In this hypothetical debate, I obviously did not change this democratic-socialist's mind. Due to cognitive dissonance he simply chose to not hear what I was saying to him.
On the flip side you also did not listen to what he had to say and used a false argument to get your point point across. Your basic premise has nothing to do with a car, and has to do with the idea that taxes = stealing using the car as a straw man. Basically, neither of you made a strong logical argument for a third party, yet you've both convinced yourself that you have - especially given the "truth" of your statement.
You mean like "No Country for Old Men," "There will be Blood," and "A Beautiful Mind" - Good stories are still made, and contrary to nostalgic belief, there were some absolutely horrible movies made in the old days. If there is one thing good special effects have done is make bad sci-fi at least marginally entertaining (at least you can't see the strings anymore)
Heaven forbid that somebody actually study how businesses choose between free and proprietary software! That's of no good whatsoever! And of course free-as-in-speech definitely does not extend to a university allowing its academics to publish material which might be bad for open source. Clearly Stanford should've had these two men killed and fed to rabid, pestulent chipmunks, rather than allow this affront to reach the press.
Slashdot is Fox News for geeks... everybody is free to have an opinion as long as it agrees with our agenda. Though I do hope that Stanford MBA's also learn on how to capitalize on open source. That is the value of a good business education, learn how to maximize opportunities no matter which choice you make.
If I had it all to do again... Dumb as it sounds... I still wouldn't have done internships; I would have gotten a different band. It still wouldn't work out, but I'm afraid it's the way I am wired. I never do it the right way; I always do it the hard way. And given the chance I'd do it the same way again.
I suggest you also teach your students about this. I don't think you did things the "wrong way." By committing yourself to a band I'm sure you had some amazing and interesting life experiences. I don't think anybody should critcize you for choosing to do something that maybe when you're older, you wouldn't have the opportunity to do. The only criticism should go to those who just sit around and do nothing with their youth.
I know its getting harder and harder, especially considering these things are only a handful of atoms across, but why can't they ever skip a generation? Why work on three generations of chips simultaneously? Why not just skip one?
Because it isn't just the technology you develop. You have to get several other companies to align their technology roadmaps with you. Processing/handling equipment, raw materials, and a number of other technologies are involved in the production of a wafer. The semiconductor manufacturing industry pretty moves together as a whole. Even if one company is out in front in terms of technology it isn't that far ahead, which is why so many companies just focus on design and have foundaries make their stuff.
I got a great education, no doubt about that. But the contacts have been very hard to build from scratch.
You don't need an A-list school to build up your networking contacts. Internships, co-ops, clubs, and conferences are your best tools for networking. You're going to make a lot more networking contacts if you are on the solar car team at the University of Alabama than if you just go to class and don't do any extracurricular work at Cal Tech.
This is what high schoolers should be told. Go for the most famous school you can get into, even if you have to go into major debt. You will probably go into debt regardless, at least if you go somewhere expensive you'll have a job to pay that debt off.
No high schoolers need to be told get involved in something no matter what school you go to. You'll make more and more meaningful contacts if you get involved in a project, research, or something outside of the classroom no matter what school you go to.
I had a friend who went to Harvard. His classes did not seem any different or better than mine at a cheap state university (Go Rams!). However, that guy walked out of Harvard into a job at MSNBC. I walked out and... Couldn't find a job for a few months... Then got a short-term job... Then crashed... Then had to go to grad school so I could get a job... Then got a short-term uni job... And now I'm getting another.
The question I would ask you, is what did you do besides go to class while you were in school? Did you apply for internships, or more importantly co-ops? Did you search for opportunities that let you network? If you go to a decent state school you should have a number of opportunities for real world and academic networking. Early on in school spent my free time volunteering on projects doing whatever worthless junk I could - cataloging and archiving satellite photos from a NASA mission was a long, boring job that requires no skill or education. A friend of mine got his start helping sort parts for a robotics project and carrying junk across campus. What mattered was literally being in the room with the people I needed to network with. Eventually as my education built up to match my interests, I had the inside track to work on funded projects that sent me to various conferences and got my name out. When it came time, I didn't have to use my network to find a job, there were already people who were just waiting for me to graduate.
Alternatively as another poster said, go to a high class graduate school. Where you go to for undergraduate work isn't as important as where you go for grad school, simply because grad school is more about doing research and getting funded than learning the basics.
