I can definitely see the advantages of getting more information to your troops, but turning them into walking blackberries may not be the best way to do it in combat.
Not to worry—this is the U.S. Army we're talking about. In the U.S. Army, information always flows up, never down. So there's no danger that the "networked soldier of the future" will be awash in too much information. Instead, he'll be deluged with the stuff that does flow down the pipes of command...orders.
Yes, I realize that's the worst possible combination, but that's how it's going to be: the colonels and generals will have all the latest intel gleaned from the satellites and drones flying overhead the battlefield—and probably the webcams built into each soldier's helmet...but the grunt still won't know diddly. He'll just get the usual flood of brain-dead orders issued by some (br)asshat sitting in an air-conditioned HQ who thinks that watching stuff on video means he knows everything. As you say, front-line leadership is the crux of the matter, but that is not something valued by the careerist officers who bloat the Army's officer corps.
Well, at least there's still the traditional remedy: "What's that sir? I can't hear you sir (sound of something scratchy being rubbed over a mike) you're...up".
WTF? Shouldn't the parent be modded up for humor, not "interesting"? It makes as little sense as the TFA, so I assumed...well...maybe both were written by the same computer.
I totally oppose penalties/benefits for aspects of our biology we can't control. I do, however, support such incentives for those aspects controllable by lifestyle choices. If you have bum genes for your heart, you can't change that. If you weigh 350 (and don't measure 7'4"), lay off the Big Macs. Simple as that.
I totally oppose even getting started on talking about "penalties" for how people live their lives. What has gone wrong so that apparently intelligent, apparently serious people can propose levying penalties on how much another individual eats? If that doesn't negate personal freedom, I don't know what does. Don't you see the obvious corollaries? What about your behaviors? Do you do risky things sometimes? No? Are you sure? There are mighty few people who live their lives so carefully that they are immune from penalties under such a system—and I'd really hate to have to spend any amount of time in their company, for they must be the most boring people in the world.
As usual, this door swings both ways, and it doesn't matter whether the health care is universal or privatized...any kind of medical insurance raises these issues.
Private health insurance doesn't have a problem with this—private insurance companies just price health insurance out of reach of people who might possibly need it. If by "public health insurance" you mean "sharing the risk equally", then you may, I suppose, want to penalize people who drive up the cost of your health insurance premiums. But once you start doing this, you are fast receding down a very slippery slope. I, for one, feel that people with lower I.Q.s should be charged more...after all, their stupidity makes it more likely that they will hurt themselves, thus making them poor risks.
Judging from the article summary, the porn was found among the "internet temporary files" on the laptop. In other words, the images were cached by the browser. This could and would happen if there was some background program running that connects automatically to these sites, and the user would never see the images. (How often do you go look to see what's in your cache?
Here's a question for you: as I understand it, Firefox follows links on any page you're reading and loads them in the background. Suppose you hit a site that contains links to child porn—possibly even invisible links. Could Firefox pre-load these pages? If so, wouldn't they show up in your cache? —I'm not saying that Firefox does this; I'm asking.
I couldn't agree more. Even if a person is guilty, I don't think they should, in effect, have a brand burned into their forehead. They should, depending on the offense and the discretion of the court, be placed under permanent surveillance as a condition of their release. (I'm talking about violent rapists or people who actually sexually assaulted children—not just watched child porn.) This has nothing to do with paying any alleged debt to society, but with protecting children and adult women from rapists or exploitation. But the surveillance shouldn't take the form of making life impossible for the convicted offender. If they're truly that dangerous, they should not be let out of jail. Ever.
The biggest problem I see with the treatment of "sex offenders" in the U.S. is that not only are our courts fallible, and sometimes convict the innocent, but the definition of what constitutes a "sex offense" is far broader than most people know. For example, if a teen-ager over a certain age has sex with a girl who is a year younger than he is, he may be classified as a "sex offender".
The U.S. is just hysterical on the whole topic of "the children". I once had a friend who was accused by his wife of molesting his two and three year old daughters as part of the divorce proceedings. I knew the individuals involved, and I am completely convinced that the guy was innocent. (The sum total of the charges was this: his ex caught him napping with the kids; she said his hand was resting in one daughter's groin...well sheesh, the guy was asleep.) He wasn't actually brought up on criminal charges—however, the mere threat of such charges meant that he automatically lost the right to all contact with his children (not to mention being financially screwed in every way possible by his ex.). I guess he was lucky...this was back in the eighties, and I think may "zero tolerance" hadn't set in yet.
I'm curious: what makes XP "downhill" from 2000? Because I used both, and XP feels like a cleaner version of 2000 (once you turn off theming, anyway).
So you judge an OS by the quality of its GUI? By that measure, I'd say Win 2000 wins (the two OSs pretty well come out even on every other measure). XP definitely had a far more irritating GUI than Win 2000. I don't remember what "theming" is, but I remember having to:
Turn off balloon "help"
Turn off "notifications" (balloons that nag you from the task bar (I think that required a reg edit)
Reverting to Windows "classic"
folders
windows
menus
Turning off the wonderful "firewall"
Telling XP not to hide "inactive" icons in the tool bar.
