Ridiculous, nobody would choose Angry Birds over sex like that. Now what MAY be cause for concern is that rather than spending the necessary time to get to know one another and establish a relationship that may lead to sex, one might choose Angry Birds because it's easier.
But I doubt it. If you are too painfully shy to stop playing angry birds long enough to talk to the cute girl, you are probably too painfully shy to sit and try to make awkward conversation. Yet somehow even the geekiest of us usually end up married, so I don't worry about these things. (And once you're married, there is almost no reason to stop playing angry birds in public)
While I do know some hopeless game "addicts", I don't agree with your assertion that "normal" social interaction is important. The issue with game addicts is that they've given up on life. Key things like: cleaning house, taking out the trash, holding down a job, taking care of their children, etc. It's not so much an addiction as an escape, and they get off on the synthetic achievement of making level 90 rather than taking care of themselves. On the other hand I'm not sure this is any different than drug addicts. My sister is a nurse, and she had to help a woman who was "addicted" to marijuana. It's a joke you see, you can't really be addicted to that in any physical way, but she smokes her life away and does insane things to get more pot. She was in the hospital being treated for serious head injuries from the boyfriend who was hooking her up this month.
"Normal social interaction" is not relevant. The problem here is much deeper, and it's not with the game (or the drug), that's just what's available.
I could learn something exciting about what Paris Hilton is doing today, or what some dumb jock has accomplished in football. yay. It's like high school again. Or I could listen to fringe politics from strangers. I have learned a few things: apparently obama has signed a doctrine for complete control, they want to warehouse children with disabilities and the UN is going to force it, and apparently there's a war on christianity that nobody invited me to.
Now, having established all of the above as false, or at least no more true now than they have been for my entire life by reading primary sources, I think I'm happy to ignore the output of the unwashed masses and return to angry birds. I wish to prescribe a few hours of angry birds to the people who come up with this shit.
Because for some reason antiquated information services are superior to modern ones, in the same way that by having automobiles we're losing on the bond with nature we used to enjoy when all we had was a horse, a buggy, and stunning view of the horses ass and the occasional view of post-processed oats.
Smart phones are great for many of us: I've never liked people, especially strangers and would otherwise have to spend time trying to appear "unapproachable". I have never liked nature, it's messy, there are bugs, and I live in fucking Texas...I get enough hellscapes in video games. I can read any thing I want on my smart phone or my ereader. That I don't prefer magazines (ever) says a lot about the quality of magazines, most of which are sports rags or hollywood tabloids, which I couldn't care less about.
Respect != Tolerance, being left alone = tolerance. Being intolerant implies you will not sit still and accept the condition, you will attempt to remedy it.
Intolerance usually involves someone taking action against what they don't tolerate. This gets confused a lot, especially by the gay community, wherein the best they can hope for, and all they deserve, is to be left alone. But they insist on ACCEPTANCE (also != respect), which will not happen in this generation. You can't legislate acceptance. You CAN legislate tolerance, and we have for time uncounted though it rarely applies internationally.
What Pakistan is asking for is another thing entirely, and no way in hell do they get it. They will just have to learn about sticks and stones like every other 5 year old. The fact is you can call Jesus a homosexual, womanizing, child molestor with a penchant for violence, and while there will be uproar and disgust, a few calls for take-down and a lot of annoying lectures about how the decline of the alleged traditional US "christian" (whatever that is) religious state. But there won't be riots, and it has nothing to do with the passive and accepting nature of christians (they have a long history of violence as well). But over the years they have learned that what someone says about their messiah does not make it fact, and really doesn't matter. Any sensible person seeing that idiotic youtube video will just ignore it as the trash that it is.
The problem is there are plenty of featuers Windows is missing (a unix like command line? better multihead support? NFS?, etc.) but it all conflicts with the MS marketing view, and may weaken the stranglehold. All they have left is to keep us hooked and charge us by hte hour to patch substandard software.
