My issue is that you really, really shouldn't be teaching someone to code without teching them general computer literacy.
"Computer literacy" usually means the ability to use a word processor, and a browser. That is NOT necessary to learn programming. 3rd and 4th graders can learn programming using Scratch without knowing any other applications. If by "computer literacy", you mean understanding how computers actually work, that is certainly not necessary. I have met very capable CS PhDs that don't know what a transistor is.
Our town already employs a guy with a pickup truck and shovel to clear possums and raccoons off the road when they get hit.
That is a silly waste of money. Just do what West Virginia has done, and legalize the gathering and consumption of roadkill. Then the roads will be cleaned up at no expense to the public. West Virginians will sometimes fight over dibs on dead racoon. They even have a Roadkill Cookoff with great recipes and plenty of samples to taste. My favorite is the possum chili.
There isn't much financial impact of people getting killed.
There is little immediate impact, but there is a big long term impact, as the lifetime production of that person doesn't happen. Most texters are young adults. Society has spent a lot to raise and educate them, but most of their productive years are in the future. For this reason, I am opposed to intentionally killing texting pedestrians. Killing texting drivers is okay.
Tesla Autopilot is already installed in ten of thousands of cars. My wife has a Tesla, and it "self-drives" for 80% of her commute. Google SDCs have driven millions of miles on public roads, and have a safety record far better than human drivers.
Can't even get Siri or chatbots to answer questions
Natural language processing is a far more difficult problem than navigation and collision avoidance.
In other words, these major corporations have formed a special interest (super?) PAC to lobby congress and the regulators
Yes, and that is a good thing. Legislators and regulators should receive input from people and organizations that actually understand the issues. Their interests in promoting this technology are pretty well aligned with the public interest, so I don't see any major problem here.
... the same corporation that was responsible for the Great Recession.
GS did not cause the Great Recession. If more banks had done what GS had done, the recession would have happened sooner, and been more mild. Blaming short sellers for crashes is like blaming storms on the weathervane.
This doesn't tell us *anything* about Cruz or Kasich. Even the Kasich spokesman saying that experts "don't know what they're talking about" isn't particularly interesting, it tells us nothing about Cruz or Kasich
Yes, it tells us a lot. A president's most important task is to surround himself with competent people. Cruz and Kasich have both failed that test.
whatsamatter? email, all of a sudden, stopped working?
sheesh!
Email is not a good tool for event management. Messages are not synchronized, and people read and reply out of order. The process starts to fall apart when you go beyond about six people.
Using a spreadsheet may be okay if you are a one person business or a Mom & Pop shop. We use Quickbooks, and it pays for itself with just the end-of-month bank reconciliation (a few seconds with the software, half a day for a human). Other than accounting and tax software which runs on a single dedicated Windows box, we are completely FLOSS. We tried GnuCash, but it is missing many crucial features, and even worse, the developers consider it "done" and are not open to suggestions for improvement. Please don't say "just fork it". That is not a reasonable alternative to paying $150 for Quickbooks.
This is unlikely to have much effect on prices. There is little evidence that longer hours leads to much additional productivity, especially as those longer hours become routine. I usually hang around for an extra hour or so at the end of the day, because my boss does. But I spend that hour unwinding, reading Slashdot or Quora, or browsing Wikipedia (Pro tip: Never sit with your back to the door). Meanwhile, all the non-exempt employees in admin and shipping are required to clock out and leave the building at 5pm, because the company doesn't want to pay them overtime.
DNA is information, right? Information is speech, legally speaking. Therefore, Monsanto can copyright GMO Crops.
No, this is wrong. Information cannot be copyrighted. Only creative expression. Information with no creativity, such as a phone book, is not protected by copyright. It is unlikely that DNA could be protected by copyright (as opposed to patents).
anybody building this without that grant is looking at about 4 years to recover their costs.
No! Almost no one would recover their costs that quickly, if at all. They key point is that this is in Alaska where nearly everything is extremely expensive. Nearly anywhere else, it would be insane to use fuel oil for heat. Instead, you would use cheap natural gas, or co-generated steam from a coal boiler, or a conventional heat pump.
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Not legally.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer
Yes they do. They also have a right to demand that their parents be present during questioning.
The problem here is not the rights, but knowledge of those rights. If you have teenage kids, you need to teach them their legal rights. Have them watch the Do Not Talk to the Police video. If you kid is questioned by the police, they should be trained to say exactly four words:
1. I 2. Want 3. My 4. Parents
Once they say those four words, the police are legally obligated to stop questioning them until their parents are present.
Our public school district here simply sends the kids home with iPads with pre-installed spyware. I've even seen the camera light turn on out of the blue.
BS. iPads don't have camera lights. Stop making things up.
The trend is towards not seeing reliable employment in any industry. Tech is just a bellwether.
