It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy. Same deal with mechanics. With almost any other specialist it's understood that if you come to them, it's because you recognize that they know a lot more about medicine, electricity, or auto repair than you do.
To be fair, after the Internet, I now question other experts MUCH more often than I used to.
Ok, so I'll probably respect an electricians'/doctors'/mechanics' opinion a lot more, just because they have a lot more practical experience, but I've found bad diagnoses made by good doctors, mechanics usually want to stuff you with used parts, and electricians might make questionable decisions (usually aesthetic or with cabling).
Of the three, I think doctors might be the more similar because they encounter a wider variety of problems, and just like in IT, I like a second opinion when dealing with doctors.
I get screenshots inside word documents a lot, and it is because some stupid company-policy-implemented filter decided you can't have images as attachments, but caved in to pressure and allows far more dangerous Word documents...
I wonder if there could ever be enough support for a "Legal Simplification" political party. I guess it will have to wait until I'm Emperor.
I'll definitely vote for you... er I mean support your ascent to the throne:)...
I've been a HUGE proponent of simplification of laws: I think the average person should be able to understand most of the consequences of his actions (ok, some lawyers should be necessary mostly for business cases, but nothing like what it is today).
While we are at it, laws should be compiled against some kind of logic machine that determines whether there are some conflicting propositions:) (not syntactically, just logically).
I think it was already discussed... now that every kid in the developed world has access to a cell phone with a camera at the very least, and think nothing of posting their photos to social networks, there are some that are bound to be child-generated child porn (whatever that definition is)
My point isn't only that computer generated images will be realistic, which I understand is already the case to a certain degree, but the fact that real photographs may be "turned into" non-realistic images that are indistinguishable from drawn cartoons.
It's already been done (not for porn that I'm aware of).
I remember a movie was made with real actors that was given a "cartoony/comic" look (can't find its name), and a quick Google Search for "film cartoon filter" finds lots of such filters for After Effects and Final Cut Pro, etc..
I really like the HP keyboards that come with the HP servers:)... not too "flat" like some of the chinese things, good springs, right size and not too clicky or too quiet.
They shouldn't have charged him or added on time for Fake Things, is what I said.
They probably should charge him for Actual Things.
Hey you're preaching to the crowd:) I agree 100% with that (I even posted the exact same thing somewhere down the thread).
While I don't have Actual Kiddy Porn[tm] in my possession, I do have some dubious CG / animemangawhatever stuff, and some porn where you can't say whether the "actress" is 17 or 19...
Whorley is a creep. He also had real pornographic images, but he was charged equally over having according to the charges is purely computer-generated, fabricated imagery.
Ok, so being a creep is a crime now? Half the readership of Slashdot might be at risk !!!
Ok, so the Wikipedia image of Whorley is disturbing, and he allegedly did much more than watch CG porn, so I'm not going to defend him, but I do not like it that he is being charged based on this stupid law, find some real crime to charge him with...)
This guy Dworley isn't exactly deserving of admiration, but.. this law and its interpretation are both insane !!!!
It's really "thoughtcrime" at its worst... I think the creators of the law wanted some easy way to jail people they don't like - that's the justification they use over here, that they are giving "tools" for the police to catch the real offenders and that they wouldn't use it on innocent people... suuure...
That is not the case in Australia, the caller to a mobile is usually charged a hefty surcharge. Take a look at your international calling rates, you will see no special mobile rate for calls to the US. It is all the same rate, there are no special mobile area codes (a.k.a. city codes).
In many cases, you can even transfer your home number to a mobile if you are eliminating your landline.
One could argue which concept is better, fairer, or whatever. As with Australia (and almost everywhere) it really depends on the package you get.
I live in Uruguay (South America), my brother lives in Canada (North America in case you don't know:P ).
I have a U$ 12 plan that lets me make up to eight hours' worth of local calls, or a bazillion text messages. However, if someone calls me from a landline, he incurs in the very hefty surcharge (about half a dollar per minute). Calling from a cell phone to my cell phone is almost free if they are from the same company. However, calling to a cell phone from another company is quite expensive.
To boot, I can call for about an hour to Canada with my U$ 12 plan, so I usually use up my spare minutes at the end of the month by making a call to my brother.
