Because, quite often, you don't want to use a library. I like Ogre, but I do a lot of OpenGL stuff too, it's just convenient when you have simple scenes. This is more common than it may seem, I have several tools I support for my team (or have supported in the past) that are just very simple OpenGL calls.
We're all going to keep on doing whatever we want, this is just preventing anyone from making a legal business out of it. Of course, there are plenty of illegal businesses doing it, and a lot of private parties offering the how-to's for free under condition of anonymity. Hell even the government wants permission to un "DRM" our devices so it can spy!
For some reason this is "big government" that nobody wants to reduce, it's "big business politics" that the other side doesn't want to eliminate. Money being spent for illusions and pretense. Go team USA.
It is wrong, IMO, to describe it as addictive due to the connotations of that word. There are no cravings that result from Afrin use
Maybe, this stuff to me is one of the greatest drugs ever. It actually works, works quickly, and is night/day. If you have nasal issues such that even when healthy you aren't breathing that well, Afrin is very compelling (it also helps if you don't want to have surgery you know you need to have). You will breathe really, really well. So there might be a psychological component, however minor.
No one is going to feel a compulsion that they "just gotta have it".
While I wouldn't describe it as anything like what heroin users allegedly go through, there is also a physical component. The rebound congestion effect of the stuff is similar to physical addiction in many senses and you will want to take more of the stuff to fix the problem. Eventually you end up with possibly a dangerous condition that requires surgery to resolve, or you man up and endure the side effects until they pass (usually 12 hours). Significantly less terrible than working through heroin withdrawal, but it is a form of withdrawal.
I think it just degrees of addiction, but I think addictive is a good word for the way a user is likely to behave w/o education. It is definitely a far easier habit to kick than tobacco or opiates of course... I'm not sitting here jonesing for my afrin fix.
Afrin is great for your nose, especially if you have a deviated septum and chronic sinusitis. However when you have a full blown cold, it takes a bit more.
In my ignorance, I bought the Sudafed containing phenylephrine, and I could not figure out why Sudafed, which was my go-to medicine for daytime cold relief, did not work! I wasn't really expecting to suddenly hear an angelic choir from the heavens after taking the stuff, just some relief. Instead, nothing. Not a goddamn thing.
I did the research and figured out what was wrong: I was rope a doped. Not only is the good stuff only behind the counter, the pharmacist (at least here) defaults to giving you the Sudafed with phenylephrine unless you specifically ask for the pseudoephedrine. So, counting that money wasted I got the good stuff, and miracle of miracles, it worked. I was my own blind trial. Phenylephrine is bullshit, don't waste money on it.
I have not done the research on meth cooking methods, but I believe it continues unabated with this blockade on pseudoephedrine... I get the strong feeling we're wasting our time here, all hail the war on drugs.
And medicine isn't what it used to be, thanks to wide access to health insurance, and insurance companies doing their best to squeeze the profit out. And if you don't get an MBA from one of a few select schools you're wasting your money, you could get access to the same mediocre job much cheaper with the same near-zero chance of hitting it big. Engineering? If you're in chemical or computer engineering, you might be OK for another few years, but thanks to H-1Bs and offshoring, we're already seeing the writing on the wall. EE was a great field when I was in HS, now but for a few elite areas, it's mostly a wasteland of supervising foreign design centers. This entire push for more CS degrees and more CS majors is, itself, just a way for CEOs to look like SJWs, when what they really want is a large supply of qualified applicants that they can pay less and less, and put more controls around (remember when programmers were cowboys who couldn't get fired? That was 20 years ago, the future is even more bleak...the day of wearing a tie may return).
There's no magic bullet, the market is always changing. When I was a kid mom wanted me to be a doctor, that seemed like a winner back then (but the writing was already on the wall, as it is in engineering & computer science). My opinion, that I bet my own children's well being on, is that if you have a strong education, particularly a strong education in math and science, you are more likely going to be able to find the high paying job of 15yrs+ than you will be without. Math and Science only because they build and are directly applicable to the working world, and if you have a weak foundation you may have to pay much more later to rebuild it. History and language arts, not as much, although I do see a continued demand for creative people with some applicable job skill. We should be concerned if some portion of the population is not performing as well in these fundamentals as another. Coding is, as far as I'm concerned, a job skill, not a career nor a field. Computer Science is an advanced field, but I think the "sciency" portions of it will always be out of reach to most high school kids. You do need to learn more mathematical formalism, and already know a bit about computing machines to really get in to it before college. Programming though, that can be learned quickly for many jobs.
What we SHOULD be doing is ignoring all these CEOs (always, as a rule) who express dubious interest in education, and start figuring out how we can provide job-specific education to provide "employees" to fill instantaneous demands. It is going to be continually necessary, as technology continues to change, to help the displaced portion of the population retrain and find something new, this will help the CEOs who are facing an instantaneous demand in one field, and a surplus in another. Of course it won't help them in over-saturating that demand in one field so as to pay minimum wage, and it will ensure that there is considerable competition for employees. This means more college & university settings for later life re-education, and a lot more reliance on trade schools for job specific training, even for people holding advanced college degrees. I can tell you in my field (computer engineering) it may be very difficult to move from one subclass of job to another simply due to the amount of job training each area requires to become proficient in whatever tools, techniques, algorithms and work-flows are in use. The common example is the guy who spent 20 years designing CPUs is unemployable in anything else (including GPUs, networks, etc.) because he can't break the interviews, he may be a really great CPU guy, but his knowledge is too domain specific. This is where trade schools would come in: continued education for even very educated people to ensure "job readiness". I suspect there are many people in the computer science field who could fill the Facebook demand, if they spent no more than 2 years learning the latest techniques.
All this would stop the idiotic push to get 5 year olds to learn javascript, when I suspect in 20 years the language will be a relic of a bygone era anyway.
