Obviously this fellow slashdotter was midled by the power of the green laser
That said, the poster makes it sound like its another case of the Patriot Act out of control, but if pilots are distracted enough by this guy to call the cops, and the beam is powerful enough for the cops to find him, then he deserves to be arrested.
I'm reading this and i'm like hmm, decent advice blah blah blah... i didn't get a great GPA in college but i did land a good programming job...blah blah blah and first i'd like to say I've never heard of this Joel guy, the submitter and Joel himself make it sound like he invented the first computer program ever, but i've never heard of him, and i like to think I keep on top of tech news and people. Then he ends his story with "kids one day you can make a great bug tracking software like my company does", and i look at the website, and no joke i've created a bug tracker with as many features as that in a single day, and I don't consider myself any kind of computing guru (I certainly dont have a website called momoruonsoftware.com). So i'm not entirely impressed with his guy, and his "Make sure you take C, and dont worry about logic classes" advice. Anyone want to explain who this guy is and why anyone should listen to his advice?
I absolutely agree that global warming exists...what i don't think we can prove yet is that the phenomenon is entirely (or even mostly) man-made. We are exiting an ice age, and have been for the past 10,000 years. Of course its getting warmer. But we only have real climate data from the last 100 years, so to look at a 100 year time span out of the hundred million earth has been around and be like "gee its getting warmer, so it must be global warming" is a little rediculous. Last year when Europe had its terrible heat wave, global warming was blamed. This year when Europe was freezing and there was snow in Germany in the Summer and snow in Dubai just the other month, you don't hear anything about global warming. Global warming in my opinion is a natural occurance and is a cycle that will occur until we enter the next ice age. Frankly global COOLING should be considerably more scary to everyone then warming. With global warming a few eskimos lose their arctic animals they hunt and miami ends up under water, boohoo. But we can grow crops consideribly farther north with global warming. If global cooling (the next ice age) were to occur we would have glaciers covering europe and reaching into the deep south of america. Thats alot more scary in my opinion.
Remember the controversy of when Microsoft didnt double check their spanish and released a spanish language version of XP that asked if the user was a Male or a Bitch ?
Ok the Ship analogy was good at first, but this is a little rediculous:
First, it is possible to let the passengers share the ship with some others without meeting them at any time. Some invisible mechanism moves the sleeping passenger out of the ship, storing him or her somewhere outside and puts another active passenger into it, taking care that only one active passenger is in each ship at any moment.
That article is strangely lacking in details...since it requires a "special codec" and the newest media player i'm assuming there is some DRM that keeps me from sending files to other people?
Re:IBM isn't entirely stupid
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
Don't get me wrong, the insiders will still become considerably rich, its the public investors that will lose money.
Re:IBM isn't entirely stupid
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is a good point that I wanted to follow up the original article with....does anyone else think Google might be making a mistake in their hiring practices? It seems that they put a really really large emphasis on highest of high education and strong mathematics. While I appreciate that their core business (search) does require quite a bit of math skills to make it great, from my experience as a programmer, the people I run into that have "real life" programming skills usually end up writing decent enough code...while the people with masters degrees in math end up writing great code, but it often takes twice as long (they seem to have less of a grasp on the business end of things which requires promptness). Perhaps this is why 90% of Google's stuff is still in Beta?
I also think it's funny that the 60 minutes seemed to contrast the Google environment from "Big evil microsoft", but Microsoft WAS google 15-20 years ago...remember how that was an enviable place to work with the free soda and the "everyone gets an office"? At the rate Google is hiring, and now that they are public their corporate climate will end up HAVING to change. Right now they can still have fun, but when their non-voting, non-dividend paying stock begins to crash (its currently at what, a 150 P/E?), they will begin to act like every other corporation.
Re:Can't Imagine this on 60 seconds...
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah I didn't quite believe this....according to SEC filings he has cashed out something around $100 million in stock (forget the exact number)....that must have been one expensive T-Shirt, either that or he has an awful big matress he's stuffing that under.
