Nothing stops you today from paying for your education with a credit card or a personal loan or by mortgaging your house.
Must be nice on your planet where every 18-year-old has $40K available on credit cards, or qualifies for a personal loan for $40K, or has a house to mortgage with $40K in equity.
I'm convinced that they did this because they found that the sort of education offered by universities did a better job of preparing people to be effective technologists, businessmen and administrators.
Another ex-IBMer! Hello.
My take on this is that the debt incurred from the university education is the real driver to making the graduates "effective" within IBM's organization. The blue-collar who takes classes later in life already has an established work ethic, some kind of self-respect, duties to family, a narrower focus, and doesn't take on much debt to get their degree. Their degree IOW can always help them but cannot hurt them: they are in take-it-or-leave territory.
But the fresh college grad has no resume to speak of, no family to worry about, lots of debt, and a broad focus. They can be molded as needed into the organization, and they are very unlikely to balk at demands that the experienced worker would consider beyond the pale. The college grad has no choice but to use their degree to the max, because they have no other credentials to bring to the table.
Serious response: you might want to start looking at bio-ethylene and bio-propylene produced from the MixAlco process commercialized by Terrabon. I used to work at a plant that had propylene/ethylene crackers, and when I ran the economics of buying acetone from Terrabon and converting it to propylene the cost advantage was ginormous (that's a technical term). Terrabon will be producing bio-gasoline very soon, and has a solid supplier of bio-feedstocks. If you could convince any of your customers to consider an aldehyde/ketone-to-ethylene/propylene route they could stand to make some serious money in a few years, and still offset their carbon footprint to boot.
I can't say that I have noticed people abandoning email or even telephone services in favour of Facebook or G+.
You'd be surprised. I'm on my second career, and the folks I work with just a few years out of college practically live on Facebook. I just went to a birthday party where the hostess was taking photos with her cellphone and immediately posting them to FB. When I used to be on FB, I could send her a message through the service and get a response within minutes. On email, it may take two business days; on telephone, SMS might come back in an hour, but voice calls are rarely picked up at all; and of course she has no landline at all.
On a related tangent, I myself am clearing out most of my home videos in favor of Netflix streaming, because why should I use up storage space for a couple hundred movies when Netflix streams them at better resolution anyway? Someone just now putting together their adult life who uses their smartphone effectively doesn't even need a general-purpose PC at home.
And by the way? Isaac Newton, father of classical physics and calculus and a critical part of why this Internet exists that allow you to shovel your shit to a wide audience? No kids. So fuck you again.
And just in case you skull is as dense as your ideas: fuck you.
Personally, if employers want votech students they should say so and stop demanding a degree. If they want a degree, they should stop whining about how the degree isn't votech.
And if they want a pliable class of debt slaves, they should keep doing what they are now.
* Hops in the middle might need a proxy setup (e.g. tsocks). * You'll need 'ssh -e none' if you want to upload a file containing tildes. * 'cat' is still running through a tty, which can corrupt things depending on its settings. Control characters (^E, ^Q, ^S, ^?, ^I, ^L, ^@ off the top of my head) might not make it through unscathed. * This looks unlikely to work on uploads without some tricks if your ssh's need passwords.
Nothing, so long as you either a) have only one network hop to do, or b) know how to get scp to tunnel through lots of hops. Sometimes I've got neither option.
I've got one workflow which is ssh to SSL port via cntlm from within a Linux VM running on a Vista box, then from that host reaching out to its internal-only network through ssh. When I see something interesting, it's just 'sz file1 file2...' and away it goes.
My solution to all of those was to upgrade my TV to the LG 32LE5400 with a USB wireless stick. Plays Netflix, has many component and HDMI inputs, and plays my videos served from mediatomb.
It's not only in the labs. Terrabon is right now demonstrating a biomass-to-gasoline process on a pilot plant scale. It's real gasoline, not alcohol or other alternative fuel.
Last I checked, recording a video on your phone doesn't require reception.
