The U.S. Constitution has no provision for a federal police force, in fact, it is very against a federal military to be used against the state's citizens
"To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;" "To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;"
"To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof."
The FBI is an extenstion (specifically the enforcement arm) of the Department of Justice. It is needed for interstate legal issues, that are unable to be covered by individual states (eg wire fraud).
What is the solution for "policing" interstate offense? Primarily it should be left to the individual cities. Offer private security companies to create a secondary network to allow police stations to communicate. The systems are there.
The Constitution specifically addresses interstate issues by placing them under the jurisdiction of the Federal government. You can't just assign them to individual states or municipalities
The great thing about dumping the FBI's powers into the local level is that every citizen can monitor what their government is spending and doing. The FBI hides behind official securities regulations, and the FOIA doesn't help
Because trying to coordinate things would be a disaster. Try running a kidnapping or mail fraud investigation across several states, where each state has to provide resources for the investigation pertaining to their particular state. So instead of one group freely travelling across state lines investigating the issue, you're trying to coordinate multiple groups all with limited knowledge of the evidence.
Yet if blogger after blogger posts on their site "Hey! The New Arkansas Tribune copied my post from 3 weeks ago verbatim and forgot to mention me" then the New Arkansas Tribune WILL lose credibility.
Lose credibility with who? The only people who would know are the ones that are already reading the blog. Also, why would the newspaper lose credibility? The story is the story, essentially you just become an unpaid news correspondent.
People who steal the work of others will lose business. There is no law needed to protect the market.
There are also people who could just steal the work of others, compile it, put it in a fancier package, and profit from it. Imagine if a major site like just decided to become a blog compilation. A major news outlet has things like marketshare, existing revenue streams, and public perception. Without giving credit to original sources, the individual contributor would not benifit. You can scream "They stole my story" and who is the public at large going to believe? The single person blogger, or the mega corp with hundreds of paid contributors
I am not worried if someone copies my work, in fact, I wish they would! Don't credit me for it. Take it as your own. Eventually it will help me, and I am in it for the long run.
If a news outlet includes a blog compiler, most readers would not know about the original sources, as the site would represent itself as the one that did the stories. Also, even if readers knew the original sources, they would not necessarily visit every one of those contributing sites, why should they, it's the exact same information.
Would one of the pro-patent people I see on these boards care to explain to me how this is a shining example of how patents foster innovation?
If a virus is found on Linux does it mean that open source doesn't work? The problem isn't patents as an idea, it's the poor implementation by the patent office and outdated length of protection with increasing rate of development and shorter time to market/profit.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring programmers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to do no harm as part of the certification process if going into a security field.
That doesn't work for doctors and lawyers, why would it work for programmers?
I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to compilers/assemblers (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the open source community) and by separating macros or other executable content from documents
Doing so via pricing is called collusion, and I doubt any intellectual community would ever want to have the tools of its trade limited by legislation. Do we outlaw word processors which can be used to write HTML for Neo-nazi websites?
For instance, an optical illusion can exploit defects in human perception to make us believe that an image has certain properties.
The problem is we can not prove the image did not have those properties. All we can do is make an assessment based on probablility (the image didn't change, and was in fact an illusion).Is it possible that some things are unknowable? Sure. Maybe we are just brains in jars, with false sensory data being calculated and fed to us. That just means that we are not perceiving reality, not that the false data is reality.
Given that we can never completely prove anything, reality then becomes an excercise of philosophy. Much like the existance of God, the fact that it is unknowable, means at best we can describe it through our individual beliefs.
IIRC his biggest blunder was discounting quantum physics and spending the last half of his life trying to come up with an alternative model that didn't require the universe to be probabilistic.
That's not a blunder, that's a difference of opinion.
repeat: There is no scientific, objective evidence that patents overall do more good than harm.
And there is none to the contrary.
