You don't understand it. The lawyers are indeed really happy. They still got paid.
My guesstimate is the lawyers are on retainer and/or are corporate salaried so they would have gotten paid anyway.
I don't think this is right. According to a recent article at Bloomberg this is actually causing a spike in lawyers and their services as this demand expands. From the article:
Costs are higher in cases before the ITC. The Washington agency has shorter timelines, squabbles over obtaining information from overseas companies, and no limits on how much pretrial evidence can be gathered or witnesses questioned. Forty or more lawyers may be assigned to each side in an ITC case, based on a review of dockets.
U.S. district court hearings can have 20 lawyers on either side. One or two wil take the lead, and the rest will be responsible for specific witnesses, the technology behind a single patent, or the legal arguments backing a key point.
“These big global cases, they become no stone unturned, no grain of sand unturned -- and for every one you turn over, you examine every facet,” Long said. “To do that, you need lots of people. You go down 1,000 rabbit holes, 10,000 rabbit holes, and most of them are empty but there’s one of them that’s not.”
The smartphone makers don’t disclose their total patent litigation costs. At some smaller companies, those expenses are enough to affect earnings. Computer-chip designer Rambus Inc. (RMBS) spent $56 million each in 2008 and 2009 when it was embroiled in trials, and chip packaging company Tessera Inc. (TSRA) has spent as much as $84 million in a year, based on their annual reports.
I believe these lawyers are assigned cases by their firm and the more cases the more lawyers and the more money paid. Of course, as that last paragraph notes, this means less innovation and more lawyers -- something nobody should want except the lawyers.
There is no such thing as normal. Normal is only a concept that we as humans have because we live such pathetically short lives. Normal simply isn't a natural concept, and we need to quit thinking of nature as being "normal" and start accepting that "change" in part of the natural cycle and learn to adapt with it.
But there is such a thing as rate of change, right? And we can measure how long it took to get from temperature A to temperature B historically and we can then look at our own time period and compare how quickly or slowly the temperature is changing, right? The funny thing about life on Earth is that it's probably always going to be here in some form or fashion but it's those unicellular organisms that need lengths of time to adjust to extreme weather.
The climate always has gone from warmer to colder and back and forth. Mostly it has been warmer, but it has also spent a fair amount of time under ice ages as well. I live in a place where I am 2000 miles from the nearest ocean and yet can find sea shells in my back yard from time to time. Things change and we need to quit fighting change and learn to adapt to our environment as our environment changes around us.
Or perhaps we can adjust our actions to limit the amount of change? Why do you use a waste disposal system in your house? Why not just throw garbage and urine and feces where ever you want inside your house? You can always learn to adapt to your environment, right? You'll get used to the smell, you'll learn to make friends with the raccoons and cockroaches living in the debris -- possibly even feed off them. So why do you take these basic precautions to keep your home clean? Is your planning not comparable to policies that aim to keep the Earth clean?
The continents will shift (there's a museum in Paris with an exhibit I have heard about that depicts how far the North American plate moves away from the European plate each year). Antarctica will eventually move away from the pole and simply melt. Other natural phenomenon will occur and we have to accept that we are simply one part of nature and to learn to live as part of it.
Again we're talking about a process that takes tens of thousands of years versus what we've done in the past hundred years. The rate at which we are influencing our environment is increasing as our population increases. The Earth's plates are not speeding up. I don't understand your analogy nor do I see how it makes our problem seem unimportant -- plate movements have been known to be catastrophic for humans.
That being said, there is no reason not be be responsible with the environment and fight pollution for the sake of fighting pollution. Living sustainably is something that we have to do as our population becomes ever larger and we need to increase efforts for green energy like nuclear, thorium, solar and geothermal power sources.
So I guess we can agree on that. Our record so far on sustainability hasn't been reflected too well in the ocean. And burning fossil fuels is directly influencing it in addition to just plain overfishing. So is it still taboo to start to talk about curbing that stuff?
I really wish people would set aside politics on this and let science do the talking.....
Funny, your post about "times change deal with it" really seems to undermine nearly all the published peer review research on the topic. Your post is a shining example to me of how someone can interject their own politics and policies into a scientific endeavor and masquerade as being the voice of reason and science themselves. Tell me, what sort of first hand results have you collected and examined that I obviously do not have access to?
I'm inclined to agree. IF they do, I can offer a counter-example where they didn't. My son had a series of ear infections during the 1st year of his life and was on antibiotics almost continually from 3 months to 9 months. He also had a serious problem with allergy-induced bronchial infections as well as the odd case of Scarlet Fever. At 23 he's what most people would call "skinny".
Wow, massive sample set there, Elmo, with impeccable use of controls and a double blind study. If you read the actual research, this is talking primarily about childhood obesity so your son's weight at age 23 is particularly useless at this juncture -- he could well be eating tubs of greek yogurt daily for all I know. From the article:
Those who had been treated with antibiotics in the first 6 months of their lives had a higher chance of being overweight at 10, 20, and 38 months of age.
Notice that they don't go into year 23. From another article:
we predict that that this rise in body mass would increase the overweight population in the U.S. by about 1.6 percent.
So at the time of taking antibiotics, this study says that your infant son could have had a slight increase in body weight that would probably not put him into the overweight category. Where he went from there was up to your parenting and his dietary and active habits.
Me, on the other hand, I chained my children to an I-beam in the basement and force-fed them industrial grade lard all day for 10 years until I had to bury them in piano boxes but I didn't give them antibiotics and this proves that antibiotics are not linked to a slight increase in weight.
Could Antibiotics Be A Factor In Childhood Obesity?
It turns out that it's a factor but it's likely a small factor quoting an expert from the NPR coverage:
"Although the effect was small on an individual level," Dr. Leonardo Trasande, the lead pediatrician on the study, tells Shots, "we predict that that this rise in body mass would increase the overweight population in the U.S. by about 1.6 percent."
And to summarize, this is not some over hyped stop using antibiotics trash, the conclusion is:
"We're not saying that children with severe infections shouldn't be treated with antibiotics," Blaser says. These findings just reinforce our need for judicious use of them.
First of all, I don't understand how this story was told without mention of Chief Executive Dbag Darl McBride.
Secondly, I flat out object to the following reoccurring theme prevalent in this piece that alleviates any leaders (none of whom are named) of any responsibility, onus or wrongdoing:
A few companies actually bought into the madness, but for the most part, the world collectively rolled its eyes at SCO, meaning that SCO would have to soldier on with their lawsuit-based business strategy, or face the wrath of their shareholders.
