"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density. This will make its first appearance in formerly-HOV lanes. I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".
As if the chasm between haves and the have-nots wasn't wide enough already... now lucking into a wealthy family will get the "born on 3rd base" advantages amplified by an order of magnitude.
Specific consequences are impossible to predict, but I susect the kind of permanent, intergenerational inequality this would engender would not make for a more peaceful planet.
As a cancer survivor (grade 4 GBMO), I am a natural mutant with a lot at stake. But altering genes to prevent disease is not the same thing as optimizing your progeny's IQ or height.
None of us has enough information to be sure, but I'm a betting man, and I bet it's the same lying cheating frauds who handed Bush two consecutive ill-gotten "wins" that are behind this.
The Republican machine stands to gain from a Clinton nomination, because national polls show that while Obama would handily beat any Republican nominee, Clinton would likely lose to any Republican candidate.
Here's hoping Obama can win anyway, and more importantly that the system be corrected for once and all, the long-term viability of our democracy is at risk.
Amen to the calls for a manual recount, and for eliminating diebold from the mix, and for paper trails, etc.
We have them. Plenty of them. Just having them isn't enough if people don't vote for them. Spread the word, get people to look beyond the Republicrats, and then we have a chance to really shake things up.
Not in our system.
In winner-take-all elections, you will always end up with two parties and a narrow 51/49 race.
The reason? Pragmatism. The two parties are not ideological. They are marriages of convenience,
in which large voting blocks and particular interest groups would switch parties in an *instant*,
if they believed being in the other party would get their voice heard and their agenda supported.
Those who say "Republicans stand for X and Democrats stand for Y" are naive.
Both parties stand for winning, and are comprised of interest groups who've picked a side
in an attempt to win. For as long as we have winner-take-all elections,
where each voter gets to pick just one candidate (rather than ranking choices), this will not change.
That's why third-party candidates *only* serve as spoilers; even when there's an extraordinarily charismatic candidate, they have literally no chance at winning. I wish it were otherwise, but it's an outcome dictated by the design of the voting mechanism. For third (and fourth, etc) -party candidates to be elected to major office, the system must be changed to count second and third-place vote-getters rather than what we have today.
To my mind, this issue is as fundamentally important (and currently flawed) as Gerrymandering,
and nearly as crucial as preventing outright election fraud.
/$0.02
New pipe: slashdot run through flickr
on
Yahoo Pipes
·
· Score: 1
I created this simple pipe in just a couple minutes, now that the site is up again. Check out
Agreed. I have an aeron and it's worth its weight in gold. Not a waste at all. (Injured/fatigued employees are damn expensive.)
OT.sig comment:
Evolution - Still a theory just dont tell its religious zealouts, the Evolutionians.
Gravity is "still a theory" too. But I'm guessing you don't have theological objections to *its* ramifications.
Creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design start with an uprovable hypothesis ("God created the Universe") and use pseudoscientific methods and scraps of evidence to justify their belief in this hypothesis. They acknowledge only the evidence when it supports their ideas. When the (overwhelming majority of) contrary evidence contradicts their religious ideas, they ignore it. That's not science, that's religion.
In my experience, those who subscribe to the notion that science (our best, honest efforts to understand the world by examining and measuring it) represents our best chance at discovering the nature of reality, are not religious by any definition. They support their ideas with scientific fact -- not a 2,000 year old fantasy written by desert wanderers.
Believe what you like -- but don't confuse a Creationist's religious beliefs with science, nor a scientist's fact-based understanding of nature (and sometimes impassioned/annoyed pleas to keep religion out of science) with religious zeal.
But you probably know all this already and are just looking to be provocative. Oh well.
... [I] adamently argue that [telecommuting is] not accepted as a viable method for getting the job done in the software engineering world.
Speaking from personal experience (I'm a software engineering manager / former principal software engineer for a profitable privately-held Boston-area marketing company with about 60 engineers on staff, roughly 200 employees total) -- I completely disagree.
