But that is how it should be: not just every movie studio should be able to make a Superman movie, because this would undermine the "real"/canonical Superman line. Fans could not be sure that the movie that they were going to see was the "official" Superman; the protection of trademark is therefore important to provide information to the consumer.
But which real/canonical Superman line? Every long-running comic series has been rebooted or retconned innumerable times, and Superman has hit the big screen in several different "continuities", including the Fleischer cartoons, the Christopher Reeve films, and the current lot. Then there's the radio, the TV series, several TV cartoon serieses.
There isn't a single canonical Superman.
Now, that said, I agree that copyright's derivative work protection should not continue to prevent similar stories, so long as there is no risk of customer confusion. If another studio wants to make a movie about "Superduperman," from the planet Argon, who flies around in his caped underwear while saving the world, they should have every right to do so -- even while the copyright for "Superman" still runs.
I don't quite agree with you there. I think the trademark law here is very odd, because you're allowed to use the trademark in place in the existing work... but not as marketing. That's very odd indeed. If I'm allowed to print the books about Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, why am I not allowed to use the name Tarzan? It's, as I said, very odd indeed.
In fact, lots of countries specifically disallow trademarking literary characters, which is why it's so important to copyright holders to get the character name in the title, or to reissue film serieses in a boxed set with the lead character in the name.
So for example, Paramount probably now have exclusive film copyright on the title "Jack Reacher". Lee Child may be able to license novels to other studios further down the line, and they'll still feature Jack Reacher as a character, but "Jack Reacher" wouldn't be part of the title. Consider also Never Say Never Again which was produced under the screen rights to the novel "Thunderball". But the producers didn't have the rights to the "James Bond" franchise, so it wasn't a "Bond film". But the name's on the poster... as a character name only: "Sean Connery is James Bond in..."
Seriously. Regardless of what your working situation is, it's as simple exercise and diet. Take your lunch to work and be active on weekends. This makes a huge difference. If you're lucky enough to have a gym at work, use it.
Yes, and it's exercise outside of work, not in downtime, because you can't work up a sweat in a ten-minute coffee break and go straight back to your desk.
One of the things most of us forget is that we've probably never actually seen a 100% pass mark on a student's programming assignment beyond first year (or second year, at a push).
When I was at university, I wanted those As. I was OK with the Bs, but I was really annoyed when I got a C and distraught when I got Ds. In the end, I got a 2:2 for my degree -- a C.
What's my point? My code at university was not spectacularly good code, but it wasgood enough. I passed. I got a job. I moved away from code. And almost a decade later I'm back in the IDE hotseat for a personal project and realising that I understand a hell of a lot about how computers work, and it's all thanks to a degree and results that I previously lamented as "mediocre".
Most of us have a hard time doing it, but we need to accept that good enough is good enough. But at the same time, that's never a good excuse for not improving yourself when the opportunity arises.
I find that my computer navigation "shortcircuits" when I get tired, in a way that's kind of analogous to focal dystonia, but in a purely mental way, not a muscular problem. I know what task I want to achieve, and I move my mouse, but I click on the wrong icon genuinely believing it'll do what I want. Example: I'm playing Minesweeper, I've identified that there's a mine on a square and I go to flag it, but I press the wrong button. Computer commands are very abstract, and are very minimally different. A physical interface paradigm takes advantage of muscle memory to give us more context for, and consciousness of, or actions.
If you look at the history of windowed UIs, the whole point was to make something as close to physical as possible -- they used to talk about "direct manipulation" lots. That's why it was all drag-and-drop in the early days, but as always, they discovered that abstract is quicker, but modern windowed UIs are abstract without much linguistic content.
Which is just a fancy way of saying that real geeks use CLI.
Surely there's an application for piezo electronics in there somewhere? If you use a truly low-power display tech (e-ink, presumably), couldn't you harvest a bit of kinetic energy out of the flexing of the "paper" and use that to keep the capacitor topped up?
But Javascript is more than a wee bit mind-bending, and navigating a DOM is really rather difficult until you've got your head round a lot of concepts...