Yeah I would disagree, just because not everyone keeps up with the tech news and what not...so imagine you are a 30 year old guy and walk past a random display of Commodore products...wouldn't you first assume that the company had "came back from the dead and is making new stuff"?
Times it looks whether True Fantasy Live one on-line one will appear. Akihiro Hino will not say sowas, in order to then take the fans nevertheless on the arm. Perhaps we become with the official Xbox 2-Vorstellung in the next year more erfahen also here.
Yes, this is so true....i can't wait to by taken on the arm!
This totally happened with me and my old roomates, thats why you gotta put your name on those food packets or Vladimir will totally eat your liquid potato chips when he gets high.
I imagine since the CEO of the company alone is worth more then the GDP of most countries, he has about influence as a country itself. If Sam Walton were still alive he would have consideribly more power then Bill Gates.
I'm certain there were a much higher percentage of viruses for windows, even if you factor in the number of people who use each. Though I don't think you can look at that alone and place blame on the operating system. If Linux were to become the most popular OS out there, there would be more viruses written and ran on it as well. If anything i suspect there may be more because the source isnt as tightly held...if you grandma cant tell the difference between a real screen saver and a virus, why would she know a legitimate install of apache from a trojan horse disguised as apache?
All countries do this...did you not notice when the Italian Prime Minister came running over to the USA last month complaining about the weak Dollar? The EU is thinking of taking steps to deflate their own currency, they are scared to death of the weak dollar. While temporarily you are correct that it would artificially deflate the trade deficit, if the "plan works", in time people will change their suppliers to those from strong currency nations to nations with a weak currency. Right now it may be temporarily be more expensive to buy my goods from Europe, but I can only put up with thin margins for so long, so I would begin to look elsewhere. This isn't a new thing, it is a cycle that goes on and on. Although the EU is gaining global strength, currently the dollar still has too much power. The Euro has many other faults that could make your economy much worse in the long run (which is part of why the British have not switched). Also even if the economy were a bigger issue, hardly anyone in our country is smart enough to understand it throughly:P.
Currently we have a huge trade deficit to China and Japan...we import tons more goods from them then we export back. The primary reason for this is that $1 American dollar can buy a lot more in China or Japan then 1 Yen or 1 Yuan can buy in the USA. Take for example a car engine. In theory we could build a car engine in Tennesee for say $500, with zero in shipping costs. But in America the raw parts and labor are more expensive...so with cheap labor China can build the same thing for $300 (the raw materials would be about the same). However, we have to import this etc so that adds maybe another $100 to the top margins. That price of that engine currently never changes, because as the dollar rises and falls, the Chinese currency (yuan) rises and falls with it, because it has an artificial peg to the dollar. If the Chinese had to float their currency, when the dollar fell, the yuan would rise, so a $300 engine would now cost $500, because it would take more dollars to buy one yuan. This no longer makes it reasonable to buy from china, because the added shipping cost and hassle takes us over the American margins. It also makes American goods cheaper for the rest of the world, so now our $500 engine only costs the Chinese $300, which now makes a competitive import for China.
A good current example if Europe. In 2000 the Euro was worth less then $1, the conversion was like.9/1 Eu/$. So a BMW from Germany that cost $1000 then would now cost $1400 (or so) now because the current conversion is 1.3/1 Eu/$. While at the same time a Ford that cost $1000 in 2000 would only cost Europeans $700 now (or so). So you can see how that would encourage exports from USA and encourage imports. We can see this already buy Europeans enjoying American vacations and increasing their imports of American goods.
(back on topic)
If the falling dollar is good thing, when do you think the bush administration will take credit for it?
I think this whole conversation is offtopic but whatever hehe. Don't know if your question is rhetorical or not, but I figured i'd give my 2 cents anyways. Obviously Bush will only take credit for a falling dollar if the plan works in the end. That is why he is not coming right out and saying that a weak dollar is good for America in the short term. If the plan fails, he will probably blame democrats for not passing his tax bills.