Generally finding every option that tells XP to STFU
Only time I ever found a reason to prefer XP over 2000 was when I was messing with wireless, and learned that it was a pain to support anything better than WEP encryption on 2000 (something MS could have easily done in a patch). Only reason I've been paying for XP these days is that it will be supported with fixes for all those security holes longer than 2000.
I'm going to have to build a new PC for She Who Must Be Obeyed in the next couple of months, so I rushed to Newegg to buy an OEM copy of XP—for $139. Bah. Maybe I should have just bought Dell PC for her. But She wants another one of those cute little Shuttles.
I'm bringing myself up to speed on nix (hey, Ubuntu Hardy Heron works!), but SWMBO is something of a support nightmare—the consequences of failure are unthinkable. I'm simply not ready to find equivalents of all her favorite applications and get them working on Ubuntu (is there even an equivalent of Turbo Tax for nixes?). And SWMBO reacts violently to any sort of change...I know how to make XP's desktop look like the Win 2000 She knows and loves, but I think it would take some work to pull off that same trick with Ubuntu.
...In the ancient Greek case, we're talking about using literacy as a substitute for memorisation. Did that cause our memory to wither?
Yes. Memory is a skill that can be improved by practice. In the ancient world, having a prodigious memory was the mark of an educated man. This ability was acquired through constant practice. In fact, education consisted largely of rote memorization right through the nineteenth century—well past the introduction of writing.
Transportation is used as a substitute for walking places. Did that cause our health to wither?
Absolutely—if you equate physical fitness with "health". Before motorized transport became common, almost everyone walked wherever they had to go. Today, only fitness nuts walk (or jog or whatever). There were no couch potatoes in the 16th century (unless you count the few aristocrats who could get people to carry them around).
Calculators are used as a substitute for mental arithmetic. Did that cause our arithmetic skills to wither?
Yes. Again, the ability to do arithmetic in your head is a skill that can be acquired only through practice. Almost all the shop-clerks these days can't compute change—they just go by what the cash register tells them.
Rhetorical questions aren't a terribly good argumentative technique—unless you truly know the answers before you ask them.
You might have argued that despite the weaknesses introduced by these technological advances, they were beneficial because technology also brought with it compensations that more than make up for the debits. Writing made accessible much more knowledge than any one person could ever hope to memorize; motorized transport allowed not only personal mobility, but the creation of an industrial society; calculators remove much of the tedium from keeping your checkbook balanced. (And computers allow computations that could not be done at all by even the most talented arithmeticians.)
Like all these, Google is a two-edged sword, and as many have noted, much depends not on the tool, but upon how it's used. I absolutely love Google. Gone are the days when an obscure question would nag at me, and I wouldn't find the answer for years. If I want to know the words of a song or poem, if I want to know what Project Orion was, or if I want to find out how to make my own UTP/Ethernet/Cat5 cables, I just turn to Google. Curiosity has never been so easily satisfied.
The deleterious effects of Google are, however, quite serious. There are three:
Shallowness: Mostly, the web gives simple answers; people get a lot of results, so they skim instead of reading them thoroughly, as they would a reference book.
Unverifiability:It is very difficult to verify the degree of authoritativeness of any information found on the web; the amount of false, misleading, vague, or incomprehensible "information" on the web probably exceeds that which is true and useful.
Transience: Though it's seldom mentioned, this is the worst weakness of the web as a source of information—you simply can't be sure that anything you find today will be there tomorrow. That means it's pointless to cite a web link as the source of your information for anything you write (on the web or otherwise). You simply can't rely on that link remaining stable for any length of time.
It's crucial to understand that none of these three weaknesses should be a serious problem for anyone who has the fundamentals of a proper education. An educated person knows how to locate substantive sources for serious research, and has learned the skill of reading closely. An educated person can think critically, and will not simply accept unsubstantiated statements as fact. An educated person knows that the web, as it is today, is simply not a substitute for a research library
You're exactly right—the reason I don't own a Kindle now is that their content is so tightly controlled as to make it nearly worthless. I can't read a Kindle book on my computer, or any other device except for the one Kindle I bought it for. I might pay 50 cents to rent content under those conditions...but Amazon wants a lot more. As usual, DRM taketh away, but giveth nothing of value. That's not capitalism, it's self-destructive stupidity.
What gets me is that Amazon shows complete ignorance of how readers think and act. They could potentially make tons o' money with this product, but their DRM paranoia has crippled their thinking.
I read a lot of fantasy and SF. When I find a good author, I loan the book to my friends. If my friends like the book, they buy every other book that author has written (often from Amazon); they watch for new books by that author, and buy those too. They loan books to me; I do the same thing. The DRM idiots look at this, and what do they see? Piracy! If they could, they'd stop me from loaning or giving books to my friends. Well, with DRM, they can do exactly that. I hope they're happy.
If Amazon were smart (and pigs could ice skate), they might do something like this: First of all, let Kindles talk to each other—make it possible to transfer a book from one Kindle to another. When you transfer a book, it gets wiped from your Kindle, just like you don't have a book that you've given away (or sold) any more. That means you could loan or sell your Kindle book just like a paper book. Amazon would get the advantage of letting readers help market their product, just like they always have—and people who buy Kindle e-books would feel like they actually owned something. Give me, in addition, a contractual guarantee that I'll always be able to read the eBook on some device, and I would seriously consider the Kindle concept as a supplement to my collection of paper books.