Your argument akin to saying somebody that can carry around a brick and put it somewhere is able to build a house that is comfortable and durable. Not so, rather obviously.
And again, you're not allowing people to be non-experts.
Not everybody can architect a house. Almost everyone can learn enough in a day to build a garden wall.
Yes, but they do have to be taught. Bricklaying is not an inate skill, and neither is computer programming..
Everyone of us uses the concept of identifiers (think variables), when we say “he" instead of "Jim", or even "Jim" instead of shoving that person in front of your eyes.
False friends. Pronouns (he, she) etc are a closed set (think "keywords", not "variables"). And pronouns, like names, are fuzzy, context-sensitive references. It is precisely these linguistic constructs that make variables hard. We're not used to the fixed, uncompromising nature of an instatiated variable, and we're not used to the idea of strict scoping and overwriting of variables. I can talk about three different Jims without ever once making an explicit assignment declaration to the label "Jim".
Everyone of us uses the concept of sequences of commands, when making a to-do list.
But that would be a semantic list, not a procedural list. Far more like HTML than programming, and not much like that either.
Everyone of us uses has no problem with including tasks into that to-do list, that themselves are a set of steps one could write down somewhere else.
"Could", not "does". We're still in semantic mode. The idea that we have to spell every single step out for a process that a human mind has rationalised as elementary is counter-intuitive.
Everyone of us is able to say "Do this 10 times.", "Do this for all people in the room.", or "Until you have at least $1000, keep on saving.".
Yet we don't normally put in explicit and unequivocable block markers to say which exact step(s) to do 10 times -- again we rely on semantics to make it obvious what needs to be repeated.
Everyone of us is able to make lists, use property lists (dating site profiles, etc), handle tree structures (company hierarchies, file systems), and even more complex ones.
Funny that your example for a property list is a computer-based example, because we're normally not quite as neat as the internet would like us to be. Most profiles are incomplete anyway.
Tree structures are very rare in most people's world, and most people use computer filesystems as a collection of flat or very shallow systems -- notice how Windows has "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Music" etc. Within that most users will only go one or two layers down ("My Documents\University assignments","My Pictures\Christmas 2012" etc).
Everyone of us uses grouping (think modules) all the time in daily life. It's part of how our brain works, to group things into classes.
But our groupings are unclear, multiple, overlapping and interfering. Our structures are often self-contradictory and our brains handle the contradiction. OO has been fighting with this since the beginning, experimenting with classes, prototypes, interfaces, multiple-inheritance etc etc trying to create a means of reconciling computers' inherent anal retentiveness with human fuzziness.
Everyone of us can use and understand the concept of expressions, when we read and write recipes. (Which essentially are programs: dinner = [(simmerFor (10 min) (add [cream,whiteWine,(dried chickenBroth),nutmeg,(piecesOf broccoli),salt,pepper,garlic] (fried (chopped chickenBreast)))) + ((cookedIn saltWater (8 min)) tagiatelle), readyMadeGarlicyFriseeSalad ].)
Expressions like that are very abstract and actually quite difficult. A recipe is not written like that because most people would be incapable of understanding it. We go to incredible lengths to render a simple sequence of steps into a prose-like form that a human can accept.
I'll just stick with Coursera - it's free and awesome, (As long as you just want the knowledge and don't care about credits.)
Unfortunately that "not caring about credits" is what is going to eventually cripple the university system. The free MOOCs are widening education, but they're liable to draw a fair amount of custom out of the paid-for distance education sector, which means that the free stuff is going to increase the cost of accredited education in the medium term.
And even leaving aside the matter of credit points and certificates, a MOOC is not equivalent to a good paid-for online course, because the assessment is far more limited. No number of MOOCs are equivalent to a degree because you're missing the individually marked essay questions, the supervised practical projects etc.
MOOCs may just be killing the university... in a bad way.