Everywhere I've worked we have been advised not to call 911, to call the emergency line instead. The justification given is the inability of 911 to trace your call (i.e. it may look like it's coming from wherever corporate headquarters are, in another state). I've never been anywhere that you were forbidden and your job would be forfeit. I've resolved to do both if the need ever arose... but I don't honestly think our security wouldn't do everything they could to get help quickly.
Here in America, you are lucky to get a choice of ONE pension plan. And you take it and consider yourself really lucky. Most of us get offered a 401(k) plan, from which we can choose from 5-100 mutual funds of various types. I think this is the confusion.
when the company providing those plans fails and takes all your money with it
A pension perhaps, I'm unfamiliar with the concept, although I think there are now rules around them to prevent that, which is also why they're so rare. I am probably wrong. I will never have the option for a pension.
But with 401(k) that does not happen. I have been in a company that failed, and I took my 401(k) and rolled it over, I lost nothing. That shouldn't be a fear, 401(k) is YOUR money, IRAs are YOUR money. The funds you invest in may lose money, that's on you, but your employer is just a proxy. If and when they fail, you get whatever you had on account out. Definitely this is not a good concern, a good concern is losing your money on a bad fund.
Choice paralysis is not because there are too many choices, its because people don't give a shit
I don't know many people who don't give a shit about money. I know a lot of people who simply don't understand it.
Current generations are spoiled brats who expect someone else to make all the choices for them.
No, we're the first generation in a long time where all options aren't obvious winners, the boom is over. Our parents had to worry about very little and did not need to develop the tools to make good choices, they did not have to. They had very little to pass on to our generation, and now we're struggling. When it comes to finance, we normally don't have the money to invest until we're relatively old, and we don't have the tools to make good decisions. We're entirely rational, but ignorant. We do not know what choice to make, but we realize we have everything to lose. You see we care a lot about money, but we believe money in hand is safer than money in someone else's hand (provably false), and perhaps that everyone is out to get us. In this framework, doing nothing makes absolute sense. Except it is wrong, holding cash on hand is definitely not the best choice beyond a certain point.
We're raising a bunch of kids who can't be bothered to take care of their own responsibilities.
Lazy, irrational, thinking couched in a broken outlook that being insulting and condescending will somehow address a problem.
"after careful consideration, none of these 150 plans are mathematically better than not saving for retirement at all."
Honestly when I read that I think "most people do not understand mutual funds, and are unable to make sense of even one plan". And there's really no shame in that, while it is easy to understand once you have the knowledge, it's not easy to get that knowledge and there are trust issues.
Fortunately I work for a place that offers free training on how to evaluate mutual funds, from a company that is forbidden from recommending anything at all, and how to comb through dozens to find one that meets my needs. I really can comb through 150 and most assuredly cannot make the optimal choice (no one can, or all fund managers would do it and we'd have maybe 9 funds) but certainly can narrow down the search to plans which meet my targets & timelines, and then start comparing them for what I think will work best for me. But to do that you have to know how to read the reports (i.e. morningstar, etc.), how to understand the ratings, what things to look for, etc. If you have that knowledge, you can easily handle 150 choices.
I just don't think most people understand money that well, most of us did not go to school for accounting and finance, and find all of that stuff baffling. It doesn't help that they have multiple words that mean the same things, while the same word may have vastly different meanings in different contexts, and you will never get an answer to your question in your own words... more or less like a politician. What people need is an academic foundation in the subject that will help them see through the bullshit. It takes maybe a week to get a full background (not just of funds, but tax implications, investing strategies, etc.) but it's time well spent. Then you will want the choices, as many as you can have.
full products are deliberately crippled to plunder the customer
Said a different way, products descriptions are misleading as to their contents and what was done to offer them in some ideal format (long shelf life, inexpensive, type of flavor). So you end up with an array of products that are the same thing with different meaningless labels.
My suggestion is rather than reducing choice, if you're not absolutely thrilled with one brand of product, try a different one next time. Going to bred, there is one brand of bread at the grocery store that (for my needs) far surpasses the others. Of course it's almost always sold out, because we all know this to be true. But it's not the healthiest brand by far, and probably is one of hte least authentic. But if authenticity is what you crave, there are like 6 choices for that too.
The only people who seem to benefit from lack of choice are shareholders who want to own really big companies with absolutely no threat from competition.
I don't care what skin color you are or who's religious garb you are displaying, people are going to detain you until they can prove that the devices are in fact fake. After which, you would be jailed for terrorism. None of this will be a kind polite experience, nor should it be.
The fact is I did all those things while studying engineering, and I no one ever batted an eye. I was well dressed, carrying a pile of electronics books. On any given monday i have been seen on a ferry assembling some bizarre electric contraption, with wires sticking out and seven segment displays counting in any direction, never once was I bothered. Certainly my DSP project really did look (unintentionally) like a bomb from a movie. The difference is, nobody would expect me to make a bomb. Honestly some of the things my friends and I did in (primarily high) school probably should have raised some eyes, and did involve explosive substances (gasoline, frequently).
I'm not going to argue that this kid (and his father) may have been trying to get attention those facts were not in evidence initially and in full fairness if that's your gig, the mayor of that town is also known to be an agitator against muslims. All the required ingredients are there to make a sensation. But it seems unlikely any of this would have happened if he were a good christian boy.
So we're on Slashdot, the official Internet home of mom's basement losers and Magic The Gathering addicts.... in other words, hundreds of thousands of people for whom the first 25 years of their lives consisted of nothing but "[being made to ] feel like an isolated second class person". How many Slashdot users go blow up innocent people as a political ploy?
We do seem to have a problem in this country of individuals going apeshit and killing a lot of people, the problem is per capita greater than most other civilized countries. Of those with an equal or greater problem, a generalization can be made that they are culturally even less tolerate of deviations from the norm than we are. This proves nothing, it's just a data point.
