I don't blame Clinton's budget cuts for our failures in Iraq. I think the cuts are large contributors to the level of strain on the Guard and Reserves. I believe that strain is excessive given the scale of the war we've taken on. But even with that strain, our objectives could be achieved with proper management/execution.
I believe Bush's mismanagement is the primary contributor to our problems there - as you said, he tried to fight the war on the cheap from the beginning, which was a huge mistake.
I believe the secondary contributor was his lack of moral leadership on issues like torture. When you're fighting a counter-insurgency, your image and moral standing are absolutely critical because you need the support of the population to succeed. Any occupier is going to be unpopular, but being seen as torturers just destroyed our credibility. Bush can call it "enhanced interrogation techniques" all he wants, but his advocacy of what are at best "gray areas" sent the message that we are either lacking moral principles, or are only willing to follow our principles when it's convenient. That's not the sort of occupier that the local population will be able to trust.
but they *can* charge more for premium seating. And they can give discounts for buying in bulk.
The devil in the details for net neutrality is how do you know when a company is charging you a higher rate because they're trying to distort the marketplace in some forbidden way, versus when you just aren't buying in large enough quantities or with a good enough negotiator?
Setting aside for the moment the wisdom of getting into this particular war, which is a debate unto itself... you've got two basic options if you're going to war.
Option A is you fight just enough to scare the other country into behaving the way you'd like. Obviously this has its advantages, but sometimes won't be practical (intransigent or insane regime).
Option B is full-out war, the end result of this is that the enemy government no longer rules its territory. Which means that our military is then the de facto government of that territory. Obviously one should set up a replacement government as quickly as possible, but there will always be some transition period during which the government is not ready and the military is thus serving as occupier and at least to some extent nation-builder. All I'm saying is if we're going to be willing to go to war we better have the resources to follow through with the consequences.
For Iraq, even had the occupation been managed brilliantly (and we're clearly *far* from that) there would have been a solid few years where the military was doing occupation and nation-building, and would be stretched to the limits. Given that Iraq was hardly our largest or most powerful potential adversary, that should give us pause.
I suppose technically there is an alternative within Option 2, which is to immediately leave the instant you've destroyed the enemy regime. But that's going to leave chaos, and put that nation's people through incredible hardship, which is pretty much guaranteed to make that country a problem again in the near future (Germany's populace was treated harshly after World War I, and look how that turned out). So that to me doesn't seem like much of an option, which leaves us needing a military that can really occupy a country for a few years without such severe strains.
How does an ISP charging you to use their service impinge upon your constitutional freedom of assembly?
Seems to me you can go organize all the rallies you want or hang out with whatever crowd you'd like. But if you want to use the service the ISP provides, which requires paying employees to maintain the infrastructure and staff support desks, then you have to pay a fee to enable that to happen. Few people can afford to work for free.
I think there's a case to be made for some Net Neutrality provisions (the devil being in the details, naturally). But I just don't see it impinging upon your freedom of assembly. It's like saying a baseball stadium can't charge you for a ticket to the game because you somehow have a right to assemble there.
If Clinton gets credit for the dot-common bubble's budget surplus, he ought to get the blame for the crash that followed too. It's one and the same phenomenon, he just was fortunate to get out of office right before the inevitable bursting of the bubble.
Besides the bubble, and the fact he had to deal with an opposition-party Congress, the other major factor that led to surpluses was Clinton's massive cuts to military spending. But among the many lessons Iraq has given us, is that the cuts went too deep. We simply don't have enough personnel anymore, and the strain on the Reserves and National Guard is the result.
Don't get me wrong - Clinton did a decent job as president overall. I just think you have to account for the minuses of his decisions along with the pluses.
And don't get me started on fiscal responsibility and Democrats - Congressional Democrats have traditionally been the worst of the lot when it comes to wasteful government spending. It's only recently that the Republicans have arguably taken over that dubious distinction. We'll see if either party starts to feel enough shame (or at least political calculation) to actually clean things up. Despite the campaign rhetoric, from what I've seen so far, I'm not too optimistic.
Agreed. And I don't think an appreciate of pictures has anything to do with attention span. In my experience working as an engineer/programmer, engineers appreciate pictures *at least* as much as non-engineers do.
A picture truly is worth a thousand words - a class diagram or simple sketch of object interactions make a design far easier to understand than two pages of text.
And that's not even accounting for engineers with not-so-great writing skills. Pictures help even more there.
It is true that the vast majority of the CS majors are not "smelly and socially broken". But the odd few make for better stories:-)
I considered being a smartass, and suggesting that since you've been at CMU forever your baseline of normalcy may have simply drifted. But I'll refrain so as to neither slander the CS majors nor scare off potential future attendees;-)
The real question I have is what exactly does "de-emphasize" mean when they're talking about programming? Does it mean that they're spending more time giving people (and particularly the women they're trying to recruit) the big picture of all the areas in which computer science is important (research or applications)? Or does it mean they're reducing their standards? I think doing a better job of the big picture is a great idea, for male and female students alike (as an ECE major I think I would've benefited from a little more big-picture stuff early on). But lowering academic standards just to get a desired gender mix is a whole different beast.
The claim that the field would be better off with a more balanced gender mix does not truly depend on a belief in women being superior to men.
One argument is the general pro-diversity argument. Basically it claims that women have a different experiences and perspectives than men, and that having computer scientists with a mix of different backgrounds can better stimulate solutions/creativity/etc than a more homogeneous mix would. Thus balancing out the gender discrepancy in computer science would benefit the field. Obviously this is a difficult thing to prove, as you alluded to. But it is an argument that does not rely on women being "better" than men at computer science, only different.
(It's possible that argument might still work even if women were actually inferior in this respect - there's been some social science suggesting that groups containing a mix of experts and non-experts can often come up with better solution than the subject matter experts alone would. See a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds").
