As a graduate student / teaching assistant in the late 1970s, it seemed like a third of the computer science students were female - and I noticed, having come from an engineering school with an 11:1 ratio. CS was useful in all sciences, and education, and business - not a purely tech subject. It was also new and open to all comers, seen as moving away from the engineering side (though again my own background was from that engineering side, and I've worked in embedded systems rather than business applications). This was still the days of Users' Groups yet before the anonymity of BBSs, and it seemed like the heyday of cooperation. I concur that things have gone downhill personality-wise as it became bigger business, and the Open Source "community" has as much show-off competition as useful cooperative product. (Even allowing for some favorite utilities existing because someone said "I can do that better", and did, the fact that those were allowed do wither and die because there's no glory in keeping things running is an ongoing problem.)
“Is not this a free country?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have not I a right to swing my arm?”
“Yes, but your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.”
I agree with you that it is a very difficult situation - because we're supposed to be the good guys, and the good guys don't censor things. I believe this is one of the reasons that civilizations fall: when they become open enough that they allow the free speech and free action and weapons collection of people who want to undermine that very openness.
Not a First Amendment issue, because the government is not involved. And yes, ISPs are not common carriers, they fight that battle continuously. But think very hard about the precedent that this sets. If public outcry can cut off this web site - despicable as it may be - then other public outcry can cut off Planned Parenthood's web site. How many articles here on/. have been about an ISP or email service or web host suddenly terminating someone's service, or banks refusing to handle credit cards for (e.g.) medical marijuana dispensaries? Do you want the phone companies to be able to turn off someone's service because of what someone says over the phone? (And how would they know, unless they're constantly monitoring, even if only computers listening in for keywords?) Blacklisting someone from having web hosting could lead to blacklisting someone from having a phone number. AND OF COURSE the people most likely to abuse these kinds of powers are the restrictive right-wing types like the current administration.
"The first atomic war wasn’t a bad one—the first one never is."
Also:
Earth
by John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978)
"A planet doesn’t explode of itself," said drily
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air.
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
Intelligent beings must have been living there."
This guy's an idiot. I'm all in agreement that road signs are inadequate, and most places don't have anywhere near enough (other than specific tourist destinations like the Orlando area (where it's probably sponsored)), but there ARE such things as printed maps, or pre-trip research on Google Maps, or just knowing the area that you live in.
Some things get to the point where they serve their purpose well, and they don't need changing any more. People don't invent new flatware to eat with; companies keep coming out with new patterns, but everything is pretty much the same size and weight and angles, and forks usually have four tines, and the designs are pretty well set. The FOSS community seems to think that constant change is good; most products in the real world stabilize.
You travel with full blister sheets of a variety of medicines?
You're young and healthy enough to not need any medicines?;-) (Yes, I see your ID is lower than mine.) I take 3 things a day, one of them morning and evening, with another 2 as-needed.
There are many drugs kept only for emergencies, in settings that have few emergencies, that must be thrown out and replaced when they expire. A good example is a general practitioner's office. They will keep a defibrillator, epinephrine, atropine, D50W, etc for medical emergencies, and may never use them over the course of a decade or two.
This category calls for more active management (which would never work in our real world because it would require cooperation and security). Each doctor's office small supply of these drugs could sit on the shelf for, say, half of their useful life, and then be transferred to the ambulance squad which will go through them before they expire. Instead the ambulance squad buys its own, and the office supply is wasted, for a net waste of money and supplies, because the transfer would count as an unlicensed re-sale or is prohibited (rather than treating it as an inter-pharmacy transfer or whatever the law calls it).
No, be realistic, just change the name. It's a "best by" or "guaranteed to" date, not an "expires - useless or dangerous" date. They're just treating it like a food product. Admittedly, the marketing has been excellent; the drug companies convince people that dry powdered pills "expire" like spoiled milk, when it was always obvious that they didn't
No fingerprint scanner has ever worked reliably on my fingers. That includes the police scanners for my teacher's license and the immigration scanners for my Global Entry. And I would rather use a password anyway.
Unlike the case in Minneapolis, responding to a 911 call about a potential incident in progress, presumably with a gun drawn in the car (never a good idea), and they STILL didn't turn on their cameras.
Just type checking. If I take the time to define an enum, or even just a type, don't just mush them all into integers and let them all be the same. That one check would catch a lot of consistency errors. For example, I do a lot of Modbus programming with 1-based Modbus addresses which turn into 0-based offsets in tables. I would love to define some variables as OneBased and ZeroBased, and specify that my table index has to be ZeroBased, And don't compare with assembler, I worked in IBM assembler for nine years, I'd *rather* work in assembler because IBM assembler macros had more capability than C++ templates. I could have donw better type checking that way.