...Thats a whopping $200 per student. Now can you tell me why the cost to the student is higher than that by almost an order of magnitude? I can, its because the universities have the same delusion as the content industries did, they thought that the internet somehow added value to their product in and of itself, when in reality, the only value it adds is to reduce operating costs and distribution costs. The value to the end user (and the value they expect to receive) is in lower prices.
The problem is twofold:
First up, the move to online is very expensive in the short term if done properly (planning, quality assurance, technology, rewriting of materials), and very expensive in the long term if done badly (constant firefighting, multiple changes of technology, multiple rewrites of materials). The actual goal of reduced costs won't be apparent for years. (And as most places are under pressure to go online for cost reasons, they mostly don't invest enough in the initial move and spend years trying to fix their problems.)
Secondly, online-as-cost-savings is often balanced against increasing costs elsewhere. IE they're looking for cheap material to cross-subsidise expensive courses (eg labs, low student numbers etc). Although admittedly this is more of an issue in countries where there are legal limits on student fees.
Especially for an online class. I've never comprehended why the hell schools believe they can get away with charging more for an online class (usually usual tuition plus a fee). Having an instructor sitting at home in their underwear has got to be cheaper than finding room on campus, etc.
This whole trend is down to short-termism from the bean counters. Classes go online for "cost-cutting" reasons: travel, time, accommodation, photocopying etc etc etc. Unfortunately they consistently forget that there's a lot of work involved in putting a course online, and that costs money. But by the time they realise this, they're personally invested in the idea that online is the way forward, and start to justify it to themselves in terms of convenience, flexibility etc and they therefore rationalise that it's better, therefore worth more, and stick a higher price-tag on it (forgetting that it's supposed to be a cost-saving exercise!
Setting up an online programme takes proper long-term planning and budgeting, and well-done to the UC for realising that this is the case, but poor show UC for not actually following through and actually, you know, planning and budgeting....
The best part about being a consultant is that you never... ever... never ever... have to deal with HR. Makes me smile just saying it.:)
There's a lot of very nice young women in HR.
Except in IT, where a lot of companies use HR and other internal functions as the dumping ground for post-maternity-leave female employees when project managers (erroneously) assume that their skills are out-of-date so refuse to take them on....
Incidentally, the opposite of being able to hire/fire at will is being able to apply-for/leave a job at will. That is, you're not forced to sign a contract that says you have to stay - you can find/get a better job and leave your current employer no matter what, and at any time.
Opposite? Really? A fair contract gives the employee and employer the same notice period. If you want to be able to get rid of me overnight, I demand the right to leave overnight if something better comes up. So to me these are the same thing, not opposites....
I think overall humans are being put at a disadvantage by operating under the illusion human readable formats are necessary. They should easily be made readable with proper tools the same way IP transactions are made readable by wireshark.
Insiting on human readabilty incurrs large opportunity costs while insuring insane amounts of bandwidth are wasted.
There is no "illusion" involved in the idea of human readable formats, because we all know that ASCII/Unicode characters are the native machine-stored format. It's not an abstract number that is an abstraction of a series of bits with an assumption of a certain endedness, and it is certainly not a series of polarities within a magnetic medium deposited on a glass or polymer disc spinning at high velocity within a hermetically sealed box.
No, Programmers File Editor doesn't translate abstract data into a human-readable form, it just gives me a window onto the untranslated data.
</sarcasm>
I agree with you entirely -- the myth of human-readability has hamstrung the power of computing environments. If I'm writing a mathematical formula that isn't going to change, why not render it to screen as a proper mathematical formula? There's no more readable notation for maths than classical mathematical notation! Entire multiline procedures can be rendered down to something that takes up a couple of lines of screen-space, and more to the point, I've then got the choice of seeing function names or function formulas when I read the code. Easy in-line substitution of functions would help debug complex problems where verifying the full logic of the procedure is required, while still leaving the option of ignoring it with a simple line of FFT(x) instead.
Why can't the language resemble more readable (English, or native language) rather than obfuscated math
Maybe in part because
(person) | nativelanguage_person != English.
Also, if you think that current programming languages offer too many ways of doing the same thing...