Huge numbers of technology practitioners, not lawyers and PTO employees who have a vested interest, are saying that patents are broken. I think that's pretty good evidence for at least a fundamental rethink.
They say the process is broken, not the fundamental idea
Only a scientist working in a very narrow area for a lifetime can do that and even then they make mistakes all the time.
That's if you continue with a single person reviewing, rather than an open source type approach. Let those skilled in the art review and approve.
Yep, and those products progressed well long before the patent mafia got in on the act. A classic example being the Kilby patent where the industry was progressing massively before it was resolved. Patents do nothing now except act as road blocks to progress.
And they are progressing at an exponential rate even with patents in place.
Yep, and patents more often than not block the promulgation and spread of knowledge and investment. Most ideas have no patent protection and yet are invested in and spread just fine.
General ideas which don't have protection, but individual implementations do.
e.g. I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a particular small town. Nobody's had that idea before after some investment it turns out to be successful. I think I should get a patent on that idea so nobody can open a competing hardware store in that town or towns of that size. Why not?
Because its an idea not an implementation. If you have a specific store design or approach to shipping, then that can be patented.
The originator is first in the market and can have dominant market share as a result. No government intervention in the citizen's business needed.
Except when the first to market is a small business, so rather than a billion dollar company investing in their buisness to acquire the technology (which happens all the time). The billion dollar company can copy with no investment and out manufacture/promote the smaller company out of business.
Not true. To use your example, heavier than air flight was possible long before anybody believed it was possible
Only if you believe that the laws of physics were the same. By your definition reality = truth, which can never be truly known. So at best we can have a strong confidence of reality, but never truly know it.
Any system based on suppressing the activity of others will almost inevitably end up in a similar state, as the users of the system keep pushing the envelope as to what can be brought under their control.
You mean just like the restrictions of government itself. It's obvious that corporations have too much influence, does that mean we abandon our republic and switch to anarchy? No we seek to ensure the system works as originally outlined (eg campaign finance reform).
If society wants a mechanism to encourage innovation, then it should encourage innovation directly (for example, hiring people to do the R&D that will benefit society but which is not cost-effective for private entities to finance), not use a backwards, half-assed mechanism which is designed to suppress the kind of activity that society wants to encourage.
There is a gap between academia and the market, which is difficult to bridge. Personally I don't want government micro-managing the direction of science. For example fuel cells have been around a long time, why don't we have them in our cars? Because a significant resource investment needs to be made to create something that can be mass produced for the public. If goverment was in control would we invest in fuel cell energy research or improving the efficiency of oil based energy? Well we know what way the current administration would go. On the flip side a private companies can justify an investment of millions of dollars a year in such research if there because there is an expectation of profitable return.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that patents in wide areas cause more harm than good and cost billions of dollars. This should be regarded as criminal negligence by public servants.
Yes, overly broad patents do cause more harm than good, but its a problem with the patent reviewers, not the overall system.
I find it very noticeable that most patented ideas end up as expensive, niche products instead of a high impact mass market items with realistic free market competition
Not really, computer chips have dozens of patents, cars have patents, even shampoo bottles and showerhead designs have patents. I wouldn't call these things niche products. Many lead-free solder alloys are patented, but that hasn't stopped the electronics industry conversion. First each patent that is published gives insight into novel solutions (eg. introduction of dopants), rather than blocking off development, they encourage sharing ideas. If I see a patent with a cobalt dopant, I can quickly understand how it works and look at some other alloy with similar properties. Where the patent process has broken down especially in the area of software, is that patents are being given for ideas, rather than implementations. Patents used to be given for a specific solution to a specific problem, with vague patents the system favors profit over innovation. The patent office needs to adhere to the rules, rather than throw out the system completely.
And please, no nonsense about how people will not think up new things with no patent protection. In large areas of technology and industry this is simply not true.
People think up new things all the time. The problem is getting that knowledge shared, and actually realizing those ideas as a product for public consumption. Often ideas will get to a point, then they require investment to be fully realized as an actual product.
