A coworker of mine took his kid on an ambulance ride because he passed out from alcohol poisoning. Idiot gave his kid Miller, said "this is beer, now you know, so you just sip on one can and nobody bothers you for not drinking" because it was shitty tasting.
Predictable result. Kid hates alcohol, it tastes like shit. Kid gets around party zone, sees alcohol as a mere vehicle to get drunk, drinks a lot. We teach our kids in the US that alcohol is absolutely bad and should never be touched. Stupid.
I told him he needs to teach that kid to drink. Get some $50 bottles of scottish islay whiskey, some good rum, and some Bass Pale Ale or Dogfish Head Shelter Pale Ale. Sit down one day and sip off an ounce of good whiskey... not the kind of shit you want to guzzle down hard and fast, because it's too good to waste. Beer is also very good, and you should expect to be served worthwhile beer.
When someone hands you cheap vodka from a $20 1.5L bottle and you gag on it, you will know: this shit isn't worth drinking. Too much good whiskey or rum will leave you regarding getting drunk as an annoying side effect of taking too much good liquor at once. Same with beer: too much nasty alcohol, not enough good malty flavor, not drinking this shit.
I'd rather ditch big-budget games and go back to Gameboy Advance. Go play Golden Sun 1 and 2 (if you can get them; they're running for $100-$150 each now). It's 2D, but immersive. The sprites move, turn, nod, shake their heads, wiggle around when they talk. Final Fantasy 6 was, to a lesser degree. These kinds of graphics are easy to do on a small budget, but very captivating and powerful.
She'd be driving a stick, so that wouldn't happen. I mis-stepped one day, slipped off my brake and landed on my accelerator in an auto, almost shot into heavy traffic. I've outright misread the light and gone to punch it when the left turn signal went green (but my through signal was still red)... rev'd the engine, came off the brake, hit the clutch, went into gear and........ no. Clutch stayed down, my foot went back on the brake while my car was hovering there in effective neutral, and I pulled the stick back to neutral position.
I drove an auto for 7 years before Charles Darwin stopped monkeying with me and gave me a good hard shove; after so many near misses, it took a serious near-death experience for me to get off that thing and go learn to drive a stick. After that, I had a hell of a lot more control over the car, and mistakes were a lot more forgiving. There are also tracks you can go to that have silicone-lubricated circuits for practicing serious low-traction skid recovery, in case your tires decide they don't like the rain one day or you're driving in snow or hit patches of ice.
Maybe NASA should have invested in safety training for their workers, and came up with some magic way to make it impossible for them to fall to their deaths. I guess it's hard to figure out if you're not a rocket scientist.
The Xoom tablet displays mail as black text on a white background (as does the iPad 2), not as white text on a black background in the manner of Android smartphones. Thus, the messages are much more readable.
Uh, my phone displays black text on white background; this of course makes text much less readable than white text on black background like most high-contrast settings for visually-impaired users provide.
It's sad i see people get expensive things and go "omg I love him so much." If you keep throwing money at a girl she keeps loving you. What the fuck is that? You can buy women? Fuck that's worthless.
Yeah the notification system needs to give me a clickable bubble. I've had a couple years to get used to it, and I learned how to get to IMs and such, but really... Thunderbird uses its own system, and when I click on the window it pops up I get those messages. This is fucking AWESOME, groundbreaking, amazing... it'd be a huge step forward if the entire notification system behaved like this.
Even slashdot is filled with narrow-minded fools. GPS is used for air navigation (they're pulling other guidance systems out of planes, even; if the GPS goes down they fall out of the sky, autopilot sure as hell won't work), power grid synchronization (for the love of god why? Everything here is in a fixed location!), and God knows what else. There's a lot of "do we really need this?" going on, or "This is nice but what about a failsafe?" as we rip out all traces of old methods because the new method is so cool.
Where I was, there was a mob response if you didn't behave properly; effectively we were forced by mob rule. We're never taught that it's acceptable not to, or stopped from harassing others to do so. We had one person in my class that would stand but not salute or speak, and I never really figured out why until years later.
Didn't you see the word bullshit, spelled "Cloud," in the topic? Unless you see "Sephiroth" with it, you should immediately recognize the fact that nobody knows what they're talking about and they want to sell you garbage.
