Re:Eh, you give the answer. Food
on
A Requiem For Saab
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· Score: 3, Insightful
YES.
I live in Japan. I get so tired of people telling me that the food/beer/coffee in America is bad. I always follow up with "where did you eat?" The people who complain the most about the food, no shit, answer "McDonald's."
Really? The food at McDonald's in America is bad? Really? So, you mean, it's exactly the same as at McDonald's in Japan? Really? Why did you go to McDonald's????
Beer? Oh, you drank Budweiser and Coors. Well, that right there is why no one with more than a high school education touches that crap. Micros abound, especially in my home state of Colorado, and many of them are fantastic and award-winning.
Coffee? Did you go to Starbucks? You did, didn't you? Did you happen to notice that it tasted exactly the same as in Japan--burnt, bitter, and then dressed up with more sweetened milk than coffee in a futile attempt to hide the fact that they spend nothing on their beans? You did? Then why did you go there?
When I'm in the states, I love to grab foreigners and take them eating. It's not that food is bad in the US. We have some really phenomenal food--both at the high, hoity-toity end, as well as the hearty "food of the people" end (truck stops FTW!)--It's just that, as a foreigner, you go for what gets in your eye first, and that's going to be a chain. Chain food, no matter what country, is bad--or, at least, nowhere near as good as if you go to an independent place.
America has many problems, but lack of delicious food is not one of them. In fact, I've never been to a country that did not have delicious food, but usually you need a local to show you where to eat.
Me too. I don't see it as "macho" at all, though. I am responsible for the output of this team to those above me, and at the same time, I see it as very much part of my job to make my team look great--for all of us. Part of my job is clearing the BS that I have to deal with from my directs' path so that they can do their best work. I feel equal loyalty to those above as to those below. We are a team and we all have roles--mine is to steer and keep the thing running smoothly.
What the OP might have had when he was a developer was just a crappy manager. A lot of the job of managing people is just sussing out what kind of manager they want/need. Some people want or need constant intervention--they get lonely or they aren't, um, quite competent. Some people lose heart if you don't come by and cheer them up a little with some encouragement. Most people, though, really just want you out of their hair, especially with the kind of work and the kind of personalities that end up in software development (or in my case test development). That's when knowing what everyone's Starbucks order is comes in handy.
I've had great bosses and I've had terrible bosses. I try to copy the great ones--being positive without being fake, being both familiar and worthy of respect (by being accountable), and staying out of the way when unnecessary and/or unwanted. Bosses that have hovered over me have gotten an earful at some point. I'm happy to say I never have.
Seriously, I think the key to being a good manager/teacher/whatever is to think of the bad ones you've had, figure out what made them bad, and never do those things, while thinking of the good ones you've had, what made them good, and trying to do those things all the time.
Most of the Christian that quote the real age of the Earth have no idea how fabricated the date was.
Most Christians don't know anything about Christianity. They don't read the Bible. They don't know where it came from. They don't know who wrote it. They don't know anything about Judaism, which was the actual religion of Jesus, and what, if they were serious about their religion, is what they should practice. They spout gibberish that would be improved substantially just by going back to the actual text and asking their local rabbis what a lot of it means--and that's really just correcting their gibberish with older gibberish!
I'm an atheist, but I was raised evangelical. I want to shake so many Christians, because it is absolutely possible to be Christian and not be a tiresome moron, but it just takes some reading not just parroting what they hear from other ignorant leaders. Even just reading the Bible and learning what it says would improve their behavior (in most cases).
Soo... Sitting in a room full of people eating anonymous food, followed by sitting in another room full of people--this time with clear physical boundaries between you--trumps sitting in a room with just you two eating perhaps home-cooked food, followed by sitting in another room alone snuggling on a sofa, with an even more intimate room within 10 seconds' walking distance?
Thank you. I live outside the US and will vilify the US government (and people) with the best of them, but that often makes people think they can then start on the "they're taking over the world and making everybody follow their laws and enslaving people in Kafoonistan blah blah blah" and have me play along. No. The US is taking over exactly nobody, not even Iraq and Afghanistan, which they have actually been trying to take over for the last few years. The US government or US-based companies make cases to their counterparts in other countries, and those parties agree to them. If the people in the other countries don't like it, they need to raise a stink about it to their local governments. It is not the US government's responsibility to ensure that everything is rainbows and unicorns around the world; it is the US government's responsibility to do their best to get those rainbows and unicorns in the US.
People always act like US diplomats come in and hold the heads of the heads of other states' heads down to the bargaining table with a Glock as they put a pen in their hands. It's preposterous.
Complain about wars all you want. The local people didn't ask for them. But when you start saying something like "The US is forcing us all to..." just stop and ask yourself if you know what the word "force" means.
The US drives me nuts. But I also would like people to be a little more fair about things. If the whole world just decided to ignore the US with their ridiculous ideas, those ideas would change almost over night.
Sorry, I've tracked my spending. At least for me, moving games to the living room has been way, way cheaper. I never pay full price for the games, though.
Writing by hand is a more physical, direct process. I write all notes, etc., by hand. I can't think on the computer. I design classes and presentations and papers by hand on paper first. Always.
Not to mention it's another "my time is of no value" story. Why not buy a used Mac and start developing?
Yes. This is actually part of how I ended up on the Mac. I used them until 1998, but then was drawn to Windows because it was better at the time, and because I was lured in by how cheaply you could buy parts and build your own machine. This made a lot of sense to a poor college student. However, as the years went on, and as I told everyone this was no problem and anyone could do it, I started really hating losing tons of time. Then Vista came out. And handing a company a wad of cash and getting a machine that worked right away in return started looking like a much better value.