Germany is a place that knows what wiretaps and domestic spying is all about. Everyone's grandfather can tell them what the Nazis did to...
Actually, the explanation may be a bit less dramatic than that. German taxes are very high—and avoiding them is a widely practiced art. For example, there's a large black market in skilled labor. If you have in a plumber, carpenter or painter to do some fix-up work, you generally call someone recommended by a friend, and you pay cash. There's a substantial discount for cash transactions between people who trust each other. Inheritance taxes are quite high, so a lot of Germans hold gold or other valuables, and simply tell their heirs where the keys are.
Naturally, you are not going to want to talk about this stuff over the phone when you know that the government is listening. My 75 year old aunt who lives in Germany recently hung up on me when I innocently brooked one of these subjects during a phone conversation recently.
She later casually mentioned that there's a new German law that all phone conversations will be recorded and retained for a certain period of time...to deter the terrorists, of course. I thought I was paranoid, but I guess I still have something to learn from the old lady.
Someone like Tiger Woods who's something like a third white, a third black, and a third asian? He's black. Even if someone is the kind of black or mixed race that would pass for another kind of minority, he's considered black.
That's only half the story. There are a lot of blacks who don't think Obama is "black enough", so the concept of "racial purity" is not restricted to "whites". (Personally, as a member of the Sorta Pink People, I think the whole race thing is bogus).
You might want to rethink your analogy by the way...it could be construed as racially offensive by some.
Oh, I think you and I agree on the wonderfulness of space—and I agree that it is the end, not the means to anything. (I've been reading science fiction for a long time.) The problem is that this potential wealth is of no interest to most people on Earth right now...and if you think about it, "space wealth" is never going to benefit people on Earth very much. You talk about "drop shipping" stuff from orbit. Um...that's usually called a "meteor impact", and it's not exactly something you want happening regularly in your back yard, trust me. And that's assuming that the "shipper" has good intentions.
No, I think that the wealth up there will benefit mainly the people who go live up there. I'm hoping that some day there will be such people, but it doesn't look like it's happening any time soon. Back in the eighteenth century, any group of disgruntled individuals could build or hire a ship to take them to the New World. But we, the disgruntled of today, are not able to escape so easily. About how much chance do you think there is that a group of private individuals would be allowed to build an Orion? And no government really has the incentive to do so.
Of course, if we learn one thing from the past, it's that things change. We need that initial rationale to get large-scale space travel off the ground, and get a critical mass of people into space to start a self-sustaining spacefaring culture. (Two puns back there, for the price of one.) Maybe someone will think of something to make people think there's sound economic reasons for building one those huge things...or maybe an imminent asteroid impact will provide the needed incentive.
Psst...did you know there's a fountain of youth on Mars? And a city of gold on Ceres.
Orion has sheer scale going for it. We're talking payloads in the thousands of tons here! I don't think the alternatives you mention will deliver anything like the economies of scale possible with Orion. Besides, the notion of propelling yourself through space by exploding nukes behind yourself has an inimitable brutal beauty unequaled by any other scheme I've ever heard of.
I'd be more than willing to absorb the risk of a launching a couple or three Orions, with the purpose of building a space-based factory to make even more (and bigger) Orions. It's not that expensive to boost people into space, but getting the tooling for a space-based factory into orbit (around the Earth or somewhere else in the Solar System) to build truly huge ships would be a pain with chemical rockets. Once the ships are available, people could go up into LEO, rendezvous with a rocket and commence living in space.
Oh yeah, we need a capitalist rationale for the whole thing. How about this for starters: old folks' homes in space! Yes, you geezers whining about your athritis, forget about those short joyrides—you can now cough up a few million bucks to help finance a zero gravity retirement home for yourself! Let's see...how old is Bill Gates these days?
Robotics challenges are usually somehow tied to military objectives such as navigating a certain terrain, rarely do they focus on something constructive and creative.
So navigation is a military technology? Of course warships have to be capable of navigation, but that's kind of like saying that because infantrymen must walk long distances, hiking is a form of military training. Nowhere in the article does it say this is a DARPA project...but even if they were kicking in some money, remember that your ability to post your comments is based on a "military" research project. If you don't remember ARPANET, Google it.
Of course, we should be wary—the favored contestant appears to be a product of that infamous think-tank of military inventiveness, Aberystwyth University in Wales! And you think devising a robot that knows how to navigate a sailboat across an ocean is trivial, and uncreative? Obviously, you've never sailed a boat across a pond.
Personally, the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline was that maybe we're getting close to the day when huge robotic sailing ships transfer cargo across the sea lanes, instead of those nasty diesel-burning freighters we have today. I think that would be kinda cool...and useful, even.
One wonders why you would still work in a place like that?
Because there are factors to consider other than my physical environment—such as the need to keep a paycheck coming in, and the difficulty of getting any other job at age 60. My immediate goal is to make it through July, which will be my 5 year anniversary, thus making me vested in their retirement fund. That means I get to take the accumulated pittance with me when they lay me off (I'm sure I'm marked for execution at the next possible opportunity). I'm sad that my career is ending in this place...things looked a lot better 20 years ago.
I'm sorry, sir, but your entry is disqualified. The heading clearly says "Worst workplaces in tech". What you describe—though it involves fearful mechanical devices, noxious chemicals, unspeakable offal, reckless driving, and odious vermin—is not "tech" according to the conventional notion applied here on SlashDot. How many computers did your "workplace" have, eh?
