Not that I agree with the guy losing his job, but he should have known better. Posting vulgarities while on the job and/or using work-related assets (computer, e-mail, internet connectivity), and/or when representing the company, that's a big no no. This is specially true if you work in an educational institute.
By mid-morning, a number of folks had commented about their experiences with Bird’s Nest Soup, octopus, cow brains and rattlesnake. Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted in reply a single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.
A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included.
About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.
So we have an individual who was using work assets to make not one, but two vulgar posts. It kinda makes you wonder how intent was this guy in checking that web page over and over (like many slashdoters do), re-posting the vulgarity as many times as needed... not the type of activity you are supposed to be doing while on the clock (after all, they give you a paycheck for work, not because you are pretty or something.)
The school was in the right in asking the guy "what are you doing, ON THE CLOCK, with OUR COMPUTER ASSETS, posting the same profanity several times?
It is also worth noting that the school didn't fire him, but that he quit on the spot... or so says the story, but that's irrelevant anyways. The guy had it coming.
Now I can't way to see the juvenile posters making this a case of libertarian freedom of speech vs 1984'esque police control and the war on terror.
Programming language theory is computer science. I'll even concede that programming with a FP language is very computer science-y. Techniques for writing maintainable code is not.
Many activities carried out every day for performing software engineering is not computer science. But good software engineering, the discipline itself, that is deeply root in computer science. Just like coding. Coding is not computer science, but good coding practices are rooted computer science.
Principles and notions such as cohesion, coupling, modularity, comprehensiveness, patterns, complexity management, architecture, they all originate in computer science.
I think you are right that software (and systems) engineering is computer science. But you might want to be precise as of why. Software Engineering is to Computer Science and Mathematics what the "physical" engineering disciplines are to Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. The former cannot exist without the later.
And that means the validation people run through their test book and create maybe 1000 or 2000 bug reports. These bug reports bounce around through the development teams acquiring cruft along the way. When the bug eventually stops bouncing somebody might have a go at fixing it. So they change something and if they can't see the bug anymore they go cvs commit right then and there. At the same time the other 1999 bugs are bouncing around, looking for a home.
At the end of the (as we call it) bug fixing process the original software doesn't exist in its original form. It appears to pass most of the test sbut you would not be advised to lean against it or anything because something else might break.
Where C++ provides classes, subclasses and templates, Go provides interfaces. A Go interface is similar to a C++ pure abstract class: a class with no data members, with methods which are all pure virtual. However, in Go, any type which provides the methods named in the interface may be treated as an implementation of the interface. No explicitly declared inheritance is required. The implementation of the interface is entirely separate from the interface itself
Know the audience. When you have a pointy haired boss, then it's going to suck no matter what. But in the general case, that's rarely the case (with the general case having problems as a matter of mis-communication combined at times with our typical IT sense of intellectual arrogance towards anyone who doesn't work on the same shit we do). But I digress.
When it comes to reports, always itemize the things you work, who requested them, when they requested, when you completed it, and the amount of effort (in term of time and collaboration with other teams) that it took you, including the time it takes you to create the report (seriously.) The first goal is to cover your behind. A report like that will show what you are doing.
The second goal is to, without much effort, have a report in a format (.i.e excel) such that you can do your own analysis. Which employee requests the most crap from you - this will also get you which department represents the bulk of your work, and which systems generate the most work. To the report, add an addendum for extreme circumstances (.ie. it took me an additional 12 hours to recover the site because there was a network failure between us and the DBA servers.).
Surprisingly, it doesn't take that much effort. All you do is keep a spreadsheet in which you log each request you receive, when you started working on it, and when you finish it. Format it well enough (or use a mickey mouse db like Access), and you can create a quick and simple report with a snap of your fingers.
Beware, though, of expending too much time trying to get the perfect reports. If it's taking you too much time, stop. The idea is to report a general ball park figure of things.
Now, if they are trying to micromanage you into daily reports with hourly entries, simply tell them that you will report 1 to 1.5 hours of effort devoted to the reporting task. After a few days, they'll back out very quickly.
Asking the pointy haired what they want is a fool's errand. Best to come up with a straw man and some reasons behind it. Build a CGI (or something) and put it on a web page. Make sure it prints nicely.
The numbers could be entirely fictional - as long as the report looks good and seems to trend the right way it will never be read.
This is a stupid, unprofessional assumption. Not every boss is a pointy haired one. You don't blatantly make up stuff in reports ever. If you ever come to work at a place so hideous that you have to do that, just keep your ethics and leave to a better job. Time to grow up.
Reducing body fat % and increasing muscle mass % to improve one's rest metabolic rate and bone density should be the goals. And these do not necessarily imply a continuous loss of weight. But the modern way of things (and our American way in particular) is for swallowing a teh magical slim-fast pill, munch some broccoli every now and then and hop on the threadmil to do some feel-good make-believe "cardio" while reading a magazine.