Of course it depends on the genre too. Madden's yearly release schedule is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that basing it on the game of pro football doesn't leave a whole lot of room for wildly different content or rule changes between outings.
Why does everybody bash Madden? Its yearly release schedule means that games are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Each year there are plenty of UI, feature, graphics, and AI changes (for better or worse). Most slashdotters should know that there are a lot of tweaks that can be done 'under the hood' of a game.
As you rightly note, existing facts don't change or disappear just because new facts are introduced. Gravity is a fact today; if it disappeared tomorrow that would not change the fact that it existed today. The theory of gravity would have to change, to encompass and explain its sudden absence. But the theory would also have to encompass and explain its former existence as well--because that happened too. A working theory has to explain all known facts, past and present.
If new data significantly violates existing assumptions, the idea can be abandoned completely. The key aspects of gravity are attraction and mass. If, for example, it is discovered that there are massive bodies that do not attract, then the fundamental idea of gravity is not a rule and something else is going on. There's a difference between new data showing the specific relationship like F=G(m1m2/r^2) is incorrect, and new data that shows that the relationship doesn't apply at all.
Gravity is a fact, the Theory of gravity is the mechanism by which it works.
Gravity is not a fact, it is a logical conclusion given a large body of facts (individual observations). There is nothing to deny that tomorrow everything could just float away (though extremely unlikely); the facts didn't change, just a new set of facts have been introduced into the discussion set. The law of gravity describes the current data data set. The theory of gravity takes things a step further to introduce method for predicting future observations
He goes on to say, "However, when young people ask questions about creationism in science classes, teachers need to be able to explain to them why evolution and the Big Bang are scientific theories but they should also take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis.
They don't even need to do that. Rather than look at scientific theories for "truth," which the structure of science can never achieve, look at theories for their utility. With that perspective the debate shifts, where even if one assumes intelligent design is correct, it doesn't have practical real world extensions the way evolution does - opens discussions and can be applied to things like genetics. Science isn't about "truth" - the Ideal Gas Law makes assumptions that are known to be untrue, but the utility of the theory cannot be denied.
Teach and treat science as a problem solving tool rather than a definitive answer to everything.
Re:Quantitative techniques in business
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Tech Vs. Business?
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Quantifying things is an excellent idea, but it's so overwhelmingly difficult to measure things like management productivity and (God help us all) "project velocity" that 98.6% of all attempts to do so are essentially fraudulent -- just as dishonest as if I pretended that number I just read off my rectal thermometer had any meaning more precise than "most."
The thing is to make meaningful decisions you HAVE TO try and quantify things. It's no different from engineering where you have to make assumptions and try to quantify unknowns.
There are honest and intelligent managers who aspire to quantitative precision and may work very hard at it, but they don't go around waving numbers and graphs because they know the results are extremely difficult to interpret -- more "food for thought" than "results."
Exactly, that's why it's important to have intelligent people, to make the tough decisions where there is little or no data. And I mean that not just leaders who go by "gut," but those who can take a limited data set, coupled with experience and take the appropriate action. The success of a business like the success of any project is how well you can account for unknowns, or tackle a problem from a different angle to minimize risk.
It never crosses their mind that it might be something intrinsically difficult that you can work really hard at without ever producing anything worth sharing -- that's how poorly they understand it.
At the same time, managers can make all the "right" decisions and the business still fail. It's important that everybody have a rudimentary understanding of all the systems involved in a business. Business oriented folks should be able to understand the tech in a general industry context, and tech folks should understand the finance & economic side of the industry. The problem is each side tends to be more interested in their own thing rather than understand the bigger picture.
Anyway, I could go on, but you get the picture. Engineers accept that not everything can be quantified, and every business decision must, of necessity, rely heavily on guesswork, folklore, and intuition in addition to hard numbers
Unless you have engineers going purely by instinct, they are at some level quantifying unknowns. Folklore, experience, and statistics allow engineers to account for variables and create general value ranges so that decisions can be intelligently made. When a customer comes up with a request for "project X" time and cost estimates from engineers don't just come out of thin air. Of course, the accuracy of quantifying unknowns isn't just a function of interpreting the data, it also is a function of the accuracy of the input data. Too often problems come with the latter.
Re:Tech vs. Business/Management: That's quite comm
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Tech Vs. Business?