Once the Chapter 7 filing is finalized by a judge, SCO will cease to be as a corporate entity, however they are proposing that SCO v. IBM be allowed to continue, not for sheer entertainment value, but rather so that they don't risk the wrath of their shareholders.
(emphasis mine) I don't understand how someone can be such a jerk and we can say "oh, yeah, well, they had to do it because of the shareholders." Yes, I know that shareholders can sue you when you commit a colossal screw up but you can't hand out free passes like this for every thing they do. What would the shareholders have done? Sued him out of his position? Well, at least he'd still have his ethics and dignity intact. The problem is that the people running SCO lacked any fragments of those things from the start! Let me remind you of McBride's open letter in 2003 that remains to this day at SCO's site. It contained such gems as:
Based on the views of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, we believe that adoption and use of the GPL by significant parts of the software industry was a mistake. The positions of the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat against proprietary software are ill-founded and are contrary to our system of copyright and patent laws. We believe that responsible corporations throughout the IT industry have advocated use of the GPL without full analysis of its long-term detriment to our economy. We are confident that these corporations will ultimately reverse support for the GPL, and will pursue a more responsible direction.
And what? Was there a shareholder holding a loaded gun to his head when he penned this letter? No, there wasn't. I mean, looking back this comment is laughable.
And a side rant is that this is a perfect example of why corporations have more rights than citizens. SCO goes Chapter 11 then Chapter 7 and all the assholes that ran the show walk. And they're hired elsewhere and they have very minimal repercussions. What happens when an individual makes bad decisions with their personal finances? They get Chapter 13? They get liens slapped on all their income? Regardless of the chapter, their credit is screwed so they can't buy anything big for 10 years? You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see the names of the people running this show published so we know who ran the show at this company. And I'd like to see bankruptcy laws barring them from assuming any position within a company where they have direct purview or control of any assets worth over $5,000. You know what? I'd bet then they'd be a little more rational, ethical and logical in their decisions just like the general populace is forced to do for fear of bankruptcy.
Seriously, where is the blame going to be placed? Who will learn their lesson here? I'll be damned if I allow you to just pass the buck to "the wrath of the shareholders." That black hole of capitalistic logic has lead to major problems in the governance and upper rankings of American companies.
Yeah, you'll notice that a lot of the richest and most successful people never completed college. And that's fine but in my humble opinion, that's a risky bet to take. I've done interviewing for developers for a fortune 500 company and seeing a college degree on the resume doesn't cause me to kick back and say "Oh thank god, they have taken Multivariate and Differential Equations calculus, now all my Spring applications are going to be able to compute the triple integral (by parts) of a toroid in three dimensional space as it passes through a fluctuating field exerting a force on it!" (Yes, I know that makes no sense at all) No, what that tells me is that we're going to be able to throw you in an environment where you have no clue what to do but resources to go out and find what to do. On top of that, you're going to be able to digest the driest and shittiest of documentation (like a calc book) and come back to me and have gleaned some working knowledge from it. Sure, you might have to go to the next cubicle and say "What is up with this stack dump?" And you may have to seek out an authority (like a professor) but you're going to come to some answer for our problems.
In short, it tells employers that you know how to play ball and high order concepts don't frighten you. I'm not going to throw integration by parts at you on the job but it is good to know that you stepped up to that challenge -- even if it was just to get to a final, pass it and move on. In short, I went to a liberal arts college, I took classes on music theory, calculus, physics, Native American studies, advanced literature, etc and in those classes I created four part inventions, mounds of calculations, papers, powerpoints, etc and I have used little if any of that in my day to day job post college. But in mastering those processes I learned how to play ball. Now, I'm not saying you need to go take music theory and Native American studies. But the thing with Calculus is that all software development is logic and math. So don't you think you'd want to get all your i's dotted and t's crossed so that any employer that looks at you knows you have studied beyond the requirements of math for writing software into a realm so lofty they won't even be able to use it? I'm sure glad I did.
I don't think he was the greatest science fiction writer but I think he got the shaft because he wasn't American or British and on top of that he wrote at a time when the Iron Curtain hindered the flow of information -- even fiction. Evidence for this can be seen when he released 17 works in the eight years that followed the "Polish October."
I will admit I don't know Polish and have only read the English translation of his works but I will also say that where I find contemporary authors like Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy to be masters of description, Lem was lacking. His works, however, I often found mirrored in later American science fiction and sometimes what he packed into a chapter could be as deeply philosophical and have as much political commentary as an entire novel by his contemporaries. One of my Polish computer vision professors in grad school saw me reading the Cyberiad and picked up my book and held it up to the class and hyperbolic-ally announced "Every work of science fiction past 1960 is a derivative of this man." He's probably a hero in Poland but I have friends that consider themselves very avid readers and haven't even heard of him.
2. Where can I get fresh builds of the Android port? I can't wait to fire it up on my Google TV!
According to their wiki some porting of libraries may still need to be done but you can clone into their github source for android and try to build it for your device (use their wiki to get started). I think all their development has been done for Pivos which now is an official sponsor of XBMC.
Virtuoso violinist practices night and day to perfect their art and everybody applauds their performance at Carnegie Hall. Talented athlete spends night and day on the field, even alters their diet to tune their body for better athletic performance and everyone applauds their super bowl pass.
From a utilitarian standpoint, I don't see a whole lot of different between these entertainers and the entertainers in this story. They are sacrificing everything and taking one risky gamble to do what they love for a little chunk of change that only the 0.01% enjoy. Why does society apply stigmas to people trying to do what they love? If you're going to rip on pro-gamers about job security, get ready to rip on pro-entertainers. Comedian jokes get old much faster than Starcraft I. A professional football players body lasts far shorter than the run of Starcraft I. Music seems to only enjoy popularity for about two weeks considering what you hear on popular radio stations. Hell, Olympic gymnasts are left with hip problems if their career lasts too long. Everything fades, even computer languages. If that's not true of your field, you're in a dead and boring field anyway. Even framing houses has become a different ballgame since I did it as a kid.
Instead of lecturing them about transient skills, you'd be better off pointing off that putting all your eggs in this basket means that their is a very high chance you're going to live the life of the starving artist. There's a small percentage you could rake in massive endorsements and if they do, they should take a page from broke athletes and musicians who squandered that money the instant they got it. Save that money. Save it. Spend money like you're making $50k a year instead of a million a year because that income is fleeting.
People playing themselves to death is no different than that stupid high school athlete shooting up steroids in the locker room. Both are terrible actions that should be criticized but there is a point where you just have to let people do what they want if they truly love what they do.