Less taxes has nothing to do with it, we need less spending....like no Trillions towards Iraq, no billions in UN dues, no trillions in useless NASA projects, and no billions in AID to third world countries. If we just cut spending our current taxes are more then enough to pay down the national debt. Besides, the original post of this thread which related to closing the trade gap is an attempt to get the national debt paid down as well.
Most of the things your describing are either not up because of inflation or are just false.
Gas is 120% higher than in 2000 - The average gas price is about $1.90 now...it hasn't been under a dollar since the mid 90s. And the recent hikes have had to do with shortages.
housing 15-100% - Most of this also related to supply and demand, housing costs in areas like Mississipi and Akron Ohio are barely up, while DC, NYC etc are extremely up because these are the job centers
It sounds more like "wishful thinking" on your part, that you would want the US economy to collapse because of this. Even though you are correct in your logic, you are incorrect in your scenario outcome....unless it happens at an incredibly slow rate, the world would not sell off their US currency reserves at these current exchange rates, if you were China or Japan and you held 5 trillion US dollars, would you really sell them at 1 trillion? Of course not. If the US economy collapsed (as i agree it could under your scenario) it would take the entire world with it. The people who own Euro's could sit on their high thrones, but there would be no one to invest in them, and there are plenty of Euro's tied up in US investments as well. Believe me if what your describing happens we will all be fucked back into the dark ages.
ah I remember spending entire weekends playing my way through games like this. I remember the first level on Mario 3 took 30 minutes alone....it always sucked to die at level 8 (especially if you were hard core and used no warms). But I think the simpsons game for nes took the cake in terms of difficulty and starting from scratch when you died.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. Now I guess i finally have to upgrade to an 8-track.
Vivendi to help Ubi . And has more financial resources to do it.
Obviously this fellow slashdotter was midled by the power of the green laser
That said, the poster makes it sound like its another case of the Patriot Act out of control, but if pilots are distracted enough by this guy to call the cops, and the beam is powerful enough for the cops to find him, then he deserves to be arrested.
I'm reading this and i'm like hmm, decent advice blah blah blah... i didn't get a great GPA in college but i did land a good programming job...blah blah blah and first i'd like to say I've never heard of this Joel guy, the submitter and Joel himself make it sound like he invented the first computer program ever, but i've never heard of him, and i like to think I keep on top of tech news and people. Then he ends his story with "kids one day you can make a great bug tracking software like my company does", and i look at the website, and no joke i've created a bug tracker with as many features as that in a single day, and I don't consider myself any kind of computing guru (I certainly dont have a website called momoruonsoftware.com). So i'm not entirely impressed with his guy, and his "Make sure you take C, and dont worry about logic classes" advice. Anyone want to explain who this guy is and why anyone should listen to his advice?
I absolutely agree that global warming exists...what i don't think we can prove yet is that the phenomenon is entirely (or even mostly) man-made. We are exiting an ice age, and have been for the past 10,000 years. Of course its getting warmer. But we only have real climate data from the last 100 years, so to look at a 100 year time span out of the hundred million earth has been around and be like "gee its getting warmer, so it must be global warming" is a little rediculous. Last year when Europe had its terrible heat wave, global warming was blamed. This year when Europe was freezing and there was snow in Germany in the Summer and snow in Dubai just the other month, you don't hear anything about global warming. Global warming in my opinion is a natural occurance and is a cycle that will occur until we enter the next ice age. Frankly global COOLING should be considerably more scary to everyone then warming. With global warming a few eskimos lose their arctic animals they hunt and miami ends up under water, boohoo. But we can grow crops consideribly farther north with global warming. If global cooling (the next ice age) were to occur we would have glaciers covering europe and reaching into the deep south of america. Thats alot more scary in my opinion.