Well I drive on this road all the time, it's practically deserted because the locals, who refused to fund it with taxes (red state - taxes are just for crack mothers and layabouts, not for roads and shit), are in some sort of quasi-rebellion against the overseas interest who owns the road and put the toll system in place. 85 feels very slow, just the comparatively short run between the Austin airport and round rock feels like you're in the middle of nowhere and may not even see a car much less pass one. Only complete pussies ever drove below 80 on this road, even when the speed limit was 65. Now I expect to see 90-95, but with the exception below, it's straight, wide and open. There isn't a much safer place to go fast that close to a major city.
Unfortunately as all the toll road speed limits have gone up, more and more people are out seemingly in protest, driving side by side way lower than the speed limit. We don't have a right lane for passing only law here, so you're stuck with them. So it may be 85 mph, but in practice you're stuck with the slowest person on the road.
Everyone is ignoring the insane cost of cities (especially Manhattan). I pay less monthly in mortgage now for a huge house in Austin than i would have paid for a small 2 bedroom in Manhattan. Forcing people to move in to the cities is effectively cutting their income or quality of life. They should be resisting...
Cities were fun when I was 20. It's just insanely impractical now. I prefer to be "near" one, where "near" means I can visit on the weekends with some investment, but I'd rather live and work where I'm isolated from the costs, crowds, and crime.
It holds water from a policy setting standpoint. While sensible individuals would not benefit from the procedure, you do not set policy around sensible individuals, as they don't generally drag the rest of us down. I assume this organization is expecting their findings will be copied by the 3rd world, and are thus setting policies at the lowest level.
So far the only argument against the practice that doesn't sound like magical thinking is that perhaps the consequences were underplayed in the study. I'd like to have heard more about that, and less about the bizarre mysticism that Europeans apparently subscribe to around the sanctity of the human body. I was hoping doctors would stick to the facts.
MLK jr was an example of intelligent civil disobedience. The Boston Tea Party was an example of intelligent civil disobedience. Ghandi was the epitome of intelligent civil disobedience. Getting off your ass and doing something, anything, to undermine authority with the intent to make positive social change, is civil disobedience. Smoking pot is smoking pot. It happens to be illegal, but so is driving over the speed limit. Neither of those things alone are civil disobedience.
You can argue you're an intellectual because you smoke pot, and can say profound anti-establishment things while you do it. So can that loud asshole at the other end of the bar after he's had one too many. But The Man approves, you are not a threat when you are numb, stoned or otherwise sedated. The Man would gladly give you a pile of pot to smoke, and arrest you for it and call you names, than having you sober and out actually trying to fix things.
Don't confuse breaking the law with civil disobedience. There is frequently a fine line, but I'm not seeing in my peer group what may have existed in the 60s with my parent's peer group. Most of the kids I grow up with who smoked pot just wanted to get numb and stoned off their ass but had no particular ambition.
Most tobacco users I know don't doubt that it'll kill them. There's plenty of evidence anyone can see now, if you know to look for it.
But it's hard to say a pot head has grown stupid. Compared to what? Is there even any contrast anymore? Is IQ that important if you don't have money but have obligations (family, children, debt)?
Compared to other Windows, Windows 7 has been great. Compared to Linux...well, let's not pick on MS, they've made great, if not entirely monotonic progress. They may yet produce an OS I would use of my own free will, rather than being forced into it.
15 years later it has not once proven valuable to me, and given how much of what I spent on college it represented, it's money I wish was spent differently.
Granted, some people in college have a far better idea of what they wanted to do with life. I knew pretty well what I wanted from about 12 years of age, all I did in higher ed is try to learn as much about it as I could, while filling my degree requirements and managing what money I could spend on education. Some people get a degree that generally suits their interests, but don't know what they're going to do with it. Those people may indeed benefit from a more well rounded education.