Set A to be the sum of B and C. Take the sum of B and C and store the result in A. Add C to B and call the result A. Make A as long as long as the two items B and C placed end-to-end. etc etc ad nauseum.
So you're going to have to restrict the set of linguistic constructs to be logically equivalent to the set of mathematical constructs in a current language of comparable functionality. From the point of view of the coder, this means that the language is going to become more pedantic, because you're writing a longer string of abitrary symbols, with much more redundancy and far more scope for error.
I'm of the opposite view to you: I believe that the problem is that programming isn't enough like mathematics, and further, that a great many code bugs and design flaws are due to programmers being insufficiently versed in formal maths methods to produce logically consistent code.
the best way to build a site is with a css grid to make your site handle different resolutions
Which is still pretty useless as it doesn't account for actual physical dimensions. A pixel is not an SI unit of size, and sites that look good on the fixed monitors I use are too small for comfortable reading on my 15" widescreen laptop. Until there's some tracking of dot pitch in the OS and browser, any attempt at designing-in sizes is doomed to failure.
a new markup language that's meant to do pixel perfect rendering (HTML is not, but its used that way),
NO!
The point of HTML appears to be too subtle for most designers to grasp: you don't know what my screen looks like. I've got a widescreen laptop, a netbook and a smarphone. Their screens are different sizes and shapes. I don't have what you would call bad eyesight, but most websites are too small on my laptop unless I scale it up. Because the dots on my screen are smaller than the dots on the designers' 20" desktop monitors.
The problem is bad design. A web app is destined for a non-homogenous environment and you will never know what I have or need (or someone with actually visual impairment has or needs) so you need to design with genericity in mind. That's why Java came with an abstract windowing toolkit... which was only a half-way house at best, but was still too subtle for most designers to cope with (what do they need, crayons?!?) and Java too has slid towards the "but it has to look exactly like it does on my screen" primary-school-of-design-thought.
Exactly. They're probably looking for unusual user-agent strings in HTTP headers, which might end up penalising people whose viewers use plugins to download videos for offline use.
Nope. The pope just wanted piece in Europe and there were too many warriors here. So he sent them eastward to kill and be killed. Politics, not religion, was the driving force. God's name was just a convenient excuse.
The government allows it to happen though -- they've banned it as a medical intervention, but they allow it under research. Are the patients paying? That's not how research is supposed to work, in which case the doctors involved should be dragged over hot coals. But even if the patients are "freely choosing", what does the doctor say to them? What is the advice? A doctor who believes in his methods is very persuasive, and something as iffy as brain-burning requires that the doctor really genuinely believes in what he's doing. In fact, I'd say that they'd have to be so personally invested in the efficacy of their treatment that they would be massively predisposed to talking the potential patient into doing it. In such cases, I don't personally believe anyone that has ever met the doctor can truly be considered to have "informed consent", in much the same way that exposure to persuasive press articles can poison a jury to the point that we have strong laws controlling the reporting of criminal cases before trial.
Unfortunately a lot of doctors, in the name of science and scientifically guided moral righteousness, support mandatory circumcisions of male babies. It's not just religious nutjobs who support this.
Bullshit. It's a Jewish tradition that became the norm in America. It's the tradition, mixed with religion, that drives people to try to find rational reasons for docking baby penises. You may as well be saying that the Kallam Cosmological Argument is recounted in the name of logic and reason. Blanket circumcision for reasons of health is no more justified than removing toe nails to prevent the many disorders that can come from them. It's tradition. Parents don't realize the impact, and they want their kid to have a "normal" penis.
He said they do it in the name of science, not because of science, just like the crusades were in the name of God and not because God actually told the Pope to go and slaughter a bunch of foreigners.
Slashdot Mirror
But that is how it should be: not just every movie studio should be able to make a Superman movie, because this would undermine the "real"/canonical Superman line. Fans could not be sure that the movie that they were going to see was the "official" Superman; the protection of trademark is therefore important to provide information to the consumer.