You can proclaim anything. Soviet Russia and China and Hitler proclaimed liberty, justice, freedom, etc. When the damn thing was written, equality for blacks and women was specifically not wanted.
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
The Pledge was supposed to be quick and to the point. Bellamy designed it to be recited in 15 seconds. As a socialist, he had initially also considered using the words equality and fraternity[6] but decided against it - knowing that the state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans.[8]
Also amusing:
One objection[18] states that a democratic republic built on freedom of dissent should not require its citizens to pledge allegiance to it, [...] Another objection lies in the fact that the people who are most likely to recite the Pledge every day, small children in schools, cannot really give their consent or even completely understand the Pledge they are taking
Most people can't even completely understand the pledge, amusingly most people don't even associate the term pledge with an oath. It's just "something you do" and "you're supposed to."
I'm amused that there's actually controversy over this; but dismayed that most complaints are due to religion and the use of the term "God." The other arguments seem more legitimate, and I really did think I was the only one that noticed.
Yes and it needs to stop. They don't even know what they're saying. Effectively the pledge of allegiance is an oath to blindly serve and follow your government; if they tell you to slaughter innocents it's okay, because you've sworn to that anyway and besides, american lives are way more important than foreign scum.
People don't seem to realize that people have absolutely no vote on what the United States of America does. Only state legislatures have such a thing. The USA Federal Government speaks with the states; the legislature is elected by the people, but does whatever the hell it really wants. They have no obligation to listen to the voice of the people, thus not a democracy.
Bottom line is I'm going to interview both candidates or neither. There will never be a situation where I interview only the candidate with the AS. That's not to say that the AS was a waste. All I'm trying to say is that it's not going to make or break a resume, in my mind.
But a candidate who spent 4 years getting a BS in programming and never wrote one line of code for any practical application gets the +1 for review, while a "hire me, please" candidate gets sent away?
That, of course, is the difference between an AS and a BS. AS gets as far as data structures, which is great for most programming tasks. An AS with solid experience is a strong resume for a programming position. Of course, so is a resume with solid experience and no post-secondary education.
This is my point. The BS carries a huge amount of theory, but it's all BS if you have nfc what you're doing. The guy with an AS will have a better intrinsic understanding of what he's doing, having had knowledge and experience both combined; whereas the guy without the AS will "have a feel for it" but, unless he's done some self-study, will be lacking a lot. He may be useful, and in fact you may want to hire him and then pay for his education because it will definitely pay off; but the education is valuable well before you're in the 300 level range.
I would love to study at the 300 and 400 level, but I don't want to pay for it and can't find a community college that goes beyond the 200 level; but I think my community college education is quite valuable. I'm not discounting higher level study; just saying that, as you said, banking entirely on a degree is silly and it's not a magic piece of paper that says you actually know what you're doing. You don't know the game until you play the game, regardless of how many books you've read about the game.
It is of value, of course. An associate's degree is cheap, and leaves you a lot of play at the end with "I need X Y and Z and can't go full time because I can't take them concurrently" (for whatever reason, i.e. 3 maths, DO NOT). Electives can be played with to round out your education in a very customized way (unlike public grade school where they decide what you should learn). Electives and extra courses can be combined to get "certificates" (useless) or come close to dual-degrees, which leaves you a few classes away from just getting them anyway so go for it.
The coursework in 200 level classes is easy enough to work part time (or full time, if you can stomach it) while going to class. This means you can get an okay foundation with personal experience and a little education, then start working something very entry level while continuing to study. You can shape and target your studies to match your actual work experience, and your experience helps you understand the college classes.
Once you have an AA, you should have no debt; work experience; and a degree that says, "Well, I did something." That you have work experience somewhat makes up for the fact that you don't have a BS. You know it's true: BS programmers with 4 year degrees and no experience; networking students with a CCNA but no experience; you can't even get a job as a doctor or get a legal license as a lawyer without nursing and apprenticeship experience. Programmers with experience and 2 years of compsci study are functionally better, and more capable; networking kids that have passed the Net+ and spent the lats 4 years as cable monkeys are vaguely useful, moreso if they've studied a little data communications and can diagram a network topology all on their own (research, ask the right people questions, pull configurations, put it together... if you can do that, you're worthwhile).
