Besides, given that knowing something is a kind of power in and of its self ("knowledge is power" and all that), omniscience could be considered a subset of omnipotence
Not quite. Being omniscient means that you *do* know everything.
Being omnipotent means that you can *do* anything, but not that you have to exercise that ability. Therefore you may have the *ability* to know everything, but you don't have to *exercise* it.
For example, I am perfectly capable of hurting people (as most people are), but being a fairly nice guy, I choose not to.
Appalachian people are generally pretty tough to get along with.
Yeah, they tend to be rather closed minded and isolationist. Out of curiosity, what part of Southern Ohio were you from? (I'm here myself at the moment)
I agree, especially for my CS classes (we had our own CS labs full of Sun boxes while most of the rest of the campus labs were windows only). It was nice to be able to sit there with other people and work on things, sometimes bouncing ideas off of each other.
At one point, a friend and I ended up finding a bug in some provided code that was tripping everyone up. Once we found and dealt with it, everyone in the room (at the time, probably half of the class) knew what was going on and what the fix was. A lot of people would have lost a lot of working time due to tracking down the same bug if it weren't for the lab.
I still went to the labs sometimes even after I got my laptop because it was nice to be around other people that were doing the same things I was. It fostered a nice sense of camaraderie between people who would probably never have even gotten to know each other if it weren't for the shared workspace.
When I was in high school I got "written up" by a teacher for using my asthma inhaler. It went something like this.
I was in a number of similar situations. One or two of them because the teacher in question either didn't like me or some random member of my family (no joke).
They got told point blank first by me and then by my parents when they were called that they were by no means going to take the medication away from me (and that in a situation or two that didn't involve necessary medication, that their behavior would not be tolerated).
They eventually backed down, but it took making one heck of a scene to get them to do it. Of course, one of them also got raked over the coals for paddling me as a kid literally without being able to state a reason for doing it to my parents.
Sometimes school officials get way too drunk on the "power" that they have.
(Now if our government would just let capitalism do it's job, we would see this happen in the financial and automotive industries as well.)
I hate to burst your bubble, but those two things are very very different.
The dot com bubble impacted, for the most part, one sector (and a small one at that). The current economic crisis is taking its toll on the entire economy, and not just for this country, but for the world as a whole.
Because of how interconnected the whole thing is, it's not a matter of good companies will survive and bad ones will fail. Good companies can, in some way, depend on bad companies (say, by needing a loan or some similar situation). When the bad companies go under, they can drag the good ones down with them.
That's why it's a bad idea to simply let the banks fail. If the banks fail, loans dry up (not to mention the possibility of losing the money you have in them if it is greater than the sum that FDIC insures as well as other problems), and when that happens, business as a whole suffers.
Cookies are always nice unless they're the browser kind or have something in them that you're allergic to. Many problems could be solved with them =]
As for my patronizing manner, having been the editor of an OSS mag, I've seen my fair share of zealot email, comments, etc on both sides of the debate. It burns you out after a while - especially when you're a pragmatic person who sees benefits to both open and closed source solutions in various situations.
You've never had fun until you've been at a conference and had someone come up to you and basically start yelling at you because your banner has a technology listed on it (it was on one of the covers) that "cost them business" because people moved to it from what they were doing.
Believe me, it's a surreal experience. After a while, you start to doubt that "subtle humor" is actually meant as humor with that sort of thing because you see it used in a serious manner far too often...
To be honest, the response you gave to my first post is really easy to mistake for actual zealotry. I've gotten real comments (both in person and online) that were just like it.
It is completely possible to write open source programs on Microsoft platforms and with Microsoft technologies. Open source happens on more than just Linux.
What we're talking about here is "complexity" in a group of libraries for a programming language family/common runtime.
The thing is that that "complexity" is optional. You only have to use the parts of it that you want. The rest you can ignore and the sky won't fall down, just like with every other "large" language platform (such as Java).
.net, which is so complex that they had to implement autocomplete to make it usable.
Yes,.NET is complex, or rather it has a hell of a lot of libraries. That, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. It saves you from having to reinvent the wheel every time you write something.
As for needing autocomplete to make it usable, personally, I think that autocomplete and the graphical debugger are two of the best things to ever happen in programming. It saves me time, makes my job one heck of a lot easier and allows me to be more productive.
You may learn the value of that sort of thing some day.
I wish that more development environments had usable autocomplete. As much as I love to use Ruby for writing scripts, my main complaint about the IDE I use for it (netbeans) is that it *doesn't* have autocomplete for Ruby unless they've come out with a new version recently that does.
You're forgetting one very important place in a casino where it is possible to consistently win if you're good - the poker tables.
There you aren't playing against the house. You're playing against other players, and the house doesn't care how much you win because they get a cut of every hand. For a casino, poker is essentially free money with no real risk. For a player, it's a game with much better odds than ones you play against the house if you know what you're doing.