But nothing stops the police from destroying the recording, except that the recording has already been uploaded somewhere. Give them the ability to stop the transmission and just watch how many phones are "accidentally" broken during traffic stops.
Here's what is good about autotools: 'make dist',./configure --enable-XXX, and easy integration with debhelper and rpmbuild.
I've got a small ~60kloc project out there that I started out using a simple makefile and C code, and then later migrated to gettext and autotools. I really wish in hindsight that I had just started with GNU Hello World and gettext from the get-go and then built out my project. As it was, I spent days re-factoring strings for gettext and more days getting my configure.ac and Makefile.am doing what they should have done rather than what I wanted them to do.
But now I've got a build system that works very cleanly on Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Cygwin, and Win32 (using the mingw32 cross compiler), and can also be used with dpkg-buildpackage to make.debs. All with the same configure.ac and Makefile.am, and automatically compiling the right things when a header is changed. I have conditionals for three different user interfaces and two optional supporting libraries. All told it was a LOT easier than make by itself or even boost.build.
Imagine every car has a scrambler, but by default is turned off. The only time it's activated is when the police send a signal, and of course they would only do that when they see someone driving recklessly, or there is a lot of traffic congestion requiring better attention from drivers, or...
Until the police figure out that by killing cell phones they also prevent most people from recording their illegal behavior, and it's back to the days of cops murdering people with impunity.
Back in the 80's and 90's many DOS users followed the same path. BYTE, PC Magazine, and even PC Computing provided essays on "how it works" and source listings for 8086 ASM and BASIC programs. But somewhere around the time of Windows 95, things seemed to change and it became expected that the "average user" had no interest or time in learning how anything works. I remember that desire to Not Know Or Care as one of the major friction points between the DOS user base and the Windows (and Mac for that matter) user base.
Why are you so hostile to learning? Clojure is a modern "Lisp done right", with all of the syntactic power of LISP minus quite a bit of historical goop, running on a very modern JVM with the goodies that that provides (the massive portfolio of Java libraries and mostly platform independence). D is a very modern "C++ done right" that is very well-suited for applications where you need the ability to occasionally shoot yourself in the foot (i.e. high performance, constrained memory, low-level access) but most of the time would like to use higher-level conveniences like garbage collection and templates.
One thing about the multiple sub-disciplines and "schools"...they all use English.
Sure, they all use English, but they don't say the same thing. (And actually many of them don't. Business is global these days.)
However, I think that any reasonable person would recognize that this Tower of Babel approach is holding back software development as a whole, needlessly fragmenting knowledge and impacting the careers of excellent programmers simply because they didn't jump on the latest bandwagon X years ago.
A little yes but mostly no. A programming language isn't just syntax, it's the entire ecosystem of libraries, tools, operating system support, university teaching, and available documentation. Just as business/finance/economics has multiple sub-disciplines and "schools" that are appropriate to different business situations, so does each major programming platform lend itself to creating certain kinds of applications. Saying "let's use programming language X to solve problem Y" is just as foolish as insisting that Six Sigma will always produce the same business outcome as LEAN.
If you must pick one thing that's holding back software development as a whole, pick human nature within business organizations. The story of LISP shows what happens when one programming language is "too powerful": managers didn't want to replace ten conventional Fortran/C/Pascal/etc. programmers with one good LISP programmer because it would simultaneously lead to that one LISP person being irreplaceable and the manager himself/herself becoming redundant. Contrast with the story of Java, a language deliberately restricted in order to enable lower-skill developers to produce something of value: Java was incredibly successfully precisely because it did not create a business dependency on ultra-productive irreplaceable programmers.
The "Tower of Babel" is only bad for the first few years of a general-purpose (not assembly language) programming language, when it needs to grow its compiler/interpreter and base libraries for common things like networking, threads, OS integration, GUI support, math, crypto, and basic algorithms. After that it becomes just another tool that may have good uses for certain situations. Every good programmer will have at least half a dozen such languages in their toolbox: mine includes C, C++, Perl, bash shell script, Java, Common Lisp, and Clojure, and I am adding to that D to eventually replace most of my use of C++ and Java.
