With cameras everywhere in airports, they can track you anyway. It should be possible to estimate waiting times based on security camera footage. Seems like a good phd topic, judging queue throughput automatically from camera footage, also for cars. Seemingly harmless topic, job guaranteed in the surveillance industry afterwards.
I'm not a wine buff, but I've found that Australian, Chilean, South African and Californian wines are generally both better and cheaper than French wines.
In France this doesn't hold. Well, that depends on the region, Bordeaux and Bourgogne are horribly overpriced here too. But don't blame the French, it's the same brand obsessed consumers that think that French wine is automatically better just as they prefer their nike shoes. In the end it's the markets that set the prices, not the snobs.
Indeed, there are still quite a lot of differences all over Europe. In France the entry level salary is _way_ higher than a PhD salary (speaking from personal experience, 25% difference). Extra benefits in terms of travel very much depend on your supervisor (usually there is no personal travel expense budget). On other accounts it is quite similar to what you describe.
Just a small note. In Europe it's perfectly normal to only do a Master's. It is the degree you get after 5 years of university. Most people going to industry won't bother doing a PhD, as it costs 3-5 years and generally doesn't pay off.
Stock markets for efficient allocation of capital, sure. Derivative markets, that's questionable, and in some cases downright laughable.
There are many different kinds of derivatives. Some of them are very useful. For example, futures are very useful in farming where it gives relatively small producers a way to insure themselves agains e.g. bad weather.
That said, contracts that would now be called futures played a big part in the tulip market crash in 1637. But they needn't be bad, just because they can be abused
There will always be yet another competitor that would happily sell and profit in the European market(s) should the competition die off. This is basic economics, but I don't expect more on Slashdot.
Actually, it is one of the assumptions of quite a few economic theories. One that, if you ask me, is stretched all too often. For example chip markets are far from ideal, lots of government involvement (subsidies), institutionalized cartels (patents), and sky-high entry barriers.
Go ahead, 'just' start another competitor. After all, if the others are fixing the prices it shouldn't be too hard to compete.
One could consider it his moral duty to teach others. Teaching is severely underrated in research communities. Good teachers probably deliver more scientific advancement to society than anyone else. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if he is a terrible teacher.
The Chinese are a resilient people who have dealt with many more huge changes than any Western culture can fathom.
Although I understand where the sentiment comes from, the statement is utter nonsense. Your point would be better served by leaving it out. I don't want to argue whether 'western' culture, whatever that might be, has seen more or less changes over the last few thousand years. My point is that comparing the histories of ill defined societies by equally unclear measures, is not helpful in any way.
It should suffice to say, that 'the Chinese' peoples have proven to be quite adaptable in the past, and there is little reason to assume they would be different now. Besides, China is currently undergoing enormous changes on pretty much all areas, except perhaps in the political system.
I think many programmers/managers would be better off with less statistics.
That's a good point. Perhaps the half baked attempts at universities and colleges to teach CS students statistics, only gives the poor graduates the misguided idea that they know statistics.
I for one had a single statistics course, which was barely enough to get acquainted to the concept of chance. Yet I still fail to grok what a 25% chance of rain tomorrow is really supposed to mean. Yes, a chance of one fourth of rain, or in one out of four cases it will rain. That's very nice, but should I take my umbrella?
... I'm not sure about the ESA but it seems kinda tiny when compared to NASA and the Russian space agencies.
NASA at a current budget of $17.6 x 10^9 is indeed much bigger than ESA's tiny $5.03 x 10^9 budget. But ESA is not tiny, the Russians are really having a hard time with a budget of only $2.4 x 10^9. Not very suprising given the state of their economy.
That said, in terms of past accomplishments ESA is tiny and is unlikely to ever catch up to either the Russians or the Americans.
I've read some german students go for loooong periods without a job- just living on welfare with no prospects to succeed. That has to wear at you after a while. But once you finally get a job, you are apparently set.
While not completely wrong, your statement does seem to skew things somewhat. People in Germany, and Europe in general are quite spoiled from the American perspective.
Practically all students will be able to find some work right after graduation. However, a job in the area of interest, at a location nearby, and at a good salary will be harder to find. So one would have to accept a less than ideal job, or god forbid, start something on their own.
Since most welfare programs in Europe do not require people to under employ and or take a job far away from home (> 100 km), one can afford to be relatively picky. For single person households, welfare is not that difficult to live off (depends on the rent I suppose).
On the other hand, the stigma of unemployment is no less grave here as it is in the USA. Also the inflexibility of the labor marked is such, that it might be better to wait for a job at the right level of education, than be underemployed. For example, it can be harder to find a job at your level once you've accepted a lower-grade job. As a matter of fact, as a recent graduate myself, I do not know any student that has accepted welfare, even if they could not find a proper job for a few months.
