Not to mention that we're expected to work long hours or "challenged" to hit pretty incredible deadlines, but there's only so much gas in the can. Periodically you just cannot code another line and need a break, but if you're not at your desk or otherwise online, you're not looking good. So you're off task, recharging. If you were out digging ditches instead of coding, they can hit you with the whip but the shovel can't move any further no matter how in shape you are.
Some corporate cultures fill this down time with meetings, in which a lot of people's time is collectively wasted in the name of communication. Some see this as a form of productivity. I see it as waste every bit as much as looking at funny pictures of cats. Either way there's a limit to productivity, firing 20% and driving everyone harder is just not going to work.
The point I was thinking but didn't make clear, is that all this is just a way to defuse the growing press suggesting that American broadband is a laughable joke. "Oh but look, gigabit fiber: ". Someone in Austin has fiber, but not very many people have it.
They've come by my door selling "fiber", calling it U-Verse. They say it's fiber, they say it's high speed. But when you ask 1) Nobody needs to come to your house to install! 2) No speeds discussed 3) Call customers service and they tell you it's just U-Verse.
I just replaced BBedit with Atom, because I'm a PC/Unix user stuck using a Mac by my employer and I find BBedit to be less than ideal. I want to highlight a line by pressing shift-end, BBedit won't do that and can't be configured to it. But it's the default in atom. BBedit isn't terrible, it certainly was the best of breed before atom. Yes, it's a resource hog relatively speaking, but nothing compared to the 4 dual display desktops full of stuff I have open and running.
Granted I have bettertouchtool and keyremap tool installed to otherwise make my keyboard 'feel' like a PC keyboard, so there are a lot of things external to the program that I'm doing to make my mac behave like a PC, but this one feature is worth almost 10 minutes a day.
How can you possibly believe that the massive environmental changes we are creating both for living our daily lives and for powering our cities and running our factories, that the chemicals we're synthesizing that had never been seen on planet earth prior to us, are NOT having an effect on the climate? Is it such a stretch that those changes aren't, necessarily, bad for life as we've known it, given that life as we've known it was adapted to the environment that existed prior to us?
You don't need a PhD or hi-falutin intellectual elite pedigrees to see the obvious. The only questions should be "How bad is it?", and I might agree with you that there's enough money on the table for all parties that it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and a realization that most of us would rather perish than go back to living in caves.
This is, of course, exactly what everyone who didn't like Bush II said, and what we continue to say about people who watch Fox news. Obama has done many things I don't like, and not done many things he said he would do. I'm not his biggest fan. But I also remember being distinctly happy when Bush II was done for almost exactly the same reasons.
I won't argue about our co-opted media, I just want to assert that it's in their interest to give us the illusion of choice, and to select between two different, allegedly opposed "identities" when we vote. But in fact, both parties are on the one true narrative of which fascism is the means, but not the end.
And I'm not going to stop you from studying those things. I just don't want to pay for it as part of my degree program, or, that ship having sailed years ago, see the financial burden that my fellow man is taking on for education that is 50% not useful, to prop up an education system that is not keeping abreast of the times.
Balancing your personal budget is as much "economics" as using the restroom is "biology". If you honestly don't see that then I question if you were even paying attention in the course.
This isn't 1850, we're not sending young wealthy children off to be polished and rounded out for high society. We're educating massive amount of commoners who cannot, generally, afford the education they're receiving without taking on a tremendous amount of debt. The only reason they show up is that the degree is a requirement for a higher paying job they'd like to fill, and the corporate world is using university degrees as a form of certification (similar to the bar or board for lawyers and doctors). It makes no sense to inflate the debt these students take, the high risk of default (which often falls on our government) for anything not specifically related to their degree program. Not to mention they may simply not be interested in the subject, thus what is the purpose in forcing it on them?
There's room in the world for the humanities and the fine arts, and I have nothing to say to those who wish to pursue them. My objection is entirely on forcing them on STEM programs as required core-education.