Having your life taking over with something like becoming a scientist or learning everything there is to know about repairing internal combustion engines will last you for your whole life, probably.
Are you really saying that the useful science today is the same useful science that came out when Starcraft I came out? Everyone has to keep learning to stay relevant. Even entertainers. Or they grow old and become has-beens, the same applies to Starcraft players.
Just as used car sales are bad for auto manufacturers, and home resales are bad for builders, and garage sales are bad for retailers,... and...,... and...
This is a fairly poor analogy in the same way that calling file sharing "theft" is a poor label. The value of the game isn't the physical cartridge or disc on which the game comes -- sure, the manual and external artwork to the packaging may have some value to you and especially to collectors. But the real value of a game is that copyrighted information and artwork and writing stored in a digital manner on whatever medium.
I still think you should be able to sell secondhand copyrighted information, I really do. But I also think it's a poor comparison when the value of the car isn't so much the intellectual property but more so it's got X lbs of steel and other materials specially arranged to get you from point A to point B. Games are artwork, not vehicles.
Better comparisons are books and DVDs. Of course, I'm sure those industries want secondhand sales abolished as well to keep their sales up and I totally disagree with that considering how much I shell out for said objects.
Me, personally, I've learned my lesson. I sold my Ocarina of Time collectors games a while ago and now truly regret it (I had thought that one day N64 cartridges would be as unplayable as NES cartridges but they appear to work for much longer). So I maintain a library next to my books and movies. Sure you might think it looks "tacky" but I think that attitude will change in the near future. I played my dad's pong game, my kids will probably play my Zelda games.
If you had unlimited resources and unlimited materials (planet sized masses, black hole measuring devices, you name it), what hypotheses and tests would you construct to give us more information on what precisely gravity is?
Your work seems to be primarily centering on observing and simulating these changing gravitational fields. What benefit or detriment could result from controlling such tides? From a science fiction standpoint, do you see this as a possibility? What engineering feat would you propose to achieve it? Is there any reason at all why this might one day be a necessity?
I feel like there are some overlooked issues here like my own inkling that there is a liberal bias to people who are online and "tweet" on a regular basis. I'd imagine a lot of people in "the heartland" that work in remote areas and vote predominantly conservative don't care about 140 character websites.
I'd also like to know how they would rate this following tweet (note: this is not my opinion on something, it's made up to illustrate a point):
Oh THANK GOD for Obamacare, now instead of barely making mortgage payments, I can pay for my neighbor's cancer treatments and default on my loans!
Clearly sarcasm but the first sentence fragment could easily be construed as positive or pro Obama by an unknown natural language parser. From the article:
Each day, the Index evaluates and weighs the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Obama or Romney relative to the more than 400 million Tweets sent on all other topics. For example, a score of 73 for a candidate indicates that Tweets containing their name or account name are on average more positive than 73 percent of all Tweets.
And what exactly does that tell me? That people are telling Romney where to shove his money or that they genuinely want to see him in office?
No, he did not make any threats. You clearly didn't actually read the article. Threats of violence actually are NOT enough to lead to arrest, but asshole-ish tweets are. Read the article before posting such crap.
I can't believe I'm linking to The Huffington Post as a better source but for lack of any other site that is explaining it better, here's a timeline of the tweets.
Here's the tweet in question:
@TomDaley1994 i'm going to find you and i'm going to drown you in the pool you cocky twat your a nobody people like you make me sick
It is listed in the Guardian article but doesn't say it's from the arrested suspect.
Don't know where the summary or you got that idea from. Brett Close was the CEO. You are write about nepotism though. From the article:
It lacked MMO development experience at the top. “Curt was not the CEO,” Dagres says, “but you could see he was quite involved and had a lot of control. I was a little nervous.” He also took note that the COO was Schilling’s relative.
I wrote out what I think should be done in my journal but of course the formatting looks like crap with italics. I think Rhode Island should get what they paid for and do what they want with most of the assets (including the source).
This is article deriding free on-line math education written by a person who develops paid on-line math education.
That sounds like an ad hominem. Motives aside, is the argument valid? One part of the article stood out to me:
As a result, experienced educators have begun to push back against what they see as fundamental problems with Khan’s approach to teaching. In June, two professors from Grand Valley State University created their own video in which they pointed out errors in Khan’s lesson on negative numbers: not things they disagreed with, but things he got plain wrong. To his credit, Khan did replace the video. However, instead of using this as an opportunity to engage educators and improve his teaching, he dismissed the criticism.
“It’s kind of weird,” Khan explained, “when people are nitpicking about multiplying negative numbers.”
When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it’s because they’re jealous. “It’d piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world’s teacher.”
Why isn't Khan embracing criticism and review/removal/replacement of his videos by knowledgeable folks? I would be rewarding people proofing my many videos and trying to get more people doing that instead of dismissing it as "nitpicking."
If the teaching is going to be bad either way, then Kahn [sic] costs a heck of a lot less to get the same result.
I think I should point out that I haven't found any place where Khan suggests that his youtube videos replace public education.
Khan's made a few mistakes. The first that is the worst is that the article mentions he was corrected about multiplying negative numbers and instead of praising the people for making a new video correcting him, he apparently just took his video down and replaced it. And then made some little remark about why people put up such a big fuss about this concept. His second and less grievous mistake was to engage talking heads and accept praise from politicians. I think if he had just focused on making videos, ignored the praise and let Bill Gates or some other public figure pitch the video, he wouldn't find himself the target in this back and forth. We need to stop looking at online education as a replacement and instead as an augmenting force in our children's learning.
And I don't mean stop making movies, I mean they should turn to their dirtier and darker titles like Preacher, Fables or Scalped. I guess those center around a more anti-hero or "regular" hero but if done right they could be a great movie franchise. Personally I'm sick of superhero movies and though they have been lucrative I hope that we get a little break here before it gets ridiculously diluted. In the movie industry too much of a good thing can go bad real fast.
Well, I'll start off by saying that your son sounds very smart and gifted -- although it also sounds like he is at that very special age where he knows everything. I too experienced such youthful bliss and ignorance but the only cure was time and experience. I might have even made similar claims that all visual editors are detrimental in some form or fashion. I have found myself shying away from absolutes like this and, actually, find it difficult to determine when something is "visual." Is the color scheme in my VIM and EMACS windows a "visual" editor? I find myself today locked in a love/hate relationship with several that I am running as I write this. I think the best course of action for you is to remind your son that nobody ever wrote a heavy integrated development environment with the intent of completely removing the burden of coding on the developer. Also, a solution that takes you 90% of the way quickly but still requires you to write out and augment that final 10% is still more useful than starting with nothing at all. I suggest you and your son work through the Rails 3 tutorial using scaffolds. This is an example where something from the command line augments your ability to stand up web applications quickly. I also suggest you do exercises with Eclipse (or I guess Visual Studio Express if he uses C#) and try to import 10 or 20 libraries into the project. Doing this with an IDE is much friendlier than doing this from the command line or hand writing ant/maven scripts.