I work from home 2 or 3 days a week. Two of my developers work out of Bangalore. My local guys are allowed to work from home pretty much at will (which amounts to roughly 1/2 the time). With email, IM, and phone, the reduction of time wasted commuting, and the longer hours folks (myself included) end up putting in when the work/home boundaries are thus blurred, everyone wins. When there are certain kinds of important meetings, sure, folks within commuting range are expected to drive in. But the job satisfaction, efficiency, etc gained by this flexibility has been an unqualified success. Stuff gets done, and we all communicate well.
Does this anecdote imply telecommuting is widespread? Not necessarily. But given how many of us do it at my workplace, and how well it works for us, I'd be surprised if this weren't part of a larger trend.
Also FWIW our offshoring of some jobs is likely a factor in telecommuting acceptance here. Given the VPN / security issues addressed in supporting remote staff in India, simply piggybacking on that infrastructure (even tho I'm only 45 miles from the office) is a nonissue./$0.02
thanks dentar, quite right. I'd meant "abstained" in the non-technical sense: who abstained from following along w the concensus/vast majority. but I try to be precise in my language, thanks for the correction.
(mods, this is a bit of an aside, but ontopic/relevant given the author's use of dante's levels of hell in his ranking system. consider it a footnote)
I stongly recommend reading N. Tosche's "in the hand of dante" as a circuitous but gratifying way to learn about the author and the divine comedy. plus it's a terrific read.
absolutely. I work from home at will (which amounts to 3 days/week). This clearly blurs the lines between "home" and "work". I'm accessible at all hours (though it's rare people require my time outside of 8-6), I get a lot done, and I'm incredibly happy w my situation. My salary is fine (nearly 3x what I started at 6 years ago), but my satisfaction w my job comes from the quality of life that comes from this degree of flexibility.
If you have a technical job (webdev, sysadmin, engineering, IT, whatever) you are also likely to be someone who is going to have a cellphone and broadband, whether you're employed or not. Asking a company to pay you for these things is not unreasonable, but neither is rejecting this request. My company moved from a location that was accessible by public transportation to one that is not. But I didn't expect them to buy me a car. What I did expect was for them to continue to pay me a good salary so I can afford things like internet access, cellphone and vehicle -- which they've done.
The degree of "us vs them, screw the greedy bastards at the top" attitude I see here on/. seems unfortunate. To be happy at your job you should be psychologically/emotionally aligned with the goals of the company as a whole. Try recognizing that a good CFO (one who might well *prevent* the kind of burn rate that prevents startups from reaching break-even) should make every effort to reduce costs, keeping you and everyone else in a job. Also a huge factor in reaching financial stability (which makes potential investors happy) is predictability. A CFO would usually prefer a flat $100/month stipend to all sysadmins (for example) to ad-hoc $70/month requests, as it can be more easily budgeted.
Note I do feel that 24/7 oncall duty or any kind of undue access to your time should be accounted for in your pay. If you and bob are paid the same, but you're expected to field 3am phone calls and pages on the weekend, and bob is not, that is a problem. But you should consider this accessibility and all its various costs as accounted for in your salary requirements (just like you pay for gas in your car if you commute) and not insist that it be reimbursed separately.
That may have been rambling and only somewhat coherent, but I'm, ah.. done.
driving in today I got 35.4mpg, avg speed 51.2mph during a 50-ish minute commute from plymouth to needham ma. this included highs of 80-ish and several short stretches of stop-and-go.
this is significantly higher than the epa estimate for my little supercharged wonder.
for the life of the car (28,000 miles so far) I've averaged about 28mpg, as I used to do more city driving before I moved. /anecdote
pretty crazy. The only hard seeming part was it actually had questions on what options were shown in this particular pane of the Wizard in this particular situation. Why the hell do I care? I can read it when I come to it.
this sums up the whole discussion, as far as I'm concerned.
personal anecdote: I majored in cognitive psychology because it interested me at the time. I worked as a paralegal then taught English in Prague. after travelling, loafing and eventually running out of money, I took a job as a "web developer" with no formal training whatsoever. in the ensuing 8 years I've taught myself html, javascript, css, xml, java, sql, jstl/el, become an expert in configuring apache (mod_rewrite in particular), struts, tiles, the http protocol, content management systems, release engineering and software configuration management... etc. In this 8-year career so far I've never been out of a job, I've earned a healthy paycheck, I've done extra well-paying consulting work on the side, had as many as 8 people reporting to me in a technical managment role, carved out my own career path and currently work from home as many hours/days per week as I like (I find 1/2-time is the right balance for me). On the whole I've been very happy with my career and my choices. And this is without a technical degree, without a certificate of any sort. I read, I do, I learn.