Perhaps you mean several dozen books, or actually journal papers, because if you've ever tried to implement cutting edge technology described only in academic journals, you'd understand that a lot of assumptions are made about the reader and the depth of his MATHEMATICAL background. Yeah you can follow references and rediscover hundred year old obscure math. Do all that, or you take a course by a studied scholar who has done all that and can boil it down for you. That same professor may also be willing to be your reference when you want to take a job at some cutting edge company working in the field. In return he has someone who is exposed to ideas from elsewhere, possibly with NDAs on them, whose brain he can pick to continue being the expert he's paid to be. It works out quite nicely.
Or you can read all the books yourself, become an expert yourself, send your resume to HR who will put it on the heap and maybe get a call back, one day, if no one else is available.
Since soviet studies was an elective I was stuck with, I do actually know that though I suspect the mutual dislike between Russia and the USA is far more complex than invasion, perhaps the reason for the invasion and the very polarized leadership each country has. If harboring a grudge over invasions was it, Americans would still be sore at Great Britain for... quite a few early issues and headaches.
Regardless, the reason most of us spend money to go get an advanced degree is exclusively for the economic value. This isn't news, better spoken men than me have made comments over this through the century. None of us are going to school for a broader education, to become worldly or well rounded. In fact I quite specifically was happy to leave "well rounded" behind in high school and get on with what I really wanted to do. I didn't go to school not knowing what major I wanted or what I wanted to do with life, I had quite specific objectives and could convince my parents that their investment would have a return, and I wasn't wrong. That doesn't mean I don't resent the waste and unnecessary barriers created by humanities requirements. I'm fairly certain we overpaid 100% as a direct result.
I should also point out that quite a lot of people graduate with humanities degrees and we're still a shambles. I find it hard to believe they're that useful.
I would have taken mandarin, but then in realizing why I was taking it, I would have changed majors entirely. In any event because they are useful, they cost money, and were not an option.
Given how incredibly specialized STEM fields are, with my direct experience being electrical and computer engineering, I would still have preferred no foreign language and more tech courses. Courses I still want to take, but that time has passed and college classes are far too expensive for anything but casual study.
I resent the humanities, they wasted my time and money. I want to help the future by seeing them relegated to where they belong: frou frou education for the super wealthy.
That's the problem, the humanities that are taught are irrelevant and useless. Partly due to it being what those in charge want to teach, partly due to someone pursuing a STEM degree being very focused on their GPA for getting a job, not wanting to lose potentially tens of thousands of dollars in starting salary because a professor in a subjective exam gave a B rather than an A.
They take far too much time to pursue seriously, for every credit earned in humanities there is some very valuable STEM subject being ignored, and you can torpedo your job opportunities. That's why we're against humanities. I graduated with my undergrad degree with 143 credit hours, a huge chunk wasted in basic humanities. As a result I had to make hard choices about RF design, power and control theory that proveably have limited my career options to the digital world. All because I had to take silly courses in essay writing, english lit, world history, soviet history and economics (the latter I thought might involve numbers and be slightly scientific, HA!). 15 years later I'd still rather have junked all that, and taken more core EE and CS courses, it would have been far better value for my money.
I never forget to not answer the phone when I don't want to answer the phone. Answering the phone is not something I do without thinking, much like driving. I can't conceive of what kind of person would just answer the phone simply because it's ringing.
The only purpose of this app would be to inflict my opinions on other people. You come to a website, get ready to read my nonsense, but you shouldn't have to put up with it if you want to avoid it. The same goes for cell phone bans. I've been driving >20 years, I talk on my cell phone while driving when I must. I have never once had an accident. The majority of my life has been in NYC, with interludes in Washington DC, San Jose and what's becoming an extended stay in Austin...hardly rural low traffic areas.
My conclusion is that there are people who cannot drive and talk at the same time, and those people should choose not to do so. They are putting their own lives at risk, I believe that is sufficiently discouraging, no further laws, "awareness" and other social bullshittery required. I will continue to drive as though every person on the road wishes to kill me, as I always have. In addition to cell phones, people are frequently chemically disrupted, emotionally disrupted, armed, fighting with their children, fighting with their spouse or SO, looking at maps, lost, confused, dazed, dumb, bored, sleepy or otherwise temporarily or permanently incompetent. We can try to ban, make "aware" or otherwise penalize people for driving in these situations, but we'll spend more time and money trying than we'll save. I acknowledge by driving on public roads, that there is a non-zero chance of me or my family suffering property loss, permanent and painful physical harm, and death. I wish I did not have to drive, but I wish a lot of things I can't have.