The other argument is a scarcity argument, i.e. that the field has a shortage of workers in general. Following Amdahl's Law, focusing on the improving particular shortage of women in the field has a much greater maximum benefit than would focusing on the shortage among some other, smaller demographic. The unspoken assumption in this is that fixing the shortage will benefit the field, whether through increased research output, more appealing work/school environments attracting better candidates (male or female), etc. IMO that's probably true; though obviously if you're one of the current members of the field, adding more competitors and thus potentially decreasing salaries does not seem like an improvement. But regardless, the argument applies even if women are no better at computer science than men.
It sounds like there are really two parts to your question: A) programming jobs that don't involve cube farms, and B) programming jobs that let you get out from your desk. And maybe a third of being able to take advantage of your security clearance.
For question A, there are companies that don't expect their programmers to work in cubicles. Ask companies about this aspect of their work environment. Consider, for example, Argon ST (Full disclosure: I work as an engineer there in the DC area. Our facility has offices instead of cubes, with either one or two people per office).
For question B, I suspect those are going to be jobs that mix programming knowledge with other skills, such as field support roles, sales engineer positions, etc. Depending on what you're looking for, maybe something like that could work for you.
This may be a nitpick, but you actually are allowed to sell someone a copy of GPL'd work. Now in general, the chances of anyone being willing to pay you for this are virtually zero, since you can typically find a copy on the Internet for free. But the license itself explicitly allows the charging of a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, as well as for providing warranty coverage of said GPL'd code.
It's sad to say, but there is no way to convince most countries to do anything
I think it'd be more accurate to say there's no way to convince most countries to do things that are against their own self-interest. That's simply logic at work - why agree to do something you think will be a net harm to your nation? The challenge is in persuading the numerous countries of the world to agree that A) something is indeed a problem for them, and B) a given solution will be effective and fair.
Item A is hard enough. B is even harder. Hence our problems herding cats at the UN.
I am not quite as skeptical about our chances of addressing global warming. If global warming is truly as dire as Al Gore and company claim, nations should start to feel the impact over time and become more motivated to deal with it. They won't deal with it as quickly as they should, and the solutions will be more painful because of the delay, but that lack of long-term vision seems to be the rule in politics.
Just look at the Social Security mess in the United States - we've known the system is heading for ruin if we do nothing, but yet we do nothing because nobody's feeling the pain yet. When taxes start skyrocketing to cover the increased costs, then I think we'll see action. But not until the politicians' jobs are at stake.
There's a world of difference between your neighbor filming you doing something that they don't like, and the government recording your every public act.
First off, if your neighbor is willing to go to that much effort, you specifically are probably doing something to cause that reaction (regardless of whether you're within your rights to do so).
Government recording is more likely to be broad-brushed - i.e. patrol and thus record a whole neighborhood because it has a few troublemakers. I don't want to live in a place where the government is recording my every move.
Second, with the neighbor, at the least now you know you're aggravating this person mightily. That knowledge can be a catalyst for a discussion with (perhaps apology to) your neighbor, such that you can come to a resolution. If harmony is restored, chances are that video comes down off the web.
Good luck trying to get that same result out of a government bureaucracy - chances are that video's been sucked into the bowels of some database, to be archived indefinitely and used in some completely non-transparent manner. Heck, good luck even discovering who you should contact in said bureaucracy to attempt to remove it, assuming you are allowed such a right.
Third, the most power the neighbor has over you is to probably shame. Maybe they can try to be annoying back at you. Whoopee - that's nothing compared to the power of the state. Thus government surveillance should be treated with much greater caution.
It's true that the government can still mine citizens' postings online. But that's both more transparent and more limited - your neighbor is probably only posting a clip of you doing something aggravating, not a continuous surveillance operation.
There is almost no dissent in the scientific community as to whether global warming is man made, and even less that it exists.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument that the above statement is true. Number of dissenters in a given population is not a particularly good standard. Proof, meaning objective scientific evidence, is. Is there proof that the earth has been warming in recent years? Yes. Is there proof that man's activities have a warming effect? Yes. Is there proof that man's activities have been the cause of the majority or even a sizable fraction of global warming? Not really. Many people (including scientists) believe this third claim to be true. It is quite possibly true, and the facts we have are at the least highly suggestive. But suggestive is not the same thing as being proven true. And given that, we ought to act with some caution (both caution in terms of doing too little and in terms of doing too much).
Skeptics have plenty of reason to be skeptical. Don't forget the 1970s, where the big climate scare was that we were approaching an impeding ice age due to man's pollution. The particulate matter we were sending into the atmosphere was supposedly going to overwhelm any greenhouse gas effects, reflect too much sunlight, and turn the earth into a frozen wasteland. We all see how that turned out. The science may turn out to be more accurate this time around, but a little skepticism towards the "sky is falling" crowd is not undeserved.
With respect to skepticism being the "lazy person's default position", I would simply note that the burden of proof rightly falls on the person who wants everyone to do something. If you tell me to go jump off a bridge, I'm certainly going to ask you why before I do, and won't do it unless I think there's good reason to. If you can show me that there's a train coming, and I'll be hit if I don't jump, then I'll jump. If I can get out of the way without jumping, maybe I'll do that. One problem with the global warming debate is that the activists expect everyone to jump without having first met the burden of proof.
Except that "proportion of life employed" is not the same as "years of related work experience". The latter has direct bearing on job requirements. The former is more indirect and runs a clear "disparate impact" risk.
The post in question presented one perspective on the situation, you presented another. The problem is that we're talking in generalities when the "right choice" is going to come down to specific circumstances and their costs and benefits. Even then, some costs and benefits are not known a priori.