Note that all this is changing. Especially in the last few years before the crisis it was hard to justify the bill of welfare given the large number of vacancies. Maybe the crisis will slow change in the labor market, but I doubt it. People have not been moving to the political left in any case.
As always, industry is changing faster than public policy: I can assure you that practically no one will be able to find lifetime employment in his or her first job. Life-time employment was a luxury of the post-war generation that, even in Europe, has ceased to exist outside government circles.
Much of Europe, except France. I actually had to learn how to write cheques when I came here, I only had vague childhood memories of my mother using cheques in the supermarket.
Re:PyPy - crashing and burning with "agile".
on
Becoming Agile
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· Score: 1
It is in no way fair to compare PyPy, a compiler that actually implements about 95% of Python and is meant to be a drop-in replacement for CPython, to Shed Skin, which only works for specially tailored Python programs.
Also, the funding of PyPy wasn't cut off as you put it. The EU hands out money for research projects with a deadline (usually 2-5 years), not to deliver a marketable product.
Don't forget that, as opposed to CPython, PyPy is primarily a research project meant to explore new compiler and VM technology. This means that most of the developers work on their own extensions, rather than the stability of the core compiler.
That is not to say that your comments are completely unwarranted. Perhaps their development process is not particularly suited to the development of a compiler/interpreter.
Oh and by the way, having built an incomplete Python interpreter myself, I have deep respect for both the people of PyPy and the developer of Shed Skin.
All of Sony's innovations in media have come to naught except BluRay, and that one's being settled still. They were all objectively better, and they all failed.
They developed the CD together with Philips, which is a quite successful medium.
Don't you love it when people get really clever at following the words of a law for the purpose of evading the spirit of a law?
Yeah, it's especially funny when you try to get people to explain. Seriously though, it's very hard to understand the spirit of the law when there is no justification whatsoever. In cases like these, we have to either `interpret' the law in context or take it as the word of god. The former is hard to justify without discrediting the source, and the latter is impossible simply because the bible contradicts itself.
While I'm sure that there are also moral reasons for it, the prohibitions against lending money at interest found in various religions really seem to be designed to prevent a house-of-cards situation like what the USA currently has with the Federal Reserve, [...]
Dunno, charging interest isn't the problem of World Wide Depression II, quite the opposite actually, the lack of interest fueled much of it. In any case, you'd think there would be better solutions than simply outlawing interest. Let's do some highly selective quoting, and try to infer the author's motivation.
Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. [Deuteronomy 23:19]
The word 'brother' is probably one of those words that can be translated and interpreted in a million ways. If we take it literal, it would explain a lot. I for one wouldn't charge interest to money I lend to my brother. I guess the author was just an honest, hard working family man.
But let's assume it was god's foresight into our financial derivatives that motivated Him to forbid interest. Maybe even He couldn't make sense of them either, so he decided to outlaw all of it. Funny thing that all the Christian leaders did not heed His Word. I suppose that's why He decided to punish that one nation under god the most, although that remains to be seen.
One thing I'm sure of. The 'eat no pork' rule has definitely been written by a chicken or cow farmer. Nothing has changed in that respect, the farm lobby is strong as ever.
Oh stop it. I know it's a popular meme, but it's not much more than that. The european union is a democratic institution and always has been. Yes it has its faults, but it has become more democratic with time. Unlike some other federations that shall remain unnamed, like the USA.
I'd also argue that the EU has brought more democracy to the world since the 90s than any other state or organisation. The expansion of the EU and the often just the prospect of it, has brought democracy to eastern europe and beyond.
Generally true. Javascript was never intended for writing large programs. The object system is basically a hack on top of dictionaries. That's easy to implement, but doesn't scale well.
Python's object system is also a hack with dictionaries, and although my instincts tell me that this is a very bad idea for big programs, it has been used for fairly large systems and libraries. I personally don't really understand how these big programs can be built. Perhaps there's a lot of failed projects that we've never heard of. After all, failed projects do have a tendency to go unnoticed. My guess is that the Python community has a successful culture, one that encourages good coding practices. If so, then I'm amaized that it can make such a difference, but I'm convinced it wouldn't work in most cases.
Ioke is cute, but there's just no really good reason for such a strange syntax, and it's going to turn too many people off. Using whitespace as an operator (really!) is probably a bad idea. The ability to change the operator precedence dynamically may be "fun", but does not lead to readable or maintainable code.