Welcome to the United Corporations of America, where our communications are censored, our community governments are contracts and our government leased with the option to buy.
I'm not sure it could be harder than the initial conversion of phonemes to distinct words with their meanings. A typical living language has some 10^5 active words in its language, the translator was amazingly able to solve that problem, even for Tamarian. It was unable to take the next step though, and knowing the words, and knowing their meanings, deduce the shared knowledge behind the references. I'm not saying this is not a hard problem, but doing what the translator already did do is a hard problem, and this seems like a logical extension.
The problem with this episode is that the translator, like transporters and "holodecks" were some bit of technomagic to help pace and make a space based sci-fi show interesting. It's all fine, we're willing to suspend disbelief and ignore the magic as a solved problem. But then trying to have a show about translation and language with that same translator in the middle I think compels us to think along the wrong lines.
In theory, after analyzing the language for long enough, an intelligent translator could produce the correct translation. "Shaka, when the walls fell", used enough in context, could eventually be replaced with "Failure".
The question is how much of some string of phonemes has to be repeated and deduced from context in order to translate even the literals properly. It seems as if the universal translator would have to be able to identify proper noun Shaka (do not translate), noun walls (interpret from context, translate), verb fell etc. from a similar set of operations as those required to get the higher level meaning.
Anyway like most TV sci-fi it was more intellectual than anything else on at the time and hadn't yet degenerated into a space-war saga. There are lots of debates about the viability of universal translation, this was a decent way of cluing in the layman I think. Dig too hard of course and it falls apart.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone isn't! Our jail cells are just full of rebellious activists who tie people down and abuse them.
Possibly some of those are not allowed to post on slashdot, but your presence here suggests that's not quite as universal as expected.
Not to mention that we're expected to work long hours or "challenged" to hit pretty incredible deadlines, but there's only so much gas in the can. Periodically you just cannot code another line and need a break, but if you're not at your desk or otherwise online, you're not looking good. So you're off task, recharging. If you were out digging ditches instead of coding, they can hit you with the whip but the shovel can't move any further no matter how in shape you are.
Some corporate cultures fill this down time with meetings, in which a lot of people's time is collectively wasted in the name of communication. Some see this as a form of productivity. I see it as waste every bit as much as looking at funny pictures of cats. Either way there's a limit to productivity, firing 20% and driving everyone harder is just not going to work.
The point I was thinking but didn't make clear, is that all this is just a way to defuse the growing press suggesting that American broadband is a laughable joke. "Oh but look, gigabit fiber: ". Someone in Austin has fiber, but not very many people have it.
They've come by my door selling "fiber", calling it U-Verse. They say it's fiber, they say it's high speed. But when you ask
1) Nobody needs to come to your house to install!
2) No speeds discussed
3) Call customers service and they tell you it's just U-Verse.
it's just PR.
I wish, but in fact while there's allegedly fiber in austin, just a few miles north in round rock there's not even a promise by either google or AT&T.
I just replaced BBedit with Atom, because I'm a PC/Unix user stuck using a Mac by my employer and I find BBedit to be less than ideal. I want to highlight a line by pressing shift-end, BBedit won't do that and can't be configured to it. But it's the default in atom. BBedit isn't terrible, it certainly was the best of breed before atom. Yes, it's a resource hog relatively speaking, but nothing compared to the 4 dual display desktops full of stuff I have open and running.
Granted I have bettertouchtool and keyremap tool installed to otherwise make my keyboard 'feel' like a PC keyboard, so there are a lot of things external to the program that I'm doing to make my mac behave like a PC, but this one feature is worth almost 10 minutes a day.
How can you possibly believe that the massive environmental changes we are creating both for living our daily lives and for powering our cities and running our factories, that the chemicals we're synthesizing that had never been seen on planet earth prior to us, are NOT having an effect on the climate? Is it such a stretch that those changes aren't, necessarily, bad for life as we've known it, given that life as we've known it was adapted to the environment that existed prior to us?
You don't need a PhD or hi-falutin intellectual elite pedigrees to see the obvious. The only questions should be "How bad is it?", and I might agree with you that there's enough money on the table for all parties that it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and a realization that most of us would rather perish than go back to living in caves.