I get the whole DIY mentality, but projects like this are just ridiculous. He has spent a huge amount of time and created something that retains no value (who will buy it when he wants to get rid of it?), probably will crap out at some point, and which--let's be honest--is ugly as sin. I think he just didn't want to be accused of having a decent-looking computer in his basement, and had a lot of time to sink into finding parts and building a case from discarded other cases...
Um, you do know that the US and the UK have an extradition treaty, and that what he did was illegal in both countries, right? The sovereign states of the US and the UK drew up this treaty on purpose, for mutual benefit.
If we went around not honoring deals we made with other countries when we change our mind, we would be no better than Japan, where I live, who thinks that if you elect a new party to office, the recently-refreshed treaty agreements made with the former ruling party don't have to be honored. What's the point of treaties if you say things are case-by-case afterwards?
This guy is a doofus; he committed a pretty serious computer crime; he's being extradited to face charges on that crime. Just because he has poor social skills doesn't mean he's not liable, or that he is unfit for extradition.
If the situation were reversed and it was an American retard who was breaking into RAF computers, yes, he'd be extradited. That's what an extradition treaty between two sovereign states is for.
As a tester who works with rating scales, I have to point out that a scale that has values that are never used is a pointless scale. If the range of scores reported by raters is from 5-10, then you don't have a 10-point scale; you have a 6-point scale. Also, if you're only using a few bands on the scale, you need to decide whether the raters need to be trained to discriminate more bands of the scale, or if your scale needs to be rewritten to allow such discriminations to occur, or if such discriminations cannot really be made (probably the case in video game reviews).
Furthermore, Metacritic's scaling system, though a step in the right direction, is highly, highly suspect. All they really do is take ratings and interpolate them to a 100-point-scale, with no regard to the individual scales they came from. This could be addressed via many-facet Rasch modeling without too much trouble, but I'm probably the only one who cares!
Mohda would be laughed at in any neuroscience conference and he certainly doesn't help the cause of theoreticians in the neuroscience field by making such stupid announcements.
Yes. I am not a neuroscientist, but applied linguistics, at the technical end (where I live) does borrow from that field from time to time, and even with that relatively small understanding of the way the brain works, I immediately called "bullshit" on this crazy claim from IBM. We just don't really know how a brain works yet; how could we model it?
In my own field, the same nonsense continually pops up from computer scientists blathering about machine translation, which, despite all the rosy claims, does not actually work. The reason is that the computer loads up on rules and objects (words and phrases), and then just links them up with another set of them from a different language. The computer doesn't "speak" either of these languages, and doesn't know what the words mean, and doesn't know what they connote (emotional response), and cant tell when it's spitting out nonsense. The problem is always approached as though languages were rule systems, when those rules are made up after the fact, and most psycholinguists believe that basically there is very little processing involved in language production--just a lot of spitting out crap we've heard before that is tied to specific feelings and concepts that we are trying to recreate in the other. Basically, we don't know how it "works," because it is an innately human activity, which is the product of the human brain and the evolutionary pressures of 2 million years plus. The computer can't do it right because it's not human.
I'm not saying "never," because I believe, and hope, that we'll be able to crack it one day--at least to the point of being useful for something. But computer scientists always overstate their successes, because they don't know enough about the end point. No one does.
I was almost-audibly cheering as I read TFA. Spot on.
There are a lot of people weighing in, saying, "Yeah, but that's not the whole problem," and they are right, but not as right as they'd like to be.
I'm an educator. I teach university. Why? A few reasons:
1) K-12 pays for shit. What this does is reduce the teaching pool at that level to people who are totally dedicated to the idea of education and don't mind the crappy pay and long hours (yes, long hours--teachers never really stop working, except for a couple weeks on the long breaks) and major stresses of dealing with kids and parents and bureaucrats if it means that kids are getting educated. Usually (but not always), these people are great.
2) Morons who can't find anything else to do and who actually don't do anything over the breaks. These people are universally terrible.
I live in Japan and have worked at every level of the system here, and while it's not as great as Americans seem to think, I will say that the quality of teachers is FAR above what I had growing up. If you want to be a public school teacher here, it is HARD. Public licenses are reserved for very smart, very capable people, and when those people hit the workforce, they are paid well. It's a job people want, not a job one thinks about as, "well, I guess I could always teach." It breeds competition, and that's what we don't have in the US (well, I take that back--it can be hard to find work as a teacher, but that is a demand problem).
The quality of the Japanese system itself, BTW, lies in elementary school. I honestly wasn't that impressed with the junior high and high school systems. There seemed to be a lot of wasted time. However, the elementary school I worked at blew me away. We kind of think of elementary teachers as exalted babysitters (good lord, don't tell my friends who are elementary school teachers in the US that--although of those people, two have MAs and the other has a PhD, so I'm not really including them), and that is a big, big mistake. The teachers I worked with at that Japanese elementary school really struck me as teachers. Like in high school. And yet they were supportive and gentle with the kids.
Do you know what they were studying in the 5th grade? Physics. They were studying stuff I didn't see until high school. It wasn't at the level I studied in high school, but it was physics nonetheless. They were calculating acceleration due to gravity, etc.