There's nothing wrong with doing everything by hand... but then again, there's no reason to shirk productivity in the name of purity. When I was writing huge monolithic classes with no dependencies in college, I was doing everything in VI. Those days have passed, I must write modules that exist in a massive hierarchical tree for many teams now. I depend on IDEs and their integration with various other tools... and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
My rule of thumb is to let editors do the mindless work for you, but never let them do so much that you don't understand exactly what it is that they're doing. If you do allow them to do something so complicated you cannot understand it, you enter into dependence that cannot be undone. You will find yourself unable to augment the automation further and left with 90% solutions and unfinished projects.
Perhaps another line of reasoning to use with him is to ask him to write a windows program using just 0s and 1s or hex in a hex editor. When he cannot do this, ask him why he is okay with C# augmenting his abilities to control the computer. Then ask him why he draws the line there and why not allow more code (IDEs and their plugins) to do more work for him. Sure, everyone draws a line in the sand and sticks to it. I've met kernel hackers that don't even trust compilers. If your son chooses that path, then let him choose his own path.
no one who has worked on a farm says 'discer'. It's a disc.
It's true. I've been living a lie. Sure, I talk the talk and I might sound like I've worked on farms but it's all a sham. "Why do I do it?" Well, there's something about being able to tell all the Carnegie Mellon, Princeton and MIT graduates I work with that I spent my childhood picking up rocks and throwing bails. I keep a bucket of pig shit behind my house and sometimes I just smear that all over me before I hit the town. But it's all a lie. I'll step into the local bar and the women will take one whiff of that sweet fecal matter and come running to me. "What were you doing today, eldavojohn?" they ask as they swoon around me. "Castratin' pigs," I'll lie. And they will just fall all over each other to touch me. I know, it's all very glamorous but it requires a lot of research to go into detail about making two incisions to get the testicles out on the small male pigs and then wiping them down with antibiotic. Or injecting the blue crap into the female piglets' ovaries. Women just absolutely adore a man who knows his way around ending the reproductive cycle of pigs. Bring up that topic at a fine family dinner and even East Coast grandma is on the edge of her seat.
And the money. My god, the money I've made claiming to have worked on farms. I get $25,000 a night just to make an appearance at places and rub elbows with businessmen, musicians and diplomats. They would trot me out like a one trick pony and all ask me questions -- hanging on my every word. That too, has been all a lie. "Con man" would be a kind label for me now.
But you caught me. I never worked on farms growing up. I only brag about walking up and down scorching black earth, picking up any baseball sized or larger rock and returning it to the flatbed behind the tractor. But I've never done it. Never done it for hundreds of hours every summer between the hours of 5am and 11am daily. Never received $8/hour under the table nor the right to use some of their equipment at my folks' place. The details are there but the colloquialism of "discer" versus "disc" ruined me. I suppose this slip has been a blessing in disguise.
I'm glad you caught me before I cut off one of my own fingers so I could tell people I lost it trying to free up the gears of a frozen motor. All the Slashdot karma that would have gotten me and all the pussy that would have been so easily accessible with only nine fingers would have been great -- but it all would have been a lie.
Thank you, Anonymous Coward. Thank you for helping me help myself and own up to this horrible vile lie that has given me an undue elevated societal status.
Listen, DIY is great. And I'm a huge fan of building things with your hands but as someone who grew up working on farms, framing houses and bussing tables I have to say that this sort of lament is laughable from my point of view. I'm sitting now in an air conditioned room, working at my own pace and making orders of magnitude more writing software than walking up and down a field picking up rocks so they don't ruin the discer. Oh, go right ahead and laugh, farming machines are funny words to people who haven't had to fix a broken belt or jerry rig up something on the fly: discer, thresher, bailer, huller, etc.
in Aisle 34 of Home Depot is precut vinyl flooring, the glue already in place. In Aisle 26 are prefab windows, and if you don't want to be your own handyman, head to Aisle 23 or Aisle 35, where a help desk will arrange for an installer, as mastering tools and working with one's hands recede as American cultural values.
Yes, I've also heard software developers complain that today you can use ExtJS 4 to instantly have a windowing option in your browser and now it's sad because all the UI guys are using something like this. These "prefab architectures" are so terrible because nobody actually writes JavaScript anymore. Well, I know how to put together a window sill, a window frame and put the pane in and everything (even know how to build the headers for load bearing regulations on houses). And I'll tell you right now my implementation of a JavaScript windowing system wouldn't be as slick or universal as ExtJS 4 just like my window would be pretty shitty compared to something prefabbed up. Both would cost my employers more time and money. I would wager that if you were someone that built houses for a living, you would be okay with someone else putting together factory made windows with a low defect rate. Unsurprisingly it saves you a bunch of money just like a lot of software libraries save me time and money.
Yeah, I can make a table. But I need a jointer and a planer and whole bunch of other tools. The barrier to entry is high. Or I can go down to Ikea and find some veneered particle board for comparative pennies. Welcome to capitalism.
'In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on,'
Oh, right, your ancestors were the farmers. It was okay for you to move on to something more interesting like building houses and cities instead of devoting every waking moment to growing growing growing. Now we've moved on and it's time to mourn the loss of... what exactly? Am I supposed to feel ashamed that all four of my grandparents were farmers and none of their 14 children are? Or that my dad was a carpenter and cement pourer and I'm a software developer? It's funny, none of my relatives guilt trip me like this New York Times writer that probably hasn't spent a day of his life working in a factory.
From the NYTimes author's bio:
Mr. Uchitelle was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York in 2002-03 and taught journalism for many years at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. Before joining The Times, he worked for The Associated Press as a reporter, an editor and a foreign correspondent in Latin America. He and his wife, Joan Uchitelle, live in Scarsdale, N.Y. They have two grown daughters.
Hey, anybody know of a good factory job near Scarsdale for Mr. Uchitelle? Maybe one of those industrial revolution jobs with industrial revolution pay? Then I think I'll listen to him bitch and moan about how progress is losing our nation's toolbox. Afterwards, take him around to farms at night (you know, the ones where people are working after sundown and before sunup) and let everyone tell him their stories about how they were injured on the job. Every hard working farmer or carpenter has those stories. I still got all my digi
Seriously, when I submitted that I was staring down ~10 hours of "Swamp Brothers," "Swamp Loggers" and "Gator Boys." Seriously. Now NatGeo is following suit... am I just getting curmudgeonly? How is this happening?
