Having lived in an emerging market (Romania) for six years, I knew several people who would carry around multiple feature phones, or a smartphone and a feature phone, just so they could use prepaid SIM cards from two different networks, so they could call all of their friends and family "in network".
I was using a prepaid SIM from Orange, and for 5 Euros/month, I had 3000 minutes/month to other Orange numbers and 100 minutes/month to other networks/landlines. As it happens, everyone I wanted to call was on Orange, so I was fine. However, I knew people who would pay 5 Euros/month to Orange, and another 5 Euros/month to Cosmote. For 10 Euros/month, they had effectively unlimited calling to everyone they wanted to call, but needed to carry a second phone (or swap SIMs to call on the correct network).
I'm surprised by how many Canadians misunderstand the temporary foreign worker program, despite the fact that it's been in the news so much for the past few months.
The TFW program is used for jobs that fail to entice existing Canadians, like agricultural work or fast-food service.
By comparison, it's quite common for tech companies to sponsor immigrants to Canada based on a lack of local skilled candidates (see http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/h...). In that case, my understanding is that the criteria are like a US H-1B visa, but the incoming employee is granted permanent residence (akin to a green card). Of course, in Canada's case, we actually want well-paid techies to come and stay.
As long as the system is so clearly corrupted by money, though, people aren't going to trust health care professionals.
Is the system "clearly corrupted by money" in all countries? In most of the developed world, medicine is government-funded and often fairly tightly-regulated to keep costs low.
As long as big pharma is taking meds off the market and replacing them with inferior versions in order to drive down demand for a generic and force people to continue to pay them, we're all going to know it's a scam.
[citation needed]
As long as doctors continue to prescribe whatever drugs the reps are wining and dinind them over, we're all going to know it's a scam.
Again, in most developed nations, there are pretty tight regulations against doctors accepting "gifts" from pharmaceutical reps. The main exception I know of is "assistance" with going to conferences (which coincidentally may be in Las Vegas or Hawaii, say). That said, a doctor who would chance losing their high-paying job in exchange for a trip worth a few thousand dollars has a rather poor assessment of risk vs reward, in my opinion.
As long as hospitals continue to charge whatever the market will bear, we're all going to know it's a scam.
Ahh... okay. So your argument doesn't apply to most of the developed world. In fact, it doesn't apply to Wales, where this outbreak occurred, and thus provides no insight into this actual case.
A subtler prank that I pulled on a friend who left himself logged in to one of the public undergrad labs (where there was the risk that an actual asshole would delete your stuff, send email as you, or something similarly cruel) was to add "echo 'sleep 1' >>.cshrc" to the end of his.cshrc before logging him out. I chuckled to myself, and then forgot about it.
A week later, when it was 5 minutes before a submission deadline and he was yelling at the terminal to finish logging in (since it was taking 2-3 minutes for the prompt to appear by that point), I realized that I had probably gone too far.
When there is no electricity supply in the villages, this is an innovative way of giving 'power' to the people!
A few years ago, I read about a tangentially-related (mobile phones without in-home electricity) situation with Mennonites using cell phones. (Apologies for any factual errors in my recollection below -- it was an article I vaguely remember from reading an in-flight magazine maybe six years ago.)
Like the Amish, the Mennonites are nominally supposed to live simple lives free of modern trappings. However, some Mennonite farmers have devised a rationalization for using cell phones. In particular, they can be really handy to be able to communicate short messages across the fields, without having to trek on foot or by horse. (They had some religious argument, where they didn't really own the phones -- but were just "borrowing" them from outsiders, or some such other way of resolving the cognitive dissonance.) In this article I read, they explained that, while the farmers didn't have electricity in their own homes, they would regularly travel to nearby "modern" shops to sell their produce or buy supplies. While there, they would leave their phones with the shopkeepers to charge up. In theory, the shopkeepers could have charged them a small fee for this service, but usually would just offer it up as a nice way to help their loyal customers.
So, that said, there are ways to charge cell phones without fully electrifying a village. If there's a single, shared charging point (either in a shop or in some public building), it should be enough. Furthermore, it's a lot easier to install a single mobile phone charging station than it is to run power lines and/or land line phone service to the entire village. Strictly speaking, the charging point doesn't even have to be in the village, as long as someone can be trusted to take everyone's free phones to the nearest charging spot (which could be a few hours away) ~once/week.