But which real/canonical Superman line? Every long-running comic series has been rebooted or retconned innumerable times, and Superman has hit the big screen in several different "continuities", including the Fleischer cartoons, the Christopher Reeve films, and the current lot. Then there's the radio, the TV series, several TV cartoon serieses.
There isn't a single canonical Superman.
Now, that said, I agree that copyright's derivative work protection should not continue to prevent similar stories, so long as there is no risk of customer confusion. If another studio wants to make a movie about "Superduperman," from the planet Argon, who flies around in his caped underwear while saving the world, they should have every right to do so -- even while the copyright for "Superman" still runs.
I don't quite agree with you there. I think the trademark law here is very odd, because you're allowed to use the trademark in place in the existing work... but not as marketing. That's very odd indeed. If I'm allowed to print the books about Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, why am I not allowed to use the name Tarzan? It's, as I said, very odd indeed.
In fact, lots of countries specifically disallow trademarking literary characters, which is why it's so important to copyright holders to get the character name in the title, or to reissue film serieses in a boxed set with the lead character in the name.
So for example, Paramount probably now have exclusive film copyright on the title "Jack Reacher". Lee Child may be able to license novels to other studios further down the line, and they'll still feature Jack Reacher as a character, but "Jack Reacher" wouldn't be part of the title. Consider also Never Say Never Again which was produced under the screen rights to the novel "Thunderball". But the producers didn't have the rights to the "James Bond" franchise, so it wasn't a "Bond film". But the name's on the poster... as a character name only: "Sean Connery is James Bond in..."
Seriously. Regardless of what your working situation is, it's as simple exercise and diet. Take your lunch to work and be active on weekends. This makes a huge difference. If you're lucky enough to have a gym at work, use it.
Yes, and it's exercise outside of work, not in downtime, because you can't work up a sweat in a ten-minute coffee break and go straight back to your desk.
One of the things most of us forget is that we've probably never actually seen a 100% pass mark on a student's programming assignment beyond first year (or second year, at a push).
When I was at university, I wanted those As. I was OK with the Bs, but I was really annoyed when I got a C and distraught when I got Ds. In the end, I got a 2:2 for my degree -- a C.
What's my point? My code at university was not spectacularly good code, but it wasgood enough. I passed. I got a job. I moved away from code. And almost a decade later I'm back in the IDE hotseat for a personal project and realising that I understand a hell of a lot about how computers work, and it's all thanks to a degree and results that I previously lamented as "mediocre".
Most of us have a hard time doing it, but we need to accept that good enough is good enough. But at the same time, that's never a good excuse for not improving yourself when the opportunity arises.
Well if you put the processor in a wrist-watch format, it might be close enough for passive NFC powering a touch-sensitive array...?
I find that my computer navigation "shortcircuits" when I get tired, in a way that's kind of analogous to focal dystonia, but in a purely mental way, not a muscular problem. I know what task I want to achieve, and I move my mouse, but I click on the wrong icon genuinely believing it'll do what I want. Example: I'm playing Minesweeper, I've identified that there's a mine on a square and I go to flag it, but I press the wrong button. Computer commands are very abstract, and are very minimally different. A physical interface paradigm takes advantage of muscle memory to give us more context for, and consciousness of, or actions.
If you look at the history of windowed UIs, the whole point was to make something as close to physical as possible -- they used to talk about "direct manipulation" lots. That's why it was all drag-and-drop in the early days, but as always, they discovered that abstract is quicker, but modern windowed UIs are abstract without much linguistic content.
Which is just a fancy way of saying that real geeks use CLI.
Surely there's an application for piezo electronics in there somewhere? If you use a truly low-power display tech (e-ink, presumably), couldn't you harvest a bit of kinetic energy out of the flexing of the "paper" and use that to keep the capacitor topped up?
But Javascript is more than a wee bit mind-bending, and navigating a DOM is really rather difficult until you've got your head round a lot of concepts...
Your argument akin to saying somebody that can carry around a brick and put it somewhere is able to build a house that is comfortable and durable. Not so, rather obviously.
And again, you're not allowing people to be non-experts.