The fundamental mechanism of the patent system is to allow a patentholder to selectively suppress the constructive activity of others. _Any_ system implemented using this kind of mechanism is going to end up suppressing the overall economic activity of society.
You left out "for a limited time and only under the condition of full disclosure". Until recently it has been relatively easy to design around patents. Essentially what would happen is the publication of a non-trivial implementation would reveal the fundamental ideas so that others can have their own non-trivial implementation. For example Westinghouse creating a two-piece lightbulb to get around the patent for a one-piece lightbulb. The problem now is that many patents are overly-broad; they protect ideas, not implementations as patents originally were meant to protect.
To the contrary, this kind of smart thinking is exactly why we don't need a patent system. Did this guy get a patent? No! Patent rights are not what is motivating him at all.
True but patent rights might motivate somebody to actually make a product we could use in a shorter time frame.
"It stems from early-20th-century work on integral photography, which experimented with using lens arrays in front of film, and an early-1990s plenoptic camera developed at MIT and used for range finding... Turning Ng's invention into a commercial product poses a few challenges. First, it works best with expensive high-resolution cameras, and when you add the price of Ng's device, the cost could be prohibitive (Ng declined to estimate a cost)"
It's great to have ideas on paper, but until the public can actually get a product it's academic. Think Canon will spend tens of millions of dollars to develop a consumer product if it can be reverse engineered and exactly copied? Yes, innovation happens without patents, but patents can make it profitable to speed the process up through investment. I do think the 17 year protection may be outdated given the rate of change has increased and time to market has decreased over the last 200 years.
Someone who doesn't play games to bilk people of harder earned money. It just isn't ethical to make all that money from something so pointless to human survival/betterment.
Beyond the entertainment value (we aren't robots), games provide a platform for learning. Necessity is the mother of invention. Games, of any kind, provide challenges to solve. Significant advances in medicine and physiology have come from athletics and mechanics and materials from autoracing. I'm sure as computer games become a bigger business, people will study and learn things about visual processing in the brain and human-computer interaction. For example, the preference for the mouse-keyboard control scheme gives us insight how people want to interact with virtual environments. Studying RTS players gives us an idea of how well the brain can track, control, and make decisions with multiple objects in a quick changing environment.
. Everyone knows that sweatshop workers, food service workers, etc., have really crappy jobs. It should be pretty obvious the previous poster was using hyperbole or exaggeration
Not necessarily, often times people on/. lose perspective, remember the original topic is on the idea that "geek" has gone mainstream.
My original response was with regards to the post: "there is a well known stereotype about IT workers being the most overworked and underappreciated and underpaid people in any business." I was pointing out that MOST jobs are underappreciated and underpaid. Yes there are easier jobs that pay more, that doesn't mean that IT professionals are the cross-bearers for the downtrodden working man.
The point is there are people in other businesses who have worse pay and worse working conditions. You in fact made my point about them being underappreciated, just because they are unskilled shouldn't diminish their contributions. Sure anybody can go get one of those jobs, but often nobody wants to due to terrible conditions and pay.
There's lots of other college majors leading to careers with better treatment and much better pay and stability; why choose CS when you can choose one of the others?
And there are many more of college majors that land you in food industry, or telemarketing. Try finding a really good job with a degree in archeology, or marine biology. Similar debt, similar rigors of study, but after graduation the opportunities are few and far between. My senior year in high school, I was debating whether to go into engineering or economics. My decision was finalized when at my summer job we hired a new secretary; she had just graduated with a 4-year degree in economics. Overall IT/CS jobs have higher pay, and better working conditions than most other jobs. Just because things are bad, doesn't mean that other don't have worse.
Interest in being a CS major has dropped because there is a well known stereotype about IT workers being the most overworked and underappreciated and underpaid people in any business.