On the other side, my brother has the exact same cell phone, but he has a plan from Rogers, the Canadian communications company. He's often charged upwards of U$ 100 for a MUCH worse plan. To boot, he never calls me because he believes that the international call rates from Rogers are very expensive (to be honest, I haven't checked).
I guess the US style is similar to the Canadian, so I think you're getting the short end of the stick. We always complain about our state-run cell phone company over here, but in my experience, we pay ten times less on average than in the US or Canada (to be fair, we earn ten times less too!!)
CS is not about programming I know... but still, starting off with pure math without any applied courses is just a bad idea (at my uni advanced logic is a freshman course for CS BTW).
That's kind of the goal in the public university over here (Uruguay)... since the budget only supports ~ 300 students and over 3000 enroll, they have to make the other 2700 drop out, they do that by teaching advanced calculus (multi-dimension integrals for example), advanced logic, physics, etc... all for a basic CS degree. Add bad teachers and frequent strikes, and you have a "winning" recipe
I dropped out, and I considered myself a good student... I enrolled at a private university, and graduated with no trouble (though I can't do multi-dimension integrals, but I've never needed them so far and don't think I ever will).
I do think teaching logic is a good idea (and I barely passed that course, as well as the physics courses, etc...)
I wonder if something more basic might be in order.. My degree is in Philosophy, so I had to take symbolic logic. There was a CS guy in my course though who actually went to the department and said, "this should be on the CS curriculum, because we really don't formally learn logic."
We do have logic (including symbolic logic) as one of the first courses in both public and private university CS curriculums over here (Uruguay).
I have still after all this time never actually met a Linux user.
Well that's just plain weird. Or you run in an exceptionally homogenous crowd.
Every developer I know has a Windows desktop at home. And I know 100s of developers from all over the world.
Almost every developer I know these days uses a Mac laptop, unless they only develop Windows apps (and even some of those tote the fruit). And I am all over the world.
It seems you haven't been to South America, then. I -have- met some Linux users, but they're few and far between... of thousands of IT graduates in my country (Uruguay), I'd say that less than one percent end up being Linux users. We're having a few hundred thousand converts soon, though:) (OLPC project)
And I can assure you that even less developers have a Mac laptop than use Linux (hell, half of us don't even have ANY laptop, myself included).
I'd say that this applies to Uruguay and Argentina, Brazil a bit less since they're more independant and anti-US so I'd say there must be a higher % of Linux users (but not much), but still that's about an equivalent of the entire population of the US that doesn't use Linux and most definitely doesn't buy overpriced Apple (nice as they are).
Even comments can be dangerous.. during training course, one potential customer's technician asked what "Houston, we have a problem" was doing in an HTML page code:)
The OP might be, but most of us aren't. I feel like a second-class citizen of the world sometimes as whom I vote doesn't affect world politics in the slightest (unlike the US).
OTOH I should expect this from someone who can't even grasp why the current pledge of allegiance is a prayer.
I'm not from the US, and that is one of the things that strike me as most backwards in your country (all the God stuff still involved in oaths and government - well, GW Bush is an example)
What is wrong with the whole damned thing is this: prostitution is illegal, even though there are no victims for this crime, and I don't care what you think about how there is illegal activity all through the sex industry, it would not be nearly as prevalent if it were a legal business for which folk could lose their license if they were doing bad things.
Erm.. prostitution might be illegal wherever you live... but it is legal in many countries (including mine). I can assure it's probably as prevalent or even more than in your country.
I do agree that it being legal helps (they have to get health inspections, etc)
Because it remains illegal, this sort of problem will plague online sites and newspapers etc. You can't get rid of it, can't keep it in a special section, can't clean it up. All those problems would be easy to deal with if it was licensed and legal.
I don't understand this... over here, as I mentioned, prostitution -is- legal, and while ads are pretty much under control, they haven gotten "rid of", and while they are mostly kept in a special section they do appear in other places (and there are non-licensed prostitutes too)
Okay, so I've been outside my country (and know some Mattis).
I worked for the credit-score company in my country, and among the interesting not-restricted information I could find was a cool database of every name in the country... it happens that over 20% of the country is named María (Mary in Spanish:P ) (FYI, I could never make even a single query into the production server. Security was serious stuff there).