The parents didn't understand the math involved, you can fault them for that. But if I were in a situation where one of my kids was accused of something and I genuinely believed that they didn't do it (and had what I believed was proof too), then HELL YES they should fight it.
They might be ignorant, but they weren't wrong in a moral sense.
I disagree. Obviously if my child were under a very serious accusation that runs counter to what I know of him (say, being accused of rape or dope dealing, or something that could give him a criminal record), then yeah, I'd fight it if I truly believe he's innocent.
But for a $150 ticket? Am I going to spend the time and effort to balance what my kid tells me vs what a police officer tells me (without me knowing anything about the officer that might make me believe his judgment needs to be challenged)?
They were wrong in a moral sense because they failed in observing a matter of proportion. The point to fight was moot. It was not a cause worth fighting for. Except in cases of clear-defined evil, morality is bound by a sense of proportion.
What lesson am I going to teach my kid, that it is ok to hire a lawyer (God knows how much that motherfucker cost) and drag the entire county legal system at the taxpayers' expense just so that I can prove a moot point from my high up in my soapbox-standing pompous high horse?
Life is such that sometimes minuscule shit that has no long-term serious consequence is thrown at you for no valid reason (say a ticket.) You pay it, you grind your teeth saying "man, this sucks" and you move on to more pressing, worthy needs.
If I, as a parent, cannot teach by my own example that kind of balance, that kind of proportion that is so vital for an adult to function, then certainly I am on wrong on the moral sense.
There's a case to be made that the entire speeding prosecution system in the US has gone way, way overboard, and that it's morally justified to fight speeding tickets just to make it more difficult on the people who perpetrate this bullshit.
One can also make the case that, in general, people are more than willing to play a game of probabilities by paying $50 to a "ticket-fixer" attorney to show up (counting in the high probability that the LEO will not because he's busy doing more important shit), get the case thrown out and save the difference from the cost of the ticket.
I'll be very honest that I've been ticketed several times, and in each, I've been in the wrong, I've admitted it, and I've paid the dues. And all the while the majority of people I've known have told me that it is foolish, that the law is in the wrong, and that we should "play the game" with the ticket lawyers.
Barring the fact that indeed there are violations by law enforcement officers, am I the only person that gets ticketed for a valid reason, and almost everybody else around me is a victim? Or is it the case that many people in general likes to rationalize their own "lite" wrong doings by blaming it to the corrupt system, not realizing (or wanting to admit) they are corrupt themselves?
The parents determine whether or not to hand the keys to the car over to the kid (unless, of course, the kid can pay for their own car, insurance, gas, maintenance, etc using just allowance). I don't go out of my way to tell parents how to raise their children. I simply treat children as citizens until they prove otherwise.
Children might be citizens, but that does not make them adults. A person does not need to prove that he/she is a citizen (that is, one subject to the protection and requirements of the law whenever applicable.) A person, however, must demonstrate at all times and in every single time or situation that he is an adult.
Barring extreme circumstances, in general, children, by definition, by psychology and anatomy cannot be expected, at all times and in all circumstances, to demonstrate the reasoning capabilities that one must expect, legally or morally from an adult.
Given the different rates at which children mature physically, and given the varied social input that they receive (which affect their ability to reason), it is impossible to draw a precise line between children and adults. All we can do is draw arbitrary, best-effort limits (say legal age of consent) and hope that good judgment is behind legal interpretations... but I'm getting off the tangent here.
The privilege of driving a car, however, is not granted by the parents, but rather by the state, in the form of earning a driver's license.
And a minor gets the car from whom? The state or the parents? Who owns the car, who pays the insurance and who, ultimately is responsible for that car's utilization as delimited by the law?
Answer: parents. Even if "little" Tyler were 21, if he's driving his parents' car (even if with their consent), they might be legally responsible for things that can occur due to its usage.
Note that by the time Tyler is allowed to drive without restrictions from his state, he is likely 18 (except in some specific states, where its older than that), and thus should not be referred to as little.
Here we are in agreement.
The issue, of course, is that "little" Tyler needs to learn how to drive in a safe environment before he is personally responsible for everything that he does (and not his parents). The only conditions a parent should impose on their children for driving should be that the parents have personally witnessed the child driving safely in public. The rest will take care of itself through legal issues.
Speeding tickets, DUI, causing crashes (I don't care if its an accident, and neither does your insurance), etc. should be what keeps people off the road, and valid, up to date licenses are what
grants the privilege of driving. Not parental consent.
I completely agree with you, regarding technical legalities on the possession of a drivers license. This is more about upbringing.
Also, I'm not arguing about the legal ability to receive a driver license by the state. I'm arguing about sound-minded parents/legal guardians authority (legal and moral) to give or deny their children permission to drive a car that legally belongs to either them (the parents) or to the children (in the later case, ownership that parents can nullify except in rare legal circumstances.)
I am with you in that a child's parental permission to drive a car should not be a function of receiving allowance.