Now, if I had known that non or low-tech workplaces were eligible, I might have trotted out some of my more lurid mini-careers (such as repainting cans of Agent Orange for the U.S. Forest service so that people wouldn't know what we were using to keep the roads clear...this was the same "workplace" in which my supervisor set my boots on fire with a drip-torch while I was wearing them, but that would be no more germane than your entry.
These are the worst workplaces? Maybe in California. I've worked in much worse. My current employer (whose CEO is among the top ten best-compensated in the US) has me working in a building in which every time it rains, the roof runs. (Not leaks, the water runs down in streams.) They keep trying to find bigger buckets.
We do have our own cubicles--made of what appears to be moldy cardboard—and they match the carpet exactly. We have nothing like a kitchenette or breakroom. If you want coffee, you have to go get water in the restrooms. Of course, the sinks are always overflowing because some stupid jerk empties the remainder of his breakfast mush, ramen, smelly fish stew, or whatever into them every day.
The lighting is typical 1950s era: harsh overhead fluorescents that would quickly blind you if you tried to work with a monitor under them. So we ask to have them turned off. They are glad to do this, because it saves on electricity bills. The drawback is that this leaves our environment utterly troglodytic ; the advantage is that we can't see our environment).
It could be worse, of course—I could have been working in the building that sank. No, it didn't sink completely—it's just sort of The Leaning Tower of Dallas. (Actually, it's in Irving, but who's heard of Irving?) The good thing is that they managed to get most of the people out (a triumph of organizational genius, considering that the sinking occurred in a mere decade), the bad news is they moved them in with us. Our warren of cubical cells is now so overcrowded that collision is a serious factor in deciding whether or not to go to the bathroom to make coffee.
It continues to amaze me how the military procurement machine goes on designing and buying immensely complex weapons that have no conceivable use and do not improve the security of this country (the U.S.A.) one whit...and nobody thinks this is strange. Sure, it's a helluva pretty plane...take up a collection and build your own if you like, but I'm so damn sick of my tax money going to these things.
We do not need an air superiority fighter/bomber/sigint/ewar platform like this. (Notice how it does everything...baaaad sign.) We do not have an enemy that makes its employment worthwhile, nor are we remotely likely to become involved in any war with a technologically sophisticated enemy for the simple reason that such an enemy will have nukes, and people with nukes do not fight other people with nukes.
What we really need to spend some money on is people: we need to attract and keep competent officers and soldiers in the Army (or the USMC, if you've given up on the Army), we need to pay these people what they're worth, give them decent benefits, and raise personnel standards throughout. That would take a lot less money than our current high-tech fixation, and would buy us a lot more security. But it's not about security, is it?
Which raises the question in my mind: Why is this about 'IT' bullies? I don't see anything here that restricts the situation to IT. This sort of exchange could happen in any discipline.
Yeah, but in IT at least they keep it verbal. I once had a boss who set my boots on fire. Yes, while I was wearing them. I was on a Forest Service crew. We were burning slash using drip-torches (think watering can that spurts flames instead of water, filled with a 50/50 mixture of diesel and gasoline), and he walked up to me and doused my boots. This was part of his clever plan to make me quit because he didn't like people who had more than a 5th grade education.
The story ended well for me, though. He finally outright demanded that I be fired, but when his boss found out what he'd done (the rest of the crew hated this jerk), I got a nice cushy job in the warehouse, instead. So every morning, I'd be warming my hands by the pot-bellied stove, while he and the crew were getting their tools to go out and work in the rain and the mud, and I'd smile and give him a cheery hello.
Of course, then I ruined things by going back to school and spending the rest of my life working in offices. Well, at least it's warm, doesn't rain, and I just get verbal abuse.
To replace your 4:3 20" monitor you'd need a... 4:3 20" monitor. Do you realize that the 24" widescreen monitors are basically (but not exactly, due to different pixel sizes) 20" ones with some extra width? Not only are they not smaller, or even the same, they're a good deal larger in every way possible. Perhaps some numbers will make this perfectly clear:
No, they won't, because this is not about numbers, it's about perception of value, marketing gimmicks, and ergonomic preferences (or idiosyncracies, if you will). I like the 4:3 ratio. It makes sense to me. I read a lot of documents on my screen, and extra width does me no good at all. The human eye can only cope with lines of so many characters, so the width that I'm going to display my documents at is going to remain the same, no matter how wide my screen. But if my vertical resolution is decreased, I'm going to have to do more scrolling. So if I replace my 4:3 20" monitor, I'm going to have to get what's marketed as a 24" monitor, just so I won't feel like I've downgraded. Since I really don't care about the extra pixels on either side, I'm being forced to buy more pixels than I really want. I think this is dumb; my monitor is not for watching movies, dammit! I'm getting my chainsaw and cutting off those extra pixels, and sending them back to the manufacturer!
You realize that all but one of the monitors you linked to cost over $900, right? The cheap one is probably on the verge of being discontinued. It's interesting the manufacturers still think there's a market for high-end monitors in the old 4:3 format...the implication is that people who are "professionals"—i.e., who know what they're doing—might have reasons to prefer this format. Too bad my employer is too cheap to spring for a $1000 monitor. I'd certainly never buy one with my own money for home use.