Getting an AA is not worthless, in the same way that getting a BS is not an employment strategy. If your resume says "BS in software engineering; hire me, please! -- Balki" then you will get binned in File 13. If you have a weak education, say AA in programming but with some decent prior experience building Web applications, database applications, working on open source projects, etc, you will get a second look at least. If you're ALL experience, you might get a second look too; but the education says, "I can talk at least competently and formally on the subject, to a degree." It says you won't be totally lost with the foreign language your masters-degree peers are speaking when they talk about your field.
I honestly wish I got more formal foundational experience, maybe doing software quality assurance testing. I'm good at that because I can and will break shit you give me. It tells people, "Hey, this guy finds things nobody else finds, and knows how to explain what he finds to people so shit gets done." That means I either understand what's happening or I can communicate well enough to explain it to someone who does; and maybe both. It would be extremely valuable. If you can pull it off, landing a job where you're skilled enough to go from "jr." to "Sr." (trust me, I could hit Sr. Quality Assurance Specialist at a firm that differentiated, it's just something that clicks with me) is probably worth more than getting "BS" instead of "AS" on your resume. It says you're both notably skilled and a hard worker; you don't get there by waiting for someone to give you work.
I never forget. In fact, I haven't studied Hiragana since 2 years ago, but every time I see Hiragana on food products at the store I recognize more somehow; but that is odd. I never forget spoken language though; when I was doing german, I would do a lesson once, stop for 3 months, then do the NEXT lesson starting cold.
Learning to read and write is hard. I am about as skilled with American cursive script as I am with Hiragana.
Yeah, or get the book used, etc... oh wait, no, they released three new editions this year, with renumbered pages and rearranged problems, and professors assign from the book so you really need the book (or photocopy problem sets from classmates). No, you need the new one.
Slashdot Mirror
A coworker of mine took his kid on an ambulance ride because he passed out from alcohol poisoning. Idiot gave his kid Miller, said "this is beer, now you know, so you just sip on one can and nobody bothers you for not drinking" because it was shitty tasting.
Predictable result. Kid hates alcohol, it tastes like shit. Kid gets around party zone, sees alcohol as a mere vehicle to get drunk, drinks a lot. We teach our kids in the US that alcohol is absolutely bad and should never be touched. Stupid.
I told him he needs to teach that kid to drink. Get some $50 bottles of scottish islay whiskey, some good rum, and some Bass Pale Ale or Dogfish Head Shelter Pale Ale. Sit down one day and sip off an ounce of good whiskey... not the kind of shit you want to guzzle down hard and fast, because it's too good to waste. Beer is also very good, and you should expect to be served worthwhile beer.
When someone hands you cheap vodka from a $20 1.5L bottle and you gag on it, you will know: this shit isn't worth drinking. Too much good whiskey or rum will leave you regarding getting drunk as an annoying side effect of taking too much good liquor at once. Same with beer: too much nasty alcohol, not enough good malty flavor, not drinking this shit.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=golden+sun&x=0&y=0
I'd rather ditch big-budget games and go back to Gameboy Advance. Go play Golden Sun 1 and 2 (if you can get them; they're running for $100-$150 each now). It's 2D, but immersive. The sprites move, turn, nod, shake their heads, wiggle around when they talk. Final Fantasy 6 was, to a lesser degree. These kinds of graphics are easy to do on a small budget, but very captivating and powerful.
She'd be driving a stick, so that wouldn't happen. I mis-stepped one day, slipped off my brake and landed on my accelerator in an auto, almost shot into heavy traffic. I've outright misread the light and gone to punch it when the left turn signal went green (but my through signal was still red) ... rev'd the engine, came off the brake, hit the clutch, went into gear and........ no. Clutch stayed down, my foot went back on the brake while my car was hovering there in effective neutral, and I pulled the stick back to neutral position.
I drove an auto for 7 years before Charles Darwin stopped monkeying with me and gave me a good hard shove; after so many near misses, it took a serious near-death experience for me to get off that thing and go learn to drive a stick. After that, I had a hell of a lot more control over the car, and mistakes were a lot more forgiving. There are also tracks you can go to that have silicone-lubricated circuits for practicing serious low-traction skid recovery, in case your tires decide they don't like the rain one day or you're driving in snow or hit patches of ice.