What I am for, though, is that allowances and the permission to drive a car are the parent's sole discretion and should be regulated according to a child's behavior.
If I know my child is careless, or if I deem I must punish him for a particular behavior, then is my consent, my parental consent, my legally bestowed consent and authority not the law on matters of vehicular driving or the legally obtain possession of a driver license that will ultimately determine when/if/how/where my child gets the keys to
"tough luck, we pay the ticket and you pay us back from your allowance".
Am I the only one who thinks that kids who still recieves allowance shouldn't be allowed to drive?
Well, when it comes to allowance and other priviledges, including the permission to drive a car, I think you need to differentiate between receiving it and earning
it.
I would not necessarily make driving conditional to receiving/not receiving allowance. They are both at parent's discretion. And the key issue here is that a parent's discretion should (read *must*) be reasonable and humane and yet strict, and with the primary purpose of providing structure and discipline and to teach life-valuable lessons on responsibilities, obligations towards family, people and social structures, consequences and the reality that life sometimes is not obliged to be fair.
I would not make one a condition for the other. I would make both bound to certain conditions.
Am I the only one who thinks that kids who still recieves allowance shouldn't be allowed to drive?
I hope so.
The fact that parents give their kids money shouldn't preclude them from being of age and passing a driving exam.
I don't quite agree with his point, but I can agree where that's coming from. Being of age and passing a driving exam are privileges that are bound with responsibilities. And type of privileges can only be given conditionally.
The problem sometimes is that parents "give" allowances instead of having their kids "earn" them.
For one thing, allowance should be earned, and then, the parental permission to drive a car (which is different from the ability to get a driver license) should also be earned.
So yeah, getting or not getting an allowance should not preclude a kid from being of age and passing an exam. However, other reasonable conditions imposed by at parent's sole discretion should (read *must) exist before letting a minor drive a car.
Jolly good! You are 17 and you passed the DL exam. Nothing else needs to be considered, here are the keys my little Tyler! I don't think so.
Fuck the parents and fuck the kid. A good parent would have told the kid "tough luck, we pay the ticket and you pay us back from your allowance". But noooooooooooo, better to make a fucking mountain out of a grain of sand at taxpayers' expense to prove a point that is questionable to anyone with a basic understanding of calculus and physics.
What i find strange is that there is only an average recorded speed. My gps can tell me my speed at the exact moment, so if i would record that , it would show my speed , exactly over time . Then you would also be able to see where i stopped , and when exactly when i speeded. So it would be much more acurate then a radar.
So , bad GPS tracking system.
No, it can't. Law of physics dude, not unless you have a GPS based on 'funny action at a distance' quantum mechanics star-trek hocus pocus.
Oxymoron isn't an adjective, it's a noun, and what's more his statement isn't one.
Run-on sentence. A period or semicolon missing between "adjective" and "it's". If using a semicolon, then a period should replace the comma that comes after "noun". And, IIRC, a comma is missing after "more".
Besides the statement being an oxymoron (an adjective I'm applying to this specific statement of yours, not you)
Oxymoron isn't an adjective, it's a noun,
Or more precisely, I'm using it as an adjectival noun (a legitimate and correct usage) for indicating a contradiction or redundancy unintentionally presented as fact.
and what's more his statement isn't one.
Yes it is in the sense that the intended usage is contradictory to message he tried to convey:
Bureaucrats are AS PRONE to those "unintended consequences" as anyone.. Ergo, they can't be trusted.
However, someone trustworthy must exist for his following statement to be feasibly implementable (There really ought to be a sensible and legal way to take frauds out.).
If such a thing ought to be or exist, then it is necessary for someone trustworthy to exist so that the former can be implemented and executed.
However, if bureaucrats are as prone to mistakes as anyone else, then every one else is also prone of that same defect. They are equivalent with respect to that flaw.
And if the propensity to that flaw is the basis to NOT trust the former on legislative and law enforcement manners, then, logically, you MUST NOT trust the later on the same subject. They are equivalently flawed after all.
So, who the hell else can one trust with legislation, policy-making and enforcement on the removal of fraud in the manner which ought to be/exist?
Ergo, oxymoron. If the usage is still erroneous, oh well. After all, English is not my first language. Let me know what other adjective or adjectival noun I should use to describe this contradiction.
Yes - but - bureaucrats are as prone to those "unintended consequences" as anyone.
That can be said of any profession, in particular software development/engineering. Besides the statement being an oxymoron (an adjective I'm applying to this specific statement of yours, not you), it is non sequitur. It doesn't follow from FlyingBishop's post, nor counters the fact that politics =/= bureaucrats (and that/.ters don't seem to know the difference.) Kinda like "computer people" and "non-techies", nebulous or incorrect usage of nouns and titles really digs into a statement's logical validity.
And once a pack of bureaucrats adopt a measure, or a method, they are harder to change than the politicians.