Perhaps a better way to put it would have been "wide-screens are a marketing gimmick to make people pay more for what they think is a larger monitor". Monitors are still advertised in terms of diagonal inches. People are supposed to think that a "wide-screen" 22" monitor is bigger than that old-fashioned squarish 20" monitor. To the geometry-challenged, this is a difficult concept. In fact, to replace my 20" 1600x1200 monitor today, I'd have to get what they are calling a 24" monitor—which gives me that 1920x1200 screen you are talking about. When I bought that monitor about 3 or so years ago, it cost about $500. Guess what the new wide-screen 24 inchers go for? You guessed it: $500. Unless making LCDs hasn't gotten any cheaper in the last 3 years, somebody is gouging.
As for the "high end business models", I haven't seen any around. Where I work, everyone is getting the new, improved, 22" wide-screens. Which is why I'm living with my work monitor (also a 20" 3:4) that's gotten a bit temperamental—the colors get weird when I first turn it on—instead of complaining and getting stuck with what I call a narrow screen monitor.
I'm glad somebody mentioned this so I can finally rant about it here. My wife has informed me she's tired of hearing about it every time I look at the Fry's ads over breakfast.
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Not to worry—this is the U.S. Army we're talking about. In the U.S. Army, information always flows up, never down. So there's no danger that the "networked soldier of the future" will be awash in too much information. Instead, he'll be deluged with the stuff that does flow down the pipes of command...orders.
Yes, I realize that's the worst possible combination, but that's how it's going to be: the colonels and generals will have all the latest intel gleaned from the satellites and drones flying overhead the battlefield—and probably the webcams built into each soldier's helmet...but the grunt still won't know diddly. He'll just get the usual flood of brain-dead orders issued by some (br)asshat sitting in an air-conditioned HQ who thinks that watching stuff on video means he knows everything. As you say, front-line leadership is the crux of the matter, but that is not something valued by the careerist officers who bloat the Army's officer corps.
Well, at least there's still the traditional remedy: "What's that sir? I can't hear you sir (sound of something scratchy being rubbed over a mike) you're...up".
WTF? Shouldn't the parent be modded up for humor, not "interesting"? It makes as little sense as the TFA, so I assumed...well...maybe both were written by the same computer.
I totally oppose even getting started on talking about "penalties" for how people live their lives. What has gone wrong so that apparently intelligent, apparently serious people can propose levying penalties on how much another individual eats? If that doesn't negate personal freedom, I don't know what does. Don't you see the obvious corollaries? What about your behaviors? Do you do risky things sometimes? No? Are you sure? There are mighty few people who live their lives so carefully that they are immune from penalties under such a system—and I'd really hate to have to spend any amount of time in their company, for they must be the most boring people in the world.
Private health insurance doesn't have a problem with this—private insurance companies just price health insurance out of reach of people who might possibly need it. If by "public health insurance" you mean "sharing the risk equally", then you may, I suppose, want to penalize people who drive up the cost of your health insurance premiums. But once you start doing this, you are fast receding down a very slippery slope. I, for one, feel that people with lower I.Q.s should be charged more...after all, their stupidity makes it more likely that they will hurt themselves, thus making them poor risks.
Judging from the article summary, the porn was found among the "internet temporary files" on the laptop. In other words, the images were cached by the browser. This could and would happen if there was some background program running that connects automatically to these sites, and the user would never see the images. (How often do you go look to see what's in your cache?
Here's a question for you: as I understand it, Firefox follows links on any page you're reading and loads them in the background. Suppose you hit a site that contains links to child porn—possibly even invisible links. Could Firefox pre-load these pages? If so, wouldn't they show up in your cache? —I'm not saying that Firefox does this; I'm asking.
I couldn't agree more. Even if a person is guilty, I don't think they should, in effect, have a brand burned into their forehead. They should, depending on the offense and the discretion of the court, be placed under permanent surveillance as a condition of their release. (I'm talking about violent rapists or people who actually sexually assaulted children—not just watched child porn.) This has nothing to do with paying any alleged debt to society, but with protecting children and adult women from rapists or exploitation. But the surveillance shouldn't take the form of making life impossible for the convicted offender. If they're truly that dangerous, they should not be let out of jail. Ever.
The biggest problem I see with the treatment of "sex offenders" in the U.S. is that not only are our courts fallible, and sometimes convict the innocent, but the definition of what constitutes a "sex offense" is far broader than most people know. For example, if a teen-ager over a certain age has sex with a girl who is a year younger than he is, he may be classified as a "sex offender".
The U.S. is just hysterical on the whole topic of "the children". I once had a friend who was accused by his wife of molesting his two and three year old daughters as part of the divorce proceedings. I knew the individuals involved, and I am completely convinced that the guy was innocent. (The sum total of the charges was this: his ex caught him napping with the kids; she said his hand was resting in one daughter's groin...well sheesh, the guy was asleep.) He wasn't actually brought up on criminal charges—however, the mere threat of such charges meant that he automatically lost the right to all contact with his children (not to mention being financially screwed in every way possible by his ex.). I guess he was lucky...this was back in the eighties, and I think may "zero tolerance" hadn't set in yet.