It takes generations to break the cycle (if in fact the cycle will be broken).
Exactly. I'm a Canadian living in Romania for the past five years, and have been following Romanian politics as well as I can (as an "outsider") during this time. Of course, since I also have no long-term stake in the outcome of Romania's political chaos (as I will move home eventually, and could just move home sooner if things get really bad), I like to think that I'm a little more objective (though I'm undoubtedly somewhat influenced by friends and coworkers who do have a vested interest).
Here are some relevant background tidbits for this story:
- There is currently a political struggle between the prime minister (Ponta) and president (Basescu) regarding the relative powers of the presidency and the parliament. (Not knowing anything about the Romanian constitution's delineation of powers, I honestly don't know who is overstepping what.)
- The parliament has suspended the president, pending a recall referendum on the 29th.
- The timing of this plagiarism scandal is very convenient, with regards to the damage it has done to Ponta's credibility, immediately prior to the impeachment. (This is where I am inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that the president's cronies probably had something to do with the plagiarism coming to light now. I'm not saying that the plagiarism didn't happen, as it seems quite certain that it did, but rather that the timing of the revelation is not coincidence.)
- The prime minister "earned" a PhD while sitting as a cabinet minister in parliament. His PhD supervisor (Adrian Nastase) was the sitting prime minister at the time. I chuckle at the thought of Victor Ponta excusing himself from a state dinner to go write a few pages on his dissertation. I also chuckle at the thought of a cabinet minister and prime minister sitting down to have grad student/supervisor discussions on edits to the dissertation. In my opinion, neither of them were actually directly involved in the writing of the thesis -- it was some party drones paid to throw something together that Ponta could claim as his own, and Nastase could endorse before a "committee" (of professors loyal to the party, or at least loyal to the favours Nastase could bestow). Those party drones recognized that it was purely a symbolic PhD (since Ponta is a politician, not an academic), so they lifted content from other sources.
- Nastase last month was convicted of using millions in state money to fund his run for the presidency in 2004, and sentenced to 2 years in prison. He supposedly tried to commit suicide to avoid prison, but "missed" (with a gun at point-blank range). This is a whole other bizarre scandal, not directly related to the plagiarism affair, but connected to the current political craziness in Romania.
As the parent alluded to, the root problem is that both sides of this particular farce are backed by people who got their power under the former communist regime. Nastase and Basescu were both well-connected prior to the revolution. Ponta was a child in 1989, and hence has no connections of his own to the old regime, but was trained through his political career by Nastase.
As a foreigner, I mostly shake my head at the current situation, and am not terribly optimistic about either outcome in the upcoming referendum. Politics in Romania truly does seem to be a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. I would like to see things improve, as the country and people are fantastic. I am confident that Romanian politics will eventually get better, but probably not within my time here.
Assuming the blog post was indeed written by the real Steve Mann, a guy who has been doing this wearable computing stuff for a while, I think we can trust that it's true. (And if he didn't write it, I would expect to hear something from him, saying that it's a fake.)
It's also not his first altercation related to his wearable stuff. See, for example, this Slashdot story from 2002.
But how do they get the laser there? If it were near the surface, a laser could be used. But deeper in the body, liver, brain, etc., how do you get laser light in there to cause the drug bomb to be dropped?
It's been a while since I studied optical therapy (before dropping out a PhD program in medical biophysics), but I'm pretty sure I remember that you can use fiber-optics. I think it's relatively "easy" (and not too invasive) to poke the patient with a fine fiber-optic cable (guided by ultrasound, I suppose) that delivers the laser light at the target site. In theory, I suppose they might be able to leave the fiber-optics in the patient for a while to deliver treatment over a few days/weeks (like a sort of "optical catheter").
Now, I only had about four weeks of classes on optical therapy 6 years ago (as part of a course that also covered thermal and radiation therapies), so I'm only barely more qualified to write on the subject than most anonymous internet jackasses. That said, I do have a clear memory of slides from class with patients with fiber-optic cables poking into their heads or other parts of their bodies, so I remember that it can be done.