If you are irrational, you blame our apeshit problem on guns. But, the gun nuts have a point that guns do not pull their own trigger, a human is behind them. So our problem is actually humans making the decision to try to mass murder. This is happening in significant and unusual quantities, so it's fair to say SOME aspect of our society is provoking this behavior, it's the only explanation that doesn't involve vast conspiracies and alien anus probes. While it would be nice from a scientific point of view to clearly identify the cause(s), and use that knowledge for all time, it seems reasonable in this case that one possible contributing factor might be social isolation due to arbitrary deviations from the norm (i.e. religion) and agree we're just not going to do that anymore because it is dumb to begin with. All problems will not be solved, but let's just not do it?
If kid has a bomb or even creates a fake and pitches it as a bomb, then we take any and all necessary actions to deal with the kid and protect the public. If the kid is insane, we need to take him out of circulation and treat him. If he's trying to pull a political stunt (and he might have been), then the best way to defuse this sort of "bomb" is to give him absolutely nothing to work with by simply being decent human beings. "Oh yeah, so you got a clock huh? Cool."
anyway, this whole thing has always struck me as a publicity stunt. There are certain things you don't do. I don't want to get robbed, I don't go walking certain places in certain cities. If you're muslim, you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb... if you're anybody you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb really, but especially if you're muslim.
I'm afraid if this was a publicity stunt, and the stunt was to show systemic discrimination and poor treatment of muslims, this was the right stunt to pull and the right way to do it. You can and should expect to be properly treated by the government, law enforcement and civilized society. Assuming a kid is carrying a bomb is a bad assumption, if he wanted to blow you up, he would have.
Now if he was going to complain that some rednecks beat him up/killed him, etc. for this stunt, I'd have somewhat less sympathy. If you go poking at morons with a stick, you probably are going to get wrecked and I can't say I have a boatload of sympathy.
The immediate parallel is the woman in "slutty clothes" crying rape. She should expect, under the law, equal treatment as anyone suffering a violent assault, and expect that everything will be done to catch and prosecute the perpetrators. She should also expect not to be raped, even if she was entirely naked, and that civilized society would let her be. If she deliberately exercised poor judgement in an effort to prove our system is broken, while I question whether this was the best means to do it, it's probably the right kind of stunt to highlight a systemic failure to address rape.
If she was trying to prove that people in a rough neighborhood can't be relied upon to avoid raping her, and/or that the police are unable to keep the violent element of a rough neighborhood suppressed...absolutely no sympathy, that's the definition of a violent neighborhood, and they exist in every city all over the world, and sometimes you have to exercise sound judgement about where you go and how you go there.
If I would live on or near the equator, where the sun goes up at 4:30 I'd get up early as well.
Also if I were a hunter-gatherer I may need less sleep. I never have any issues with sleep deprivation if the next day I'm doing something very physical. Sleep deprivation hurts an awful lot, however, when I'm sitting in front of a computer with my heart-rate just above corpse level, trying to do something intellectual. It can be extremely hard to focus and stay on task, any interruption at all can be devastating. Whereas if I'm well rested I can usually tune out my environment pretty quickly and get to work.
It's possible sleep has more to do with our brains than our bodies (or maybe not both in equal measure).
In that this seems like an option no one should ever be checking at all, ever.... this is something users need to decide on. There are still some incompatibilities, and honestly I still prefer the Windows 7 UI, the new start menu is obnoxious, just less obnoxious than the old. Not to mention that the "control panel" is now hidden behind a fully useless UI that lets you do nothing at all useful and hte right click menu has the stuff you really want.
Any decently educated programmer can pick up any language quickly and easily.
Hire polyglots not language end-users.
I'm torn on this one. On one hand, yes, anyone with a CS background who didn't cheat through school can learn a new language quickly.
The issue is whether they can learn to write idiomatically correct code in that language, and whether they "think" in terms of how that language was designed. That usually requires a bit of time, not to mention some patience. Python is my usual example for this, it breaks a lot of (in my opinion) sensible conventions that people over 10 are used to: no need for semicolons (sneered at if you use them), mandatory white space, duck-typing, etc. Yes, you can learn python in a few hours, but to write "good" python that other python people can/want to support, and generally don't waste time fighting the language, you need to spend some time.
Generally when I see a language like this I want to barf, but it's hard not to run in to something like this a few times in life, and if you're on the hiring side and you have a pile of (say) Python, you probably want to hire someone that can do it properly, versus someone from say, C, who is going to be very upset with almost everything.
You're probably someone who considers themselves and 'old school hacker' and have been out of a programming job for twenty years
Or he's doing a different job than you. I've got a pile of C code I'm staring at now, which is going in to active products that ship in the tens of millions. I have both never been unemployed longer than I wanted to be, nor had any issues selling my "dinosaur" C skills. I've never worked anywhere that C skills aren't a job requirement, nor that replacing C would get you anything but a funny look, it's solving a problem we don't have.
C isn't going anywhere, it's a perfectly safe choice. It may not be the optimal choice for all situations. Smart people don't put one tool in their toolbox and call themselves an expert, they learn how to use a small but complementary set of tools really well, and then experiment with some new ones here and there but leave them on the wall for that niche situation that needs them. C is a hammer, you should always have a hammer in your toolbox. Most problems can be made to look like nails, with the proper combination of desperation and alcohol.
While I was a teenager, I had two friends, both musicians who were constantly ragging on me about the need for more "creativity in my life". Both were musicians, one a bassist aspiring to metal bands, another was a guitarist more closely aligned to classic rock. In any event, I argued that my computer & electronics habits were absolutely a creative outlet, where I was free to express myself and create anything I wished. They claimed it's all equations, logic and deus ex machina. I pointed out that music is just a bunch of notes & chords strung together which human ears and brains find pleasing, which they argued is totally different. I could never get a definitive answer for how, I got "emotion", "expression", "unpredictable", "unthinking", each of which I systematically tore apart as clearly not being both exclusive properties of art, nor present in all forms of art. But they remain unconvinced. I think it's impossible for someone to appreciate art, who doesn't appreciate the medium.