Most banks are open until at least 7pm one day a week.
I wish I lived in an enlightened country such as yours. Over here (Uruguay), bankers and most public offices are open only 4 hs a day for public (6 or 8 if it's the central office).
Which means us private workers usually have to take time off from work (or lunchtime) to do any paperwork at all.
In my previous work there was a special 4 hs allowance for that included in the timesheet !
"American" means "of the Americas". Anybody living on the continents of North or South America could rightly call themselves "American".
"USian" is probably not the best term to use, but it's a damn sight more accurate than "American".
In my country (Uruguay), we regularly do refer to ourselves as "Americanos" (American in Spanish).
When somebody calls himself an "American" in English we understand what they mean, but in Spanish we call them "Estadounidenses" - which should be translated to USian:)
and even then it could be a bit of a misnomer (Brazil for example is United States of Brazil, etc...)
I wonder why the above post was modded troll... is it the Ron Paul mention?
I actually found it informative (never heard of ARM in that context before, I thought they were a kind of chip:P but I found out it's Adjustable-rate mortgages )
No more than a few days in office will clearly have them properly handling debt and economy. Thank you for your enlightening opinions!
Most of us already handle our own budgets, and our IT departments', and indirectly, our companies'... thinking we could do better than the current government isn't too far-fetched.
In my case, I'll probably run for a parliament seat and fail miserably in a couple years:) (or maybe not, I only need about 50.000 votes to get a lower seat here in Uruguay).
BTW I don't think ALL of the members of the current government in my country are incompetent (and I do subscribe to Hanlon's razor), it's just that politics tends to tie their hands, and nobody has the guts to commit political suicide and do what has to be done (cut government spending, etc..).
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy. Same deal with mechanics. With almost any other specialist it's understood that if you come to them, it's because you recognize that they know a lot more about medicine, electricity, or auto repair than you do.
To be fair, after the Internet, I now question other experts MUCH more often than I used to.
Ok, so I'll probably respect an electricians'/doctors'/mechanics' opinion a lot more, just because they have a lot more practical experience, but I've found bad diagnoses made by good doctors, mechanics usually want to stuff you with used parts, and electricians might make questionable decisions (usually aesthetic or with cabling).
Of the three, I think doctors might be the more similar because they encounter a wider variety of problems, and just like in IT, I like a second opinion when dealing with doctors.
To the people who....
1) Send me screenshots inside a word document
I get screenshots inside word documents a lot, and it is because some stupid company-policy-implemented filter decided you can't have images as attachments, but caved in to pressure and allows far more dangerous Word documents...
I wonder if there could ever be enough support for a "Legal Simplification" political party. I guess it will have to wait until I'm Emperor.
I'll definitely vote for you... er I mean support your ascent to the throne :) ...
:) (not syntactically, just logically).
I've been a HUGE proponent of simplification of laws: I think the average person should be able to understand most of the consequences of his actions (ok, some lawyers should be necessary mostly for business cases, but nothing like what it is today).
While we are at it, laws should be compiled against some kind of logic machine that determines whether there are some conflicting propositions
I think it was already discussed... now that every kid in the developed world has access to a cell phone with a camera at the very least, and think nothing of posting their photos to social networks, there are some that are bound to be child-generated child porn (whatever that definition is)
My point isn't only that computer generated images will be realistic, which I understand is already the case to a certain degree, but the fact that real photographs may be "turned into" non-realistic images that are indistinguishable from drawn cartoons.
It's already been done (not for porn that I'm aware of).
I remember a movie was made with real actors that was given a "cartoony/comic" look (can't find its name), and a quick Google Search for "film cartoon filter" finds lots of such filters for After Effects and Final Cut Pro, etc..
That is an excellent question... I'd also like it answered for good old regular porn :)
I really like the HP keyboards that come with the HP servers :) ... not too "flat" like some of the chinese things, good springs, right size and not too clicky or too quiet.
"Space Ace" and "Dragon's Lair"
Wow, were those eye candy... and incredibly frustrating... :)
Hence, creep.
They shouldn't have charged him or added on time for Fake Things, is what I said. They probably should charge him for Actual Things.