IT workers are so much less paid and appreciated than farm workers, landscapers, road construction crews, secretaries, food service etc.
There are a lot of people in this world who feel underpaid and underappreciated. How many times do IT professionals have to ask to use the restroom, or to take a 10 minute break, or have their lunch scheduled to the minute.
The drop in CS majors is more a perception of lack of opportunities, along with social stigma, rather than horrid working conditions and low pay.
Because, as geeks we too laugh at these exagerated characters. So it feels like they are laughing with us, when in reality they see us in the same light, and are laughing at us. We think we are cool because of the added attention towards geeks, but nonetheless are still the butt of the joke.
I am not against making literature more accessible, but I am worried about what will be lost (intentionally or not), when people no longer read the originals.
Lost to who? This is geared towards people who would unlikely read the originals anyway. What it could do is stimulate discussion and interest in those students. Let's say the message "ge7 th33 to a nuNn3ry" goes out, and students start saying it, conversing about it, and may actually get them interested in where the quote comes from. Sometimes the perception of great literature, gets in the way of the actual plot and interesting aspects. The tantilizing aspects of sex, murder, subterfuge often get lost in the high brow discussions of classics.
Secondly Scientific method is based on taking data, making a model of it (a FALSIFIABLE one) and checking the model against the data. If the model do not match the data then it is MERCILESSLY dropped.
Actually scientific method is based on making assumptions, taking data, and generating a model. As for "Mercilessly dropped" based on data, much of physics can't describe all data collected (eg disconnect between quantum physics and relativity). You don't always drop theories, you use the model that best fits until you come up with something better.
Slashdot Mirror
The price of their loss though was the death of Federalism in the US.
Dude, Federalism WON over state's rights in the civil war. A single overriding authority can supercede that of a sovereign sub authority.
The U.S. Constitution has no provision for a federal police force, in fact, it is very against a federal military to be used against the state's citizens
"To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;"
"To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;"
"To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof."
The FBI is an extenstion (specifically the enforcement arm) of the Department of Justice. It is needed for interstate legal issues, that are unable to be covered by individual states (eg wire fraud).
What is the solution for "policing" interstate offense? Primarily it should be left to the individual cities. Offer private security companies to create a secondary network to allow police stations to communicate. The systems are there.
The Constitution specifically addresses interstate issues by placing them under the jurisdiction of the Federal government. You can't just assign them to individual states or municipalities
The great thing about dumping the FBI's powers into the local level is that every citizen can monitor what their government is spending and doing. The FBI hides behind official securities regulations, and the FOIA doesn't help
Because trying to coordinate things would be a disaster. Try running a kidnapping or mail fraud investigation across several states, where each state has to provide resources for the investigation pertaining to their particular state. So instead of one group freely travelling across state lines investigating the issue, you're trying to coordinate multiple groups all with limited knowledge of the evidence.
Yet if blogger after blogger posts on their site "Hey! The New Arkansas Tribune copied my post from 3 weeks ago verbatim and forgot to mention me" then the New Arkansas Tribune WILL lose credibility.
Lose credibility with who? The only people who would know are the ones that are already reading the blog. Also, why would the newspaper lose credibility? The story is the story, essentially you just become an unpaid news correspondent.
People who steal the work of others will lose business. There is no law needed to protect the market.
There are also people who could just steal the work of others, compile it, put it in a fancier package, and profit from it. Imagine if a major site like just decided to become a blog compilation. A major news outlet has things like marketshare, existing revenue streams, and public perception. Without giving credit to original sources, the individual contributor would not benifit. You can scream "They stole my story" and who is the public at large going to believe? The single person blogger, or the mega corp with hundreds of paid contributors
I am not worried if someone copies my work, in fact, I wish they would! Don't credit me for it. Take it as your own. Eventually it will help me, and I am in it for the long run.