So your hypothesis is that God possibly had a bit too much nebular burrito over at the Wolf's Head, stopped by the kid's house at KIC 8462852, they're chatting, meanwhile God is literallly sharting up some form of giant gas/astroid cloud, and that's causing aperiodic incidents of 20% light dimming?
Could be, we should get a guy working on this hypothesis to make sure all the bases are covered. We should also attempt to locate the Febreeze cluster, because someone is going to need to drop a heavy dose there.
So you're saying that guessing about some alien civilization we can't prove exists, building a fabulously and probably impossibly expensive structure around a star we can't see that well might be jumping to conclusions?
I've been in electronics for almost 20 years and I have no idea who he is. I'm not trying to belittle anyone, it certainly looks like he has contributed quite a lot. But the guys who wrote "the text" on electronics are probably Sedra/Smith in Microelectronic Circuits (https://books.google.com/books?id=RcodQm6LaVEC), pretty much everyone I knew when learning used that book, I still have mine on the shelf behind me. The only other "the text" i could think of is Horowitz/Hill "The Art of Electronics". I think just about everything about transistors, amplifiers and circuits is at least touched on between those two books in deep, painful, gory mathematical detail.
Radio shack books always were in the category of "I need a quick circuit that does and don't want to think about it". Useful for hobby work or quick prototype, but not terribly portable if you had to build a circuit that would be manufactured in the bazillions in some low cost region by trained monkeys, using parts you didn't control, shipped by drop-kick to a customer you'd never meet, interfaced with hardware you'd never dream of. I imagine they paid his bills, but hardly a scientific contribution.
TL;DR summary bad, just RTFA if you care about what he does and what his actual contribution to science is.
I RTFA'd but what he's talking about and what we really want aren't the same thing. I want to be able to summon a vehicle (I can own it, but perhaps it's not parked nearby), tell it to take me from A to B, and wait. Then from B to A and wait. If it can't reach B, it takes me to the best place it can and either I take over or use some other transit. On my daily commute or trip to the grocery store, or doctors in my town, I don't want the steering wheel. I don't need it, a computer could in theory do that job without my input, better than I can do it. With the proper preconditions.
I agree with the good Dr. that it seems unlikely that any level of car automation is going to work on all road, weather, and traffic conditions, everywhere in the world. But then your average car starts to misbehave when it's off paved roads, and if you're on a dirt road in the rain, it can get bad. One day in NYC breaks the hearts and souls of human drivers, I can't imagine what a machine might think. Much like we built the existing road & traffic system to accommodate reasonably trailed human piloted vehicles, we should be constructing a traffic network that a reasonably decent autonomous vehicle system can safely navigate with exactly this level of input: where do you want to go? The car can handle the transport, I will do other things.
Perhaps this road system exists, for the foreseeable future, only in large urban centers with otherwise unsolvable traffic problems, and human drivers may have to continue to navigate traditional roads the old fashioned way for some of their journeys. The horse and buggy didn't disappear overnight, and dirt roads were common enough in the US even 40 years back. But the impact on my daily life of yielding the car to a computer for my commute even if it achieved no average decrease in commute duration, would be tremendous. Lower insurance premiums, more deterministic commute delays, more scheduling options (ex. in austin I leave before 6:25am, or after 930am, and stay at work until just about 3pm or after 7pm...this is stupid!), more time for me (rather than unpaid time supporting my job, or unrewarding time spent schlepping the family). This seems like what the goal of it all should be.
I think the Dr. is probably right that putting the entire burden on some sophisticated AI to handle conditions even humans can't read properly is very unlikely, but we also can engineer our environment to fit the needs of the AI.
Free markets develop price signals. This is true in both wholesale and retail markets... in fact whenever there is free trade. The producer does in fact know that the supplier's needs are met, because otherwise the supplier would have asked more for his goods. People just don't normally sell stuff for less than cost. That's an act of a company or corporation with a diverse package of goods. Not a seller of fertilizer.
Not often, and again that's because of the nature of free markets. The market as a whole will not sell for a loss, that's not sane practice and most people aren't insane. The market finds a price which satisfies both the seller and the buyer, or the market ceases to exist.
Or the supplier was in a position to either sell for below cost, and cut his losses, or not sell at all and run out of money quickly. This can go on for extended periods of time (because of these rainy day funds) before someone is forced to relent. It is entirely possible for large players, or players on unequal footing (say they have influenced their government to totally ignore laws which increase their costs) to arbitrarily undercut fair competitors just to run them out of business and ultimately corner the market. This same tactic can be used to discourage competitors from entering in the first place.
Only in the very short term. Markets do not persist in that condition. And a smart trader plans for weak seasons. This is all baked into the price of the goods.
In many cases it can go on for long enough to run the supplier entirely out of business, and allow the price to be set by some other arbitrary force (say: how much do you have in your wallet?).
You neglect the very engine that drives free markets: the finding of a price point over time. Throwing in these abrupt disasters you imagine can indeed happen, but usually don't, and again the savvy player plans for bad weather. That's HOW they set the price.
I would argue these disasters have happened, are happening, and are eternal. Many things work properly, or else we'd be in absolute chaos, obviously. But from my standpoint is the theory is useless if it can't be used to make useful predictions. At any given time, someone is engaging in some sort of shennanigans in some financially significant part of the market.
If computers implemented a free market according to the simple algorithms that we feel they should be using, perhaps economics might have some universality to it (or at least to a universe of sane actors). But, economics is a SOCIAL science. Actors play a very significant role in how it plays out. While it seems like actors always act in their self-interest, that is not very helpful. One's greater self-interest might involve behaving in a way that appears locally irrational, but might make sense if all information necessary were known. In other cases they actually don't understand their own self-interests very well and are engaging in destructive behavior because they think it will produce some result they are looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, quite often, you don't want to use a library. I like Ogre, but I do a lot of OpenGL stuff too, it's just convenient when you have simple scenes. This is more common than it may seem, I have several tools I support for my team (or have supported in the past) that are just very simple OpenGL calls.