No, you need to get a reality check. Unemployment in tech is much lower than the national average (2.9% vs 5.1%), and tech job tenure is higher than average. There is no evidence that employment is becoming less reliable. Average job tenure in America today is higher than it was 30 years ago.
"dear management: your request to work yet another weekend for YOUR company is being declined.
I think I understand why you are unemployed. I am over 50, and if my employer needs me to come in on an occasional weekend to supervise the younglings, then I am there.
You complain about ageism, and in the very next breath you display the very sort of surly attitude and "senior privilege" that employers are trying to avoid. If you cannot find a job in the SF Bay Area in the current economy, then the problem is you.
The biggest problem I've seen is young jocks wanting to use "buzzword technology" just for the sake of using them
Free advice: Pick your battles carefully, and avoid being overly negative. Instead, point out the drawbacks of new-fangelism, and make constructive suggestions. If your organization is, say, going with JavaScript so everything will be "cross-platform", then go with the flow, but suggest a framework/library that is actually cross-platform, familiarize yourself with JS static analysis tools like JSHint and Closure, and become the expert in on-device debugging (notoriously hard with JS). You won't be the high-flying trapeze artist, but you will be the guy with the safety net.
More free advice: Don't ever, EVER say "I told you so", no matter how tempting it may be.
I am over 50, I live and work in Silicon Valley, and I have never personally experienced ageism. By the time someone is my age, they should have plenty of experience, be able to apply old tricks to new technologies, and have deep and wide professional network. If I was looking for a new job (I am not), I could easily tap old friends and coworkers, and have several offers within a day or two. If an old person is trying to find a job using Craigslist, Dice, etc. then that means they have no network, or don't think their old coworkers would recommend them, because they are unproductive. That is not "ageism", it is "unproductivism".
So what is new about this device? Capturing energy from RF was done over a century ago. Energy harvesting for sensors and microcontrollers has been common for several decades. The only difference that I can see about this device is that it requires pairing with an RFID transmitter, while many other devices harvest from ambient sources, so that makes this device worse that what has been available for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
My issue is that you really, really shouldn't be teaching someone to code without teching them general computer literacy.
"Computer literacy" usually means the ability to use a word processor, and a browser. That is NOT necessary to learn programming. 3rd and 4th graders can learn programming using Scratch without knowing any other applications. If by "computer literacy", you mean understanding how computers actually work, that is certainly not necessary. I have met very capable CS PhDs that don't know what a transistor is.
What is this clown babbling about?
He thinks the most profitable company in the world should stop what they are doing and do things his way instead.
Our town already employs a guy with a pickup truck and shovel to clear possums and raccoons off the road when they get hit.
That is a silly waste of money. Just do what West Virginia has done, and legalize the gathering and consumption of roadkill. Then the roads will be cleaned up at no expense to the public. West Virginians will sometimes fight over dibs on dead racoon. They even have a Roadkill Cookoff with great recipes and plenty of samples to taste. My favorite is the possum chili.
There isn't much financial impact of people getting killed.
There is little immediate impact, but there is a big long term impact, as the lifetime production of that person doesn't happen. Most texters are young adults. Society has spent a lot to raise and educate them, but most of their productive years are in the future. For this reason, I am opposed to intentionally killing texting pedestrians. Killing texting drivers is okay.
we are nowhere close on self-driving cars.
Tesla Autopilot is already installed in ten of thousands of cars. My wife has a Tesla, and it "self-drives" for 80% of her commute. Google SDCs have driven millions of miles on public roads, and have a safety record far better than human drivers.
Can't even get Siri or chatbots to answer questions
Natural language processing is a far more difficult problem than navigation and collision avoidance.
This tech could put millions out of work.
The purpose of economic activity is the production of goods and services, not "keeping people busy".
Perhaps the government could pay the unemployed drivers to throw rocks through windows to generate jobs for glaziers.
In other words, these major corporations have formed a special interest (super?) PAC to lobby congress and the regulators
Yes, and that is a good thing. Legislators and regulators should receive input from people and organizations that actually understand the issues. Their interests in promoting this technology are pretty well aligned with the public interest, so I don't see any major problem here.
why did they need the bailout then?
GS did not need a bailout. Their customers/victims did. They received some TARP money, but they certainly didn't need it.
... the same corporation that was responsible for the Great Recession.
GS did not cause the Great Recession. If more banks had done what GS had done, the recession would have happened sooner, and been more mild. Blaming short sellers for crashes is like blaming storms on the weathervane.
Goldman Sachs! Synonym with trustworthiness and financial stability.
GS had enough sense to short the sub-prime mortgage market when everyone else was digging in deeper. So they aren't dumb.
This doesn't tell us *anything* about Cruz or Kasich. Even the Kasich spokesman saying that experts "don't know what they're talking about" isn't particularly interesting, it tells us nothing about Cruz or Kasich
Yes, it tells us a lot. A president's most important task is to surround himself with competent people. Cruz and Kasich have both failed that test.
whatsamatter? email, all of a sudden, stopped working?
sheesh!