We can't know the future, so you have to consider hypothetical situations, and take a guess at their probability of happening and their associated costs. That's not "cherry-picking", it's picking the areas that you think will be of concern to your company. You can't know whether your tool vendor will be around in N years, whether they will provide adequate and timely bug fixes. You can't know the severity of the bugs you'll encounter. You can't know how big your company will have grown in N years and what the corresponding changes to your needs will be.
So you guess to the best of your knowledge, and try not to paint yourself into a corner for important decisions with significant uncertainty. Open-source has a lot going for it in managing particular uncertainties - you have the ability to hire people to fix bugs or make enhancements on your schedule rather than a vendor's, and you know the software isn't going to disappear from the face of the earth (either from licensing changes or a company's demise).
That doesn't mean open-source is always the solution - a commercial tool may simply be a better fit for your needs and the risks of the proprietary solution may not be large in a given situation. But it's going to come down to that sort of case-by-case judgment call.
The industry group Association for Computing Machinery has a model curriculum for integrating computer science into K-12 education. You might find some helpful ideas in there.
and all that because some people cant't handle the complexity. tough shit. IT ain't easy
No it isn't. But usually our solution as engineers/developers to things that people have trouble handling is to redesign the systems to better meet the user's needs and capabilities. After all, technology is supposed to serve mankind, not the other way around.
In our 35 years or so of experience since the invention of C, the industry has learned lots of ways to do better. The result is things like C++, Java, and yes, the "fancy-scripting-du-jour":-)
As a point of comparison, C was invented around 1972, while the Ford Pinto came out in 1971. The Pinto, like C, will usually get you where you need to go. But the Pinto, like C, has this unfortunate habit of bursting into flames when you make certain types of mistakes. Modern cars and programming languages, on the other hand, generally do not. They even throw in a few extra amenities.
It's not bad-mouthing the Pinto to suggest to your friends that perhaps a Pinto is not the best choice in this day and age. If a Pinto is all you've got and can afford, then good luck, and be sure to drive slowly for your own safety. Otherwise, it's worth considering a newer model.
actually, the memory randomization's main benefit is that the memory addresses are different among different machines on the network. Thus even if one machine gets infected, it's unlikely to be able to infect its neighbors, and you effectively get a herd immunity.
That benefit doesn't go away with prebuilt images, assuming that different machines have differently randomized images. I.e. a given machine can choose to use the same memory addresses all the time, as long as those addresses are different than the ones used by its neighbors.
It is clear from the previously cited chart that the Top 5% have benefited from a redistribution of income since 1980. I don't think this redistribution of more income to the top 5% is a function of their increased education, for their working harder, based on merit, because the other groups are less educated or for any other reason other than an economic structure has been changed to benefit those at the top
Agreed. An interesting question is what caused the economic structures to change? Regulation/deregulation? Given the amount of regulation that we have (and often need), it's probable IMO that regulatory changes played at least a partial role. There has also been a shift towards "knowledge work" in our economy, which leads to greater disparities in productivity (and hence income), and also tends to require little financial capital to start businesses (which tend to produce lots of income when successful). I don't know how we untangle those effects to see how much of the effect was from what. I guess if I did I'd be an economist:-)
There are actually some interesting statistics about what the top 5% means - currently it's people making $157,000+ a year (sources: current and from 2001). Well-off for sure, though not as high as I'd assumed. The Wikipedia article actually breaks it out by percentages in each $10,000 increment of income (though the last two bars in the graph are actually $50k increments, which is why there's an odd spike there).
I don't think the problem is primarily education. I think the primary problem is concentrated wealth. If you start out in life with a $1 million dollar trust fund, you are going to have different opportunities than someone that has to earn money to put food on their parent's table - irrespective of your education level.
It is certainly true that someone with a $1 million trust fund has enormously more opportunities than the rest of us. The children of those in the top 5% of earnings also have better opportunities. But few people are in that situation. I'm much more interested in what's happening to the other 95% of people. It's not like there's a fixed amount of income to go around, such that the top 5% getting more necessarily means the other 95% get less. If the economy grows, we can all earn more; and if we got to a point where everyone had enough to live good lives, but a few people still made way more money, I think I'd be okay with that. Problem is that we're not at that point. So I see the problem as how do we as a society help folks in the 95% with the problems that impact them.
Maybe it's just a philosophical point, but I think it can make a difference in what types of solutions come to mind, and their likelihood of being implemented. We see the 95% problems all the time - the skyrocketing cost of healthcare and loss of insurance, the job insecurity caused by the shifts in our economy to more education-intensive jobs (and the loss of some less-education-intensive jobs folks have relied on for years), risks in retirement and Social Security, etc. I think people are willing to fund through their taxes solutions to these problems, because they're serious problems and people see the need for some level of a safety net. But I believe you'd have a much harder time convincing people there should be new or higher taxes on people in the top 5% simply by virtue of the fact that they've gotten to the top 5% and the income levels are uneven - it's seen as punishing success.
Affirmative action should be showing a preference for candidates that are members of traditionally discriminated against groups when all else is equal.
I think pretty much everyone would agree the idea of helping individuals who have been disadvantaged by circumstances beyond their control (whether it be by racism, poverty, etc.). But that's not qu
I don't think the post was suggesting that we live in a pure meritocracy. Simply that rewarding merit should be a feature of our economic system.
There's no doubt that some degree of regulation is necessary to deal with exactly those externalities that the market doesn't account for. But that doesn't mean that the government should have as its aim the forcible redistribution of people's possessions.
First, there is no commonly accepted definition of what an "equitable" redistribution would be.
Second, the closest you'll probably get to such a definition in the US is the grandparent-post's suggestion of rewarding those who "sacrifice, save, and work hard". Trying to keep track of whether each citizen fits that definition is pretty much impossible.