We're all going to keep on doing whatever we want, this is just preventing anyone from making a legal business out of it. Of course, there are plenty of illegal businesses doing it, and a lot of private parties offering the how-to's for free under condition of anonymity. Hell even the government wants permission to un "DRM" our devices so it can spy!
For some reason this is "big government" that nobody wants to reduce, it's "big business politics" that the other side doesn't want to eliminate. Money being spent for illusions and pretense. Go team USA.
It is wrong, IMO, to describe it as addictive due to the connotations of that word. There are no cravings that result from Afrin use
Maybe, this stuff to me is one of the greatest drugs ever. It actually works, works quickly, and is night/day. If you have nasal issues such that even when healthy you aren't breathing that well, Afrin is very compelling (it also helps if you don't want to have surgery you know you need to have). You will breathe really, really well. So there might be a psychological component, however minor.
No one is going to feel a compulsion that they "just gotta have it".
While I wouldn't describe it as anything like what heroin users allegedly go through, there is also a physical component. The rebound congestion effect of the stuff is similar to physical addiction in many senses and you will want to take more of the stuff to fix the problem. Eventually you end up with possibly a dangerous condition that requires surgery to resolve, or you man up and endure the side effects until they pass (usually 12 hours). Significantly less terrible than working through heroin withdrawal, but it is a form of withdrawal.
I think it just degrees of addiction, but I think addictive is a good word for the way a user is likely to behave w/o education. It is definitely a far easier habit to kick than tobacco or opiates of course... I'm not sitting here jonesing for my afrin fix.
Afrin is great for your nose, especially if you have a deviated septum and chronic sinusitis. However when you have a full blown cold, it takes a bit more.
In my ignorance, I bought the Sudafed containing phenylephrine, and I could not figure out why Sudafed, which was my go-to medicine for daytime cold relief, did not work! I wasn't really expecting to suddenly hear an angelic choir from the heavens after taking the stuff, just some relief. Instead, nothing. Not a goddamn thing.
I did the research and figured out what was wrong: I was rope a doped. Not only is the good stuff only behind the counter, the pharmacist (at least here) defaults to giving you the Sudafed with phenylephrine unless you specifically ask for the pseudoephedrine. So, counting that money wasted I got the good stuff, and miracle of miracles, it worked. I was my own blind trial. Phenylephrine is bullshit, don't waste money on it.
I have not done the research on meth cooking methods, but I believe it continues unabated with this blockade on pseudoephedrine... I get the strong feeling we're wasting our time here, all hail the war on drugs.
And medicine isn't what it used to be, thanks to wide access to health insurance, and insurance companies doing their best to squeeze the profit out. And if you don't get an MBA from one of a few select schools you're wasting your money, you could get access to the same mediocre job much cheaper with the same near-zero chance of hitting it big. Engineering? If you're in chemical or computer engineering, you might be OK for another few years, but thanks to H-1Bs and offshoring, we're already seeing the writing on the wall. EE was a great field when I was in HS, now but for a few elite areas, it's mostly a wasteland of supervising foreign design centers. This entire push for more CS degrees and more CS majors is, itself, just a way for CEOs to look like SJWs, when what they really want is a large supply of qualified applicants that they can pay less and less, and put more controls around (remember when programmers were cowboys who couldn't get fired? That was 20 years ago, the future is even more bleak...the day of wearing a tie may return).
There's no magic bullet, the market is always changing. When I was a kid mom wanted me to be a doctor, that seemed like a winner back then (but the writing was already on the wall, as it is in engineering & computer science). My opinion, that I bet my own children's well being on, is that if you have a strong education, particularly a strong education in math and science, you are more likely going to be able to find the high paying job of 15yrs+ than you will be without. Math and Science only because they build and are directly applicable to the working world, and if you have a weak foundation you may have to pay much more later to rebuild it. History and language arts, not as much, although I do see a continued demand for creative people with some applicable job skill. We should be concerned if some portion of the population is not performing as well in these fundamentals as another. Coding is, as far as I'm concerned, a job skill, not a career nor a field. Computer Science is an advanced field, but I think the "sciency" portions of it will always be out of reach to most high school kids. You do need to learn more mathematical formalism, and already know a bit about computing machines to really get in to it before college. Programming though, that can be learned quickly for many jobs.
What we SHOULD be doing is ignoring all these CEOs (always, as a rule) who express dubious interest in education, and start figuring out how we can provide job-specific education to provide "employees" to fill instantaneous demands. It is going to be continually necessary, as technology continues to change, to help the displaced portion of the population retrain and find something new, this will help the CEOs who are facing an instantaneous demand in one field, and a surplus in another. Of course it won't help them in over-saturating that demand in one field so as to pay minimum wage, and it will ensure that there is considerable competition for employees. This means more college & university settings for later life re-education, and a lot more reliance on trade schools for job specific training, even for people holding advanced college degrees. I can tell you in my field (computer engineering) it may be very difficult to move from one subclass of job to another simply due to the amount of job training each area requires to become proficient in whatever tools, techniques, algorithms and work-flows are in use. The common example is the guy who spent 20 years designing CPUs is unemployable in anything else (including GPUs, networks, etc.) because he can't break the interviews, he may be a really great CPU guy, but his knowledge is too domain specific. This is where trade schools would come in: continued education for even very educated people to ensure "job readiness". I suspect there are many people in the computer science field who could fill the Facebook demand, if they spent no more than 2 years learning the latest techniques.
All this would stop the idiotic push to get 5 year olds to learn javascript, when I suspect in 20 years the language will be a relic of a bygone era anyway.