Not everybody can architect a house. Almost everyone can learn enough in a day to build a garden wall.
Yes, but they do have to be taught. Bricklaying is not an inate skill, and neither is computer programming..
Everyone of us uses the concept of identifiers (think variables), when we say “he" instead of "Jim", or even "Jim" instead of shoving that person in front of your eyes.
False friends. Pronouns (he, she) etc are a closed set (think "keywords", not "variables"). And pronouns, like names, are fuzzy, context-sensitive references. It is precisely these linguistic constructs that make variables hard. We're not used to the fixed, uncompromising nature of an instatiated variable, and we're not used to the idea of strict scoping and overwriting of variables. I can talk about three different Jims without ever once making an explicit assignment declaration to the label "Jim".
Everyone of us uses the concept of sequences of commands, when making a to-do list.
But that would be a semantic list, not a procedural list. Far more like HTML than programming, and not much like that either.
Everyone of us uses has no problem with including tasks into that to-do list, that themselves are a set of steps one could write down somewhere else.
"Could", not "does". We're still in semantic mode. The idea that we have to spell every single step out for a process that a human mind has rationalised as elementary is counter-intuitive.
Everyone of us is able to say "Do this 10 times.", "Do this for all people in the room.", or "Until you have at least $1000, keep on saving.".
Yet we don't normally put in explicit and unequivocable block markers to say which exact step(s) to do 10 times -- again we rely on semantics to make it obvious what needs to be repeated.
Everyone of us is able to make lists, use property lists (dating site profiles, etc), handle tree structures (company hierarchies, file systems), and even more complex ones.
Funny that your example for a property list is a computer-based example, because we're normally not quite as neat as the internet would like us to be. Most profiles are incomplete anyway.
Tree structures are very rare in most people's world, and most people use computer filesystems as a collection of flat or very shallow systems -- notice how Windows has "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Music" etc. Within that most users will only go one or two layers down ("My Documents\University assignments","My Pictures\Christmas 2012" etc).
Everyone of us uses grouping (think modules) all the time in daily life. It's part of how our brain works, to group things into classes.
But our groupings are unclear, multiple, overlapping and interfering. Our structures are often self-contradictory and our brains handle the contradiction. OO has been fighting with this since the beginning, experimenting with classes, prototypes, interfaces, multiple-inheritance etc etc trying to create a means of reconciling computers' inherent anal retentiveness with human fuzziness.
Everyone of us can use and understand the concept of expressions, when we read and write recipes. (Which essentially are programs: dinner = [(simmerFor (10 min) (add [cream,whiteWine,(dried chickenBroth),nutmeg,(piecesOf broccoli),salt,pepper,garlic] (fried (chopped chickenBreast)))) + ((cookedIn saltWater (8 min)) tagiatelle), readyMadeGarlicyFriseeSalad ].)
Expressions like that are very abstract and actually quite difficult. A recipe is not written like that because most people would be incapable of understanding it. We go to incredible lengths to render a simple sequence of steps into a prose-like form that a human can accept.
I'll just stick with Coursera - it's free and awesome, (As long as you just want the knowledge and don't care about credits.)
Unfortunately that "not caring about credits" is what is going to eventually cripple the university system. The free MOOCs are widening education, but they're liable to draw a fair amount of custom out of the paid-for distance education sector, which means that the free stuff is going to increase the cost of accredited education in the medium term.
And even leaving aside the matter of credit points and certificates, a MOOC is not equivalent to a good paid-for online course, because the assessment is far more limited. No number of MOOCs are equivalent to a degree because you're missing the individually marked essay questions, the supervised practical projects etc.
MOOCs may just be killing the university... in a bad way.
...Thats a whopping $200 per student. Now can you tell me why the cost to the student is higher than that by almost an order of magnitude? I can, its because the universities have the same delusion as the content industries did, they thought that the internet somehow added value to their product in and of itself, when in reality, the only value it adds is to reduce operating costs and distribution costs. The value to the end user (and the value they expect to receive) is in lower prices.