Pure speculation, a generalization that can be said even of us in engineering, if we look hard enough for circumstantial/anecdotal evidence and we cleverly re-arrange it to give the impression of cause-and-effect. As opposed to real science and kinda like creationist - establish your conclusion and then hunt for the facts to support it (or make them up as necessary.)
There really ought to be a sensible and legal way to take frauds out.
Define sensible and define legal into a nice package that can be argued to be better/more relevant/more appropriate/more practical than what currently exist. Then lobby for it. If you are lucky, it will come to pass, if not... keep lobbying with an amount of effort proportional to the depth of your convictions.
But, I don't expect anything sensible from the government
So nothing ever good has come out of ICANN, FCC, FDA, DOJ, FTA, FDA, ATF, DOE, DE, DOD, DARPA, DOJ's Antitrust Division, Environment and Natural Resources Division, National Park Service, DOI, US Department of Agriculture, US Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Housing, Health & Human Service, or their equivalents (where applicable) at the state and local level?
Nothing, nothing good at all? Everything bad? Everything not sensible? Think about that next time you use all the facilities provided by the existing infrastructure. Hell, all of that good shit, as imperfect as it might be (just like anything in real life) just came to existing by a miracle - ZOMG! The ultimate proof that ${DEITY} exist came out of a high horse standing on a soap box!!(10+1)
whether the politicos or the bureaucrats are involved.
Nonsensical rhetorical bits make for excellent slogans.
I dunno, my geography might be rusty, but if and when the Rift goes split like Jenna Jameson, wouldn't that either simply create an inland sea going either inland into Mozambique or opening up again on the Indian Ocean (and south of Somalia), with either scenario starting off the Bab-el-Mandeb strait????? It kinda like doesn't look like creating a new pathway, but a widening of the strait basically merging the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden into a new and wider waterway?
Can't wait to see another Aussie-sounding infomercial guy selling you the one book on how to me a fuckzillion dollars in buying fixer-uppers for a fraction of a penny in the someday-to-be Ethiopian Riviera!
So he's not a geek, he just wrote a compiler in machine code on an 8080 interpreter Allen had written for the PDP-10 targetting the kit-form hobbyist computer credited for starting the personal computer revolution.
He just wrote a compile in machine code? Just?
Do you realize that *that* is a lot more than most of the self-proclaimed "geeks" in/. have ever/will ever accomplish when it comes to genuine geekiness (installing Linux to run gcc to complete homeworks and posting on/. does not count as geek ingenuity, at least *productive* geek ingenuity that is.)
Hell, that's more than the average CS senior student has done in the last 2 decades <rimshot/>
Actually I take that back, his comment about Java being a slow piece of shit is something I didn't quite get (blame it on glossing over reading.)
Anytime someone calls something *slow* makes me chuckle, wondering in exactly what kind of context other than home works and badly done implementations that person is talking to.
You realize in most independent benchmarks, Java is quite a bit faster than.NET and has been proven in really huge enterprise apps..NET hasn't been proven, just ask the London Stock Exchange.
I think you need to get the facts, my friend.
Actually he's quite right. As a professional Java programmer that has been doing it for a living for a while now, I tell you that.NET pretty much has many of Java mistakes *fixed*, in particular support for multiple languages and a common type system.
As for the benchmarks, you have to differentiate between Java, the language and the JVM. The JVM is far superior to anything else, including.NET. Java, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. The London Stock Exchange decision had the JVM as the contributing factor, with OS-specific performance factors coming second, not the language.
For any argument to make sense, you *must* separate Java factors from JVM factors. For most of my Java career I spent it on the back-end, first on CORBA and then on J2EE, trying to get it as close to the metal as possible, taking the OS (mostly Solaris and Linux) and network into account, which you have to in high performance (or non-mediocre^_^) enterprise computing. In the last couple of years I've had the fortune to look and evaluate Java vs.NET and other non-Java JVM solutions.
It really gets you to understand the short comings of Java and on how lucky we are that we have the best VM available for enterprise computing.
bjourne is right on the mark that Sun has fucked up the Java language - it is a wasteland of missing opportunities where unproven standards designed committee and academic/tool-vendor driven syntactic salt and bloated, fringe-case scenario solutions were force-fed to the development community (remember the *Pet Store* in EJB 1.0?
The entire community has had to fight that back and come with their own solutions to solve real problems in enterprise computing (Spring, Struts, Hibernate, Velocity, Wicket, Jakarta-*) And the community by itself has had to explore non-Java alternatives for the JVM for addressing actual gaps in the language - compare that to.NET which from the start attempted to support that with a common type system.
Your reply about bench marking is non-sequitur as it applies to the JVM (seriously) and about the London Stock Exchange, it is about cases where the utmost in high performance and throughput are required. It's like XA - more often than not, it does not apply.