Just be sure to go during the day when the resident sharks are asleep (they only tend to come out at night). There's still plenty of action, and a much better chance of leaving with more money than you walked in with.
I haven't been able to play with Win7 since I don't have a spare machine sitting around, but if it performs that well on that hardware (which is similar to the laptop I'm using right now), I'm honestly impressed.
Hopefully it remains in that good a state, performance wise, and doesn't have the DRM, etc problems that Vista has when it gets released.
Sounds about like one I ran across last year or so. The place was wanting someone to fill the roles of developer, DBA, and sysadmin for a salary of 30k.
I've seen a few that were also caused by a program writing to a place in memory where it shouldn't have had access. I should know; I ran into a bug in Visual Studio 6 that caused one of my programs to wander off into system memory and crash the system it was running on while I was still in college.
It worked fine in Solaris, but using VS on Windows, it started crashing random programs, and then, eventually, the operating system. It was kind of neat. heh
If I remember correctly, it was some strange scoping problem with VS. It's been years though.
Like I said, in the years that I've run XP for myself and the places I've worked, I've had 2 (maybe 3) blue screens and those were not long after release. The reason was that the drivers at the time choked, but once those were fixed, I've never had a problem with them.
I used to get them with win2k on occasion. After the move to XP, we only had a couple of bsods, and those were very early on, both caused by driver issues.
Sorry about that. I've been dealing with a lack of electricity for the last few hours coupled with digging things out of close to a foot of snow and ice. I think my brain is a little frozen lol
Actually, as a TA you should also have the ability to bring it to the attention of the department if the professor doesn't do anything about it. Most engineering departments take a dim view of cheating. The one at my alma mater ended up uncovering cheating that had occurred a few years prior when a student was, I believe, researching a thesis.
He reported his findings, and the dept dug deeper. I think they ended up pulling the degrees from a few people.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, given that knowing something is a kind of power in and of its self ("knowledge is power" and all that), omniscience could be considered a subset of omnipotence
Not quite. Being omniscient means that you *do* know everything.
Being omnipotent means that you can *do* anything, but not that you have to exercise that ability. Therefore you may have the *ability* to know everything, but you don't have to *exercise* it.
For example, I am perfectly capable of hurting people (as most people are), but being a fairly nice guy, I choose not to.
Appalachian people are generally pretty tough to get along with.
Yeah, they tend to be rather closed minded and isolationist. Out of curiosity, what part of Southern Ohio were you from? (I'm here myself at the moment)
Considering that "today" is a member of the set "every day", the statement would be logically correct =]
I agree, especially for my CS classes (we had our own CS labs full of Sun boxes while most of the rest of the campus labs were windows only). It was nice to be able to sit there with other people and work on things, sometimes bouncing ideas off of each other.
At one point, a friend and I ended up finding a bug in some provided code that was tripping everyone up. Once we found and dealt with it, everyone in the room (at the time, probably half of the class) knew what was going on and what the fix was. A lot of people would have lost a lot of working time due to tracking down the same bug if it weren't for the lab.
I still went to the labs sometimes even after I got my laptop because it was nice to be around other people that were doing the same things I was. It fostered a nice sense of camaraderie between people who would probably never have even gotten to know each other if it weren't for the shared workspace.
When I was in high school I got "written up" by a teacher for using my asthma inhaler. It went something like this.
I was in a number of similar situations. One or two of them because the teacher in question either didn't like me or some random member of my family (no joke).
They got told point blank first by me and then by my parents when they were called that they were by no means going to take the medication away from me (and that in a situation or two that didn't involve necessary medication, that their behavior would not be tolerated).
They eventually backed down, but it took making one heck of a scene to get them to do it. Of course, one of them also got raked over the coals for paddling me as a kid literally without being able to state a reason for doing it to my parents.
Sometimes school officials get way too drunk on the "power" that they have.
(Now if our government would just let capitalism do it's job, we would see this happen in the financial and automotive industries as well.)
I hate to burst your bubble, but those two things are very very different.
The dot com bubble impacted, for the most part, one sector (and a small one at that). The current economic crisis is taking its toll on the entire economy, and not just for this country, but for the world as a whole.
Because of how interconnected the whole thing is, it's not a matter of good companies will survive and bad ones will fail. Good companies can, in some way, depend on bad companies (say, by needing a loan or some similar situation). When the bad companies go under, they can drag the good ones down with them.
That's why it's a bad idea to simply let the banks fail. If the banks fail, loans dry up (not to mention the possibility of losing the money you have in them if it is greater than the sum that FDIC insures as well as other problems), and when that happens, business as a whole suffers.
Knowing that they require glow plugs, I would have asked for those instead. Then again, that's just me...
Some are not, like Dune. I can't help myself. I'm nitpicky. Occasionally very nitpicky.
As a stand alone film, Dune was alright. For its time, it was actually pretty decent.
However, if you want something that follows the book a bit more, the mini series was quite good.
