That's because you don't know how Hollywood accounting works. Each film is a company, through which the money is funneled. It never comes out ahead. It's not supposed to. But trust me, there are people in there making money.
Now, compared to the tech industry, movies are pretty small potatoes. There's a big list of single IT companies that could buy all of Hollywood for pocket change.
It would be interesting to compare openings for welders against openings for, say, product design. Which is growing more? I know which one is more of a 'trade.'
If the welding is growing faster, that could be evidence the economy is climbing back down the abstraction ladder, which (I think) would be a bad thing. Welders may make the world, but they don't run it. Product designers direct a lot of what your world looks like. And product designers need some insight into how human beings work and what they need. An understanding of the deep narratives of the culture will help you make things for it.
Maybe that doesn't entail a whole degree, but it certainly entails some degree of liberalism in education, and more than most high schools give you.
tl;dr: trade school vs. liberal education is not a binary, it's a scale. Maybe things need to move closer to the trade end, but not necessarily all the way.
Your car is more inefficient, in terms of the value you can make of time spent. On mass transit you can read, listen to books on tape, generally make the time useful. Walking, you are getting exercise. In your car, you better be focusing your attention on not killing yourself or anyone else.
I'm for professionalization of driving. It's far too easy to get a driver's license in America, and far too easy to keep one.
And I don't even have to be in the car. I could be beside the car, or just past the car. God help those around if I'm driving. My car might be fine (that's a good question, does this effect only the target car? How tight is the beam? Could reflections kill other cars?) but I'd likely die instantly (or be in a permanent coma, no difference to me) and my car and drooling carcass would probably drift across lanes into other cars...
If by some miracle I were to survive such an incident, I hope the police department and manufacturer have a shitload of liability insurance, because they would need it. As a rule, I don't use my condition to abuse the legal system (though I certainly could), but I would get very litigious about that, and encourage my family to do so in my stead.
I have deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants for dystonia, and they're hit or miss. Maybe you get some sort of high, maybe your arm goes rigid, maybe you see spots. And for twenty hours of brain surgery, awake--well, I wouldn't have done it if I thought I had any better options.
The state of the art with this is nowhere near reliable enough to do for nonessential reasons, even if you have some of the best doctors in the world. And the expense--well, if it had been out of pocket, it would have cost me >$300k.
Or, you can just go score some coke, if you're into that kind of thing.
Many companies aren't interested in any experience you weren't paid for - they're looking for professional experience.
Besides, once you have more than 10 years experience a few months more is just in the noise.
Two responses:
1. from the above poster:
"In the end, I got top-notch job--which I wouldn't have been able to get if I'd shown up to the interview and been unable to answer engineering-questions due to having not done any engineering for 3+ months. Being able to show my prospective employer which projects were using my code (and show the code) was a definite plus, too--I'm certain that it helped me win-out over the other candidates."
Skillsets are perishable. A shark smothers when it stops swimming. You don't want to be stale for a tough interview.
2. That's why you do something both to a professional standard, and that is impressive. Set a high standard for yourself, pick a difficult problem, and solve it. If it's impressive it's impressive, whether you got paid to do it or not. That's what I'm actually doing now, with boogiepants.
I don't have one either. I like more control of my media experience than TV provides. I watch very occasionally at a neighbor's place.
It's interesting, though: my experience of TV is different when I do watch it. I get angrier at villains, more repulsed by violence. Part of that is obviously just not exposing myself to it as much. I wonder, though: how much it is about my general immersion in more interactive media? Usually when something happens in the spaces I spend my time in (mailing lists, facebook) I can say something about it, and change the action.
Which does change my response to things like TV, too, but in a way that's hard to sort out.
The bitsfrombytes mechanical kit does not include electronics or feedstock, or a power supply. It does include servos. You can get the full electronics set at rrrf.org. Support rrrf.org! Zack Smith just quit his job to go full time on RepRaps. Because taking over the world is a full-time job.
So with all of these poor accessibility practices, Google is going to have difficulty indexing your content, aren't they? How well does google index text in an image? How well does it handle links in javascript? Don't you think alt tags might help?
I'm not up on all the accessibility guidelines, and I'm inclined to say a lot of things should be accessible, but I think accessibilty can only help your googlejuice.
There's lots of good advice here. The one thing I'd add is: document it the way it's done, not the way you think it should be done.
In the process of documentation, you will find stupid processes. Resist the temptation to change them while documenting them. If you really want to waste a lot of time writing docs no one will use, give in.
Process improvement is a separate task. It requires a whole different attitude, a whole different level of buy-in...