For the general case in enterprise computing, either JVM or.NET do fine, and it has to do more with making the right choices in integration, architecture and implementation than on the platform itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Now consider the following (bold text by me):
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-editors-desk/the-editors-desk/2009/11/post-a-vulgar-comment-while-youre-at-work-lose-your-job/all-comments/
By mid-morning, a number of folks had commented about their experiences with Bird’s Nest Soup, octopus, cow brains and rattlesnake. Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted in reply a single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.
A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included. About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.
So we have an individual who was using work assets to make not one, but two vulgar posts. It kinda makes you wonder how intent was this guy in checking that web page over and over (like many slashdoters do), re-posting the vulgarity as many times as needed... not the type of activity you are supposed to be doing while on the clock (after all, they give you a paycheck for work, not because you are pretty or something.)
The school was in the right in asking the guy "what are you doing, ON THE CLOCK, with OUR COMPUTER ASSETS, posting the same profanity several times?
It is also worth noting that the school didn't fire him, but that he quit on the spot... or so says the story, but that's irrelevant anyways. The guy had it coming.
Now I can't way to see the juvenile posters making this a case of libertarian freedom of speech vs 1984'esque police control and the war on terror.
Programming language theory is computer science. I'll even concede that programming with a FP language is very computer science-y. Techniques for writing maintainable code is not.
Many activities carried out every day for performing software engineering is not computer science. But good software engineering, the discipline itself, that is deeply root in computer science. Just like coding. Coding is not computer science, but good coding practices are rooted computer science.
Principles and notions such as cohesion, coupling, modularity, comprehensiveness, patterns, complexity management, architecture, they all originate in computer science.
I think you are right that software (and systems) engineering is computer science. But you might want to be precise as of why. Software Engineering is to Computer Science and Mathematics what the "physical" engineering disciplines are to Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. The former cannot exist without the later.
And that means the validation people run through their test book and create maybe 1000 or 2000 bug reports. These bug reports bounce around through the development teams acquiring cruft along the way. When the bug eventually stops bouncing somebody might have a go at fixing it. So they change something and if they can't see the bug anymore they go cvs commit right then and there. At the same time the other 1999 bugs are bouncing around, looking for a home.
At the end of the (as we call it) bug fixing process the original software doesn't exist in its original form. It appears to pass most of the test sbut you would not be advised to lean against it or anything because something else might break.
software maintenance =/= bug fixing.
Where C++ provides classes, subclasses and templates, Go provides interfaces. A Go interface is similar to a C++ pure abstract class: a class with no data members, with methods which are all pure virtual. However, in Go, any type which provides the methods named in the interface may be treated as an implementation of the interface. No explicitly declared inheritance is required. The implementation of the interface is entirely separate from the interface itself
Now, this is awesome.
What if you ARE dealing with massive data AND complex relationships?
And how often does that happen?
When it comes to reports, always itemize the things you work, who requested them, when they requested, when you completed it, and the amount of effort (in term of time and collaboration with other teams) that it took you, including the time it takes you to create the report (seriously.) The first goal is to cover your behind. A report like that will show what you are doing.
The second goal is to, without much effort, have a report in a format (.i.e excel) such that you can do your own analysis. Which employee requests the most crap from you - this will also get you which department represents the bulk of your work, and which systems generate the most work. To the report, add an addendum for extreme circumstances (.ie. it took me an additional 12 hours to recover the site because there was a network failure between us and the DBA servers.).
Surprisingly, it doesn't take that much effort. All you do is keep a spreadsheet in which you log each request you receive, when you started working on it, and when you finish it. Format it well enough (or use a mickey mouse db like Access), and you can create a quick and simple report with a snap of your fingers.
Beware, though, of expending too much time trying to get the perfect reports. If it's taking you too much time, stop. The idea is to report a general ball park figure of things.
Now, if they are trying to micromanage you into daily reports with hourly entries, simply tell them that you will report 1 to 1.5 hours of effort devoted to the reporting task. After a few days, they'll back out very quickly.
Asking the pointy haired what they want is a fool's errand. Best to come up with a straw man and some reasons behind it. Build a CGI (or something) and put it on a web page. Make sure it prints nicely.
The numbers could be entirely fictional - as long as the report looks good and seems to trend the right way it will never be read.
This is a stupid, unprofessional assumption. Not every boss is a pointy haired one. You don't blatantly make up stuff in reports ever. If you ever come to work at a place so hideous that you have to do that, just keep your ethics and leave to a better job. Time to grow up.
Reducing body fat % and increasing muscle mass % to improve one's rest metabolic rate and bone density should be the goals. And these do not necessarily imply a continuous loss of weight. But the modern way of things (and our American way in particular) is for swallowing a teh magical slim-fast pill, munch some broccoli every now and then and hop on the threadmil to do some feel-good make-believe "cardio" while reading a magazine.
The parents didn't understand the math involved, you can fault them for that. But if I were in a situation where one of my kids was accused of something and I genuinely believed that they didn't do it (and had what I believed was proof too), then HELL YES they should fight it.