Really? I'd assumed he meant the game involved hacking people off at the knees. "We are the knights who say 'Nih'"...
So you judge an OS by the quality of its GUI? By that measure, I'd say Win 2000 wins (the two OSs pretty well come out even on every other measure). XP definitely had a far more irritating GUI than Win 2000. I don't remember what "theming" is, but I remember having to:
Only time I ever found a reason to prefer XP over 2000 was when I was messing with wireless, and learned that it was a pain to support anything better than WEP encryption on 2000 (something MS could have easily done in a patch). Only reason I've been paying for XP these days is that it will be supported with fixes for all those security holes longer than 2000.
I'm going to have to build a new PC for She Who Must Be Obeyed in the next couple of months, so I rushed to Newegg to buy an OEM copy of XP—for $139. Bah. Maybe I should have just bought Dell PC for her. But She wants another one of those cute little Shuttles.
I'm bringing myself up to speed on nix (hey, Ubuntu Hardy Heron works!), but SWMBO is something of a support nightmare—the consequences of failure are unthinkable. I'm simply not ready to find equivalents of all her favorite applications and get them working on Ubuntu (is there even an equivalent of Turbo Tax for nixes?). And SWMBO reacts violently to any sort of change...I know how to make XP's desktop look like the Win 2000 She knows and loves, but I think it would take some work to pull off that same trick with Ubuntu.
Yes. Memory is a skill that can be improved by practice. In the ancient world, having a prodigious memory was the mark of an educated man. This ability was acquired through constant practice. In fact, education consisted largely of rote memorization right through the nineteenth century—well past the introduction of writing.
Absolutely—if you equate physical fitness with "health". Before motorized transport became common, almost everyone walked wherever they had to go. Today, only fitness nuts walk (or jog or whatever). There were no couch potatoes in the 16th century (unless you count the few aristocrats who could get people to carry them around).
Yes. Again, the ability to do arithmetic in your head is a skill that can be acquired only through practice. Almost all the shop-clerks these days can't compute change—they just go by what the cash register tells them.
Rhetorical questions aren't a terribly good argumentative technique—unless you truly know the answers before you ask them.
You might have argued that despite the weaknesses introduced by these technological advances, they were beneficial because technology also brought with it compensations that more than make up for the debits. Writing made accessible much more knowledge than any one person could ever hope to memorize; motorized transport allowed not only personal mobility, but the creation of an industrial society; calculators remove much of the tedium from keeping your checkbook balanced. (And computers allow computations that could not be done at all by even the most talented arithmeticians.)
Like all these, Google is a two-edged sword, and as many have noted, much depends not on the tool, but upon how it's used. I absolutely love Google. Gone are the days when an obscure question would nag at me, and I wouldn't find the answer for years. If I want to know the words of a song or poem, if I want to know what Project Orion was, or if I want to find out how to make my own UTP/Ethernet/Cat5 cables, I just turn to Google. Curiosity has never been so easily satisfied.
The deleterious effects of Google are, however, quite serious. There are three:
It's crucial to understand that none of these three weaknesses should be a serious problem for anyone who has the fundamentals of a proper education. An educated person knows how to locate substantive sources for serious research, and has learned the skill of reading closely. An educated person can think critically, and will not simply accept unsubstantiated statements as fact. An educated person knows that the web, as it is today, is simply not a substitute for a research library
You're exactly right—the reason I don't own a Kindle now is that their content is so tightly controlled as to make it nearly worthless. I can't read a Kindle book on my computer, or any other device except for the one Kindle I bought it for. I might pay 50 cents to rent content under those conditions...but Amazon wants a lot more. As usual, DRM taketh away, but giveth nothing of value. That's not capitalism, it's self-destructive stupidity.
What gets me is that Amazon shows complete ignorance of how readers think and act. They could potentially make tons o' money with this product, but their DRM paranoia has crippled their thinking.
I read a lot of fantasy and SF. When I find a good author, I loan the book to my friends. If my friends like the book, they buy every other book that author has written (often from Amazon); they watch for new books by that author, and buy those too. They loan books to me; I do the same thing. The DRM idiots look at this, and what do they see? Piracy! If they could, they'd stop me from loaning or giving books to my friends. Well, with DRM, they can do exactly that. I hope they're happy.
If Amazon were smart (and pigs could ice skate), they might do something like this: First of all, let Kindles talk to each other—make it possible to transfer a book from one Kindle to another. When you transfer a book, it gets wiped from your Kindle, just like you don't have a book that you've given away (or sold) any more. That means you could loan or sell your Kindle book just like a paper book. Amazon would get the advantage of letting readers help market their product, just like they always have—and people who buy Kindle e-books would feel like they actually owned something. Give me, in addition, a contractual guarantee that I'll always be able to read the eBook on some device, and I would seriously consider the Kindle concept as a supplement to my collection of paper books.
Actually, the explanation may be a bit less dramatic than that. German taxes are very high—and avoiding them is a widely practiced art. For example, there's a large black market in skilled labor. If you have in a plumber, carpenter or painter to do some fix-up work, you generally call someone recommended by a friend, and you pay cash. There's a substantial discount for cash transactions between people who trust each other. Inheritance taxes are quite high, so a lot of Germans hold gold or other valuables, and simply tell their heirs where the keys are.