Third, the result of that impossibility is that the government is then forced to resort to gross substitutes like total income or total assets. Such measures totally neglect the question of how somebody got to be at the bottom of the income/asset distribution, which is really fundamental to the question of fairness or justice. Did the person just get some bad luck outside of their control, or were they lazy? Helping the former is seen as just, helping the latter is not (it's enabling a freeloader). By making no distinction in the redistribution, you are adding unfairness to the system.
Rather than attempt a well-intentioned but inevitably unfair income redistribution, the far better solution is to fix the structural problems that create unequal opportunity. You'll always have some people who work harder than others, and it's okay if those folks make more money. But we need to try our best to make sure everyone starts off on as level of a playing field as we can.
In today's economy, I believe we could get much of the way there by fixing our education system. The biggest source of unequal wealth is unequal education. If you have a crappy school as a kid, you're much less likely to go to college, or get into a good college. That in turn makes you much less likely to get a well-paying job.
Unfortunately, our politicians so far seem disinclined to fix this structural problem (actually a few structural problems - no incentives for schools to perform well, difficulty of removing poorly performing administrators or faculty, funding that is tied to property taxes and thus perpetuates existing inequality, etc). So instead they try half-measures that add additional unfairnesses into the system, as if they will somehow "cancel out". But the old adage about "two wrongs don't make a right" is particularly true when you create policies that cover the nearly infinite different personal situations that occur in a whole nation.
For example, rather than fix the broken schools that are disproportionately attended by minorities, our politicians have enacted "affirmative action" policies that discriminate against non-minorities in college admissions. For the minorities who attended poor schools, it's too little too late - they're already behind their new college classmates. Non-minorities who suffered in poor schools are doubly penalized. This is not a fair system - but it's what comes from trying to address outcomes directly rather than dealing with the underlying problems of opportunity.
One can believe in and support democracy, while simultaneously holding democratically elected leaders accountable for their actions.
In the case of the Palestinians, the US fully supports their right to democracy, and in fact supports a full state for the Palestinians. That does not obligate the US to financially support a Hamas government that refuses to recognize that Israel should have those same rights.
There's no reason to believe that democracy should come without responsibility or accountability. The people and leadership of democracies must decide where their own interests lie. The Palestinians were faced with such a choice, and unfortunately for both them and the rest of the world, their options were lousy. On the one hand was the corruption of Fatah, and on the other hand was the anti-peace agenda of Hamas.
I don't blame the Palestinians for trying to end the corruption. But neither to I blame the US for refusing to support Hamas when it refuses to work for peace.
One can only hope that in time, democratic pressure will either force Fatah to clean itself up in order to regain power, or will force Hamas to work towards a settlement in order to stay in power.
The qestion I have come to dread is "how passionate are you about your job?" which seems to be a thinly veiled way to say that they're looking for someone who works 70+ hours a week and be on call 24/7.
That's a tough question to handle, if you believe that it is indeed a thinly veiled way of asking if you want to have no life outside of work. You need to be able to answer that you are very passionate, without giving the impression that you want to be a slave, and still allowing for the possibility it was an innocent question.
My first thought would be to try something like "I'm very passionate about my job - in fact, other than my family, it's the thing I'm most passionate about. I love X, Y, and Z about this kind of work...".
That lets you talk up how much passion you have for your job but still lets them know that your family comes first. Any employer worth working for will respect that. If they don't, well then it's best to find out up front (as you seem to know, given your comments).
It'sa much tougher question to handle if one is young and single - because you still need to have personal time to go out and meet people (obvious prerequisite to *starting* a family), but dating doesn't get the same societal respect as taking care of a family you already have.
You've proved the OPs point. His competitors are playing catch up by writing code that the OP already has
Or it could be that his company is the one playing catch-up, not his competitors, who might similarly have their own secret patches to do the same thing and more. There's really no way to know unless the various competitors communicate their positions, which is probably unlikely.
Also, consider that by contributing his version of improvements to the OSS community, his company can get free maintenance and further improvements. This imposes a cost on their competitors, who now must either essentially maintain a fork of the software with their own now-incompatible secret changes (thus losing out on the community's improvements), or spend money to convert their own secret changes to be compatible with the new "official" version.
Being the first provider of a new feature allows your version to become the de facto standard. Getting to define the standard can be quite the competitive advantage, as above, in addition to whatever PR benefits may accrue.
Of course, if you're way ahead of your competition in terms of proprietary code patches, then maybe you don't want to contribute them. But you run the risk that your competitor will, thus imposing costs on you. So there's a balancing game to be played based on your estimate of your position relative to the competition.
Also, sometimes it can make sense to collaborate with your competitors to contribute to an OSS project in order to fend off, or obtain leverage over, other commercial entities that are a "common enemy". I.e. many consumer electronics makers working with Linux to prevent Microsoft from being able to exert excessive influence into their industry.
... the number of people leaving for positions at companies with real offices, like this job at ArgonST?
Having worked both in cubes and in real offices, offices win hands-down.
I would suggest that the original developer is the best person to develop the tests, because thinking about how you're going to test your code often exposes flaws in your design, interface, or implementation. Better for the developer to realize that early in his process, than after the fact when some QA or "test developer" comes along and says something doesn't work quite right. It's almost always faster/cheaper/more efficient to fix a problem early on in the lifecycle than at the end.
Besides, the developer is typically going to do *some* sort of unit testing to convince himself that his code works. It's often not a huge effort to formalize that already-planned testing into a repeatable/automated unit test.