Nothing, so long as both sides understand TELNET BINARY, the locale of the remote system uses a Unicode encoding (in practice this means UTF-8), your terminal understands Unicode (which excludes the FreeBSD console and most hardware terminals), your terminal is capable of *displaying* the Unicode (which excludes all non-GUI terminals except the Linux console), and your font has all the glyphs you need.
Writing a terminal emulator teaches one quite a bit about Unicode. Once it's working though it's quite nice.
Do you think language designers would really use both symbols and not make them interchangeable?
I imagine they would have a heart attack determining which whitespace code points should count as token breaks, which shouldn't, and which should be forbidden entirely because they make it difficult to trust someone's patches.
Habeas corpus was suspended under G.W. Bush. Obama reinstated it.
A fundamental constitutional right can neither be suspended nor reinstated by an executive order. And the Obama administration is still performing indefinite detention, albeit under different terms than habeas corpus.
To get rid of the national debt in 13 years, taxes would have to go up by about 87%. I don't know anybody sane that wants a 70% tax bracket to be the top end.
OK, following the numbers I'm guessing you mean the top end needs to exceed 87%, right? Because by the Mean Value Theorem there is no way to make up a 87% tax shortfall without someone out there paying more than 87% on some of the income.
We should cut all programs to a level that is affordable, stop waste, and run a $1tn surplus until the debt is eliminated.
We could start by closing the 1000 or so military bases outside our borders and stop our two pointless wars.
Slashdot Mirror
The tech belongs to Germany, Japan, China. They did the research and raced to the bottom with production lines churning out many solar panels.
The key ingredient to solar panels (polysilicon) has a very strong U.S. player in the form of Dow Corning's Hemlock Semiconductor.
Nothing stops you today from paying for your education with a credit card or a personal loan or by mortgaging your house.
Must be nice on your planet where every 18-year-old has $40K available on credit cards, or qualifies for a personal loan for $40K, or has a house to mortgage with $40K in equity.
I'm convinced that they did this because they found that the sort of education offered by universities did a better job of preparing people to be effective technologists, businessmen and administrators.
Another ex-IBMer! Hello.
My take on this is that the debt incurred from the university education is the real driver to making the graduates "effective" within IBM's organization. The blue-collar who takes classes later in life already has an established work ethic, some kind of self-respect, duties to family, a narrower focus, and doesn't take on much debt to get their degree. Their degree IOW can always help them but cannot hurt them: they are in take-it-or-leave territory.
But the fresh college grad has no resume to speak of, no family to worry about, lots of debt, and a broad focus. They can be molded as needed into the organization, and they are very unlikely to balk at demands that the experienced worker would consider beyond the pale. The college grad has no choice but to use their degree to the max, because they have no other credentials to bring to the table.
Don't worry, that also happens with plenty of engineers on topics inside their specialty too.
Serious response: you might want to start looking at bio-ethylene and bio-propylene produced from the MixAlco process commercialized by Terrabon. I used to work at a plant that had propylene/ethylene crackers, and when I ran the economics of buying acetone from Terrabon and converting it to propylene the cost advantage was ginormous (that's a technical term). Terrabon will be producing bio-gasoline very soon, and has a solid supplier of bio-feedstocks. If you could convince any of your customers to consider an aldehyde/ketone-to-ethylene/propylene route they could stand to make some serious money in a few years, and still offset their carbon footprint to boot.
I can't say that I have noticed people abandoning email or even telephone services in favour of Facebook or G+.
You'd be surprised. I'm on my second career, and the folks I work with just a few years out of college practically live on Facebook. I just went to a birthday party where the hostess was taking photos with her cellphone and immediately posting them to FB. When I used to be on FB, I could send her a message through the service and get a response within minutes. On email, it may take two business days; on telephone, SMS might come back in an hour, but voice calls are rarely picked up at all; and of course she has no landline at all.