When I interview candidates I often ask them to solve technical problems for me on the spot, or to tell me their thoughts on web standards, or simply to defend their choice of browser. One thing I *never* do is ask about certification.
granted this is a rambling anecdote, and there may be certain cases where a cert. helps open the door... but not in my experience.
1. Cars (of course) 2. 3 wheeled one seater 3. 4 Wheel ATV with cargo frame 4. Horses 5. Segways
6. radio waves (ok it's not a transportation option per se, but it's a "vehicle" for catching criminals nonetheless) seriously, another (common) way to catch a suspect is to keep em in sight long enough to bring other cops into the picture, pursuing from a convergent angle. anyone can get away from *one* cop. but you can't outrun (nor out-drive, nor out-segway [-ugh, verbing]) "the cops". there are enough beat cops in chicago to hone in on this clown pretty quick, methinks./$0.02
amen. mod parent up. gmail privacy is between its users and google. as long as google's actions are defined/constrained by their privacy policy/user agreement, where is the problem?
as a bit of a tangent, I began using gmail as of last week (got an , and it is *fantastic*.
Read "Bringing Down the House"
on
Geeks and Poker?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
M.I.T. geeks vs Vegas. True story. An amazing read.
"Designing with web standards" - zeldman (new riders) - is a great introduction.
"eric meyer on css" (also new riders) is rife w good real-world examples.
the one I use most though is the wonderfully concise o'reilly "css pocket reference" at under 100pgs and w very specific, accurate browser-compatibility charts for various attributes.
all that said, by far the best way to learn is to simply experiment. once you get used to it, designing w css is imho *easier* than using old-school html hacks. and it makes maintenance/redesign work orders of magnitude simpler.
per your comment about tables, it's possible to use tables in a limited role for basic layout. some css purists will complain, but imo the pragmatic approach is to use them when it's too much of a headache not to. the pgs can still be standards-compliant, valid, and css-based, even if they use a few tables.
I've been making web pages for 7 years, but it's only in the 18 months or so that I've really become so convinced and enamored of the wisdom of css for real separation of content from presentation.
good luck and enjoy - it's really empowering once you get the hang of it!
"..useful layout features that don't have anything to do with style classes..." ??
you're joking, right?
"beauty of... complete newbs... text-edit"
gack. if you think what you see when you view source in your average web page is beautiful, you sir, are beyond help.
html *should* be simple -- but in practice it's bloated, convoluted, and full of things that have only to do with presentation. the markup should simply describe the content. css should describe how it looks. it's cleaner, more readable, *easier* to write, read, maintain... and it's better-performing.
this separation of content from presentation is so clearly a design goal for web developers and architects. do you really oppose it?
"it's impossible to hand-write html that will pass a verifier"
this is also ignorant and false. it's quite easy. and using tools like TIDY to help is straightforward if you have trouble.
I won't get into your ideas about changes to HTTP1.1 now, but had to say something about your distorted perception of the role of html/css in the web.
actually the distinction between "many" and "most" is significant. you may be right that it's a tiny minority, if by "tiny" you mean a tiny percentage, nowhere near "most". BUT, if this minority is comprised of thousands of people, then it's legitimate to describe them as "many". you're right that they are perceived as a larger group than they really are, due to their vociferousness, but nonetheless there are many of them. so I think the original poster's comment holds some water.
Agree or disagree with the author, there is one thing he shows quite clearly: Many Linux users would rather attack than help.
then you wrote:
I disagree (rather strongly) with your use of the word "most." It isn't "most" users, it is the "loudest" users. There is an important difference.
He didn't use the word "most", he used the word "many", it's even in your quote. if you're going to pick nits over words, you have to at least read what he wrote! Your other points have some merit.
Slashdot Mirror
"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density. This will make its first appearance in formerly-HOV lanes. I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".