486 came in a DX model which ran at 33/66Mhz. The 1st Pentiums came in at 75Mhz. The only 286 i remember was a Unisys 8 or 10Mhz. I'm just sayin.
The 486DX4s ran at 75Mhz (with a 25Mhz bus, since despite the name, they only had a 3x multiplier. The DX4-100 had a 33Mhz FSB.). The first Pentiums were 60 or 66Mhz, with no multiplier (i.e. the CPU and FSB were clocked the same). The 75Mhz Pentiums came a year later and ran on a 50Mhz FSB (at 1.5x), and were cheaper (or at least the same price) compared to the 66Mhz model (since you had a faster CPU, but slower bus), if I recall correctly.
Perhaps because of 1984, but perhaps because that TV has become a major part of people's reality and has so far only been one way.
Or because TVs are more likely to be found in bedrooms and other places where people would very much not want to be seen by others. Unlike laptops (which can be closed and/or moved), those TVs are always pointed so that you can see them from the bed. This means that if it has a camera, it can watch you have sex, it can watch you watch porn (which, Slashdot readers notwithstanding, is more likely on a TV than a computer), and (if the angle is wide enough) it can watch you get dressed in the morning.
A TV in a common room with a camera is potentially acceptable, but making it a standard feature of every TV would be a catastrophically bad idea. There are some places that cameras just do not belong. Like my bathroom.
While I distlike the idea of TVs in bedrooms (unless you're a college kid whose only private space is the bedroom), I have to strongly disagree with the idea that a TV with a camera (that can watch you without your knowledge) in a common room is even remotely acceptable. Most of the time that I spend interacting with my child is in the living room, with the TV in plain sight, on standby (unless we're watching Sesame Street). I am strongly opposed to the very idea that someone could be watching or listening to what I'm teaching my children. (For what it's worth, I don't have anything to hide, assuming a secular upbringing loosely based on the "golden rule" isn't outlawed anytime soon, but if it were to be outlawed, I wouldn't want my TV ratting me out.)
To be honest, I would rather have a camera in the bedroom. I don't particularly care about shadowy figures watching me have sex with my wife. (We enjoy it, but we're not especially camera-friendly, and we don't do anything that you couldn't find much more professional "amateurs" doing online.) The values that we instill in our children are personal and way more important than our naked asses.
Who brought up the word "politician" (before you)?
The grandparent (and the referenced French law) talk about people "working in government" (i.e. bureaucrats + politicians, but the bureaucrats far outnumber the politicians).
Was Randall Long elected to his position at the FTC? No? So, he's not a politician. He's a former bureaucrat. Sure, many bureaucracies have generous pension plans, but they tend to be linked to the number of years served. Thus, your "serve a month and get payed for 40" example is completely irrelevant.
I am genuinely curious about how the law in France works, with regards to bureaucrats being able to support themselves after leaving their positions. Do they receive some sort of government compensation during this period? Or is it, as another post suggested, simply the case that the rule serves to keep people in the bureaucracy?
Do you really think politicians loose their income when they loose office? You are a moron.
The American method of 'learning' is mostly rote learning. This does not help. As Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Really? As a Canadian living in Romania, I have to strongly disagree. The education system here appears to be heavily based on rote learning (much moreso than I saw in Canada or attending American schools in my childhood). The folks I have hired have had excellent imagination, in spite of, not because of, their education (and have generally been the ones who skipped a lot of classes at university and taught themselves the required material).
That said, I previously worked (in Canada) as a physics researcher in a hospital, and we would regularly "joke" about the MDs not being "real doctors" (in contrast to how most people view PhDs), since their main skill appeared to be rote memorization. (See also Richard Feynman's story about his diagram of cat anatomy when he gave a presentation to some med students.) Of couse, as a sibling post says, most medicine comes down to reproducing what is already known (as it should be).
I now look at doctors the way I look at lawyers. To get in, you don't need to be creative (and in fact, you probably shouldn't be, or should suppress it until you've already proven yourself), you just need to know the existing "case law" very very well. Mostly, your job is to identify stuff that has been seen before (taking into account quite a lot of subtle data) and go directly to the most successful known solution. If you want to be imaginative as a doctor, you can go the MD/PhD route (which, in my opinion, makes you a superstar), I suppose, or run the risk of losing your job by doing something no one else has done before (and hence is not "approved").