They might be ignorant, but they weren't wrong in a moral sense.
I disagree. Obviously if my child were under a very serious accusation that runs counter to what I know of him (say, being accused of rape or dope dealing, or something that could give him a criminal record), then yeah, I'd fight it if I truly believe he's innocent.
But for a $150 ticket? Am I going to spend the time and effort to balance what my kid tells me vs what a police officer tells me (without me knowing anything about the officer that might make me believe his judgment needs to be challenged)?
They were wrong in a moral sense because they failed in observing a matter of proportion. The point to fight was moot. It was not a cause worth fighting for. Except in cases of clear-defined evil, morality is bound by a sense of proportion.
What lesson am I going to teach my kid, that it is ok to hire a lawyer (God knows how much that motherfucker cost) and drag the entire county legal system at the taxpayers' expense just so that I can prove a moot point from my high up in my soapbox-standing pompous high horse?
Life is such that sometimes minuscule shit that has no long-term serious consequence is thrown at you for no valid reason (say a ticket.) You pay it, you grind your teeth saying "man, this sucks" and you move on to more pressing, worthy needs.
If I, as a parent, cannot teach by my own example that kind of balance, that kind of proportion that is so vital for an adult to function, then certainly I am on wrong on the moral sense.
There's a case to be made that the entire speeding prosecution system in the US has gone way, way overboard, and that it's morally justified to fight speeding tickets just to make it more difficult on the people who perpetrate this bullshit.
One can also make the case that, in general, people are more than willing to play a game of probabilities by paying $50 to a "ticket-fixer" attorney to show up (counting in the high probability that the LEO will not because he's busy doing more important shit), get the case thrown out and save the difference from the cost of the ticket.
I'll be very honest that I've been ticketed several times, and in each, I've been in the wrong, I've admitted it, and I've paid the dues. And all the while the majority of people I've known have told me that it is foolish, that the law is in the wrong, and that we should "play the game" with the ticket lawyers.
Barring the fact that indeed there are violations by law enforcement officers, am I the only person that gets ticketed for a valid reason, and almost everybody else around me is a victim? Or is it the case that many people in general likes to rationalize their own "lite" wrong doings by blaming it to the corrupt system, not realizing (or wanting to admit) they are corrupt themselves?
What would Occam do?
The parents determine whether or not to hand the keys to the car over to the kid (unless, of course, the kid can pay for their own car, insurance, gas, maintenance, etc using just allowance). I don't go out of my way to tell parents how to raise their children. I simply treat children as citizens until they prove otherwise.
Children might be citizens, but that does not make them adults. A person does not need to prove that he/she is a citizen (that is, one subject to the protection and requirements of the law whenever applicable.) A person, however, must demonstrate at all times and in every single time or situation that he is an adult.
Barring extreme circumstances, in general, children, by definition, by psychology and anatomy cannot be expected, at all times and in all circumstances, to demonstrate the reasoning capabilities that one must expect, legally or morally from an adult.
Given the different rates at which children mature physically, and given the varied social input that they receive (which affect their ability to reason), it is impossible to draw a precise line between children and adults. All we can do is draw arbitrary, best-effort limits (say legal age of consent) and hope that good judgment is behind legal interpretations... but I'm getting off the tangent here.
The privilege of driving a car, however, is not granted by the parents, but rather by the state, in the form of earning a driver's license.
And a minor gets the car from whom? The state or the parents? Who owns the car, who pays the insurance and who, ultimately is responsible for that car's utilization as delimited by the law?
Answer: parents. Even if "little" Tyler were 21, if he's driving his parents' car (even if with their consent), they might be legally responsible for things that can occur due to its usage.
Note that by the time Tyler is allowed to drive without restrictions from his state, he is likely 18 (except in some specific states, where its older than that), and thus should not be referred to as little.
Here we are in agreement.
The issue, of course, is that "little" Tyler needs to learn how to drive in a safe environment before he is personally responsible for everything that he does (and not his parents). The only conditions a parent should impose on their children for driving should be that the parents have personally witnessed the child driving safely in public. The rest will take care of itself through legal issues.
Speeding tickets, DUI, causing crashes (I don't care if its an accident, and neither does your insurance), etc. should be what keeps people off the road, and valid, up to date licenses are what grants the privilege of driving. Not parental consent.
I completely agree with you, regarding technical legalities on the possession of a drivers license. This is more about upbringing.
Also, I'm not arguing about the legal ability to receive a driver license by the state. I'm arguing about sound-minded parents/legal guardians authority (legal and moral) to give or deny their children permission to drive a car that legally belongs to either them (the parents) or to the children (in the later case, ownership that parents can nullify except in rare legal circumstances.)
I am with you in that a child's parental permission to drive a car should not be a function of receiving allowance.
What I am for, though, is that allowances and the permission to drive a car are the parent's sole discretion and should be regulated according to a child's behavior.