Through both direct government subsidy and extra fees, the phone companies have been collecting money for years that was supposed to be going to exactly this purpose.
>>> cancelled my other one because I never used it.
You can keep two credit cards, use the one in your wallet *only* in person with signature (and you can even tell some banks that remote charges are not allowed on that card), and the other one with a low credit limit *only* online. That limits the exposure and segregates the bills too.
Jamming will jam the surrounding neighborhood, and might well interfere with emergency communication from security staff. If the problem is that someone had a cellphone when they're not supposed to, fix THAT problem, just like they would deal with someone having a knife when they're not supposed to.
Imagine a ten story building with two lift shafts and 10 cars.
Cool scenario, but overkill (pending simulation results:-) ) Take your idea with just 4 cars, which should get a large amount of the improvement (over the current 2 cars in two lift shafts). 10 cars means they spend a lot of energy getting out of the way all the time. And usage patterns would vary quite a bit; in a residence, where most trips are from home to lobby (or basement for wash/garbage), moving out of the way is a common activity, while an office building with trips between floors might well get a "working set" effect.
That's the point - you CAN shunt cars out of the way. Or, like a train system, you can use multiple shafts as local and express in each direction - and UNLIKE a train system, more like the phone system, you can dynamically reallocate which shaft is being used for what as usage changes during the day. The flexibility is what it's all about. Depends how long the track switch takes, of course, Your example of "get off at one floor to transfer to another lift" doesn't need to happen any more; a big office building that used to have multiple separate elevators for separate floor ranges can now have an "express" shaft to get to each range, then shunt to the "local" shaft for the floors within that range - but only during rush hour! In the middle of the day, with random usage, the shafts could be "up" and "down" for a cyclic pattern, or whatever simulation shows is the average most efficient.
... the days when you could program in whatever you wanted on whatever machine architecture was handy with no thought to having to support it in the future
Perhaps you meant to say "in whatever limited languages were supported on whatever limited machine architecture was available"?
Oh, wait, there's MORE work to do? Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. (Hey, come to think of it, Governor LePetomane would probably do as good a job . ..)
Slashdot Mirror
If you haven't experienced assholes at work, you've been lucky. If you haven't experienced M&A disasters, and companies folding under you, ditto.
As a graduate student / teaching assistant in the late 1970s, it seemed like a third of the computer science students were female - and I noticed, having come from an engineering school with an 11:1 ratio. CS was useful in all sciences, and education, and business - not a purely tech subject. It was also new and open to all comers, seen as moving away from the engineering side (though again my own background was from that engineering side, and I've worked in embedded systems rather than business applications). This was still the days of Users' Groups yet before the anonymity of BBSs, and it seemed like the heyday of cooperation. I concur that things have gone downhill personality-wise as it became bigger business, and the Open Source "community" has as much show-off competition as useful cooperative product. (Even allowing for some favorite utilities existing because someone said "I can do that better", and did, the fact that those were allowed do wither and die because there's no glory in keeping things running is an ongoing problem.)
“Is not this a free country?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have not I a right to swing my arm?”
“Yes, but your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.”
I agree with you that it is a very difficult situation - because we're supposed to be the good guys, and the good guys don't censor things. I believe this is one of the reasons that civilizations fall: when they become open enough that they allow the free speech and free action and weapons collection of people who want to undermine that very openness.
Not a First Amendment issue, because the government is not involved. And yes, ISPs are not common carriers, they fight that battle continuously. But think very hard about the precedent that this sets. If public outcry can cut off this web site - despicable as it may be - then other public outcry can cut off Planned Parenthood's web site. How many articles here on /. have been about an ISP or email service or web host suddenly terminating someone's service, or banks refusing to handle credit cards for (e.g.) medical marijuana dispensaries? Do you want the phone companies to be able to turn off someone's service because of what someone says over the phone? (And how would they know, unless they're constantly monitoring, even if only computers listening in for keywords?) Blacklisting someone from having web hosting could lead to blacklisting someone from having a phone number. AND OF COURSE the people most likely to abuse these kinds of powers are the restrictive right-wing types like the current administration.
"The first atomic war wasn’t a bad one—the first one never is."
Also:
Earth
by John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978)
"A planet doesn’t explode of itself," said drily
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air.
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
Intelligent beings must have been living there."
This guy's an idiot. I'm all in agreement that road signs are inadequate, and most places don't have anywhere near enough (other than specific tourist destinations like the Orlando area (where it's probably sponsored)), but there ARE such things as printed maps, or pre-trip research on Google Maps, or just knowing the area that you live in.