Remember the controversy of when Microsoft didnt double check their spanish and released a spanish language version of XP that asked if the user was a Male or a Bitch ?
Ok the Ship analogy was good at first, but this is a little rediculous:
First, it is possible to let the passengers share the ship with some others without meeting them at any time. Some invisible mechanism moves the sleeping passenger out of the ship, storing him or her somewhere outside and puts another active passenger into it, taking care that only one active passenger is in each ship at any moment.
That article is strangely lacking in details...since it requires a "special codec" and the newest media player i'm assuming there is some DRM that keeps me from sending files to other people?
Don't get me wrong, the insiders will still become considerably rich, its the public investors that will lose money.
This is a good point that I wanted to follow up the original article with....does anyone else think Google might be making a mistake in their hiring practices? It seems that they put a really really large emphasis on highest of high education and strong mathematics. While I appreciate that their core business (search) does require quite a bit of math skills to make it great, from my experience as a programmer, the people I run into that have "real life" programming skills usually end up writing decent enough code...while the people with masters degrees in math end up writing great code, but it often takes twice as long (they seem to have less of a grasp on the business end of things which requires promptness). Perhaps this is why 90% of Google's stuff is still in Beta?
I also think it's funny that the 60 minutes seemed to contrast the Google environment from "Big evil microsoft", but Microsoft WAS google 15-20 years ago...remember how that was an enviable place to work with the free soda and the "everyone gets an office"? At the rate Google is hiring, and now that they are public their corporate climate will end up HAVING to change. Right now they can still have fun, but when their non-voting, non-dividend paying stock begins to crash (its currently at what, a 150 P/E?), they will begin to act like every other corporation.
Yeah I didn't quite believe this....according to SEC filings he has cashed out something around $100 million in stock (forget the exact number)....that must have been one expensive T-Shirt, either that or he has an awful big matress he's stuffing that under.
Yeah I would disagree, just because not everyone keeps up with the tech news and what not...so imagine you are a 30 year old guy and walk past a random display of Commodore products...wouldn't you first assume that the company had "came back from the dead and is making new stuff"?
Times it looks whether True Fantasy Live one on-line one will appear. Akihiro Hino will not say sowas, in order to then take the fans nevertheless on the arm. Perhaps we become with the official Xbox 2-Vorstellung in the next year more erfahen also here.
Yes, this is so true....i can't wait to by taken on the arm!
This totally happened with me and my old roomates, thats why you gotta put your name on those food packets or Vladimir will totally eat your liquid potato chips when he gets high.
I imagine since the CEO of the company alone is worth more then the GDP of most countries, he has about influence as a country itself. If Sam Walton were still alive he would have consideribly more power then Bill Gates.
I'm certain there were a much higher percentage of viruses for windows, even if you factor in the number of people who use each. Though I don't think you can look at that alone and place blame on the operating system. If Linux were to become the most popular OS out there, there would be more viruses written and ran on it as well. If anything i suspect there may be more because the source isnt as tightly held...if you grandma cant tell the difference between a real screen saver and a virus, why would she know a legitimate install of apache from a trojan horse disguised as apache?
All countries do this...did you not notice when the Italian Prime Minister came running over to the USA last month complaining about the weak Dollar? The EU is thinking of taking steps to deflate their own currency, they are scared to death of the weak dollar. While temporarily you are correct that it would artificially deflate the trade deficit, if the "plan works", in time people will change their suppliers to those from strong currency nations to nations with a weak currency. Right now it may be temporarily be more expensive to buy my goods from Europe, but I can only put up with thin margins for so long, so I would begin to look elsewhere. This isn't a new thing, it is a cycle that goes on and on. Although the EU is gaining global strength, currently the dollar still has too much power. The Euro has many other faults that could make your economy much worse in the long run (which is part of why the British have not switched). Also even if the economy were a bigger issue, hardly anyone in our country is smart enough to understand it throughly :P.