Incidentally, this is how "break" is implemented in Scala. There is no break keyword in the language, but it is implemented at the library level by throwing/catching an exception.
I agree. But I would prefer a puzzle to questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years" and "what are your goals". I want to answer "My goal is to get hired. Why else would I answer such stupid questions?"
I believe Mitch Hedberg said that to "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" in an interview, he replied, "Celebrating the fifth anniversary of you asking me that question!"
TL:DR? Novell had PLENTY of time to come out with a new product but instead hung onto the old code for too long and by the time they saw the train it ran them over.
They didn't hang onto the old code. Novell only owned WordPerfect between buying it in June 1994 and selling it to Corel in January 1996. (Technically, they did hold onto some of the WordPerfect libraries, which they integrated into GroupWoes.)
Personally, I find MathWorld pretty good for that purpose. Most articles are pretty encyclopedic in nature -- providing first a simple, general explanation, then diving deeper into the more complicated stuff (where the math gets more advanced by necessity).
If they do offer this service, I see potential for a much-improved version of my great experience with cheap mobile internet access seven years ago.
Back then, a lot of mobile phones didn't offer graphical web-browsing. My phone at the time (some Samsung of some form) was purely text-based, but Telus (in Canada) offered a $2/month unlimited email option.
So, I signed up, and after the novelty of being able to check my email anywhere wore off, I began itching for more information.
Since Telus would still charge me 50 cents for Canada411 lookups, the first thing I did was write an email gateway for canada411.com (which was probably still canada411.sympatico.ca at the time). I had email to my domain set up to go to my home computer, and directed all email to services@mydomain directed through qmail to go to a Perl script.
If the subject was "Canada411" (since Telus allowed me to store various preset subject lines), it would then parse the body as lookup parameters (Last name, First name, City, if I recall correctly). Then it would email me the results in plain text, after doing some web-scraping.
Later on, I added some more "services", like dictionary lookups, recipes, university course schedules, etc. I could even list the current Slashdot headlines if I wanted (in retrospect, since RSS was already around, a basic email-based RSS reader would probably have been more generally-applicable).
Nowadays, with HTML email being the norm for smartphones, you wouldn't even necessarily need to do the web-scraping (which is what ate up most of my development time).
With email-based web-browsing, you can get what you want, but it takes a certain amount of patience and ingenuity.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up
Having lived in an emerging market (Romania) for six years, I knew several people who would carry around multiple feature phones, or a smartphone and a feature phone, just so they could use prepaid SIM cards from two different networks, so they could call all of their friends and family "in network".
I was using a prepaid SIM from Orange, and for 5 Euros/month, I had 3000 minutes/month to other Orange numbers and 100 minutes/month to other networks/landlines. As it happens, everyone I wanted to call was on Orange, so I was fine. However, I knew people who would pay 5 Euros/month to Orange, and another 5 Euros/month to Cosmote. For 10 Euros/month, they had effectively unlimited calling to everyone they wanted to call, but needed to carry a second phone (or swap SIMs to call on the correct network).
I'm surprised by how many Canadians misunderstand the temporary foreign worker program, despite the fact that it's been in the news so much for the past few months.
The TFW program is used for jobs that fail to entice existing Canadians, like agricultural work or fast-food service.
By comparison, it's quite common for tech companies to sponsor immigrants to Canada based on a lack of local skilled candidates (see http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/h...). In that case, my understanding is that the criteria are like a US H-1B visa, but the incoming employee is granted permanent residence (akin to a green card). Of course, in Canada's case, we actually want well-paid techies to come and stay.
I personally prefer the version where a guy is showing his friend his new talking dog.
New dog owner: Hey Sparky, what's on top of the house?
Sparky: Roof!
New dog owner: Hey Sparky, how does sandpaper feel?
Sparky: Rough!
New dog owner: Hey Sparky, who was the best baseball player of all time?
Sparky: Ruth!
Friend: Come on, you expect me to believe this bullshit?
Sparky: What? You think I should have gone with DiMaggio?
And Cluj specifically is in Transylvania
I'm sorry --- how is this insightful?
As long as the system is so clearly corrupted by money, though, people aren't going to trust health care professionals.