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand it. The lawyers are indeed really happy. They still got paid.
My guesstimate is the lawyers are on retainer and/or are corporate salaried so they would have gotten paid anyway.
I don't think this is right. According to a recent article at Bloomberg this is actually causing a spike in lawyers and their services as this demand expands. From the article:
Costs are higher in cases before the ITC. The Washington agency has shorter timelines, squabbles over obtaining information from overseas companies, and no limits on how much pretrial evidence can be gathered or witnesses questioned. Forty or more lawyers may be assigned to each side in an ITC case, based on a review of dockets.
U.S. district court hearings can have 20 lawyers on either side. One or two wil take the lead, and the rest will be responsible for specific witnesses, the technology behind a single patent, or the legal arguments backing a key point.
“These big global cases, they become no stone unturned, no grain of sand unturned -- and for every one you turn over, you examine every facet,” Long said. “To do that, you need lots of people. You go down 1,000 rabbit holes, 10,000 rabbit holes, and most of them are empty but there’s one of them that’s not.”
The smartphone makers don’t disclose their total patent litigation costs. At some smaller companies, those expenses are enough to affect earnings. Computer-chip designer Rambus Inc. (RMBS) spent $56 million each in 2008 and 2009 when it was embroiled in trials, and chip packaging company Tessera Inc. (TSRA) has spent as much as $84 million in a year, based on their annual reports.
I believe these lawyers are assigned cases by their firm and the more cases the more lawyers and the more money paid. Of course, as that last paragraph notes, this means less innovation and more lawyers -- something nobody should want except the lawyers.
There is no such thing as normal. Normal is only a concept that we as humans have because we live such pathetically short lives. Normal simply isn't a natural concept, and we need to quit thinking of nature as being "normal" and start accepting that "change" in part of the natural cycle and learn to adapt with it.
But there is such a thing as rate of change, right? And we can measure how long it took to get from temperature A to temperature B historically and we can then look at our own time period and compare how quickly or slowly the temperature is changing, right? The funny thing about life on Earth is that it's probably always going to be here in some form or fashion but it's those unicellular organisms that need lengths of time to adjust to extreme weather.
The climate always has gone from warmer to colder and back and forth. Mostly it has been warmer, but it has also spent a fair amount of time under ice ages as well. I live in a place where I am 2000 miles from the nearest ocean and yet can find sea shells in my back yard from time to time. Things change and we need to quit fighting change and learn to adapt to our environment as our environment changes around us.
Or perhaps we can adjust our actions to limit the amount of change? Why do you use a waste disposal system in your house? Why not just throw garbage and urine and feces where ever you want inside your house? You can always learn to adapt to your environment, right? You'll get used to the smell, you'll learn to make friends with the raccoons and cockroaches living in the debris -- possibly even feed off them. So why do you take these basic precautions to keep your home clean? Is your planning not comparable to policies that aim to keep the Earth clean?
The continents will shift (there's a museum in Paris with an exhibit I have heard about that depicts how far the North American plate moves away from the European plate each year). Antarctica will eventually move away from the pole and simply melt. Other natural phenomenon will occur and we have to accept that we are simply one part of nature and to learn to live as part of it.
Again we're talking about a process that takes tens of thousands of years versus what we've done in the past hundred years. The rate at which we are influencing our environment is increasing as our population increases. The Earth's plates are not speeding up. I don't understand your analogy nor do I see how it makes our problem seem unimportant -- plate movements have been known to be catastrophic for humans.
That being said, there is no reason not be be responsible with the environment and fight pollution for the sake of fighting pollution. Living sustainably is something that we have to do as our population becomes ever larger and we need to increase efforts for green energy like nuclear, thorium, solar and geothermal power sources.
So I guess we can agree on that. Our record so far on sustainability hasn't been reflected too well in the ocean. And burning fossil fuels is directly influencing it in addition to just plain overfishing. So is it still taboo to start to talk about curbing that stuff?
I really wish people would set aside politics on this and let science do the talking.....
Funny, your post about "times change deal with it" really seems to undermine nearly all the published peer review research on the topic. Your post is a shining example to me of how someone can interject their own politics and policies into a scientific endeavor and masquerade as being the voice of reason and science themselves. Tell me, what sort of first hand results have you collected and examined that I obviously do not have access to?
I'm inclined to agree. IF they do, I can offer a counter-example where they didn't. My son had a series of ear infections during the 1st year of his life and was on antibiotics almost continually from 3 months to 9 months. He also had a serious problem with allergy-induced bronchial infections as well as the odd case of Scarlet Fever. At 23 he's what most people would call "skinny".
Wow, massive sample set there, Elmo, with impeccable use of controls and a double blind study. If you read the actual research, this is talking primarily about childhood obesity so your son's weight at age 23 is particularly useless at this juncture -- he could well be eating tubs of greek yogurt daily for all I know. From the article:
Those who had been treated with antibiotics in the first 6 months of their lives had a higher chance of being overweight at 10, 20, and 38 months of age.
Notice that they don't go into year 23. From another article:
we predict that that this rise in body mass would increase the overweight population in the U.S. by about 1.6 percent.
So at the time of taking antibiotics, this study says that your infant son could have had a slight increase in body weight that would probably not put him into the overweight category. Where he went from there was up to your parenting and his dietary and active habits.
Me, on the other hand, I chained my children to an I-beam in the basement and force-fed them industrial grade lard all day for 10 years until I had to bury them in piano boxes but I didn't give them antibiotics and this proves that antibiotics are not linked to a slight increase in weight.
No.
That's not exactly right. I read NPR's coverage of this earlier today and vastly prefer their title and interpretation of results:
Could Antibiotics Be A Factor In Childhood Obesity?
It turns out that it's a factor but it's likely a small factor quoting an expert from the NPR coverage:
"Although the effect was small on an individual level," Dr. Leonardo Trasande, the lead pediatrician on the study, tells Shots, "we predict that that this rise in body mass would increase the overweight population in the U.S. by about 1.6 percent."
And to summarize, this is not some over hyped stop using antibiotics trash, the conclusion is:
"We're not saying that children with severe infections shouldn't be treated with antibiotics," Blaser says. These findings just reinforce our need for judicious use of them.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
So Fahrenheit is right out but tennis courts are a valid area unit?
Jeez, somebody whizzed on the electric fence last night.