I just got a Deep Brain Stimulation implant, for treatment of Muscular Dystonia. Seems like a bad idea to have EMP when there are people walking around with wires in their brains. Might be deadly--hard to say. At the very least expensive--replacing the implants is no fun. One of those situations where you better hope you kill me, because you'll be on the business end of a lawsuit.
I am scheduled for DBS surgery next month, for a condition called muscular Dystonia, which I've had since I was a kid. My neurologist has done dozens of DBS implants for dystonia, and probably hundreds for Parkinson's. I believe the total for Dystonia patients worldwide is under a thousand. Maybe it's under fifty for people with depression.
I worked at IBM from 1989 to 1994, in the mainframe OS development area, in Poughkeepsie and Kingston, NY. In that time, my area went from a shirt-and-tie environment for everyone to an place where my boss's boss would wear jeans.
IBM was not homogenous in that respect. Our offices were in a diverse area, near manufacturing, final roll-out facilities (a room bigger than a football field, filled with mainframes running test suites--very cool), and an executive suite, and there were many and varied cultures.
IBM was always most disciplined about its public face. As a place to work, it was bureaucratic, but full of geeky challenge. I like more creative opportunity in my work, but I have less now than I did then.
It wasn't a bad place to be a geek. One of our favorite games was to imagine how much damage you could do with malicious code. I worked with a guy who managed the security setup piece after a user logged in, and we always joked about putting various backdoors in. I had a friend who worked with a power supply system, which regulated cooling, power, in the bipolar chips. He could have brought down every mainframe in the world of a particular model at some preset time. Whole lot of molten silicon.
It's an interesting question: how far could a civilization get without math? IANA historian, but it seems to me the more sophisticated a (human) civilization, the better its mathematics. The Aztecs did develop a fair amount of math completely independently of Eurasian civilizations.
Could a race become spacefaring without math? Could they develop the radio communications we could use to detect them? I suppose they could if the circumstances of their environment or adaptation (Low-gravity, bio-radio communications) allowed it.
But how would you arrive at the necessary conclusions without an abstracted intellectual framework like math? Maybe progress would just be slower.
Hmmm... makes you wonder what we're still missing.
EMUN actually sounds transitional to me. It's a bridge technology to integrate the phohe system, and then at some point, when we have deployed better interaction models for telephony, we'll go to a broader, more flexible URI scheme.
Actually, I also think it's not a complete integration. There have to be other things you can integrate with a live stream of data. Digital signatures would be one. Perhaps some open (and better designed) analog of Powerpoint might be another.
I worked a couple years at a recruiting firm that was spinning off consulting firms, and they had a us--the technical team--in the same room as the recruiters. Fascinating. A few insights:
Definitely, they hire the hotties. We called it "the Tommy factor," after the guy who started their Chicago office. They were mostly a little young for me, but damn. Hot, friendly, fun, loyal as a cat. Salespeople. You know.
Headhunting is not a career. The big reason they don't establish a long term relationship with you is because they don't plan to stick around in the job. Someone else from the same company might call you, but again, it's a sales thing. You don't know them. None of these companies have brands, and for good reason.
They may say they act in your interests, but if they can get a good deal for a client, they will. They have competition too. Remember, you are the recruit, not the client.
Think there are ores there worth mining? They are here on Earth to, and a lot cheap to aquire. Want a base for research purposes?
Not exactly true. The cost structure is more complicated than that.
The initial investment is more expensive, enormously more. Shipping and building pieces to start a lunar mine would be very expensive. Perhaps prohibitively so at this point.
There are ongoing cost savings, though. The Moon has a much shallower gravity well. It's cheaper to launch large amounts of material off the Moon than Earth. Also, the lack of atmosphere provides two benefits: easier launches and easier energy collection. Sunlight is much more abundant at the Earth's surface than the Moon's, and could be used for cheaper launches, either through a pure laser push or laser-powered space elevator climb.
A serious push into space will make all of that cost-effective. By serious I mean one involving millions of people. I've often thought we shouldn't go to Mars until we can build the ship out of lunar pig iron. The moon is an obvious toehold.
The most interesting scifi In run into these days is more inward looking than outward looking. I think we're closer to altering ourt own nature (through genetic engineering and stuff) than we are to exploring the stars. Ted Chiang has done some great short stories about the interesting possibilities of enhancing yourself. What would it really be like to be superintelligent, or be able to have direct control of your brain?
Of course, fantasy isn't what it used to be either. My personal favorite author right now is Jonathan Lethem, who wrote in the sci-fi/fantasy domain for a while, but has moved towards more inward examinations of freakishness. Instead of the freakish world, the freakish self. Motherless Brooklyn is a great example.
Though pure escapism doesn't interest me as much as good writing, and good questions explored through storytelling. So maybe it's just me.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because you don't know how Hollywood accounting works. Each film is a company, through which the money is funneled. It never comes out ahead. It's not supposed to. But trust me, there are people in there making money.