Some things get to the point where they serve their purpose well, and they don't need changing any more. People don't invent new flatware to eat with; companies keep coming out with new patterns, but everything is pretty much the same size and weight and angles, and forks usually have four tines, and the designs are pretty well set. The FOSS community seems to think that constant change is good; most products in the real world stabilize.
Is India creating 800,000 new jobs per year for those 800,000 new graduates? Maybe there are so many unemployed because there are so many.
You travel with full blister sheets of a variety of medicines?
You're young and healthy enough to not need any medicines? ;-) (Yes, I see your ID is lower than mine.) I take 3 things a day, one of them morning and evening, with another 2 as-needed.
There are many drugs kept only for emergencies, in settings that have few emergencies, that must be thrown out and replaced when they expire. A good example is a general practitioner's office. They will keep a defibrillator, epinephrine, atropine, D50W, etc for medical emergencies, and may never use them over the course of a decade or two.
This category calls for more active management (which would never work in our real world because it would require cooperation and security). Each doctor's office small supply of these drugs could sit on the shelf for, say, half of their useful life, and then be transferred to the ambulance squad which will go through them before they expire. Instead the ambulance squad buys its own, and the office supply is wasted, for a net waste of money and supplies, because the transfer would count as an unlicensed re-sale or is prohibited (rather than treating it as an inter-pharmacy transfer or whatever the law calls it).
No, be realistic, just change the name. It's a "best by" or "guaranteed to" date, not an "expires - useless or dangerous" date. They're just treating it like a food product. Admittedly, the marketing has been excellent; the drug companies convince people that dry powdered pills "expire" like spoiled milk, when it was always obvious that they didn't
No fingerprint scanner has ever worked reliably on my fingers. That includes the police scanners for my teacher's license and the immigration scanners for my Global Entry. And I would rather use a password anyway.
Unlike the case in Minneapolis, responding to a 911 call about a potential incident in progress, presumably with a gun drawn in the car (never a good idea), and they STILL didn't turn on their cameras.
Just type checking. If I take the time to define an enum, or even just a type, don't just mush them all into integers and let them all be the same. That one check would catch a lot of consistency errors. For example, I do a lot of Modbus programming with 1-based Modbus addresses which turn into 0-based offsets in tables. I would love to define some variables as OneBased and ZeroBased, and specify that my table index has to be ZeroBased, And don't compare with assembler, I worked in IBM assembler for nine years, I'd *rather* work in assembler because IBM assembler macros had more capability than C++ templates. I could have donw better type checking that way.
Through both direct government subsidy and extra fees, the phone companies have been collecting money for years that was supposed to be going to exactly this purpose.
No, they allow precisely one subsequent "adjustment", typically within a limited time window, for tips.
>>> cancelled my other one because I never used it.
You can keep two credit cards, use the one in your wallet *only* in person with signature (and you can even tell some banks that remote charges are not allowed on that card), and the other one with a low credit limit *only* online. That limits the exposure and segregates the bills too.
Jamming will jam the surrounding neighborhood, and might well interfere with emergency communication from security staff. If the problem is that someone had a cellphone when they're not supposed to, fix THAT problem, just like they would deal with someone having a knife when they're not supposed to.
You need the sideways movement to shuffle the cars around, even if you don't transport people sideways.
Imagine a ten story building with two lift shafts and 10 cars.
Cool scenario, but overkill (pending simulation results :-) ) Take your idea with just 4 cars, which should get a large amount of the improvement (over the current 2 cars in two lift shafts). 10 cars means they spend a lot of energy getting out of the way all the time. And usage patterns would vary quite a bit; in a residence, where most trips are from home to lobby (or basement for wash/garbage), moving out of the way is a common activity, while an office building with trips between floors might well get a "working set" effect.
That's the point - you CAN shunt cars out of the way. Or, like a train system, you can use multiple shafts as local and express in each direction - and UNLIKE a train system, more like the phone system, you can dynamically reallocate which shaft is being used for what as usage changes during the day. The flexibility is what it's all about. Depends how long the track switch takes, of course, Your example of "get off at one floor to transfer to another lift" doesn't need to happen any more; a big office building that used to have multiple separate elevators for separate floor ranges can now have an "express" shaft to get to each range, then shunt to the "local" shaft for the floors within that range - but only during rush hour! In the middle of the day, with random usage, the shafts could be "up" and "down" for a cyclic pattern, or whatever simulation shows is the average most efficient.
As already noted, the line between "exposing bad guys" and "doxxing good guys" is very faint. I vote for people before principles.
... the days when you could program in whatever you wanted on whatever machine architecture was handy with no thought to having to support it in the future
Perhaps you meant to say "in whatever limited languages were supported on whatever limited machine architecture was available"?
Oh, wait, there's MORE work to do? Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. (Hey, come to think of it, Governor LePetomane would probably do as good a job . . .)