorized ( especially at the higher levels ), not concepts to be thought about.