Now, compared to the tech industry, movies are pretty small potatoes. There's a big list of single IT companies that could buy all of Hollywood for pocket change.
It would be interesting to compare openings for welders against openings for, say, product design. Which is growing more? I know which one is more of a 'trade.'
If the welding is growing faster, that could be evidence the economy is climbing back down the abstraction ladder, which (I think) would be a bad thing. Welders may make the world, but they don't run it. Product designers direct a lot of what your world looks like. And product designers need some insight into how human beings work and what they need. An understanding of the deep narratives of the culture will help you make things for it.
Maybe that doesn't entail a whole degree, but it certainly entails some degree of liberalism in education, and more than most high schools give you.
tl;dr: trade school vs. liberal education is not a binary, it's a scale. Maybe things need to move closer to the trade end, but not necessarily all the way.
Your car is more inefficient, in terms of the value you can make of time spent. On mass transit you can read, listen to books on tape, generally make the time useful. Walking, you are getting exercise. In your car, you better be focusing your attention on not killing yourself or anyone else.
I'm for professionalization of driving. It's far too easy to get a driver's license in America, and far too easy to keep one.
I think this guy skipped a step.
And assholes like me with deep brain stimulation implants. Yes, I have wires in my brain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_brain_stimulation
And I don't even have to be in the car. I could be beside the car, or just past the car. God help those around if I'm driving. My car might be fine (that's a good question, does this effect only the target car? How tight is the beam? Could reflections kill other cars?) but I'd likely die instantly (or be in a permanent coma, no difference to me) and my car and drooling carcass would probably drift across lanes into other cars...
If by some miracle I were to survive such an incident, I hope the police department and manufacturer have a shitload of liability insurance, because they would need it. As a rule, I don't use my condition to abuse the legal system (though I certainly could), but I would get very litigious about that, and encourage my family to do so in my stead.
I have deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants for dystonia, and they're hit or miss. Maybe you get some sort of high, maybe your arm goes rigid, maybe you see spots. And for twenty hours of brain surgery, awake--well, I wouldn't have done it if I thought I had any better options.
The state of the art with this is nowhere near reliable enough to do for nonessential reasons, even if you have some of the best doctors in the world. And the expense--well, if it had been out of pocket, it would have cost me >$300k.
Or, you can just go score some coke, if you're into that kind of thing.
Many companies aren't interested in any experience you weren't paid for - they're looking for professional experience.
Besides, once you have more than 10 years experience a few months more is just in the noise.
Two responses:
1. from the above poster:
"In the end, I got top-notch job--which I wouldn't have been able to get if I'd shown up to the interview and been unable to answer engineering-questions due to having not done any engineering for 3+ months. Being able to show my prospective employer which projects were using my code (and show the code) was a definite plus, too--I'm certain that it helped me win-out over the other candidates."
Skillsets are perishable. A shark smothers when it stops swimming. You don't want to be stale for a tough interview.
2. That's why you do something both to a professional standard, and that is impressive. Set a high standard for yourself, pick a difficult problem, and solve it. If it's impressive it's impressive, whether you got paid to do it or not. That's what I'm actually doing now, with boogiepants.
I don't have one either. I like more control of my media experience than TV provides. I watch very occasionally at a neighbor's place.
It's interesting, though: my experience of TV is different when I do watch it. I get angrier at villains, more repulsed by violence. Part of that is obviously just not exposing myself to it as much. I wonder, though: how much it is about my general immersion in more interactive media? Usually when something happens in the spaces I spend my time in (mailing lists, facebook) I can say something about it, and change the action.
Which does change my response to things like TV, too, but in a way that's hard to sort out.
The bitsfrombytes mechanical kit does not include electronics or feedstock, or a power supply. It does include servos. You can get the full electronics set at rrrf.org. Support rrrf.org! Zack Smith just quit his job to go full time on RepRaps. Because taking over the world is a full-time job.
aack-forgot I wasn't logged in... this was me
So with all of these poor accessibility practices, Google is going to have difficulty indexing your content, aren't they? How well does google index text in an image? How well does it handle links in javascript? Don't you think alt tags might help?
I'm not up on all the accessibility guidelines, and I'm inclined to say a lot of things should be accessible, but I think accessibilty can only help your googlejuice.
There's lots of good advice here. The one thing I'd add is: document it the way it's done, not the way you think it should be done.
In the process of documentation, you will find stupid processes. Resist the temptation to change them while documenting them. If you really want to waste a lot of time writing docs no one will use, give in.
Process improvement is a separate task. It requires a whole different attitude, a whole different level of buy-in...