The problem is twofold:
First up, the move to online is very expensive in the short term if done properly (planning, quality assurance, technology, rewriting of materials), and very expensive in the long term if done badly (constant firefighting, multiple changes of technology, multiple rewrites of materials). The actual goal of reduced costs won't be apparent for years. (And as most places are under pressure to go online for cost reasons, they mostly don't invest enough in the initial move and spend years trying to fix their problems.)
Secondly, online-as-cost-savings is often balanced against increasing costs elsewhere. IE they're looking for cheap material to cross-subsidise expensive courses (eg labs, low student numbers etc). Although admittedly this is more of an issue in countries where there are legal limits on student fees.
Especially for an online class. I've never comprehended why the hell schools believe they can get away with charging more for an online class (usually usual tuition plus a fee). Having an instructor sitting at home in their underwear has got to be cheaper than finding room on campus, etc.
This whole trend is down to short-termism from the bean counters. Classes go online for "cost-cutting" reasons: travel, time, accommodation, photocopying etc etc etc. Unfortunately they consistently forget that there's a lot of work involved in putting a course online, and that costs money. But by the time they realise this, they're personally invested in the idea that online is the way forward, and start to justify it to themselves in terms of convenience, flexibility etc and they therefore rationalise that it's better, therefore worth more, and stick a higher price-tag on it (forgetting that it's supposed to be a cost-saving exercise!
Setting up an online programme takes proper long-term planning and budgeting, and well-done to the UC for realising that this is the case, but poor show UC for not actually following through and actually, you know, planning and budgeting....
The best part about being a consultant is that you never ... ever ... never ever ... have to deal with HR. Makes me smile just saying it. :)
There's a lot of very nice young women in HR.
Except in IT, where a lot of companies use HR and other internal functions as the dumping ground for post-maternity-leave female employees when project managers (erroneously) assume that their skills are out-of-date so refuse to take them on....
Liar! From your username it's clear you're an active FBI agent!!
Incidentally, the opposite of being able to hire/fire at will is being able to apply-for/leave a job at will. That is, you're not forced to sign a contract that says you have to stay - you can find/get a better job and leave your current employer no matter what, and at any time.
Opposite? Really? A fair contract gives the employee and employer the same notice period. If you want to be able to get rid of me overnight, I demand the right to leave overnight if something better comes up. So to me these are the same thing, not opposites....
I think overall humans are being put at a disadvantage by operating under the illusion human readable formats are necessary. They should easily be made readable with proper tools the same way IP transactions are made readable by wireshark.
Insiting on human readabilty incurrs large opportunity costs while insuring insane amounts of bandwidth are wasted.
There is no "illusion" involved in the idea of human readable formats, because we all know that ASCII/Unicode characters are the native machine-stored format. It's not an abstract number that is an abstraction of a series of bits with an assumption of a certain endedness, and it is certainly not a series of polarities within a magnetic medium deposited on a glass or polymer disc spinning at high velocity within a hermetically sealed box.
No, Programmers File Editor doesn't translate abstract data into a human-readable form, it just gives me a window onto the untranslated data.
</sarcasm>
I agree with you entirely -- the myth of human-readability has hamstrung the power of computing environments. If I'm writing a mathematical formula that isn't going to change, why not render it to screen as a proper mathematical formula? There's no more readable notation for maths than classical mathematical notation! Entire multiline procedures can be rendered down to something that takes up a couple of lines of screen-space, and more to the point, I've then got the choice of seeing function names or function formulas when I read the code. Easy in-line substitution of functions would help debug complex problems where verifying the full logic of the procedure is required, while still leaving the option of ignoring it with a simple line of FFT(x) instead.
HTML/CSS is a fair text markup language, it's a horrible tool to design user interfaces
Don't underestimate what can be achieved with elements in a well-structured .
Anything else is just aesthetics, which should be a secondary concern.
Should have checked the preview...
<form> elements in a well-structured <table>....
HTML/CSS is a fair text markup language, it's a horrible tool to design user interfaces
Don't underestimate what can be achieved with elements in a well-structured .