You're right that there is the rose-tinted glasses effect, but you can overcome that by including unit test code as part of peer review that happens on the "regular" code. (This obviously assumes the company does some form of peer review; if they don't then who is picked to write unit tests is the least of their problems).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't blame Clinton's budget cuts for our failures in Iraq. I think the cuts are large contributors to the level of strain on the Guard and Reserves. I believe that strain is excessive given the scale of the war we've taken on. But even with that strain, our objectives could be achieved with proper management/execution.
I believe Bush's mismanagement is the primary contributor to our problems there - as you said, he tried to fight the war on the cheap from the beginning, which was a huge mistake.
I believe the secondary contributor was his lack of moral leadership on issues like torture. When you're fighting a counter-insurgency, your image and moral standing are absolutely critical because you need the support of the population to succeed. Any occupier is going to be unpopular, but being seen as torturers just destroyed our credibility. Bush can call it "enhanced interrogation techniques" all he wants, but his advocacy of what are at best "gray areas" sent the message that we are either lacking moral principles, or are only willing to follow our principles when it's convenient. That's not the sort of occupier that the local population will be able to trust.
but they *can* charge more for premium seating. And they can give discounts for buying in bulk.
The devil in the details for net neutrality is how do you know when a company is charging you a higher rate because they're trying to distort the marketplace in some forbidden way, versus when you just aren't buying in large enough quantities or with a good enough negotiator?
Setting aside for the moment the wisdom of getting into this particular war, which is a debate unto itself... you've got two basic options if you're going to war.
Option A is you fight just enough to scare the other country into behaving the way you'd like. Obviously this has its advantages, but sometimes won't be practical (intransigent or insane regime).
Option B is full-out war, the end result of this is that the enemy government no longer rules its territory. Which means that our military is then the de facto government of that territory. Obviously one should set up a replacement government as quickly as possible, but there will always be some transition period during which the government is not ready and the military is thus serving as occupier and at least to some extent nation-builder. All I'm saying is if we're going to be willing to go to war we better have the resources to follow through with the consequences.
For Iraq, even had the occupation been managed brilliantly (and we're clearly *far* from that) there would have been a solid few years where the military was doing occupation and nation-building, and would be stretched to the limits. Given that Iraq was hardly our largest or most powerful potential adversary, that should give us pause.
I suppose technically there is an alternative within Option 2, which is to immediately leave the instant you've destroyed the enemy regime. But that's going to leave chaos, and put that nation's people through incredible hardship, which is pretty much guaranteed to make that country a problem again in the near future (Germany's populace was treated harshly after World War I, and look how that turned out). So that to me doesn't seem like much of an option, which leaves us needing a military that can really occupy a country for a few years without such severe strains.
How does an ISP charging you to use their service impinge upon your constitutional freedom of assembly?
Seems to me you can go organize all the rallies you want or hang out with whatever crowd you'd like. But if you want to use the service the ISP provides, which requires paying employees to maintain the infrastructure and staff support desks, then you have to pay a fee to enable that to happen. Few people can afford to work for free.
I think there's a case to be made for some Net Neutrality provisions (the devil being in the details, naturally). But I just don't see it impinging upon your freedom of assembly. It's like saying a baseball stadium can't charge you for a ticket to the game because you somehow have a right to assemble there.
If Clinton gets credit for the dot-common bubble's budget surplus, he ought to get the blame for the crash that followed too. It's one and the same phenomenon, he just was fortunate to get out of office right before the inevitable bursting of the bubble.
Besides the bubble, and the fact he had to deal with an opposition-party Congress, the other major factor that led to surpluses was Clinton's massive cuts to military spending. But among the many lessons Iraq has given us, is that the cuts went too deep. We simply don't have enough personnel anymore, and the strain on the Reserves and National Guard is the result.
Don't get me wrong - Clinton did a decent job as president overall. I just think you have to account for the minuses of his decisions along with the pluses.
And don't get me started on fiscal responsibility and Democrats - Congressional Democrats have traditionally been the worst of the lot when it comes to wasteful government spending. It's only recently that the Republicans have arguably taken over that dubious distinction. We'll see if either party starts to feel enough shame (or at least political calculation) to actually clean things up. Despite the campaign rhetoric, from what I've seen so far, I'm not too optimistic.
Agreed. And I don't think an appreciate of pictures has anything to do with attention span. In my experience working as an engineer/programmer, engineers appreciate pictures *at least* as much as non-engineers do.
A picture truly is worth a thousand words - a class diagram or simple sketch of object interactions make a design far easier to understand than two pages of text.
And that's not even accounting for engineers with not-so-great writing skills. Pictures help even more there.
It is true that the vast majority of the CS majors are not "smelly and socially broken". But the odd few make for better stories :-)
;-)
I considered being a smartass, and suggesting that since you've been at CMU forever your baseline of normalcy may have simply drifted. But I'll refrain so as to neither slander the CS majors nor scare off potential future attendees
The real question I have is what exactly does "de-emphasize" mean when they're talking about programming? Does it mean that they're spending more time giving people (and particularly the women they're trying to recruit) the big picture of all the areas in which computer science is important (research or applications)? Or does it mean they're reducing their standards? I think doing a better job of the big picture is a great idea, for male and female students alike (as an ECE major I think I would've benefited from a little more big-picture stuff early on). But lowering academic standards just to get a desired gender mix is a whole different beast.
The claim that the field would be better off with a more balanced gender mix does not truly depend on a belief in women being superior to men.
One argument is the general pro-diversity argument. Basically it claims that women have a different experiences and perspectives than men, and that having computer scientists with a mix of different backgrounds can better stimulate solutions/creativity/etc than a more homogeneous mix would. Thus balancing out the gender discrepancy in computer science would benefit the field. Obviously this is a difficult thing to prove, as you alluded to. But it is an argument that does not rely on women being "better" than men at computer science, only different.
(It's possible that argument might still work even if women were actually inferior in this respect - there's been some social science suggesting that groups containing a mix of experts and non-experts can often come up with better solution than the subject matter experts alone would. See a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds").