I just got a Deep Brain Stimulation implant, for treatment of Muscular Dystonia. Seems like a bad idea to have EMP when there are people walking around with wires in their brains. Might be deadly--hard to say. At the very least expensive--replacing the implants is no fun. One of those situations where you better hope you kill me, because you'll be on the business end of a lawsuit.
I am scheduled for DBS surgery next month, for a condition called muscular Dystonia, which I've had since I was a kid. My neurologist has done dozens of DBS implants for dystonia, and probably hundreds for Parkinson's. I believe the total for Dystonia patients worldwide is under a thousand. Maybe it's under fifty for people with depression.
So these chips have holes in them... are they structurally weaker? Do we need to worry more about dropping devices made of them?
I suppose it's possible they might be stronger, but that would be a coincidence... they didn't do this for strength.
Nonesevent is a perfectly cromulent word!
What happens when you hit the send button before you're done typing the email.
I hear it happens to lots of guys.
I worked at IBM from 1989 to 1994, in the mainframe OS development area, in Poughkeepsie and Kingston, NY. In that time, my area went from a shirt-and-tie environment for everyone to an place where my boss's boss would wear jeans.
IBM was not homogenous in that respect. Our offices were in a diverse area, near manufacturing, final roll-out facilities (a room bigger than a football field, filled with mainframes running test suites--very cool), and an executive suite, and there were many and varied cultures.
IBM was always most disciplined about its public face. As a place to work, it was bureaucratic, but full of geeky challenge. I like more creative opportunity in my work, but I have less now than I did then.
It wasn't a bad place to be a geek. One of our favorite games was to imagine how much damage you could do with malicious code. I worked with a guy who managed the security setup piece after a user logged in, and we always joked about putting various backdoors in. I had a friend who worked with a power supply system, which regulated cooling, power, in the bipolar chips. He could have brought down every mainframe in the world of a particular model at some preset time. Whole lot of molten silicon.
Sounds like geeks to me.
It's an interesting question: how far could a civilization get without math? IANA historian, but it seems to me the more sophisticated a (human) civilization, the better its mathematics. The Aztecs did develop a fair amount of math completely independently of Eurasian civilizations.
Could a race become spacefaring without math? Could they develop the radio communications we could use to detect them? I suppose they could if the circumstances of their environment or adaptation (Low-gravity, bio-radio communications) allowed it.
But how would you arrive at the necessary conclusions without an abstracted intellectual framework like math? Maybe progress would just be slower.
Hmmm... makes you wonder what we're still missing.
Ireland: population 6 million
India: poplulation 1 billion
We can only lose so many jobs to Ireland.
EMUN actually sounds transitional to me. It's a bridge technology to integrate the phohe system, and then at some point, when we have deployed better interaction models for telephony, we'll go to a broader, more flexible URI scheme.
Actually, I also think it's not a complete integration. There have to be other things you can integrate with a live stream of data. Digital signatures would be one. Perhaps some open (and better designed) analog of Powerpoint might be another.
Think there are ores there worth mining? They are here on Earth to, and a lot cheap to aquire. Want a base for research purposes?
Not exactly true. The cost structure is more complicated than that.
The initial investment is more expensive, enormously more. Shipping and building pieces to start a lunar mine would be very expensive. Perhaps prohibitively so at this point.
There are ongoing cost savings, though. The Moon has a much shallower gravity well. It's cheaper to launch large amounts of material off the Moon than Earth. Also, the lack of atmosphere provides two benefits: easier launches and easier energy collection. Sunlight is much more abundant at the Earth's surface than the Moon's, and could be used for cheaper launches, either through a pure laser push or laser-powered space elevator climb.
A serious push into space will make all of that cost-effective. By serious I mean one involving millions of people. I've often thought we shouldn't go to Mars until we can build the ship out of lunar pig iron. The moon is an obvious toehold.
The most interesting scifi In run into these days is more inward looking than outward looking. I think we're closer to altering ourt own nature (through genetic engineering and stuff) than we are to exploring the stars. Ted Chiang has done some great short stories about the interesting possibilities of enhancing yourself. What would it really be like to be superintelligent, or be able to have direct control of your brain?
Of course, fantasy isn't what it used to be either. My personal favorite author right now is Jonathan Lethem, who wrote in the sci-fi/fantasy domain for a while, but has moved towards more inward examinations of freakishness. Instead of the freakish world, the freakish self. Motherless Brooklyn is a great example.
Though pure escapism doesn't interest me as much as good writing, and good questions explored through storytelling. So maybe it's just me.
What is the genesis of this "clicky click thing" phrase? I love it. It only has about 7 hits on Google, and no entry on Everything. Where is it from?