Is the system "clearly corrupted by money" in all countries? In most of the developed world, medicine is government-funded and often fairly tightly-regulated to keep costs low.
As long as big pharma is taking meds off the market and replacing them with inferior versions in order to drive down demand for a generic and force people to continue to pay them, we're all going to know it's a scam.
[citation needed]
As long as doctors continue to prescribe whatever drugs the reps are wining and dinind them over, we're all going to know it's a scam.
Again, in most developed nations, there are pretty tight regulations against doctors accepting "gifts" from pharmaceutical reps. The main exception I know of is "assistance" with going to conferences (which coincidentally may be in Las Vegas or Hawaii, say). That said, a doctor who would chance losing their high-paying job in exchange for a trip worth a few thousand dollars has a rather poor assessment of risk vs reward, in my opinion.
As long as hospitals continue to charge whatever the market will bear, we're all going to know it's a scam.
Ahh... okay. So your argument doesn't apply to most of the developed world. In fact, it doesn't apply to Wales, where this outbreak occurred, and thus provides no insight into this actual case.
If you want to learn nothing about the Toughpad, but have fun while doing so, I suggest the following article: http://lookrobot.co.uk/2013/01/14/the-panasonic-toughpad-press-conference/
A subtler prank that I pulled on a friend who left himself logged in to one of the public undergrad labs (where there was the risk that an actual asshole would delete your stuff, send email as you, or something similarly cruel) was to add "echo 'sleep 1' >> .cshrc" to the end of his .cshrc before logging him out. I chuckled to myself, and then forgot about it.
A week later, when it was 5 minutes before a submission deadline and he was yelling at the terminal to finish logging in (since it was taking 2-3 minutes for the prompt to appear by that point), I realized that I had probably gone too far.
To be fair, one of the "new colours" should be used to indicate Smoke on the Water.
Nice cover story... what are you really looking to do with that other hand while coding?
Maybe he's using functors in Haskell.
When there is no electricity supply in the villages, this is an innovative way of giving 'power' to the people!
A few years ago, I read about a tangentially-related (mobile phones without in-home electricity) situation with Mennonites using cell phones. (Apologies for any factual errors in my recollection below -- it was an article I vaguely remember from reading an in-flight magazine maybe six years ago.)
Like the Amish, the Mennonites are nominally supposed to live simple lives free of modern trappings. However, some Mennonite farmers have devised a rationalization for using cell phones. In particular, they can be really handy to be able to communicate short messages across the fields, without having to trek on foot or by horse. (They had some religious argument, where they didn't really own the phones -- but were just "borrowing" them from outsiders, or some such other way of resolving the cognitive dissonance.) In this article I read, they explained that, while the farmers didn't have electricity in their own homes, they would regularly travel to nearby "modern" shops to sell their produce or buy supplies. While there, they would leave their phones with the shopkeepers to charge up. In theory, the shopkeepers could have charged them a small fee for this service, but usually would just offer it up as a nice way to help their loyal customers.
So, that said, there are ways to charge cell phones without fully electrifying a village. If there's a single, shared charging point (either in a shop or in some public building), it should be enough. Furthermore, it's a lot easier to install a single mobile phone charging station than it is to run power lines and/or land line phone service to the entire village. Strictly speaking, the charging point doesn't even have to be in the village, as long as someone can be trusted to take everyone's free phones to the nearest charging spot (which could be a few hours away) ~once/week.
It takes generations to break the cycle (if in fact the cycle will be broken).
Exactly. I'm a Canadian living in Romania for the past five years, and have been following Romanian politics as well as I can (as an "outsider") during this time. Of course, since I also have no long-term stake in the outcome of Romania's political chaos (as I will move home eventually, and could just move home sooner if things get really bad), I like to think that I'm a little more objective (though I'm undoubtedly somewhat influenced by friends and coworkers who do have a vested interest).
Here are some relevant background tidbits for this story:
As the parent alluded to, the root problem is that both sides of this particular farce are backed by people who got their power under the former communist regime. Nastase and Basescu were both well-connected prior to the revolution. Ponta was a child in 1989, and hence has no connections of his own to the old regime, but was trained through his political career by Nastase.
As a foreigner, I mostly shake my head at the current situation, and am not terribly optimistic about either outcome in the upcoming referendum. Politics in Romania truly does seem to be a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. I would like to see things improve, as the country and people are fantastic. I am confident that Romanian politics will eventually get better, but probably not within my time here.