The other argument is a scarcity argument, i.e. that the field has a shortage of workers in general. Following Amdahl's Law, focusing on the improving particular shortage of women in the field has a much greater maximum benefit than would focusing on the shortage among some other, smaller demographic. The unspoken assumption in this is that fixing the shortage will benefit the field, whether through increased research output, more appealing work/school environments attracting better candidates (male or female), etc. IMO that's probably true; though obviously if you're one of the current members of the field, adding more competitors and thus potentially decreasing salaries does not seem like an improvement. But regardless, the argument applies even if women are no better at computer science than men.
It sounds like there are really two parts to your question: A) programming jobs that don't involve cube farms, and B) programming jobs that let you get out from your desk. And maybe a third of being able to take advantage of your security clearance.
For question A, there are companies that don't expect their programmers to work in cubicles. Ask companies about this aspect of their work environment. Consider, for example, Argon ST (Full disclosure: I work as an engineer there in the DC area. Our facility has offices instead of cubes, with either one or two people per office).
For question B, I suspect those are going to be jobs that mix programming knowledge with other skills, such as field support roles, sales engineer positions, etc. Depending on what you're looking for, maybe something like that could work for you.
This may be a nitpick, but you actually are allowed to sell someone a copy of GPL'd work. Now in general, the chances of anyone being willing to pay you for this are virtually zero, since you can typically find a copy on the Internet for free. But the license itself explicitly allows the charging of a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, as well as for providing warranty coverage of said GPL'd code.
It's sad to say, but there is no way to convince most countries to do anything
I think it'd be more accurate to say there's no way to convince most countries to do things that are against their own self-interest. That's simply logic at work - why agree to do something you think will be a net harm to your nation? The challenge is in persuading the numerous countries of the world to agree that A) something is indeed a problem for them, and B) a given solution will be effective and fair.
Item A is hard enough. B is even harder. Hence our problems herding cats at the UN.
I am not quite as skeptical about our chances of addressing global warming. If global warming is truly as dire as Al Gore and company claim, nations should start to feel the impact over time and become more motivated to deal with it. They won't deal with it as quickly as they should, and the solutions will be more painful because of the delay, but that lack of long-term vision seems to be the rule in politics.
Just look at the Social Security mess in the United States - we've known the system is heading for ruin if we do nothing, but yet we do nothing because nobody's feeling the pain yet. When taxes start skyrocketing to cover the increased costs, then I think we'll see action. But not until the politicians' jobs are at stake.
There's a world of difference between your neighbor filming you doing something that they don't like, and the government recording your every public act.
First off, if your neighbor is willing to go to that much effort, you specifically are probably doing something to cause that reaction (regardless of whether you're within your rights to do so).
Government recording is more likely to be broad-brushed - i.e. patrol and thus record a whole neighborhood because it has a few troublemakers. I don't want to live in a place where the government is recording my every move.
Second, with the neighbor, at the least now you know you're aggravating this person mightily. That knowledge can be a catalyst for a discussion with (perhaps apology to) your neighbor, such that you can come to a resolution. If harmony is restored, chances are that video comes down off the web.
Good luck trying to get that same result out of a government bureaucracy - chances are that video's been sucked into the bowels of some database, to be archived indefinitely and used in some completely non-transparent manner. Heck, good luck even discovering who you should contact in said bureaucracy to attempt to remove it, assuming you are allowed such a right.
Third, the most power the neighbor has over you is to probably shame. Maybe they can try to be annoying back at you. Whoopee - that's nothing compared to the power of the state. Thus government surveillance should be treated with much greater caution.
It's true that the government can still mine citizens' postings online. But that's both more transparent and more limited - your neighbor is probably only posting a clip of you doing something aggravating, not a continuous surveillance operation.
There is almost no dissent in the scientific community as to whether global warming is man made, and even less that it exists.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument that the above statement is true. Number of dissenters in a given population is not a particularly good standard. Proof, meaning objective scientific evidence, is. Is there proof that the earth has been warming in recent years? Yes. Is there proof that man's activities have a warming effect? Yes. Is there proof that man's activities have been the cause of the majority or even a sizable fraction of global warming? Not really. Many people (including scientists) believe this third claim to be true. It is quite possibly true, and the facts we have are at the least highly suggestive. But suggestive is not the same thing as being proven true. And given that, we ought to act with some caution (both caution in terms of doing too little and in terms of doing too much).
Skeptics have plenty of reason to be skeptical. Don't forget the 1970s, where the big climate scare was that we were approaching an impeding ice age due to man's pollution. The particulate matter we were sending into the atmosphere was supposedly going to overwhelm any greenhouse gas effects, reflect too much sunlight, and turn the earth into a frozen wasteland. We all see how that turned out. The science may turn out to be more accurate this time around, but a little skepticism towards the "sky is falling" crowd is not undeserved.
With respect to skepticism being the "lazy person's default position", I would simply note that the burden of proof rightly falls on the person who wants everyone to do something. If you tell me to go jump off a bridge, I'm certainly going to ask you why before I do, and won't do it unless I think there's good reason to. If you can show me that there's a train coming, and I'll be hit if I don't jump, then I'll jump. If I can get out of the way without jumping, maybe I'll do that. One problem with the global warming debate is that the activists expect everyone to jump without having first met the burden of proof.
Except that "proportion of life employed" is not the same as "years of related work experience". The latter has direct bearing on job requirements. The former is more indirect and runs a clear "disparate impact" risk.
The post in question presented one perspective on the situation, you presented another. The problem is that we're talking in generalities when the "right choice" is going to come down to specific circumstances and their costs and benefits. Even then, some costs and benefits are not known a priori.