Cookies are always nice unless they're the browser kind or have something in them that you're allergic to. Many problems could be solved with them =]
As for my patronizing manner, having been the editor of an OSS mag, I've seen my fair share of zealot email, comments, etc on both sides of the debate. It burns you out after a while - especially when you're a pragmatic person who sees benefits to both open and closed source solutions in various situations.
You've never had fun until you've been at a conference and had someone come up to you and basically start yelling at you because your banner has a technology listed on it (it was on one of the covers) that "cost them business" because people moved to it from what they were doing.
Believe me, it's a surreal experience. After a while, you start to doubt that "subtle humor" is actually meant as humor with that sort of thing because you see it used in a serious manner far too often...
To be honest, the response you gave to my first post is really easy to mistake for actual zealotry. I've gotten real comments (both in person and online) that were just like it.
Open Source is pretty good for that, too.
Is this where I give you a cookie?
It is completely possible to write open source programs on Microsoft platforms and with Microsoft technologies. Open source happens on more than just Linux.
What we're talking about here is "complexity" in a group of libraries for a programming language family/common runtime.
The thing is that that "complexity" is optional. You only have to use the parts of it that you want. The rest you can ignore and the sky won't fall down, just like with every other "large" language platform (such as Java).
.net, which is so complex that they had to implement autocomplete to make it usable.
Yes, .NET is complex, or rather it has a hell of a lot of libraries. That, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. It saves you from having to reinvent the wheel every time you write something.
As for needing autocomplete to make it usable, personally, I think that autocomplete and the graphical debugger are two of the best things to ever happen in programming. It saves me time, makes my job one heck of a lot easier and allows me to be more productive.
You may learn the value of that sort of thing some day.
I wish that more development environments had usable autocomplete. As much as I love to use Ruby for writing scripts, my main complaint about the IDE I use for it (netbeans) is that it *doesn't* have autocomplete for Ruby unless they've come out with a new version recently that does.
Go out to a sit-down restaurant or something similar with a lot of teenage workers.
The sheer number of blackberries, iphones, and iphone-like phones is amazing...
You MAY wish to obtain copies of your reviews and other praises prior to leaving the company.
I second this. Remember that you have access to your personnel file. Make a copy.
You're forgetting one very important place in a casino where it is possible to consistently win if you're good - the poker tables.
There you aren't playing against the house. You're playing against other players, and the house doesn't care how much you win because they get a cut of every hand. For a casino, poker is essentially free money with no real risk. For a player, it's a game with much better odds than ones you play against the house if you know what you're doing.
Just be sure to go during the day when the resident sharks are asleep (they only tend to come out at night). There's still plenty of action, and a much better chance of leaving with more money than you walked in with.
Why is it always amen? What about bmen? And why stop at men? Why not awomen? =]
I haven't been able to play with Win7 since I don't have a spare machine sitting around, but if it performs that well on that hardware (which is similar to the laptop I'm using right now), I'm honestly impressed.
Hopefully it remains in that good a state, performance wise, and doesn't have the DRM, etc problems that Vista has when it gets released.
Indeed. The paperweight and slap on the back are generally accompanied by a new line on your resume in order to get a better/better paying job.
(May I also say that I love the sig? =])
Sounds about like one I ran across last year or so. The place was wanting someone to fill the roles of developer, DBA, and sysadmin for a salary of 30k.
I just kind of stared at it and shook my head.
Indeed. Though, I have to say that the look my friend and I gave each other while it was happening was priceless. heh
I've seen a few that were also caused by a program writing to a place in memory where it shouldn't have had access. I should know; I ran into a bug in Visual Studio 6 that caused one of my programs to wander off into system memory and crash the system it was running on while I was still in college.
It worked fine in Solaris, but using VS on Windows, it started crashing random programs, and then, eventually, the operating system. It was kind of neat. heh
If I remember correctly, it was some strange scoping problem with VS. It's been years though.
Like I said, in the years that I've run XP for myself and the places I've worked, I've had 2 (maybe 3) blue screens and those were not long after release. The reason was that the drivers at the time choked, but once those were fixed, I've never had a problem with them.
It's pretty impressive actually.
I used to get them with win2k on occasion. After the move to XP, we only had a couple of bsods, and those were very early on, both caused by driver issues.
Sorry about that. I've been dealing with a lack of electricity for the last few hours coupled with digging things out of close to a foot of snow and ice. I think my brain is a little frozen lol
Not to be overly pedantic in this thread on semantics, but... 14ft/sec^2??
That's how they used to teach it in schools before the big switch to metric. In fact, it's still the way that my father says it.
Actually, as a TA you should also have the ability to bring it to the attention of the department if the professor doesn't do anything about it. Most engineering departments take a dim view of cheating. The one at my alma mater ended up uncovering cheating that had occurred a few years prior when a student was, I believe, researching a thesis.
He reported his findings, and the dept dug deeper. I think they ended up pulling the degrees from a few people.