Anything else is just aesthetics, which should be a secondary concern.
Why can't the language resemble more readable (English, or native language) rather than obfuscated math
Maybe in part because
(person) | nativelanguage_person != English.
Also, if you think that current programming languages offer too many ways of doing the same thing...
Set A to be the sum of B and C. Take the sum of B and C and store the result in A. Add C to B and call the result A. Make A as long as long as the two items B and C placed end-to-end. etc etc ad nauseum.
So you're going to have to restrict the set of linguistic constructs to be logically equivalent to the set of mathematical constructs in a current language of comparable functionality. From the point of view of the coder, this means that the language is going to become more pedantic, because you're writing a longer string of abitrary symbols, with much more redundancy and far more scope for error.
I'm of the opposite view to you: I believe that the problem is that programming isn't enough like mathematics, and further, that a great many code bugs and design flaws are due to programmers being insufficiently versed in formal maths methods to produce logically consistent code.
the best way to build a site is with a css grid to make your site handle different resolutions
Which is still pretty useless as it doesn't account for actual physical dimensions. A pixel is not an SI unit of size, and sites that look good on the fixed monitors I use are too small for comfortable reading on my 15" widescreen laptop. Until there's some tracking of dot pitch in the OS and browser, any attempt at designing-in sizes is doomed to failure.
a new markup language that's meant to do pixel perfect rendering (HTML is not, but its used that way),
NO!
The point of HTML appears to be too subtle for most designers to grasp: you don't know what my screen looks like. I've got a widescreen laptop, a netbook and a smarphone. Their screens are different sizes and shapes. I don't have what you would call bad eyesight, but most websites are too small on my laptop unless I scale it up. Because the dots on my screen are smaller than the dots on the designers' 20" desktop monitors.
The problem is bad design. A web app is destined for a non-homogenous environment and you will never know what I have or need (or someone with actually visual impairment has or needs) so you need to design with genericity in mind. That's why Java came with an abstract windowing toolkit... which was only a half-way house at best, but was still too subtle for most designers to cope with (what do they need, crayons?!?) and Java too has slid towards the "but it has to look exactly like it does on my screen" primary-school-of-design-thought.
Exactly. They're probably looking for unusual user-agent strings in HTTP headers, which might end up penalising people whose viewers use plugins to download videos for offline use.
Nope. The pope just wanted piece in Europe and there were too many warriors here. So he sent them eastward to kill and be killed. Politics, not religion, was the driving force. God's name was just a convenient excuse.
The government allows it to happen though -- they've banned it as a medical intervention, but they allow it under research. Are the patients paying? That's not how research is supposed to work, in which case the doctors involved should be dragged over hot coals. But even if the patients are "freely choosing", what does the doctor say to them? What is the advice? A doctor who believes in his methods is very persuasive, and something as iffy as brain-burning requires that the doctor really genuinely believes in what he's doing. In fact, I'd say that they'd have to be so personally invested in the efficacy of their treatment that they would be massively predisposed to talking the potential patient into doing it. In such cases, I don't personally believe anyone that has ever met the doctor can truly be considered to have "informed consent", in much the same way that exposure to persuasive press articles can poison a jury to the point that we have strong laws controlling the reporting of criminal cases before trial.
Unfortunately a lot of doctors, in the name of science and scientifically guided moral righteousness, support mandatory circumcisions of male babies. It's not just religious nutjobs who support this.
Bullshit. It's a Jewish tradition that became the norm in America. It's the tradition, mixed with religion, that drives people to try to find rational reasons for docking baby penises. You may as well be saying that the Kallam Cosmological Argument is recounted in the name of logic and reason. Blanket circumcision for reasons of health is no more justified than removing toe nails to prevent the many disorders that can come from them. It's tradition. Parents don't realize the impact, and they want their kid to have a "normal" penis.
He said they do it in the name of science, not because of science, just like the crusades were in the name of God and not because God actually told the Pope to go and slaughter a bunch of foreigners.