We can't know the future, so you have to consider hypothetical situations, and take a guess at their probability of happening and their associated costs. That's not "cherry-picking", it's picking the areas that you think will be of concern to your company. You can't know whether your tool vendor will be around in N years, whether they will provide adequate and timely bug fixes. You can't know the severity of the bugs you'll encounter. You can't know how big your company will have grown in N years and what the corresponding changes to your needs will be.
So you guess to the best of your knowledge, and try not to paint yourself into a corner for important decisions with significant uncertainty. Open-source has a lot going for it in managing particular uncertainties - you have the ability to hire people to fix bugs or make enhancements on your schedule rather than a vendor's, and you know the software isn't going to disappear from the face of the earth (either from licensing changes or a company's demise).
That doesn't mean open-source is always the solution - a commercial tool may simply be a better fit for your needs and the risks of the proprietary solution may not be large in a given situation. But it's going to come down to that sort of case-by-case judgment call.
The industry group Association for Computing Machinery has a model curriculum for integrating computer science into K-12 education. You might find some helpful ideas in there.
and all that because some people cant't handle the complexity. tough shit. IT ain't easy
:-)
No it isn't. But usually our solution as engineers/developers to things that people have trouble handling is to redesign the systems to better meet the user's needs and capabilities. After all, technology is supposed to serve mankind, not the other way around.
In our 35 years or so of experience since the invention of C, the industry has learned lots of ways to do better. The result is things like C++, Java, and yes, the "fancy-scripting-du-jour"
As a point of comparison, C was invented around 1972, while the Ford Pinto came out in 1971. The Pinto, like C, will usually get you where you need to go. But the Pinto, like C, has this unfortunate habit of bursting into flames when you make certain types of mistakes. Modern cars and programming languages, on the other hand, generally do not. They even throw in a few extra amenities.
It's not bad-mouthing the Pinto to suggest to your friends that perhaps a Pinto is not the best choice in this day and age. If a Pinto is all you've got and can afford, then good luck, and be sure to drive slowly for your own safety. Otherwise, it's worth considering a newer model.
actually, the memory randomization's main benefit is that the memory addresses are different among different machines on the network. Thus even if one machine gets infected, it's unlikely to be able to infect its neighbors, and you effectively get a herd immunity.
That benefit doesn't go away with prebuilt images, assuming that different machines have differently randomized images. I.e. a given machine can choose to use the same memory addresses all the time, as long as those addresses are different than the ones used by its neighbors.
It is clear from the previously cited chart that the Top 5% have benefited from a redistribution of income since 1980. I don't think this redistribution of more income to the top 5% is a function of their increased education, for their working harder, based on merit, because the other groups are less educated or for any other reason other than an economic structure has been changed to benefit those at the top
:-)
Agreed. An interesting question is what caused the economic structures to change? Regulation/deregulation? Given the amount of regulation that we have (and often need), it's probable IMO that regulatory changes played at least a partial role. There has also been a shift towards "knowledge work" in our economy, which leads to greater disparities in productivity (and hence income), and also tends to require little financial capital to start businesses (which tend to produce lots of income when successful). I don't know how we untangle those effects to see how much of the effect was from what. I guess if I did I'd be an economist
There are actually some interesting statistics about what the top 5% means - currently it's people making $157,000+ a year (sources: current and from 2001). Well-off for sure, though not as high as I'd assumed. The Wikipedia article actually breaks it out by percentages in each $10,000 increment of income (though the last two bars in the graph are actually $50k increments, which is why there's an odd spike there).
I don't think the problem is primarily education. I think the primary problem is concentrated wealth. If you start out in life with a $1 million dollar trust fund, you are going to have different opportunities than someone that has to earn money to put food on their parent's table - irrespective of your education level.
It is certainly true that someone with a $1 million trust fund has enormously more opportunities than the rest of us. The children of those in the top 5% of earnings also have better opportunities. But few people are in that situation. I'm much more interested in what's happening to the other 95% of people. It's not like there's a fixed amount of income to go around, such that the top 5% getting more necessarily means the other 95% get less. If the economy grows, we can all earn more; and if we got to a point where everyone had enough to live good lives, but a few people still made way more money, I think I'd be okay with that. Problem is that we're not at that point. So I see the problem as how do we as a society help folks in the 95% with the problems that impact them.
Maybe it's just a philosophical point, but I think it can make a difference in what types of solutions come to mind, and their likelihood of being implemented. We see the 95% problems all the time - the skyrocketing cost of healthcare and loss of insurance, the job insecurity caused by the shifts in our economy to more education-intensive jobs (and the loss of some less-education-intensive jobs folks have relied on for years), risks in retirement and Social Security, etc. I think people are willing to fund through their taxes solutions to these problems, because they're serious problems and people see the need for some level of a safety net. But I believe you'd have a much harder time convincing people there should be new or higher taxes on people in the top 5% simply by virtue of the fact that they've gotten to the top 5% and the income levels are uneven - it's seen as punishing success.
Affirmative action should be showing a preference for candidates that are members of traditionally discriminated against groups when all else is equal.
I think pretty much everyone would agree the idea of helping individuals who have been disadvantaged by circumstances beyond their control (whether it be by racism, poverty, etc.). But that's not qu
I don't think the post was suggesting that we live in a pure meritocracy. Simply that rewarding merit should be a feature of our economic system.
There's no doubt that some degree of regulation is necessary to deal with exactly those externalities that the market doesn't account for. But that doesn't mean that the government should have as its aim the forcible redistribution of people's possessions.
First, there is no commonly accepted definition of what an "equitable" redistribution would be.
Second, the closest you'll probably get to such a definition in the US is the grandparent-post's suggestion of rewarding those who "sacrifice, save, and work hard". Trying to keep track of whether each citizen fits that definition is pretty much impossible.