On a related tangent, I myself am clearing out most of my home videos in favor of Netflix streaming, because why should I use up storage space for a couple hundred movies when Netflix streams them at better resolution anyway? Someone just now putting together their adult life who uses their smartphone effectively doesn't even need a general-purpose PC at home.
Times they are changing, and fast.
Fuck you.
And by the way? Isaac Newton, father of classical physics and calculus and a critical part of why this Internet exists that allow you to shovel your shit to a wide audience? No kids. So fuck you again.
And just in case you skull is as dense as your ideas: fuck you.
Personally, if employers want votech students they should say so and stop demanding a degree. If they want a degree, they should stop whining about how the degree isn't votech.
And if they want a pliable class of debt slaves, they should keep doing what they are now.
It's not that easy:
* Hops in the middle might need a proxy setup (e.g. tsocks).
* You'll need 'ssh -e none' if you want to upload a file containing tildes.
* 'cat' is still running through a tty, which can corrupt things depending on its settings. Control characters (^E, ^Q, ^S, ^?, ^I, ^L, ^@ off the top of my head) might not make it through unscathed.
* This looks unlikely to work on uploads without some tricks if your ssh's need passwords.
Nothing, so long as you either a) have only one network hop to do, or b) know how to get scp to tunnel through lots of hops. Sometimes I've got neither option.
I've got one workflow which is ssh to SSL port via cntlm from within a Linux VM running on a Vista box, then from that host reaching out to its internal-only network through ssh. When I see something interesting, it's just 'sz file1 file2 ...' and away it goes.
My solution to all of those was to upgrade my TV to the LG 32LE5400 with a USB wireless stick. Plays Netflix, has many component and HDMI inputs, and plays my videos served from mediatomb.
It's not only in the labs. Terrabon is right now demonstrating a biomass-to-gasoline process on a pilot plant scale. It's real gasoline, not alcohol or other alternative fuel.
Maybe they just ought tweet everything. At least the 140 character limit should slow people down a bit.
140 characters per packet is more than sufficient for Kermit file transfers.
Last I checked, recording a video on your phone doesn't require reception.
But nothing stops the police from destroying the recording, except that the recording has already been uploaded somewhere. Give them the ability to stop the transmission and just watch how many phones are "accidentally" broken during traffic stops.
Here's what is good about autotools: 'make dist', ./configure --enable-XXX, and easy integration with debhelper and rpmbuild.
I've got a small ~60kloc project out there that I started out using a simple makefile and C code, and then later migrated to gettext and autotools. I really wish in hindsight that I had just started with GNU Hello World and gettext from the get-go and then built out my project. As it was, I spent days re-factoring strings for gettext and more days getting my configure.ac and Makefile.am doing what they should have done rather than what I wanted them to do.
But now I've got a build system that works very cleanly on Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Cygwin, and Win32 (using the mingw32 cross compiler), and can also be used with dpkg-buildpackage to make .debs. All with the same configure.ac and Makefile.am, and automatically compiling the right things when a header is changed. I have conditionals for three different user interfaces and two optional supporting libraries. All told it was a LOT easier than make by itself or even boost.build.
Imagine every car has a scrambler, but by default is turned off. The only time it's activated is when the police send a signal, and of course they would only do that when they see someone driving recklessly, or there is a lot of traffic congestion requiring better attention from drivers, or...
Until the police figure out that by killing cell phones they also prevent most people from recording their illegal behavior, and it's back to the days of cops murdering people with impunity.
Back in the 80's and 90's many DOS users followed the same path. BYTE, PC Magazine, and even PC Computing provided essays on "how it works" and source listings for 8086 ASM and BASIC programs. But somewhere around the time of Windows 95, things seemed to change and it became expected that the "average user" had no interest or time in learning how anything works. I remember that desire to Not Know Or Care as one of the major friction points between the DOS user base and the Windows (and Mac for that matter) user base.
"Clojure" and "D"?
Just shoot me now.