Naturally, you are not going to want to talk about this stuff over the phone when you know that the government is listening. My 75 year old aunt who lives in Germany recently hung up on me when I innocently brooked one of these subjects during a phone conversation recently.
She later casually mentioned that there's a new German law that all phone conversations will be recorded and retained for a certain period of time...to deter the terrorists, of course. I thought I was paranoid, but I guess I still have something to learn from the old lady.
That's only half the story. There are a lot of blacks who don't think Obama is "black enough", so the concept of "racial purity" is not restricted to "whites". (Personally, as a member of the Sorta Pink People, I think the whole race thing is bogus).
You might want to rethink your analogy by the way...it could be construed as racially offensive by some.
Oh...I assumed it was "catamite". Who was their cameraman, riding in the catamaran. Say that three times fast.
Oh, I think you and I agree on the wonderfulness of space—and I agree that it is the end, not the means to anything. (I've been reading science fiction for a long time.) The problem is that this potential wealth is of no interest to most people on Earth right now...and if you think about it, "space wealth" is never going to benefit people on Earth very much. You talk about "drop shipping" stuff from orbit. Um...that's usually called a "meteor impact", and it's not exactly something you want happening regularly in your back yard, trust me. And that's assuming that the "shipper" has good intentions.
No, I think that the wealth up there will benefit mainly the people who go live up there. I'm hoping that some day there will be such people, but it doesn't look like it's happening any time soon. Back in the eighteenth century, any group of disgruntled individuals could build or hire a ship to take them to the New World. But we, the disgruntled of today, are not able to escape so easily. About how much chance do you think there is that a group of private individuals would be allowed to build an Orion? And no government really has the incentive to do so.
Of course, if we learn one thing from the past, it's that things change. We need that initial rationale to get large-scale space travel off the ground, and get a critical mass of people into space to start a self-sustaining spacefaring culture. (Two puns back there, for the price of one.) Maybe someone will think of something to make people think there's sound economic reasons for building one those huge things...or maybe an imminent asteroid impact will provide the needed incentive.
Psst...did you know there's a fountain of youth on Mars? And a city of gold on Ceres.
Orion has sheer scale going for it. We're talking payloads in the thousands of tons here! I don't think the alternatives you mention will deliver anything like the economies of scale possible with Orion. Besides, the notion of propelling yourself through space by exploding nukes behind yourself has an inimitable brutal beauty unequaled by any other scheme I've ever heard of.
I'd be more than willing to absorb the risk of a launching a couple or three Orions, with the purpose of building a space-based factory to make even more (and bigger) Orions. It's not that expensive to boost people into space, but getting the tooling for a space-based factory into orbit (around the Earth or somewhere else in the Solar System) to build truly huge ships would be a pain with chemical rockets. Once the ships are available, people could go up into LEO, rendezvous with a rocket and commence living in space.
Oh yeah, we need a capitalist rationale for the whole thing. How about this for starters: old folks' homes in space! Yes, you geezers whining about your athritis, forget about those short joyrides—you can now cough up a few million bucks to help finance a zero gravity retirement home for yourself! Let's see...how old is Bill Gates these days?
So navigation is a military technology? Of course warships have to be capable of navigation, but that's kind of like saying that because infantrymen must walk long distances, hiking is a form of military training. Nowhere in the article does it say this is a DARPA project...but even if they were kicking in some money, remember that your ability to post your comments is based on a "military" research project. If you don't remember ARPANET, Google it.
Of course, we should be wary—the favored contestant appears to be a product of that infamous think-tank of military inventiveness, Aberystwyth University in Wales! And you think devising a robot that knows how to navigate a sailboat across an ocean is trivial, and uncreative? Obviously, you've never sailed a boat across a pond.
Personally, the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline was that maybe we're getting close to the day when huge robotic sailing ships transfer cargo across the sea lanes, instead of those nasty diesel-burning freighters we have today. I think that would be kinda cool...and useful, even.
Because there are factors to consider other than my physical environment—such as the need to keep a paycheck coming in, and the difficulty of getting any other job at age 60. My immediate goal is to make it through July, which will be my 5 year anniversary, thus making me vested in their retirement fund. That means I get to take the accumulated pittance with me when they lay me off (I'm sure I'm marked for execution at the next possible opportunity). I'm sad that my career is ending in this place...things looked a lot better 20 years ago.
I'm sorry, sir, but your entry is disqualified. The heading clearly says "Worst workplaces in tech". What you describe—though it involves fearful mechanical devices, noxious chemicals, unspeakable offal, reckless driving, and odious vermin—is not "tech" according to the conventional notion applied here on SlashDot. How many computers did your "workplace" have, eh?
Now, if I had known that non or low-tech workplaces were eligible, I might have trotted out some of my more lurid mini-careers (such as repainting cans of Agent Orange for the U.S. Forest service so that people wouldn't know what we were using to keep the roads clear...this was the same "workplace" in which my supervisor set my boots on fire with a drip-torch while I was wearing them, but that would be no more germane than your entry.
These are the worst workplaces? Maybe in California. I've worked in much worse. My current employer (whose CEO is among the top ten best-compensated in the US) has me working in a building in which every time it rains, the roof runs. (Not leaks, the water runs down in streams.) They keep trying to find bigger buckets.