Maybe NASA should have invested in safety training for their workers, and came up with some magic way to make it impossible for them to fall to their deaths. I guess it's hard to figure out if you're not a rocket scientist.
Death was not instant. He was speeding down to the ground at terminal velocity when Charles Darwin appeared to him, pointed, and laughed.
I have no doubt he died doing what he loved.
Skydiving.
The Xoom tablet displays mail as black text on a white background (as does the iPad 2), not as white text on a black background in the manner of Android smartphones. Thus, the messages are much more readable.
Uh, my phone displays black text on white background; this of course makes text much less readable than white text on black background like most high-contrast settings for visually-impaired users provide.
It's sad i see people get expensive things and go "omg I love him so much." If you keep throwing money at a girl she keeps loving you. What the fuck is that? You can buy women? Fuck that's worthless.
The Amnion taught them how to do it.
Yeah the notification system needs to give me a clickable bubble. I've had a couple years to get used to it, and I learned how to get to IMs and such, but really... Thunderbird uses its own system, and when I click on the window it pops up I get those messages. This is fucking AWESOME, groundbreaking, amazing... it'd be a huge step forward if the entire notification system behaved like this.
Even slashdot is filled with narrow-minded fools. GPS is used for air navigation (they're pulling other guidance systems out of planes, even; if the GPS goes down they fall out of the sky, autopilot sure as hell won't work), power grid synchronization (for the love of god why? Everything here is in a fixed location!), and God knows what else. There's a lot of "do we really need this?" going on, or "This is nice but what about a failsafe?" as we rip out all traces of old methods because the new method is so cool.
The exact argument is we're becoming too comfortable with tech and leaving off old-school thinking.
It's easy: the fearless leader waves the flag to remind you he is its guardian, and you do what he says.
Second Place: The First Loser
Where I was, there was a mob response if you didn't behave properly; effectively we were forced by mob rule. We're never taught that it's acceptable not to, or stopped from harassing others to do so. We had one person in my class that would stand but not salute or speak, and I never really figured out why until years later.
Didn't you see the word bullshit, spelled "Cloud," in the topic? Unless you see "Sephiroth" with it, you should immediately recognize the fact that nobody knows what they're talking about and they want to sell you garbage.
You can proclaim anything. Soviet Russia and China and Hitler proclaimed liberty, justice, freedom, etc. When the damn thing was written, equality for blacks and women was specifically not wanted.
Bellamy's original Pledge read as follows:[7]
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
The Pledge was supposed to be quick and to the point. Bellamy designed it to be recited in 15 seconds. As a socialist, he had initially also considered using the words equality and fraternity[6] but decided against it - knowing that the state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans.[8]
Also amusing:
One objection[18] states that a democratic republic built on freedom of dissent should not require its citizens to pledge allegiance to it, [...] Another objection lies in the fact that the people who are most likely to recite the Pledge every day, small children in schools, cannot really give their consent or even completely understand the Pledge they are taking
Most people can't even completely understand the pledge, amusingly most people don't even associate the term pledge with an oath. It's just "something you do" and "you're supposed to."
I'm amused that there's actually controversy over this; but dismayed that most complaints are due to religion and the use of the term "God." The other arguments seem more legitimate, and I really did think I was the only one that noticed.
if you can keep it. Franklin and Orwell would have gotten along well. Maybe disagreed a lot, but gotten along quite well.
Yes and it needs to stop. They don't even know what they're saying. Effectively the pledge of allegiance is an oath to blindly serve and follow your government; if they tell you to slaughter innocents it's okay, because you've sworn to that anyway and besides, american lives are way more important than foreign scum.
People don't seem to realize that people have absolutely no vote on what the United States of America does. Only state legislatures have such a thing. The USA Federal Government speaks with the states; the legislature is elected by the people, but does whatever the hell it really wants. They have no obligation to listen to the voice of the people, thus not a democracy.
Bottom line is I'm going to interview both candidates or neither. There will never be a situation where I interview only the candidate with the AS. That's not to say that the AS was a waste. All I'm trying to say is that it's not going to make or break a resume, in my mind.
But a candidate who spent 4 years getting a BS in programming and never wrote one line of code for any practical application gets the +1 for review, while a "hire me, please" candidate gets sent away?