Everywhere I've worked we have been advised not to call 911, to call the emergency line instead. The justification given is the inability of 911 to trace your call (i.e. it may look like it's coming from wherever corporate headquarters are, in another state). I've never been anywhere that you were forbidden and your job would be forfeit. I've resolved to do both if the need ever arose... but I don't honestly think our security wouldn't do everything they could to get help quickly.
having a choice of 150 pension plans
Here in America, you are lucky to get a choice of ONE pension plan. And you take it and consider yourself really lucky. Most of us get offered a 401(k) plan, from which we can choose from 5-100 mutual funds of various types. I think this is the confusion.
when the company providing those plans fails and takes all your money with it
A pension perhaps, I'm unfamiliar with the concept, although I think there are now rules around them to prevent that, which is also why they're so rare. I am probably wrong. I will never have the option for a pension.
But with 401(k) that does not happen. I have been in a company that failed, and I took my 401(k) and rolled it over, I lost nothing. That shouldn't be a fear, 401(k) is YOUR money, IRAs are YOUR money. The funds you invest in may lose money, that's on you, but your employer is just a proxy. If and when they fail, you get whatever you had on account out. Definitely this is not a good concern, a good concern is losing your money on a bad fund.
Choice paralysis is not because there are too many choices, its because people don't give a shit
I don't know many people who don't give a shit about money. I know a lot of people who simply don't understand it.
Current generations are spoiled brats who expect someone else to make all the choices for them.
No, we're the first generation in a long time where all options aren't obvious winners, the boom is over. Our parents had to worry about very little and did not need to develop the tools to make good choices, they did not have to. They had very little to pass on to our generation, and now we're struggling. When it comes to finance, we normally don't have the money to invest until we're relatively old, and we don't have the tools to make good decisions. We're entirely rational, but ignorant. We do not know what choice to make, but we realize we have everything to lose. You see we care a lot about money, but we believe money in hand is safer than money in someone else's hand (provably false), and perhaps that everyone is out to get us. In this framework, doing nothing makes absolute sense. Except it is wrong, holding cash on hand is definitely not the best choice beyond a certain point.
We're raising a bunch of kids who can't be bothered to take care of their own responsibilities.
Lazy, irrational, thinking couched in a broken outlook that being insulting and condescending will somehow address a problem.
"after careful consideration, none of these 150 plans are mathematically better than not saving for retirement at all."
Honestly when I read that I think "most people do not understand mutual funds, and are unable to make sense of even one plan". And there's really no shame in that, while it is easy to understand once you have the knowledge, it's not easy to get that knowledge and there are trust issues.
Fortunately I work for a place that offers free training on how to evaluate mutual funds, from a company that is forbidden from recommending anything at all, and how to comb through dozens to find one that meets my needs. I really can comb through 150 and most assuredly cannot make the optimal choice (no one can, or all fund managers would do it and we'd have maybe 9 funds) but certainly can narrow down the search to plans which meet my targets & timelines, and then start comparing them for what I think will work best for me. But to do that you have to know how to read the reports (i.e. morningstar, etc.), how to understand the ratings, what things to look for, etc. If you have that knowledge, you can easily handle 150 choices.
I just don't think most people understand money that well, most of us did not go to school for accounting and finance, and find all of that stuff baffling. It doesn't help that they have multiple words that mean the same things, while the same word may have vastly different meanings in different contexts, and you will never get an answer to your question in your own words... more or less like a politician. What people need is an academic foundation in the subject that will help them see through the bullshit. It takes maybe a week to get a full background (not just of funds, but tax implications, investing strategies, etc.) but it's time well spent. Then you will want the choices, as many as you can have.
full products are deliberately crippled to plunder the customer
Said a different way, products descriptions are misleading as to their contents and what was done to offer them in some ideal format (long shelf life, inexpensive, type of flavor). So you end up with an array of products that are the same thing with different meaningless labels.
My suggestion is rather than reducing choice, if you're not absolutely thrilled with one brand of product, try a different one next time. Going to bred, there is one brand of bread at the grocery store that (for my needs) far surpasses the others. Of course it's almost always sold out, because we all know this to be true. But it's not the healthiest brand by far, and probably is one of hte least authentic. But if authenticity is what you crave, there are like 6 choices for that too.
The only people who seem to benefit from lack of choice are shareholders who want to own really big companies with absolutely no threat from competition.
I don't care what skin color you are or who's religious garb you are displaying, people are going to detain you until they can prove that the devices are in fact fake. After which, you would be jailed for terrorism. None of this will be a kind polite experience, nor should it be.
The fact is I did all those things while studying engineering, and I no one ever batted an eye. I was well dressed, carrying a pile of electronics books. On any given monday i have been seen on a ferry assembling some bizarre electric contraption, with wires sticking out and seven segment displays counting in any direction, never once was I bothered. Certainly my DSP project really did look (unintentionally) like a bomb from a movie. The difference is, nobody would expect me to make a bomb. Honestly some of the things my friends and I did in (primarily high) school probably should have raised some eyes, and did involve explosive substances (gasoline, frequently).
I'm not going to argue that this kid (and his father) may have been trying to get attention those facts were not in evidence initially and in full fairness if that's your gig, the mayor of that town is also known to be an agitator against muslims. All the required ingredients are there to make a sensation. But it seems unlikely any of this would have happened if he were a good christian boy.
So we're on Slashdot, the official Internet home of mom's basement losers and Magic The Gathering addicts.... in other words, hundreds of thousands of people for whom the first 25 years of their lives consisted of nothing but "[being made to ] feel like an isolated second class person". How many Slashdot users go blow up innocent people as a political ploy?
We do seem to have a problem in this country of individuals going apeshit and killing a lot of people, the problem is per capita greater than most other civilized countries. Of those with an equal or greater problem, a generalization can be made that they are culturally even less tolerate of deviations from the norm than we are. This proves nothing, it's just a data point.