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Just do make it clear to everyone: Would you as business man like to discuss your great business plan with a non-business Tech, who then decides which way to go? No, of course not -- he'll hardly understand what your point is at all.
Actually yes you would if it involved implementation of technology as part of the plan. You don't want to have a plan that looks good on paper but can't be implemented with current technology. Just as a tech person should consult the non-tech business man if significant capital is involved. Most tech workers don't have to consult the higher ups if they need to buy some cables, but if they are going to stress available capital or impact how the business runs, then they should be talking
"Hey we just upgraded the database software, it should save us millions" "The systems were down for a week and we lost all our customers"
Stardock Entertainment are also responsibile for the proposed "Gamers Bill of rights"
Should be called the Bill of Good Customer Service, and be applauded and rewarded for their work (I've bought a few of their games). That said, consumers always have the ultimate right - not to play
What happens when CD/Floppy Disc/Cartridge wears out, or the hardware/software required is no longer easily found. Any purchase has risk, understand it and evaluate the value accordingly.
I think I covered part of that in the rest of my post, to which you have not responded.
I did respond. The definition of "general welfare," can be interpreted very differently between individuals or cultures. Whether it's education, space program, drug rehab, social security or any government spending, there will be intelligent people who think it's beneficial to the overall well-being of the nation, and intelligent people who disagree. General welfare is a matter for debate, not an absolute that can be set in stone.
Humans did in fact exist for at least a few centuries before the Constitution was written, and while they existed, they occasionally wrote about the proper functions of a government.
Many constitutions include "welfare," as part of the document, the Federalist papers address it, even the Magna Carta mentions "aid," (restricting, though still legitimizing it) The concept of taxation for a greater good was not created in a vaccuum, there is a long standing history over those centuries you talked about. "General welfare" has been pointed to numerous times as THE reason for establishing a government. Again, what exactly general welfare is has been debated over centuries, but that does not mean it is not an expectation of a fully funtioning government.
This created a huge flood of 'impatient' capital. Where in previous decades, you'd invest in some 'thing' (factory that makes widgets, whatever...) spend a few years in the red or in revenue neutral, then eventually you'd make your money back in the long-term.
Now, given that you can instantly make an excellent rate of return just by investing in what amounts to a giant roulette wheel, why bother with that initial investment period?
Wow, where is this place where you can magically make an excellent rate of return. What you call a roulette wheel is just pooling money together to minimize risk and allow experts to invest - which is akin to sponsoring a blackjack team. Impatient captial in fact has the opposite effect of what you are proposing. While people may profit without directly investing in widget factories, at the end of the line somewhere a widget factory is being built to support the returns. Impatient capital does not result in less factories, it results in more. The combination of excess capital with reduced risk means more investment, and often over investment. So you have a bubble with too many widget factories, or dotcoms, or houses built because it's too risky to NOT invest.
Henry Mintzberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Mintzberg) said something about how "the more American MBA schools succeed at getting their grads into top boardrooms, the more American Business fails."
The same is true with any educational system - individual achievement does not necessarily reflect educational excellence. In scientific fields it's the whole "publish or perish," problem.
i'd like to see interest phased out, or reduced to something just small enough to allow people to buy homes, cars and pay for education, and to run the lending institutions. Make banks NPOs, or at least have NP banks available.
It's already low enough, look at the housing bubble problem when interest rates were too low for too long. Lower interest rates won't make people responsible, it will just mean people will carry greater base debt (as well as driving inflation higher). People tend to spend up to their limit, no matter what that limit is (the whole unlimited wants things)
This is what the average joe sees, then he/she looks at the space program and goes "Why?"
It's not just average Joe who asks "why... right now?" Most people support the space program, they aren't completely short sighted. The problem comes with the price tags of manned flights, where the output seems to be far less, and costs are far more, than unmanned flights. Do we really need to spend billions on launches to put people in space so we can do simple experiments with bees and bubbles? It makes more sense to continue research into efficient launch systems until prices for manned spacecrafts become more reasonable and safer. Unless there is some magic experiment I'm not aware of that would fix all of humanity's ills and can't wait 20 years?
Slashdot Mirror
On the flip side you also did not listen to what he had to say and used a false argument to get your point point across. Your basic premise has nothing to do with a car, and has to do with the idea that taxes = stealing using the car as a straw man.
Basically, neither of you made a strong logical argument for a third party, yet you've both convinced yourself that you have - especially given the "truth" of your statement.