I don't really see why we go so slowly with math and science in the US. I would have killed to have been studying physics in 5th grade. Also, studying math-intensive science like physics or chemistry frames math in the real world--something that I didn't see until high school, either, and which was too late--I'd already decided that math was boring. This is a systemic problem, but I also think it goes back to the teachers. Science and math education are terrible in the US, so finding teachers--people usually from the education department of their universities, which is in the college of liberal arts--who are good at them is already difficult, and people who are good at them have better employment opportunities elsewhere. It's a systemic and cyclical problem.
Last, parents are to blame. In the education world, one of the best-known statistics is that socio-economic level, even when controlling for all other factors, is the best predictor of academic and financial success. Why? Simple. Middle-class people have a culture that values education, and it is just a given that the kid is going to do homework when he gets home, and the parents will understand that it's a given that they help out if the kid gets lost. There's no attitude of, "If you don't do your homework, what're they gonna do? Fire you?" or that kind of thing. It's "when you get home from school, you practice piano for an hour, and then you hit your homework, and then you eat, and then you finish your homework, and if there's any time before bed after that, you can watch TV or whatever." Once again, this is where Japan beats the US, with its vast middl
Yes. People hear the kids practicing in the garage next door and think "music is easy." No, it isn't. If it were, everyone would make it. It's extremely time-consuming, laborious, and expensive. It is no different from software.
Yes. This is not really Apple's fault. Jobs famously called a meeting of wireless execs who were trying to "sell" him, "orifices." The way that he got things pushed through with the iPhone was by offering an exclusive. If it became illegal to have exclusives, this would be a boon to Apple, because then they could get out from under AT & T and sell to anyone on any carrier. It would be a boon to every handset manufacturer.
The issue here is not Apple or the iPhone or even AT & T; it's the US's ridiculous lack of regulations on this market (same thing in Japan, where I live, though). The carriers need to get the hell out of the handset market and just do their damned orifice jobs. They want to be retailers, but they are very obviously utility companies. This and net neutrality are basically the same thing: Utility companies aspiring to be retailers or content companies. They need to be smacked down as the knuckle-draggers they are.
Yes, to everything you said. Just a little low-hanging fruit that you missed (but probably know), though:
China doesn't just believe they are the center of the Earth; that's what the country is named. Westerners often wax quaint and endearing to the "Middle Kingdom," but that first character can mean "middle," but here it means "central." It isn't "Middle Kingdom;" it's "Central Nation!"
The emperor used to make Western envoys dance for his pleasure to secure trade contracts. All these European trade ministers in the court, trying to dance around and amuse the emperor more than the last... And we're still doing it.
The only chance the West would have ever had to have fair dealings with China would have been if we let Japan take it over. Now, I'm not saying we should have done that (we were right to stop them, of course), but it might have made more sense from a business perspective.
I've never even heard of a "use tax." I'm not keeping track of every little thing I buy.
I live in Japan. Do you know how they handle taxes? They come out of your pay check. Once a year you submit a form for dependents to your employer's office. It takes 5 minutes and is just there to update the records.
You pay 5% sales tax everywhere in the country, and they actually include the tax in the displayed price, so what it says on the shelf is what it says on the register.
Taxes don't enter my mind at all.
My US taxes, which I have to file every year, even though I don't have to pay any every year because I make less than $80k (foreign income exclusion limit), take hours of my time, and one on occasion, I stuffed something up and had to do a bunch of idiotic late-night calls to Washington DC to sort it out.
The whole time I'm doing this every year, I'm grumbling, because I know that sizable chunk of the taxes that I'm not even paying are going to this idiotic machine to collect taxes.
The US needs to just set up a bracket system, collect that amount from everyone (we have way too many exclusions, credits, etc.--you end up having to pay someone to find them all), and shut up about it. It's totally inefficient.
Now, Japan is full of idiotic inefficiencies, but the taxes and healthcare are actually functional, which is nice.
That's not true, most courses in the US use canned lesson plans that the district pays a small fortune to obtain. My father is a school administrator (and has been for districts large and small) and I can tell you a significant portion of the budget goes to buying lesson plans*.
Put your dad on. I want to hear about these lesson plans they are buying.
I think there seems to be a huge disconnect in this discussion. There is a difference between "lesson plan" and "textbook." Your dad buys textbooks and workbooks. Those are not lesson plans. Those are the seeds of lesson plans.
Lesson plans are what the teacher does with those seeds and, in many cases, they have to supplement with stuff they've made themselves (to be honest, I'd love to work somewhere where I just follow some external lesson plan--I've never heard of such a place and again think you mean "textbook"). Teachers share this stuff around all the time, edit, and use as necessary. All these pay sites are doing is adding a little money to it, and as a teacher, I'm all for it. I don't mind kicking a little dough to a compatriot-in-arms for their good ideas, and I might even throw some stuff up there myself.
Now, I am a university professor, so my situation is different, but if anyone asked me to sign an IP waiver that said that whatever materials I made belonged to the school, I'd laugh and walk. That is my bread and butter. Teachers are free agents; we usually move around. If something happens and we need to change jobs, we're not re-inventing a 20-year-career; we're taking the stuff we made.
Hell, I take stuff I didn't make, but use. There's no controls on this stuff, and until it gets published (which is usually never), people do whatever they want.
At a meeting at my last school, the head of the department responded to a question about ownership of materials we were making for the department with this, "Well, those are all property of the university, obviously." I chortled, and I was sitting right next to him. He looked at me, shocked, and I said, "where did it say that in my contract?" This was about half a second before the room erupted in a mixture of scoffing, laughter, and loud complaining.