If you are irrational, you blame our apeshit problem on guns. But, the gun nuts have a point that guns do not pull their own trigger, a human is behind them. So our problem is actually humans making the decision to try to mass murder. This is happening in significant and unusual quantities, so it's fair to say SOME aspect of our society is provoking this behavior, it's the only explanation that doesn't involve vast conspiracies and alien anus probes. While it would be nice from a scientific point of view to clearly identify the cause(s), and use that knowledge for all time, it seems reasonable in this case that one possible contributing factor might be social isolation due to arbitrary deviations from the norm (i.e. religion) and agree we're just not going to do that anymore because it is dumb to begin with. All problems will not be solved, but let's just not do it?
If kid has a bomb or even creates a fake and pitches it as a bomb, then we take any and all necessary actions to deal with the kid and protect the public. If the kid is insane, we need to take him out of circulation and treat him. If he's trying to pull a political stunt (and he might have been), then the best way to defuse this sort of "bomb" is to give him absolutely nothing to work with by simply being decent human beings. "Oh yeah, so you got a clock huh? Cool."
anyway, this whole thing has always struck me as a publicity stunt. There are certain things you don't do. I don't want to get robbed, I don't go walking certain places in certain cities. If you're muslim, you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb... if you're anybody you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb really, but especially if you're muslim.
I'm afraid if this was a publicity stunt, and the stunt was to show systemic discrimination and poor treatment of muslims, this was the right stunt to pull and the right way to do it. You can and should expect to be properly treated by the government, law enforcement and civilized society. Assuming a kid is carrying a bomb is a bad assumption, if he wanted to blow you up, he would have.
Now if he was going to complain that some rednecks beat him up/killed him, etc. for this stunt, I'd have somewhat less sympathy. If you go poking at morons with a stick, you probably are going to get wrecked and I can't say I have a boatload of sympathy.
The immediate parallel is the woman in "slutty clothes" crying rape. She should expect, under the law, equal treatment as anyone suffering a violent assault, and expect that everything will be done to catch and prosecute the perpetrators. She should also expect not to be raped, even if she was entirely naked, and that civilized society would let her be. If she deliberately exercised poor judgement in an effort to prove our system is broken, while I question whether this was the best means to do it, it's probably the right kind of stunt to highlight a systemic failure to address rape.
If she was trying to prove that people in a rough neighborhood can't be relied upon to avoid raping her, and/or that the police are unable to keep the violent element of a rough neighborhood suppressed...absolutely no sympathy, that's the definition of a violent neighborhood, and they exist in every city all over the world, and sometimes you have to exercise sound judgement about where you go and how you go there.
Naw man, it means the grass is good, moo
If I would live on or near the equator, where the sun goes up at 4:30 I'd get up early as well.
Also if I were a hunter-gatherer I may need less sleep. I never have any issues with sleep deprivation if the next day I'm doing something very physical. Sleep deprivation hurts an awful lot, however, when I'm sitting in front of a computer with my heart-rate just above corpse level, trying to do something intellectual. It can be extremely hard to focus and stay on task, any interruption at all can be devastating. Whereas if I'm well rested I can usually tune out my environment pretty quickly and get to work.
It's possible sleep has more to do with our brains than our bodies (or maybe not both in equal measure).
In that this seems like an option no one should ever be checking at all, ever.... this is something users need to decide on. There are still some incompatibilities, and honestly I still prefer the Windows 7 UI, the new start menu is obnoxious, just less obnoxious than the old. Not to mention that the "control panel" is now hidden behind a fully useless UI that lets you do nothing at all useful and hte right click menu has the stuff you really want.
Any decently educated programmer can pick up any language quickly and easily.
Hire polyglots not language end-users.
I'm torn on this one. On one hand, yes, anyone with a CS background who didn't cheat through school can learn a new language quickly.
The issue is whether they can learn to write idiomatically correct code in that language, and whether they "think" in terms of how that language was designed. That usually requires a bit of time, not to mention some patience. Python is my usual example for this, it breaks a lot of (in my opinion) sensible conventions that people over 10 are used to: no need for semicolons (sneered at if you use them), mandatory white space, duck-typing, etc. Yes, you can learn python in a few hours, but to write "good" python that other python people can/want to support, and generally don't waste time fighting the language, you need to spend some time.
Generally when I see a language like this I want to barf, but it's hard not to run in to something like this a few times in life, and if you're on the hiring side and you have a pile of (say) Python, you probably want to hire someone that can do it properly, versus someone from say, C, who is going to be very upset with almost everything.
You're probably someone who considers themselves and 'old school hacker' and have been out of a programming job for twenty years
Or he's doing a different job than you. I've got a pile of C code I'm staring at now, which is going in to active products that ship in the tens of millions. I have both never been unemployed longer than I wanted to be, nor had any issues selling my "dinosaur" C skills. I've never worked anywhere that C skills aren't a job requirement, nor that replacing C would get you anything but a funny look, it's solving a problem we don't have.
C isn't going anywhere, it's a perfectly safe choice. It may not be the optimal choice for all situations. Smart people don't put one tool in their toolbox and call themselves an expert, they learn how to use a small but complementary set of tools really well, and then experiment with some new ones here and there but leave them on the wall for that niche situation that needs them. C is a hammer, you should always have a hammer in your toolbox. Most problems can be made to look like nails, with the proper combination of desperation and alcohol.
While I was a teenager, I had two friends, both musicians who were constantly ragging on me about the need for more "creativity in my life". Both were musicians, one a bassist aspiring to metal bands, another was a guitarist more closely aligned to classic rock. In any event, I argued that my computer & electronics habits were absolutely a creative outlet, where I was free to express myself and create anything I wished. They claimed it's all equations, logic and deus ex machina. I pointed out that music is just a bunch of notes & chords strung together which human ears and brains find pleasing, which they argued is totally different. I could never get a definitive answer for how, I got "emotion", "expression", "unpredictable", "unthinking", each of which I systematically tore apart as clearly not being both exclusive properties of art, nor present in all forms of art. But they remain unconvinced. I think it's impossible for someone to appreciate art, who doesn't appreciate the medium.