You mean like "No Country for Old Men," "There will be Blood," and "A Beautiful Mind" - Good stories are still made, and contrary to nostalgic belief, there were some absolutely horrible movies made in the old days.
If there is one thing good special effects have done is make bad sci-fi at least marginally entertaining (at least you can't see the strings anymore)
Slashdot is Fox News for geeks... everybody is free to have an opinion as long as it agrees with our agenda.
Though I do hope that Stanford MBA's also learn on how to capitalize on open source. That is the value of a good business education, learn how to maximize opportunities no matter which choice you make.
I suggest you also teach your students about this. I don't think you did things the "wrong way." By committing yourself to a band I'm sure you had some amazing and interesting life experiences. I don't think anybody should critcize you for choosing to do something that maybe when you're older, you wouldn't have the opportunity to do. The only criticism should go to those who just sit around and do nothing with their youth.
Because it isn't just the technology you develop. You have to get several other companies to align their technology roadmaps with you. Processing/handling equipment, raw materials, and a number of other technologies are involved in the production of a wafer.
The semiconductor manufacturing industry pretty moves together as a whole. Even if one company is out in front in terms of technology it isn't that far ahead, which is why so many companies just focus on design and have foundaries make their stuff.
You don't need an A-list school to build up your networking contacts. Internships, co-ops, clubs, and conferences are your best tools for networking. You're going to make a lot more networking contacts if you are on the solar car team at the University of Alabama than if you just go to class and don't do any extracurricular work at Cal Tech.
No high schoolers need to be told get involved in something no matter what school you go to. You'll make more and more meaningful contacts if you get involved in a project, research, or something outside of the classroom no matter what school you go to.
The question I would ask you, is what did you do besides go to class while you were in school? Did you apply for internships, or more importantly co-ops? Did you search for opportunities that let you network?
If you go to a decent state school you should have a number of opportunities for real world and academic networking. Early on in school spent my free time volunteering on projects doing whatever worthless junk I could - cataloging and archiving satellite photos from a NASA mission was a long, boring job that requires no skill or education. A friend of mine got his start helping sort parts for a robotics project and carrying junk across campus. What mattered was literally being in the room with the people I needed to network with. Eventually as my education built up to match my interests, I had the inside track to work on funded projects that sent me to various conferences and got my name out. When it came time, I didn't have to use my network to find a job, there were already people who were just waiting for me to graduate.
Alternatively as another poster said, go to a high class graduate school. Where you go to for undergraduate work isn't as important as where you go for grad school, simply because grad school is more about doing research and getting funded than learning the basics.
Who needs an expensive college? Attend a cheap state school, use the leftover "living expense" money to start your own company.
Yeah because individuals never try to monetize their skills and services.
How dare that kid who used to help fix my car open a shop and charge me!
Why does everybody bash Madden? Its yearly release schedule means that games are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Each year there are plenty of UI, feature, graphics, and AI changes (for better or worse). Most slashdotters should know that there are a lot of tweaks that can be done 'under the hood' of a game.
If new data significantly violates existing assumptions, the idea can be abandoned completely. The key aspects of gravity are attraction and mass. If, for example, it is discovered that there are massive bodies that do not attract, then the fundamental idea of gravity is not a rule and something else is going on.
There's a difference between new data showing the specific relationship like F=G(m1m2/r^2) is incorrect, and new data that shows that the relationship doesn't apply at all.
Gravity is not a fact, it is a logical conclusion given a large body of facts (individual observations).
There is nothing to deny that tomorrow everything could just float away (though extremely unlikely); the facts didn't change, just a new set of facts have been introduced into the discussion set.
The law of gravity describes the current data data set. The theory of gravity takes things a step further to introduce method for predicting future observations
They don't even need to do that. Rather than look at scientific theories for "truth," which the structure of science can never achieve, look at theories for their utility. With that perspective the debate shifts, where even if one assumes intelligent design is correct, it doesn't have practical real world extensions the way evolution does - opens discussions and can be applied to things like genetics.
Science isn't about "truth" - the Ideal Gas Law makes assumptions that are known to be untrue, but the utility of the theory cannot be denied.
Teach and treat science as a problem solving tool rather than a definitive answer to everything.
The thing is to make meaningful decisions you HAVE TO try and quantify things. It's no different from engineering where you have to make assumptions and try to quantify unknowns.