When the noise died down I said, "That's fine if that's what you want to do, but that is the kind of thing that would need to be stated explicitly in our contracts. There are two sides to that, of course. On the one hand, you'd be safe from anyone ever taking stuff they did here and publishing it, which might make it hard for you to use for free anymore, but on the other, well, I'm not making anything for any of my classes anymore, unless you pay me per lesson or something." No clause was ever added to the contract, and I am using a lot of the materials--some of which I didn't make--at my current job, edited for the new situation. There is no way that I could re-do those years of work while moving my career ahead. Some of that stuff is now in my permanent bag of tricks.
So, there's how it works, and I suspect your dad would agree with me. I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't get it.
There's a large number of people here (myself included) that wouldn't know where to find drugs if they wanted them this week.
That's just because you don't want any this week. If you did, you'd know.
I don't want any this week, either, but I know someone who would know, if I did want any.
See, I don't think we've done anything, because the simple fact of the matter is that most people don't actually want to do anything harder than pot (which is why we should legalize it). I've never liked pot, but I've experimented considerably beyond that, and you know what? Drugs suck. I don't think they should be illegal, but I also don't think we are really reducing users any, because the vast majority of people who try them don't keep doing them.
Alcohol, for all its ills, is very easy to use and very easy to dose correctly. Mistakes still happen, but the truth of the matter is that doing a little of it feels good, and then it starts feeling bad and worse and worse the more you do. There is a very large swath of dosage of that drug that is just plain unpleasant, and that is usually enough to keep people from hurting themselves on it. Even so, people--usually novice users of it--sometimes go too far. No matter though, because when that happens, you just take them to the hospital and get their stomach pumped.
I say "no matter" because when you decide to do that, you're not deciding to go to jail after the hospital. And that is am important difference between legal drugs and illegal drugs.
Now, there are some people for whom the unpleasantness of drunkenness is not dissuasive. They will keep using until they are addicted. The same is true with any other drug you can think of--some people can't or won't control themselves, and you can't stop them from destroying their lives with substances. They are weak people, even when they are our friends and family members, and they get what they deserve.
Maybe it's in their character; maybe it's in their genes, but they are going to die in a gutter whether drugs are illegal or not.
So why do all of us have to have our rights trampled and lose our sovereignty over what we do with our own bodies just to vainly try to save degenerates who are not long for this world and are only trivially affected by these laws?
You, Mr. Freeman, have obviously not tried enough drugs or been around enough users to have any idea what you're talking about.
I kind of wish McCain of 2000 was running in the last election instead of McCain of 2008.
Hear hear. I am a Democrat, but I was quite interested in McCain in 2000--and then was shocked shitless when Shrub got it, and then the world fell apart in a way even worse than I'd expected under him.
When McCain came back last year, I cheered, because I've always liked him. And then he started talking like a neocon, and then he brought that trainwreck from Wasilla onto the ticket, and I really feared that he was senile.
That being said, I was pretty happy with our choices last time. I liked (and still like--I wasn't one of these loonies with crazy expectations) Obama, but I thought that McCain would do a fine job as well. They were quite different, but I think that both of them are smart and responsible. I just really didn't want him to die and leave us at the hands of that whackjob.
The problem is that Slashdot has a whole lot of Ayn Rand Assholes floating around. These are people who need to think that they are superior to other people because they worship the magical market, and that it is their job to be exploited because the people above them are better people. To admit that they are being taken advantage of would be to act like "leeches."
Folks, people who do very little and who, despite what they claim, have no particular risk suck up most of your money. Organizations are team efforts, and while I think it's clear that those at the top should make more than those at the bottom, the vast armies of mid- and lower-level workers deserve a much bigger cut of the pie. There is no organization without them--just a bunch of sociopaths having a circle-jerk in a boardroom. "Men of talent" like to believe they don't need "mediocrites," but they most certainly do. An economy only exists when everyone is playing.
I have been contemplating joining a union myself. The Japanese education industry is starting to do some pretty crazy things--things that have become commonplace in the US, to the detriment of our system. They are attempting to keep us all on one-year contracts. This is a great deal for them, because they can fire people as enrollment rises and falls, but it means that one never knows if he can finish a research project--research being a type of marketing for a university, so it's not just for the researcher--and makes it very hard to get started. Furthermore, it hurts loyalty and productivity. When my school asks me to do things, the zeal with which I do it has a lot to do with my contract length. Getting involved in a project and then coming to the end of your contract and being let go hurts the project and makes one feel like they have been cheated (it's happened to me). Furthermore, to make sure that they are being fair, schools hold tight to the number of contract renewals they say you can have. It doesn't matter how beneficial your presence, they open themselves to legal liability if they let you stay, because someone else who isn't may sue. There was actually a panic and scramble at the end of my contract at my last place, because there was no one who could replace me. My boss tried to work out a deal to keep me, but administration made the (absolutely correct) liability point and off I went, and the project died after lots of time and money spent.
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING FIXES PROBLEMS LIKE THIS.
There is nothing wrong with asserting yourself and demanding a bigger cut of the pie--executives do it all the time! That's business!
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YES.
I live in Japan. I get so tired of people telling me that the food/beer/coffee in America is bad. I always follow up with "where did you eat?" The people who complain the most about the food, no shit, answer "McDonald's."
Really? The food at McDonald's in America is bad? Really? So, you mean, it's exactly the same as at McDonald's in Japan? Really? Why did you go to McDonald's????