Secondly, I flat out object to the following reoccurring theme prevalent in this piece that alleviates any leaders (none of whom are named) of any responsibility, onus or wrongdoing:
A few companies actually bought into the madness, but for the most part, the world collectively rolled its eyes at SCO, meaning that SCO would have to soldier on with their lawsuit-based business strategy, or face the wrath of their shareholders.
Once the Chapter 7 filing is finalized by a judge, SCO will cease to be as a corporate entity, however they are proposing that SCO v. IBM be allowed to continue, not for sheer entertainment value, but rather so that they don't risk the wrath of their shareholders.
(emphasis mine) I don't understand how someone can be such a jerk and we can say "oh, yeah, well, they had to do it because of the shareholders." Yes, I know that shareholders can sue you when you commit a colossal screw up but you can't hand out free passes like this for every thing they do. What would the shareholders have done? Sued him out of his position? Well, at least he'd still have his ethics and dignity intact. The problem is that the people running SCO lacked any fragments of those things from the start! Let me remind you of McBride's open letter in 2003 that remains to this day at SCO's site. It contained such gems as:
Based on the views of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, we believe that adoption and use of the GPL by significant parts of the software industry was a mistake. The positions of the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat against proprietary software are ill-founded and are contrary to our system of copyright and patent laws. We believe that responsible corporations throughout the IT industry have advocated use of the GPL without full analysis of its long-term detriment to our economy. We are confident that these corporations will ultimately reverse support for the GPL, and will pursue a more responsible direction.
And what? Was there a shareholder holding a loaded gun to his head when he penned this letter? No, there wasn't. I mean, looking back this comment is laughable.
And a side rant is that this is a perfect example of why corporations have more rights than citizens. SCO goes Chapter 11 then Chapter 7 and all the assholes that ran the show walk. And they're hired elsewhere and they have very minimal repercussions. What happens when an individual makes bad decisions with their personal finances? They get Chapter 13? They get liens slapped on all their income? Regardless of the chapter, their credit is screwed so they can't buy anything big for 10 years? You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see the names of the people running this show published so we know who ran the show at this company. And I'd like to see bankruptcy laws barring them from assuming any position within a company where they have direct purview or control of any assets worth over $5,000. You know what? I'd bet then they'd be a little more rational, ethical and logical in their decisions just like the general populace is forced to do for fear of bankruptcy.
Seriously, where is the blame going to be placed? Who will learn their lesson here? I'll be damned if I allow you to just pass the buck to "the wrath of the shareholders." That black hole of capitalistic logic has lead to major problems in the governance and upper rankings of American companies.
Yeah, you'll notice that a lot of the richest and most successful people never completed college. And that's fine but in my humble opinion, that's a risky bet to take. I've done interviewing for developers for a fortune 500 company and seeing a college degree on the resume doesn't cause me to kick back and say "Oh thank god, they have taken Multivariate and Differential Equations calculus, now all my Spring applications are going to be able to compute the triple integral (by parts) of a toroid in three dimensional space as it passes through a fluctuating field exerting a force on it!" (Yes, I know that makes no sense at all) No, what that tells me is that we're going to be able to throw you in an environment where you have no clue what to do but resources to go out and find what to do. On top of that, you're going to be able to digest the driest and shittiest of documentation (like a calc book) and come back to me and have gleaned some working knowledge from it. Sure, you might have to go to the next cubicle and say "What is up with this stack dump?" And you may have to seek out an authority (like a professor) but you're going to come to some answer for our problems.
In short, it tells employers that you know how to play ball and high order concepts don't frighten you. I'm not going to throw integration by parts at you on the job but it is good to know that you stepped up to that challenge -- even if it was just to get to a final, pass it and move on. In short, I went to a liberal arts college, I took classes on music theory, calculus, physics, Native American studies, advanced literature, etc and in those classes I created four part inventions, mounds of calculations, papers, powerpoints, etc and I have used little if any of that in my day to day job post college. But in mastering those processes I learned how to play ball. Now, I'm not saying you need to go take music theory and Native American studies. But the thing with Calculus is that all software development is logic and math. So don't you think you'd want to get all your i's dotted and t's crossed so that any employer that looks at you knows you have studied beyond the requirements of math for writing software into a realm so lofty they won't even be able to use it? I'm sure glad I did.
I don't think he was the greatest science fiction writer but I think he got the shaft because he wasn't American or British and on top of that he wrote at a time when the Iron Curtain hindered the flow of information -- even fiction. Evidence for this can be seen when he released 17 works in the eight years that followed the "Polish October."
I will admit I don't know Polish and have only read the English translation of his works but I will also say that where I find contemporary authors like Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy to be masters of description, Lem was lacking. His works, however, I often found mirrored in later American science fiction and sometimes what he packed into a chapter could be as deeply philosophical and have as much political commentary as an entire novel by his contemporaries. One of my Polish computer vision professors in grad school saw me reading the Cyberiad and picked up my book and held it up to the class and hyperbolic-ally announced "Every work of science fiction past 1960 is a derivative of this man." He's probably a hero in Poland but I have friends that consider themselves very avid readers and haven't even heard of him.
I have to admit I even stumble upon works of his I never got around to and find pleasure in them.
1. Where can I donate? XBMC rocks and I'm long overdue :)
Here.
2. Where can I get fresh builds of the Android port? I can't wait to fire it up on my Google TV!
According to their wiki some porting of libraries may still need to be done but you can clone into their github source for android and try to build it for your device (use their wiki to get started). I think all their development has been done for Pivos which now is an official sponsor of XBMC.
"Uh, yeah, I'll have a double Crono frappuccino and a venti Cloud -- be sure to leave room for Chocobo."
From a utilitarian standpoint, I don't see a whole lot of different between these entertainers and the entertainers in this story. They are sacrificing everything and taking one risky gamble to do what they love for a little chunk of change that only the 0.01% enjoy. Why does society apply stigmas to people trying to do what they love? If you're going to rip on pro-gamers about job security, get ready to rip on pro-entertainers. Comedian jokes get old much faster than Starcraft I. A professional football players body lasts far shorter than the run of Starcraft I. Music seems to only enjoy popularity for about two weeks considering what you hear on popular radio stations. Hell, Olympic gymnasts are left with hip problems if their career lasts too long. Everything fades, even computer languages. If that's not true of your field, you're in a dead and boring field anyway. Even framing houses has become a different ballgame since I did it as a kid.
Instead of lecturing them about transient skills, you'd be better off pointing off that putting all your eggs in this basket means that their is a very high chance you're going to live the life of the starving artist. There's a small percentage you could rake in massive endorsements and if they do, they should take a page from broke athletes and musicians who squandered that money the instant they got it. Save that money. Save it. Spend money like you're making $50k a year instead of a million a year because that income is fleeting.