Ioke is cute indeed. I just think it won't introduce enough new idea's to make it successful. But in my opinion it wouldn't be the syntax's fault, and especially not the points you mention.
Haskell has both whitespace as operators and customiseable operator precedence. These features are loved by the Haskell community. They allow one to avoid much of the parenthesis you'd find in lisp programs. Custom operators are very powerful and should be used carefully, but they can lead to very nice library interfaces.
People who come up with "l33t" ideas like this need to be put on maintenance programming of code written by others for six months or so.
Agreed, I can find far to few use cases on the Ioke website anyway. In particular, where are all the examples showing how Ioke is much better than plain Io?
You are mistaken. Many intellectuals do read science-fiction, albeit in different forms. For example Kafka's and Orwell's work extensively explore alternate realities and possible futures. These books however, concentrate on the human rather than technological aspects. Their writing probably also has a more artistic touch, but I won't pretend to understand such inherently subjective notions.
In the end, most book reading people are bored by the technological stuff and are not really interested in the male adventure stories. Which is, lets face it, the gist of most science-fiction books. I can't honestly blame them for not reading science-fiction.
According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan) it was him. Where you get the idea that he is working for the Iranian government? The simple fact that his blog is blocked in Iran, makes that rather unlikely. In other words:
In stead of taking the easy moral high ground here, you could stop and listen to what he is saying. Suicide is a selfish act. Even when thirteen year olds are the victims. Assigning blame in cases of suicide is futile. Is the woman guilty of murdering a child? No. Did she play a part in her tragic death? Yes, but so did the girls parents, teachers and friends who failed to protect her.
While there's probably a lot of americans (blame their education) making this mistake, I can imagine dutch speaking people making that mistake as well. In dutch it's actually the correct plural form for for many words, for example "baby's" is proper dutch for the English word "babies".
NSA guy: Well we realize its against the law and all but we would like you to do it anyways.
Telephone company CEO: I am pretty sure that what you want me to do is illegal.
NSA guy: Im with the government. I wouldnt ask you to do it if it were illegal.
Sounds alot like THIS:
Child molester: Listen kid I know your parents told you not to let people touch you there but I think you should let me do it anyways.
Small inocent child: I am pretty sure that you shouldnt do that.
Child molester: Listen kid I am an adult. I wouldnt ask you to do something if it were wrong.
I agree that the telcom companies need feel some heat for allowing the NSA to violate peoples rights but its a bit like punishing the child instead of the child molester.
Yes, it does sound alot like it, but it's not quite the same.
The phone companies aren't selling themselves out.
It's as if your small innocent child lets his little sister be abused.
In that case, the brat definately deserves a beating.
Slashdot Mirror
With cameras everywhere in airports, they can track you anyway. It should be possible to estimate waiting times based on security camera footage. Seems like a good phd topic, judging queue throughput automatically from camera footage, also for cars. Seemingly harmless topic, job guaranteed in the surveillance industry afterwards.
I'm not a wine buff, but I've found that Australian, Chilean, South African and Californian wines are generally both better and cheaper than French wines.
In France this doesn't hold. Well, that depends on the region, Bordeaux and Bourgogne are horribly overpriced here too. But don't blame the French, it's the same brand obsessed consumers that think that French wine is automatically better just as they prefer their nike shoes. In the end it's the markets that set the prices, not the snobs.
Indeed, there are still quite a lot of differences all over Europe. In France the entry level salary is _way_ higher than a PhD salary (speaking from personal experience, 25% difference). Extra benefits in terms of travel very much depend on your supervisor (usually there is no personal travel expense budget). On other accounts it is quite similar to what you describe.
Just a small note. In Europe it's perfectly normal to only do a Master's. It is the degree you get after 5 years of university. Most people going to industry won't bother doing a PhD, as it costs 3-5 years and generally doesn't pay off.
Stock markets for efficient allocation of capital, sure. Derivative markets, that's questionable, and in some cases downright laughable.
There are many different kinds of derivatives. Some of them are very useful. For example, futures are very useful in farming where it gives relatively small producers a way to insure themselves agains e.g. bad weather.
That said, contracts that would now be called futures played a big part in the tulip market crash in 1637. But they needn't be bad, just because they can be abused
There will always be yet another competitor that would happily sell and profit in the European market(s) should the competition die off. This is basic economics, but I don't expect more on Slashdot.
Actually, it is one of the assumptions of quite a few economic theories. One that, if you ask me, is stretched all too often. For example chip markets are far from ideal, lots of government involvement (subsidies), institutionalized cartels (patents), and sky-high entry barriers.
Go ahead, 'just' start another competitor. After all, if the others are fixing the prices it shouldn't be too hard to compete.