If a news outlet includes a blog compiler, most readers would not know about the original sources, as the site would represent itself as the one that did the stories. Also, even if readers knew the original sources, they would not necessarily visit every one of those contributing sites, why should they, it's the exact same information.
Would one of the pro-patent people I see on these boards care to explain to me how this is a shining example of how patents foster innovation?
If a virus is found on Linux does it mean that open source doesn't work?
The problem isn't patents as an idea, it's the poor implementation by the patent office and outdated length of protection with increasing rate of development and shorter time to market/profit.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring programmers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to do no harm as part of the certification process if going into a security field.
That doesn't work for doctors and lawyers, why would it work for programmers?
I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to compilers/assemblers (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the open source community) and by separating macros or other executable content from documents
Doing so via pricing is called collusion, and I doubt any intellectual community would ever want to have the tools of its trade limited by legislation. Do we outlaw word processors which can be used to write HTML for Neo-nazi websites?
For instance, an optical illusion can exploit defects in human perception to make us believe that an image has certain properties.
The problem is we can not prove the image did not have those properties. All we can do is make an assessment based on probablility (the image didn't change, and was in fact an illusion).Is it possible that some things are unknowable? Sure. Maybe we are just brains in jars, with false sensory data being calculated and fed to us. That just means that we are not perceiving reality, not that the false data is reality.
Given that we can never completely prove anything, reality then becomes an excercise of philosophy. Much like the existance of God, the fact that it is unknowable, means at best we can describe it through our individual beliefs.
IIRC his biggest blunder was discounting quantum physics and spending the last half of his life trying to come up with an alternative model that didn't require the universe to be probabilistic.
That's not a blunder, that's a difference of opinion.
repeat: There is no scientific, objective evidence that patents overall do more good than harm.
And there is none to the contrary.
Huge numbers of technology practitioners, not lawyers and PTO employees who have a vested interest, are saying that patents are broken. I think that's pretty good evidence for at least a fundamental rethink.
They say the process is broken, not the fundamental idea
Only a scientist working in a very narrow area for a lifetime can do that and even then they make mistakes all the time.
That's if you continue with a single person reviewing, rather than an open source type approach. Let those skilled in the art review and approve.
Yep, and those products progressed well long before the patent mafia got in on the act. A classic example being the Kilby patent where the industry was progressing massively before it was resolved. Patents do nothing now except act as road blocks to progress.
And they are progressing at an exponential rate even with patents in place.
Yep, and patents more often than not block the promulgation and spread of knowledge and investment. Most ideas have no patent protection and yet are invested in and spread just fine.
General ideas which don't have protection, but individual implementations do.
e.g. I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a particular small town. Nobody's had that idea before after some investment it turns out to be successful. I think I should get a patent on that idea so nobody can open a competing hardware store in that town or towns of that size. Why not?
Because its an idea not an implementation. If you have a specific store design or approach to shipping, then that can be patented.
The originator is first in the market and can have dominant market share as a result. No government intervention in the citizen's business needed.
Except when the first to market is a small business, so rather than a billion dollar company investing in their buisness to acquire the technology (which happens all the time). The billion dollar company can copy with no investment and out manufacture/promote the smaller company out of business.
Not true. To use your example, heavier than air flight was possible long before anybody believed it was possible
Only if you believe that the laws of physics were the same. By your definition reality = truth, which can never be truly known. So at best we can have a strong confidence of reality, but never truly know it.
Any system based on suppressing the activity of others will almost inevitably end up in a similar state, as the users of the system keep pushing the envelope as to what can be brought under their control.
You mean just like the restrictions of government itself. It's obvious that corporations have too much influence, does that mean we abandon our republic and switch to anarchy? No we seek to ensure the system works as originally outlined (eg campaign finance reform).
If society wants a mechanism to encourage innovation, then it should encourage innovation directly (for example, hiring people to do the R&D that will benefit society but which is not cost-effective for private entities to finance), not use a backwards, half-assed mechanism which is designed to suppress the kind of activity that society wants to encourage.