People playing themselves to death is no different than that stupid high school athlete shooting up steroids in the locker room. Both are terrible actions that should be criticized but there is a point where you just have to let people do what they want if they truly love what they do.
Having your life taking over with something like becoming a scientist or learning everything there is to know about repairing internal combustion engines will last you for your whole life, probably.
Are you really saying that the useful science today is the same useful science that came out when Starcraft I came out? Everyone has to keep learning to stay relevant. Even entertainers. Or they grow old and become has-beens, the same applies to Starcraft players.
Just as used car sales are bad for auto manufacturers, and home resales are bad for builders, and garage sales are bad for retailers, ... and ..., ... and ...
This is a fairly poor analogy in the same way that calling file sharing "theft" is a poor label. The value of the game isn't the physical cartridge or disc on which the game comes -- sure, the manual and external artwork to the packaging may have some value to you and especially to collectors. But the real value of a game is that copyrighted information and artwork and writing stored in a digital manner on whatever medium.
I still think you should be able to sell secondhand copyrighted information, I really do. But I also think it's a poor comparison when the value of the car isn't so much the intellectual property but more so it's got X lbs of steel and other materials specially arranged to get you from point A to point B. Games are artwork, not vehicles.
Better comparisons are books and DVDs. Of course, I'm sure those industries want secondhand sales abolished as well to keep their sales up and I totally disagree with that considering how much I shell out for said objects.
Me, personally, I've learned my lesson. I sold my Ocarina of Time collectors games a while ago and now truly regret it (I had thought that one day N64 cartridges would be as unplayable as NES cartridges but they appear to work for much longer). So I maintain a library next to my books and movies. Sure you might think it looks "tacky" but I think that attitude will change in the near future. I played my dad's pong game, my kids will probably play my Zelda games.
If you had unlimited resources and unlimited materials (planet sized masses, black hole measuring devices, you name it), what hypotheses and tests would you construct to give us more information on what precisely gravity is?
Your work seems to be primarily centering on observing and simulating these changing gravitational fields. What benefit or detriment could result from controlling such tides? From a science fiction standpoint, do you see this as a possibility? What engineering feat would you propose to achieve it? Is there any reason at all why this might one day be a necessity?
What in the world was up with this letter from ex-employees (also discussed on Slashdot)? Was that just totally out of left field? Was there an internal reaction to it? Did you respond?
I'd also like to know how they would rate this following tweet (note: this is not my opinion on something, it's made up to illustrate a point):
Oh THANK GOD for Obamacare, now instead of barely making mortgage payments, I can pay for my neighbor's cancer treatments and default on my loans!
Clearly sarcasm but the first sentence fragment could easily be construed as positive or pro Obama by an unknown natural language parser. From the article:
Each day, the Index evaluates and weighs the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Obama or Romney relative to the more than 400 million Tweets sent on all other topics. For example, a score of 73 for a candidate indicates that Tweets containing their name or account name are on average more positive than 73 percent of all Tweets.
And what exactly does that tell me? That people are telling Romney where to shove his money or that they genuinely want to see him in office?
No, he did not make any threats. You clearly didn't actually read the article. Threats of violence actually are NOT enough to lead to arrest, but asshole-ish tweets are. Read the article before posting such crap.
I can't believe I'm linking to The Huffington Post as a better source but for lack of any other site that is explaining it better, here's a timeline of the tweets.
Here's the tweet in question:
@TomDaley1994 i'm going to find you and i'm going to drown you in the pool you cocky twat your a nobody people like you make me sick
It is listed in the Guardian article but doesn't say it's from the arrested suspect.
It lacked MMO development experience at the top. “Curt was not the CEO,” Dagres says, “but you could see he was quite involved and had a lot of control. I was a little nervous.” He also took note that the COO was Schilling’s relative.
I wrote out what I think should be done in my journal but of course the formatting looks like crap with italics. I think Rhode Island should get what they paid for and do what they want with most of the assets (including the source).
This is article deriding free on-line math education written by a person who develops paid on-line math education.
That sounds like an ad hominem. Motives aside, is the argument valid? One part of the article stood out to me:
As a result, experienced educators have begun to push back against what they see as fundamental problems with Khan’s approach to teaching. In June, two professors from Grand Valley State University created their own video in which they pointed out errors in Khan’s lesson on negative numbers: not things they disagreed with, but things he got plain wrong. To his credit, Khan did replace the video. However, instead of using this as an opportunity to engage educators and improve his teaching, he dismissed the criticism.
“It’s kind of weird,” Khan explained, “when people are nitpicking about multiplying negative numbers.”
When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it’s because they’re jealous. “It’d piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world’s teacher.”
Why isn't Khan embracing criticism and review/removal/replacement of his videos by knowledgeable folks? I would be rewarding people proofing my many videos and trying to get more people doing that instead of dismissing it as "nitpicking."
If the teaching is going to be bad either way, then Kahn [sic] costs a heck of a lot less to get the same result.
I think I should point out that I haven't found any place where Khan suggests that his youtube videos replace public education.
Khan's made a few mistakes. The first that is the worst is that the article mentions he was corrected about multiplying negative numbers and instead of praising the people for making a new video correcting him, he apparently just took his video down and replaced it. And then made some little remark about why people put up such a big fuss about this concept. His second and less grievous mistake was to engage talking heads and accept praise from politicians. I think if he had just focused on making videos, ignored the praise and let Bill Gates or some other public figure pitch the video, he wouldn't find himself the target in this back and forth. We need to stop looking at online education as a replacement and instead as an augmenting force in our children's learning.
And I don't mean stop making movies, I mean they should turn to their dirtier and darker titles like Preacher, Fables or Scalped. I guess those center around a more anti-hero or "regular" hero but if done right they could be a great movie franchise. Personally I'm sick of superhero movies and though they have been lucrative I hope that we get a little break here before it gets ridiculously diluted. In the movie industry too much of a good thing can go bad real fast.