Assuming the blog post was indeed written by the real Steve Mann, a guy who has been doing this wearable computing stuff for a while, I think we can trust that it's true. (And if he didn't write it, I would expect to hear something from him, saying that it's a fake.)
It's also not his first altercation related to his wearable stuff. See, for example, this Slashdot story from 2002.
When asked for comment, I hear one of the lawyers replied "ORA-01337: Message 1337 not found".
But how do they get the laser there? If it were near the surface, a laser could be used. But deeper in the body, liver, brain, etc., how do you get laser light in there to cause the drug bomb to be dropped?
It's been a while since I studied optical therapy (before dropping out a PhD program in medical biophysics), but I'm pretty sure I remember that you can use fiber-optics. I think it's relatively "easy" (and not too invasive) to poke the patient with a fine fiber-optic cable (guided by ultrasound, I suppose) that delivers the laser light at the target site. In theory, I suppose they might be able to leave the fiber-optics in the patient for a while to deliver treatment over a few days/weeks (like a sort of "optical catheter").
Now, I only had about four weeks of classes on optical therapy 6 years ago (as part of a course that also covered thermal and radiation therapies), so I'm only barely more qualified to write on the subject than most anonymous internet jackasses. That said, I do have a clear memory of slides from class with patients with fiber-optic cables poking into their heads or other parts of their bodies, so I remember that it can be done.
486 came in a DX model which ran at 33/66Mhz. The 1st Pentiums came in at 75Mhz. The only 286 i remember was a Unisys 8 or 10Mhz. I'm just sayin.
The 486DX4s ran at 75Mhz (with a 25Mhz bus, since despite the name, they only had a 3x multiplier. The DX4-100 had a 33Mhz FSB.). The first Pentiums were 60 or 66Mhz, with no multiplier (i.e. the CPU and FSB were clocked the same). The 75Mhz Pentiums came a year later and ran on a 50Mhz FSB (at 1.5x), and were cheaper (or at least the same price) compared to the 66Mhz model (since you had a faster CPU, but slower bus), if I recall correctly.
Or because TVs are more likely to be found in bedrooms and other places where people would very much not want to be seen by others. Unlike laptops (which can be closed and/or moved), those TVs are always pointed so that you can see them from the bed. This means that if it has a camera, it can watch you have sex, it can watch you watch porn (which, Slashdot readers notwithstanding, is more likely on a TV than a computer), and (if the angle is wide enough) it can watch you get dressed in the morning.
A TV in a common room with a camera is potentially acceptable, but making it a standard feature of every TV would be a catastrophically bad idea. There are some places that cameras just do not belong. Like my bathroom.
While I distlike the idea of TVs in bedrooms (unless you're a college kid whose only private space is the bedroom), I have to strongly disagree with the idea that a TV with a camera (that can watch you without your knowledge) in a common room is even remotely acceptable. Most of the time that I spend interacting with my child is in the living room, with the TV in plain sight, on standby (unless we're watching Sesame Street). I am strongly opposed to the very idea that someone could be watching or listening to what I'm teaching my children. (For what it's worth, I don't have anything to hide, assuming a secular upbringing loosely based on the "golden rule" isn't outlawed anytime soon, but if it were to be outlawed, I wouldn't want my TV ratting me out.)
To be honest, I would rather have a camera in the bedroom. I don't particularly care about shadowy figures watching me have sex with my wife. (We enjoy it, but we're not especially camera-friendly, and we don't do anything that you couldn't find much more professional "amateurs" doing online.) The values that we instill in our children are personal and way more important than our naked asses.
Who brought up the word "politician" (before you)?
The grandparent (and the referenced French law) talk about people "working in government" (i.e. bureaucrats + politicians, but the bureaucrats far outnumber the politicians).
Was Randall Long elected to his position at the FTC? No? So, he's not a politician. He's a former bureaucrat. Sure, many bureaucracies have generous pension plans, but they tend to be linked to the number of years served. Thus, your "serve a month and get payed for 40" example is completely irrelevant.