Exactly, that's why it's important to have intelligent people, to make the tough decisions where there is little or no data. And I mean that not just leaders who go by "gut," but those who can take a limited data set, coupled with experience and take the appropriate action. The success of a business like the success of any project is how well you can account for unknowns, or tackle a problem from a different angle to minimize risk.
At the same time, managers can make all the "right" decisions and the business still fail. It's important that everybody have a rudimentary understanding of all the systems involved in a business. Business oriented folks should be able to understand the tech in a general industry context, and tech folks should understand the finance & economic side of the industry. The problem is each side tends to be more interested in their own thing rather than understand the bigger picture.
Unless you have engineers going purely by instinct, they are at some level quantifying unknowns. Folklore, experience, and statistics allow engineers to account for variables and create general value ranges so that decisions can be intelligently made. When a customer comes up with a request for "project X" time and cost estimates from engineers don't just come out of thin air. Of course, the accuracy of quantifying unknowns isn't just a function of interpreting the data, it also is a function of the accuracy of the input data. Too often problems come with the latter.
Actually yes you would if it involved implementation of technology as part of the plan. You don't want to have a plan that looks good on paper but can't be implemented with current technology.
Just as a tech person should consult the non-tech business man if significant capital is involved. Most tech workers don't have to consult the higher ups if they need to buy some cables, but if they are going to stress available capital or impact how the business runs, then they should be talking
"Hey we just upgraded the database software, it should save us millions"
"The systems were down for a week and we lost all our customers"
Should be called the Bill of Good Customer Service, and be applauded and rewarded for their work (I've bought a few of their games).
That said, consumers always have the ultimate right - not to play
What happens when CD/Floppy Disc/Cartridge wears out, or the hardware/software required is no longer easily found.
Any purchase has risk, understand it and evaluate the value accordingly.
Don't worry it's in the definition queue right behind - good, evil, freedom, equality, interstate commerce, and porn
Star Wars Galaxies at launch had this sort of scope. I made it very fun for some folks, but most want spoon-fed content rather than a real sandbox.
I did respond. The definition of "general welfare," can be interpreted very differently between individuals or cultures.
Whether it's education, space program, drug rehab, social security or any government spending, there will be intelligent people who think it's beneficial to the overall well-being of the nation, and intelligent people who disagree. General welfare is a matter for debate, not an absolute that can be set in stone.
Many constitutions include "welfare," as part of the document, the Federalist papers address it, even the Magna Carta mentions "aid," (restricting, though still legitimizing it)
The concept of taxation for a greater good was not created in a vaccuum, there is a long standing history over those centuries you talked about. "General welfare" has been pointed to numerous times as THE reason for establishing a government.
Again, what exactly general welfare is has been debated over centuries, but that does not mean it is not an expectation of a fully funtioning government.
It falls under the part - "promote the general Welfare"
Just because you disagree with how services are offered, does not mean the government doesn't have the right to offer them.
Wow, where is this place where you can magically make an excellent rate of return. What you call a roulette wheel is just pooling money together to minimize risk and allow experts to invest - which is akin to sponsoring a blackjack team.
Impatient captial in fact has the opposite effect of what you are proposing. While people may profit without directly investing in widget factories, at the end of the line somewhere a widget factory is being built to support the returns. Impatient capital does not result in less factories, it results in more. The combination of excess capital with reduced risk means more investment, and often over investment. So you have a bubble with too many widget factories, or dotcoms, or houses built because it's too risky to NOT invest.
The same is true with any educational system - individual achievement does not necessarily reflect educational excellence. In scientific fields it's the whole "publish or perish," problem.
It's already low enough, look at the housing bubble problem when interest rates were too low for too long. Lower interest rates won't make people responsible, it will just mean people will carry greater base debt (as well as driving inflation higher). People tend to spend up to their limit, no matter what that limit is (the whole unlimited wants things)
Isn't that how the Americas were colonized?
It's not just average Joe who asks "why... right now?"
Most people support the space program, they aren't completely short sighted. The problem comes with the price tags of manned flights, where the output seems to be far less, and costs are far more, than unmanned flights. Do we really need to spend billions on launches to put people in space so we can do simple experiments with bees and bubbles?
It makes more sense to continue research into efficient launch systems until prices for manned spacecrafts become more reasonable and safer. Unless there is some magic experiment I'm not aware of that would fix all of humanity's ills and can't wait 20 years?