Well, I'll start off by saying that your son sounds very smart and gifted -- although it also sounds like he is at that very special age where he knows everything. I too experienced such youthful bliss and ignorance but the only cure was time and experience. I might have even made similar claims that all visual editors are detrimental in some form or fashion. I have found myself shying away from absolutes like this and, actually, find it difficult to determine when something is "visual." Is the color scheme in my VIM and EMACS windows a "visual" editor? I find myself today locked in a love/hate relationship with several that I am running as I write this. I think the best course of action for you is to remind your son that nobody ever wrote a heavy integrated development environment with the intent of completely removing the burden of coding on the developer. Also, a solution that takes you 90% of the way quickly but still requires you to write out and augment that final 10% is still more useful than starting with nothing at all. I suggest you and your son work through the Rails 3 tutorial using scaffolds. This is an example where something from the command line augments your ability to stand up web applications quickly. I also suggest you do exercises with Eclipse (or I guess Visual Studio Express if he uses C#) and try to import 10 or 20 libraries into the project. Doing this with an IDE is much friendlier than doing this from the command line or hand writing ant/maven scripts.
... but then again, there's no reason to shirk productivity in the name of purity. When I was writing huge monolithic classes with no dependencies in college, I was doing everything in VI. Those days have passed, I must write modules that exist in a massive hierarchical tree for many teams now. I depend on IDEs and their integration with various other tools ... and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
There's nothing wrong with doing everything by hand
My rule of thumb is to let editors do the mindless work for you, but never let them do so much that you don't understand exactly what it is that they're doing. If you do allow them to do something so complicated you cannot understand it, you enter into dependence that cannot be undone. You will find yourself unable to augment the automation further and left with 90% solutions and unfinished projects.
Perhaps another line of reasoning to use with him is to ask him to write a windows program using just 0s and 1s or hex in a hex editor. When he cannot do this, ask him why he is okay with C# augmenting his abilities to control the computer. Then ask him why he draws the line there and why not allow more code (IDEs and their plugins) to do more work for him. Sure, everyone draws a line in the sand and sticks to it. I've met kernel hackers that don't even trust compilers. If your son chooses that path, then let him choose his own path.
no one who has worked on a farm says 'discer'. It's a disc.
It's true. I've been living a lie. Sure, I talk the talk and I might sound like I've worked on farms but it's all a sham. "Why do I do it?" Well, there's something about being able to tell all the Carnegie Mellon, Princeton and MIT graduates I work with that I spent my childhood picking up rocks and throwing bails. I keep a bucket of pig shit behind my house and sometimes I just smear that all over me before I hit the town. But it's all a lie. I'll step into the local bar and the women will take one whiff of that sweet fecal matter and come running to me. "What were you doing today, eldavojohn?" they ask as they swoon around me. "Castratin' pigs," I'll lie. And they will just fall all over each other to touch me. I know, it's all very glamorous but it requires a lot of research to go into detail about making two incisions to get the testicles out on the small male pigs and then wiping them down with antibiotic. Or injecting the blue crap into the female piglets' ovaries. Women just absolutely adore a man who knows his way around ending the reproductive cycle of pigs. Bring up that topic at a fine family dinner and even East Coast grandma is on the edge of her seat.
And the money. My god, the money I've made claiming to have worked on farms. I get $25,000 a night just to make an appearance at places and rub elbows with businessmen, musicians and diplomats. They would trot me out like a one trick pony and all ask me questions -- hanging on my every word. That too, has been all a lie. "Con man" would be a kind label for me now.
But you caught me. I never worked on farms growing up. I only brag about walking up and down scorching black earth, picking up any baseball sized or larger rock and returning it to the flatbed behind the tractor. But I've never done it. Never done it for hundreds of hours every summer between the hours of 5am and 11am daily. Never received $8/hour under the table nor the right to use some of their equipment at my folks' place. The details are there but the colloquialism of "discer" versus "disc" ruined me. I suppose this slip has been a blessing in disguise.
I'm glad you caught me before I cut off one of my own fingers so I could tell people I lost it trying to free up the gears of a frozen motor. All the Slashdot karma that would have gotten me and all the pussy that would have been so easily accessible with only nine fingers would have been great -- but it all would have been a lie.
Thank you, Anonymous Coward. Thank you for helping me help myself and own up to this horrible vile lie that has given me an undue elevated societal status.
in Aisle 34 of Home Depot is precut vinyl flooring, the glue already in place. In Aisle 26 are prefab windows, and if you don't want to be your own handyman, head to Aisle 23 or Aisle 35, where a help desk will arrange for an installer, as mastering tools and working with one's hands recede as American cultural values.
Yes, I've also heard software developers complain that today you can use ExtJS 4 to instantly have a windowing option in your browser and now it's sad because all the UI guys are using something like this. These "prefab architectures" are so terrible because nobody actually writes JavaScript anymore. Well, I know how to put together a window sill, a window frame and put the pane in and everything (even know how to build the headers for load bearing regulations on houses). And I'll tell you right now my implementation of a JavaScript windowing system wouldn't be as slick or universal as ExtJS 4 just like my window would be pretty shitty compared to something prefabbed up. Both would cost my employers more time and money. I would wager that if you were someone that built houses for a living, you would be okay with someone else putting together factory made windows with a low defect rate. Unsurprisingly it saves you a bunch of money just like a lot of software libraries save me time and money.
Yeah, I can make a table. But I need a jointer and a planer and whole bunch of other tools. The barrier to entry is high. Or I can go down to Ikea and find some veneered particle board for comparative pennies. Welcome to capitalism.
'In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on,'
Oh, right, your ancestors were the farmers. It was okay for you to move on to something more interesting like building houses and cities instead of devoting every waking moment to growing growing growing. Now we've moved on and it's time to mourn the loss of ... what exactly? Am I supposed to feel ashamed that all four of my grandparents were farmers and none of their 14 children are? Or that my dad was a carpenter and cement pourer and I'm a software developer? It's funny, none of my relatives guilt trip me like this New York Times writer that probably hasn't spent a day of his life working in a factory.
From the NYTimes author's bio:
Mr. Uchitelle was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York in 2002-03 and taught journalism for many years at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. Before joining The Times, he worked for The Associated Press as a reporter, an editor and a foreign correspondent in Latin America. He and his wife, Joan Uchitelle, live in Scarsdale, N.Y. They have two grown daughters.
Hey, anybody know of a good factory job near Scarsdale for Mr. Uchitelle? Maybe one of those industrial revolution jobs with industrial revolution pay? Then I think I'll listen to him bitch and moan about how progress is losing our nation's toolbox. Afterwards, take him around to farms at night (you know, the ones where people are working after sundown and before sunup) and let everyone tell him their stories about how they were injured on the job. Every hard working farmer or carpenter has those stories. I still got all my digi
Two decades ago (before it went to shit) ...
Seriously, when I submitted that I was staring down ~10 hours of "Swamp Brothers," "Swamp Loggers" and "Gator Boys." Seriously. Now NatGeo is following suit ... am I just getting curmudgeonly? How is this happening?