Beer? Oh, you drank Budweiser and Coors. Well, that right there is why no one with more than a high school education touches that crap. Micros abound, especially in my home state of Colorado, and many of them are fantastic and award-winning.
Coffee? Did you go to Starbucks? You did, didn't you? Did you happen to notice that it tasted exactly the same as in Japan--burnt, bitter, and then dressed up with more sweetened milk than coffee in a futile attempt to hide the fact that they spend nothing on their beans? You did? Then why did you go there?
When I'm in the states, I love to grab foreigners and take them eating. It's not that food is bad in the US. We have some really phenomenal food--both at the high, hoity-toity end, as well as the hearty "food of the people" end (truck stops FTW!)--It's just that, as a foreigner, you go for what gets in your eye first, and that's going to be a chain. Chain food, no matter what country, is bad--or, at least, nowhere near as good as if you go to an independent place.
America has many problems, but lack of delicious food is not one of them. In fact, I've never been to a country that did not have delicious food, but usually you need a local to show you where to eat.
Me too. I don't see it as "macho" at all, though. I am responsible for the output of this team to those above me, and at the same time, I see it as very much part of my job to make my team look great--for all of us. Part of my job is clearing the BS that I have to deal with from my directs' path so that they can do their best work. I feel equal loyalty to those above as to those below. We are a team and we all have roles--mine is to steer and keep the thing running smoothly.
What the OP might have had when he was a developer was just a crappy manager. A lot of the job of managing people is just sussing out what kind of manager they want/need. Some people want or need constant intervention--they get lonely or they aren't, um, quite competent. Some people lose heart if you don't come by and cheer them up a little with some encouragement. Most people, though, really just want you out of their hair, especially with the kind of work and the kind of personalities that end up in software development (or in my case test development). That's when knowing what everyone's Starbucks order is comes in handy.
I've had great bosses and I've had terrible bosses. I try to copy the great ones--being positive without being fake, being both familiar and worthy of respect (by being accountable), and staying out of the way when unnecessary and/or unwanted. Bosses that have hovered over me have gotten an earful at some point. I'm happy to say I never have.
Seriously, I think the key to being a good manager/teacher/whatever is to think of the bad ones you've had, figure out what made them bad, and never do those things, while thinking of the good ones you've had, what made them good, and trying to do those things all the time.
Most of the Christian that quote the real age of the Earth have no idea how fabricated the date was.
Most Christians don't know anything about Christianity. They don't read the Bible. They don't know where it came from. They don't know who wrote it. They don't know anything about Judaism, which was the actual religion of Jesus, and what, if they were serious about their religion, is what they should practice. They spout gibberish that would be improved substantially just by going back to the actual text and asking their local rabbis what a lot of it means--and that's really just correcting their gibberish with older gibberish!
I'm an atheist, but I was raised evangelical. I want to shake so many Christians, because it is absolutely possible to be Christian and not be a tiresome moron, but it just takes some reading not just parroting what they hear from other ignorant leaders. Even just reading the Bible and learning what it says would improve their behavior (in most cases).
Soo... Sitting in a room full of people eating anonymous food, followed by sitting in another room full of people--this time with clear physical boundaries between you--trumps sitting in a room with just you two eating perhaps home-cooked food, followed by sitting in another room alone snuggling on a sofa, with an even more intimate room within 10 seconds' walking distance?
Sorry. You fail at dating.
Thank you. I live outside the US and will vilify the US government (and people) with the best of them, but that often makes people think they can then start on the "they're taking over the world and making everybody follow their laws and enslaving people in Kafoonistan blah blah blah" and have me play along. No. The US is taking over exactly nobody, not even Iraq and Afghanistan, which they have actually been trying to take over for the last few years. The US government or US-based companies make cases to their counterparts in other countries, and those parties agree to them. If the people in the other countries don't like it, they need to raise a stink about it to their local governments. It is not the US government's responsibility to ensure that everything is rainbows and unicorns around the world; it is the US government's responsibility to do their best to get those rainbows and unicorns in the US.
People always act like US diplomats come in and hold the heads of the heads of other states' heads down to the bargaining table with a Glock as they put a pen in their hands. It's preposterous.
Complain about wars all you want. The local people didn't ask for them. But when you start saying something like "The US is forcing us all to..." just stop and ask yourself if you know what the word "force" means.
The US drives me nuts. But I also would like people to be a little more fair about things. If the whole world just decided to ignore the US with their ridiculous ideas, those ideas would change almost over night.
But 41,000,000,000 is the largest number in Maths.
No way. 24 is the highest number. Fugeddaboutit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkP_OGDCLY0
Sorry, I've tracked my spending. At least for me, moving games to the living room has been way, way cheaper. I never pay full price for the games, though.
Marry me.
I'd eat ant eggs any day of the week. Brains? No thanks. I don't need my brain going all spongy on me.
Writing by hand is a more physical, direct process. I write all notes, etc., by hand. I can't think on the computer. I design classes and presentations and papers by hand on paper first. Always.
Not to mention it's another "my time is of no value" story. Why not buy a used Mac and start developing?
Yes. This is actually part of how I ended up on the Mac. I used them until 1998, but then was drawn to Windows because it was better at the time, and because I was lured in by how cheaply you could buy parts and build your own machine. This made a lot of sense to a poor college student. However, as the years went on, and as I told everyone this was no problem and anyone could do it, I started really hating losing tons of time. Then Vista came out. And handing a company a wad of cash and getting a machine that worked right away in return started looking like a much better value.