Why are you so hostile to learning? Clojure is a modern "Lisp done right", with all of the syntactic power of LISP minus quite a bit of historical goop, running on a very modern JVM with the goodies that that provides (the massive portfolio of Java libraries and mostly platform independence). D is a very modern "C++ done right" that is very well-suited for applications where you need the ability to occasionally shoot yourself in the foot (i.e. high performance, constrained memory, low-level access) but most of the time would like to use higher-level conveniences like garbage collection and templates.
One thing about the multiple sub-disciplines and "schools"...they all use English.
Sure, they all use English, but they don't say the same thing. (And actually many of them don't. Business is global these days.)
However, I think that any reasonable person would recognize that this Tower of Babel approach is holding back software development as a whole, needlessly fragmenting knowledge and impacting the careers of excellent programmers simply because they didn't jump on the latest bandwagon X years ago.
A little yes but mostly no. A programming language isn't just syntax, it's the entire ecosystem of libraries, tools, operating system support, university teaching, and available documentation. Just as business/finance/economics has multiple sub-disciplines and "schools" that are appropriate to different business situations, so does each major programming platform lend itself to creating certain kinds of applications. Saying "let's use programming language X to solve problem Y" is just as foolish as insisting that Six Sigma will always produce the same business outcome as LEAN.
If you must pick one thing that's holding back software development as a whole, pick human nature within business organizations. The story of LISP shows what happens when one programming language is "too powerful": managers didn't want to replace ten conventional Fortran/C/Pascal/etc. programmers with one good LISP programmer because it would simultaneously lead to that one LISP person being irreplaceable and the manager himself/herself becoming redundant. Contrast with the story of Java, a language deliberately restricted in order to enable lower-skill developers to produce something of value: Java was incredibly successfully precisely because it did not create a business dependency on ultra-productive irreplaceable programmers.
The "Tower of Babel" is only bad for the first few years of a general-purpose (not assembly language) programming language, when it needs to grow its compiler/interpreter and base libraries for common things like networking, threads, OS integration, GUI support, math, crypto, and basic algorithms. After that it becomes just another tool that may have good uses for certain situations. Every good programmer will have at least half a dozen such languages in their toolbox: mine includes C, C++, Perl, bash shell script, Java, Common Lisp, and Clojure, and I am adding to that D to eventually replace most of my use of C++ and Java.
What prevents Telnet from ever using Unicode?
Nothing, so long as both sides understand TELNET BINARY, the locale of the remote system uses a Unicode encoding (in practice this means UTF-8), your terminal understands Unicode (which excludes the FreeBSD console and most hardware terminals), your terminal is capable of *displaying* the Unicode (which excludes all non-GUI terminals except the Linux console), and your font has all the glyphs you need.
Writing a terminal emulator teaches one quite a bit about Unicode. Once it's working though it's quite nice.
Do you think language designers would really use both symbols and not make them interchangeable?
I imagine they would have a heart attack determining which whitespace code points should count as token breaks, which shouldn't, and which should be forbidden entirely because they make it difficult to trust someone's patches.
--
What would Loki do?
If it's Loki Stormbringer from _The Daemon_ he would order a bunch of razorbacks and AutoM8's into the area to kill them all.
Habeas corpus was suspended under G.W. Bush. Obama reinstated it.
A fundamental constitutional right can neither be suspended nor reinstated by an executive order. And the Obama administration is still performing indefinite detention, albeit under different terms than habeas corpus.
Treason is *VERY* far away. Constitutional amendment far.
About the same far away as suspending habeas corpus, which has already been done by Abraham Lincoln, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama?
To get rid of the national debt in 13 years, taxes would have to go up by about 87%. I don't know anybody sane that wants a 70% tax bracket to be the top end.
OK, following the numbers I'm guessing you mean the top end needs to exceed 87%, right? Because by the Mean Value Theorem there is no way to make up a 87% tax shortfall without someone out there paying more than 87% on some of the income.
We should cut all programs to a level that is affordable, stop waste, and run a $1tn surplus until the debt is eliminated.
We could start by closing the 1000 or so military bases outside our borders and stop our two pointless wars.
This is what net neutrality is all about. (Direct image link here.