As if the chasm between haves and the have-nots wasn't wide enough already... now lucking into a wealthy family will get the "born on 3rd base" advantages amplified by an order of magnitude.
Specific consequences are impossible to predict, but I susect the kind of permanent, intergenerational inequality this would engender would not make for a more peaceful planet.
As a cancer survivor (grade 4 GBMO), I am a natural mutant with a lot at stake. But altering genes to prevent disease is not the same thing as optimizing your progeny's IQ or height.
None of us has enough information to be sure, but I'm a betting man,
and I bet it's the same lying cheating frauds who handed Bush two consecutive ill-gotten "wins"
that are behind this.
The Republican machine stands to gain from a Clinton nomination,
because national polls show that while Obama would handily beat any Republican nominee,
Clinton would likely lose to any Republican candidate.
Here's hoping Obama can win anyway, and more importantly that the system be corrected for once and all,
the long-term viability of our democracy is at risk.
Amen to the calls for a manual recount, and for eliminating diebold from the mix, and for paper trails, etc.
MOD PARENT UP.
Mod parent up
This is the best summary of the reasons to avoid table-based layouts I've ever seen, nice job jddj.
I lurked in 98 and created this account in 99 (springtime?), IIRC. ;)
/. will always have a special place in my heart, here's to the next 10 years.
I remember when getting a +5 insightful felt like a real accomplishment
In all seriousness, hats off and thanks Rob and Taco and everyone,
Not in our system. In winner-take-all elections, you will always end up with two parties and a narrow 51/49 race. The reason? Pragmatism. The two parties are not ideological. They are marriages of convenience, in which large voting blocks and particular interest groups would switch parties in an *instant*, if they believed being in the other party would get their voice heard and their agenda supported.
Those who say "Republicans stand for X and Democrats stand for Y" are naive. Both parties stand for winning, and are comprised of interest groups who've picked a side in an attempt to win. For as long as we have winner-take-all elections, where each voter gets to pick just one candidate (rather than ranking choices), this will not change.
That's why third-party candidates *only* serve as spoilers; even when there's an extraordinarily charismatic candidate, they have literally no chance at winning. I wish it were otherwise, but it's an outcome dictated by the design of the voting mechanism. For third (and fourth, etc) -party candidates to be elected to major office, the system must be changed to count second and third-place vote-getters rather than what we have today.
To my mind, this issue is as fundamentally important (and currently flawed) as Gerrymandering, and nearly as crucial as preventing outright election fraud.
I created this simple pipe in just a couple minutes, now that the site is up again.
O Q/ ... it's not as powerful as rssbus but w/ the friendly(/ier) GUI and visibility from yahoo, this really is pretty cool.
Check out
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/LM5nwfu32xGj_1LrZoQM
OT
Gravity is "still a theory" too.
But I'm guessing you don't have theological objections to *its* ramifications.
Creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design start with an uprovable hypothesis ("God created the Universe") and use pseudoscientific methods and scraps of evidence to justify their belief in this hypothesis. They acknowledge only the evidence when it supports their ideas. When the (overwhelming majority of) contrary evidence contradicts their religious ideas, they ignore it. That's not science, that's religion.
In my experience, those who subscribe to the notion that science (our best, honest efforts to understand the world by examining and measuring it) represents our best chance at discovering the nature of reality, are not religious by any definition. They support their ideas with scientific fact -- not a 2,000 year old fantasy written by desert wanderers.
Believe what you like -- but don't confuse a Creationist's religious beliefs with science, nor a scientist's fact-based understanding of nature (and sometimes impassioned/annoyed pleas to keep religion out of science) with religious zeal.
But you probably know all this already and are just looking to be provocative.
Oh well.
Speaking from personal experience (I'm a software engineering manager / former principal software engineer for a profitable privately-held Boston-area marketing company with about 60 engineers on staff, roughly 200 employees total) -- I completely disagree.