We do have our own cubicles--made of what appears to be moldy cardboard—and they match the carpet exactly. We have nothing like a kitchenette or breakroom. If you want coffee, you have to go get water in the restrooms. Of course, the sinks are always overflowing because some stupid jerk empties the remainder of his breakfast mush, ramen, smelly fish stew, or whatever into them every day.
The lighting is typical 1950s era: harsh overhead fluorescents that would quickly blind you if you tried to work with a monitor under them. So we ask to have them turned off. They are glad to do this, because it saves on electricity bills. The drawback is that this leaves our environment utterly troglodytic ; the advantage is that we can't see our environment).
It could be worse, of course—I could have been working in the building that sank. No, it didn't sink completely—it's just sort of The Leaning Tower of Dallas. (Actually, it's in Irving, but who's heard of Irving?) The good thing is that they managed to get most of the people out (a triumph of organizational genius, considering that the sinking occurred in a mere decade), the bad news is they moved them in with us. Our warren of cubical cells is now so overcrowded that collision is a serious factor in deciding whether or not to go to the bathroom to make coffee.
Don't forget "people found dead after we drop bombs on them".
It continues to amaze me how the military procurement machine goes on designing and buying immensely complex weapons that have no conceivable use and do not improve the security of this country (the U.S.A.) one whit...and nobody thinks this is strange. Sure, it's a helluva pretty plane...take up a collection and build your own if you like, but I'm so damn sick of my tax money going to these things.
We do not need an air superiority fighter/bomber/sigint/ewar platform like this. (Notice how it does everything...baaaad sign.) We do not have an enemy that makes its employment worthwhile, nor are we remotely likely to become involved in any war with a technologically sophisticated enemy for the simple reason that such an enemy will have nukes, and people with nukes do not fight other people with nukes.
What we really need to spend some money on is people: we need to attract and keep competent officers and soldiers in the Army (or the USMC, if you've given up on the Army), we need to pay these people what they're worth, give them decent benefits, and raise personnel standards throughout. That would take a lot less money than our current high-tech fixation, and would buy us a lot more security. But it's not about security, is it?
Yeah, but in IT at least they keep it verbal. I once had a boss who set my boots on fire. Yes, while I was wearing them. I was on a Forest Service crew. We were burning slash using drip-torches (think watering can that spurts flames instead of water, filled with a 50/50 mixture of diesel and gasoline), and he walked up to me and doused my boots. This was part of his clever plan to make me quit because he didn't like people who had more than a 5th grade education.
The story ended well for me, though. He finally outright demanded that I be fired, but when his boss found out what he'd done (the rest of the crew hated this jerk), I got a nice cushy job in the warehouse, instead. So every morning, I'd be warming my hands by the pot-bellied stove, while he and the crew were getting their tools to go out and work in the rain and the mud, and I'd smile and give him a cheery hello.
Of course, then I ruined things by going back to school and spending the rest of my life working in offices. Well, at least it's warm, doesn't rain, and I just get verbal abuse.
No, they won't, because this is not about numbers, it's about perception of value, marketing gimmicks, and ergonomic preferences (or idiosyncracies, if you will). I like the 4:3 ratio. It makes sense to me. I read a lot of documents on my screen, and extra width does me no good at all. The human eye can only cope with lines of so many characters, so the width that I'm going to display my documents at is going to remain the same, no matter how wide my screen. But if my vertical resolution is decreased, I'm going to have to do more scrolling. So if I replace my 4:3 20" monitor, I'm going to have to get what's marketed as a 24" monitor, just so I won't feel like I've downgraded. Since I really don't care about the extra pixels on either side, I'm being forced to buy more pixels than I really want. I think this is dumb; my monitor is not for watching movies, dammit! I'm getting my chainsaw and cutting off those extra pixels, and sending them back to the manufacturer!
You realize that all but one of the monitors you linked to cost over $900, right? The cheap one is probably on the verge of being discontinued. It's interesting the manufacturers still think there's a market for high-end monitors in the old 4:3 format...the implication is that people who are "professionals"—i.e., who know what they're doing—might have reasons to prefer this format. Too bad my employer is too cheap to spring for a $1000 monitor. I'd certainly never buy one with my own money for home use.
Perhaps a better way to put it would have been "wide-screens are a marketing gimmick to make people pay more for what they think is a larger monitor". Monitors are still advertised in terms of diagonal inches. People are supposed to think that a "wide-screen" 22" monitor is bigger than that old-fashioned squarish 20" monitor. To the geometry-challenged, this is a difficult concept. In fact, to replace my 20" 1600x1200 monitor today, I'd have to get what they are calling a 24" monitor—which gives me that 1920x1200 screen you are talking about. When I bought that monitor about 3 or so years ago, it cost about $500. Guess what the new wide-screen 24 inchers go for? You guessed it: $500. Unless making LCDs hasn't gotten any cheaper in the last 3 years, somebody is gouging.
As for the "high end business models", I haven't seen any around. Where I work, everyone is getting the new, improved, 22" wide-screens. Which is why I'm living with my work monitor (also a 20" 3:4) that's gotten a bit temperamental—the colors get weird when I first turn it on—instead of complaining and getting stuck with what I call a narrow screen monitor.
I'm glad somebody mentioned this so I can finally rant about it here. My wife has informed me she's tired of hearing about it every time I look at the Fry's ads over breakfast.