I am genuinely curious about how the law in France works, with regards to bureaucrats being able to support themselves after leaving their positions. Do they receive some sort of government compensation during this period? Or is it, as another post suggested, simply the case that the rule serves to keep people in the bureaucracy?
Do you really think politicians loose their income when they loose office? You are a moron.
Classic...
The American method of 'learning' is mostly rote learning. This does not help. As Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Really? As a Canadian living in Romania, I have to strongly disagree. The education system here appears to be heavily based on rote learning (much moreso than I saw in Canada or attending American schools in my childhood). The folks I have hired have had excellent imagination, in spite of, not because of, their education (and have generally been the ones who skipped a lot of classes at university and taught themselves the required material).
That said, I previously worked (in Canada) as a physics researcher in a hospital, and we would regularly "joke" about the MDs not being "real doctors" (in contrast to how most people view PhDs), since their main skill appeared to be rote memorization. (See also Richard Feynman's story about his diagram of cat anatomy when he gave a presentation to some med students.) Of couse, as a sibling post says, most medicine comes down to reproducing what is already known (as it should be).
I now look at doctors the way I look at lawyers. To get in, you don't need to be creative (and in fact, you probably shouldn't be, or should suppress it until you've already proven yourself), you just need to know the existing "case law" very very well. Mostly, your job is to identify stuff that has been seen before (taking into account quite a lot of subtle data) and go directly to the most successful known solution. If you want to be imaginative as a doctor, you can go the MD/PhD route (which, in my opinion, makes you a superstar), I suppose, or run the risk of losing your job by doing something no one else has done before (and hence is not "approved").
Incidentally, this is how "break" is implemented in Scala. There is no break keyword in the language, but it is implemented at the library level by throwing/catching an exception.
Here's the source code:
https://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/browser/scala/tags/R_2_9_1_final/src//library/scala/util/control/Breaks.scala#L1
I agree. But I would prefer a puzzle to questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years" and "what are your goals". I want to answer "My goal is to get hired. Why else would I answer such stupid questions?"
I believe Mitch Hedberg said that to "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" in an interview, he replied, "Celebrating the fifth anniversary of you asking me that question!"
TL:DR? Novell had PLENTY of time to come out with a new product but instead hung onto the old code for too long and by the time they saw the train it ran them over.
They didn't hang onto the old code. Novell only owned WordPerfect between buying it in June 1994 and selling it to Corel in January 1996. (Technically, they did hold onto some of the WordPerfect libraries, which they integrated into GroupWoes.)
Personally, I find MathWorld pretty good for that purpose. Most articles are pretty encyclopedic in nature -- providing first a simple, general explanation, then diving deeper into the more complicated stuff (where the math gets more advanced by necessity).
Unfortunately, the article on floating-point arithmetic is just a one-liner (likely because it's more computer science than math).
I like to commute to work in (what is to me) a self-driving vehicle. I play on my DS while doing it.
I call it a subway. (Though buses and trains also work.)
So, the Goggles... they do nothing?
If they do offer this service, I see potential for a much-improved version of my great experience with cheap mobile internet access seven years ago.
Back then, a lot of mobile phones didn't offer graphical web-browsing. My phone at the time (some Samsung of some form) was purely text-based, but Telus (in Canada) offered a $2/month unlimited email option.
So, I signed up, and after the novelty of being able to check my email anywhere wore off, I began itching for more information.
Since Telus would still charge me 50 cents for Canada411 lookups, the first thing I did was write an email gateway for canada411.com (which was probably still canada411.sympatico.ca at the time). I had email to my domain set up to go to my home computer, and directed all email to services@mydomain directed through qmail to go to a Perl script.
If the subject was "Canada411" (since Telus allowed me to store various preset subject lines), it would then parse the body as lookup parameters (Last name, First name, City, if I recall correctly). Then it would email me the results in plain text, after doing some web-scraping.
Later on, I added some more "services", like dictionary lookups, recipes, university course schedules, etc. I could even list the current Slashdot headlines if I wanted (in retrospect, since RSS was already around, a basic email-based RSS reader would probably have been more generally-applicable).
Nowadays, with HTML email being the norm for smartphones, you wouldn't even necessarily need to do the web-scraping (which is what ate up most of my development time).
With email-based web-browsing, you can get what you want, but it takes a certain amount of patience and ingenuity.