If I know my child is careless, or if I deem I must punish him for a particular behavior, then is my consent, my parental consent, my legally bestowed consent and authority not the law on matters of vehicular driving or the legally obtain possession of a driver license that will ultimately determine when/if/how/where my child gets the keys to
"tough luck, we pay the ticket and you pay us back from your allowance". Am I the only one who thinks that kids who still recieves allowance shouldn't be allowed to drive?
Well, when it comes to allowance and other priviledges, including the permission to drive a car, I think you need to differentiate between receiving it and earning
it.
I would not necessarily make driving conditional to receiving/not receiving allowance. They are both at parent's discretion. And the key issue here is that a parent's discretion should (read *must*) be reasonable and humane and yet strict, and with the primary purpose of providing structure and discipline and to teach life-valuable lessons on responsibilities, obligations towards family, people and social structures, consequences and the reality that life sometimes is not obliged to be fair.
I would not make one a condition for the other. I would make both bound to certain conditions.
Am I the only one who thinks that kids who still recieves allowance shouldn't be allowed to drive?
I hope so.
The fact that parents give their kids money shouldn't preclude them from being of age and passing a driving exam.
I don't quite agree with his point, but I can agree where that's coming from. Being of age and passing a driving exam are privileges that are bound with responsibilities. And type of privileges can only be given conditionally.
The problem sometimes is that parents "give" allowances instead of having their kids "earn" them.
For one thing, allowance should be earned, and then, the parental permission to drive a car (which is different from the ability to get a driver license) should also be earned.
So yeah, getting or not getting an allowance should not preclude a kid from being of age and passing an exam. However, other reasonable conditions imposed by at parent's sole discretion should (read *must) exist before letting a minor drive a car.
Jolly good! You are 17 and you passed the DL exam. Nothing else needs to be considered, here are the keys my little Tyler! I don't think so.
Fuck the parents and fuck the kid. A good parent would have told the kid "tough luck, we pay the ticket and you pay us back from your allowance". But noooooooooooo, better to make a fucking mountain out of a grain of sand at taxpayers' expense to prove a point that is questionable to anyone with a basic understanding of calculus and physics.
What i find strange is that there is only an average recorded speed. My gps can tell me my speed at the exact moment, so if i would record that , it would show my speed , exactly over time . Then you would also be able to see where i stopped , and when exactly when i speeded. So it would be much more acurate then a radar.
So , bad GPS tracking system.
No, it can't. Law of physics dude, not unless you have a GPS based on 'funny action at a distance' quantum mechanics star-trek hocus pocus.
Shit, then. I guess we learned it all wrong then 0.o
Oxymoron isn't an adjective, it's a noun, and what's more his statement isn't one.
Run-on sentence. A period or semicolon missing between "adjective" and "it's". If using a semicolon, then a period should replace the comma that comes after "noun". And, IIRC, a comma is missing after "more".
Gramm3r nazi ftw!
Oxymoron isn't an adjective, it's a noun,
Or more precisely, I'm using it as an adjectival noun (a legitimate and correct usage) for indicating a contradiction or redundancy unintentionally presented as fact.
and what's more his statement isn't one.
Yes it is in the sense that the intended usage is contradictory to message he tried to convey:
Bureaucrats are AS PRONE to those "unintended consequences" as anyone.. Ergo, they can't be trusted.
However, someone trustworthy must exist for his following statement to be feasibly implementable (There really ought to be a sensible and legal way to take frauds out.).
If such a thing ought to be or exist, then it is necessary for someone trustworthy to exist so that the former can be implemented and executed.
However, if bureaucrats are as prone to mistakes as anyone else, then every one else is also prone of that same defect. They are equivalent with respect to that flaw.
And if the propensity to that flaw is the basis to NOT trust the former on legislative and law enforcement manners, then, logically, you MUST NOT trust the later on the same subject. They are equivalently flawed after all.
So, who the hell else can one trust with legislation, policy-making and enforcement on the removal of fraud in the manner which ought to be/exist?
Ergo, oxymoron. If the usage is still erroneous, oh well. After all, English is not my first language. Let me know what other adjective or adjectival noun I should use to describe this contradiction.
Yes - but - bureaucrats are as prone to those "unintended consequences" as anyone.
That can be said of any profession, in particular software development/engineering. Besides the statement being an oxymoron (an adjective I'm applying to this specific statement of yours, not you), it is non sequitur. It doesn't follow from FlyingBishop's post, nor counters the fact that politics =/= bureaucrats (and that /.ters don't seem to know the difference.) Kinda like "computer people" and "non-techies", nebulous or incorrect usage of nouns and titles really digs into a statement's logical validity.
And once a pack of bureaucrats adopt a measure, or a method, they are harder to change than the politicians.