Hey you're preaching to the crowd :) I agree 100% with that (I even posted the exact same thing somewhere down the thread).
While I don't have Actual Kiddy Porn[tm] in my possession, I do have some dubious CG / animemangawhatever stuff, and some porn where you can't say whether the "actress" is 17 or 19...
Whorley is a creep. He also had real pornographic images, but he was charged equally over having according to the charges is purely computer-generated, fabricated imagery.
Ok, so being a creep is a crime now? Half the readership of Slashdot might be at risk !!!
Ok, so the Wikipedia image of Whorley is disturbing, and he allegedly did much more than watch CG porn, so I'm not going to defend him, but I do not like it that he is being charged based on this stupid law, find some real crime to charge him with...)
This guy Dworley isn't exactly deserving of admiration, but.. this law and its interpretation are both insane !!!!
It's really "thoughtcrime" at its worst... I think the creators of the law wanted some easy way to jail people they don't like - that's the justification they use over here, that they are giving "tools" for the police to catch the real offenders and that they wouldn't use it on innocent people... suuure...
That is not the case in Australia, the caller to a mobile is usually charged a hefty surcharge. Take a look at your international calling rates, you will see no special mobile rate for calls to the US. It is all the same rate, there are no special mobile area codes (a.k.a. city codes).
In many cases, you can even transfer your home number to a mobile if you are eliminating your landline.
One could argue which concept is better, fairer, or whatever. As with Australia (and almost everywhere) it really depends on the package you get.
I live in Uruguay (South America), my brother lives in Canada (North America in case you don't know :P ).
I have a U$ 12 plan that lets me make up to eight hours' worth of local calls, or a bazillion text messages. However, if someone calls me from a landline, he incurs in the very hefty surcharge (about half a dollar per minute). Calling from a cell phone to my cell phone is almost free if they are from the same company. However, calling to a cell phone from another company is quite expensive.
To boot, I can call for about an hour to Canada with my U$ 12 plan, so I usually use up my spare minutes at the end of the month by making a call to my brother.
On the other side, my brother has the exact same cell phone, but he has a plan from Rogers, the Canadian communications company. He's often charged upwards of U$ 100 for a MUCH worse plan. To boot, he never calls me because he believes that the international call rates from Rogers are very expensive (to be honest, I haven't checked).
I guess the US style is similar to the Canadian, so I think you're getting the short end of the stick. We always complain about our state-run cell phone company over here, but in my experience, we pay ten times less on average than in the US or Canada (to be fair, we earn ten times less too!!)
Philosophy IS taught to 14-year-olds in my country (Uruguay) :) (well, more like 15 to 16-year olds, but still...)
:)
http://es.wikiversity.org/wiki/Educaci%C3%B3n_Secundaria_en_Uruguay
Maybe a more realistic goal would be teaching people to use uppercase to start sentences?
she was very enjoyable
If you really want early drop outs... sure
CS is not about programming I know ... but still, starting off with pure math without any applied courses is just a bad idea (at my uni advanced logic is a freshman course for CS BTW).
That's kind of the goal in the public university over here (Uruguay)... since the budget only supports ~ 300 students and over 3000 enroll, they have to make the other 2700 drop out, they do that by teaching advanced calculus (multi-dimension integrals for example), advanced logic, physics, etc... all for a basic CS degree. Add bad teachers and frequent strikes, and you have a "winning" recipe
I dropped out, and I considered myself a good student... I enrolled at a private university, and graduated with no trouble (though I can't do multi-dimension integrals, but I've never needed them so far and don't think I ever will).
I do think teaching logic is a good idea (and I barely passed that course, as well as the physics courses, etc...)
I wonder if something more basic might be in order.. My degree is in Philosophy, so I had to take symbolic logic. There was a CS guy in my course though who actually went to the department and said, "this should be on the CS curriculum, because we really don't formally learn logic."
We do have logic (including symbolic logic) as one of the first courses in both public and private university CS curriculums over here (Uruguay).
Well that's just plain weird. Or you run in an exceptionally homogenous crowd.
Almost every developer I know these days uses a Mac laptop, unless they only develop Windows apps (and even some of those tote the fruit). And I am all over the world.