I was never in a position where I needed "filler classes" to manage my workload or gradesl. The grades were not that hard, I loved what I was doing. I left college wishing I had been able to take a long list of items in the course catalog...but the money was spent and it was time to earn it back. Now there's just no time, that part of my life is over unless I strike it rich somewhere.
My ISP reports that 10+Mbps broadband is available in the area, but in fact only 6Mbps if you're just using it for data. Apparently that other stuff is available only for their bundled video package. I don't need that I can stream from anywhere, I'd rather just have the bwidth.
The funny part is that you're exactly right while being so exactly wrong, all at the same time.
The derivation for what you linked really does require some calculus, and if you want to adapt that equation to something else, you probably need to work with calculus. More importantly, with math you may find that this particular method of estimation does not apply as well to battery life as to queue length. The weightings mentioned there also have fancy math terms which actually help you understand how to work with the equation.
Yes, if someone else gives you an equation like the wikipedia, you're all good. I don't know that anyone else is going to want to produce that for you, but they will happily criticize how your product "totally sucks, the battery life indicator totally doesn't work".
When I hear "discrete math", I think of map problems, circuit minimization, bipartite graphs, and what boils down to PhD level computer science (or pure math, whatever floats your boat). You can take this as a freshman, I did.
What you mean is "discrete time math", which is an entirely different type of math that has very strong roots in calculus. Discrete time math, at least as it is useful to me, is the mathematical method of working on sampled signals.
You can get jobs with both, I think the former is far more useful to computer scientists in general. To be honest, most jobs won't really require it of you, but understanding why things are is frequently more important than understanding what they are, if you're going to have a long lived career. If you just want to code up someones lifecycle management DB, it's probably not useful. But if you want to do something new that solves a hard problem for a new industry, it is a tool you may find valuable. I know that tools I use as a EE rely on someone having a discrete math background to have solved them.
The latter job is normally reserved for electrical engineers specializing in digital signal processing. You can definitely get a job with it, and you will use it in your job, although usually in the form of block diagrams you lay out in matlab. You may or may not use C to implement it, although most people I know at least start there since it's faster to write than verilog or vhdl.
Video game programming is mostly trigonometry, but there's some calculus in there too. Physics engines of course use calculus and a lot of matrix math. You may use those as packages, but I think if you want to do something the library designers (who are mostly focused on physics and execution speed) didn't conceive of, it would be good to know the math that gets you there.
As always the value of higher education isn't teaching you practical things that you can use today, it's teaching you how things work so you can use them in new ways tomorrow. I can understand frustration on this, we've all been there, and I do wish universities would spend a little more time on "practical" to augment the abstract and toss the liberal arts stuff which is useless for the intentions of 99% of people attending school.
Most importantly, going back 10 years, the fact that we CAN drop our web browser and just fire up a different vendor's browser, and have it render up web pages every bit as well is a huge improvement.
10 years ago we were bitching that IE6 sucked, but we have no choice, people were designing to it and Netscape couldn't handle that content. Now we're complaining that Firefox has fallen behind, but there's Chrome, Safari and (if you're desparate) IE9. I assume that Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple pay a lot of attention to the usage of their browser, and looking at the shift in market. They will correct issues, while we, the users, can choose the browser that works best.
This "all or nothing" mentality is absolutely insane. We see it with the tablet/smartphone market, people think there's no room for PCs anymore (as if). We're bitching about Firefox because it's fallen into momentary disarray, so it must be about to combust. No, assuming Mozilla wants to keep firefox dominant, they will fix it. It may take a couple years, but they'll fix it. In the mean time we can hop on Chrome or Safari or whatever is happening now, be happy, and this is all good.
I don't see her doing that. She seems to be explaining the boundaries of the case that she and the lawyers have "agreed" to, and what the jury needs to decide on. I didn't notice her telling them how to think.
The fact is the case is so broad and there are so many nits to pick, I'd be surprised if the jury could do anything rational with it.