Third, the result of that impossibility is that the government is then forced to resort to gross substitutes like total income or total assets. Such measures totally neglect the question of how somebody got to be at the bottom of the income/asset distribution, which is really fundamental to the question of fairness or justice. Did the person just get some bad luck outside of their control, or were they lazy? Helping the former is seen as just, helping the latter is not (it's enabling a freeloader). By making no distinction in the redistribution, you are adding unfairness to the system.
Rather than attempt a well-intentioned but inevitably unfair income redistribution, the far better solution is to fix the structural problems that create unequal opportunity. You'll always have some people who work harder than others, and it's okay if those folks make more money. But we need to try our best to make sure everyone starts off on as level of a playing field as we can.
In today's economy, I believe we could get much of the way there by fixing our education system. The biggest source of unequal wealth is unequal education. If you have a crappy school as a kid, you're much less likely to go to college, or get into a good college. That in turn makes you much less likely to get a well-paying job.
Unfortunately, our politicians so far seem disinclined to fix this structural problem (actually a few structural problems - no incentives for schools to perform well, difficulty of removing poorly performing administrators or faculty, funding that is tied to property taxes and thus perpetuates existing inequality, etc). So instead they try half-measures that add additional unfairnesses into the system, as if they will somehow "cancel out". But the old adage about "two wrongs don't make a right" is particularly true when you create policies that cover the nearly infinite different personal situations that occur in a whole nation.
For example, rather than fix the broken schools that are disproportionately attended by minorities, our politicians have enacted "affirmative action" policies that discriminate against non-minorities in college admissions. For the minorities who attended poor schools, it's too little too late - they're already behind their new college classmates. Non-minorities who suffered in poor schools are doubly penalized. This is not a fair system - but it's what comes from trying to address outcomes directly rather than dealing with the underlying problems of opportunity.
One can believe in and support democracy, while simultaneously holding democratically elected leaders accountable for their actions.
In the case of the Palestinians, the US fully supports their right to democracy, and in fact supports a full state for the Palestinians. That does not obligate the US to financially support a Hamas government that refuses to recognize that Israel should have those same rights.
There's no reason to believe that democracy should come without responsibility or accountability. The people and leadership of democracies must decide where their own interests lie. The Palestinians were faced with such a choice, and unfortunately for both them and the rest of the world, their options were lousy. On the one hand was the corruption of Fatah, and on the other hand was the anti-peace agenda of Hamas.
I don't blame the Palestinians for trying to end the corruption. But neither to I blame the US for refusing to support Hamas when it refuses to work for peace.
One can only hope that in time, democratic pressure will either force Fatah to clean itself up in order to regain power, or will force Hamas to work towards a settlement in order to stay in power.
The qestion I have come to dread is "how passionate are you about your job?" which seems to be a thinly veiled way to say that they're looking for someone who works 70+ hours a week and be on call 24/7.
That's a tough question to handle, if you believe that it is indeed a thinly veiled way of asking if you want to have no life outside of work. You need to be able to answer that you are very passionate, without giving the impression that you want to be a slave, and still allowing for the possibility it was an innocent question.
My first thought would be to try something like "I'm very passionate about my job - in fact, other than my family, it's the thing I'm most passionate about. I love X, Y, and Z about this kind of work...".
That lets you talk up how much passion you have for your job but still lets them know that your family comes first. Any employer worth working for will respect that. If they don't, well then it's best to find out up front (as you seem to know, given your comments).
It'sa much tougher question to handle if one is young and single - because you still need to have personal time to go out and meet people (obvious prerequisite to *starting* a family), but dating doesn't get the same societal respect as taking care of a family you already have.
You've proved the OPs point. His competitors are playing catch up by writing code that the OP already has
Or it could be that his company is the one playing catch-up, not his competitors, who might similarly have their own secret patches to do the same thing and more. There's really no way to know unless the various competitors communicate their positions, which is probably unlikely.
Also, consider that by contributing his version of improvements to the OSS community, his company can get free maintenance and further improvements. This imposes a cost on their competitors, who now must either essentially maintain a fork of the software with their own now-incompatible secret changes (thus losing out on the community's improvements), or spend money to convert their own secret changes to be compatible with the new "official" version.
Being the first provider of a new feature allows your version to become the de facto standard. Getting to define the standard can be quite the competitive advantage, as above, in addition to whatever PR benefits may accrue.
Of course, if you're way ahead of your competition in terms of proprietary code patches, then maybe you don't want to contribute them. But you run the risk that your competitor will, thus imposing costs on you. So there's a balancing game to be played based on your estimate of your position relative to the competition.
Also, sometimes it can make sense to collaborate with your competitors to contribute to an OSS project in order to fend off, or obtain leverage over, other commercial entities that are a "common enemy". I.e. many consumer electronics makers working with Linux to prevent Microsoft from being able to exert excessive influence into their industry.
... the number of people leaving for positions at companies with real offices, like this job at ArgonST? Having worked both in cubes and in real offices, offices win hands-down.
I would suggest that the original developer is the best person to develop the tests, because thinking about how you're going to test your code often exposes flaws in your design, interface, or implementation. Better for the developer to realize that early in his process, than after the fact when some QA or "test developer" comes along and says something doesn't work quite right. It's almost always faster/cheaper/more efficient to fix a problem early on in the lifecycle than at the end.
Besides, the developer is typically going to do *some* sort of unit testing to convince himself that his code works. It's often not a huge effort to formalize that already-planned testing into a repeatable/automated unit test.
You're right that there is the rose-tinted glasses effect, but you can overcome that by including unit test code as part of peer review that happens on the "regular" code. (This obviously assumes the company does some form of peer review; if they don't then who is picked to write unit tests is the least of their problems).