It seems you haven't been to South America, then. I -have- met some Linux users, but they're few and far between... of thousands of IT graduates in my country (Uruguay), I'd say that less than one percent end up being Linux users. We're having a few hundred thousand converts soon, though :) (OLPC project)
And I can assure you that even less developers have a Mac laptop than use Linux (hell, half of us don't even have ANY laptop, myself included).
I'd say that this applies to Uruguay and Argentina, Brazil a bit less since they're more independant and anti-US so I'd say there must be a higher % of Linux users (but not much), but still that's about an equivalent of the entire population of the US that doesn't use Linux and most definitely doesn't buy overpriced Apple (nice as they are).
Comments, yes.
:)
Variables and error messages, please no.
Even comments can be dangerous.. during training course, one potential customer's technician asked what "Houston, we have a problem" was doing in an HTML page code
Psst,
You are part of the government.
The OP might be, but most of us aren't. I feel like a second-class citizen of the world sometimes as whom I vote doesn't affect world politics in the slightest (unlike the US).
OTOH I should expect this from someone who can't even grasp why the current pledge of allegiance is a prayer.
I'm not from the US, and that is one of the things that strike me as most backwards in your country (all the God stuff still involved in oaths and government - well, GW Bush is an example)
What is wrong with the whole damned thing is this: prostitution is illegal, even though there are no victims for this crime, and I don't care what you think about how there is illegal activity all through the sex industry, it would not be nearly as prevalent if it were a legal business for which folk could lose their license if they were doing bad things.
Erm.. prostitution might be illegal wherever you live... but it is legal in many countries (including mine). I can assure it's probably as prevalent or even more than in your country.
I do agree that it being legal helps (they have to get health inspections, etc)
Because it remains illegal, this sort of problem will plague online sites and newspapers etc. You can't get rid of it, can't keep it in a special section, can't clean it up. All those problems would be easy to deal with if it was licensed and legal.
I don't understand this... over here, as I mentioned, prostitution -is- legal, and while ads are pretty much under control, they haven gotten "rid of", and while they are mostly kept in a special section they do appear in other places (and there are non-licensed prostitutes too)
That was easy, 100% (and I'm South American) :P
:P ) (FYI, I could never make even a single query into the production server. Security was serious stuff there).
Okay, so I've been outside my country (and know some Mattis).
I worked for the credit-score company in my country, and among the interesting not-restricted information I could find was a cool database of every name in the country... it happens that over 20% of the country is named María (Mary in Spanish
Most banks are open until at least 7pm one day a week.
I wish I lived in an enlightened country such as yours. Over here (Uruguay), bankers and most public offices are open only 4 hs a day for public (6 or 8 if it's the central office).
Which means us private workers usually have to take time off from work (or lunchtime) to do any paperwork at all.
In my previous work there was a special 4 hs allowance for that included in the timesheet !
"American" means "of the Americas". Anybody living on the continents of North or South America could rightly call themselves "American".
"USian" is probably not the best term to use, but it's a damn sight more accurate than "American".
In my country (Uruguay), we regularly do refer to ourselves as "Americanos" (American in Spanish).
:)
When somebody calls himself an "American" in English we understand what they mean, but in Spanish we call them "Estadounidenses" - which should be translated to USian
and even then it could be a bit of a misnomer (Brazil for example is United States of Brazil, etc...)
I wonder why the above post was modded troll... is it the Ron Paul mention?
:P but I found out it's Adjustable-rate mortgages )
I actually found it informative (never heard of ARM in that context before, I thought they were a kind of chip
No more than a few days in office will clearly have them properly handling debt and economy. Thank you for your enlightening opinions!
Most of us already handle our own budgets, and our IT departments', and indirectly, our companies' ... thinking we could do better than the current government isn't too far-fetched.
:) (or maybe not, I only need about 50.000 votes to get a lower seat here in Uruguay).
In my case, I'll probably run for a parliament seat and fail miserably in a couple years
BTW I don't think ALL of the members of the current government in my country are incompetent (and I do subscribe to Hanlon's razor), it's just that politics tends to tie their hands, and nobody has the guts to commit political suicide and do what has to be done (cut government spending, etc..).