Except that Unity is absolutely the worst kind of horror: unrepentant horror. They refuse to acknowledge that they've done wrong. I work in a company with a strong Linux element, and while ubuntu is the preferred distro, nobody runs unity. Describing KDE or Gnome as having run amok is somewhat unfair, the desktop in Linux has improved significantly over the past decade. I doubt they achieved all their goals, but they have achieved something significantly positive.
I pretty much agree, Ubuntu with gnome classic mode works great for me. There are probably some things I'd like to do that no system presently does, but it does not seem like the direction of the "newer" systems is heading even in the right direction, they seem to be trying to iPadize my desktop. I'm not sure something that enters maintenance is a bad thing.
It can be difficult. Jargon is often well defined only within a particular field, and can mean something entirely different in another field, or, more typically, nothing at all. Judicious use of jargon makes sense though.
"I instrumented and characterized a high speed buffer as part of the silicon validation strategy" - This is a sentence people would use at my job, and while many of the words are approachable to the uninitiated, it sounds awkward and some of the words are near fits that don't mean what the dictionary says they mean while others are just inscrutable ("A buffer? What, is your paint scratched?"). This sentence could be converted to "I tested the chip" to the least educated of audiences, it doesn't quite mean that, but it's close enough. Chip is jargon, though widely enough known that you probably could find it in a dictionary, but it's easy to include Figure 1 "A Chip", and instantly everyone would know what I mean, and not a potato chip, a french fry, a piece of stone broken off a larger piece of stone, or that chocolate thing in cookies.
You don't even have to send a flowery resume. They're cold calling people on linked-in lately. Several times they have found me, I even went on the interview once, just for shits n giggles.
All you have to do is look at the office environment to say "yeah, thanks, but no thanks, I'll try McDonalds"
I've worked at several soulless companies before, I'm no stranger to cubicells, idiotic HR policies and the large amount of doublethink that is required to survive large company management. MS is the worst, you can't even make it through the interview without feeling it course through your veins. No way.
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Ridiculous, nobody would choose Angry Birds over sex like that. Now what MAY be cause for concern is that rather than spending the necessary time to get to know one another and establish a relationship that may lead to sex, one might choose Angry Birds because it's easier.
But I doubt it. If you are too painfully shy to stop playing angry birds long enough to talk to the cute girl, you are probably too painfully shy to sit and try to make awkward conversation. Yet somehow even the geekiest of us usually end up married, so I don't worry about these things. (And once you're married, there is almost no reason to stop playing angry birds in public)
While I do know some hopeless game "addicts", I don't agree with your assertion that "normal" social interaction is important. The issue with game addicts is that they've given up on life. Key things like: cleaning house, taking out the trash, holding down a job, taking care of their children, etc. It's not so much an addiction as an escape, and they get off on the synthetic achievement of making level 90 rather than taking care of themselves. On the other hand I'm not sure this is any different than drug addicts. My sister is a nurse, and she had to help a woman who was "addicted" to marijuana. It's a joke you see, you can't really be addicted to that in any physical way, but she smokes her life away and does insane things to get more pot. She was in the hospital being treated for serious head injuries from the boyfriend who was hooking her up this month.
"Normal social interaction" is not relevant. The problem here is much deeper, and it's not with the game (or the drug), that's just what's available.
I could learn something exciting about what Paris Hilton is doing today, or what some dumb jock has accomplished in football. yay. It's like high school again. Or I could listen to fringe politics from strangers. I have learned a few things: apparently obama has signed a doctrine for complete control, they want to warehouse children with disabilities and the UN is going to force it, and apparently there's a war on christianity that nobody invited me to.
Now, having established all of the above as false, or at least no more true now than they have been for my entire life by reading primary sources, I think I'm happy to ignore the output of the unwashed masses and return to angry birds. I wish to prescribe a few hours of angry birds to the people who come up with this shit.
Because for some reason antiquated information services are superior to modern ones, in the same way that by having automobiles we're losing on the bond with nature we used to enjoy when all we had was a horse, a buggy, and stunning view of the horses ass and the occasional view of post-processed oats.