Pure speculation, a generalization that can be said even of us in engineering, if we look hard enough for circumstantial/anecdotal evidence and we cleverly re-arrange it to give the impression of cause-and-effect. As opposed to real science and kinda like creationist - establish your conclusion and then hunt for the facts to support it (or make them up as necessary.)
There really ought to be a sensible and legal way to take frauds out.
Define sensible and define legal into a nice package that can be argued to be better/more relevant/more appropriate/more practical than what currently exist. Then lobby for it. If you are lucky, it will come to pass, if not... keep lobbying with an amount of effort proportional to the depth of your convictions.
But, I don't expect anything sensible from the government
So nothing ever good has come out of ICANN, FCC, FDA, DOJ, FTA, FDA, ATF, DOE, DE, DOD, DARPA, DOJ's Antitrust Division, Environment and Natural Resources Division, National Park Service, DOI, US Department of Agriculture, US Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Housing, Health & Human Service, or their equivalents (where applicable) at the state and local level?
Nothing, nothing good at all? Everything bad? Everything not sensible? Think about that next time you use all the facilities provided by the existing infrastructure. Hell, all of that good shit, as imperfect as it might be (just like anything in real life) just came to existing by a miracle - ZOMG! The ultimate proof that ${DEITY} exist came out of a high horse standing on a soap box!!(10+1)
whether the politicos or the bureaucrats are involved.
Nonsensical rhetorical bits make for excellent slogans.
I dunno, my geography might be rusty, but if and when the Rift goes split like Jenna Jameson, wouldn't that either simply create an inland sea going either inland into Mozambique or opening up again on the Indian Ocean (and south of Somalia), with either scenario starting off the Bab-el-Mandeb strait????? It kinda like doesn't look like creating a new pathway, but a widening of the strait basically merging the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden into a new and wider waterway?
Can't wait to see another Aussie-sounding infomercial guy selling you the one book on how to me a fuckzillion dollars in buying fixer-uppers for a fraction of a penny in the someday-to-be Ethiopian Riviera!
So he's not a geek, he just wrote a compiler in machine code on an 8080 interpreter Allen had written for the PDP-10 targetting the kit-form hobbyist computer credited for starting the personal computer revolution.
He just wrote a compile in machine code? Just?
Do you realize that *that* is a lot more than most of the self-proclaimed "geeks" in /. have ever/will ever accomplish when it comes to genuine geekiness (installing Linux to run gcc to complete homeworks and posting on /. does not count as geek ingenuity, at least *productive* geek ingenuity that is.)
Hell, that's more than the average CS senior student has done in the last 2 decades <rimshot/>
Anytime someone calls something *slow* makes me chuckle, wondering in exactly what kind of context other than home works and badly done implementations that person is talking to.
You realize in most independent benchmarks, Java is quite a bit faster than .NET and has been proven in really huge enterprise apps. .NET hasn't been proven, just ask the London Stock Exchange.
I think you need to get the facts, my friend.
Actually he's quite right. As a professional Java programmer that has been doing it for a living for a while now, I tell you that .NET pretty much has many of Java mistakes *fixed*, in particular support for multiple languages and a common type system.
As for the benchmarks, you have to differentiate between Java, the language and the JVM. The JVM is far superior to anything else, including .NET. Java, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. The London Stock Exchange decision had the JVM as the contributing factor, with OS-specific performance factors coming second, not the language.
For any argument to make sense, you *must* separate Java factors from JVM factors. For most of my Java career I spent it on the back-end, first on CORBA and then on J2EE, trying to get it as close to the metal as possible, taking the OS (mostly Solaris and Linux) and network into account, which you have to in high performance (or non-mediocre^_^) enterprise computing. In the last couple of years I've had the fortune to look and evaluate Java vs .NET and other non-Java JVM solutions.
It really gets you to understand the short comings of Java and on how lucky we are that we have the best VM available for enterprise computing.
bjourne is right on the mark that Sun has fucked up the Java language - it is a wasteland of missing opportunities where unproven standards designed committee and academic/tool-vendor driven syntactic salt and bloated, fringe-case scenario solutions were force-fed to the development community (remember the *Pet Store* in EJB 1.0?
The entire community has had to fight that back and come with their own solutions to solve real problems in enterprise computing (Spring, Struts, Hibernate, Velocity, Wicket, Jakarta-*) And the community by itself has had to explore non-Java alternatives for the JVM for addressing actual gaps in the language - compare that to .NET which from the start attempted to support that with a common type system.
Your reply about bench marking is non-sequitur as it applies to the JVM (seriously) and about the London Stock Exchange, it is about cases where the utmost in high performance and throughput are required. It's like XA - more often than not, it does not apply.
For the general case in enterprise computing, either JVM or .NET do fine, and it has to do more with making the right choices in integration, architecture and implementation than on the platform itself.
Like, uh, the rise of the internet, which Windows 95 was built for? Oh, wait...
Understand technology =/= infallible or immune to mistakes at technology-driven decisions
Not that I'm defending the guy, but your logic sucks dude.