Email is not a good tool for event management. Messages are not synchronized, and people read and reply out of order. The process starts to fall apart when you go beyond about six people.
[same as before computers but]... on a computer.
Using a spreadsheet may be okay if you are a one person business or a Mom & Pop shop. We use Quickbooks, and it pays for itself with just the end-of-month bank reconciliation (a few seconds with the software, half a day for a human). Other than accounting and tax software which runs on a single dedicated Windows box, we are completely FLOSS. We tried GnuCash, but it is missing many crucial features, and even worse, the developers consider it "done" and are not open to suggestions for improvement. Please don't say "just fork it". That is not a reasonable alternative to paying $150 for Quickbooks.
Get ready for things to get more expensive.
This is unlikely to have much effect on prices. There is little evidence that longer hours leads to much additional productivity, especially as those longer hours become routine. I usually hang around for an extra hour or so at the end of the day, because my boss does. But I spend that hour unwinding, reading Slashdot or Quora, or browsing Wikipedia (Pro tip: Never sit with your back to the door). Meanwhile, all the non-exempt employees in admin and shipping are required to clock out and leave the building at 5pm, because the company doesn't want to pay them overtime.
This is why I only use FLOSS software in my business, and why I don't care which Free/Libre/Open license it is.
What do you use for accounting/bookkeepping/taxes?
DNA is information, right? Information is speech, legally speaking. Therefore, Monsanto can copyright GMO Crops.
No, this is wrong. Information cannot be copyrighted. Only creative expression. Information with no creativity, such as a phone book, is not protected by copyright. It is unlikely that DNA could be protected by copyright (as opposed to patents).
anybody building this without that grant is looking at about 4 years to recover their costs.
No! Almost no one would recover their costs that quickly, if at all. They key point is that this is in Alaska where nearly everything is extremely expensive. Nearly anywhere else, it would be insane to use fuel oil for heat. Instead, you would use cheap natural gas, or co-generated steam from a coal boiler, or a conventional heat pump.
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Not legally.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer
Yes they do. They also have a right to demand that their parents be present during questioning.
The problem here is not the rights, but knowledge of those rights. If you have teenage kids, you need to teach them their legal rights. Have them watch the Do Not Talk to the Police video. If you kid is questioned by the police, they should be trained to say exactly four words:
1. I
2. Want
3. My
4. Parents
Once they say those four words, the police are legally obligated to stop questioning them until their parents are present.
Our public school district here simply sends the kids home with iPads with pre-installed spyware. I've even seen the camera light turn on out of the blue.
BS. iPads don't have camera lights. Stop making things up.
It is actually very difficult to simulate quantum phenomena on a computer.
Not if you use a quantum computer.
The trend is towards not seeing reliable employment in any industry. Tech is just a bellwether.
No, you need to get a reality check. Unemployment in tech is much lower than the national average (2.9% vs 5.1%), and tech job tenure is higher than average. There is no evidence that employment is becoming less reliable. Average job tenure in America today is higher than it was 30 years ago.
read this:
"dear management: your request to work yet another weekend for YOUR company is being declined.
I think I understand why you are unemployed. I am over 50, and if my employer needs me to come in on an occasional weekend to supervise the younglings, then I am there.
You complain about ageism, and in the very next breath you display the very sort of surly attitude and "senior privilege" that employers are trying to avoid. If you cannot find a job in the SF Bay Area in the current economy, then the problem is you.
The biggest problem I've seen is young jocks wanting to use "buzzword technology" just for the sake of using them
Free advice: Pick your battles carefully, and avoid being overly negative. Instead, point out the drawbacks of new-fangelism, and make constructive suggestions. If your organization is, say, going with JavaScript so everything will be "cross-platform", then go with the flow, but suggest a framework/library that is actually cross-platform, familiarize yourself with JS static analysis tools like JSHint and Closure, and become the expert in on-device debugging (notoriously hard with JS). You won't be the high-flying trapeze artist, but you will be the guy with the safety net.
More free advice: Don't ever, EVER say "I told you so", no matter how tempting it may be.
I am over 50, I live and work in Silicon Valley, and I have never personally experienced ageism. By the time someone is my age, they should have plenty of experience, be able to apply old tricks to new technologies, and have deep and wide professional network. If I was looking for a new job (I am not), I could easily tap old friends and coworkers, and have several offers within a day or two. If an old person is trying to find a job using Craigslist, Dice, etc. then that means they have no network, or don't think their old coworkers would recommend them, because they are unproductive. That is not "ageism", it is "unproductivism".
So what is new about this device? Capturing energy from RF was done over a century ago. Energy harvesting for sensors and microcontrollers has been common for several decades. The only difference that I can see about this device is that it requires pairing with an RFID transmitter, while many other devices harvest from ambient sources, so that makes this device worse that what has been available for decades.