Smart phones are great for many of us: I've never liked people, especially strangers and would otherwise have to spend time trying to appear "unapproachable". I have never liked nature, it's messy, there are bugs, and I live in fucking Texas...I get enough hellscapes in video games. I can read any thing I want on my smart phone or my ereader. That I don't prefer magazines (ever) says a lot about the quality of magazines, most of which are sports rags or hollywood tabloids, which I couldn't care less about.
Respect != Tolerance, being left alone = tolerance. Being intolerant implies you will not sit still and accept the condition, you will attempt to remedy it.
Intolerance usually involves someone taking action against what they don't tolerate. This gets confused a lot, especially by the gay community, wherein the best they can hope for, and all they deserve, is to be left alone. But they insist on ACCEPTANCE (also != respect), which will not happen in this generation. You can't legislate acceptance. You CAN legislate tolerance, and we have for time uncounted though it rarely applies internationally.
What Pakistan is asking for is another thing entirely, and no way in hell do they get it. They will just have to learn about sticks and stones like every other 5 year old. The fact is you can call Jesus a homosexual, womanizing, child molestor with a penchant for violence, and while there will be uproar and disgust, a few calls for take-down and a lot of annoying lectures about how the decline of the alleged traditional US "christian" (whatever that is) religious state. But there won't be riots, and it has nothing to do with the passive and accepting nature of christians (they have a long history of violence as well). But over the years they have learned that what someone says about their messiah does not make it fact, and really doesn't matter. Any sensible person seeing that idiotic youtube video will just ignore it as the trash that it is.
Says "Hork_Monkey"
The problem is there are plenty of featuers Windows is missing (a unix like command line? better multihead support? NFS?, etc.) but it all conflicts with the MS marketing view, and may weaken the stranglehold. All they have left is to keep us hooked and charge us by hte hour to patch substandard software.
Well I drive on this road all the time, it's practically deserted because the locals, who refused to fund it with taxes (red state - taxes are just for crack mothers and layabouts, not for roads and shit), are in some sort of quasi-rebellion against the overseas interest who owns the road and put the toll system in place. 85 feels very slow, just the comparatively short run between the Austin airport and round rock feels like you're in the middle of nowhere and may not even see a car much less pass one. Only complete pussies ever drove below 80 on this road, even when the speed limit was 65. Now I expect to see 90-95, but with the exception below, it's straight, wide and open. There isn't a much safer place to go fast that close to a major city.
Unfortunately as all the toll road speed limits have gone up, more and more people are out seemingly in protest, driving side by side way lower than the speed limit. We don't have a right lane for passing only law here, so you're stuck with them. So it may be 85 mph, but in practice you're stuck with the slowest person on the road.
You won't have a head-on on this road, it has a huge dividing median where it doesn't actually have walls. A
Everyone is ignoring the insane cost of cities (especially Manhattan). I pay less monthly in mortgage now for a huge house in Austin than i would have paid for a small 2 bedroom in Manhattan. Forcing people to move in to the cities is effectively cutting their income or quality of life. They should be resisting...
Cities were fun when I was 20. It's just insanely impractical now. I prefer to be "near" one, where "near" means I can visit on the weekends with some investment, but I'd rather live and work where I'm isolated from the costs, crowds, and crime.
It holds water from a policy setting standpoint. While sensible individuals would not benefit from the procedure, you do not set policy around sensible individuals, as they don't generally drag the rest of us down. I assume this organization is expecting their findings will be copied by the 3rd world, and are thus setting policies at the lowest level.
So far the only argument against the practice that doesn't sound like magical thinking is that perhaps the consequences were underplayed in the study. I'd like to have heard more about that, and less about the bizarre mysticism that Europeans apparently subscribe to around the sanctity of the human body. I was hoping doctors would stick to the facts.