There is a gap between academia and the market, which is difficult to bridge. Personally I don't want government micro-managing the direction of science.
For example fuel cells have been around a long time, why don't we have them in our cars? Because a significant resource investment needs to be made to create something that can be mass produced for the public.
If goverment was in control would we invest in fuel cell energy research or improving the efficiency of oil based energy? Well we know what way the current administration would go. On the flip side a private companies can justify an investment of millions of dollars a year in such research if there because there is an expectation of profitable return.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that patents in wide areas cause more harm than good and cost billions of dollars. This should be regarded as criminal negligence by public servants.
Yes, overly broad patents do cause more harm than good, but its a problem with the patent reviewers, not the overall system.
I find it very noticeable that most patented ideas end up as expensive, niche products instead of a high impact mass market items with realistic free market competition
Not really, computer chips have dozens of patents, cars have patents, even shampoo bottles and showerhead designs have patents. I wouldn't call these things niche products.
Many lead-free solder alloys are patented, but that hasn't stopped the electronics industry conversion. First each patent that is published gives insight into novel solutions (eg. introduction of dopants), rather than blocking off development, they encourage sharing ideas. If I see a patent with a cobalt dopant, I can quickly understand how it works and look at some other alloy with similar properties.
Where the patent process has broken down especially in the area of software, is that patents are being given for ideas, rather than implementations. Patents used to be given for a specific solution to a specific problem, with vague patents the system favors profit over innovation. The patent office needs to adhere to the rules, rather than throw out the system completely.
And please, no nonsense about how people will not think up new things with no patent protection. In large areas of technology and industry this is simply not true.
People think up new things all the time. The problem is getting that knowledge shared, and actually realizing those ideas as a product for public consumption. Often ideas will get to a point, then they require investment to be fully realized as an actual product.
The fundamental mechanism of the patent system is to allow a patentholder to selectively suppress the constructive activity of others. _Any_ system implemented using this kind of mechanism is going to end up suppressing the overall economic activity of society.
You left out "for a limited time and only under the condition of full disclosure". Until recently it has been relatively easy to design around patents. Essentially what would happen is the publication of a non-trivial implementation would reveal the fundamental ideas so that others can have their own non-trivial implementation. For example Westinghouse creating a two-piece lightbulb to get around the patent for a one-piece lightbulb.
The problem now is that many patents are overly-broad; they protect ideas, not implementations as patents originally were meant to protect.
To the contrary, this kind of smart thinking is exactly why we don't need a patent system. Did this guy get a patent? No! Patent rights are not what is motivating him at all.
True but patent rights might motivate somebody to actually make a product we could use in a shorter time frame.
"It stems from early-20th-century work on integral photography, which experimented with using lens arrays in front of film, and an early-1990s plenoptic camera developed at MIT and used for range finding... Turning Ng's invention into a commercial product poses a few challenges. First, it works best with expensive high-resolution cameras, and when you add the price of Ng's device, the cost could be prohibitive (Ng declined to estimate a cost)"
It's great to have ideas on paper, but until the public can actually get a product it's academic. Think Canon will spend tens of millions of dollars to develop a consumer product if it can be reverse engineered and exactly copied? Yes, innovation happens without patents, but patents can make it profitable to speed the process up through investment.
I do think the 17 year protection may be outdated given the rate of change has increased and time to market has decreased over the last 200 years.
Someone who doesn't play games to bilk people of harder earned money. It just isn't ethical to make all that money from something so pointless to human survival/betterment.
Beyond the entertainment value (we aren't robots), games provide a platform for learning.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Games, of any kind, provide challenges to solve. Significant advances in medicine and physiology have come from athletics and mechanics and materials from autoracing.