So your hypothesis is that God possibly had a bit too much nebular burrito over at the Wolf's Head, stopped by the kid's house at KIC 8462852, they're chatting, meanwhile God is literallly sharting up some form of giant gas/astroid cloud, and that's causing aperiodic incidents of 20% light dimming?
Could be, we should get a guy working on this hypothesis to make sure all the bases are covered. We should also attempt to locate the Febreeze cluster, because someone is going to need to drop a heavy dose there.
So you're saying that guessing about some alien civilization we can't prove exists, building a fabulously and probably impossibly expensive structure around a star we can't see that well might be jumping to conclusions?
Dyson Denier.
I've been in electronics for almost 20 years and I have no idea who he is. I'm not trying to belittle anyone, it certainly looks like he has contributed quite a lot. But the guys who wrote "the text" on electronics are probably Sedra/Smith in Microelectronic Circuits (https://books.google.com/books?id=RcodQm6LaVEC), pretty much everyone I knew when learning used that book, I still have mine on the shelf behind me. The only other "the text" i could think of is Horowitz/Hill "The Art of Electronics". I think just about everything about transistors, amplifiers and circuits is at least touched on between those two books in deep, painful, gory mathematical detail.
Radio shack books always were in the category of "I need a quick circuit that does and don't want to think about it". Useful for hobby work or quick prototype, but not terribly portable if you had to build a circuit that would be manufactured in the bazillions in some low cost region by trained monkeys, using parts you didn't control, shipped by drop-kick to a customer you'd never meet, interfaced with hardware you'd never dream of. I imagine they paid his bills, but hardly a scientific contribution.
TL;DR summary bad, just RTFA if you care about what he does and what his actual contribution to science is.
ITT Slashdot.
He literally finished his course In This Thread.
I RTFA'd but what he's talking about and what we really want aren't the same thing. I want to be able to summon a vehicle (I can own it, but perhaps it's not parked nearby), tell it to take me from A to B, and wait. Then from B to A and wait. If it can't reach B, it takes me to the best place it can and either I take over or use some other transit. On my daily commute or trip to the grocery store, or doctors in my town, I don't want the steering wheel. I don't need it, a computer could in theory do that job without my input, better than I can do it. With the proper preconditions.
I agree with the good Dr. that it seems unlikely that any level of car automation is going to work on all road, weather, and traffic conditions, everywhere in the world. But then your average car starts to misbehave when it's off paved roads, and if you're on a dirt road in the rain, it can get bad. One day in NYC breaks the hearts and souls of human drivers, I can't imagine what a machine might think. Much like we built the existing road & traffic system to accommodate reasonably trailed human piloted vehicles, we should be constructing a traffic network that a reasonably decent autonomous vehicle system can safely navigate with exactly this level of input: where do you want to go? The car can handle the transport, I will do other things.
Perhaps this road system exists, for the foreseeable future, only in large urban centers with otherwise unsolvable traffic problems, and human drivers may have to continue to navigate traditional roads the old fashioned way for some of their journeys. The horse and buggy didn't disappear overnight, and dirt roads were common enough in the US even 40 years back. But the impact on my daily life of yielding the car to a computer for my commute even if it achieved no average decrease in commute duration, would be tremendous. Lower insurance premiums, more deterministic commute delays, more scheduling options (ex. in austin I leave before 6:25am, or after 930am, and stay at work until just about 3pm or after 7pm...this is stupid!), more time for me (rather than unpaid time supporting my job, or unrewarding time spent schlepping the family). This seems like what the goal of it all should be.
I think the Dr. is probably right that putting the entire burden on some sophisticated AI to handle conditions even humans can't read properly is very unlikely, but we also can engineer our environment to fit the needs of the AI.
Free markets develop price signals. This is true in both wholesale and retail markets... in fact whenever there is free trade. The producer does in fact know that the supplier's needs are met, because otherwise the supplier would have asked more for his goods. People just don't normally sell stuff for less than cost. That's an act of a company or corporation with a diverse package of goods. Not a seller of fertilizer.
Not often, and again that's because of the nature of free markets. The market as a whole will not sell for a loss, that's not sane practice and most people aren't insane. The market finds a price which satisfies both the seller and the buyer, or the market ceases to exist.
Or the supplier was in a position to either sell for below cost, and cut his losses, or not sell at all and run out of money quickly. This can go on for extended periods of time (because of these rainy day funds) before someone is forced to relent. It is entirely possible for large players, or players on unequal footing (say they have influenced their government to totally ignore laws which increase their costs) to arbitrarily undercut fair competitors just to run them out of business and ultimately corner the market. This same tactic can be used to discourage competitors from entering in the first place.
Only in the very short term. Markets do not persist in that condition. And a smart trader plans for weak seasons. This is all baked into the price of the goods.
In many cases it can go on for long enough to run the supplier entirely out of business, and allow the price to be set by some other arbitrary force (say: how much do you have in your wallet?).
You neglect the very engine that drives free markets: the finding of a price point over time. Throwing in these abrupt disasters you imagine can indeed happen, but usually don't, and again the savvy player plans for bad weather. That's HOW they set the price.
I would argue these disasters have happened, are happening, and are eternal. Many things work properly, or else we'd be in absolute chaos, obviously. But from my standpoint is the theory is useless if it can't be used to make useful predictions. At any given time, someone is engaging in some sort of shennanigans in some financially significant part of the market.
If computers implemented a free market according to the simple algorithms that we feel they should be using, perhaps economics might have some universality to it (or at least to a universe of sane actors). But, economics is a SOCIAL science. Actors play a very significant role in how it plays out. While it seems like actors always act in their self-interest, that is not very helpful. One's greater self-interest might involve behaving in a way that appears locally irrational, but might make sense if all information necessary were known. In other cases they actually don't understand their own self-interests very well and are engaging in destructive behavior because they think it will produce some result they are looking for.