MLK jr was an example of intelligent civil disobedience. The Boston Tea Party was an example of intelligent civil disobedience. Ghandi was the epitome of intelligent civil disobedience. Getting off your ass and doing something, anything, to undermine authority with the intent to make positive social change, is civil disobedience. Smoking pot is smoking pot. It happens to be illegal, but so is driving over the speed limit. Neither of those things alone are civil disobedience.
You can argue you're an intellectual because you smoke pot, and can say profound anti-establishment things while you do it. So can that loud asshole at the other end of the bar after he's had one too many. But The Man approves, you are not a threat when you are numb, stoned or otherwise sedated. The Man would gladly give you a pile of pot to smoke, and arrest you for it and call you names, than having you sober and out actually trying to fix things.
Don't confuse breaking the law with civil disobedience. There is frequently a fine line, but I'm not seeing in my peer group what may have existed in the 60s with my parent's peer group. Most of the kids I grow up with who smoked pot just wanted to get numb and stoned off their ass but had no particular ambition.
Most tobacco users I know don't doubt that it'll kill them. There's plenty of evidence anyone can see now, if you know to look for it.
But it's hard to say a pot head has grown stupid. Compared to what? Is there even any contrast anymore? Is IQ that important if you don't have money but have obligations (family, children, debt)?
Compared to other Windows, Windows 7 has been great. Compared to Linux...well, let's not pick on MS, they've made great, if not entirely monotonic progress. They may yet produce an OS I would use of my own free will, rather than being forced into it.
15 years later it has not once proven valuable to me, and given how much of what I spent on college it represented, it's money I wish was spent differently.
Granted, some people in college have a far better idea of what they wanted to do with life. I knew pretty well what I wanted from about 12 years of age, all I did in higher ed is try to learn as much about it as I could, while filling my degree requirements and managing what money I could spend on education. Some people get a degree that generally suits their interests, but don't know what they're going to do with it. Those people may indeed benefit from a more well rounded education.
I was never in a position where I needed "filler classes" to manage my workload or gradesl. The grades were not that hard, I loved what I was doing. I left college wishing I had been able to take a long list of items in the course catalog...but the money was spent and it was time to earn it back. Now there's just no time, that part of my life is over unless I strike it rich somewhere.
This strikes me as arguing evolution to a creationist - a giant waste of everyone's time, and more than likely going to start a fight.
My ISP reports that 10+Mbps broadband is available in the area, but in fact only 6Mbps if you're just using it for data. Apparently that other stuff is available only for their bundled video package. I don't need that I can stream from anywhere, I'd rather just have the bwidth.
The funny part is that you're exactly right while being so exactly wrong, all at the same time.
The derivation for what you linked really does require some calculus, and if you want to adapt that equation to something else, you probably need to work with calculus. More importantly, with math you may find that this particular method of estimation does not apply as well to battery life as to queue length. The weightings mentioned there also have fancy math terms which actually help you understand how to work with the equation.
Yes, if someone else gives you an equation like the wikipedia, you're all good. I don't know that anyone else is going to want to produce that for you, but they will happily criticize how your product "totally sucks, the battery life indicator totally doesn't work".
When I hear "discrete math", I think of map problems, circuit minimization, bipartite graphs, and what boils down to PhD level computer science (or pure math, whatever floats your boat). You can take this as a freshman, I did.
What you mean is "discrete time math", which is an entirely different type of math that has very strong roots in calculus. Discrete time math, at least as it is useful to me, is the mathematical method of working on sampled signals.
You can get jobs with both, I think the former is far more useful to computer scientists in general. To be honest, most jobs won't really require it of you, but understanding why things are is frequently more important than understanding what they are, if you're going to have a long lived career. If you just want to code up someones lifecycle management DB, it's probably not useful. But if you want to do something new that solves a hard problem for a new industry, it is a tool you may find valuable. I know that tools I use as a EE rely on someone having a discrete math background to have solved them.