I had this same problem too, and I could not turn it off in the BIOS. My 1 Ghz chip ran at 500Mhz most of the time, even when plugged in.
Sure, the trade gap works like this:
.9/1 Eu/$. So a BMW from Germany that cost $1000 then would now cost $1400 (or so) now because the current conversion is 1.3/1 Eu/$. While at the same time a Ford that cost $1000 in 2000 would only cost Europeans $700 now (or so). So you can see how that would encourage exports from USA and encourage imports. We can see this already buy Europeans enjoying American vacations and increasing their imports of American goods.
Currently we have a huge trade deficit to China and Japan...we import tons more goods from them then we export back. The primary reason for this is that $1 American dollar can buy a lot more in China or Japan then 1 Yen or 1 Yuan can buy in the USA. Take for example a car engine. In theory we could build a car engine in Tennesee for say $500, with zero in shipping costs. But in America the raw parts and labor are more expensive...so with cheap labor China can build the same thing for $300 (the raw materials would be about the same). However, we have to import this etc so that adds maybe another $100 to the top margins. That price of that engine currently never changes, because as the dollar rises and falls, the Chinese currency (yuan) rises and falls with it, because it has an artificial peg to the dollar. If the Chinese had to float their currency, when the dollar fell, the yuan would rise, so a $300 engine would now cost $500, because it would take more dollars to buy one yuan. This no longer makes it reasonable to buy from china, because the added shipping cost and hassle takes us over the American margins. It also makes American goods cheaper for the rest of the world, so now our $500 engine only costs the Chinese $300, which now makes a competitive import for China.
A good current example if Europe. In 2000 the Euro was worth less then $1, the conversion was like
(back on topic)
If the falling dollar is good thing, when do you think the bush administration will take credit for it?
I think this whole conversation is offtopic but whatever hehe. Don't know if your question is rhetorical or not, but I figured i'd give my 2 cents anyways. Obviously Bush will only take credit for a falling dollar if the plan works in the end. That is why he is not coming right out and saying that a weak dollar is good for America in the short term. If the plan fails, he will probably blame democrats for not passing his tax bills.
Less taxes has nothing to do with it, we need less spending....like no Trillions towards Iraq, no billions in UN dues, no trillions in useless NASA projects, and no billions in AID to third world countries. If we just cut spending our current taxes are more then enough to pay down the national debt. Besides, the original post of this thread which related to closing the trade gap is an attempt to get the national debt paid down as well.
Most of the things your describing are either not up because of inflation or are just false.
Gas is 120% higher than in 2000 - The average gas price is about $1.90 now...it hasn't been under a dollar since the mid 90s. And the recent hikes have had to do with shortages.
housing 15-100% - Most of this also related to supply and demand, housing costs in areas like Mississipi and Akron Ohio are barely up, while DC, NYC etc are extremely up because these are the job centers
postage up 25% - Two words, Email, FedEx
It sounds more like "wishful thinking" on your part, that you would want the US economy to collapse because of this. Even though you are correct in your logic, you are incorrect in your scenario outcome....unless it happens at an incredibly slow rate, the world would not sell off their US currency reserves at these current exchange rates, if you were China or Japan and you held 5 trillion US dollars, would you really sell them at 1 trillion? Of course not. If the US economy collapsed (as i agree it could under your scenario) it would take the entire world with it. The people who own Euro's could sit on their high thrones, but there would be no one to invest in them, and there are plenty of Euro's tied up in US investments as well. Believe me if what your describing happens we will all be fucked back into the dark ages.
Now you can perform that costly laser eye surgery your mom wanted for Christmas from the comfort of your living room!
ah I remember spending entire weekends playing my way through games like this. I remember the first level on Mario 3 took 30 minutes alone....it always sucked to die at level 8 (especially if you were hard core and used no warms). But I think the simpsons game for nes took the cake in terms of difficulty and starting from scratch when you died.