One could consider it his moral duty to teach others. Teaching is severely underrated in research communities. Good teachers probably deliver more scientific advancement to society than anyone else. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if he is a terrible teacher.
The Chinese are a resilient people who have dealt with many more huge changes than any Western culture can fathom.
Although I understand where the sentiment comes from, the statement is utter nonsense. Your point would be better served by leaving it out. I don't want to argue whether 'western' culture, whatever that might be, has seen more or less changes over the last few thousand years. My point is that comparing the histories of ill defined societies by equally unclear measures, is not helpful in any way.
It should suffice to say, that 'the Chinese' peoples have proven to be quite adaptable in the past, and there is little reason to assume they would be different now. Besides, China is currently undergoing enormous changes on pretty much all areas, except perhaps in the political system.
I think many programmers/managers would be better off with less statistics.
That's a good point. Perhaps the half baked attempts at universities and colleges to teach CS students statistics, only gives the poor graduates the misguided idea that they know statistics.
I for one had a single statistics course, which was barely enough to get acquainted to the concept of chance. Yet I still fail to grok what a 25% chance of rain tomorrow is really supposed to mean. Yes, a chance of one fourth of rain, or in one out of four cases it will rain. That's very nice, but should I take my umbrella?
... I'm not sure about the ESA but it seems kinda tiny when compared to NASA and the Russian space agencies.
NASA at a current budget of $17.6 x 10^9 is indeed much bigger than ESA's tiny $5.03 x 10^9 budget. But ESA is not tiny, the Russians are really having a hard time with a budget of only $2.4 x 10^9. Not very suprising given the state of their economy.
That said, in terms of past accomplishments ESA is tiny and is unlikely to ever catch up to either the Russians or the Americans.
I've read some german students go for loooong periods without a job- just living on welfare with no prospects to succeed. That has to wear at you after a while. But once you finally get a job, you are apparently set.
While not completely wrong, your statement does seem to skew things somewhat. People in Germany, and Europe in general are quite spoiled from the American perspective.
Practically all students will be able to find some work right after graduation. However, a job in the area of interest, at a location nearby, and at a good salary will be harder to find. So one would have to accept a less than ideal job, or god forbid, start something on their own.
Since most welfare programs in Europe do not require people to under employ and or take a job far away from home (> 100 km), one can afford to be relatively picky. For single person households, welfare is not that difficult to live off (depends on the rent I suppose).
On the other hand, the stigma of unemployment is no less grave here as it is in the USA. Also the inflexibility of the labor marked is such, that it might be better to wait for a job at the right level of education, than be underemployed. For example, it can be harder to find a job at your level once you've accepted a lower-grade job. As a matter of fact, as a recent graduate myself, I do not know any student that has accepted welfare, even if they could not find a proper job for a few months.
Note that all this is changing. Especially in the last few years before the crisis it was hard to justify the bill of welfare given the large number of vacancies. Maybe the crisis will slow change in the labor market, but I doubt it. People have not been moving to the political left in any case.
As always, industry is changing faster than public policy: I can assure you that practically no one will be able to find lifetime employment in his or her first job. Life-time employment was a luxury of the post-war generation that, even in Europe, has ceased to exist outside government circles.
Much of Europe, except France. I actually had to learn how to write cheques when I came here, I only had vague childhood memories of my mother using cheques in the supermarket.
It is in no way fair to compare PyPy, a compiler that actually implements about 95% of Python and is meant to be a drop-in replacement for CPython, to Shed Skin, which only works for specially tailored Python programs.
Also, the funding of PyPy wasn't cut off as you put it. The EU hands out money for research projects with a deadline (usually 2-5 years), not to deliver a marketable product.
Don't forget that, as opposed to CPython, PyPy is primarily a research project meant to explore new compiler and VM technology. This means that most of the developers work on their own extensions, rather than the stability of the core compiler.
That is not to say that your comments are completely unwarranted. Perhaps their development process is not particularly suited to the development of a compiler/interpreter.
Oh and by the way, having built an incomplete Python interpreter myself, I have deep respect for both the people of PyPy and the developer of Shed Skin.
I for one will miss vim regular expressions 101 I it will be moved someplace else.
Happy 1234567890-day!
All of Sony's innovations in media have come to naught except BluRay, and that one's being settled still. They were all objectively better, and they all failed.
They developed the CD together with Philips, which is a quite successful medium.
Don't you love it when people get really clever at following the words of a law for the purpose of evading the spirit of a law?