I get the whole DIY mentality, but projects like this are just ridiculous. He has spent a huge amount of time and created something that retains no value (who will buy it when he wants to get rid of it?), probably will crap out at some point, and which--let's be honest--is ugly as sin. I think he just didn't want to be accused of having a decent-looking computer in his basement, and had a lot of time to sink into finding parts and building a case from discarded other cases...
Preposterous.
Where do those of us looking for not-legally avaliable stuff, like dubbed anime go now?
You could always go teach English in Japan.
No thanks; we already have enough unqualified, illiterate, socially-retarded English "teachers" over here as it is.
Um, you do know that the US and the UK have an extradition treaty, and that what he did was illegal in both countries, right? The sovereign states of the US and the UK drew up this treaty on purpose, for mutual benefit.
If we went around not honoring deals we made with other countries when we change our mind, we would be no better than Japan, where I live, who thinks that if you elect a new party to office, the recently-refreshed treaty agreements made with the former ruling party don't have to be honored. What's the point of treaties if you say things are case-by-case afterwards?
This guy is a doofus; he committed a pretty serious computer crime; he's being extradited to face charges on that crime. Just because he has poor social skills doesn't mean he's not liable, or that he is unfit for extradition.
If the situation were reversed and it was an American retard who was breaking into RAF computers, yes, he'd be extradited. That's what an extradition treaty between two sovereign states is for.
As a tester who works with rating scales, I have to point out that a scale that has values that are never used is a pointless scale. If the range of scores reported by raters is from 5-10, then you don't have a 10-point scale; you have a 6-point scale. Also, if you're only using a few bands on the scale, you need to decide whether the raters need to be trained to discriminate more bands of the scale, or if your scale needs to be rewritten to allow such discriminations to occur, or if such discriminations cannot really be made (probably the case in video game reviews).
Furthermore, Metacritic's scaling system, though a step in the right direction, is highly, highly suspect. All they really do is take ratings and interpolate them to a 100-point-scale, with no regard to the individual scales they came from. This could be addressed via many-facet Rasch modeling without too much trouble, but I'm probably the only one who cares!
Mohda would be laughed at in any neuroscience conference and he certainly doesn't help the cause of theoreticians in the neuroscience field by making such stupid announcements.
Yes. I am not a neuroscientist, but applied linguistics, at the technical end (where I live) does borrow from that field from time to time, and even with that relatively small understanding of the way the brain works, I immediately called "bullshit" on this crazy claim from IBM. We just don't really know how a brain works yet; how could we model it?
In my own field, the same nonsense continually pops up from computer scientists blathering about machine translation, which, despite all the rosy claims, does not actually work. The reason is that the computer loads up on rules and objects (words and phrases), and then just links them up with another set of them from a different language. The computer doesn't "speak" either of these languages, and doesn't know what the words mean, and doesn't know what they connote (emotional response), and cant tell when it's spitting out nonsense. The problem is always approached as though languages were rule systems, when those rules are made up after the fact, and most psycholinguists believe that basically there is very little processing involved in language production--just a lot of spitting out crap we've heard before that is tied to specific feelings and concepts that we are trying to recreate in the other. Basically, we don't know how it "works," because it is an innately human activity, which is the product of the human brain and the evolutionary pressures of 2 million years plus. The computer can't do it right because it's not human.
I'm not saying "never," because I believe, and hope, that we'll be able to crack it one day--at least to the point of being useful for something. But computer scientists always overstate their successes, because they don't know enough about the end point. No one does.
I was almost-audibly cheering as I read TFA. Spot on.
There are a lot of people weighing in, saying, "Yeah, but that's not the whole problem," and they are right, but not as right as they'd like to be.
I'm an educator. I teach university. Why? A few reasons:
1) K-12 pays for shit. What this does is reduce the teaching pool at that level to people who are totally dedicated to the idea of education and don't mind the crappy pay and long hours (yes, long hours--teachers never really stop working, except for a couple weeks on the long breaks) and major stresses of dealing with kids and parents and bureaucrats if it means that kids are getting educated. Usually (but not always), these people are great.
2) Morons who can't find anything else to do and who actually don't do anything over the breaks. These people are universally terrible.
I live in Japan and have worked at every level of the system here, and while it's not as great as Americans seem to think, I will say that the quality of teachers is FAR above what I had growing up. If you want to be a public school teacher here, it is HARD. Public licenses are reserved for very smart, very capable people, and when those people hit the workforce, they are paid well. It's a job people want, not a job one thinks about as, "well, I guess I could always teach." It breeds competition, and that's what we don't have in the US (well, I take that back--it can be hard to find work as a teacher, but that is a demand problem).
The quality of the Japanese system itself, BTW, lies in elementary school. I honestly wasn't that impressed with the junior high and high school systems. There seemed to be a lot of wasted time. However, the elementary school I worked at blew me away. We kind of think of elementary teachers as exalted babysitters (good lord, don't tell my friends who are elementary school teachers in the US that--although of those people, two have MAs and the other has a PhD, so I'm not really including them), and that is a big, big mistake. The teachers I worked with at that Japanese elementary school really struck me as teachers. Like in high school. And yet they were supportive and gentle with the kids.
Do you know what they were studying in the 5th grade? Physics. They were studying stuff I didn't see until high school. It wasn't at the level I studied in high school, but it was physics nonetheless. They were calculating acceleration due to gravity, etc.