I work from home 2 or 3 days a week. Two of my developers work out of Bangalore. My local guys are allowed to work from home pretty much at will (which amounts to roughly 1/2 the time). With email, IM, and phone, the reduction of time wasted commuting, and the longer hours folks (myself included) end up putting in when the work/home boundaries are thus blurred, everyone wins. When there are certain kinds of important meetings, sure, folks within commuting range are expected to drive in. But the job satisfaction, efficiency, etc gained by this flexibility has been an unqualified success. Stuff gets done, and we all communicate well.
Does this anecdote imply telecommuting is widespread? Not necessarily. But given how many of us do it at my workplace, and how well it works for us, I'd be surprised if this weren't part of a larger trend.
Also FWIW our offshoring of some jobs is likely a factor in telecommuting acceptance here. Given the VPN / security issues addressed in supporting remote staff in India, simply piggybacking on that infrastructure (even tho I'm only 45 miles from the office) is a nonissue.
agreed.
at least they're getting there w mysql 5.0:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Stored_Pr
thanks dentar, quite right.
I'd meant "abstained" in the non-technical sense: who abstained from following along w the concensus/vast majority. but I try to be precise in my language, thanks for the correction.
now, does anyone know who voted in dissent?
399-1, the lone opposition likely took a gamble just in case the bill is shown to be a disaster, he/she can claim "I knew it all along"....
(mods, this is a bit of an aside, but ontopic/relevant given the author's use of dante's levels of hell in his ranking system. consider it a footnote)
I stongly recommend reading N. Tosche's "in the hand of dante" as a circuitous but gratifying way to learn about the author and the divine comedy.
plus it's a terrific read.
absolutely.
I work from home at will (which amounts to 3 days/week). This clearly blurs the lines between "home" and "work". I'm accessible at all hours (though it's rare people require my time outside of 8-6), I get a lot done, and I'm incredibly happy w my situation. My salary is fine (nearly 3x what I started at 6 years ago), but my satisfaction w my job comes from the quality of life that comes from this degree of flexibility.
good for you for finding some of this too!
chris
If you have a technical job (webdev, sysadmin, engineering, IT, whatever) you are also likely to be someone who is going to have a cellphone and broadband, whether you're employed or not. Asking a company to pay you for these things is not unreasonable, but neither is rejecting this request. My company moved from a location that was accessible by public transportation to one that is not. But I didn't expect them to buy me a car. What I did expect was for them to continue to pay me a good salary so I can afford things like internet access, cellphone and vehicle -- which they've done.
/. seems unfortunate. To be happy at your job you should be psychologically/emotionally aligned with the goals of the company as a whole. Try recognizing that a good CFO (one who might well *prevent* the kind of burn rate that prevents startups from reaching break-even) should make every effort to reduce costs, keeping you and everyone else in a job. Also a huge factor in reaching financial stability (which makes potential investors happy) is predictability. A CFO would usually prefer a flat $100/month stipend to all sysadmins (for example) to ad-hoc $70/month requests, as it can be more easily budgeted.
The degree of "us vs them, screw the greedy bastards at the top" attitude I see here on
Note I do feel that 24/7 oncall duty or any kind of undue access to your time should be accounted for in your pay. If you and bob are paid the same, but you're expected to field 3am phone calls and pages on the weekend, and bob is not, that is a problem. But you should consider this accessibility and all its various costs as accounted for in your salary requirements (just like you pay for gas in your car if you commute) and not insist that it be reimbursed separately.
That may have been rambling and only somewhat coherent, but I'm, ah.. done.
driving in today I got 35.4mpg, avg speed 51.2mph during a 50-ish minute commute from plymouth to needham ma. this included highs of 80-ish and several short stretches of stop-and-go.
/anecdote
this is significantly higher than the epa estimate for my little supercharged wonder.
for the life of the car (28,000 miles so far) I've averaged about 28mpg, as I used to do more city driving before I moved.
this sums up the whole discussion, as far as I'm concerned.
personal anecdote: I majored in cognitive psychology because it interested me at the time. I worked as a paralegal then taught English in Prague. after travelling, loafing and eventually running out of money, I took a job as a "web developer" with no formal training whatsoever. in the ensuing 8 years I've taught myself html, javascript, css, xml, java, sql, jstl/el, become an expert in configuring apache (mod_rewrite in particular), struts, tiles, the http protocol, content management systems, release engineering and software configuration management... etc.