That, of course, is the difference between an AS and a BS. AS gets as far as data structures, which is great for most programming tasks. An AS with solid experience is a strong resume for a programming position. Of course, so is a resume with solid experience and no post-secondary education.
This is my point. The BS carries a huge amount of theory, but it's all BS if you have nfc what you're doing. The guy with an AS will have a better intrinsic understanding of what he's doing, having had knowledge and experience both combined; whereas the guy without the AS will "have a feel for it" but, unless he's done some self-study, will be lacking a lot. He may be useful, and in fact you may want to hire him and then pay for his education because it will definitely pay off; but the education is valuable well before you're in the 300 level range.
I would love to study at the 300 and 400 level, but I don't want to pay for it and can't find a community college that goes beyond the 200 level; but I think my community college education is quite valuable. I'm not discounting higher level study; just saying that, as you said, banking entirely on a degree is silly and it's not a magic piece of paper that says you actually know what you're doing. You don't know the game until you play the game, regardless of how many books you've read about the game.
It is of value, of course. An associate's degree is cheap, and leaves you a lot of play at the end with "I need X Y and Z and can't go full time because I can't take them concurrently" (for whatever reason, i.e. 3 maths, DO NOT). Electives can be played with to round out your education in a very customized way (unlike public grade school where they decide what you should learn). Electives and extra courses can be combined to get "certificates" (useless) or come close to dual-degrees, which leaves you a few classes away from just getting them anyway so go for it.
The coursework in 200 level classes is easy enough to work part time (or full time, if you can stomach it) while going to class. This means you can get an okay foundation with personal experience and a little education, then start working something very entry level while continuing to study. You can shape and target your studies to match your actual work experience, and your experience helps you understand the college classes.
Once you have an AA, you should have no debt; work experience; and a degree that says, "Well, I did something." That you have work experience somewhat makes up for the fact that you don't have a BS. You know it's true: BS programmers with 4 year degrees and no experience; networking students with a CCNA but no experience; you can't even get a job as a doctor or get a legal license as a lawyer without nursing and apprenticeship experience. Programmers with experience and 2 years of compsci study are functionally better, and more capable; networking kids that have passed the Net+ and spent the lats 4 years as cable monkeys are vaguely useful, moreso if they've studied a little data communications and can diagram a network topology all on their own (research, ask the right people questions, pull configurations, put it together... if you can do that, you're worthwhile).
Getting an AA is not worthless, in the same way that getting a BS is not an employment strategy. If your resume says "BS in software engineering; hire me, please! -- Balki" then you will get binned in File 13. If you have a weak education, say AA in programming but with some decent prior experience building Web applications, database applications, working on open source projects, etc, you will get a second look at least. If you're ALL experience, you might get a second look too; but the education says, "I can talk at least competently and formally on the subject, to a degree." It says you won't be totally lost with the foreign language your masters-degree peers are speaking when they talk about your field.
I honestly wish I got more formal foundational experience, maybe doing software quality assurance testing. I'm good at that because I can and will break shit you give me. It tells people, "Hey, this guy finds things nobody else finds, and knows how to explain what he finds to people so shit gets done." That means I either understand what's happening or I can communicate well enough to explain it to someone who does; and maybe both. It would be extremely valuable. If you can pull it off, landing a job where you're skilled enough to go from "jr." to "Sr." (trust me, I could hit Sr. Quality Assurance Specialist at a firm that differentiated, it's just something that clicks with me) is probably worth more than getting "BS" instead of "AS" on your resume. It says you're both notably skilled and a hard worker; you don't get there by waiting for someone to give you work.
then forget and re-learn.
I never forget. In fact, I haven't studied Hiragana since 2 years ago, but every time I see Hiragana on food products at the store I recognize more somehow; but that is odd. I never forget spoken language though; when I was doing german, I would do a lesson once, stop for 3 months, then do the NEXT lesson starting cold.
Learning to read and write is hard. I am about as skilled with American cursive script as I am with Hiragana.
Yeah, or get the book used, etc ... oh wait, no, they released three new editions this year, with renumbered pages and rearranged problems, and professors assign from the book so you really need the book (or photocopy problem sets from classmates). No, you need the new one.