I don't really see why we go so slowly with math and science in the US. I would have killed to have been studying physics in 5th grade. Also, studying math-intensive science like physics or chemistry frames math in the real world--something that I didn't see until high school, either, and which was too late--I'd already decided that math was boring. This is a systemic problem, but I also think it goes back to the teachers. Science and math education are terrible in the US, so finding teachers--people usually from the education department of their universities, which is in the college of liberal arts--who are good at them is already difficult, and people who are good at them have better employment opportunities elsewhere. It's a systemic and cyclical problem.
Last, parents are to blame. In the education world, one of the best-known statistics is that socio-economic level, even when controlling for all other factors, is the best predictor of academic and financial success. Why? Simple. Middle-class people have a culture that values education, and it is just a given that the kid is going to do homework when he gets home, and the parents will understand that it's a given that they help out if the kid gets lost. There's no attitude of, "If you don't do your homework, what're they gonna do? Fire you?" or that kind of thing. It's "when you get home from school, you practice piano for an hour, and then you hit your homework, and then you eat, and then you finish your homework, and if there's any time before bed after that, you can watch TV or whatever." Once again, this is where Japan beats the US, with its vast middl
Yes. People hear the kids practicing in the garage next door and think "music is easy." No, it isn't. If it were, everyone would make it. It's extremely time-consuming, laborious, and expensive. It is no different from software.
Yes. This is not really Apple's fault. Jobs famously called a meeting of wireless execs who were trying to "sell" him, "orifices." The way that he got things pushed through with the iPhone was by offering an exclusive. If it became illegal to have exclusives, this would be a boon to Apple, because then they could get out from under AT & T and sell to anyone on any carrier. It would be a boon to every handset manufacturer.
The issue here is not Apple or the iPhone or even AT & T; it's the US's ridiculous lack of regulations on this market (same thing in Japan, where I live, though). The carriers need to get the hell out of the handset market and just do their damned orifice jobs. They want to be retailers, but they are very obviously utility companies. This and net neutrality are basically the same thing: Utility companies aspiring to be retailers or content companies. They need to be smacked down as the knuckle-draggers they are.
Someone else knows Chinese history!!!
Yes, to everything you said. Just a little low-hanging fruit that you missed (but probably know), though:
China doesn't just believe they are the center of the Earth; that's what the country is named. Westerners often wax quaint and endearing to the "Middle Kingdom," but that first character can mean "middle," but here it means "central." It isn't "Middle Kingdom;" it's "Central Nation!"
The emperor used to make Western envoys dance for his pleasure to secure trade contracts. All these European trade ministers in the court, trying to dance around and amuse the emperor more than the last... And we're still doing it.
The only chance the West would have ever had to have fair dealings with China would have been if we let Japan take it over. Now, I'm not saying we should have done that (we were right to stop them, of course), but it might have made more sense from a business perspective.
And they ruin your carefully-mussed hair! If the whole burning-house-and-satan thing doesn't dissuade you.
I've never even heard of a "use tax." I'm not keeping track of every little thing I buy.
I live in Japan. Do you know how they handle taxes? They come out of your pay check. Once a year you submit a form for dependents to your employer's office. It takes 5 minutes and is just there to update the records.
You pay 5% sales tax everywhere in the country, and they actually include the tax in the displayed price, so what it says on the shelf is what it says on the register.
Taxes don't enter my mind at all.
My US taxes, which I have to file every year, even though I don't have to pay any every year because I make less than $80k (foreign income exclusion limit), take hours of my time, and one on occasion, I stuffed something up and had to do a bunch of idiotic late-night calls to Washington DC to sort it out.
The whole time I'm doing this every year, I'm grumbling, because I know that sizable chunk of the taxes that I'm not even paying are going to this idiotic machine to collect taxes.
The US needs to just set up a bracket system, collect that amount from everyone (we have way too many exclusions, credits, etc.--you end up having to pay someone to find them all), and shut up about it. It's totally inefficient.
Now, Japan is full of idiotic inefficiencies, but the taxes and healthcare are actually functional, which is nice.
That's not true, most courses in the US use canned lesson plans that the district pays a small fortune to obtain. My father is a school administrator (and has been for districts large and small) and I can tell you a significant portion of the budget goes to buying lesson plans*.
Put your dad on. I want to hear about these lesson plans they are buying.
I think there seems to be a huge disconnect in this discussion. There is a difference between "lesson plan" and "textbook." Your dad buys textbooks and workbooks. Those are not lesson plans. Those are the seeds of lesson plans.
Lesson plans are what the teacher does with those seeds and, in many cases, they have to supplement with stuff they've made themselves (to be honest, I'd love to work somewhere where I just follow some external lesson plan--I've never heard of such a place and again think you mean "textbook"). Teachers share this stuff around all the time, edit, and use as necessary. All these pay sites are doing is adding a little money to it, and as a teacher, I'm all for it. I don't mind kicking a little dough to a compatriot-in-arms for their good ideas, and I might even throw some stuff up there myself.
Now, I am a university professor, so my situation is different, but if anyone asked me to sign an IP waiver that said that whatever materials I made belonged to the school, I'd laugh and walk. That is my bread and butter. Teachers are free agents; we usually move around. If something happens and we need to change jobs, we're not re-inventing a 20-year-career; we're taking the stuff we made.
Hell, I take stuff I didn't make, but use. There's no controls on this stuff, and until it gets published (which is usually never), people do whatever they want.