This is, of course, exactly what everyone who didn't like Bush II said, and what we continue to say about people who watch Fox news. Obama has done many things I don't like, and not done many things he said he would do. I'm not his biggest fan. But I also remember being distinctly happy when Bush II was done for almost exactly the same reasons.
I won't argue about our co-opted media, I just want to assert that it's in their interest to give us the illusion of choice, and to select between two different, allegedly opposed "identities" when we vote. But in fact, both parties are on the one true narrative of which fascism is the means, but not the end.
I'd believe you if you had just removed "Obama and company". The push towards greater fascism has been a bipartisan effort in our new millenium.
And I'm not going to stop you from studying those things. I just don't want to pay for it as part of my degree program, or, that ship having sailed years ago, see the financial burden that my fellow man is taking on for education that is 50% not useful, to prop up an education system that is not keeping abreast of the times.
Balancing your personal budget is as much "economics" as using the restroom is "biology". If you honestly don't see that then I question if you were even paying attention in the course.
This isn't 1850, we're not sending young wealthy children off to be polished and rounded out for high society. We're educating massive amount of commoners who cannot, generally, afford the education they're receiving without taking on a tremendous amount of debt. The only reason they show up is that the degree is a requirement for a higher paying job they'd like to fill, and the corporate world is using university degrees as a form of certification (similar to the bar or board for lawyers and doctors). It makes no sense to inflate the debt these students take, the high risk of default (which often falls on our government) for anything not specifically related to their degree program. Not to mention they may simply not be interested in the subject, thus what is the purpose in forcing it on them?
There's room in the world for the humanities and the fine arts, and I have nothing to say to those who wish to pursue them. My objection is entirely on forcing them on STEM programs as required core-education.
Perhaps you mean several dozen books, or actually journal papers, because if you've ever tried to implement cutting edge technology described only in academic journals, you'd understand that a lot of assumptions are made about the reader and the depth of his MATHEMATICAL background. Yeah you can follow references and rediscover hundred year old obscure math. Do all that, or you take a course by a studied scholar who has done all that and can boil it down for you. That same professor may also be willing to be your reference when you want to take a job at some cutting edge company working in the field. In return he has someone who is exposed to ideas from elsewhere, possibly with NDAs on them, whose brain he can pick to continue being the expert he's paid to be. It works out quite nicely.
Or you can read all the books yourself, become an expert yourself, send your resume to HR who will put it on the heap and maybe get a call back, one day, if no one else is available.
Since soviet studies was an elective I was stuck with, I do actually know that though I suspect the mutual dislike between Russia and the USA is far more complex than invasion, perhaps the reason for the invasion and the very polarized leadership each country has. If harboring a grudge over invasions was it, Americans would still be sore at Great Britain for ... quite a few early issues and headaches.
Regardless, the reason most of us spend money to go get an advanced degree is exclusively for the economic value. This isn't news, better spoken men than me have made comments over this through the century. None of us are going to school for a broader education, to become worldly or well rounded. In fact I quite specifically was happy to leave "well rounded" behind in high school and get on with what I really wanted to do. I didn't go to school not knowing what major I wanted or what I wanted to do with life, I had quite specific objectives and could convince my parents that their investment would have a return, and I wasn't wrong. That doesn't mean I don't resent the waste and unnecessary barriers created by humanities requirements. I'm fairly certain we overpaid 100% as a direct result.
I should also point out that quite a lot of people graduate with humanities degrees and we're still a shambles. I find it hard to believe they're that useful.
I would have taken mandarin, but then in realizing why I was taking it, I would have changed majors entirely. In any event because they are useful, they cost money, and were not an option.
Given how incredibly specialized STEM fields are, with my direct experience being electrical and computer engineering, I would still have preferred no foreign language and more tech courses. Courses I still want to take, but that time has passed and college classes are far too expensive for anything but casual study.
I resent the humanities, they wasted my time and money. I want to help the future by seeing them relegated to where they belong: frou frou education for the super wealthy.