I'm sure as computer games become a bigger business, people will study and learn things about visual processing in the brain and human-computer interaction. For example, the preference for the mouse-keyboard control scheme gives us insight how people want to interact with virtual environments. Studying RTS players gives us an idea of how well the brain can track, control, and make decisions with multiple objects in a quick changing environment.
. Everyone knows that sweatshop workers, food service workers, etc., have really crappy jobs. It should be pretty obvious the previous poster was using hyperbole or exaggeration
/. lose perspective, remember the original topic is on the idea that "geek" has gone mainstream.
Not necessarily, often times people on
Again you miss the point of the arguement.
My original response was with regards to the post: "there is a well known stereotype about IT workers being the most overworked and underappreciated and underpaid people in any business."
I was pointing out that MOST jobs are underappreciated and underpaid. Yes there are easier jobs that pay more, that doesn't mean that IT professionals are the cross-bearers for the downtrodden working man.
All those workers you listed there are unskilled.
The point is there are people in other businesses who have worse pay and worse working conditions. You in fact made my point about them being underappreciated, just because they are unskilled shouldn't diminish their contributions. Sure anybody can go get one of those jobs, but often nobody wants to due to terrible conditions and pay.
There's lots of other college majors leading to careers with better treatment and much better pay and stability; why choose CS when you can choose one of the others?
And there are many more of college majors that land you in food industry, or telemarketing. Try finding a really good job with a degree in archeology, or marine biology. Similar debt, similar rigors of study, but after graduation the opportunities are few and far between.
My senior year in high school, I was debating whether to go into engineering or economics. My decision was finalized when at my summer job we hired a new secretary; she had just graduated with a 4-year degree in economics. Overall IT/CS jobs have higher pay, and better working conditions than most other jobs. Just because things are bad, doesn't mean that other don't have worse.
Interest in being a CS major has dropped because there is a well known stereotype about IT workers being the most overworked and underappreciated and underpaid people in any business.
IT workers are so much less paid and appreciated than farm workers, landscapers, road construction crews, secretaries, food service etc.
There are a lot of people in this world who feel underpaid and underappreciated. How many times do IT professionals have to ask to use the restroom, or to take a 10 minute break, or have their lunch scheduled to the minute.
The drop in CS majors is more a perception of lack of opportunities, along with social stigma, rather than horrid working conditions and low pay.
You don't see a lot of girls upside-down in trash cans, do you?
Hmmm maybe if we put CS books next to kegs, there would be an increase.
Because, as geeks we too laugh at these exagerated characters. So it feels like they are laughing with us, when in reality they see us in the same light, and are laughing at us. We think we are cool because of the added attention towards geeks, but nonetheless are still the butt of the joke.
x = (-b(+/-)sqrt(b^2-4ac))/2a
:)
Is it me or is 1337 sp3ak getting even harder to understand
I am not against making literature more accessible, but I am worried about what will be lost (intentionally or not), when people no longer read the originals.
Lost to who? This is geared towards people who would unlikely read the originals anyway. What it could do is stimulate discussion and interest in those students. Let's say the message "ge7 th33 to a nuNn3ry" goes out, and students start saying it, conversing about it, and may actually get them interested in where the quote comes from.
Sometimes the perception of great literature, gets in the way of the actual plot and interesting aspects. The tantilizing aspects of sex, murder, subterfuge often get lost in the high brow discussions of classics.
Secondly Scientific method is based on taking data, making a model of it (a FALSIFIABLE one) and checking the model against the data. If the model do not match the data then it is MERCILESSLY dropped.
Actually scientific method is based on making assumptions, taking data, and generating a model. As for "Mercilessly dropped" based on data, much of physics can't describe all data collected (eg disconnect between quantum physics and relativity). You don't always drop theories, you use the model that best fits until you come up with something better.
Warming starts with CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Twice as much water is produced in typical hydrocarbon reactions than CO2
C(N)H(2N+2)+[(3N+1)/2]O2-->(N)CO2+(N+1)H2O
Jesus will return before Duke Nukem Forever