At a meeting at my last school, the head of the department responded to a question about ownership of materials we were making for the department with this, "Well, those are all property of the university, obviously." I chortled, and I was sitting right next to him. He looked at me, shocked, and I said, "where did it say that in my contract?" This was about half a second before the room erupted in a mixture of scoffing, laughter, and loud complaining.
When the noise died down I said, "That's fine if that's what you want to do, but that is the kind of thing that would need to be stated explicitly in our contracts. There are two sides to that, of course. On the one hand, you'd be safe from anyone ever taking stuff they did here and publishing it, which might make it hard for you to use for free anymore, but on the other, well, I'm not making anything for any of my classes anymore, unless you pay me per lesson or something." No clause was ever added to the contract, and I am using a lot of the materials--some of which I didn't make--at my current job, edited for the new situation. There is no way that I could re-do those years of work while moving my career ahead. Some of that stuff is now in my permanent bag of tricks.
So, there's how it works, and I suspect your dad would agree with me. I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't get it.
There's a large number of people here (myself included) that wouldn't know where to find drugs if they wanted them this week.
That's just because you don't want any this week. If you did, you'd know.
I don't want any this week, either, but I know someone who would know, if I did want any.
See, I don't think we've done anything, because the simple fact of the matter is that most people don't actually want to do anything harder than pot (which is why we should legalize it). I've never liked pot, but I've experimented considerably beyond that, and you know what? Drugs suck. I don't think they should be illegal, but I also don't think we are really reducing users any, because the vast majority of people who try them don't keep doing them.
Alcohol, for all its ills, is very easy to use and very easy to dose correctly. Mistakes still happen, but the truth of the matter is that doing a little of it feels good, and then it starts feeling bad and worse and worse the more you do. There is a very large swath of dosage of that drug that is just plain unpleasant, and that is usually enough to keep people from hurting themselves on it. Even so, people--usually novice users of it--sometimes go too far. No matter though, because when that happens, you just take them to the hospital and get their stomach pumped.
I say "no matter" because when you decide to do that, you're not deciding to go to jail after the hospital. And that is am important difference between legal drugs and illegal drugs.
Now, there are some people for whom the unpleasantness of drunkenness is not dissuasive. They will keep using until they are addicted. The same is true with any other drug you can think of--some people can't or won't control themselves, and you can't stop them from destroying their lives with substances. They are weak people, even when they are our friends and family members, and they get what they deserve.
Maybe it's in their character; maybe it's in their genes, but they are going to die in a gutter whether drugs are illegal or not.
So why do all of us have to have our rights trampled and lose our sovereignty over what we do with our own bodies just to vainly try to save degenerates who are not long for this world and are only trivially affected by these laws?
You, Mr. Freeman, have obviously not tried enough drugs or been around enough users to have any idea what you're talking about.
I kind of wish McCain of 2000 was running in the last election instead of McCain of 2008.
Hear hear. I am a Democrat, but I was quite interested in McCain in 2000--and then was shocked shitless when Shrub got it, and then the world fell apart in a way even worse than I'd expected under him.
When McCain came back last year, I cheered, because I've always liked him. And then he started talking like a neocon, and then he brought that trainwreck from Wasilla onto the ticket, and I really feared that he was senile.
That being said, I was pretty happy with our choices last time. I liked (and still like--I wasn't one of these loonies with crazy expectations) Obama, but I thought that McCain would do a fine job as well. They were quite different, but I think that both of them are smart and responsible. I just really didn't want him to die and leave us at the hands of that whackjob.
The problem is that Slashdot has a whole lot of Ayn Rand Assholes floating around. These are people who need to think that they are superior to other people because they worship the magical market, and that it is their job to be exploited because the people above them are better people. To admit that they are being taken advantage of would be to act like "leeches."
Folks, people who do very little and who, despite what they claim, have no particular risk suck up most of your money. Organizations are team efforts, and while I think it's clear that those at the top should make more than those at the bottom, the vast armies of mid- and lower-level workers deserve a much bigger cut of the pie. There is no organization without them--just a bunch of sociopaths having a circle-jerk in a boardroom. "Men of talent" like to believe they don't need "mediocrites," but they most certainly do. An economy only exists when everyone is playing.
I have been contemplating joining a union myself. The Japanese education industry is starting to do some pretty crazy things--things that have become commonplace in the US, to the detriment of our system. They are attempting to keep us all on one-year contracts. This is a great deal for them, because they can fire people as enrollment rises and falls, but it means that one never knows if he can finish a research project--research being a type of marketing for a university, so it's not just for the researcher--and makes it very hard to get started. Furthermore, it hurts loyalty and productivity. When my school asks me to do things, the zeal with which I do it has a lot to do with my contract length. Getting involved in a project and then coming to the end of your contract and being let go hurts the project and makes one feel like they have been cheated (it's happened to me). Furthermore, to make sure that they are being fair, schools hold tight to the number of contract renewals they say you can have. It doesn't matter how beneficial your presence, they open themselves to legal liability if they let you stay, because someone else who isn't may sue. There was actually a panic and scramble at the end of my contract at my last place, because there was no one who could replace me. My boss tried to work out a deal to keep me, but administration made the (absolutely correct) liability point and off I went, and the project died after lots of time and money spent.
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING FIXES PROBLEMS LIKE THIS.
There is nothing wrong with asserting yourself and demanding a bigger cut of the pie--executives do it all the time! That's business!