That's the problem, the humanities that are taught are irrelevant and useless. Partly due to it being what those in charge want to teach, partly due to someone pursuing a STEM degree being very focused on their GPA for getting a job, not wanting to lose potentially tens of thousands of dollars in starting salary because a professor in a subjective exam gave a B rather than an A.
They take far too much time to pursue seriously, for every credit earned in humanities there is some very valuable STEM subject being ignored, and you can torpedo your job opportunities. That's why we're against humanities. I graduated with my undergrad degree with 143 credit hours, a huge chunk wasted in basic humanities. As a result I had to make hard choices about RF design, power and control theory that proveably have limited my career options to the digital world. All because I had to take silly courses in essay writing, english lit, world history, soviet history and economics (the latter I thought might involve numbers and be slightly scientific, HA!). 15 years later I'd still rather have junked all that, and taken more core EE and CS courses, it would have been far better value for my money.
I never forget to not answer the phone when I don't want to answer the phone. Answering the phone is not something I do without thinking, much like driving. I can't conceive of what kind of person would just answer the phone simply because it's ringing.
The only purpose of this app would be to inflict my opinions on other people. You come to a website, get ready to read my nonsense, but you shouldn't have to put up with it if you want to avoid it. The same goes for cell phone bans. I've been driving >20 years, I talk on my cell phone while driving when I must. I have never once had an accident. The majority of my life has been in NYC, with interludes in Washington DC, San Jose and what's becoming an extended stay in Austin...hardly rural low traffic areas.
My conclusion is that there are people who cannot drive and talk at the same time, and those people should choose not to do so. They are putting their own lives at risk, I believe that is sufficiently discouraging, no further laws, "awareness" and other social bullshittery required. I will continue to drive as though every person on the road wishes to kill me, as I always have. In addition to cell phones, people are frequently chemically disrupted, emotionally disrupted, armed, fighting with their children, fighting with their spouse or SO, looking at maps, lost, confused, dazed, dumb, bored, sleepy or otherwise temporarily or permanently incompetent. We can try to ban, make "aware" or otherwise penalize people for driving in these situations, but we'll spend more time and money trying than we'll save. I acknowledge by driving on public roads, that there is a non-zero chance of me or my family suffering property loss, permanent and painful physical harm, and death. I wish I did not have to drive, but I wish a lot of things I can't have.
you're doing it wrong
Captcha: puberty
Pretty much everyone does that wrong.
I gave up after parking my car.
I was too busy looking for the app and just left mine in drive. I gave up after tripping over the curb.
To control the velociraptor population we'll have to introduce asteroids. This concerns me slightly more.
Twitter, last I checked, was not part of government.
Welcome to the United Corporations of America, where our communications are censored, our community governments are contracts and our government leased with the option to buy.
Dum de dum dum bang bang boom!
Cookie monster has a throwdown with Oscar the Grouch?
Or you hide behind anonymity, which is one reason it should be a protected institution itself.
I'm not sure it could be harder than the initial conversion of phonemes to distinct words with their meanings. A typical living language has some 10^5 active words in its language, the translator was amazingly able to solve that problem, even for Tamarian. It was unable to take the next step though, and knowing the words, and knowing their meanings, deduce the shared knowledge behind the references. I'm not saying this is not a hard problem, but doing what the translator already did do is a hard problem, and this seems like a logical extension.
The problem with this episode is that the translator, like transporters and "holodecks" were some bit of technomagic to help pace and make a space based sci-fi show interesting. It's all fine, we're willing to suspend disbelief and ignore the magic as a solved problem. But then trying to have a show about translation and language with that same translator in the middle I think compels us to think along the wrong lines.
In theory, after analyzing the language for long enough, an intelligent translator could produce the correct translation. "Shaka, when the walls fell", used enough in context, could eventually be replaced with "Failure".
The question is how much of some string of phonemes has to be repeated and deduced from context in order to translate even the literals properly. It seems as if the universal translator would have to be able to identify proper noun Shaka (do not translate), noun walls (interpret from context, translate), verb fell etc. from a similar set of operations as those required to get the higher level meaning.
Anyway like most TV sci-fi it was more intellectual than anything else on at the time and hadn't yet degenerated into a space-war saga. There are lots of debates about the viability of universal translation, this was a decent way of cluing in the layman I think. Dig too hard of course and it falls apart.