In this 8-year career so far I've never been out of a job, I've earned a healthy paycheck, I've done extra well-paying consulting work on the side, had as many as 8 people reporting to me in a technical managment role, carved out my own career path and currently work from home as many hours/days per week as I like (I find 1/2-time is the right balance for me). On the whole I've been very happy with my career and my choices. And this is without a technical degree, without a certificate of any sort. I read, I do, I learn.
When I interview candidates I often ask them to solve technical problems for me on the spot, or to tell me their thoughts on web standards, or simply to defend their choice of browser. One thing I *never* do is ask about certification.
granted this is a rambling anecdote, and there may be certain cases where a cert. helps open the door... but not in my experience.
ok enough.
g'night all.
1. Cars (of course)
2. 3 wheeled one seater
3. 4 Wheel ATV with cargo frame
4. Horses
5. Segways
6. radio waves
(ok it's not a transportation option per se, but it's a "vehicle" for catching criminals nonetheless)
seriously, another (common) way to catch a suspect is to keep em in sight long enough to bring other cops into the picture, pursuing from a convergent angle. anyone can get away from *one* cop. but you can't outrun (nor out-drive, nor out-segway [-ugh, verbing]) "the cops". there are enough beat cops in chicago to hone in on this clown pretty quick, methinks.
amen. mod parent up. gmail privacy is between its users and google. as long as google's actions are defined/constrained by their privacy policy/user agreement, where is the problem?
as a bit of a tangent, I began using gmail as of last week (got an , and it is *fantastic*.
M.I.T. geeks vs Vegas.
True story.
An amazing read.
"Designing with web standards" - zeldman (new riders) - is a great introduction.
c om/
"eric meyer on css" (also new riders) is rife w good real-world examples.
the one I use most though is the wonderfully concise o'reilly "css pocket reference" at under 100pgs and w very specific, accurate browser-compatibility charts for various attributes.
also these sites are chock full o help:
http://www.zeldman.com/
http://www.alistapart.
http://www.w3schools.com
all that said, by far the best way to learn is to simply experiment. once you get used to it, designing w css is imho *easier* than using old-school html hacks. and it makes maintenance/redesign work orders of magnitude simpler.
per your comment about tables, it's possible to use tables in a limited role for basic layout. some css purists will complain, but imo the pragmatic approach is to use them when it's too much of a headache not to. the pgs can still be standards-compliant, valid, and css-based, even if they use a few tables.
I've been making web pages for 7 years, but it's only in the 18 months or so that I've really become so convinced and enamored of the wisdom of css for real separation of content from presentation.
good luck and enjoy - it's really empowering once you get the hang of it!
"..useful layout features that don't have anything to do with style classes..." ??
you're joking, right?
"beauty of... complete newbs... text-edit"
gack. if you think what you see when you view source in your average web page is beautiful, you sir, are beyond help.
html *should* be simple -- but in practice it's bloated, convoluted, and full of things that have only to do with presentation. the markup should simply describe the content. css should describe how it looks. it's cleaner, more readable, *easier* to write, read, maintain... and it's better-performing.
this separation of content from presentation is so clearly a design goal for web developers and architects. do you really oppose it?
"it's impossible to hand-write html that will pass a verifier"
this is also ignorant and false. it's quite easy. and using tools like TIDY to help is straightforward if you have trouble.
I won't get into your ideas about changes to HTTP1.1 now, but had to say something about your distorted perception of the role of html/css in the web.
hi (thanks for keeping this civil!)
;)
actually the distinction between "many" and "most" is significant. you may be right that it's a tiny minority, if by "tiny" you mean a tiny percentage, nowhere near "most". BUT, if this minority is comprised of thousands of people, then it's legitimate to describe them as "many". you're right that they are perceived as a larger group than they really are, due to their vociferousness, but nonetheless there are many of them. so I think the original poster's comment holds some water.
also it's "mea culpa" not "mae culpa"
(ducks)
then you wrote:
He didn't use the word "most", he used the word "many", it's even in your quote. if you're going to pick nits over words, you have to at least read what he wrote! Your other points have some merit.