Yeah, it's especially funny when you try to get people to explain. Seriously though, it's very hard to understand the spirit of the law when there is no justification whatsoever. In cases like these, we have to either `interpret' the law in context or take it as the word of god. The former is hard to justify without discrediting the source, and the latter is impossible simply because the bible contradicts itself.
While I'm sure that there are also moral reasons for it, the prohibitions against lending money at interest found in various religions really seem to be designed to prevent a house-of-cards situation like what the USA currently has with the Federal Reserve, [...]
Dunno, charging interest isn't the problem of World Wide Depression II, quite the opposite actually, the lack of interest fueled much of it. In any case, you'd think there would be better solutions than simply outlawing interest. Let's do some highly selective quoting, and try to infer the author's motivation.
Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. [Deuteronomy 23:19]
The word 'brother' is probably one of those words that can be translated and interpreted in a million ways. If we take it literal, it would explain a lot. I for one wouldn't charge interest to money I lend to my brother. I guess the author was just an honest, hard working family man.
But let's assume it was god's foresight into our financial derivatives that motivated Him to forbid interest. Maybe even He couldn't make sense of them either, so he decided to outlaw all of it. Funny thing that all the Christian leaders did not heed His Word. I suppose that's why He decided to punish that one nation under god the most, although that remains to be seen.
One thing I'm sure of. The 'eat no pork' rule has definitely been written by a chicken or cow farmer. Nothing has changed in that respect, the farm lobby is strong as ever.
And rightfully so. Do not forget that the US military is the single most powerful organisation in the world. Thankfully it's full of our friends.
Oh stop it. I know it's a popular meme, but it's not much more than that. The european union is a democratic institution and always has been. Yes it has its faults, but it has become more democratic with time. Unlike some other federations that shall remain unnamed, like the USA.
I'd also argue that the EU has brought more democracy to the world since the 90s than any other state or organisation. The expansion of the EU and the often just the prospect of it, has brought democracy to eastern europe and beyond.
Generally true. Javascript was never intended for writing large programs. The object system is basically a hack on top of dictionaries. That's easy to implement, but doesn't scale well.
Python's object system is also a hack with dictionaries, and although my instincts tell me that this is a very bad idea for big programs, it has been used for fairly large systems and libraries. I personally don't really understand how these big programs can be built. Perhaps there's a lot of failed projects that we've never heard of. After all, failed projects do have a tendency to go unnoticed. My guess is that the Python community has a successful culture, one that encourages good coding practices. If so, then I'm amaized that it can make such a difference, but I'm convinced it wouldn't work in most cases.
Ioke is cute, but there's just no really good reason for such a strange syntax, and it's going to turn too many people off. Using whitespace as an operator (really!) is probably a bad idea. The ability to change the operator precedence dynamically may be "fun", but does not lead to readable or maintainable code.
Ioke is cute indeed. I just think it won't introduce enough new idea's to make it successful. But in my opinion it wouldn't be the syntax's fault, and especially not the points you mention.
Haskell has both whitespace as operators and customiseable operator precedence. These features are loved by the Haskell community. They allow one to avoid much of the parenthesis you'd find in lisp programs. Custom operators are very powerful and should be used carefully, but they can lead to very nice library interfaces.
People who come up with "l33t" ideas like this need to be put on maintenance programming of code written by others for six months or so.
Agreed, I can find far to few use cases on the Ioke website anyway. In particular, where are all the examples showing how Ioke is much better than plain Io?
You are mistaken. Many intellectuals do read science-fiction, albeit in different forms. For example Kafka's and Orwell's work extensively explore alternate realities and possible futures. These books however, concentrate on the human rather than technological aspects. Their writing probably also has a more artistic touch, but I won't pretend to understand such inherently subjective notions.
In the end, most book reading people are bored by the technological stuff and are not really interested in the male adventure stories. Which is, lets face it, the gist of most science-fiction books. I can't honestly blame them for not reading science-fiction.
According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan) it was him. Where you get the idea that he is working for the Iranian government? The simple fact that his blog is blocked in Iran, makes that rather unlikely. In other words:
Citation needed
In stead of taking the easy moral high ground here, you could stop and listen to what he is saying. Suicide is a selfish act. Even when thirteen year olds are the victims. Assigning blame in cases of suicide is futile. Is the woman guilty of murdering a child? No. Did she play a part in her tragic death? Yes, but so did the girls parents, teachers and friends who failed to protect her.
While there's probably a lot of americans (blame their education) making this mistake, I can imagine dutch speaking people making that mistake as well. In dutch it's actually the correct plural form for for many words, for example "baby's" is proper dutch for the English word "babies".
The phone companies aren't selling themselves out.
It's as if your small innocent child lets his little sister be abused.
In that case, the brat definately deserves a beating.