The latter job is normally reserved for electrical engineers specializing in digital signal processing. You can definitely get a job with it, and you will use it in your job, although usually in the form of block diagrams you lay out in matlab. You may or may not use C to implement it, although most people I know at least start there since it's faster to write than verilog or vhdl.
Video game programming is mostly trigonometry, but there's some calculus in there too. Physics engines of course use calculus and a lot of matrix math. You may use those as packages, but I think if you want to do something the library designers (who are mostly focused on physics and execution speed) didn't conceive of, it would be good to know the math that gets you there.
As always the value of higher education isn't teaching you practical things that you can use today, it's teaching you how things work so you can use them in new ways tomorrow. I can understand frustration on this, we've all been there, and I do wish universities would spend a little more time on "practical" to augment the abstract and toss the liberal arts stuff which is useless for the intentions of 99% of people attending school.
Most importantly, going back 10 years, the fact that we CAN drop our web browser and just fire up a different vendor's browser, and have it render up web pages every bit as well is a huge improvement.
10 years ago we were bitching that IE6 sucked, but we have no choice, people were designing to it and Netscape couldn't handle that content. Now we're complaining that Firefox has fallen behind, but there's Chrome, Safari and (if you're desparate) IE9. I assume that Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple pay a lot of attention to the usage of their browser, and looking at the shift in market. They will correct issues, while we, the users, can choose the browser that works best.
This "all or nothing" mentality is absolutely insane. We see it with the tablet/smartphone market, people think there's no room for PCs anymore (as if). We're bitching about Firefox because it's fallen into momentary disarray, so it must be about to combust. No, assuming Mozilla wants to keep firefox dominant, they will fix it. It may take a couple years, but they'll fix it. In the mean time we can hop on Chrome or Safari or whatever is happening now, be happy, and this is all good.
I don't see her doing that. She seems to be explaining the boundaries of the case that she and the lawyers have "agreed" to, and what the jury needs to decide on. I didn't notice her telling them how to think.
The fact is the case is so broad and there are so many nits to pick, I'd be surprised if the jury could do anything rational with it.
Except that Unity is absolutely the worst kind of horror: unrepentant horror. They refuse to acknowledge that they've done wrong. I work in a company with a strong Linux element, and while ubuntu is the preferred distro, nobody runs unity. Describing KDE or Gnome as having run amok is somewhat unfair, the desktop in Linux has improved significantly over the past decade. I doubt they achieved all their goals, but they have achieved something significantly positive.
I pretty much agree, Ubuntu with gnome classic mode works great for me. There are probably some things I'd like to do that no system presently does, but it does not seem like the direction of the "newer" systems is heading even in the right direction, they seem to be trying to iPadize my desktop. I'm not sure something that enters maintenance is a bad thing.
It can be difficult. Jargon is often well defined only within a particular field, and can mean something entirely different in another field, or, more typically, nothing at all. Judicious use of jargon makes sense though.
"I instrumented and characterized a high speed buffer as part of the silicon validation strategy" - This is a sentence people would use at my job, and while many of the words are approachable to the uninitiated, it sounds awkward and some of the words are near fits that don't mean what the dictionary says they mean while others are just inscrutable ("A buffer? What, is your paint scratched?"). This sentence could be converted to "I tested the chip" to the least educated of audiences, it doesn't quite mean that, but it's close enough. Chip is jargon, though widely enough known that you probably could find it in a dictionary, but it's easy to include Figure 1 "A Chip", and instantly everyone would know what I mean, and not a potato chip, a french fry, a piece of stone broken off a larger piece of stone, or that chocolate thing in cookies.
You don't even have to send a flowery resume. They're cold calling people on linked-in lately. Several times they have found me, I even went on the interview once, just for shits n giggles.
All you have to do is look at the office environment to say "yeah, thanks, but no thanks, I'll try McDonalds"
I've worked at several soulless companies before, I'm no stranger to cubicells, idiotic HR policies and the large amount of doublethink that is required to survive large company management. MS is the worst, you can't even make it through the interview without feeling it course through your veins. No way.